The Blue Ranger
by Paul Adams
Chapter Two:
Tammy’s Recommendation
Several months earlier, Tammy Hayes sat on a bus as it drove through a mountainous wasteland on her way to her new assignment.
“Yes, sir,” she said into a cell phone at her chin as she put together her clipboard. “Yes, sir, I’ll send any recommendations I find directly to you. I hope the suits turn out alright on your end. Thank you, sir. I think we’re about . . . fifteen minutes out. I’d better go. Tell James and Anthony I said hi.”
She hung up the phone and leaned her head back against the seat, looking out the dusty window as a large domed wall appeared on the horizon, surrounding a city tucked in between the mountains and the coast. The bus made its way toward a small collection of buildings on the city’s outskirts. There it was. Where she’d be working for the next year or so.
The bus pulled up to a security gate before passing through and driving up to a large brownstone building in the center of the base. Tammy gathered up her belongings and stepped off the bus. Heavy wind whipped at her hair and clothes the second she stepped off. She covered her eyes to see a large man in general’s regalia and shades waiting to meet her.
“General Truman, I assume?” she asked, shouting over the wind.
“Agent Hayes,” he said, stepping forward. “Welcome to Corinth.” He held out a large hand in greeting. Tammy had to step back to take in the man that towered over her small-ish frame. She squared her shoulders and tried hard not to look intimidated. She shook his hand, the man’s grip firm and crushing. Tammy winced a bit.
“Shall we head inside?” he asked, gesturing to the door behind him.
“Yes, please,” Tammy said. She held her clipboard tight to her chest as she followed him inside.
Once inside, and after going through all the routine security checks, General Truman led her down a long corridor lit by fluorescent lighting. EAGLE operatives, both military and not, passed them by, all going about their business and paying them no mind. After about five minutes, General Truman stopped outside a barracks door on the far end of the compound.
“Right through here is our squad,” he said, opening the door onto a room full of soldiers lounging around on their cots, reading books, and tossing around a small football between them.
“Attention!” General Truman shouted.
At the sound of his voice, every soldier in the room immediately dropped what they were doing and jumped to their feet, lining up before the general.
“This is Agent Hayes,” he said, speaking loudly to the crowd of soldiers once they were all in place. “She will be one of my aides from here on out. I expect you to give her the same respect you would show me.”
The troops saluted. “Yes, sir.”
Tammy looked down self-consciously, feeling all their eyes on her. She pulled at her hair and cleared her throat, trying her best to maintain her composure.
“Sergeant Ban!” General Truman shouted.
A young officer with dark hair and green eyes stepped forward. “Yes, sir?”
“This is Sergeant David Ban,” the general told Tammy. “He handles all the files for the division. If you have any questions about anything, you can direct them to him.”
Tammy smiled and shook the young soldier’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Sergeant Ban,” she said. She hefted her notepad and took down a quick note on that information.
Sergeant Ban peered over her shoulder at the note and raised an eyebrow. “Um, nice to meet you too?” he said.
General Truman cleared his throat. “At ease,” he shouted. Immediately, the troops dropped their stiff posture and went back to what they were doing. “Right this way, Miss Hayes,” the general said.
He led her out of the barracks and down the hall, to an office clearly marked with his name. He opened the door and let her inside.
“Now,” he said, sitting down in his high-backed chair and facing Tammy as she took the opposite seat. “I received the message from command about your arrival, but they weren’t very clear on what you’ll actually be doing here. What’s this mission all about?”
Tammy sat up straighter, still feeling a bit intimidated by the man’s steely gaze as he took off his shades. “Well, you see, sir,” she began, her memorized spiel running through her head, “I am a representative of a secret project commissioned by EAGLE called the Ranger Program. We are currently in the process of constructing a series of specialized super-soldier armors for use against the Black Cross. I and a number of other recruiters have been sent out to every EAGLE base in search of potential candidates for the program. You’ll find all the information you need in this file.”
