A heavy crunch of gravel sounded twenty yards to my left, around the corner of the fuel tanks.
"Vance!"
The voice belonged to Major Miller, the senior federal agent who had pinned Sterling's arm to the serving counter. His gray field trench was soaked dark across the shoulders, his boots splashing through the slush as he rounded the generator fence. Two garrison police followed five paces back, their hands resting on the butts of their sidearms, their breath rising in gray plumes against the freezing rain.
"You're walking the wrong direction for Tactical Three, Colonel," Miller said, his face shadowed beneath the brim of his wet patrol cap. He didn't smile. He stopped six feet from the catwalk stairs, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets. "The General's waiting. He told me to escort you in personally, and he specifically requested that I carry the recording unit to ensure the evidence seal remains unbroken."
I slid the red paper into the narrow slit behind my collar dog-tags, letting the cold brass plates hold the cardstock flat against my skin, and snapped the recorder's battery latch shut with my thumb.
"The unit doesn't leave my custody until the provost clerk logs the serial numbers, Miller," I said, descending the three metal steps toward the gravel path. "You know standard field evidence procedure as well as I do."
Miller didn't step back. He stood squarely in the center of the narrow walkway between the fuel tanks, his broad shoulders blocking the only path leading back to the administrative quadrangle.
"The General just superseded standard field procedure," Miller said quietly. "As of three minutes ago, the provost office has been placed under direct federal oversight. Hand me the machine, Colonel, or we can conduct this transfer the hard way right here in the mud."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"The paper is sitting on the General’s desk in Tactical Three," Miller replied. He took one deliberate step forward, closing the distance to four paces. The cold rain dripped from the stiff brim of his patrol cap onto his cheekbone. "You can walk over there under your own power and watch him stamp it, or these two men can carry your sidearm, your belt, and that recorder in three separate evidence bags. You have five seconds to unshoulder the strap."
He was counting on protocol. In twenty-four years of service, an administrative officer faced with an armed escort backed down, preserved the chain of custody on paper, and filed a grievance through official channels on Monday morning. But the purple ink drying against the dog tags under my collar had already broken protocol. If Hale had signed tomorrow’s dispatch order today, the paper in Tactical Three was not an administrative filing. It was an execution of post clearance designed to seal the base before Corporal Aris’s missing-person report left the garrison network.
I did not reach for the canvas strap on my shoulder. Instead, I stepped off the wooden walkway straight into the eight-inch culvert drainage ditch between the tank foundations.
"Vance!" Miller barked, his right hand tearing free from his coat pocket, lunging forward to grab the nylon webbing.
The mud in the drainage cut gave way under my left heel, but the pipe rack three feet above offered a solid iron anchor. I caught the secondary steam valve with my gloved left hand and swung my weight hard to the left, pivoting around the rust-streaked housing of Fuel Tank Seven. Miller’s wet glove grazed the corner of the recorder’s aluminum chassis, stripping the foam windscreen from the microphone mount before his balance broke on the slick gravel rim of the ditch.
"Hold him!" Miller shouted behind me. "Do not let him reach the motor pool!"
A carbine action racked with a loud, metallic slap in the sleet, but no shot followed. They could not fire inside the petroleum containment apron without risking an ignited vapor line, and Miller knew the sound of a discharge would pull every mechanic out from under the repair bays fifty yards away.
I scrambled up the concrete retaining wall of the trench, my field boots finding purchase on the embedded rebar rungs. Cold water poured off the drainage lip into my collar, plastering the stiff wool of my tunic against my spine, but the accordion fold of the crimson transit slip stayed pinned flat against the metal tags on my skin.
I cleared the apron fence through an open maintenance gate and broke into a dead run across the open gravel expanse toward the maintenance compound.
The motor pool was a cavern of grease, yellow sodium lamps, and diesel smoke. Three five-ton tactical transports sat jacked up on concrete pylons in the center bay, their stripped axles dripping black hydraulic fluid into galvanized pans. Half a dozen mechanics in oil-blackened coveralls stood near the tool cages, wrenches hanging slack in their hands as the base-wide sirens overhead continued their mournful, single-tone drone.
Captain Sarah Lin was standing at the bench by Bay Two, checking the tire pressure on a command utility truck. Her head snapped up the second my boots struck the concrete threshold. She took one look at the stripped microphone mount on my shoulder and the wet mud coating my left sleeve, and she dropped her gauge into the metal toolbox with a sharp clang.
"They blocked the lane," I said, barely slowing down as I reached the shadow behind her truck’s tailgate. My lungs burned against the freezing air I had dragged across the yard. "Miller tried to pull the chassis off my shoulder at the fuel farm."