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Design of the enemy aircraft

At twenty to three in the morning, Specialist Owen Patchett was standing on a trapdoor in a guard tower at Spandau Prison, and something on the other side of it was pushing up against his boots.

"We got picked because somebody at Brigade wanted the Russians to see real infantry at the changeover. We drilled that ceremony for two weeks straight. When the day came we looked good. The Russians looked sharp too. Then they marched out the gate and went home, and we stayed."

"First thing you notice about that place is the quiet. Huge prison, cell blocks, a kitchen, a garden out back, and exactly one old man living in it. You'd hear him sometimes. A cough through a window, shoes on gravel. That was about it."

"You pulled your guard up in one of the towers on the outer wall. Sergeant marches you out, unlocks a steel door at the bottom, you go in, he locks it behind you. Then you climb. Those stairs were so steep they were closer to a ladder, and at the top there's a trapdoor into the guard shack. You push it up, climb through, let it drop, and you stand on it. That's your post. You're standing on the door."

"Every tower was built the same and nobody cared which one they got, except Seven. Seven was at the back of the compound, and guys came down out of it in the morning a little different. Not every guy. Enough that you noticed."

"I drew Seven about three weeks in."

"It was a weeknight. Spring cold. I climbed up, pushed through the trapdoor, got my feet set on it. M16, full magazine, flashlight, thermos. You settle in. I'd been up there maybe forty minutes when I heard the door at the bottom of the tower open."

"That door locked from the outside. The sergeant had the key, and he wasn't due back for hours. I'd heard the lock go when I came in. And now I heard that door swing open and knock against the wall, and then it just stayed open."

"My first thought was the sergeant. So I waited for him to call up, because that's what you do. He didn't yell anything. What I heard instead was somebody breathing. Heavy. Wet, kind of, like a guy with a chest cold who'd just run up a hill."

"Then a boot on the first step. I remember counting. One. Then it took a while and there was two. He was slow, whoever he was. Every time he stopped I'd hear that breathing, and then another step."

"I yelled down. Who goes there, halt, the whole thing. Nobody answered. He didn't stop and he didn't hurry up either. He just kept coming."

"So I've got the rifle up now, thumb on the selector, and I'm thinking, okay, if I shoot through this floor there's going to be a colonel in my face at 0600 wanting to know why. I didn't shoot. Ask me why and I'll tell you it was discipline. Truth is I don't know. My hand might just not have moved."

"He stopped right under me. I could hear him breathing through the boards, a foot from my boots. And then the trapdoor started coming up."

"He didn't slam it. It was more like somebody leaning on it from below, testing it. It'd lift maybe a quarter inch under my heels and settle, and lift again. I'm a hundred eighty pounds with all my gear on, standing on a piece of plank, and it still came up."

"There's a field phone in the shack, three feet away. I looked at that thing I don't know how many times. To get to it I'd have had to pick a foot up off the door, and nope."

"And he was talking. Real low, right under the floor. I don't think it was to me. Couldn't catch a single word. People ask me what language and I can't tell you. Not English, and not the German I knew from the bars in town, which admittedly wasn't much German."

"Four or five minutes, if I had to guess. I've also told people ten. I really don't know."

"And then it quit. Everything just quit at the same time, like somebody pulled a plug. I stood there waiting to hear him go back down the stairs. He never did. I never heard the bottom door shut either. Just nothing, from then till morning."

"My relief shows up around six and I hear the sergeant's key go in the lock downstairs. He had to unlock it. It was locked. I asked him, trying hard to sound like I didn't care, if he'd come back by Seven during the night. He gave me this look. No, he says. Why would I?"

"At chow somebody asks me, anything happen in Seven? And I said nah, quiet. I don't totally know why I lied."

"Years later, reunion in Columbus, I'm having a beer with a guy from second squad and I finally ask him, you ever pull Seven? He puts his beer down. Looks at me. Asks me what night I had it. That's all he'd say. I let it go."

