Everybody knew the grunts were in Afghanistan and suffered heavy casualties but didn’t lose a man. In fact, every wounded commando eventually returned to the grunts. When Gerhard himself was targeted by a BBC news correspondent after the war, she asked him; what his men had actually done in Afghanistan to sustain so much injury.
Gerhard sneered at her and said, “We fucked it.”
“So,” asked the stammering correspondent, “how was it, fucking Afghanistan?”
“Dry,” Gerhard said. “Painful. But we were the right pricks for the job.”
That interview never aired.
When word came down from the commander in chief that an insertion team was needed in Topeka soon, the military’s sharpest minds immediately thought of Gerhard’s Grunts.
By the time their transport was descending on Kansas, they had seen the video footage of attacks that had happened throughout the middle part of the nation. The footage showed swarms of freaky albinos committing theft, violence, murder, kidnapping and cannibalism.
As the transport plane touched down in Kansas, Topeka was just waking itself up. It was a cool, blue-sky morning, full of promise. The people were oblivious to the overnight violence. If the federal government had its way, they would never know. This was going to stop here and now.
A U.S. Army cordon surrounded the Paradise Caverns, with tanks and jeep-mounted machine guns, enough firepower to reduce the building to rubble.
Outside the Army cordon was a ragtag jumble of local police. A Topeka police official stormed up to the first of the grunts’ vehicles as it stopped for the Army checkpoint. He had a speech all ready—he had delivered it several times that morning. He started delivering the speech to Gerhard. It had something to do with the Feds not respecting the authority of the chief of police of a major metropolitan city. What was Gerhard going to do about it?
“Fuck you. Chief,” Gerhard answered, and they rolled into the protected realm where the local law was not allowed.
The grunts exited the vehicles, fully armed and fully prepared to move in. The Army officer in charge of the scene told him that there hadn’t been any sign of the albinos since the overnight attack. “If you’re lucky they’re long gone.”
“If I’m lucky,” Gerhard said disdainfully, “they’re inside waiting to engage. Battle is my job. What the hell is yours, soldier?”
The grunts went into Paradise Caverns, followed the route of the albinos to the cavern’s subterranean waterfall and started blowing up the rock. In minutes they revealed a hidden passage, then belayed over the cascade and marched into the earth, leaving behind the glorious Kansas dawn without a backward glance.
Their base communications operator kept in constant radio contact to insure their retransmitters were situated to maintain a signal. They fed back continuous data streams, including infrared video images.
The on-site CO was in a command truck in the parking lot outside the cavern, and he couldn’t see anything in the images except for an occasional rock and a grunt’s foot. After an hour the CO called in personally.
“What’s the terrain like?”
“It’s like a sidewalk in Central Park,” Gerhard explained. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess we were on a part of the paved walkway for the regular cavern tours.”
“Blasted?” the CO asked.
“Worn,” Gerhard radioed back.
“You mean eroded, like by water?” the lieutenant commander said.
“No, sir, I mean worn. By foot traffic.”
“Oh”
“Our worst problem is the litter. Shoes. Personal effects such as wallets and keys. Soon as the air started getting hot we started seeing a lot of clothes. Sweaters and jackets, then shirts and bras and torn pant legs. Now short pants, socks, everything. The victims must be just about naked. Hold on.”
There was a pause as the team went into silent running and the CO went into tense sweating in his command truck. Naked victims? Foot-worn pathways? How much foot traffic did it take to wear a path into the rock floor of cave? He didn’t know, but he knew it was no small amount.
Gerhard spoke from miles away below the surface of the green earth. “Sir, we have a body.”
“Show it!”
Gerhard pointed his helmet-mounted lipstick video pickup. The body was revealed in the imperfect infrared signal.
“Holy mother of Jesus, what is it?”
“This ain’t one of the victims, sir. This ain’t even a human.”
The CO couldn’t take his eyes off the naked, gaunt creature sprawled in a crevice off the side of the trail. its upper torso and his hips twisted unnaturally away from each other.
“There’s another up the trail. Watch it, grunts!” They advanced barely a foot at a time, and the lieutenant colonel could almost feel what it was like to be down there, nerves in a razor edge, adrenaline pumping, senses tuned to every real and imagined movement. The cavern opened and many bodies came into view, sprawled in the jagged crevices, facedown in a deep trench with its trickle of water.
