Chapter 3
That was the moment I had come here to see — not the cruelty directed at me, which was simply the same cruelty that had been directed at everyone this command had decided it could afford to discard, but the silence of a young man who knew something was wrong and had learned that knowing was survivable only if it stayed inside his own head. Fear wearing a uniform and hoping nobody noticed. That fear was the evidence I needed.
Rawlins moved directly into my path. "You need to leave before this gets embarrassing."
I looked at my soaked jacket, then back at him. "I think we moved past embarrassing thirty seconds ago."
A few of his men dropped their eyes.
"You think you're funny?"
"No."
"Then what are you?"
I let the silence stretch until even the rain seemed to quiet. Then I reached beneath the soaked flap of my uniform jacket.
Parker's face changed first.
He saw them before his senior chief did — three stars on a collar that had just spent four minutes submerged in black water and come back up wearing the same expression it had worn going down. I watched the information move through him, watched it reach his face and rearrange it from the inside, the specific transformation of a person who has understood that they have just participated in something that is going to be documented.
Rawlins still had not moved his eyes from my face.
"You asked what I am," I said. "I am the officer who reviewed your command's incident files for the last ninety days, Senior Chief. I am the officer who found three safety discrepancies on this dock before I ever touched the water. I am the officer whose incident number is already open at Naval Special Warfare Command headquarters because I filed it from my car before I walked down that ramp." I paused. "And I am the officer you just pushed off a federal military installation's training pier at two in the morning in front of twenty-two witnesses."
Rawlins said nothing.
The dock was so quiet I could hear the Atlantic working against the pilings.
May you like
"Stand your men down," I said. "Get the safety observer on duty — the real one, not the initials in your log — and have him retrieve that throw ring from wherever it actually is. And then nobody on this pier goes anywhere, because we're all going to be here for a while."
Parker was the first one to move. Not toward me — toward the safety equipment locker, moving with the purposefulness of a man who has decided, finally, which side of something he is on.
