Standing before the only truck bay door, the inset necessary to accommodate even the small trucks which could get in to the door sacrificed a good bit of dock floor space. Standing at the far end of warehouse, then, the floor running to the back wall a couple dozen yards was open to the ceiling high above.
Each man had been specifically orderd to bring his own flashlight. As they began to explore, they found the truck bay had been already somewhat stacked up with boxes and furniture which was clearly American government stuff, most of it older, some of it needing a little repair. Nearest to them was the pile of apparently new cots they had already noticed. There were also several more cases of the field rations which had sustained them on their journey from the one working airfield in the country.
They all agreed that was not a good sign, but Krumm spotted another stack of boxes, each labeled with the usual incomprehensible military abbreviations. However, he noticed a small pasted label on each one said “Class 1 expedite” — military jargon for food. Opening the top box in the stack, he pulled out a large steel tub sealed with a heavy foil cover. He recalled a particular test program using these. They were meant to be loaded into low heat ovens mounted on trucks, which could quickly deploy and serve hot food in the field. While there was apparently no oven there to fit these trays, Krumm assured them it was all fully cooked, meal-in-one type stuff which had been rather well received among the troops. They decided to test one immediately, using a stash of cheap flatware among the pile of stuff there. It was tolerable cold.
It took the six of them another fifteen minutes of exploration to discover the layout of the building. Mounted on the ceiling above them was a chain hoist, but the chains had been pulled aside. They appeared to by lying on the top floor of a section of the open warehouse which was filled with a substantial wood framed series of decks. The decks were simply open where they faced the doors of the dock. They ran the length of the building to the office block, attached by a switchback stairway, and landings on each floor. The whole thing was built as a single unit. Each stair landing was open to the deck system on one side, and on the other side two doors each floor in the office block. The wood was obviously old, but rather thick and still solid, most of it rough cut.
Aside from the truck bay at the far end, each of the half dozen loading doors were just about wide enough for two men to walk through abreast, and just over six feet high when fully rolled open. The dock itself was solid concrete, and on the floor level, there was only one doorway into the office block, a rather wide swinging door with spring hinges. It was surprisingly quiet in operation. The wall above it seemed to have had a long banner at one time, because there was a bright spot in the faded paint. Under the first stair going up was a flat, heavy steel door which had been slid open to reveal a concrete stairway down.
Krumm didn’t hesitate to descend. It was deeper than a single story, in part because the concrete floor it pierced was quite thick. Furthermore, the ceiling was at least ten feet high, so the stairs were quite long in a single run. Manford came behind him, being the Facility Engineer, because he hoped to find a way to turn on some power and water. A quick check of the bathrooms in the office block indicated there was no water pressure in the plumbing.
At the bottom of the stairs, Krumm was near the dock side of the build. To his right was a steel door. Inside was an empty room easily one-third the floor space of the office block floor plan. In the center of the wall was an open doorway which led farther back under the office block. Behind him he heard Manford, “Bingo!”
Coming back out, he saw Manford shining his light into an alcove under the stairs. Sure enough, there was an obvious electrical box, a large switching box with different handles on each side. In an alcove behind them was large piping, some insulated, and several large valves. Upon closer inspection, they realized there was another narrow open doorway back up under the dock area. Ducking the cobwebs, they found themselves in a large chamber. On the right was a compression tank and a bump on the floor. “Looks like a water well,” Krumm noted.
Manford simply responded, “Mm-hm.”
The rest of the chamber was occupied with a large boiler system. “Hot water circulation for heat,” Manford said.
Then Krumm spotted yet one more open doorway on the far wall. He leaned in with his flashlight. “Wow!”
Manford crowed to see over his shoulder, and Krumm moved to let him look at a very large stationary motor and dynamo. The room had sound absorbing coverings on the wall. While this did not account for all the space under the dock, it was more than enough for the moment. Returning to the stairway, Manford leaned in close to the switches. “What? Is that…?”
“Russian,” Krumm agreed. “That explains a whole lot. It won’t be fast, but I have translation software on my laptop. In fact…” He pulled out his pocket device. Sliding out the keyboard, the screen glowed brightly in the basement gloom. It was indeed a slow process as he selected one character at a time from a grid, then entered one word at a time for translation.
“That one says ‘off’ and that one says ‘standard.’ Hmm.” A little more rigorous poking with his thumbs on the keyboard. “That one says ‘off’ but that one says ’emergency’ — must be the generator switch.”
