Cross didn't deny it. He glanced back at the sedan, where the tinted driver’s window rolled down two inches, releasing a faint trace of cigarette smoke into the cold air.
"You think you're protecting the post, Elena," Cross said, gesturing toward Miller. "All you're doing is standing in front of a private who doesn't understand the machinery he’s caught in. Hand me the boy. Hand me the key. I will sign an administrative transfer that puts you in command of the headquarters detachment at Fort Meade by the end of the week. No inquiry. No mark on your record."
Miller pulled on my jacket sleeve, his voice shaking with terror. "Colonel, please. Don't let them take me. The car... look inside the car."
I glanced past Cross’s shoulder. Through the open slit of the sedan's window, illuminated by the dash lights, sat a third man in civilian clothes. He held an unsealed olive-drab personnel binder across his lap, its metal binder rings gleaming under the interior dome bulb. Pasted to the cover was an official military police red-border expulsion order, bearing the blank signature lines used for prisoners transferred into off-base custody.
If Miller entered that car, he would never reach a magistrate. He would become an AWOL fugitive before midnight, his name permanently wiped from the post muster roll.
"Reyes," I said, keeping my eyes on the provost marshal. "You took an oath to the uniform, not to Tom Cross’s pension. Back off."
Sergeant Reyes looked at Cross, then looked at the service weapon at my hip. Slowly, deliberately, the sergeant took two steps backward, clearing the line between my shoulder and the provost marshal.
Cross's face hardened into stone. "You're making an irreversible mistake, Vance."
"The gate log clears at midnight, Tom," I said, gripping Miller's arm and shoving him hard toward the narrow, unpaved drainage culvert that ran along the post's eastern security ditch. "Run, Leo. Run to the communications bunker."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Major Cross’s jaw tightened into a rigid knot of muscle. His eyes tracked the wet darkness where Miller had vanished, but the muzzle of my sidearm held him pinned against the amber haze of the idling sedan. Behind him, Master Sergeant Reyes stayed motionless, both hands raised flat at shoulder level, refusing to step into the line of fire. Inside the sedan, the civilian in the passenger seat rolled his tinted window all the way up and leaned over the console, killing the overhead dome light.
"You can't get him out of the garrison, Elena," Cross said. His tone had lost its administrative calm, sharpened by the bitter edge of an officer watching his perimeter unravel. "The MPs on the gates report to my office. The commercial lines were severed forty minutes ago for the regional data migration. If Miller reaches the bunker, Sergeant Miller can't dial off-post. All he can do is barricade himself in a concrete box until the dawn patrol cuts the power."
"He doesn't need to dial off-post," I said. "He has the brass key card."
Cross’s left hand twitched, drifting toward his utility belt before catching himself. "That card is scrap metal. The mag stripe was scrubbed with a bench grinder."
"Then you haven't worked security on the old ordnance revetments since the post transitioned to digital badging," I said, retreating backward one measured step at a time, keeping my weapon level while my boots found the broken asphalt of the service ditch. "The heavy vault beneath Communications Bunker Four isn't wired into your local server. It was built during the Cold War for manual telegraph and telegraph-relay archives. The lock on the inner bulkhead is a mechanical Yale pin tumbler that requires a solid brass blank cut to an older ordnance profile. That's what Hale handed him. The filed stripe was just camouflage to fool an MP inspecting a gate pass."
Cross didn't answer. The silence that fell between us was louder than the diesel generators humming across the motor pool. In that instant, I knew my deduction was right. Hale hadn't given the boy a digital key to an active computer network. He had given him the physical key to the underground lockbox where the original, carbon-paper transport manifests from last month’s fuel transfers had been deposited before the digital audit trail was scrubbed.
"Elena," Cross said, his voice dropping into an urgent, low register that barely carried over the idle of the Impala's engine. "Think about what happens if you break the seal on that vault. Hale isn't a victim. He sold those thirty-six railcars of diesel to a private contractor in Wilmington to cover an eleven-million-dollar shortfall in his third-quarter supply ledger. If you open that bunker without a signed warrant from the Fourth Circuit, you aren't uncovering evidence. You're contaminating the chain of custody. The post commander will have no choice but to sign your dismissal under Article ninety-two."
"Then he can sign it," I said.
I backed around the corner of the supply warehouse, letting the corrugated metal siding break Cross’s visual line. The moment the sedan's high beams slipped out of sight behind the warehouse wall, I turned and broke into a dead sprint along the wet grass bordering the perimeter drainage trench.