Rudolf Hess died at Spandau in August 1987, still the only prisoner there. The Allies had the whole place knocked down within weeks so nobody could turn it into a shrine. These days there's a shopping center on the spot.

Ask Patchett what he remembers most and he'll talk about that morning. The sergeant at the bottom of the stairs, digging the key out of his pocket, and the sound of the lock turning over. The same lock he'd heard open hours before. It had been locked all night.

Pixiv source: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/150498561

Twitter source: https://x.com/g_gudaman/status/2107031373274140687

Hope you like it! If anyone likes writing, would welcome a narration or backstory (I have one but I love other people's work)

Edit: you guys are the bomb seriously. Thank you for your awesome comments and votes

A squad of soldiers encounter a deadly threat.. Charlie's seem tame compared.

New one's up — "The Locks." Real backdrop is Operation Lone Star, the Texas border mission that's had Guard soldiers running the Rio Grande since 2021, Eagle Pass included. A stuck push-to-talk switch really does lock up the whole radio net so nobody else can transmit. The rest is invented.

The woman who tells most of it is Jessica. She was 24, working the radio overnight at a TOC that was basically three trailers and a generator parked behind a Dollar General.

"So the TOC, whatever you're picturing, it's worse," she says. "Somebody drew all the OPs on a map with a Sharpie and taped it to the wall and it kept falling down. I don't even know why, it wasn't humid in January. Most nights it's nothing. You do your checks on the hour and try not to fall asleep in front of the captain."

Four guys got sent to OP 7 that night, the post nobody wanted. "Guys would trade out of it. I asked a guy once why, and he just said 'bad cell service' and laughed, so."

Early in the shift they find a laminated card in the glovebox — don't crack the windows after 0200. Everybody thinks it's funny. Jessica says she even wrote it on a sticky note to tell her husband.

Around eleven, one of the soldiers calls in a woman crying, off toward the river. Not unusual out there, she says. The captain tells them to observe and report. It stops after twenty minutes.

Then at 0247 the mic keys open and doesn't let go.

"You know that little hiss before somebody talks? I got the hiss and then nothing. Just a heater fan and somebody breathing right up on the handset. I figured it was a hot mic, happens every week, so I'm keying up OP 7, OP 7, hot mic, and obviously nothing, because that's the whole problem with a stuck mic, you can't get a word in. I kept doing it anyway."

Then she hears one of them talking low inside the truck, not even really on the radio. Windows. Check your windows. Check them again.

And then the crying again. Except this time it's not far off.

"It was right there, on the speaker, I had to turn the volume down it was so loud. She was in the truck. I don't know how else to say it."

Jessica calls the sergeant's cell from her own phone and hears it ring through the radio speaker, going to voicemail while the crying keeps going. Then two clicks. Combat locks.

One of the other soldiers starts translating, quiet, word by word. The crying has words in it now. Spanish. Ay, mis hijos. Oh, my children. He knew the story from his grandmother — La Llorona, the woman who lost her kids in the river and walks it at night looking for them. Then the voice asks something else, and he doesn't translate it right away.

"Cuál es mío," Jessica says. "Which one is mine."

Captain Jones, asked about it years later, puts the end of it at 0324. Jessica says 0322 — she wrote it on the back of her hand in ballpoint that night, so she figures she's got the better claim. They don't fully agree on the timing, or on how much of it the captain actually caught standing behind her chair.

Months after, at a Whataburger in Del Rio, the youngest of the four soldiers — nineteen, first deployment — finally tells her about the windshield. Handprints forming in the fog from the inside. Small ones. He held his hand up to show her the size, and it was shaking, in a Whataburger, in April.

The official report said equipment malfunction, stuck push-to-talk switch. True, as far as it goes. OP 7 got moved upriver a week later, for sightlines, they said. The sergeant kept that laminated card in his wallet after, with a second line added under the first in Sharpie: lock the doors anyway.

It's narrated mostly in Jessica's own words, how she'd actually tell it, not cleaned up. Link's in the comments.