Chapter 10

The communications room marked maintenance was exactly what Briggs had described.

Small. Functional. Smelling of dust and old electronics. A single workstation with a secure terminal that was connected to a communications architecture that bypassed the normal operations staff routing. A room designed for conversations that could not afford to become institutional knowledge before they were ready to be institutional knowledge.

Tala Nez arrived at 1755.

She spent five minutes examining the room before touching anything. Not paranoia. Habit. Her grandfather had taught her to understand a space before she used it the same way he had taught her to understand terrain before she moved through it. Spaces had their own communication if you gave them the attention they deserved.

The room was clean.

She sat at the terminal at 1800 exactly.

Colonel Foss appeared on the screen forty seconds later. He was in a different location than the previous call. Smaller room. No staff visible behind him. He had understood what the secure channel request meant and had prepared accordingly.

He looked at her without preamble.

“Tell me,” he said.

Tala Nez told him.

She was precise and sequential and she left nothing out that was relevant and included nothing that was not. The eastern ridgeline sentry. The mission profile information that would have been required to position that sentry correctly. The eastern ambush on the Rashid mission reconsidered in light of what she now knew. The pattern that connected both events through a single consistent conclusion.

Foss listened without interrupting.

When she finished he was quiet for eleven seconds. She counted.

“You are telling me we have a penetration in the mission planning chain,” he said.

“Yes sir,” Tala Nez said.

“And you have been developing this assessment since when?”

“The pattern became clear to me before the Haqqani mission,” she said. “The sentry on the ridgeline confirmed it.”

Foss nodded slowly.

“Why are you bringing this to me through the sensitive reporting channel rather than through Briggs’ chain of command?” he asked. Not challenging. Genuinely asking.

“Because I do not know where the breach is,” Tala Nez said. “If it is in Briggs’ chain I have just contained the information appropriately. If it is in your operations staff I need you to know before the investigation touches that level.”

Foss looked at her for a moment.

“You are protecting the investigation before it starts,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

Another silence.

“What do you need?” Foss asked.

The same question Briggs always asked. Direct and practical. She was beginning to understand that this quality in commanders was not coincidental. The best ones asked what you needed because they understood that the person closest to the problem usually understood the solution better than anyone further from it.

“Personnel and financial records for everyone in the Haqqani mission information chain,” she said. “Communication logs for the same group covering the past twelve months. Leave and travel records. Any anomalies in behavior or performance that were noted but not acted on.”