Project - 16 by Martyn J. Pass Read Free Book Online Page B

meant for
someone else.”
    “ Like who?”
    Riley shrugged. “Who knows? We stamp on one faction and 10
more pop up a week later. It was DuPont all right, I could tell
from his sloppy Morse code.”
    “ And you want to track him down?” I said.
    “ Yes,” she replied.
    “ Why?”
    “ Because I owe my sister one and I spent half my life with
that boy. I was as proud as she was the moment I saw him in his
dress uniform the day he passed out. I felt like I'd contributed to
it somehow, that some of the running and the drills we'd practised
before hand had finally paid off.”
    “ Did you keep in touch after he finished basic?”
    “ On and off as soldiers with families do. Most of it came
through my sister - we used to call each other once a week without
fail. She works in D.C, some business exec or something. She would
tell me a little about what he was up to but I had to warn her not
to say too much over the phone especially after I'd
retired.”
    “ So she was the one who told you about him going AWOL?” I
asked.
    “ Yeah. I was in Africa at the time on contract. I flew home to
try and help. That was when we found the letters.”
    “ Letters? Not email or text?”
    “ Yeah, that's why they stood out to us. When I arrived in
Illinois I asked if I could search his room straight away to see if
he'd left a note or if there was some trail I could follow. We went
through it like a dose of salts and turned up nothing but a stack
of letters hidden in his old kit bag.” She went into her bag again
and produced the letters in a zip-loc bag, handed them to me and
got up to pour herself another coffee. I took one out and had a
look at it.
    “ Home-made paper and ink,” I said, turning it over in my
hands. I lifted it to my nose and smelled the raw quality it had.
“Recycled. You're thinking the only reason to do that would be if
you had no access to fresh paper or a computer or a phone. Someone
living here where there are none of those things.”
    “ Exactly.”
    “ How did she post them then?”
    “ She?” asked Riley. She'd rooted round in the cupboards and
found a pack of biscuits. The Colonel was still staring out of the
window and hadn't noticed. She offered me the packet after taking
three for herself. I took four.
    “ It's a woman's handwriting. It's a personal letter.
Emotional. Pleading. That's why he ran. But how did she send
them?”
    “ We think she had help,” said the Colonel suddenly. “Someone
on this base had been sending the letters for her under the guise
of our own HR dispatches. They would have gone unnoticed for
years.”
    “ Any paper trail?” I asked.
    “ None. We don't keep track other than numbers. Special
messages are sent via courier and are signed for but I doubt our
guy would have took that risk. No, he probably put them in the bag
before it was loaded onto the plane and they simply flew through
the system unnoticed. The Dauntless receives thousands of
hard-copies, orders, schematics and the like, so it could easily
have slipped through the net.”
    “ Have you tried to find this guy?” I asked.
    “ We did, but that was just before we realised the last letter
was nearly a year old. In that time we've rotated the men twice.
The chances of finding him now would be slim and unless he were to
confess it all to us we'd have nothing to pin on him.”
    “ So DuPont had to have access to the incoming mail at his end
in order for this to work. Surely all personal letters would have
been sent via email?” I said.
    “ Yes and as it turns out Alex had weeks of time logged sorting
dispatches into their relevant files,” said Riley.
    “ How did he wangle that job if he was a Marine?” She shrugged.
“So we're looking at something that has been planned, prepared for
and has now been executed. But why? To elope?”
    “ You may need to read all of the letters for it to make
sense,” she said. “But the brief side of the story is that they
think they've found something here, buried in