A Small Elite Group On A Mission To Find And Remove Enemy Weapons
Our main mission was to destroy the enemy weapon storehouse inside Slaughter City and return to headquarters any way we could .
It was a mission we never chose . It chose us .
We had been told not to return if we failed .
Dropped by parachute into code Rhino we made our way to the city .
After three weeks of hand to hand combat and slow steady counter attack we were in the situation of no way back .
Some of our number had already been killed and some had decided to leave before the mission was complete .
We started to convince ourselves that our secret weapon would be ok .
We had to have belief in those who had put it all together .
We had all been instructed to make sure our target was reached .
It was our job and there was only one way to achieve success .
We were all that was left of the final assault force .
Finally we reached the target area and as night fell we waited to make our move . We climbed to the top of the warehouse as the noise of the city life crowded out the inner sounds of the soul .
Between fear and apprehension we dropped down on ropes through the roof of the building and discovered a vast arms cache .
Despite of everything that was being reported we had stumbled upon a deadly supply of chemical weapons capable of destroying millions of people .
We all stood there in shock like lambs on the edge of an abyss hoping to find some way across .
Like a maze of death there were mines and other electronic devices that lay around waiting to be triggered .
Trip wires and laser beams . Heat censors and cameras .
What a terrible thing it was to find out that we were inside our very own Slaughter house .One wrong move and we were all history .
We stood there in silence like seven very small specks in an ocean of thoughts that meander across the universe .
This was our mission .
Sometimes within a great conscious mystery the reality of knowing ourselves lies between logic and something unexplainable .
This understanding of the soul makes us an individual .
We faced death and discovered life on that cold night .
Outside a lonely picture of the city looked back at us .
We all knew the fear and yet understood what we had to do in this place .
Surrounding the weapons storehouse was the prisons .
Beyond the prison block was the wall that kept the city out .
Our objective was transport and the safe removal of the entire stock we had found .
Electronic warfare was our secret weapon and with the equipment we all had we could disable all triggers and security devices in the weapons store house
On my signal we hit the switch and waited for a reaction .
It was immediate .
All the laser beams went off and the trip wires snapped without making a click of any kind .
We left the warehouse and unlocked the doors of the prison .
By the time the enemy were aware of the escaping prisoners we had their
Gates open and our trucks rolling in through the main gates .
The prisoners became the guards and the guards were thrown inside their own cells .
The trucks were loaded before morning and we were out of there .
Mission accomplished .
The World is a safer place now .
The End
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Reviewed by Gerald Zollar
12/4/2006
Interesting, telling a story without narrative. Short declarative sentences, but descriptive and holding the attention. It was almost worthy of Dan Brown as a story. Any tweaking of the writing would have only made it longer and possibly destroyed it. I felt thought the ending could have been a smidgeon better.
Mushroom Cloud, a fact-based historical novel, is the first book of The First Strike Trilogy: USA and the Soviet Union are building nuclear arms for a face off in a potential nuclear war in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
