Grafenwöhr
US Army Training Area
Training Site 22
2/19th Company Area
West Germany
29 October, 1987
2300 Hours

The tent flap opened as a big titted moron finally shoved her way into the tent, pulling off her helmet and spilling snowflakes on the canvas floor. She hadn't even bothered to fix her lipstick, which was smeared across her mouth like a goddamn nickle lot lizard at some Route-66 truck stop. She clomped her way over to the stove and held her hands out over it, shivering slightly from the cold outside before turning and looking at me.

"It's about goddamn time you got here, Nagle," I snarled at her. I saw the confusion flash in her eyes when she realized I'd decided to forego the normal insults. She looked at Bomber, saw the Corporal rank on his color, and saw a flash of jealousy pass through her brown eyes. "While you were busy with your husband, having fun, Corporal Bomber and I have been trying to figure something out."

"What's that, Chief?" she asked, frowning slightly. That goddamn I-Want line between her eyebrows showed up and I had to resist an urge to slap her stupid ass.

"Trying to figure out how to keep your ex alive until dawn, you mooing dime store shopping weak kneed housewife," I roared at her, coming to my feet and slapping the papers that had stacked up, including a recent sat scan that had gotten lucky and had gotten a shot through a narrow gap in the cloud cover. "You remember, Sergeant Anthony Stillwater, your ex-boyfriend, current Squad Leader, and all around fucking menace? Or did you get your married face crammed too full of desperate REMF cock and forget that you're in the goddamn Army and when I say to get your fat ass out here, you better not even stop to wipe that sloppy roast beef sandwich cunt of yours or try to find your panties underneath whatever fucking hobo you convinced to fuck your husband in the ass until he can achieve an erection!"

She stepped back, coloring slightly. The rage had slightly subsided as I had yelled at her, and I took a deep breath before grabbing the bottle of whiskey and taking a long pull off of it. I slammed the bottle down, wiped off my mouth, and glared at her.

"I sent for you five hours ago, Specialist, and when I give a goddamn order, it is not an invitation, it is not a request, I expect to be obeyed immediately, even if he's shooting that watery waste of protein he calls cum across the fat rolls that have built up over your cottage cheese looking ass," I snarled.

"Ant's in trouble," That Texas retard said simply, shrugging.

"What's going on?" She asked, moving over to the map. I stepped in front of her, letting her run into my stomach. I ignored the flash of pain, it was an old pain I was used to, and let it fuel the rage that was pounding at my temples.

"Oh, now you want to fucking play soldier again?" I snarled. "You sure you don't want to run back home and put on a fucking petticoat? If that's all you're good for now, is sucking cock, squeezing out squalling brats, and making dinner out of whatever road kill your retard husband happens to scrape up, then do us all a favor, go over to S-2, and drop from the goddamn program!"

She stared at me in shock, and I could see fear flash through her eyes.

"Because whoever you are now, you're a sorry excuse for the female soldier that was one of the first to complete the fucking program," I told her, turning around and moving over to the table. I put my hands on it and stared at the paper.

"Don't you fucking cry, you sorry bitch," I told her without looking at her. "If you've gotten so weak that just words make you cry, you have no place in Special Weapons, no place in 2/19th, no place in Atlas, and certainly don't belong at Alfenwehr. At least when you were just spreading those fat thighs for Stillwater out at Atlas you seemed to remember you're a goddamn soldier and not some chicken necked Mary Joe Rottencrotch looking for her next belly full of inbreeding rotted semen."

Bomber didn't say anything, just looked toward the overlapping entry flaps of the tent and lit another cigarette.

"When you're done throwing yourself a pity party, either walk out of that tent and drop from the goddamn program and give up your Zulu identifier, or grab a hold of your fucking ovaries and help us make sense of what's happening," I told her. "I don't need the fat assed housewife you're busy trying to turn yourself into, I need Specialist Nagle."

We were looking at the single scan we had. High resolution, taken from a Naval low-orbit spy satellite normally used to watch ship movements in the Black Sea. It had passed over Alfenwehr at just the right time to give us a nice clear shot of the area. The NSA and NASA had cleaned it up for us, and they'd had the transparency and the photostat in my hands within one hour thirty minutes of it being taken.

