Chapter 2 - The Archive Recorder
The static came first.
It filled the briefing room, gritty and low, the sound of open water on a radio. Then a woman's voice in Arabic, fast and frightened, and behind her the sound of something metal hitting something metal, over and over, and a man shouting in a language Maya did not recognize.
Maya closed her eyes.
She had heard this recording before. She had heard it live. She had been sitting at a console on the Dunmore with a headset on and a pen in her hand, and she had written down every word the woman said, and then she had picked up the phone and called the watch officer and said, "Sir, I have a distress call from a civilian trawler, bearing two-seven-zero, range eight nautical miles, and the caller says they are under attack."
That had been at 14:22.
The recording continued.
The woman's voice stopped. There was a long moment of silence, then a click, then a man's voice — American, older, calm, the kind of voice that had been trained to sound calm no matter what it was saying.
The man said an authorization phrase. Then he said a call sign.
"Raven Six."
The room went absolutely silent.
Maya opened her eyes.
She did not look at the recorder. She looked at Sloane.
His face was gray. His hands had gone flat on the metal table, fingers spread, as if he were holding himself down. He was looking at the recorder and then at Ben and then at Maya and then at the recorder again.
The recording continued.
"—hold position," the voice said. "Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage. Raven Six out."
There was another click, and then the sound of the recording ending.
Ben pressed stop.
The silence in the briefing room was so complete that Maya could hear the harbor wind against the porthole windows.
"That line was cut from the report," Ben said.
Sloane's hand moved.
He reached across the table toward the recorder.
Maya stepped forward and put herself between him and the machine. She was shorter than him by six inches and lighter by forty pounds and she did not care. She looked up at him and she said, very quietly, so quietly that only the front row could hear it:
"Who ordered the edit, Captain?"
Sloane's mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
He looked down at the recorder, and then at the sailors behind Maya, and then at the two lieutenants from his own staff, who were staring at him with expressions that had not yet decided between confusion and horror. The yeoman by the door had stopped pretending to take notes. The pen was hovering over the notebook and had not moved in a long time.
"Everyone out," Sloane said.
No one moved.
"*Everyone out,*" he said, louder, and this time his voice broke on the last word, just slightly, the way a man's voice breaks when he is not used to raising it and is not sure it will obey him.
The sailors got up. The lieutenants got up. The yeoman got up. They filed out of the room in a slow, awkward line, and Maya heard one of them whisper something in the corridor, and another one shush her, and then the door clicked shut.
Ben stayed where he was.
Sloane looked at him.
"Chief," he said. "I am going to ask you to leave the recorder on the table and step out of this room."
"No, sir," Ben said.
"Chief Ortiz—"
"No, sir." Ben's voice was flat. "I've been in this Navy for twenty-two years. I've seen one good officer get destroyed by a cover-up and I promised myself I would never let it happen again. I'm not leaving the room, and I'm not leaving the recorder, and I'm not leaving Specialist Chen."
Sloane stared at him.
"You will be relieved of duty," he said.
"I expect so, sir."
"You will be charged."
"I expect so, sir."
"You will lose your pension."
"I've done the math, sir."
Sloane stood in the middle of the briefing room with his hands flat on the table and his jaw working and his voice gone. He looked, for the first time in the entire confrontation, like a man who had made a mistake and had just understood, with great clarity and very little time, exactly how large that mistake had been.
May you like
"Chief," he said, and his voice was different now, lower, almost reasonable. "Chief, let's be sensible about this."
"No, sir," Ben said. "I think we've been sensible long enough."
