Chapter 4
"That is Colonel Crossmore."
Knox's face did the thing that faces do when the framework that has been holding them up has been removed without warning. Not a slow collapse. An immediate one, the specific falling-away of an expression that has been constructed on an assumption that has just been found to be wrong.
Crowell lowered the blank transfer sheet.
Vexley looked at both of them for a moment, and the rain came down, and the formation of recruits stood very still.
Then he said, to his aide, without looking at Knox or Crowell: "I need a secure line to the IG's office. Tonight."
The aide nodded and stepped back, already dialing.
I rose from my knees.
I had been waiting for the signal that the documentation phase had completed its purpose, which was Vexley's recognition, and the signal had arrived, and there was no further operational reason to remain on the ground. I stood with the mud on my knees and my shaved head cold in the rain and my back in the posture it had been in since the first morning, which was the posture of someone who is entirely at ease in a position that other people are finding extremely uncomfortable.
Vexley turned toward me and gave me the specific look of a senior officer who is apologizing without apologizing because the context does not support the word and the look will have to serve.
I accepted it.
"General," I said.
May you like
"Colonel." He said it with the weight it deserved.
Knox said my name, or started to say it, and I turned toward him and he stopped. Not because I did anything. Because I turned toward him and he saw my face, the face that had been under the clippers and at the bottom of the cargo net and in the mud for forty hours, and he understood, perhaps for the first time in a career spent deciding who had value based on the thickness of their file, that the woman he had been processing as nothing had been watching everything.
