He brought a grenade.
And General Sloane brought the logs.
By the third day, the case had split into three layers.
The first layer was visible and easy to understand: Cacau sabotaged an aircraft windshield and threatened the flight line with a grenade.
The second layer was procedural: false maintenance notes, fake weather advisories, unauthorized access badges, and corrupted scheduling entries were used to delay or stop Flight Copper Nine.
The third layer was the one that mattered most: a defense contractor network and military procurement officers had tried to prevent evidence from reaching federal investigators with a clean chain of custody.
Origi sat in his quarters that night unable to sleep.
The aircraft had been cleaned, but he could still see the paint when he closed his eyes. Not the whole windshield. Just the first second after impact, when the horizon disappeared. Pilots are trained to handle instrument failure, weather loss, smoke, system warnings, engine problems, and human error. But this was different. A man had walked up and taken his sight before he even left the ground.
The more Origi thought about it, the angrier he became.
Not because of the danger to him.
Because of what Cacau had trusted.
Cacau trusted that everyone would focus on Origi’s anger.
He trusted that a pilot leaving the cockpit furious would look unstable on camera.
He trusted that the grenade would make the scene too chaotic for clean questions.
He trusted that command might prefer a neat discipline story to an ugly corruption case.
Origi had served long enough to know that trust was not irrational. Institutions often love clean stories. One angry pilot. One disturbed soldier. One canceled flight. One internal review. Move on.
General Sloane did not allow a clean story.
That was why Cacau feared her.
Not because she outranked him.
Because she refused the simpler lie.
The base changed in small ways over the next week.
People stopped talking when Origi entered rooms, then tried to act like they had not. Flight crews lowered their voices around him. Maintenance personnel treated his aircraft with a strange reverence, as if the painted canopy had made it sacred or cursed. Several young pilots asked him careful questions about the incident without asking the real one: What does it feel like when somebody tries to turn your own reaction into evidence against you?
Origi did not have a good answer.
It felt like being used twice.
Once as the target.
Once as the distraction.
Cacau’s court-martial proceedings began with the visible offenses, because those were undeniable. Sabotage of military property. Threatening personnel with an explosive device. Assault-related conduct on an active flight line. Disobeying security protocols. Interference with aircraft operations. The government could have stopped there and still had a serious case.
Sloane pushed for the full case.
That choice was controversial.
A few senior officers privately argued that broadening the proceedings to include contractor corruption, evidence-chain interference, and procurement misconduct risked delaying punishment for Cacau’s obvious acts. Sloane’s response was blunt.
“The obvious act was camouflage.”
She was right.
At the Article 32 hearing, prosecutors opened with the runway video.
It began outside the aircraft, from a camera mounted near the service lane. Origi was visible through the clean windshield, head down, running final checks. Ground crew moved around the aircraft. The runway looked ordinary. Then Cacau appeared at the edge of the frame.
The jar left his hand at the two-second mark.
The paint struck the windshield.
The room watched Origi’s head snap up behind the smear.
Then the cockpit opened.
Then Origi climbed down.
Then the collar grab.
Then the grenade.
Then Sloane’s entrance.
The video did not capture every word clearly, but enough audio survived.
“You weren’t supposed to fly today.”
“Let go.”
“Unless you want this strip to go up with you on it.”
“Don’t.”
The prosecutor paused the video on Cacau’s face the moment he recognized Sloane.
That still image became one of the most important pieces of the hearing. Not legally decisive by itself, but psychologically impossible to ignore. The arrogance was gone. His eyes widened. His mouth parted slightly. It was the expression of a man not surprised by authority, but terrified by exposure.
The prosecutor said, “This is not the face of a man interrupted during a safety intervention. This is the face of a man whose plan has just met the person investigating it.”
Cacau’s defense objected.
The judge allowed the panel to view the video but cautioned them to draw their own conclusions.
They did.
The maintenance chief testified next.
Master Sergeant Devon Pike explained that the windshield concern entered at 04:03 was false. The aircraft had passed inspection. The note came through an administrative channel that should not have been used for physical readiness determinations. He testified that delaying the aircraft for the note would have been unnecessary.
Then the weather officer testified.
No low visibility advisory had been issued.
Then the logistics dispatcher testified.
He had received an anonymous message instructing him to verify a two-hour delay that did not exist. He assumed the delay was legitimate because the message included internal flight code language. It took investigators less than a day to trace that language back to a scheduling draft accessed by Cacau.
Then came the access badge records.
Cacau had entered Hangar Three at 06:36.
He opened the supply cabinet at 06:38.
He exited with an object consistent in size with the paint jar at 06:40.