"Then we don't drop it from inside," Lin replied. She looked at me, her eyes dead steady in the dim red beam of the flashlight. "You have the media card. You have the pre-dated tag with Hale’s seal. I take the key across the ditch and drop the manual trip on the rail itself. When the alarm trips, Hale’s people will run for the switch. That gives you ninety seconds to get Aris off that gravel bed."
"You won't make the timberline, Sarah," I said. "There’s seventy yards of open ballast between the track and the drainage ditch."
"I don't need to make the timberline," she said. She reached out, took my thumb, and pressed the cold brass of the switch key into my palm instead. "You take the key, Thomas. You’re the record officer. You’re the one they need to sign the custody log when this ends. I’m the company commander whose sentry is standing on that track in chains."
Before I could grab her arm, Lin kicked the side door of the pump house open and stepped directly into the glare of the halogen towers.
"General Hale!" her voice cracked across the frozen yard like a rifle report, cutting clean through the diesel roar of the switcher locomotive.
Every head on the rail bed snapped toward her. The men with the cutting torch froze, the blue flame sputtering against the wet steel of the reefer door. Hale didn't jump. He slowly lowered the clipboard, his eyes narrowing as he peered through the sleet toward the pump shed.
"Captain Lin," Hale said. His voice was carried over the engine noise by the trackside speaker horn mounted on the light tower. "You are outside your assigned sector during a security lockdown. Step down onto the ballast and surrender your sidearm."
"I have the audio relay from Tuesday night, General!" Lin walked steadily toward the light, her hands held wide, empty, away from her belt. Every guard on the train had an automatic weapon trained on the center of her chest. "I have your voice ordering Corporal Aris away from the siding! I have the record of the Omaha pharmaceutical manifests you diverted from Fort Riley!"
Hale did not look angry. He looked tired—the terrible, patient weariness of a man who had spent forty years managing logistical attrition and saw this as merely another balance sheet to balance.
"Captain," Hale said, his tone conversational, almost fatherly. "A recording without a certified chain of custody is not evidence. It is an administrative anomaly. Major Sterling is currently in a federal transport van on his way to the regional detention facility in Leavenworth. In twenty minutes, Corporal Aris will be on this locomotive heading west. Do you truly believe anyone in the Department of the Army will take the word of a insubordinate company commander over a divisional general officer?"
"They won't have to take my word," Lin said. She stopped ten paces from the lead reefer, directly beneath the light tower. She didn't look at Aris. She didn't look back toward the pump shed where I crouched in the shadow of the water tank. "They’ll take the word of the man who holds the manual track key."
Hale’s eyes hardened. He looked down at the track bed, twenty yards ahead of the switcher engine, where the mechanical derailer sat locked in the open position.
"Search her," Hale told the two guards beside Aris. "Take the key and drop her in the creek bed."
The guards stepped off the ballast, their boots crunching into the frozen slush.
They were looking at Lin. Hale was looking at Lin. The torch operators were looking at Lin.
Nobody was looking at the manual derailer switch thirty feet to the left of the switcher engine, where the grease-coated iron lever stood upright against the timber tie.
I slipped out of the pump house door into the deep mud of the drainage cut, the brass switch key clenched in my fist, the ice water rising over my boots as I began to crawl toward the track.
CHAPTER 4: What The Morning Log Demanded
The steel wedge of the derailer had bitten through the flange of the switcher’s lead wheel at four-twenty in the morning, and by noon the sleet had stopped, leaving Camp Vora encased in an amber sheet of frozen road grit. The cold had not lifted. It had sunk into the concrete expansion joints of the administration building, into the lime-dusted gravel around Rail Siding Nine, and into the wet wool of my service tunic, which hung stiff and salt-stained against the radiator in the provost marshal’s second-floor holding room.
General Hale sat on the wooden bench across from the clerk’s wire counter. He had not taken off his overcoat. The wool was dark with melted sleet along the shoulders, but his collar brass was aligned to the eighth of an inch, his silver stars catching the dull winter daylight that angled through the frosted glass. Major Miller stood three paces to his left, his civilian overcoat unbuttoned to reveal his belt holster, his right hand hooked over his leather notebook.