Chapter 4
Story: He Rolled His Cart Straight Into a Live Artillery Lane and Wouldn't Stop
Braddock found her at the gate an hour later with the crates still cold and the guns still silent and a hundred recruits doing supervised PMCS checks that didn't need doing, because standing around waiting was worse than being busy.
"Gate log?" he asked, and his voice was clipped, back to business.
Reyes handed him the clipboard and the two lists. She watched his face as he read them — the hard cut of his jaw, the way his eyes moved down the columns and stopped at the missing name.
"His name was on the list last month," Reyes said. "It's off now. Someone retyped it and left him off, and nobody noticed until this morning."
Braddock's thumb traced the blank line where Otis's name should have been. "Ammunition section signs these."
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Two weeks ago."
"Yes, Sergeant."
Braddock looked up, and there was something moving behind his eyes, a thought assembling itself in real time. "The lot number he flagged. The recalled batch. When was it flagged in the system?"
Reyes checked the radio traffic log from earlier. "0430 this morning."
"Notifications go out to the section chiefs. The ammunition section gets the automatic copy, same as everyone else." Braddock's voice was flat, steady, working through it. "The same section that retyped the clearance list and left off the name of the retired inspector who would know the recalled lot number the second he saw it."
Reyes went still.
"You think someone did this on purpose," she said.
"I think there are exactly two possibilities." Braddock set the clipboard down on the counter. "Either the ammunition section made two mistakes in luck nobody's that unlucky — or they made the clearance list change for a reason, and the recalled lot flag coming through the same week is a problem they thought they had time to fix."
The heater hummed. The sun rectangle on the floor had shifted, grown shorter, brighter.
"The third shell in that crate," Reyes said slowly, "was from the recalled batch. It shouldn't have been there at all. Someone loaded it during the offload — mixed it into the stack on purpose or by mistake. And if Otis hadn't walked the lane this morning—"
"The first volley would have fired it." Braddock finished the sentence for her, and his voice was hard. "A recalled shell, on a firing lane, with a hundred recruits standing within three hundred meters."
The silence in the shack was thick enough to hold.
"Where's the ammunition section chief?" Braddock asked.
"Morning formation," Reyes said. "He's in the battalion area until ten hundred."
Braddock picked up the radio on his belt, keyed it, spoke three words. "One-Six Actual. Need battalion HQ on the line."
The radio crackled.
Reyes looked out the window again, at the empty lane. Somewhere out there, an old man in a tan jacket was pushing a rusted cart through the morning, carrying a lot card in his pocket that had stopped a volley and maybe saved a hundred lives.
"Sergeant," she said, "what are you going to do?"
Braddock's thumb moved over the blank line where Otis's name had been, and his jaw worked once, hard.
"I'm going to find out who took his name off this list," he said. "And when I do, I'm going to walk that man down to the lane and make him say why."
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