A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE
Chapter 5
For a moment the clinic felt too quiet — the refrigerator hum, the tick of the clock, the far-off sound of boots on concrete.
“Define nobody,” I said.
“His bunkmates said he never came back.”
“Was he logged off base?”
“I don’t know.”
“Medical?”
“No.”
“Disciplinary hold?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
I stood up. Pain rolled up my side and I ignored it.
Pike put a hand out. “No.”
“I need to find Reeve.”
“You need an X-ray.”
“We may have a missing recruit.”
“And you may have a cracked rib.”
“I can have both.”
Pike stared at me. Then he muttered something under his breath that sounded distinctly like a complaint about officers.
I made it to the hallway before he caught up.
“Commander.”
“What.”
“If Sutton is actually missing, don’t announce it in the open.”
I stopped.
He was right. Which meant he was thinking faster than I was, and pain does that — it narrows the aperture until all you can see is the single bright thing in front of you.
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Pike folded his arms. “That was almost human.”
“I’m told it happens occasionally.”
We walked back across the courtyard toward the mess hall. Halfway there, Reeve appeared at the end of the corridor with Captain Duarte, and he took one look at my face and whatever he had been about to say evaporated.
“What happened?”
I glanced at Duarte. Then back at him.
“We need privacy.”
His face hardened. “Office. Now.”
Reeve’s temporary office overlooked the training field — a long, low room with a desk, three chairs, and a wall of glass that someone had covered with blinds the moment we walked in. Duarte stayed. So did Pike, once Reeve learned he was the one who had given me the information.
I stayed standing.
“Caleb Sutton is missing.”
Reeve went still.
Duarte looked at him. “Missing?”
“His bunkmates haven’t seen him since last night,” I said. “He met Chief Thorne in the mess hall shortly before I arrived this morning.”
Reeve turned to Pike. “You saw that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did Sutton appear distressed?”
Pike considered it carefully. “Nervous. Not frightened.”
“Did he leave voluntarily?”
“I only saw him leave the mess hall.”
I looked at Reeve. “When was Sutton last officially accounted for?”
Reeve crossed to the desk and picked up the phone. “Get me the duty roster for Recruit Caleb Sutton. Immediately.”
He hung up. Duarte spoke.
“There’s something else.”
She set a small storage drive on the desk. I knew from her tone that I was not going to like what came next.
“The camera footage.”
“What about it?” Reeve asked.
“Camera one and camera three are clean.”
“And camera two?”
Duarte looked at me. “There is no recording.”
I thought about the camera mounted high on the far wall of the mess hall. The one facing Chief Thorne’s position. The one with the clearest, cleanest angle on the entire confrontation.
“Failed?” I asked.
“No.”
“Disconnected?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Duarte folded her hands behind her back. “The files were deleted.”
Reeve’s expression sharpened. “When?”
“Approximately nine minutes after the incident.”
Nobody spoke.
I looked at the drive. “Someone deleted that footage after Thorne hit me.”
“Yes.”
“From where?”
“Local administration terminal.”
“Which account?”
Duarte hesitated. “That’s the strange part.”
“Whose account?”
“Yours.”
Pike stared at me.
I almost laughed — not because it was funny, but because sometimes the only sane response to a truly bad situation is a flat refusal to believe it.
“That’s impossible.”
“I know.”
“I hadn’t accessed the system.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t have full credentials until Reeve arrived.”
“I know.”
Reeve looked from Duarte to me. “Could someone have obtained your temporary credential package?”
“No. It was generated forty-eight hours ago and hand-delivered to me.”
“Copied?”
“Not without triggering a verification flag.”
Duarte walked to the desk. “The system believes Commander Vance logged in from administrative terminal six.”
“Location?”
“Training operations building.”
“Time?”
“Eleven minutes after the altercation.”
I checked the clock on the wall. At that time I had been sitting on an examination table with Pike’s fingers pressed against my ribs.
Pike understood instantly. “She was with me.”
Duarte nodded. “I assumed so.”
Reeve picked up the phone again. “Lock terminal six. Nobody touches it.”
He hung up and looked at me. “What are you thinking?”
“That whoever did this knew I was coming.”
He said nothing.
“They knew my name,” I went on. “They had credentials prepared before I arrived. They knew which camera mattered. And they moved within minutes.”
Duarte frowned. “Then Thorne attacking you might not have been random.”
I thought back. His face when I walked into the mess hall — the smile, the theater of it, office girls. The punch. The demand that I kneel.
It had felt spontaneous. A man performing for a room.
But what if it wasn’t?
“What if he wanted me distracted?” I said.
Pike shook his head. “By punching an intelligence commander in front of a hundred witnesses?”
“He didn’t know my rank.”
“You sure?”
I wasn’t.
That was the part that bothered me.