The Stickmen

Smashwords
Edition

Necro
Publications

2011

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THE STICKMEN

THE STICKMEN
© 1999
by Edward Lee

Cover art © 1999 Erik
Wilson

This digital edition January
2011 © Necro Publications

eBook ISBN:
978-1-4524-2815-4

Cover, Book Design &
Typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic
Design

http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

a Necro
Publication

5139 Maxon Terrace •
Sanford, FL 32771

http://www.necropublications.com

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PROLOGUE

U.S. ARMY MUNITIONS COMMAND

EDGEWOOD, MARYLAND

Be all that you can be,
Emery
thought.
In the Army.

During his two years in green, he’d seen
some butt-ugly posts—Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Dix, Sill, and
Devans in Massachusetts before they’d closed that hock-bucket
down—but this…

This?

“Good God,” Emery muttered.

The U.S. Army Edgewood Arsenal made Bosnia
look like the French Riviera. Home of the illustrious 1st
Redeposition Battalion, Edgewood seemed to be the sinkhole where
the Army buried all its junk, and men like Emery were the masters
of the junkyard.

Quanset huts and fences—acres of them, all
set in mud. No grass was allowed to grow on this post because dirt
and mud would take castable footprints, something CID wanted in
case anyone was stupid enough to break into this joint. In essence,
then, the Edgewood Arsenal was a seemingly limitless mud hole.

It’s the ass-crack of the world,
Emery thought,
and here I am stuck between the cheeks.

Whenever he pulled sentry duty, it rained.
Dressed in an olive-drab hood and poncho, Specialist 4th Class
Craig Emery walked his solitary guard post in front of a long
warehouse. Just like the warehouse he’d guarded last night, and the
night before that, and so on. The warehouses all looked the same.
Slung around his shoulder was an M-16A2. His boots clicked wetly
through the rain puddles.

Just like the rain puddles last night, and
the night before that.

And so on.

Emery, like a lot of eighteen year olds
fresh out of high school, had fallen for the recruiter’s shtick,
hook, line, and sinker. He’d wanted to be an infantry man, try to
make the cut with the Rangers, go to jump school and all that. He’d
wanted to be a SOLDIER. But once the recruitment officer got to
jacking his jaws, that was all she wrote for Emery.

“You don’t want to be a ground-pounder, do
you?” he’d insisted. “You want to be a 095-Echo Security Materials
Technician. See, Craig, you passed the background check. You
qualify for a Secret clearance with an access higher than most U.S.
congressmen. The Army needs men like you, Craig. Men of integrity,
men of character. Plus, when you get out, the Army pays all your
college tuition, or if you stay in, you get a $25,000 re-enlistment
bonus.”

Wow,
Emery had thought.

“Don’t be a sod-pounder, Craig. As a
095-Echo Security Materials Technician, you’ll be working the U.S.
Army Munitions Command, and you’ll be maintaining critical security
on…
secret
weapons.”

Wow,
Emery had thought.
Security
Materials Technician!

That’s all it took. Emery signed on the
dotted line and was shipped of to Basic a week later. He was going
to work on
secret weapons!

Security Materials Technician indeed. The
title sounded intriguing, and, yes, Emery received his Secret
clearance just as he graduated Basic and was shipped to his
Advanced Individual Training at Fort Goodfellow in San Angelo,
Texas. He’d passed the polygraphs. He’d never stolen. He’d never
used drugs. And he’d never done any…atypical things with animals.
Emery was
in!

At Goodfellow, though, he’d found out just
exactly what a Security Materials Technician was.

A sentry. A flunky walking a guard post.
That was it.

No, in the two years and eleven months of
his three-year stint, Emery had never seen a single “secret
weapon.” Oh, there were plenty such things on the vast post: old
field nukes from the 60s and 70s, RAP artillery shells, binary
chemical-weapons canisters. He’d even heard that the base stored
hundreds of Whisky-79 155mm warheads which were essentially neutron
bombs but, because of their older design, had slipped through some
SALT II loopholes.

But Emery never
saw
any of this
stuff, and he certainly never
worked
on it.

He just guarded it.

I should’ve joined the Rangers,
he
regretted.
Should’ve gone to Kosovo.

Because there was another thing: Nothing
ever happened here. Action was not this post’s middle name.

Just walking one eight-hour shift after
another, looking at the same long gray locked warehouses.

In the rain.

Behind him, heavy rolls of razor wire topped
the double-layer steel fence.

The fence
hummed.

An ever-familiar warning sign read: NO
TRESPASSING! DO NOT TOUCH PERIMETER FENCE!

Emery passed two more such signs: RESTRICTED
AREA. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED and SECTION 21, INTERNAL
SECURITY ACT OF 1950 - 50 U.S.C. 797 - ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE
FIRED UPON.

Yeah yeah yeah,
Emery thought, rain
running off him as though he were a human drain-spout.

He glanced at his watch.
Thank God!
he thought.

It was 11:59 p.m.

His post ended in one minute.

Or maybe not.

Emery had already abruptly stopped. He was
staring at the perimeter fence.

There was a hole in it, a big one. At least
three feet around.

Nothing ever happens here,
he
reminded himself. He unslung his rifle, its plastic handgrips tight
in his fingers. He pulled back the charging handle—

clack!

—and fed a 5.56mm round into the
chamber.

Then he turned around one hundred and eighty
degrees.

“Fuck,” he muttered between his clenched
teeth.

Nothing ever happened here?

