Chapter 2 - The Name on the Photograph
The man at the edge of the yard was Major Daniel Voss, training command's deputy director. He smiled whenever recruits looked his way. Olivia remembered his smile from a place where nobody smiled at all.
“Sir,” she told Hale, “don't let him use that radio.”
Hale didn't ask why. “Sergeant!” he barked. “Major Voss is not to leave this installation.”
Voss turned his back before the order finished. Two guards hurried toward him; he slipped through a maintenance gate and vanished behind the motor pool.
“Lock the gates,” Hale said into his own handset.
Briggs stood with his hands at his sides, trying to hide how badly they shook. “I didn't know, sir.”
“You knew you were humiliating a fellow soldier,” Hale said. “That was enough.”
He led Olivia into a cramped records office. The window rattled under the wind. Hale set the photograph on the desk. Its caption read: OPERATION NIGHTGLASS, 2017. RECOVERY TEAM: NO SURVIVORS.
“My name was Olivia Mercer then,” she said. “Reed is my mother's name.”
Hale sat down slowly. “Mercer. The communications specialist.”
“Not the only thing I did.” She covered the torn back of her shirt with a field jacket somebody had brought. “You signed the casualty report.”
“I signed what the rescue team told me.”
“There wasn't a rescue team.”
Hale's jaw tightened. “Then whose bodies did we recover?”
“That's the question, Colonel.”
Outside, a siren sounded once. Then the base loudspeakers ordered all personnel to remain at their current posts.
Hale opened a locked cabinet and pulled out a sealed envelope. He'd kept it for nine years, unable to throw it away. Inside was a second photograph: a young medic grinning beside a helicopter. On her sleeve someone had drawn the same angular symbol and three lines.
“Her name was Mara Quinn,” Hale said. “She was like a daughter to me.”
Olivia touched Mara's face with one finger. “She died saving mine.”
Hale's eyes shone, but his voice stayed hard. “Tell me everything.”
A sharp knock came at the office door. A guard called through it: “Colonel, we found Major Voss's radio.”
“Where?”
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“In the recruit barracks. It was wired to an explosive charge.”
THE MARK THEY TRIED TO ERASE •
