Chapter 8 - The Paper Trail of Wolves
Torres didn't answer with words.
The tear that ran down her left cheek cut a clean, pale line through the grey coal dust that had settled on her face from the morning wind. She stood there, her shoulders shaking, her hands locked against the seams of her trousers, taking the question like a bayonet thrust to the ribs.
"Both, ma'am," she whispered.
General Mitchell stopped chewing his apple. He looked at the girl over the rims of his glasses, then glanced at me.
"That’s the first true sentence spoken on this installation since we landed," Mitchell said.
I sat down in Miller’s high-backed leather chair. It was too soft—the kind of chair that encourages an officer to lean back, to avoid looking out the window, to let the paperwork pile up until the rot becomes structural.
"Sit down, Torres," I said, pointing to the second steel chair beside Miller.
Miller flinched as the girl sat down beside him. He shifted his weight away from her, as if the contamination of a junior enlisted soldier’s confession might somehow accelerate his own ruin.
"You're twenty-two years old," I said, pulling her personnel file from the stack Albright had laid out. "Two years of college at San Antonio. Scored a 118 on your GT score. You were supposed to be an intelligence analyst at Fort Meade."
"Yes, ma'am."
"What happened?"
"I... I had an issue with an instructor at Huachuca," she said, her voice barely louder than the hum of the electric radiators. "He was an E-7. He told me if I didn't spend the four-day weekend with him at his cabin in the Huachuca mountains, my security clearance wouldn't clear the background phase. I reported him to the company commander."
"And?"
"The commander told me that an E-7 with three tours in Iraq doesn't get his ticket punched over an allegation from a student who hadn't even finished Phase Two," she said, her chin beginning to tremble again. "Two weeks later, my file was flagged for 'temperamental unsuitability.' They sent me to Black Ridge to work out my service obligation."
I looked at Mitchell.
The General’s face was stone. He didn't say anything, but his pen made a single, sharp entry in the pocket notebook he kept in his breast pocket.
"When you arrived here," I said, turning back to Torres, "Dalton told you that the only way to survive was to become like Brennan."
"He told me that if I stayed soft, they’d break me until I took the chapter discharge," she said. "He said nobody leaves Black Ridge with an honorable unless Dalton signs the voucher. And Brennan... Brennan’s uncle is a bird colonel in the National Guard bureau in Helena. Dalton didn't touch her. So everyone stayed close to Brennan."
"Where is the master drive for the security cameras in Barracks Three?" I asked.
Torres blinked, her eyes darting toward Miller.
Miller stiffened. "There are no cameras in the barracks bays, Colonel. That’s a violation of privacy regulations under the Privacy Act of 1974—"
"Shut up, Arthur," I said. "Torres?"
"It’s not in the administration building, ma'am," Torres said. She had made her choice now. The bridge behind her was not just burning; it had collapsed into the gorge. "It’s in the boiler room. Behind the number two furnace. Dalton has an old NVR recorder tied into the emergency lighting circuit. He told us the cameras were there to catch thieves, but... he used them to watch the bunks."
Albright didn't wait for an order. He tapped two of the CID agents on the shoulder and pointed toward the door. "Boiler room. Take a sledge if the access panel is locked. I want the drives intact."
The agents moved out.
I stood up and walked around the desk until I was standing between Miller and Torres.
The contrast was absolute: the broken, middle-aged officer who had sold his commission for thirty cents a bullet, and the twenty-two-year-old girl who had become a monster because an E-7 in Arizona had decided she belonged to him.
"This is the rot, General," I said, looking at Mitchell. "It doesn't start with the theft of the night-vision tubes. It starts when the system decides that protecting the predator is cheaper than replacing the trainer."
Mitchell closed his pocketknife with a soft *snap*.
"The helicopter from Fairchild is twelve minutes out, Emma," he said. "The federal marshals are bringing the first set of warrants for Miller and the depot staff. But we have a larger problem."
He pointed toward the eastern ridge through the frosted window.
"The civilian trucks," he said. "The convoy from Bozeman. They don't know we’re here. The snow in the pass delayed them by three hours, but our satellite relay shows three heavy flatbeds with commercial canvas covers clearing the lower checkpoint right now."
I looked at the desk clock. It was zero-six-forty.
"Who was supposed to meet them at the gate?" I asked Miller.
Miller didn't answer. He kept his eyes fixed on his unlaced boots.
I leaned down until my face was six inches from his ear.
"Arthur," I whispered. "You are currently facing thirty-two years at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. That means you’ll see the sun through razor wire until you’re seventy-eight years old. If you want your daughter to have enough of your pension left to pay for her college textbooks, you’re going to tell me who is driving those flatbeds."
Miller’s shoulders rose and fell in a long, shuddering sigh.
"It isn't civilian truckers," he said, his voice flat, dead, empty of everything except the terror of what he had invited onto his base. "It’s a private security team from Helena. Ex-contractors from the Blackwater rotations. They aren't coming to pick up 5.56 green-tip, Carter."
"What are they picking up, Miller?"
Miller looked up at me, his eyes wide and bloodshot behind his spectacles.
May you like
"The consignment that came in on the rail spur three days ago," he whispered. "The sixty crates marked 'Agricultural Surplus.' They aren't grain drills, Colonel. They’re Stinger missiles from the old depot stocks at Tooele."
***
