I walked toward the green cinderblock shack. The heat radiating off the gravel bed made the horizon ripple.
The front entrance to the siding office was secured by a commercial padlock, but the heavy brass hasp had been cut clean through with a battery-powered grinding wheel. The scarred steel hung loose against the jamb, fresh metal shavings dusting the concrete threshold.
Vance had already sent someone.
I drew the sidearm, flattened my shoulder against the cinderblock exterior, and nudged the heavy wooden door inward with my toe. The hinges groaned, swinging into darkness that smelled of mildew, stale tobacco, and burnt electrical wiring.
"Clear," I whispered to myself, stepping across the broken sill.
Inside, the siding control room was a wreck of vandalized bureaucracy. Three metal filing cabinets had been overturned, their manila freight slips and weigh tickets scattered across the linoleum like autumn leaves. In the center of the room sat the automated Department of Transportation scale terminal. The gray metal tower housing the central processing unit had been wrenched open with a pry bar, its internal circuit boards snapped in half, their green fiberglass splinters hanging by ribbon cables.
A cold knot tightened in my gut. Vance had not waited for Colonel Brooks to finish the inquiry. The local dispatch logs were destroyed. The hard drives that recorded vehicle axle weights were smashed beyond salvage.
Then my gaze traveled past the ruined workstation to the small utility closet behind the water cooler.
The door was locked with an old brass Yale cylinder, but the concrete floor beneath the threshold was dry and undisturbed. A pair of shielded coaxial cables ran out of the upper ceiling tiles, down the doorframe, and disappeared directly through a drilled hole in the wood.
This wasn't the military staging terminal. This was the state Department of Transportation backup vault—the independent optical archiving station installed to prevent private rail operators from falsifying chemical transit weights across municipal bridges.
I set my shoulder against the closet door, drew back my boot, and kicked hard right beside the lock cylinder. The dried pine frame splintered with a sharp crack. A second kick sheared the latch, and the door flew inward, revealing a small, windowless concrete alcove lit by the green blinking LEDs of an uninterruptible power supply.
Mounted on the steel equipment rack was a standalone industrial server, its intake fans humming smoothly against the quiet room. On the desk below sat a monochrome monitor displaying a waiting command prompt: NC-DOT HIGHWAY LOGISTICS LOG—STATION 14B.
My breath caught in my throat. The vandalism out in the main office had been a distraction. Whoever Vance sent had destroyed the local commercial workstation, completely unaware that the state monitoring system recorded its own independent feed directly from the track sensors fifty yards north.
I unbuttoned my blouse, pulled out Corporal Miller’s burned micro-cassette recorder, and laid it beside the terminal keyboard. Then I sat down and touched the spacebar.
The green phosphor screen flickered to life. I did not search for my own name or my forged office routing code. I typed the date that had torn my career to pieces: 10-12.
A cascade of digital lines rolled down the screen, listing vehicle weights, axle counts, and infrared gate triggers for the civilian spur between midnight and zero four hundred.
There it was.