Chapter 11 - The Aftermath
The heavy iron gates of the motor pool slammed shut behind the transport vehicle carrying Thorne away, the sound echoing sharply against the concrete buildings. Silence hung over the parade ground, thick and suffocating. The hundreds of soldiers standing in formation didn't move a muscle, their eyes locked straight ahead, completely altered by what they had just witnessed. In less than ten minutes, their untouchable battalion commander had been dismantled, stripped of his command, and escorted off the base like a common thief.
Sergeant Major Vance stepped up beside me, his boots clicking rhythmically against the asphalt. He looked down at the puddle of hydraulic fluid still leaking from the tank Thorne had tried to hide. "Well, ma'am, the word is spreading faster than a grease fire. Every company commander on this post is currently sweating through their undershirts."
"Let them sweat," I replied, pulling my leather gloves tighter over my knuckles as the morning wind swept across the range. "Sweat cleans the system. What’s the status of the maintenance logs now that Thorne’s personal files have been locked down?"
"I had military police secure his office at 0600," Vance said, offering a grim, approving smile. "Turns out he wasn't just hiding broken tracks. He was falsifying fuel allocations for half the reserve fleet. We’ve got enough documentation to keep a court-martial board busy until Christmas."
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"Good," I said, turning to face the silent lines of troops. "We don't have until Christmas. We have forty-eight hours before the corps inspector general arrives for our quarterly evaluation. If this battalion isn't operating at ninety percent readiness by then, we're all going to be reading about our early retirements in the morning papers."
Across the yard, the young soldier who had pushed my stool the night before—Miller—was standing in the third row, his face completely drained of color. He looked like he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole. I caught his eye for a split second, and he immediately snapped his gaze back to the front, trembling like a leaf in a gale.
