Chapter 5
For about two weeks after, I heard the rumor version. The one that went around the company, then around the battalion, then around the post.
The rumor went like this: Mullins lost his temper at a slow gate, shoved a junior soldier in front of a line of cars, and got himself relieved because there happened to be an audit going on. A bad morning. A career-ending bad morning, sure, but one bad morning. People said he was stressed. They said his mother had been sick. They said the morning push had grown into something nobody could handle alone, and Delgado — that's me — was the slowest guard on the lane, and Mullins had just carried it for a year too long and finally broke.
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I heard a first sergeant say it out loud at the smoke pit. "Man just snapped," the first sergeant said. "Happens."
That version passed around like currency. I heard it from a supply clerk, a cook, a driver who ran the trash route. I heard it from my own platoon sergeant, who told me not to worry, that the command was going to treat the shove as an isolated incident, that Mullins would probably get an Article 15 and maybe a reduction and be reassigned somewhere out of the way, and that I should be proud of myself for keeping calm.
"They gave him a real hard look," the platoon sergeant told me. "The signature thing was a misunderstanding. Happens when you sign with a hurt hand."
I said okay. I said thank you, Sergeant. I went back to Gate 3 and logged entries and kept my mouth shut and kept the notebook in my left cargo pocket.
But something wasn't right about the rumor version.
Mullins had been signing entries in that book for fourteen months that matched no vehicle on my lane. I had fourteen months of pages showing me exactly that. If he'd snapped once, why were there fourteen months of signatures on entries for vehicles that crossed no camera I could see?
And there was the other thing. My watch is set four minutes ahead of the shack clock — I've always kept it that way since I got to Gate 3, because the schedule board in the shack runs a little slow and I like to see a real time on my wrist. The entry I pointed at said 06:38. The side-gate camera said 06:38. The shove happened at 06:39 by the shack clock.
So the entry on the page wasn't signed during an argument. It was signed one minute before he walked over to me. He wrote it, and then he came over and shoved me, and the shove was the thing he did to keep anybody from asking what he'd just written.
That's not snapping. That's covering.
I don't know when I decided I needed to prove that. Maybe the morning the rumor hit the smoke pit. Maybe the afternoon I overheard a driver call me the slow specialist who cost a man his pension. Maybe the night my roommate told me I should let it go, that people would believe what they wanted, that the command had already made up its mind.
The version of the story everyone was telling didn't need me to do anything. I was the slow guard. Mullins was the stressed NCO. End of file.
But I had fourteen months of entries in a notebook, and I had a thing that had happened on the lane in front of forty witnesses at 06:39, and I had a time stamp at 06:38 that I now understood was the whole point.
So I started reading my own notebook again. Every page. Every gap.
That's when I found the second signature problem.