Chapter 12 - Blood in the Hydraulic Lines
I didn't waste a second. Within forty minutes, I had Julian on the secure comms line while my staff car tore through the rainy morning traffic toward the Pentagon.
"Julian, listen to me carefully," I said, adjusting the headset with one hand while my prosthetic foot pressed firmly into the floorboard of the sedan. "Richard Halston is setting up a frame job. They’ve backdated forge logs from Norfolk and injected my encryption signature onto the approval manifests for Hull 804."
Julian’s voice was steady, but I could hear the cold fury humming just beneath his words. "I already heard rumblings from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service corridor. A confidential tip was dropped into the Inspector General’s hotline at midnight. They’re claiming you took a six-figure consulting retainer through a blind offshore trust in the Caymans right before the Admiral pinned those eagles on your collar."
"It's absurd," I snapped. "I was fighting for my life in Walter Reed when those accounts were supposedly established!"
"To a military tribunal, paperwork is paper until proven forged," Julian replied, the sound of keyboard clatter filtering through the receiver. "Richard Halston didn't survive forty years in Washington by leaving sloppy trails. He owns three members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he’s using Derek’s upcoming trial as smoke. If he can impeach your credibility as the lead technical witness, Derek walks on a technicality—and the entire family empire remains untouchable."
When my car pulled up to the River Entrance of the Pentagon, two armed Shore Patrol officers in pristine white leggings and brassards were already waiting beneath the concrete canopy.
As I stepped out, my cane clicking against the wet asphalt, Master-at-Arms First Class Jenkins stepped forward, his eyes fixed dead ahead, refusing to look me in the eye. "Captain Ellison. By order of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, your security clearance is temporarily restricted pending an administrative inquiry. Please surrender your badge and sidearm."
A crowd of junior officers and civilian contractors stopped in their tracks, murmuring as they watched the decorated hero of the *Gallant* being intercepted at the door like a common traitor. For a split second, the humiliating sting of that gala dinner—the sneering laughter of Derek Halston and his sycophants—threatened to claw its way back into my throat.
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I stood tall. I did not drop my chin. I unclipped my gold-embroidered badge and handed it over with rigid dignity.
"Carry out your orders, Petty Officer," I said calmly. "Just make sure the Vice Chief knows that while he’s confiscating my plastic card, there are four thousand sailors scheduled to board a carrier whose reactor compartment will buckle at twenty-eight knots."
