NINE
Jade
When we arrived at FOB Cobra, everything looked a bit different somehow. The knowledge of a huge conspiracy just out of my reach drove me crazy.
“You’re going to cut it out with the investigating, right?” he asked after parking.
“Yeah, yeah,” I lied. “Too dangerous for me.”
“Good. I’d hate to see someone like you get wrapped up in this. It’s been hell for me trying to get out.”
“Why is that?”
He grinned and pointed a finger at me.
“Ah, there you go again. Nice one. You almost got me.”
Out the window, Tony Roth rushed toward us.
“Fuck,” I said.
Cooper twisted around in his seat and opened the door.
“What’s up, Roth?” he asked.
“Captain wants to see her. Right away.”
“What about?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, climbing down from the massive vehicle.
When I walked around, I saw him staring at me.
“Be careful,” he said in a quiet voice.
“I’m always careful,” I said confidently as I walked past him.
Tony dashed back to the CO’s office building, reaching it before me. Cooper walked back to his CHU. I smiled at how familiar I’d become with the terminology in such a short time period.
Inside the long, metal building, my smile faded as soon as I saw Captain Jeffries behind his desk.
“What in the hell were you doing off base with Cooper?” he asked, skipping any form of greeting.
“Hello to you, too, Captain.”
I walked over and sat down in front of his desk.
“You better answer my question,” he said.
Our eyes met. I flipped through a few options in my mind.
“Me and Cooper have been getting along, and…”
“Don’t say anymore,” he interrupted, raising his hand into the air. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“It was my idea, not his.”
“I don’t care whose idea it was, Ms. Hart, he should know better than to go out in that area unaccompanied and with a civilian.”
“We were fine. I didn’t see anyone around for miles.”
“You didn’t see anyone?”
I shook my head and lied one more time.
“No.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary?”
I laughed nervously.
“Now you got me thinking I missed something. Do you want to tell me anything?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re leaving on the next chopper out of here.”
“I thought you had to wait because of the Taliban or something.”
“The situation in Afghanistan is still fluid, Ms. Hart. I want you to be packed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Do you understand?”
“I’m not done with my story!”
“That ain’t my problem,” he said, damn near smiling.
I stood, furious at him and the rest of the male dominated world. After leaving his office, I headed to my quarters to pack my belongings.
Should I go talk with Cooper? Or maybe Max? Would one of them give me the information I needed before I got kicked off the base?
All I had brought with me was a week’s worth of clothes, my laptop, phone, and various cords and chargers for the electronic equipment.
It didn’t take long to get it all packed up. Would the CO really kick me out? Returning without a story would not go over well with the website that had hired me.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. The thought repeated itself, bouncing off the imaginary walls of my mind. It got even worse as images of Cooper and Max both popped up.
The two men were similar in some ways, both alpha males teetering on the edge of being an alpha hole or a straight up psycho. They had their differences too.
Cooper was definitely the smarter of the two. Beyond his semi-romantic picnic on top of a hill in the Afghanistan boonies, something about him made my soul smile.
On the other hand, Max was down to earth and to the point. He was dumb, but I’d never had good luck with smart men. Would the hulk of a man even want a woman like me?
What type of woman am I? The question floated past my consciousness for inspection. I toyed with it, wondering if I would ever be able to answer it completely.
Both men attracted me in one way or another, but it didn’t matter if I liked either of them. I would be going back without a story and wouldn’t talk to either of them ever again.
I placed the blame for my failing to get the story at their feet. If they hadn’t been such assholes, I might have been able to dig around enough to come up with some sort of story to save my ass.
Did the criminal conspiracy really go all the way to the top? Was I sitting on another scandal like the Iran-Contra Affair? The thought excited me. People would finally see me as a real journalist.
I closed my eyes, pleasant thoughts floating through my mind as I drifted through the land between waking and dreams. As I approached sweet sleep, I heard a knock at the door. Who could that be?