PALLET NINE

Synopsis

Staff Sergeant Duke Ferriday has loaded cargo aircraft for sixteen years without wondering what was in any of it. He regards this as a professional skill. His squadron regards it as the reason he is still employed. Then a pallet comes aboard at Bagram weighing eleven hundred pounds more than its manifest, and the manifest has four signatures on it, and one of them is a warrant officer Ferriday has been drinking coffee with since March. Everybody he asks has a reasonable answer. The answers get better each time, which he finds more alarming than if they had gotten worse. The aircraft is wheels up in nine hours, and the seal on pallet nine is a strip of plastic.

Who this is about

Staff Sergeant Duke Ferriday has loaded cargo aircraft for sixteen years and has never once been curious, which he considers a professional skill rather than a character flaw.

What goes wrong

Pallet nine weighs eleven hundred pounds more than its paperwork says, and its paperwork has four signatures on it, all of them from people Ferriday would have described as reasonable.

What's at stake

Sixteen years, a pension, and the good opinion of a squadron, against a number on a form that only he has bothered to check twice.

Why it keeps going

Every episode somebody reasonable explains why the discrepancy is nothing, and every episode the explanation is a little better than the last one, which is the problem.

Takeaway

A lie with four signatures on it is not a lie anymore, it is a procedure.

Shelves

Themes

Story, in the creator's words

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