Chapter 17
Brodie discreetly placed his hand on his holstered pistol, and he noticed Taylor do the same. When it came to making an unannounced visit to a soldier with mental health issues and—potentially—access to a weapon, there was no taking chances.
Brodie knocked loudly on the door and announced, “CID! Open the door.”
After a moment he heard footsteps, and then the door opened slowly to reveal a tall, fit man of about twenty in a black Nirvana T-shirt and jeans with close-cropped dirty-blond hair.
Despite his imposing physique, he had a softness and innocence to his features.
His large blue eyes moved between his three visitors.
Brodie and Taylor produced their creds, and Brodie said, “Special Agents Brodie and Taylor, CID. Are you PFC Thomas Greer?”
“Yes, sir,” the man answered. He looked at Sergeant Miller. “Is everything all right, Sergeant?”
Miller said, “The agents just have a few questions for you, Tom.”
Greer nodded and stepped aside. They all entered a small living room with a couch, TV, table and chairs, and kitchenette.
Brodie turned to Sergeant Miller. “Thank you for your cooperation. We have it from here. But we’d like to get a look at your training grounds tomorrow.”
Miller nodded. “Yes, sir. I can meet you at the west gate with a vehicle and take you out.”
“Good. Oh-eight-hundred. And we’d like it if Captain Pickman can join us. We have yet to meet.”
The sergeant looked as though he didn’t love that idea, but said, “I will notify the captain.” Miller took a last look at Private Greer, then left the room.
Brodie gestured for Greer to have a seat on the couch, and the two agents pulled up chairs across from him.
Brodie noticed a PlayStation controller, a graphic novel, and the remnants of a burrito on the coffee table in front of the couch. He asked, “How have you been handling the lockdown?”
Greer shrugged. “Don’t mind it, sir. Don’t mind the break. They’ve been running us ragged.”
“So I’ve heard.” He added, “As I’m sure you’re aware, we are here because of the death of Major Roger Ames. Did you know the major?”
Greer broke eye contact and looked at the coffee table, contemplating his burrito, or perhaps whether he should lie to CID agents. He said, “I knew who he was. There’s only a handful of officers at this camp.”
“Right. But did you ever converse with him?”
Greer looked at Brodie. “No, sir.”
“So he never told you why he was accessing the Vault in the middle of the night?”
Greer cleared his throat. “I do recall letting him in on a night shift or two while on guard duty. Wouldn’t be my place to ask what he was doing, though.”
Taylor asked, “Was he alone?”
Greer thought for a moment—or pretended to. “I believe so.”
She followed up, “Were you alone on guard duty?”
Greer nodded. “There are supposed to be two guys, but on night duty it doesn’t always work out that way. Someone gets sick, or says they’re sick, or just hasn’t had enough rest since a training exercise to manage it. So long as one guy is there, command seems okay with it.”
Brodie asked, “Did you accompany the major down into the Vault?”
Greer shook his head. “I just let him into the building and activated the elevator for him.”
Was that a lie? Ames would have needed Greer’s access code to activate and release the D-17 unit. Unless Greer had given his code to the major, which would have been a major breach of protocol. “Did you give your access code to Major Ames?”
“No, sir. That is forbidden.”
Taylor said in as soft a voice as she could muster, “Private, we are well versed in the security protocols of this camp. And we know that Major Ames could not have done anything in the Vault without the access code that is not given to DEVCOM, and that is only known to officers within the camp command and select enlisted men while performing guard duty. So we will ask you again, with a reminder that you are speaking with officers of the law: Did you accompany Major Ames down to the Vault during any of his nighttime visits?”
Greer shook his head vigorously. “No, ma’am.”
“Did you give your code to Major Ames?”
Greer sighed. “Yes, ma’am, I did. I apologize for not being truthful.”
Brodie said, “Next time it will come with a price.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brodie asked, “Why did you give the major your code?”
“Because he asked for it. He said that since I was alone it would not be good to leave the Vault unguarded.”
