Chapter 7 - The Paper Trail
The admin block was quiet when we walked back in through the side entrance, avoiding the main courtyard where the afternoon training drills were still grinding on.
My shirt was still torn down the back, the lioness tattoo exposed to the cool air conditioning of the hallway, but nobody looked twice at me now. The base was running on a different frequency. The server crash in the comms annex had triggered an automated diagnostic across three battalions, and according to the digital ghosts Hayes was tracking on her encrypted tablet, the entire network was being scrubbed from the top down.
"If Vance is running the compliance office," Hayes muttered as we hurried down the second-floor corridor toward the historical archives, her fingers flying over her screen, "then every audit file on Firebase Vanguard didn't just pass through his desk—he rewrote them. He’s the one who classified your team's mission as a 'unauthorized patrol deviation' to keep Congress from auditing the missing munitions."
"Which means," I added, pushing open the heavy wooden door to the records room, "he has the original sign-off sheets. The ones with actual signatures, not digital ghosts."
The historical archives room smelled of old paper, vinegar-scented decomposing film, and floor wax. Metal filing cabinets stretched down three long aisles under flickering fluorescent tubes.
We didn't need to search long.
At the end of aisle three, the filing cabinet marked Special Operations: 2020–2022 was unlocked. The bottom drawer hung open by an inch.
Inside wasn't a collection of folders. There was a single manila envelope resting on an empty shelf, addressed in neat, block-lettered handwriting to Agent S. Merrick.
I stared at it for three seconds before picking it up.
"You didn't find this," Rick said, lingering near the doorway like a dog waiting to be kicked. "Vance left it here. He knew you'd check the historical files after the bunker incident. It’s an invitation."
I broke the wax seal—an old Department of the Army stamp—and pulled out a single sheet of heavy cardstock.
It wasn't a logistics manifest. It was a photograph.
It showed four people standing outside a modular operations hut in Kandahar, smiling in the dust, their gear slung over their shoulders. My team. But someone had drawn a heavy red X across the face of the sergeant standing on the left—and right beside him, smiling with his arm around my shoulder, was a much younger Vance, wearing civilian desert utilities with no insignia.
And scrawled across the bottom in dark ink was a single handwritten line: You were never meant to come back from that ridge, Sloane. Why did you have to start asking about the boxes we left behind?
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Hayes looked over my shoulder, her breath catching in her throat. "That's not just a threat. That's a ledger reference. The boxes... they weren't radios, Sloane. They were cash pallets from the reconstruction fund."
Before I could answer, the fluorescent lights overhead flickered once, twice, and then went completely black, plunging the aisle into absolute shadow.
