Chapter 2 - The Fallen Ribbon in the Dust
Natalie caught herself against the steel edge of the bench, forcing her breathing to remain slow and controlled despite the burning fire in her femur.
She straightened her spine with agonizing deliberation, refusing to let him see her grimace.
When her tray tilted, a small, worn velvet pouch had slipped from her breast pocket, tumbling to the floor beside Briggs's boots.
Briggs nudged the pouch with the tip of his boot, kicking it open.
Spilling out onto the gray floor was not an ordinary ribbon. It was a tarnished, battle-worn Combat Medical Badge flanked by a miniature Purple Heart ribbon bar.
The private sitting at the adjacent table, Specialist Miller, looked at the device and whispered in horror: “Sergeant… she got that in Kunar Province.”
Briggs let out a loud, derisive snort. “Kunar? Please. Half the supply clerks in Bagram got valor ribbons for sitting in air-conditioned bunkers while real infantrymen took the shrapnel.”
He planted his heavy combat boot directly onto the velvet case, crushing the delicate silver clasp beneath his heel.
“If you're too fragile to walk without leaning on people, Carter, go submit your medical discharge paperwork. Stop taking up space in my dining hall.”
Captain Julian Vance, the company commander who had been sitting two tables away sipping black coffee, simply looked over, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and looked back at his tablet without uttering a single word of reprimand.
Vance owed Briggs fifty thousand dollars in off-the-books motor-pool fuel kickbacks. He wasn't about to discipline his best earner for humiliating a crippled replacement lieutenant.
Natalie looked down at the crushed ribbon case, then up into Briggs’s sneering face.
Her anger didn't explode into shouts. It crystallized into something terrifyingly quiet, smooth, and cold as sub-zero steel.
“You believe that uniform protects your cowardice, Briggs?” Natalie asked, her voice dropping into a register that made the soldiers at the surrounding tables stop chewing.
Briggs laughed, leaning his face inches from hers. “I’m a master sergeant selectee with three combat deployments, Lieutenant. You're an administrative nobody whose career ended in an orthopedic ward. Who are you going to complain to? The battalion chaplain?”
Natalie reached into her combat uniform blouse.
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She pulled out a rugged, encrypted tactical satellite token bearing a distinctive four-star gold crest on its housing.
She tapped the emergency override switch.