Goddamn, the idea that you could take a photographic image, turn it into ones and zeros, and send it across the Trans-Atlantic cable system was fucking amazing. Sure, it took nearly twenty minutes to transfer, but otherwise it would have taken nearly 14 hours to get to me. Goddamn scientists were crazy. What kind of brain shot mongoloid had ever approved funding for that project? ARPNET was bad enough, but sending pictures? That was some crazy juju shit you heard drunks at the local watering hole yammering about while they killed brain cells with moonshine and beer before going home and smacking around their buck toothed wives.

Pretty soon I'd be replaced by a goddamn robot controlled by some pimply faced fat fuck in the Pentagon playing Rock Em Sock Em robots or some shit.

I sighed, pulling my imagination from lining up every fucking scientist on Earth and burning them all with a flamethrower, and looked back at the image with the magnifying glass.

It had caught a figure that could only be Stillwater on top of the snow pack, moving between the chow hall and the Dispensary. Out in the open. It was a newer satellite, launched earlier in the year, and the goddamn resolution was incredible, even after being turned into ones and zeros. Whoever had printed it off had caught all the detail. I could even see his snowshoe tracks leading back to the Dispensary.

There were eight dead men behind of him. The bodies were crisp and clear, and so was the darkness of the blood that had spilled into the snow.

Eight on one, and it looks like he'd taken them out without breaking stride.

"Can either of you predict what he's going to do?" I asked. I looked at Nagle, who had moved around to the other side of the table, "Which buildings will he target and why?"

Nagle shook her head. "I'm not sure."

Bomber sighed and tapped the lower motor pool area. "Trans guys dropped the last conex of nukes right here, all fifty-six of them. Blackbriar ordered Stillwater to secure them by all means necessary, and to terminate all hostiles with extreme prejudice."

She stared at me for a second and I nodded slowly.

"Where's Cromwell, Groom, and the others? Didn't they go with him?" She asked.

I sighed and took a moment to rub my face with my hands. I was exhausted and starting to feel it. I'd been farting up a storm the last two hours, my intestines not handling the stress very well as digestive acid seeped from my stomach into my intestines. The whole tent stank, but Bomber had thrown some sugar into the stove along with some chocolate powder to take the edge off.

"Cliff Notes: Stillwater and the others went up to the barracks. Stillwater got ambushed and stabbed in his room, the others were taken hostage. Stillwater got back up, killed a bunch of them, then got the preggo's and Cromwell and those two useless motherfuckers into the War Fighter Tunnels, but had to retreat. He made it to the CIA Listening Post, contacted me, but passed out from blood loss and his injuries. I contacted up the chain, the Joint Chiefs got involved, Blackbriar got involved because 21st Trans left a conex full of tank fired tactical nuclear weapons with enhanced jacketing down in the lower vehicle area of the motorpool. Stillwater woke back up, contacted me, and I was ordered to instruct him to secure the nuclear weapons and kill all hostile forces." I caught her up real quick.

She chewed her lip for a moment, staring at the map, then shook her head. "I don't know. I mean, maybe go straight for the nukes, straight for the motorpool?"

"Then why did he go to the Chow Hall and then the Dispensary?" I asked, tapping the sat-scan.

She shook her head again. "I don't know."

"For fuck's sake, for as much as you sucked his goddamn cock, you had to at least absorb some of his personality through osmosis! How can you fuck a man for three goddamn years and know jack and shit about him?" I shouted. "You've been fucking him since he was a kid, and now that you're thirty you can't remember?" I turned away from her and stared at the radio, balling up my fists so I didn't punch her in her face. "Goddamn it, Nagle, you're worse than fucking useless to me."

Bomber spoke up. "He went to air field first, Chief," He said.

"That cache of yours up in the old plane wreck? Why there? Why not the old Nazi bunker and tunnel entrance?" I turned back to the map, sliding it across the table until I could see the airfield. The wind had swept the snow away, revealing that the glacier had calved, and I saw that the plane wreck was clear of snow and ice. "Never mind, I see it now. A cache he could get into with minimum effort. Smart."