Emery was staring at the nearest warehouse
door. He saw three heavy-duty padlocks lying in pieces at the foot
of the door.

The door stood ajar.

Emery whipped out his hand-held Motorola
radio…

««—»»

The guard hut was cozy, warm. And dry.

Those poor bohunkers,
Staff Sergeant
Young thought with a chuckle, thinking all off his boys out there
in the rain tonight. It rained a lot around here.

But the Sergeant of the Guard didn’t have to
walk a post. SSG Young felt he’d earned the privilege. Combat
Infantry Badge and Purple Heart in Desert Storm. He’d be E-8 by now
if it weren’t for that minor altercation at Nurnberg two years ago.
You punch a 2nd lieutenant in the face at a bar, you get busted.
Didn’t matter that the punk had only been in the service nine
months. Didn’t matter that it was over a pissant bar argument about
baseball. Young was a Yankees fan. The lieutenant…the fucking
Orioles.

Didn’t matter. When an EM punches an officer
in the face, the officer always won.

Young pleaded guilty before the UCMJ court,
and when the judge took one look at his record, he’d let Young off
light in a big way. One stripe in the shitter and ninety-days Extra
Duty.

Young’s escalating security clearance had
landed him at Edgewood. It was easy time, and Young figured that he
deserved it, after so many times of being fired at—and shot—by
Hussein’s Republican Guard. He’d taken out six of the pricks before
they’d tagged him. Young had been deep in the field, sensor-reading
Iraqi weapons igloos that had been lazed and bombed by the Air
Force. The things their CAT detectors had told them…

Well, that was another story.

At least
I
got the shots,
he
thought.

Right now he was slouched back at the guard
desk reading—of all things—
TV Guide.
Forget about the
Playboys
and
Hustlers
under the desk. This ish had
the first pix of Pamela Lee with her de-planted bosoms.

What a woman,
he thought.
With or
without, babe, you’re the greatest…

That’s when the base-station radio went
off.

“Sergeant of the Guard, Post Number 3!”

Pam was on the floor as Young rushed to the
set. He keyed the mike:

“Post 3, this is Security Point SOG. What’s
your status?”

“Sarge, this is Emery! Sector 9 fence is
breached!
And the door to Vault 6 is
open!
”

Young spat out his wad of Cannonball chewing
tobacco. “Emery! Lock and load, and man your post. A SERT’s on the
way!” Young, harried now, grabbed a phone. “Division CQ, this is
1st Redep. Wake up the CO and tell him we got a breach.”

Goddamn godamn goddamn,
he thought
when he hung up the phone. Nothing ever happened at this post. But
tonight…something
had.

Young clicked the radio base to another
channel, then grabbed the mike.

“Base Security, this is 1st Redep SOG. Put
the Base on Op Stat 4 Alert,
now.
I need a Special Emergency
Response Team dispatched to Vault 6,
now.
”

The alarms were already blaring when Staff
Sergeant Young donned his field hat, cocked his Beretta 92F, then
ran out the guard shack’s door.

««—»»

“Right there, Sarge!” Emery yelled.

Rain ran in rivulets down Young’s face and
arms. “Where?”

Emery pointed to the hole cut into the
fence. Behind them, the spotlights were roving, and many armed
soldiers could be seen searching the outside perimeter.

The breach alarm continued to blare.

Then the Emery pointed to the opened
warehouse door. “And there!” he shouted.

Young eyed the cracked Milspec locks on the
ground, thinking
Shit!
“We ain’t waiting for the SERT team,”
he told Emery. “Come on.”

Young pushed open the warehouse door, thrust
out his sidearm.

Inside, the warehouse extended vast as a
ship’s cargo hold. Intermittent caged lights hung overhead,
throwing blocks of stiff shadows. Long aisles formed by wooden
crates stacked ceiling-high. A sign warned from a low support beam:
NO OPEN LIGHTS. NO SMOKING. DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES.

“This sucks, Sarge,” Emery complained. Fear
put a slight crack in his voice. “You see how those door locks were
busted? Somebody popped ’em right off the u-bolts. I heard those
locks—”

“You heard right,” Young snapped back.
“They’re the best padlocks in the world; a .50-cal round won’t
break them. And how’d they get through the security fence? It’s
1,500 volts.”

“We-we should wait for the SERT team,
Sarge.”

“Bullshit. Whoever busted in might still be
here.”

Sweat formed around Emery’s collar. “Yeah,
which is why we should—”

“Pipe down,” Young ordered. “And aim your
weapon forward—it ain’t a goddamn broom. You watch right, I watch
left. Keep an eye out for trip-wires. And shoot anything that
moves.”

Young lead on through the main aisle,
determined, eyes keen over his pistol sight. Emery followed with
quite a bit less enthusiasm. As they moved deeper into the
warehouse, the air grew heavy with the scents of bare wood and
fire-retardants.

“First section of the warehouse is mainly
primers and rigging gear. Now we’re getting into the tough
stuff.”

Emery began to sweat harder as he read the
stenciled markings on various crates:

MINES/M-18 (Claymore) APERS, One (1) Box of
Twelve (12)

BLOCK, DEMOLITION M2 (Tetrytol) 6.5 LB, Six
(6) Pieces

GRENADES, HAND, FRAG MK2A1 with FUSE
M204A1.

“Aw, come on, Sarge!” Emery raised his
voice. “This is all bomb shit! It could be some terrorist busted in
here and rigged the place to blow. We need to get our asses out of
here and call the ordnance people!”