Brodie nodded. He had some sympathy for Greer. What he’d done was against protocol, but it was at the request of a commissioned officer. The steep power imbalance made it difficult for the private to say no.
Taylor asked, “How many incidents were there of the major coming to the Vault late at night when you were alone on guard duty, and you giving the major your access code? Think before you answer.”
Private Greer thought, and if he was smart, he was thinking that the agents already knew the answer to the question. Then he replied, “Three.”
“And do you recall why you were alone on duty all three nights?”
Greer nodded. “First time a guy was sick. Second time, I think it was because the guy’s training schedule had changed last-minute, and he had to rest up that night. Third time, the other Ranger just didn’t show, and later I heard he’d… kind of been on a bender and was in no shape to do anything.”
Taylor asked, “Are you often on nighttime sentry duty?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why? Is that based on seniority, or a disciplinary measure?”
Greer shook his head. “Neither. Most of the guys don’t want to do it, but I volunteered to pull extra night shifts.
I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, so figured I’d get some shifts on the books instead of staring at the ceiling all night.
It allowed me to get excused from some of the early drills the next day, and if I slept at all I had a better chance of doing it during the daytime. ”
A cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine, and steroids is bound to screw up your internal clock. Brodie asked, “Were you alone on any of your other nighttime guard shifts?”
Greer thought a moment. “Not that I recall.”
“Did Major Ames come to the Vault on any of those nights when you were with another Ranger?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you find that odd?”
Greer thought a moment. The man seemed a little nervous but relatively calm and cogent, and Brodie could believe that this guy had quit or at least paused his mass consumption of uppers. He replied, “Yes, sir, that is odd now that you put it like that.”
Brodie switched gears and said, “We are aware of the incident with your roommate, Kowalski.”
Greer refocused on his burrito. “Yes, sir. That was… a bad time for me.”
“Do you remember the incident?”
“Parts. I remember sitting here on this couch, staring at that door.” He gestured to a door on the wall opposite, which presumably led to the bedroom that used to be Private Kowalski’s. “And I was feeling like… like there was something very wrong on the other side of that door.”
Taylor asked, “What do you mean, wrong?”
Greer looked at her with his large blue eyes. He appeared pained. “Unnatural, ma’am. Something unnatural, that was going to kill me if I didn’t kill it first.”
She asked, “And then what happened?”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember. I blacked out.
Next thing I remember is Sergeant Miller pinning me against the wall and yelling at me.
I looked over and saw Kowalski getting talked down by another Ranger.
He had blood dripping out of his nose and a black eye.
” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Taylor said in a calm voice, “Private, you likely experienced stimulant psychosis. It affects judgment as well as memory. It can occur from prolonged amphetamine abuse.”
Private Greer nodded. “I don’t do that anymore.”
Taylor asked, “When did you start using stimulants?”
Greer met Taylor’s eyes. “It was about six weeks into our assignment here, ma’am. During one of our training missions.”
“What prompted you to start using?”
“That mission was a head game. Different than the others. Screwed us all up.”
Brodie said, “Describe the mission.”
Greer took a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “We were defending the village against two squads of tin men. That’s twelve bots.
Pretty standard, or so we thought. Usually they fan out and launch their assault.
We take some of them out, but never enough.
We all die, and the village falls. Well, this time, they took up positions around the village, weapons trained, and they waited.
One of our guys popped up to get a better look and was sniped.
Head shot. We had an M2 open up on them, but the bots took cover in the hills and man-made barriers around the village.
And it went on like that. Guy exposes himself and gets sniped.
We return with heavy fire but can’t get a kill.
The hours drag on. We take shifts eating and eventually sleeping.
It’s a siege. They’re starving us of food and ammo.
And energy. But they run on batteries, so we figure maybe we can wait them out.
We’re thirty hours in when our spotter catches sight of them taking rations from their sacks and…
they have, like, these slots, where they can process food and recharge, and these things…
they’re just shoving the rations into their bodies, all still wrapped up in paper and plastic, right into their bodies.
