<div align="center">(http://baltimorechromiumresiduecleanup.com/_resources/images/photos/2011_terminal.jpg)<br/><em>Dundalk Marine Terminal, before the world blew up.</em></div><br/>If Sparrow's Point, at the entrance to Baltimore's harbor, was anything to go by, this would be a very, very short mission.  The Hand of God itself had come down on the spot marked "Old Road Bay" on the Chief's charts, and turned the shipyard at Sparrow's point into a heap of twisted steel and concrete.  The cranes stuck out of the water at odd angles, and their bases seemed as much melted as snapped.  Lying at the dock was a smallish freighter on her side, collapsed nearly onto itself with rust- not a bit of paint could anyone see on the hull, it seemed to have been all burned off.  On the other side of the bay, what was once a forest was now twisted into a scorched abatis, and there was supposed to be a town somewhere in between the two.  There wasn't.<br/><br/>The parade of boats- some Navy, some stolen from abandoned marinas nearby- had made its way up the Chesapeake from the Bay Bridge.  Someone would see if the Bridge could support traffic, but that wasn't going to be B Troop's job.  As they waited for the sun to go down, they got the first bit of news- C Troop didn't even have to get close to Annapolis- no stone was laying on top of another at the Naval Academy or in town.  Someone had put a bucket of instant sunshine right atop Bancroft Hall, the massive dormitory, and then put another one right across the mouth of the Severn River, as if to prove a fucking point. (That point: They were assholes.)  The crater was still a little hot, even.  Not enough that you'd notice it from the sea, but you wouldn't want to camp there.<br/><br/><div class="floatleft">(http://i43.tinypic.com/19laio.jpg)</div><br/>It was a cloudless night, and the moon, half full, stood brightly out in the night sky.  Without clouds or the sun, the temperature began to fall rapidly once total darkness overcame them- the Navy guys huddled into their woolen peacoats, particularly as the breeze picked up.  At 0130 AM, the navy Lieutenant in charge of this whole screwup passed the order, and they proceeded in a column- "line astern" according to Chief Bivona, who was in overall command of the Platoon's water transport- towards Fort Carrol, the stopper to the harbor's bottle.  Once there, the formation broke up, everyone to their own destinations.  Chief Bivona kept his boats moving slowly cautiously in the dark.  As they passed under the Francis Scott Key Bridge, they could hear it creak slightly as the wind blew, and the bridge's bulk blocked out the moon for a bit. That said, it had not collapsed, which was the first good news they had gotten.<br/><br/>About 10 minutes later, they were close enough to start making out Dundalk's port by their night vision scopes.  Shockingly, the place was not a radioactive cinder.<br/><br/>It was actually fairly well preserved.  As the boats made a slow procession around the perimeter of the dock, it was pretty clear that Dundalk was mostly intact- one of the cranes had collapsed, but the rest were still there.  Three ships had been docked and abandoned.  One now lay partially capsized, leaning against the sea wall.  One had settled into the water, about halfway down before she hit the floor of the bay.  The third had, at some point, slipped her bow moorings, and now jutted out into the harbor like a tooth smashed out of place.  Too much more detail couldn't be found in the greenscale images generated by their NVGs- the ships might be rotting, rusting hulks, but that would have to wait for daytime.<br/><br/>Once they reached the mouth of the canal that separated the Mid Atlantic Terminal from Seagirt, the Chief brought the wheel back over, and sailed towards the harbor before turning back towards the southern of the two terminals.  He didn't want to go probing too far up the canal at night, and Seagirt was more disorganized, from what they could see, and the approaches more likely to be fouled- or maybe the Chief was losing his nerve, piloting in the dark on an open boat in a strange harbor that should have been wiped from the face of the earth.<br/><br/>The most obvious place to go in was on the southeast side of the terminal, as far away from the ships as possible, near the big parking lot.  The three boats approached in formation, working forward slowly.  They closed with the tall seawall that formed the boundary between the sea and the United States of America.  Boatswain's Mate Johansen was the first one back in the US, as each boat boosted a sailor up onto the wall, and each one carried a rope ladder with them, which they tied to cleats on the dock and dropped down to the boat deck.  Several unsteady steps later, 3rd Platoon was ashore, and Chief Bivona cut the engines on the boats.<br/><br/>Without the rumble of the engines, it was very, very calm, and very very eerie.  A dock like this should be well lit, and busy, even at night.  The whole shoreline should be awash in yellow sodium light, but it wasn't.  Just a few sounds- the water lapping against the dock.  The slight woosh of the wind.  The distant clanking of a unsecured crane hook banging against something in the distance.<br/><br/>The shuffling, then running footsteps from the stack of shipping containers 50 yards to the north.