She pulled a large file from her bag and handed it to him. The general took it and flipped through it with ever-increasing skepticism. “I take it you haven’t heard of the program?” Tammy said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” the general said, shaking his head. “I’d heard rumors. Tall tales. Locker room talk. But I didn’t take them very seriously. What’s this about recruits?” He turned to her and raised an eyebrow.
“Well, you see, sir,” Tammy said. “We’re looking for soldiers with both the physical capacity to handle the requirements of the job but who are also examples of outstanding moral character, soldiers we can trust not to abuse the suits’ power. At the moment, we are only looking for five candidates for the program in total, so chances are I probably won’t even find one here myself.”
General Truman kept flipping through the file, looking less than enthused about the idea. He grumbled to himself and handed the file back to her.
“I don’t suppose it matters one way or another if I agree to your being here or not,” he said. “Being from command and all.”
“I’m afraid not,” Tammy said, looking down.
The general looked at the ceiling and shook his head. “Well, as I said before, you have free access to all of our files and whatever else you’ll need. Just don’t get in my way and we’ll get along just fine.”
“Understood, sir,” Tammy said.
“Dismissed,” he said. He pulled out a small piece of paper from his desk. “You’ll find your personal quarters here. Do you need any help getting set up?”
“Nope,” Tammy said, hefting her suitcase and bag. “I travel light.”
Over the next few days, Tammy got settled in, setting up her quarters and accompanying General Truman and his soldiers in their daily routines, learning all of their names and starting to take notes on each one. The general didn’t bother her, but she could tell he didn’t much care for her presence. She mostly stayed out of the way, glued to her clipboard as she took down her notes. She also made a point to make herself familiar with Sergeant Ban, visiting his office on her second day in order to take a look at all the squad’s files.
“Here they all are,” Ban said, pulling out stacks and stacks of files from the giant filing cabinet that took up most of the space and placing them on a cart before her. He looked up at her with a perplexed expression. “What do you need all this for anyway?”
“Oh, no reason,” Tammy said, putting on her patented innocent smile. “Just classified EAGLE stuff.”
“Uh huh,” he said, pulling out another batch of files. “If you say so.”
He set the stack on the cart and pulled open a file. “You’ll find each one’s name, rank, and serial number at the top, with most of their background information starting on page two. I’ve taken lots of notes on other important details in the margins, so those will probably be pretty helpful too.”
He held it out to show her. Tammy took the file and flipped through it. Ban’s notes weren’t nearly as detailed as her own tended to be, but she could tell already this would be very helpful. Ban was clearly the guy who knew stuff around this place. She’d have to pick his brain at some point. But first, she next wanted to meet them all individually, put a face to their names.
She started her interviews on her third day, approaching them one by one in alphabetical order during their daily workout in the gym.
“Can I pull you aside for a minute?” she would ask each one, starting with Private Aarons and moving on down the list.
“Of course, Miss Hayes,” the recruit would say, showing her the utmost respect.
At first, the recruits were open to her questions and answered them easily and honestly.
“First of all, let’s state your name,” she said.
“Daniel Aarons.”
“Gustavo Hernandez.”
“Sarah Stein.”
“Katherine Hillard.”
“Scott Truman.”
And so on.
“Where are you from?”
“Mariner Bay.”
“Berlin, Germany.”
“Silver City.”
“Tokyo.”
“Right here in Corinth.”
Tammy took detailed notes for each response, both what they said and how they said it. She found a rich diversity of backgrounds among the squad, most being assigned from all over the world.
After the basic questions, she started getting into her more personal questions, questions designed to gauge their character more than their basic information.
“Why did you join up with EAGLE?”
“What do you do for fun?”
“Do you like fighting?”
“What would you like to do after your service here?”
“When that first Black Cross bombing took place, the one in Angel Grove, what was your reaction? What were you doing at the time?”
As Tammy had come to expect whenever she started this line of questioning, the soldiers started acting more and more uncomfortable talking to her, clamming up and only giving her one word answers, trying to finish up the interview as fast as possible. Tammy noticed this but kept going. She took down her notes with a much larger focus on how they responded to each answer and which ones made them the most uncomfortable.
