Chapter 2 - The Command Sandbox
The interrogation room at Dover Air Force Base smelled of industrial carpet cleaner and burnt decaf coffee.
For three hours, I sat across a metal table from a two-man panel consisting of Major Donovan and a humorless JAG officer named Lieutenant Colonel Vance. They didn't yell. That was the worst part. Yelling meant they were angry; quiet professionalism meant they were looking for a scapegoat to court-martial or administratively separate.
“Let’s look at the timeline again, Morgan,” Vance said, sliding a printed copy of my encrypted comms logs across the table. “You arrived at your mother’s residence at 1345. By 1420, your credential was destroyed. At 1423, you placed the notification call.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you maintain that you had no prior indication your sister intended to target your gear?”
“None,” I said, keeping my hands flat on the cold steel table. “My sister’s history of interfering with my personal property is well-documented by family arguments, but she has never touched my military gear before.”
Donovan rubbed his temples. He looked exhausted, the bags under his eyes darker than they had been during our last European rotation.
“Do you know what was on that manifest, Hayes?”
“Standard personnel and logistics transport, major. C-17 deployment support.”
Vance leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “The transport wasn't standard. It was carrying specialized communications hardware destined for a classified node in Ramstein. Two hours after your credential's digital signature dropped offline, a secondary node in Germany experienced an unscheduled data packet bounce from an unknown domestic IP address.”
My breath caught.
“Are you saying...”
“I’m saying the timing is an extraordinary coincidence,” Vance said smoothly. “A secure credential is intentionally shattered in a suburban kitchen, an encrypted link drops, and an unauthorized handshake occurs on our overseas relay within a hundred and twenty minutes.”
“You think I leaked my own hardware?” My voice rose, the injustice burning hot in my throat. “I spent eight years flying night missions into contested airspace without a single safety infraction! My record is spotless!”
“Your record was spotless,” Donovan corrected quietly. “Until your sister’s domestic vandalism intersected with a high-level network anomaly. Internal Security doesn’t care about family drama, Morgan. They care about vectors.”
“Then look at Britney’s phone,” I urged, leaning forward. “Look at her search history, her texts, who she was talking to before I walked through the front door. She doesn’t even know what an IP address is—she spends all her time arguing with florists about peonies!”
Vance exchanged a long, unreadable look with Donovan.
“We did look at your sister’s phone,” Vance said. “Or rather, local law enforcement secured a mirror of her device under a preliminary counter-intelligence warrant requested by Agent Keller.”
I blinked. “You already warranted her phone?”
“When a level-three DoD credential is compromised on domestic soil, standard protocols trigger an immediate threat assessment,” Vance said. He picked up a fresh folder. “And that brings us to why you’re still sitting in this room instead of being locked in a holding cell.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “Go on.”
“Your sister didn’t talk to a foreign operative,” Vance said, flipping open the folder. “She talked to someone much closer to home.”
He slid a single printed screenshot across the metal table.
It was a text thread between Britney and a contact saved under the name Greg.
My future brother-in-law.
May you like
The message, timestamped ten minutes before I walked through my mother's front door, read: Just make sure she can't log in before 3 PM. Everything else is set.
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