Time/Date Error (Damned of the 2/19th-Book Six) - Done

Atlas Three Five

(For those of you who read the previous chapter, now un-published, and wonder where it went: After writing nearly 25K words on that operation, I decided it'll be a side novel, not part of the Damned exactly. I unpublished it and figured I should continue with this story without getting into a full length novel)

CIA Listening Post #487
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
29 October, 1987
0300

I woke up feeling like knives were slicing into my chest. My right eye was glued shut and I had to reach up and rub at it. I'd slept with my face against the pillow, and apparently I'd been bleeding from my nose and mouth as I slept. The pillow in front of my face was soaked in blood, now dried to a rusty brown hue. The inside of my little shelter was damp, but not frozen.

It was actually warm inside. I inhaled, cough, but didn't taste pennies, and determined that the stabbing pains were from torn flesh busy knitting and possible fractured ribs.

I knew I'd been attacked, and I knew whoever had done it had managed to put me down, or would have put me down and delivered me to Alfenwehr if it hadn't been for Aine. She'd had a baby, had little breasts full of milk, and that increased her power rather than diminished it. She'd been able to reach out, through the odd connection we'd always shared, and diverted Alfenwehr's cold touch into keeping me alive but not leaving me in the mountain's power.

I rolled onto my back, reaching under my clothing to press on my ribs.

Across my right side. At least four of them were popped. They didn't shift under my fingers, although the pain made me inhale sharply. No jabbing feeling of a broken rib, just cracked.

Someone had thrown several hard right hands into my rib cage, probably while their buddy was shanking me. It was too far forward to be the guy behind me, so that meant at least two attacked me. One grabbed me from behind, the other worked me up from the front. The stab wounds weren't from my knife, it was still in my boot, so that meant they had to use a knife, not a weapon. My holster was empty, so they'd taken my .45, but from what I'd seen in the hallway before I'd been forced to run, they were out of ammo since the ammo pouches were still on my LBE and full. I had a full basic load for a 2/9th NCO, 8 magazines (I stretched my magazine pouches by cutting the inner straps, soaking it in water, and pushing four magazines with spacers in there to stretch the canvas, giving me two more mags than normal) for my M-16, and two ammo pouches with a total of four .45 magazines, for a total of 28 rounds of .45 caliber sledgehammers. Two 9mm pistols with one magazine each, for a total of thirty rounds of 9mm ammo, fast penetrators that couldn't guarantee an instant kill.

There wasn't anything else to do. I needed to piss, and I was hungry and thirsty, so it was time to leave my little cave. Judging from the way I'd passed out I hadn't gotten my ventilation right and had suffered from carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide poisoning. The oxygen level as high up as the Group Area was for shit to begin with, and I'd been burning C-4 and diesel fuel to warm everything up. I'd need to redo the ventilation, probably pipe it directly. I'd lose some heat, but the hotter exhaust would go up and out, leaving me with oxygen.

The only problem was I'd need intake paths so that the stove didn't gobble up all my available O2 for the fire, which was probably another mistake I had made.

Ice crackled as I pulled the mattress aside, the muscles down my side screaming in protest. I crawled out and stood up, taking a deep breath. It tasted clean, clear, and I stretched slowly, already feeling the cold trying to creep in through my uniform.

I closed the upper windows, leaving every third lower window open, then went outside. The interior snow was all ice, but I figured the temperature was sitting at about 38 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit. That increased my chances of survival by quite a bit.