Manford yelled up the stairs, “Stand clear from electrical devices!” Then he threw the first switch up. The box hummed, but nothing more happened. He stepped to another panel, felt around and pulled off a cover. Setting it on the floor, he examined the collection of switches but needed no translation for most of it; there was a diagram showing each floor of the office block and another showing the dock. Matching the two character code on the drawing with the switches, he threw the one he thought might be the light nearest the top of the stairs. Sure enough, light flooded down the stairs from above.
“Yahoo!”
That night they slept on the ground floor of the office area. Manford spent the next few days making sure various parts of the facility itself worked. Each of the other men began feeling his way through their presumed contract duties. Jordan began organizing whatever he found in the warehouse. It was not quite empty when the previous occupants left, because there were a few crates and lockers he began opening, but the most surprising find was a pair of old bicycles. The tires and tubes had dry rotted, but they worked fine otherwise.
Gilson as Personnel Manager and Worley over Operations shared a shocking amount of disorganized HTS paperwork. It had apparently been collected from several different locations and simply stacked haphazardly in one office. They begged Krumm to get the computers and network going as quickly as possible.
Ripley’s main purpose in life quickly came to revolve around reading and digesting a huge library of regulations, rules, advisories and so forth. At first, he was puzzled by the way nothing seemed to apply to their situation. Krumm suggested it meant they were pretty much on their own. Indeed, he argued, it was to their greatest advantage to do precisely what the commander wanted, and set up procedures which forced the HTS field officers to stay out of his hair.
It turned out the HTS Chief they met in the briefing room was as useless as she appeared. That is, she pretty much refused to make decisions, so while she offered zero guidance, she also refused to act on complaints from the HTS officers who didn’t like the way Ripley was running things. Only a few filtered through the offices at first, but the majority seemed to believe they were in charge, or should be. Ripley had seen and heard it all when he managed a company which had been shutdown by outsourcing. He was physically large and just charismatic enough to get away with refusing their conflicting outrageous demands. Krumm swore the man enjoyed arguing with them.
For his part, Krumm stayed up late the first night with the phone. There was only one hooked up, sitting on the floor atop a booklet which provided a directory and some instructions on calling into the military HQ. At that hour, it made sense to try the operator first, since every installation he had seen had at least one on duty 24-7. The first try didn’t work because the man’s local accent was just too muddy. He hung up, waited a bit and tried again. Sure enough, this time he got a West Texas drawl.
The woman who answered invited him to authenticate by his badge number and some silly password they had all been told to memorize when they first arrived in country. She used a phrase Krumm recognized as a reference to one particular city. “You sound like someone from Lubbock.”
She laughed, and from then on the chatter was non-stop. He encouraged her to reminisce, and in the process took notes and began mapping out the real organization which paralleled the official one at HQ. Two hours later, she reluctantly had to hang up to monitor the nightly conference call which served to check emergency communications between various headquarter offices across the theater. Krumm shook his head. “Lord, I hope I never run into her in the flesh.” Yet, he knew it was necessary to continue cultivating the most useful intelligence source he could have. It was all about whom to talk to in each office to get things done.
The next day, he tested his data by contacting a middling sergeant in the military IT bunker and worked out a schedule for setting up and testing the broadband wifi antenna they found buried in the stuff dumped in the truck bay. It was meant to be aimed at the HQ Comm Center, but the normal procedure meant one of their tech teams came out and that would not happen for a couple of weeks. By volunteering to take the burden on himself, Krumm made friends quickly. So in just a half hour, once he had the thing mounted on a bracket built into the roof of the warehouse, and a phone line attached to a hands-free phone on his belt, and a headset and mike, he got the sergeant to talk him through until the signal was solid on both ends.
For the next 24 hours straight Krumm was running wires to where each man decided to make his office, and repairing and refurbishing computers with cannibalized parts from a large stack of nearly obsolete systems. Then he began sleeping in short stretches over the next few days between installation and compiling of software. There was no official software package, and he was free to build a secure and stable data system, with several terminals for the HTS officers on the ground floor. The military had not mandated any particular software package. Krumm had dreaded the possibility of some hideous specially written boondoggle contract program typical of government contracting. Instead, their operation was all self-contained, and the only thing which left the building was email, a few documents in common electronic formats, and bundles of printed statistics required by other offices. Ripley kept his own books and simply typed by hand himself whatever the Finance Office demanded.
After that first week, they began having time to actually attempt spending some of their pay.