Halfway through the day, Tammy was almost done. She was heading into the S’s now. Her hands were shaking slightly and her anxiety was going crazy from all the uncomfortable looks she was getting now. Just keep going, Tammy, she told herself. It’ll all be over soon.
She came to the next person on her list. “Is it . . . Aquila . . . Shumway?”
A tall, lanky soldier with shoulder-length blonde hair and a cowboy hat sat up and smiled at her, his bright blue eyes piercing through her. Tammy shifted awkwardly. “That it is, Ma’am,” he said softly. “How can I help you?”
Tammy stared at his name, trying to avoid meeting his gaze directly. “Is . . . is your name literally ‘Eagle’?”
Aquila tipped his hat, looking a bit embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am, it is. My parents were a bit eccentric.”
Tammy cleared her throat and shook her head. “Do you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
For just a moment, Aquila looked a little wary, but he smiled and agreed. Tammy sat down across from him and got started. “I guess we already know your name,” she said. “Where are you from?”
“A small farm in Northern Texas,” he said. “Just north of Amber Beach.”
Tammy kept going, getting into the questions she hated, expecting him to shut down too. No matter what questions she asked however, he answered them calmly and smoothly, only hesitating for a second on the tougher ones, his eyes shifting for just a moment. He proved to be one of the easiest interviews she had that day. “Do you mind if I watch you work for a few minutes?” she asked once the interview was done.
“I don’t see why not,” Aquila shrugged. He laid back down on the bench and went back to his weights. Tammy stood off to the side and watched him for a while.
A few nights later, Tammy sat alone in the mess hall, away from the rest. Pizza had been brought in for the squad, and most of the soldiers were living it up and having a good time. None of them really wanted to sit by her, after the poor impression she had made a few days before. She didn’t really mind though. Or at least, she told herself she didn’t. It allowed her to work without being bothered.
“May I sit here?”
Tammy looked up in surprise to see Aquila standing before her with a plate of pizza, fixing her with his gentle smile and blue eyes. Tammy’s face went red, looking away and swallowing. “Sure,” she said, trying to be polite. She pulled her papers back and offered him the opposite seat.
Aquila set his tray down and sat across from her. “You looked a bit lonely,” he said. “I thought you might like some company.”
Tammy looked around self-consciously, glancing at the partying soldiers nearby. “It’s fine,” she said. “I prefer being alone most of the time.”
She flipped through her notes, writing a few more things down. Aquila watched her, taking a bite out of a slice of supreme.
“What’s all this for?” he asked, looking over her notes. “This stuff you’ve been doing?”
Tammy put on her innocent smile again. “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just classified command stuff. Can’t really talk about it, you know.”
Aquila nodded, squinting at a page. “Should you have it all out in the open like this, then?”
Tammy was about to say “It’s fine,” but paused, considering for a moment. She normally didn’t have to worry much about it, since no one sat with her most of the time. She gathered up her papers and put them away in her bag. “So anyway,” she said, picking up her cold pizza she’d been ignoring a bit too long and taking a bite. “What have you been up to?”
Tammy started paying a little extra attention to Private Shumway after that. As her assignment went on, he consistently checked off qualities she was looking for in a potential Ranger candidate. First of all, he was strong. Possibly one of the strongest in the squad, regularly lifting weights ten pounds above what the others were pulling. While watching him, Tammy suspected he could lift even more if he wanted to.
He had a ton of stamina, as far as Tammy could see. Each and every day, he worked as long and hard as everyone else in the squad, but even though all the rest were panting and drenched in sweat by midday, Tammy was fairly certain she had never even seen a bead of sweat on him. He also seemed as rested and ready to go as he had been at the start of the day.
And then there was his personality. Aquila was very quiet and reserved, keeping his head down and sticking to the back of the group most of the time, avoiding attention as much as possible. When he did speak, he was always soft-spoken and kind, never bullying or quick to anger as some of his fellow soldiers tended to be, but always helping out and looking out for anyone who might have been having a hard time, as he had done for Tammy when she was sitting alone.