The same food we had, but they had more of it.
And that’s when we knew we were fucked.” He added, “Sorry.”
Brodie tried to imagine what this must have been like—under siege by machines that don’t sleep, that don’t lose patience, that don’t even run out of gas, shoving human food, wrapper and all, into their microbial fuel cells.
It was beyond bleak. It was a mockery. Brodie wondered if that was the intent, and if so, whose intent it was.
Greer continued, “One of my squad buddies, he gives me some pills, and a bump of coke. I’d never done anything like that and I gotta be honest, it felt good.
I felt like I needed it. I got confidence, it was almost like I got hope.
The rest of the survivors in our squads, they took some too, and we all decided to just charge them.
Go out in a blaze of glory. It was dumb, but we were all flying high and out of options anyway.
They cut us down in seconds. We didn’t take out a single one of them. ”
Taylor asked, “How many Rangers were involved in this exercise?”
Greer thought a moment. “About thirty-five. Over half the platoon.”
Thirty-five versus a dozen. That was about a three-to-one ratio of defenders to attackers, which, if they had all been human, would have given the defenders unbeatable odds.
Greer said the drugs gave him “hope,” but the hope wasn’t to win or even to survive. The hope was to die well.
Brodie asked, “And then you kept using?”
Greer nodded. “Yes, sir. Basically, every exercise from then on out. It made things easier.” He clarified, “It made things feel easier. We kept losing. But as time went on things weren’t so lopsided. And they never did the siege tactic again. Kinetic assaults from then on out.”
Brodie nodded. If the Rangers had to go through thirty-hour sieges on a regular basis, General Morgan would probably have had a mutiny on his hands.
Though Brodie wondered who had decided to change tactics, and why, and how.
According to Caroline Dixon and Captain Spencer, the D-17s had a simple doctrine statement that remained unchanged, and the rest was up to them to figure out.
Or at least that was how he understood it. He needed to clarify that.
Taylor asked, “When did you feel yourself beginning to lose control from your drug use?”
Greer appeared uncomfortable with the question. “I don’t know. Hard to say. We already feel like we’ve got so little control here, ma’am.”
Taylor clarified, “You experienced some sort of psychotic break the night you assaulted your roommate. Was that the first and only time you felt yourself losing your grip on reality? Have you experienced any hallucinations—visual, auditory, anything?”
Greer shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing like what happened on that night. Confusion, maybe, feeling delirious. But that was something else.”
Brodie asked, “Were you high any of the nights that Major Ames came by the Vault?”
Greer nodded. “The first two nights I was. Not the third.”
“What did Ames say to you?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, sir. We greeted each other, I saluted, and I let him into the elevator.”
“And you gave him your code to release the access keys and the holding bays.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“How often is that code changed?”
“Daily.”
“How long did the major stay down in the Vault?”
“Well… I wasn’t keeping good track of time the first two nights. But the last night he came by, I’d say he was down there for maybe an hour.”
“Were you aware of what he was doing down there?”
“No, sir.”
“On all three nights, the only bot he activated and released from its holding bay was Number 20. Bucky. The same unit that later killed him.”
If PFC Greer was surprised by that information, he didn’t show it. In fact, he said, “I was afraid there was some connection between whatever he was up to down there and what happened to him.”
“Why didn’t you report any of this to your superiors once you learned of Major Ames’s death?”
Greer looked away again. “I don’t know, sir. I should have.”
Brodie leaned forward in his chair. “I need you to think, Tom. Of something he said, or his demeanor, anything at all that you might remember that can help us get justice for the major and his family.”
Greer took a deep breath. “Like I said, I was jacked up the first two nights, so I really can’t totally remember, but the third night, the major came back up and he looked… afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of them, sir. The tin men.”
“What did he say to you?”
Greer met Brodie’s gaze. “He said to me, ‘There’s a ghost in the machine.’ And then he walked away. And that’s the last time I ever saw him.”