John Ringo by Into the Looking Glass

Author:Into the Looking Glass [Glass, Into the Looking]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Human-alien encounters, Adventure, Military, General, Florida, Explosions
ISBN: 9780743498807
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2005-05-02T22:00:00+00:00

8

Major Thomas "Bomber" Slade was the S-3 (Operations) officer of the 229th Combat Engineering Battalion (Light, Sappers Lead), based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The short, stocky, erect officer had arrived three hours before with the main body of the engineering battalion that was tasked with designing and beginning construction upon interlocking defenses to attempt to stem further Titcher incursions through the Staunton wormhole. He was currently observing the wormhole from the front glacis of an M-88 engineering vehicle, that being the only place in relatively short range that wasn't radioactive as hell.

Major Slade was an "active reserve" officer. That is, he no longer held a regular Army commission, despite being a product of the United States Military Academy (West Point, NY). He had resigned his regular commission as a captain to embark on a career as a civilian civil engineer. He had his bachelors in civil engineering from West Point and had attained a masters from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York while in the United States Army. After serving with the Army in several positions, notably as a company commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's light engineering company, he felt that he had limited chance of eventual advancement to high rank in the regular Army. This was as a result of the incident that had given him the moniker "Bomber" Slade.

As a young lieutenant he had been tasked with clearing a live fire range of unexploded ammunition. His platoon had spent two weeks carefully policing the combined arms' range for unexploded ordnance ranging from small mortar "sabot" rounds, which were about as dangerous as firecrackers, up to five-hundred-pound bombs. They would comb one-hundred-meter by one-hundred-meter segments and put white flags on any ordnance that was detected. Then, when the area was fully surveyed, they would carefully lay small charges of Composition Four on any of the unexploded ordnance, "daisy-chain" the explosives together for simultaneous detonation and then, having removed to a distance considered safe, detonate the charges thereby blowing up the dangerous munitions that had been lying around.

They had done this for two weeks and at approximately three p.m. on a Friday the range had been declared, by Lieutenant Slade, clear.

Unfortunately, Lieutenant Slade was a meticulous officer and he had ensured that only sufficient C-4 had been used on each munition to ensure its destruction. Furthermore there had not been as many exploded munitions as were anticipated. Therefore, there was a large quantity of C-4 left over, approximately thirteen hundred pounds. Once drawn from the ordnance corps, munitions are extremely hard to return, even if it is, as most of this was, in unopened ammunition boxes. It entails vast amounts of paperwork and annoyingly intense questions from various ordnance officers and NCOs who are, understandably, unhappy to have "irregular" munitions in their storage bunkers.

Therefore it was Lieutenant Slade's decision to detonate the C-4 on site.

The careful and cautious manner to do so was to detonate the C-4 in small lots, carefully moved from the site of the central group of material.

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