As the months passed, Tammy became more and more convinced of Aquila’s qualifications. Tammy would eat her lunch with him most days and listened to him strum his guitar on his time off. That was another thing he was good at. Most nights, before lights out, most of the troops would gather around to listen to him strum haunting melodies, wistful ballads, and silly folk songs, whatever struck his mood at the time.
After about three months of taking diligent notes and determining he was the one she wanted to recommend, she stopped by Ban’s office and requested every file he had on Aquila Shumway.
“Shumway, huh?” he said, going to his file cabinet and raising an eyebrow at her. He, like most of the squad, had started to take notice of the extra attention Tammy had been giving him.
Tammy blushed a bit and averted her eyes. “Just give me the file,” she said.
Ban snickered and handed her the file.
She left the room, holding the file open and looking through it. She passed the barracks and peeked in to see Aquila strumming his guitar, talking and joking around with a soldier who, if Tammy remembered right, had received bad news from home about his dog that morning. Now though, it looked like the soldier was smiling a bit more, and it seemed that Aquila had taken a moment to help cheer him up. The soldier was holding what looked like a small picture of the dog and was telling Aquila a story about when they used to play.
Tammy smiled and quickly passed by the barracks door so they wouldn’t notice her. That night, Tammy worked until well-past two a.m., her desk strewn with papers, both from her own notes and from files obtained from Ban’s office. She sipped from a large mug of coffee and pored over the sheets, scanning through all of her notes and cross-referencing them with information in Aquila’s files. Aquila’s picture lay on one corner of the desk, and Tammy smiled over at it every now and then.
She pulled a clean piece of paper from her desk, laying it out before her, and translating her scatterbrained scribbles from her pages of notes into a clean bulleted list, without all the duplicate or inconsequential information filling it up.
A knock on the door made her jump and spill her coffee all over the page. “Who is it?” she said.
The door opened, and Ban came in with a whole new cart of files. “Here’s that stuff you requested,” he said, looking disheveled and a little annoyed that he had had to get up this late at night. He looked over all the files on her desk while Tammy crumpled up her ruined paper and pulled out a new one. “You’re sure you’re not a stalker, Hayes?” he asked.
“Nope,” Tammy said, looking over one of the files he brought. “Just doing my job.” She gave him her innocent smile again. “Thank you, Ban. Have a good night.”
Ban grumbled and left the room.
Tammy went back to work, looking through the new files and fact-checking the information from Aquila’s file to make sure all the information added up. So far everything looked pretty good. She popped open her desk drawer to reveal a stack of recommendation forms provided to her by General Kenpachi. She pulled one off the top and started filling in the blank fields, starting with his name, rank, and serial number and moving on to his background, his qualifications, and his qualities, giving as satisfactory an answer to each as she could muster.
Once it was filled out entirely, she stapled it to copies she had made of several important documents from his file and stuck them all together in a folder. She rolled over to her laptop and started typing out a letter of recommendation to General Kenpachi. Once satisfied with the letter, she printed it off, read it through one more time, and slipped it into the folder with the rest before stuffing it all in an envelope and finally going to bed.
The next morning, Tammy shuffled wearily to the base’s post office, carrying her sizable package under her arm. She barely noticed when she walked right into Sergeant Ban.
“Oops, sorry, Hayes,” he said.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, yawning and rubbing her eyes.
Ban looked down at the package in her arms. “Sending something out?”
Tammy managed her smile again. “Yep,” she said. “Just finished.” She nudged past him a bit and handed it to the postmaster at the desk. “Can you see that that gets to General Edgar Kenpachi at Silver City base.”
“Sure thing, Miss Hayes,” the postmaster said, taking the package. “Just fill this out and you’ll be good to go.”
Tammy filled out the information she’d been given, feeling Sergeant Ban’s eyes watching her as she did so. She finished up, handed the sheet back, and turned to smile at Ban. “See you at breakfast,” she said. “I’ll get those files I borrowed back to you ASAP.”
Ban opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, Tammy spotted Aquila coming around the corner and hurried off to join him.
“Hey! Headed to breakfast?”
Aquila smiled at her. “Breakfast was a couple of hours ago, Miss Hayes,” he said. “Where have you been?”
