Chapter 5 - THE PATCH DID NOT MEAN WHAT JAKE THOUGHT IT MEANT
By afternoon, Jake had convinced himself the patch explained everything.
Sarah was some kind of elite evaluator.
He hadn’t recognized it.
Bad luck.
Wrong target.
He told Ethan exactly that while they waited outside the division office.
“We picked the one woman on base we couldn’t mess with.”
Noah was sitting ten feet away.
He looked up.
“That’s what you got from this?”
Jake glared.
“What?”
“You think the mistake was who she was.”
“The mistake was everything.”
“That’s not what you said.”
Ethan leaned against the wall.
“Who cares? We’re already screwed.”
Noah cared.
Because he had seen Jake behave similarly before.
Not this badly.
But enough.
Jake slapped trays away from weaker recruits.
Made jokes about accents.
Called one smaller recruit “princess” for three weeks.
Once locked a shower-room door while another recruit begged to get to formation.
Everyone treated it as stupid twenty-two-year-old behavior.
Noah included.
He had told Jake to grow up.
Then kept eating with him.
Now training leadership began asking about earlier incidents.
The first hidden truth emerged.
Jake had already received an informal counseling note six weeks earlier.
A recruit named Mason Reed reported that Jake repeatedly took his personal items and hid them.
Jake claimed it was harmless joking.
Mason withdrew the complaint after other recruits called him soft.
The written note remained.
Ethan’s name appeared as a witness.
So did Noah’s.
Noah stared at the copy when investigators showed him.
He remembered.
Of course he remembered.
He had told Mason:
Jake’s an idiot. Just ignore him and he’ll get bored.
Noah had believed he was helping.
Now he understood what he had actually done.
He had advised the person being targeted to become easier to target.
When Sarah learned about the old counseling note, she asked one question.
“What happened to Mason?”
Transferred to a different training section after failing an unrelated physical standard.
That fact prevented anyone from turning him into a convenient martyr.
Mason’s later failure did not make Jake’s behavior acceptable.
Both could be true.
Sarah asked whether Mason could be contacted for a statement if appropriate.
Leadership handled it.
Then Jake learned Sarah was not an admiral.
Not a hidden commander.
Not someone with the power to end his career by pointing.
She was a Chief assigned to an evaluation team.
Experienced.
Respected.
Influential only inside actual procedures.
That bothered Jake.
He had been telling himself he was unlucky enough to insult someone “too powerful.”
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The truth was worse.
A perfectly ordinary accountability system might be enough.
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