HUNTER (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Erin wasn’t wrong about how much attention her thesis would get. Even she didn’t expect the media reaction to be half as strong as it was. It only took a few days after she submitted her thesis to an academic journal before every news outlet in the United States aired the story.

“Massive military cover-up, or just another crazy conspiracy theory?” one major news station’s anchor asked. “Government officials are refusing to comment on documents released by a resident in a little town in Kansas called Nintipi. Can you blame them? The released documents contain information about sightings of an experimental military craft in Iraq by Iraqi locals. Kyla Rose, the woman who found and released the documents, claims the sighting happened just days before the town was targeted by the Special Operations Unit led by Lieutenant Frederick Meraux. You might remember that Lieutenant Meraux was killed in a roadside bombing just days later.

“Though, according to Rose, Meraux was never killed. Rose claims Meraux fled to the Congo where he sought refuge with Congolese Rebels. Supposedly, the subsequent 2010 military operation in the Congo was, in reality, an operation to assassinate Meraux, disguised as a peace-keeping mission. Sound outrageous? We thought so, too. Until we dug deeper.

“Rose claims her information comes straight from one of the operatives from the Congo mission, Sergeant Hunter Sykes, who, you may remember, recently escaped and returned to the United States. Rose and Sykes made headlines back in 2010, when rumours began to spread about her sleeping with Sergeant Sykes while in a relationship with another Special Forces operative, Sergeant Samuel Patrick.”

“I don’t know,” the co-anchor chimed in. “It kind of sounds like this Kyla Rose girl just loves herself some media attention.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” the lead anchor continued. “Nintipi residents have confirmed with our reporters that Rose and Sykes have been close, long-time friends. Rose herself claimed that, just last month, she spent a week alone with Sykes at a cabin in northern Kansas. According to a press-release, Sykes was in a PTSD rehabilitation center that week, but our reporters could find no records with any treatment center.” The station replayed footage of my press release.

My gut turned and I cringed, forced to relive that loud sigh of disgust that rose from crowd when I told the world I cheated on Liam. Since the press release, I hadn’t heard from Liam. Now that it was all over the news, I was wondering if I ever would, or if he was too ashamed, too humiliated. Liam made some mistakes, but he didn’t deserve to be belittled on every news station in America.

“Rose claims the government sent Sergeant Sykes and Corporal Cherovitz, the other surviving member of the Congo Operation, to be killed, so they would keep their mouths shut about Meraux. Once again, the military has responded by saying both Sykes and Cherovitz are in a rehabilitation center, seeking treatment for PTSD.”

“And are they?”

“Once again, our reporters found no record of either men in any rehabilitation center. So now, it’s on the military to prove that Sykes and Cherovitz are alive.”

“You want to know what I think?” the co-anchor asked.

“What’s that?”

“I think they should check this Kyla Rose girl’s basement. She sounds like a real nut case. That’s where you’ll find those men—in Kyla Rose’s basement. I’m willing to bet she’s at her house right now, trying to figure out a way to get rid of two bodies.”

I expected some backlash, but things were out of control. The crowds out front of my house were ten times the size of the ones when Hunter returned home from the Congo. It was a good thing I wasn’t epileptic, or the constantly flashing of cameras in my windows would have given me a seizure.

Within minutes of the nasty co-anchor accusing me of murdering my best friends, there were reporters at my door. “Ms Rose! Are you hiding Sergeant Sykes’s body in your basement?” they shouted through my thin walls.

The suggestion alone made my heart palpitate. I wanted to throw the door open and strangle each of those reporters.

This time around, I didn’t have the military on my side. I didn’t have a team of government lawyers making sure the reporters didn’t cross my property line. All I had was one police officer who I went to high-school with, who I could tell hated me like the rest of Nintipi because he made no effort to stop the reporters from crowding my house. When I peered out the window, I could see him standing three houses down, facing the other direction, playing with his pistol like he was a cowboy practicing for a showdown.

I had no chance.

But I didn’t have any bodies in my basement. I didn’t even have a basement, I lived in a trailer, for crying out loud. There was nothing in my house to hide—nothing that would make things worse, anyway. Sure, I would rather the media didn’t explore my lingerie drawer, and there was a carton of milk in my fridge that had just past its expiration date that I didn’t need the world to know I was still using. But if it would shut them up, fine. I opened the door and the reporters erupted.

“Go ahead,” I said, stepping aside.

They became silent and confusion riddled their faces.

“Go ahead. Search my house. I don’t care,” I said.

There was a hesitation, no one totally sure what to do. Even the veteran reporters in the crowd exchanged silent glances and pinched expressions. Then, as if they all shared one big, stupid brain, they raced towards me, up my steps, and into my home. The savages tore the place to shreds, turning every cushion upside down, flipping every rug over, pulling every appliance out from the wall as if my little trailer contained secret passageways. It didn’t, and that’s what they discovered.

