Now it was Monday morning and with the full realization that Jake might still be in North Carolina, she freaked.
She realized that she had stopped brushing her teeth, the toothbrush dripping saliva and paste onto the carpet. She stared straight ahead at the window that opened onto her front yard.
She tried Jake’s cell, which went straight to voicemail. Dialing his home number Jake’s father answered.
“Amanda, we’re going to have to ask you not to contact Jake anymore,” he said.
“Huh?” she said, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand. What’s happened? Where’s Jake?”
“Jake’s in jail and is charged with burning down your father’s house and the attempted murder of Ms. Riley Dwyer, your psychiatrist.”
“Burning down my father’s house?” Amanda said. “It’s not burned! He did none of those things.”
“This is a legal matter now and we can’t have you discussing any of this with Jake. Thank you for your cooperation, Amanda.”
Jake’s father, the lawyer, hung up the phone. She stared at her cell phone blankly for several moments as the gravity of his words settled over her.
She could feel the vivid memories in her mind beginning to recede as if someone had picked up the remote of her life and punched reverse. It was as if she was the patrol leader, and her team behind her was being picked off one by one.
Then, in a moment of pure realization, when she realized what she had done, she screamed.
CHAPTER 41
Mary Ann Singlaub sat at her computer terminal in the small cubbyhole of the public affairs office known as the RLB, or re-locatable building. Amongst the twenty some journalists that had to elbow through it’s narrow spaces each day, it was, more affectionately known as “Really Lousy Bullshit.”
It was a basic four-walled structure with plywood shelves tacked into the walls at waist level, like chair molding, and held up by two-by-fours hammered at an angle from the outer edge of the plywood to the wall. About thirty computers were perched precariously along this makeshift workspace. An Internet drop was the only perk, and once a Web site loaded, a task that sometimes afforded one the time to retrieve coffee, use the latrine, and take a smoke break, it would work reasonably well. She typed in her password and pulled up the Google Web site. Typing in “Colonel Zachary Garrett,” she hit Return and watched 72,116 hits appear.
“Wow,” she said to herself, and hit the News tab, which narrowed the search considerably to 127 articles.
She blew a small tuft of hair away from her forehead as if it were a fly bothering her, swatting at it as well. She scrolled through the articles, most having been posted within a few days, naming him as the senior U.S. officer killed in the War on Terror. Scrolling and scanning, Mary Ann zeroed in on an article that mentioned the colonel was survived by a daughter in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Bingo. Another potential source.
She quickly Googled “Amanda Garrett” both in a Web search and a news search, which turned up a trove of swimming meet times. Deep into the search of the 237,124 hits on Amanda Garrett, Mary Ann found two court documents. She printed those out and continued to scan until she found her address and home phone number. She then went back to Zachary Garrett in the news.
She froze on an article released only hours ago on the Associated Press wire and published in the Charlotte Observer by a freelance journalist named Del Dangurs. While it was possible that he was new, she found it curious that she had never heard of him, especially since he was reporting within a military domain, her area of expertise.
Her curiosity at who the reporter might be was replaced by shock at the content of the article.
Colonel With Spartanburg Ties Dies In Afghanistan
Leaves Behind Questionable Legacy
By Del Dangurs
Colonel Zachary Garrett was killed in a helicopter crash last week in Afghanistan in the U.S. military’s continued failed attempts to find any of the leaders of the 9-11 attacks on America. A review of the officer’s life raises important questions about his death and the suitability of the senior officers we have fighting the War on Terror today.
Court records show that Colonel Garrett was divorced, estranged from his daughter, and had twice been summoned to defend himself against breaking-and-entering and child-abuse charges.
But today’s revelation that Colonel Garrett allegedly provided Al Qaeda reams of top secret documents detailing the U.S. military intentions to withdraw from Afghanistan on a more rapid timetable have shattered the revered commander’s reputation and perhaps set back the war on terror by years. He is also implicated in the massive leak of classified operational documents to the Wiki-Leaks website. This is a developing story and the Charlotte Observer has exclusive inside sources providing up to date information.
With a senior leader such as Colonel Garrett living a life of familial abuse and abandonment, and potentially even guilty of treason, is it any wonder we are not further along in the so-called Global War on Terror?
It is true that Garrett played some nominal role in defeating the Ballantine attacks last year. Yet conspiracy theorists make much of the fact that he actually captured Ballantine in the first Gulf War, arguing that their relationship might have actually strengthened over the years and led to a role in the attacks for Colonel Garrett. After all, they ask, how did he mysteriously wind up in Lake Moncrief, the terrorists’ den? The explosive treason charges against Colonel Garrett seem to strengthen the critics that argue Garrett was in collusion with Ballantine.
According to a Defense Department official, selection of military commanders is conducted by a group of officers, picked at random every year…
“No way.” Mary Ann went back and read the first part of the article again, her jaw agape.
She knew all of the sayings about what goes on behind closed doors, but also had spent a considerable amount of time at Fort Bragg, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Few officers were accorded the respect that Colonel Garrett received from the Special Operations community. There were none that she knew of that maintained the respect of everyone at Fort Bragg the way Colonel Garrett did.
So, either the good colonel lived a double life or someone was doing a hatchet job on him. Having never heard of the reporter, she had her guesses.
As she was printing the article, she heard a commotion near the front door. There was some jostling, and someone shouted, “Hey, where are you going?”
As Mary Ann Singlaub stood and turned, she found Sergeant Lance Eversoll staring her in the face.
“This your idea of a human interest story, bitch?”
Stunned, she looked at the piece of paper in his hand. The story was being broadcast all over the Web to millions of people. MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews, and all the dot coms were publishing the story.
“I had nothing to do with that story, Sergeant, and if you call me bitch again I will throw this coffee in your face and kick you in the nuts. Do we understand each other?”
She had been raised in the South, too.
They squared off, the public affairs office a tense set of bystanders in Dodge City, Kansas, waiting to see who would draw first.