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I nodded. "Sure. I'd like to notify my kids."

"Tomorrow morning you will be allowed to make one phone call prior to your departure. In the meantime, Sergeant Calles will escort you to dinner and then back to your cell. And remember, Sinclair, you're still just another inmate doing time while you're in my facility."

"Roger that," I replied.

"Let's go, Sinclair," Sergeant Calles said.

Calles was a big woman with inch-long blond hair on top that was tapered with shears on the sides and back. One day several months ago while working the mail room, I'd overheard her complaining to another guard that she had failed out of the army's challenging Ranger School. Originally from Nebraska, she had chosen military police as her career field, and Fort Leavenworth as her first assignment to be near her home.

I respected her straightforward approach to her job and her inmates, but her wanton use of the baton had grown tiresome. In her block, I was just another prisoner, as it should be, though she must have recognized the pressure of housing a three-star general in pretrial confinement.

Prison had not required much of an adjustment for me. I had never taken comfort in the trappings of rank. Having led from the front lines, much to the criticism of some of my peers who saw career progression as a pathway out of danger, I didn't see a wide chasm between a foxhole and a prison cell. Three hots and a cot, as they say. Many had it worse. Who was I to bitch?

With Calles' baton in my back, we departed the command wing of the prison with its big windows full of daylight, shiny floors, and executive furniture. We transitioned back into the dark, depressing catacombs of muted cinder block walls and hydraulic barred doors. I shuffled along until the heavy metal door opened with a hiss and I was standing in the cafeteria line with my fellow inmates.

"General," Private First-Class Johnnie Hooper said. Hooper had been convicted for distributing fentanyl from his barracks room in Fort Hood, Texas.

"Hoop," I replied.

"No talking!" Calles shouted. Her baton plowed into my kidney. I nodded at her as the forty or so prisoners turned and looked at her with hard eyes. I might have been an inmate, but they knew I was an active-duty general. More to the point, I was their general. An odd respect emanated from my status and my reputation as a combat warrior.

Not a day went by where there wasn't some rumor about me and my status, especially in relation to the Eye of Africa battle last year. My Dagger team had risked it all to stop China from releasing four or five nuclear hypersonic glide vehicles on the United States and maybe several European cities. The irony was that there had been online traffic, surely fabricated, that implicated my team and me in the Chinese scheme to launch nukes at the United States. The media had portrayed me as the ringleader of the nuclear threat against America. It was preposterous, but the power of the corporate media had half the world believing it to be true. I had transitioned from a shadow warrior leading our nation's finest to support and defend our Constitution, to an infamous prisoner mysteriously held in contravention of that very document.

Because I took no part in social media, I didn't see the volumes of information people told me were being spewed across all the platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, billionaire Mitch Drewson's newest app called Shoutter, and LanxPro, tech mogul Aurelius Blanc's app. My fellow inmates tried to keep me up to date with the latest musings about my fate.

A broken man, I was barely interested.

I shuffled forward in the line for food, Calles still at my back. Hooper got his glop, then I held up my tray. With his white hairnet and apron, Private Sam McWhorley looked like a fry cook at McDonald's. Grease-stained white apron. Stringy mustache and beard. Tattoo sleeves on both arms. Hateful sneer on his face. He leaned over and let a long stringy loogie slip between his lips and sucked it back in before it hit the ladle in his hand. He had been a mechanic at Fort Campbell in Kentucky and was here for sexual assault of a fellow soldier. I had been the court-martial convening authority at the time and gave him the maximum punishment. I figured no chow was better than something mixed with his bodily fluids, so I kept shuffling ahead. If there was an inside job to hit me this evening, McWhorley would gladly be the ringleader.

Handing out the sweet tea in plastic cups was Corporal Sonny Jones, a big African American from New Orleans and relatively recent addition to the Disciplinary Barracks population. He put a cup of iced tea on my tray and slid a cheeseburger from who knows where next to it.

"General," he said with a nod. "Hearing news."

"Sonny," I said.

He smiled. A few weeks ago, Jones told me he had posted a long rant about the Eye of Africa battle and how my former Dagger team had saved the country, maybe the world. He said that it was trending on social media and he had used the hashtags #EAB #garrettsinclair #savingamerica.