Chapter 6
I released Sullivan's wrist before the command finished crossing the air. Clean. No follow-through. No punctuation. I stepped back one step to the position I had been standing in before any of this began, and I stood there in the California sun with the handkerchief in my jacket pocket and the blood drying on my lip and twelve hundred people completely motionless around me.
Sullivan was on one knee.
He was conscious and functional and his expression was doing something I had seen faces do very few times — the complete reorganization of a man's understanding of his own position in a world that has just demonstrated it is not arranged the way he believed.
Reed was moving across the field, not running, walking with the pace of a man covering distance that needs to be covered. He stopped four feet from Sullivan and looked at him on one knee on the parade field, and then he looked at me, and then he looked at the formation, and then he said the thing that finished what Sullivan had started.
"That is not an administrative officer."
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The formal proceedings opened within the hour. The base surveillance system had captured everything from seven angles, including the audio from the live microphone, which had transmitted Sullivan's precise words to every speaker on the parade ground and preserved them in the digital record of the ceremony. The inspector general's office had a preliminary notification before the formation was dismissed.
The investigation into Sullivan's command climate opened simultaneously, drawing on the transfer records of Petty Officer Marsh and six other personnel whose departure from Sullivan's unit had followed the same pattern with the same six-week timing. The administrative transfer documentation, when pulled against the original complaint records, produced a correlation that the base legal team described in their preliminary assessment using the word systematic, which in that context had a specific meaning with specific implications.
