Chapter 2
I let my chin hang for a long second. My ribs burned. My wrists had gone numb. I thought about Caleb — my older brother, who had died at this base two years ago in what the official report called a training accident, a Humvee rollover during a night exercise. Caleb who was too careful and too skilled and too honest. Caleb who had seen what Garrick was hiding and had made the mistake of believing that evidence was protection.
Three days earlier, under loose floorboards in an abandoned maintenance shed near the perimeter, I had found Caleb's old laptop. Inside was an encrypted file containing names, bank accounts, dates, and GPS coordinates for drop zones where American military equipment had been exchanged for cartel cash. The proof was real. The names on that file were the names of the men currently surrounding me.
I lifted my head and spat blood onto Garrick's polished boot.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Captain."
Nobody moved.
Garrick looked at his boot. Then back at me. Then he smiled in the way that men smile when they have never been corrected by anyone they respected.
"Sergeant Briggs."
Briggs stepped forward from the edge of the square — six foot four, built like a man who had spent his career learning exactly how to hurt people while keeping the paperwork clean. He drove his gloved fist into my stomach hard enough that the air tore out of me and my forehead found the asphalt. The heat of the concrete surface burned against my skin.
I did not scream.
At the left edge of the formation, Staff Sergeant Miller clenched his jaw until the muscle jumped in his cheek. He had seen what Garrick was hiding. He had seen it for fourteen months. Equipment marked destroyed in transit when the trucks never left Arizona. Contractors who had no business near a secure facility. Private meetings in the motor pool office with men who wore civilian clothes and did not sign the visitor log.
Miller had a wife in Georgia. A nine-year-old daughter in Boston who was fighting a cancer that was winning more rounds than it was losing, and whose treatment was funded by a pension and a service record that both depended on Miller standing still.
He stood still.
Nineteen-year-old Callahan, the one everyone called Tex, was crying silently two rows back in the formation, tears cutting channels through the dust on his face. Three weeks earlier, during a live-fire navigation exercise, he had gotten turned around in a heat-blind canyon and I had found him before anyone else did, shared my water, carried his pack, and never reported his mistake. Now he watched Briggs grab my torn collar and haul me upright.
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"Where is the data, Cross?" Briggs said, his voice dropping low enough that only the people nearest us could hear it. "Your brother didn't learn his lesson. You want to end up in a canyon just like him?"
Caleb.
