Chapter 10 - The Dawn of Reckoning
The three flatbed trucks were commercial Peterbilts—painted the dull, road-salt gray of long-haul cattle transports, their canvas covers lashed down with steel cables that had been tightened with heavy ratchet binders.
They didn't stop at the outer warning line.
They rolled past the "RESTRICTED AREA – DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED" sign at twenty miles an hour, their air brakes snorting against the sub-zero chill, their heavy tires grinding the fresh drift into black, greasy mud.
The lead truck had two men in the cab.
The driver was an older man with a grey beard and a grease-stained Carhartt jacket, his left arm resting on the door frame. Beside him sat Keith Vance—fifty-two years old, with the broad, flat face of his son and the cold, dead eyes of a man who had spent twenty years running logistical security for the high-dollar supply routes between Kuwait and Baghdad.
Vance had an MP5 submachine gun resting across his knees, the selector switch set to fire.
He didn't like the look of the compound.
The parade ground was empty. The one hundred and forty recruits who usually stood in their ragged, shivering ranks during morning formation were nowhere to be seen. The barracks doors were closed.
Only Captain Miller stood by the guard shack, wearing his heavy winter parka, his clipboard held against his chest with both hands as if he were trying to keep his ribs from caving in.
The lead Peterbilt hissed to a halt five yards from the yellow gate arm.
Keith Vance rolled down the passenger window. The smell of burning diesel and hot oil washed over the snow.
"Where’s Dalton?" Vance called out. His voice was gravelly, hardened by three packs of unfiltered Camels a day.
Miller took one step forward. His boots were dragging in the slush. His knees were visibly trembling beneath the hem of his parka.
"Dalton... Dalton is in the boiler room," Miller stammered, his voice thin as tissue paper in the wind. "The... the pallets are staged in the south warehouse. We had an issue with the forklift hydraulic line."
Vance’s eyes narrowed.
He didn't look at the clipboard. He looked at Miller’s hands. He looked at the white knuckles. He looked at the Captain’s throat, where the carotid artery was pulsing against the collar of his shirt like a trapped bird.
"Where are the boys, Miller?" Vance asked softly.
"They're... they're on interior detail," Miller said, his voice cracking. "The cold—it was thirty below on the ridge last night—"
Vance reached down with his right hand toward the floorboards between the seats.
"Back it up," Vance said to the driver, his voice dropping into a flat, professional whisper. "Turn the bird around. Now."
"Too late for that, Mr. Vance," a voice said from the roof of the guard shack.
I stood on the corrugated tin roof, twelve feet above the hood of the Peterbilt.
The wind was blowing my service trousers against my legs, the gold piping bright against the dark blue cloth. I had no rifle. My hands were behind my back, my fingers interlaced, my feet spread thirty inches apart in the standard position of command.
Vance’s head jerked up.
He saw the eagles on my collar. He saw the bare, shorn scalp beneath the patrol cap. He saw the Combat Infantryman Badge catching the pale morning light like a strip of gray bone.
"Who the hell are you?" Vance snarled, his hand bringing the MP5 up toward the windshield.
"I’m the new girl," I said.
From behind the snowbank thirty yards to the west, twenty-four barrels rose in a single, coordinated movement.
The recruits of Company B—the thieves, the alcoholics, the whistleblowers, the broken transfers—stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind the snow berms, their M4 carbines leveled at the cabs of the three flatbeds.
Torres was in the center.
She had her cheek pressed against the receiver of her rifle, her eye locked through the Aimpoint sight, her finger steady on the trigger shoe. Beside her stood the supply clerk from Ohio, his face grim, his weapon held with the solid, immovable grip of a soldier who had finally remembered why he wore the uniform.
And above them, clearing the ridge with a deafening, chest-crushing roar that threw eighty thousand pounds of rotor wash down upon the access road, came the two Night Stalker Black Hawks.
They hovered forty feet above the snow, their nose-mounted miniguns tracking the three cabs with the high, electric whine of sixty-cycle feed motors.
"Engine off," I ordered, looking down into Keith Vance’s face. "Step out of the cab with your hands on your head, or I will let these recruits practice their marksmanship on your engine blocks."
Vance looked at the miniguns.
He looked at the twenty-four carbines held by soldiers who had nothing left to lose.
He looked at Miller, who had fallen to his knees in the mud, weeping into his clipboard like a child who had been left behind in a burning house.
Slowly, carefully, Vance took his fingers off the receiver of the submachine gun. He reached out with two fingers, clicked the ignition off, and raised his hands until his palms were flat against the frosted glass of the windshield.
"That’s it," I said.
The side door of the guard shack opened.
General Vance Mitchell walked out into the road, his four stars gleaming in the morning sun that had finally broken through the grey ceiling over the continental divide.
He looked up at me on the roof.
"Colonel Carter," he called out over the idling engines of the helicopters.
"Sir!"
"The installation is secure," Mitchell said. "The federal marshals are at the south gate. The transport from Fort Leavenworth will be on the tarmac in twenty minutes."
He looked at the line of recruits standing behind the snow berm—at Torres, whose hands were steady now, at the Ohio clerk, at the mechanic who had stood his ground.
"What do you want to do with the company, Emma?"
I looked down at the three ranks of soldiers who had watched me sit in silence while their NCOs shaved my head for an internet video twelve hours ago.
They weren't looking at a victim anymore.
They were looking at their Colonel.
"Keep them on the line, General," I said, stepping down from the ladder onto the frozen Montana gravel. "Their training starts tomorrow. And this time, we’re going to teach them how to be soldiers."
I walked toward the gate, past Miller who was still sobbing in the slush, past Dalton who was being led out of Barracks Three in iron leg-irons by two CID agents, straight toward Private Torres.
The girl lowered her weapon, snapped to attention, and held her salute with her eyes locked straight ahead.
I stopped in front of her.
I reached out and adjusted the collar of her field jacket, straightening the fabric where the corporal’s chevrons had been torn away.
"You have work to do, Torres," I said.
May you like
"Yes, Colonel," she whispered.
"Get your gear," I said, turning toward the administrative building where the blue-and-gold flag of the Special Oversight Group was already rising up the flagpole into the clear, freezing blue of the Montana morning. "We have twenty-two hundred files to rewrite before sundown. And none of them are going to be redacted."
