Chapter 2 - The Sandbridge Marker
The salt air of the Norfolk base clung to my skin even after a hot shower, but the chill in my bones had nothing to do with the Atlantic.
Vance and I sat in a corner booth of a diner just outside the main gate—a greasy spoon called The Anchor where the coffee tasted like burnt copper and the waitresses knew better than to ask questions about why two heavily armed service members looked like they were plotting a war.
"Read it again," I said, sliding a manila envelope across the Formica table.
Vance didn't open it. He already knew what was inside. He had delivered it to me twenty minutes after we left the middle school.
"There's no point in reading it twice, Sarah. You know what it says," Vance muttered, stirring a mountain of sugar into his black coffee. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to bury an inert Mark 14 naval mine right in the tidal zone where they knew your EOD unit would be running the morning sweep. They used an old casing, but the wiring inside? Modern. Commercial grade. And wrapped around the central detonator housing was a laminated index card with your service number and a single coordinate."
I stared down at the brown paper napkin where I had jotted down those coordinates during the drive over. They weren't random. They pointed to a defunct naval testing facility off the coast of Cape Henry—a place that had been officially decommissioned and sealed up twelve years ago, right around the time of the Vanguard incident.
The Vanguard incident was a ghost I had spent a decade trying to bury. It was the classified botched disposal operation in the Persian Gulf that had cost three good men their lives and nearly ended my career before it truly started. Official records blamed human error on a subcontractor. I knew better. But the Navy had closed the book, stamped Top Secret, and told everyone to move on.
"Who knew we were pulling that Sandbridge sector today?" I asked, my voice dangerously low.
"Just the duty roster coordinator," Vance said carefully. "And command staff."
"Which means it's an inside job," I said, the pieces clicking together with a sickening precision. "Someone inside the base wanted to pull me out into the open. They didn't want to kill me at Sandbridge—if they wanted me dead, that mine would have been live. They wanted to get my attention."
Vance looked up, his eyes grave. "It worked. But Sarah, you shouldn't go down to Cape Henry alone. If this ties back to Vanguard, whatever's waiting for you down in those old bunkers isn't just an administrative glitch. It's a trap."
"If it's about Vanguard," I said, standing up and dropping a ten-dollar bill onto the table, "I don't have a choice. They brought my son into it today at that school. The moment they dragged Matty into their games, this stopped being about protocol. This is personal."
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Vance didn't try to stop me. He just reached out, gripped my forearm with a heavy, calloused hand, and said, "Watch your six, Commander. Not everyone wearing our uniform is on our side."
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