Chapter 6 - Shadows in the Wire
By midday, the base was in a state of seismic shock.
The news of Vance’s arrest had spread through every shop, squad, and barracks like wildfire. The junior airmen were walking with their heads higher, but an eerie stillness had settled over the senior maintenance staff. Fear had shifted sides; now it was the men who had aided Vance who were sweating.
In my temporary office on the top floor of Headquarters, I sat across from Special Agent David Cross, the lead investigator from OSI. Between us lay three thick case binders and a heavy black external hard drive.
"We cracked the encrypted partition on Vance's personal laptop," Cross said, tapping a pen against the drive. "It's worse than we anticipated, Colonel."
"Tell me."
"Vance wasn't selling second-hand parts to local civilian hobbyists," Cross explained grimly. "He was working directly with a shell company called Orion Aerospace Logistics out of Miami. They’ve been siphoning classified APG-83 radar arrays and electronic countermeasure pods straight off our active-duty airframes."
I felt a cold rage knot in my gut. "Those are front-line avionics. They protect our pilots from surface-to-air missile locks."
"Exactly. Vance was flagging the units as 'unrepairable electronic failure' during routine 300-hour inspections. He’d swap the working components with fried test dummies, pack the real hardware into unmarked shipping crates, and ship them out as scrap metal. Orion was paying him fifty thousand dollars a pop through offshore accounts in Cyprus."
"Where were the crates going once Orion received them?"
Cross paused, his expression turning grave. "We don't know yet. But the shipping manifests show the destination port was always redirected to non-NATO countries in Eastern Europe."
Before I could respond, my desk phone buzzed with an urgent tone. I punched the speaker button.
"Colonel Carter."
"Ma'am, it's Captain Lin," her voice was breathless, tinged with panic. "We have a critical situation at Hangar Four. Rachel Brooks was just assaulted."
I shot up from my chair, my hand immediately moving to my duty belt. "Is she alive?"
"She's breathing, but the medics are working on her right now. Someone ran her patrol vehicle off the perimeter road near the fuel depots. And ma'am... they took the logbooks she brought us this morning."
I looked at Cross. His face was set in stone.
"Vance didn't work alone," I said, my voice dangerously calm. "And whoever is backing him knows the net is closing."
"Colonel," Cross said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out his service sidearm to check the chamber. "If they're willing to kill on-base to protect these manifests, they’re not just trying to avoid prison. They're preparing to run."
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"Then let's make sure they hit a wall," I replied, grabbing my service cap. "Seal the base gates. Code Red. No vehicle, no aircraft, no personnel leaves Blackridge without my personal signature."
***
