Them Bones

THE BOX I

DA Form 11432Z 01 Oct 2002

Comp 147TOE 148

Pres for duty

146

Missing, line of duty

1 For: S. Spaulding

Col, Inf.

Total: 147

Commanding Barnes, Bonnie

Cpt ADC

Adjutant

Smith’s Diary

Oct 4

It took two and a half days for us all to come through, though we started at thirty-second intervals. I came through in the middle of the first night.

Forty-five minutes later Sgt. Croft came out of the portal behind me.

And so on through the night, the next day and night, and early into the second morning.

One hundred and forty-six of us.

There is still no sign of Leake, or of what happened to him. Dr. Heidegger thought the jump-reading on the instruments just before Leake went through may have something to do with it. The point man could be back where we started from, a few days before or after where we started from, Up There.

If he is, he knows where he is better than we do. Or when, for that matter. Colonel Spaulding sent scouts out on two-hour rides in every direction. All they found were trails, but nothing else manmade, so far. No smoke, no footprints, no boats, no houses, no aircraft.

We have set up camp on the bluff overlooking the bayou. It’s the highest point for kilometers around. Spaulding had us dig in the usual star pattern defenses, but hasn’t let us set up anything permanent yet.

Everybody’s getting this wild look in their eyes, if they didn’t already have it before we left Up There. This is it, whenever and wherever it is. We’re stuck here, unless life somehow goes on Up There, and they find some way to come get us. We knew that when we came through, but we also thought we’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty years from the time we started.

Spaulding is taking it right, acting like this is just another exercise, some problem the War College has set for him. What did we expect from a thirty-year man? Come to think of it, what’s a ’copter pilot like me doing here, anyway? As acting assistant adjutant, no less.

It’s better than being back Up There, dying with the rest of them.

Acting assistant adjutant, I can see giving the CIA spooks orders some day when everybody else is out of the camp. They all have shifty eyes and look like insurance agents on an overnight campout. Jeez.

There are more lightning bugs and bigger mosquitoes here than I ever imagined could live in Louisiana.

And so, as Pepys used to say, to bed.