And every soldier who worked the night detail at the incinerator—the men who actually loaded the slag and hauled the ashes—eventually noticed that the crates going into the pit were not empty bandages or clinic refuse.
I pulled the waterproof papers from my service cap: the three torn pages from Sterling's ledger.
I knelt beside the first pallet, smoothing the damp sheets against the rough wood of the crate. In the margin beside the fourth crossed-out name—Private First Class Daniel Vance—was a five-digit number written in tiny, cramped pencil: 8842-A.
The exact contract suffix stenciled into the recessed corner of the wood beneath my hand.
My nephew hadn't been transferred overseas. Daniel had been the night inventory clerk on this very loading dock four months ago. He had seen the contract numbers. He had recorded the mismatch between the clinic burn orders and the weight of the crates on the floor scales. And Sterling had used that same red grease pencil to mark Daniel’s name off the active roll before his signature on the transfer papers had even dried.
"Colonel," Cole said suddenly, his hand clamping down on my shoulder. "Listen."
Through the heavy concrete walls of the vault pit, a new sound cut through the steady hum of the incinerator stack.
It wasn't the gun trucks. It was the sharp, distinctive chime of the base public-address horn, echoing out over the marsh from the administration building half a mile away. Three short, rising blasts followed by a flat, automated tone: the installation-wide muster signal.
Then Sterling’s voice boomed through the distant horn, magnified by four thousand watts of perimeter speakers until it rolled across the swamp like thunder.
"All personnel, this is the Executive Officer. Condition Red is declared across all sectors. Special Agent Cole and Colonel Vance are officially designated armed fugitives following an assault on Trailer Four. Any unit establishing visual contact is authorized to use lethal force to prevent access to the main perimeter gates. Repeat: lethal force is authorized."
Miller sat back against the cold concrete wall of the vault, his face draining of whatever color remained. "He’s locking the perimeter," the boy whispered, his eyes wide and blank with terror. "We can't get to the division tent. We can't even get across the road."
"He isn't trying to catch us," I said, standing up and folding the ledger pages back into my pocket. "He knows what we have. He’s triggering a base lockdown so he can bring his own security detail here to the incinerator, dump forty gallons of fuel into this vault, and burn every crate before the division inspection convoy rolls through the main gate at dawn."
I looked at Cole. His sidearm was back in his hand, his thumb resting firmly against the hammer.
"We have two hours before the inspection team reaches the wire," Cole said grimly. "We don't have the firepower to hold this bunker against Harlan’s detail, and we can't carry four hundred pounds of avionics through the swamp."
"We aren't holding the bunker," I said, stepping up to the iron hatch and looking out through the fog toward the perimeter transformer bank fifty yards away. "We don't need to carry the crates to division command. We just need to make sure Sterling can't burn them in the dark."
CHAPTER 3: The Muster Across The Wire
The siren on the water tower died, leaving the marsh in a flat, ringing silence broken only by the hiss of cooling slag.
I pushed the iron vault hatch down until the spring latched into its seat, leaving only a quarter-inch seam to watch the gravel yard. Agent Cole dropped to one knee on the concrete ledge below me, his thumb easing the hammer of his sidearm down against the frame. Toby Miller sat between the two oak pallets, his back wedged against crate 8842-AV, his wet field jacket pulled tight around his ribs to muffle his shaking.
"He won't use the regular gate sentries," Cole said, his voice flat under the concrete lip. "The company clerks are thirty yards from the telephone bank. If Sterling calls them out, the duty officer has to log the ammunition draw in the division blotter. He’ll keep this inside his own detachment."
"Harlan's three men," I said. "And whatever auxiliary driver he used to run the flatbed tractor."