"From there, he probably cached his gear somewhere that we found a while back," Bomber said. He slid the map to the side and pointed at what looked like bare mountainside. "There's an old Templar fortification up here. There's an artesain spring in the back, so he'd have fresh water, choke points that he could hold, and secondary caches. Specifically stoves, about fifty gallons of diesel, and about twenty boxes of MRE's hidden in one of the back rooms."

"And you didn't tell anyone about this spot?" I asked slowly.

Bomber glanced at Nagle and shook his head. "Lane found it. Led us right to it one day. Hell, the armory is still intact, has swords and some old armor in it. You could walk right by the entrance to where it's at and not even see it."

I shook my head. "Yeah, makes sense to go there."

Bomber drew a line to the Chow Hall. "Next, he went there. Probably to check their food levels. He said they went cannibal, he probably wanted to know why, wanted to see if he could secure the food or at least regain control of it."

"I called. They never coordinated with Main Post to get their MRE's delivered, but hell, the War Fighter stocks have enough MRE's for a battalion to last at least six months." I said.

"That's if they found them," Nagle said softly, tapping the buried barracks. "We forget pretty easy that the barracks is goddamn huge. Stillwater and Bomber here haven't really been stationed anywhere else," She looked at the big Texan and smiled sadly, making me want to slap her across the face until all the weakness I saw in her eyes was replaced by something more useful. "Group's larger than some battalions, the barracks we live in would usually house about a brigade."

Bomber nodded, "All right. So, whatever went down, the people in the Chow Hall were hostile, which is why we have these two sets of bodies. He went the Dispensary to ensure he had control over the medical supplies. Either whoever is there is allied with him, or they are all dead and he wired the building to prevent anyone from taking it."

"So why isn't he pulling back into the War Fighter Tunnels?" I asked. Finally, they were thinking together. They knew that maniac better than I did, would understand his motivations in ways that I couldn't. "Nevermind, he'd figure it would put Cromwell at risk, and he'd change all the codes, so he probably assumes she's already done that or put the whole site under lockdown." I shook my head. "Someone activated the immanent impact systems, so it won't open for at lease," I checked my watch, "Twenty eight more hours."

"He's probably moving to the Motorpool next," Bomber said, tapping where the roof had been exposed. "He'll want to know who's controlling it, what is in there, and it will be the first step in securing the weapons. He knows the Rangers aren't coming, he knows he's on his own."

I nodded, "It checks out." I sighed and rubbed my face again. "All right. I'm going to try to get some sleep. One of you stay on the radio in case his stupid ass figures out a way to call in and keep the stove running so we don't freeze to death in this muddy shit hole. The other can get some sleep. Tell the guards not to let anyone in unless that maniac fires off the nukes."

I got up and moved over to my cot, pulling back the blanket. For a second I thought I saw a snake, but realized it was just my brain was tired. I wasn't thinking clearly right now. I laid down, fully dressed, and put my M-16 at my side before pulling the blanket over me. Bomber was standing up and turning off the light bulb.

Before she could ask I told her.

"No, you can't go back and finish getting your guts stirred around by your husband's baby dick. Sit at the radio and masturbate with your rifle or something, but until this is resolved, none of us go anywhere," I said, closing my eyes and not bothering to look at her. "There's a German hard core porn mag under the paperwork next to the radio, don't get pussy juice on the pages."

I ignored the noise she made.

Stillwater was on his own.

"Good luck, Ant," Bomber said softly in the dimness.

I wanted to laugh.

It wasn't him that needed the luck. It was those idiots in his way.

"You know, if he isn't blood crazy yet, he will be, Chief," Bomber's voice broke the quiet.

"What do you mean?" I asked, not bothering to open my eyes.

"It's Alfenwehr, Chief," Bomber said. "Whatever Ant is walking into, I can guarantee one thing to both of you."

"What's that, Johnny?" Nagle asked before I could.

Johnny. Jesus Christ on a fart powered go-kart, you have gotten weak.

"It's going to be a horror show."