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immobilized.
    An Air Force one-star.
    Standing in the bus line.
    Carrying his own briefcase.
    P.J. watched as the general stepped onto the bus and disappeared among all the other passengers. Then he thought about the gold oak leaf on his own collar, signifying a full three ranks below the general, and remembered the words of those around him when news broke of his assignment to the Pentagon.
    â€œYou’ll be making coffee for the admiral. You’ll be getting the admiral his toilet paper and taking him his lunch.”
    Well, it hadn’t been that bad. Officers at Code 13 did, in fact, handle some of the most top-secret military matters confronting the Navy.
    But in terms of the space where he had to work, it was that bad.
    They put Code 13 down in the basement of the D-Ring, four decks below the office of the Judge Advocate General, Vice Admiral Zack Brewer.
    Most people didn’t even know the Pentagon had a basement, but for the Pentagon insiders, if anything resembled a dungeon in the building, this was it.
    The sight of all kinds of creatures crawling about on the unpainted cement floors in the huge underground corridors circumventing the D-Ring of the Pentagon had a certain symbolic relevance. Midlevel officers, like Navy lieutenant commanders or Marine Corp majors or Army captains, all wielded about as much power in this great citadel as the rodents creeping about on the bottom floor. The midlevel and junior officers here were accustomed to the classic “low man on the totem pole” treatment.
    Incandescent lights hanging from the ceiling cast a dim glow in the basement corridor. One could see, but there was always a bit of an adjustment period stepping out of the brightly lit office spaces into the large, darker corridor.
    P.J. had walked down the corridor and up the steps to the main deck, then stepped out into the courtyard for a few minutes, trying to clear his head. After enjoying five minutes of sunshine and taking in the breeze, he finished his bottled water and headed back into the building.
    He was on his way back to the Code 13 spaces when a huge gray rat crawled right in front of him, so close to his feet that he almost kicked it.
    Like a schoolkid traversing a crosswalk, the rat took its time, undaunted by the presence of a human, as if it had legal, proprietary rights to the basement and could file an injunction if anything got in its way.
    They were arrogant creatures, these river rats of the Pentagon basement, bold and fearless of the humans intruding on their spaces.
    P.J. watched the huge rodent as it crossed from the left bulkhead to the right bulkhead, then squeezed its fat body into a small hole, its six-inch tail still protruding out onto the floor.
    As ugly as these creatures were, somehow they proved mesmerizing, and something always made P.J. want to stop and watch. Maybe it was because he was one of the few people in the world who got to witness one of the Pentagon’s best-kept secrets.
    Rats in the basement.
    One would have thought the airplane that exploded into the building on September 11, 2001, would have incinerated them all. But after the blast, it seemed that the cockroaches and rodents not only survived but actually thrived.
    P.J. waited until the rat’s black tail disappeared into the hole in the plastered wall, then walked up the concrete passageway to the next bend in the Pentagon.
    No more than fifty feet beyond the rat, a simple blue-and-white sign over a door along the left interior corridor proclaimed “Navy JAG Code 13 —Administrative Law.”
    Time to get back to work.
    He punched in the security code, waited as the locking mechanism hummed and electronically unlocked the steel door, then stepped into the spartan work space.
    Under bright fluorescent lighting and with a blue Astroturf-like carpet on the floor, the JAG officers of Code 13 shared adjoining workstation-cubicles in a largely open room. Only the division commander occupied an