Chapter 2 - The Archive Drawer
Investigator Hayes didn't look like a federal auditor; she looked like a librarian who moonlighted as an executioner. She stepped into the cramped office, dropping the manila folder onto the metal desk with a heavy slap.
Rick took half a step backward, his boots scraping the linoleum. "That's an administrative error," he snapped, his voice tight. "Files get cross-filed during base transitions. It doesn't mean—"
"It means," Hayes interrupted, pushing her glasses up her nose with a single finger, "that someone with level-four clearance requested the original Firebase Vanguard logistics ledger forty-eight hours ago. And the only level-four active badge in this sector belongs to Staff Sergeant Danner."
She turned her gaze to me, her eyes sharp and assessing. "Agent Merrick, your team wasn't just running recon. You were tracking a localized munitions leak. When your comms went down in 2021, the official report blamed enemy interference. But this ledger suggests your radio encryption keys were revoked from an internal terminal right here in Missouri twenty minutes before the ambush."
My chest tightened. For three years, I had lived with the guilt of that night—the sound of incoming mortar fire, the realization that our fallback coordinates were dead air, the faces of my team vanishing into the dust. I had blamed bad luck. I had blamed the Taliban.
I had never considered that the knife in our backs came from an air-conditioned room six thousand miles away.
"You revoked our keys," I said, looking at Rick. My voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
Rick swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the door as if he might bolt. "I was following orders from higher up. You don't understand how the supply lines worked—we had to cut dead weight to protect the larger operation."
"Dead weight?" I stepped away from the desk, closing the distance between us until he had nowhere left to retreat. "We were the only unit holding that valley. Who gave you the order, Rick? Give me a name."
Before Rick could speak, a heavy crash echoed from the hallway outside.
We all turned. Through the wire-mesh glass of the office door, we saw a group of recruits scrambling past, led by a frantic platoon sergeant.
"Get back! Move it!" someone yelled outside. "Code red in the communications annex. Someone just wiped the mainframe servers."
Hayes grabbed her folder. "That's impossible. Those terminals are air-gapped from the civilian internet."
"They aren't air-gapped from the internal base network," Rick muttered, his face draining of all color. He looked at me, a strange, desperate panic settling into his eyes. "You think I'm the one who sold you out, Sloane? I was just the clerk. Someone else wanted that valley cleared out. And they're still here."
May you like
I didn't wait for him to explain. I grabbed the edge of the desk, shoved past Hayes, and sprinted down the corridor toward the comms annex, leaving Rick and the IG investigator behind in the dust.
---
