"Are you safe, Special Agent Vance?" she asked.

"My face smells like brown gravy, Colonel, but my cover holds," I replied, tracing a hand over my sore jaw. "I've spent nineteen days watching him. Sterling isn't just a tyrant with a bad temper. He's running the depot like a personal fiefdom because he knows fear keeps people from looking at the manifest ledgers."

"Have you found the paper trail?" Vance asked, her tone sharpening.

"I've found the edge of it," I said. "Three weeks ago, two supply convoys carrying high-grade tactical communications hardware and night-vision optics were logged into Depot Warehouse 4. According to the master inventory system in D.C., those items were shipped out to Fort Lewis six days later. But I checked the transport logs at the main gate. No heavy flatbeds left this base on those dates."

"So where is the hardware?"

"Still here," I said, leaning back against the wooden wall. "Or it was, until Sterling found a private buyer. He's using his control over the personnel here to ensure nobody asks why Warehouse 4 is locked twenty-four hours a day under his personal guard detail."

"That equipment is worth over four million dollars on the black market," Colonel Vance noted dryly. "If Sterling is moving military-grade hardware off an active base, he isn't working alone. He has buyers lined up, and he likely has someone higher up in the regional logistics command covering his tracks."

"I know," I said. "And I'm getting close to identifying his contact. But I had an incident in the mess hall today. Sterling took a swing at me."

"Did you break cover?"

"No," I said. "I played the part of a stubborn, foolish holdover who didn't know his place. But he's assigned me to extra detail tonight. He wants to break me."

"Withdraw if your position is compromised, Marcus," Vance ordered sternly. "You're an IG investigator, not a martyr. If Sterling realizes you're an undercover officer checking his manifests, he won't just put you on extra duty. Men who steal four million dollars in night-vision gear don't hesitate to cover their tracks with a body."

"I'm staying," I said quietly. "If I pull out now, he'll lock down Warehouse 4 and erase the drive. I need twenty-four hours to get into his personal terminal in the administrative building."

"You have twenty-four hours," Vance said. "After that, I'm sending a federal audit team with a platoon of Military Police to seize the base. Don't get yourself killed over a shipment of radios, Marcus."

"Understood," I said, and snapped the phone shut.

At seven o'clock that evening, the damp Pacific Northwest rain began to fall in earnest, coming down in long, vertical gray sheets that rattled against the tin roof of Barracks C like thousands of small thrown stones.

I reported to the motor pool compound, a sprawling asphalt yard filled with rusted olive-drab trucks and covered in oil slicks, to begin my extra duty detail.

The detail sergeant, a tired, thick-bellied Staff Sergeant named Kowalski who looked like he was three months away from retirement, handed me a bucket, a heavy stiff-bristled brush, and a gallon container of industrial degreaser.

"Major Sterling's orders," Kowalski muttered, looking everywhere except at my eyes. "You're scrubbing the grease pit under Bay 3. All of it. By hand."

The grease pit was a six-foot-deep concrete trench beneath the heavy vehicle bays, where mechanics stood to work on the undercarriages of five-ton trucks. It was cold, dark, and accumulated decades of black engine oil, stagnated rain water, and dead insects.

"Understood, Sergeant," I said, taking the bucket.

Kowalski paused, holding the handle of the grease bucket for a second longer than necessary. He looked over his shoulder toward the glass-windowed office at the front of the motor pool, then leaned in slightly.

"You shouldn't have stepped up to him today, kid," Kowalski whispered softly. "I saw what happened in the chow hall. Word travels fast."

"He was going to hurt the boy," I said.

"The boy is nineteen. He'll get hurt, he'll do his time, he'll go home," Kowalski said bitterly. "Now Sterling's got his eyes on you. He asked the registrar for your personnel file an hour ago."

My heart gave a subtle, deliberate thud against my ribs. My file.

The file created for "Transfer Holdover Marcus Miller" was a masterwork of bureaucratic fiction crafted by the IG's technical operations branch. It showed a history of mediocre performance evaluations, three administrative transfers across two different commands, and a pending discharge for failure to adapt to military discipline. It was designed to make me look useless, lazy, and completely uninteresting.

"Did he find what he was looking for?" I asked casually.

"I don't know," Kowalski said, letting go of the bucket handle. "All I know is he smiled when he closed the folder. That's never a good sign. Get into the pit, Miller. And don't come out until the concrete is gray."

For five straight hours, I knelt in the cold, oily sludge beneath Bay 3, the harsh smell of industrial degreaser burning the inside of my nose and throat. My knees grew numb against the icy concrete. My arms burned with a dull, heavy fatigue as I worked the stiff brush back and forth, scrubbing away years of caked black grime.

It was backbreaking work, designed deliberately to exhaust a man until his mind grew dull, until his spirit broke under the sheer weight of meaningless physical misery.

But while my hands moved in rhythmic, repetitive motions, my mind was running through the blueprint of the base administrative office.

Major Sterling’s office sat on the second floor of Headquarters Building 101, a two-story brick structure built during the Korean War. The building had two entry points: the main front doors, which were guarded around the clock by a duty desk clerk, and a rear fire escape that opened onto a narrow service alley where the heating boilers were housed.

Sterling kept his personal terminal locked behind a heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned mechanical key lock. He didn't trust digital keycards—he was too old-school, too paranoid for that.

To get into that office, I needed three things: a forty-five-minute window when the building was empty, a set of tension wrenches to bypass the lock, and a master administrative bypass key for the base server, which I knew was stored in a fireproof safe in the adjutant's office on the first floor.