"You have ten minutes to get down to that rail siding and secure the state server drive before Vance’s people realize Cole talked," Brooks whispered, his voice dangerously low. "If you come back with an empty hard drive, Captain, I will sign the charge sheet Vance is carrying right now, and you will spend the next ten years at Fort Leavenworth."
"What about Cole, sir?" I asked, taking the heavy envelope.
"Cole stays in the stockade until I see that terminal log," Brooks said, standing up and buttoning his blouse. "Take the rear basement fire exit through the heating plant. It comes out behind the motor pool fence. Take my driver's staff car; the plates will clear the inner check-lanes without a search."
He tossed a set of heavy brass vehicle keys across the desk blotter. They landed with a sharp jingle against the leather.
The banging on the outer door intensified, accompanied by the metallic rattle of a master key turning in the lock cylinder. Major Vance had arrived with his paperwork.
I scooped up the keys, shoved the envelope deep into my tunic, and pushed through the small private washroom door behind Brooks’s desk that connected to the maintenance corridors below the headquarters building. The cold smell of industrial grease and damp boiler steam hit my face as I pulled the access hatch shut behind me, the deadbolt clicking into place just as Vance's angry shout echoed through the office above.
CHAPTER 3: The Siding Where Truth Burned
The heavy steel fire door slammed shut behind me, severing Major Paul Vance’s shouting voice mid-syllable.
Down in the sub-basement corridor, the air tasted of scorched boiler dust and damp concrete. I ran past the humming heat exchangers, keeping my boots low and light against the gravel-dusted floor, the manila envelope tucked flat against my ribs under my service blouse. In my left fist, Colonel Brooks’s brass car keys clattered with every stride. If the provost marshal’s office put out a base-wide apprehension broadcast before I cleared the perimeter wire, an administrative arrest warrant would freeze my credentials across every military gate in Cumberland County.
I burst through the emergency escape exit behind the central heating plant. The afternoon sun off the tarmac hit my eyes like broken glass, humid and thick with the resinous smell of Carolina longleaf pines. Brooks’s olive-drab staff sedan sat parked in the restricted commander’s stall beside the fuel farm fence, its chrome bumper gleaming under the heat haze.
I did not pause to adjust my uniform. I slid into the driver’s seat, stabbed the ignition key into the column, and cranked the starter. The big V8 engine turned over with a heavy, throaty rumble.
At the secondary post access point on Honeycutt Road, the guard specialist stepped out of his booth with a clipboard in hand, squinting against the glare. When he saw the blue brigade commander’s placard mounted on the front bumper, his hand snapped instantly to his brow. He pressed the yellow gate button without asking for a trip ticket. The hydraulic arm lifted into the sky, and I swung the sedan out onto the two-lane state blacktop, accelerating south toward the industrial spur line that bordered the civilian rail yards in East Fayetteville.
Ten miles of sun-bleached asphalt dissolved beneath the tires. My knuckles remained locked against the steering wheel until the white road markers blurred into a single vibrating ribbon.
For ninety days, they had let me sit in a basement salvage cage, listening to clerks trade jokes about the female captain who panicked behind a desk when the night run exploded. They had told Corporal Miller’s mother that her twenty-year-old son had fallen asleep at the wheel of a military tactical vehicle, drifting across the center stripe because he lacked convoy discipline. They had built a wall of silence out of forged carbon dockets, burned metal, and my disgraced signature.
Now, the entire apparatus rested on whether a commercial rail scale three miles outside the post boundary still held its digital memory.
I turned off the state highway onto an unpaved haul road rutted by heavy timber trucks. To the left, the East Fayetteville civilian siding stretched out beneath the rusted framework of an overhead gantry crane. Four gravel spurs cut through the scrub brush, their tracks overgrown with weeds and oily chicory. At the far end sat the concrete staging office: a low, cinderblock bunker painted faded industrial green, topped with an antenna mast and a single floodlight bank.
Between the rails sat three blackened tank cars, their outer cylindrical shells blistered and scarred from an intense chemical blaze. These were not the tactical drab-green tankers belonging to the division motor pool. They were civilian leased cars, their private fleet markings hastily scrubbed away with acid wash, leaving streaks of bare lead-gray steel along their flanks.
I brought the sedan to a halt behind an embankment of discarded railroad ties, killed the engine, and pulled the service revolver from the vehicle's glove box—a standard issue M9 Brooks had left behind the registration sleeve. I checked the magazine, chambered a round, dropped the hammer safely with the decocker, and slid the weapon into the waistband of my slacks behind my back.