Four bright silver stars glinted on each side of his formal collar under the fluorescent lights of the terminal.

I looked past Evan’s shoulder and met the steady, unbending eyes of General Arthur Vance.

He didn’t blink, and he didn’t so much as glance at the civilians sitting along the glass wall behind us.

Seeing him standing there at Gate C27 brought every puzzling line of my altered travel orders into sudden, sharp focus.

My command staff had ordered full Service Dress because General Vance had personally scheduled an immediate joint command presentation at destination headquarters five minutes after our flight landed.

The red stamp in the top right corner of my travel binder wasn’t some routine transit code from a clerk.