They weren’t even interested in my lingerie. They threw my panties aside like they were packing peanuts in a box full of human organs. The frustrated and sad looks on their faces were priceless when they realized there were no organs, just panties and a few pairs of mismatched socks.

“The crawlspace!” one man yelled, and all the reporters rushed out the door and began crawling under the house. Still, they found nothing.

I sat on the bench in front of my house as they all regrouped on the front lawn. After another moment of confused hesitation, they started asking questions. Without hesitating, I answered every single one of them. None of their questions addressed anything new, and none of their questions were terribly interesting. Even they knew it, but they didn’t know what else to do. “Did Sergeant Sykes tell you whether or not they killed Lieutenant Meraux in the Congo?”

“He didn’t say, but I don’t think so.”

“Were they really ambushed and kept in a prison camp for four years?” another asked. “Or was that also a lie?”

“They really were in a prison camp. And it was more like four and a half years,” I said.

They asked question after question. Nothing phased me. Not even, “Aren’t you ashamed to suggest all of this about our troops? Are you not ashamed to call yourself an American?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “I love America,” I said. “I’m proud to be an American, and it makes me sad that there are hardly any Americans left in this country.”

The crowds erupted again. I couldn’t hear any one question over another as everybody fought for my attention. Finally, one question found my ears. “Do you love Hunter Sykes?” It found the ears of the other reporters too. They all became silent in anticipation of my response.

“Yes,” I said. “I love Hunter and I always have. And I’m sorry to all the people I’ve hurt pretending otherwise.”

The crowd took a moment to digest my answer before erupting once again into unintelligible hysteria. On the other end of the street, beyond the reporters, I could see Liam.

He had his hands in his pockets and his hood over his head. My words hit him hard. His body slouched, deflated as he turned and walked away. I wanted to chase after him and apologize, but it would have been impossible to cross the frenzied sea of media fast enough. Liam made some big mistakes, but he didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve this level of public humiliation.

As the days passed, I became worried the media would lose interest. I started to wonder if being so open was working against me, boring the media. I went out every day and answered all of their questions—hours and hours of questions, until they couldn’t think of anymore. “Um, was Sergeant Sykes a Kansas City Royals fan?” one reporter asked. I wondered, had I been more private, would the story have become bigger?

Then I woke up to a loud hysteria outside of my house, just ten days after the first wave of reporters landed in Nintipi. I peered out my blinds and thought I was still dreaming. The crowd had grown ten times in size. Every policeman in Nintipi was out on the street, trying desperately to tame the masses. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the morning sun before I could read the signs they were holding up.

Free Hunter

Love is stronger than war!

One of the signs had my face on it—not a photograph, but a painting. It wasn’t the most flattering painting, my eyes looked way too small, but there was no question it was me. Most surprising of all, there were no Hitler moustaches or devil horns on my face. Just the caption:

A True American Hero

My heart fluttered and my legs became weak. I had to sit down right there on the floor so I wouldn’t fall over and crack my head open. What was happening? Why had they suddenly changed their minds?

Hunter was still nowhere to be seen, and the military were still refusing to say anything more than, “Hunter is in a PTSD rehabilitation center. He was admitted under an alias to preserve his privacy.” It was a load of hooey, seeing as reporters were scouring every clinic in the country.

I pulled the morning newspaper out from my door’s mail slot.

I didn’t understand it. The night before, when I’d gone to bed, the newspaper read, “Could this e-mail that Kyla Rose sent in 2008 be proof that she made up the story about the Black Knight?” Six hours later, the same paper asked, “When will the military admit that the Black Knight craft is real?” What changed?

“We love you, Kyla!” someone outside yelled.

I went outside to face the crowds. The sudden cheering was deafening. Faces lit up as if they were seeing the Pope step out onto his Vatican balcony, and not Kyla Rose stepping out of her trailer in Nintipi, Kansas.

Once the cheering died down, the reporters piped up and it was business as usual—an indistinguishable mess of questions I’d already answered one hundred times over.

But there was one question that took me by surprise. “What are your thoughts on the transmission that was recently released by WikiLeaks about Corporal Cherovitz?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The reporter was quick to pull an article up on his cellphone. He handed it to me. Everyone waited and watched while I read the article. If it was true, Greg was dead.

My ears started ringing and I became faint. Someone noticed and helped me over to the bench beside my front door. I had to read the transmission a second time to convince myself it was real. It was given to the WikiLeaks website by an anonymous source who claimed to work with a man named General Chesney, the same name that was on the previous transcripts.