"Yeah?"

"May I sit down please? Otherwise."

Bolan pointed his gun at the floor. "Sit." Cottonwood sat and waited silently.

"'Are you glad to be alive, Cottonwood?"

"Y-yes, sir."

"Well, don't be too glad, because it may be a very temporary situation."

"I see, sir."

"I'm going to give it to you straight, and then you're going to give it to me straight."

"Yessir."

Bolan stared icily into the boy's eyes.

"You're the one who passed on the report about this location and the meeting to the authorities. Right?"

"Yessir."

"Why? And don't waste my time with rationallations or excuses."

"No, sir, I won't." Cottonwood swallowed something thick in his throat. "I work the VT100 computer terminal for incoming shipments of everything from toilet paper to tanks. Sergeant Grendal approached me a couple months ago with his idea of how to program the computer so that it kicked out certain supply orders as duplicate shipments. Hell, CFU is the most common explanation for anything that goes wrong over here."

"CFU..."

"Computer foul up."

Bolan nodded.

"Whenever we showed a duplicate supply of something, we had orders to crate and store the supplies in the warehouse, because you never knew when the CFU would go the other way and short us. That was General Wilson's idea. Once you got something, never return it. He'd always say that. It was Billy Tomlin's and Sergeant Grendal's job to crate the stuff and store it. Except that they started to sell the stuff on the black market." Bolan leaned forward, his eyes boring into the nervous private like a laser beam through the neocortex.