“Calm like a bomb.” By Rage Against the Machine, That’s the first song that popped in my head. I started to sing the song in my head to pass the time. I was kneeling behind a table in a darkened room at the Westin Plaza in downtown Atlanta on the 52nd floor. I didn’t want to be there, but this was a priority one for me. I had been following my wife, Simone, for the better part of 3 months now. I had an idea that she had a lover, but had a really hard time proving it. I’ll admit that our lives had become a bit dull after I had taken that security job for a company in Richmond, VA. I was working late trying to get operations overseas up and going. Sometimes, it would often involve travel to bad places. Simone was working for the Navy again as a civilian doing the same thing she did while on active duty.

Let me give you some background about myself so you have some frame of reference for the following story. I’m Mike Atkinson, retired Lieutenant Colonel for the US Army. I had a great childhood. I didn’t want for anything, but I learned that if I wanted something I had to work for it. My parents were killed when I was a sophomore at Auburn. A drunk driver decided that he wanted to try and evade the cops, so he drove into the oncoming lane and tried to dodge traffic. I was told that they died on impact and didn’t suffer. Thank the Almighty for small favors, I guess.

I started out like most every other Army officer. I did ROTC at Auburn University and graduated fourth in my class with a degree in chemical engineering. After my commissioning and all the other training, I had to take, I ended up as a Second Lieutenant stationed at Fort Lewis with the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. After I was promoted to Captain, I was re-assigned to Fort Bragg, 82nd Airborne. It wasn’t a bad duty assignment, but much too much politicking with the brass for me. I opted to go to Selection for CAG, or as everyone knows it from the Chuck Norris movie, Delta Force.

I ended up having to do Delta selection twice. The first time I got frostbite on both feet (Almost lost 3 toes). The second time I went, I made it. Needless to say, I was in hog heaven. Don’t ask me what kind of missions we did; I’m not going to tell you.

Fast-forward 2 years. I’d been promoted to the rank of Major and was now in charge of a Delta Platoon. We were on a 9-month rotation to “Asscrackistan” (as we not so jokingly called it), doing pretty much whatever “they” wanted us to do. “THEY” being mostly the intelligence people in Washington DC that thought they understood Afghanistan better than the people on the ground. THIS is where I met the wife.

Simone Nicolette Jordan. I first met her in Kandahar Afghanistan while she was on loan to “The Company”. She was doing counter-surveillance, intelligence assessments, and analysis and profiling of Taliban warlords. I was sitting in on a briefing because my Delta platoon was going to be a part of a joint British SAS/American operation to rescue some aid workers that had been taken captive by a Taliban warlord.

I honestly never believed it was possible, but it was love at first sight, for both of us. She’s about 5’7, 130, blond hair, hazel eyes, with a cross trainer’s build. DAMN sexy. You could tell she can run, but she could throw up some weights also. Every chance we got, through the briefing, we were smiling at each other. Talk about high school antics...

“Major Atkinson,” my commanding officer said to me acting annoyed. “I’m sorry, would like us to pause the briefing so you and Lieutenant Jordan can pass love notes really quick?”

“No need sir, I’ll just slide it into her locker after class is over.” I said. The whole room started to laugh. Lieutenant Simone Jordan was blushing as she smiled at me. Yep, I was hooked. Needless to say, I sat through the rest of the briefing with a very funny feeling in my lower abdominal region.

The mission went off without a problem, and we got all the hostages back, more or less, in one piece. One of the women was a bit too curious about what was going on and took a bullet to the shoulder. One of my team’s medics was able to easily patch her up and get her moving. She had what we call a through and through wound (The bullet went all the way through and didn’t lodge in the shoulder).

After the mission was over, I was sitting in on the de-briefing of the hostages. The man in charge of them was a British doctor from Doctors Without Borders. He said that they were giving medical care to anyone that needed it in that village, regardless of politics or religion. “We weren’t there to fight or spy, just help people.”, he said. Nice enough person, but he was a bit on the naïve side, to say the least. He said the Taliban warlord didn’t care what they were there for, that he and his people were enemies of Allah.

I heard the door open and who should walk through it? It was none other than LT Simone Jordan herself. She looked around the room and I watched her eyes light up like it was Christmas morning when she saw me. She wrote something down quickly, and then went right to work listening and asking questions.

After the debrief was concluded, I was walking back to our compound, and I heard someone behind me say, “Excuse me, Sir!”

I turned around and there was a Marine Gunnery Sergeant walking up to me. He fired off a crisp salute and then came to attention in front of me. “At Ease Marine, what can I do for you?” I said to him.

He handed me a folded piece of paper and said: “With LT Jordan’s compliments, sir.” Then he saluted, executed a perfect about-face, and walked back the way he came.

The note was quick and to the point. “Green Beans Coffee on the boardwalk, tomorrow morning, 1030.” Was all that it said. Looks like I had a date tomorrow morning. I won’t lie to you, I had a spring in my step the rest of the way back.

I was looking at the Stars and Stripes newspaper when I heard a “Morning, this seat taken?” I put the paper down and looked up. She was wearing a pair of jeans, a Pink Floyd T-shirt, and a pair of Merrill boots. Her hair was in a ponytail and looped through the back of a Penn State ball cap. There was that funny feeling in my lower abdominal region again.

“Hey, you better watch out, the flies around here might think you’ve got a pretty mouth.” She told me. Of course, I had an equally snappy comeback to hers, “My mouth isn’t pretty, it’s just lacking in manliness this morning.”

I went and got us some coffee and we talked for I have no idea how long. I had nothing to do today, so I was in no hurry for anything other than to see her. We talked about our lives and where we wanted to go after this.

I learned that she grew up in central Ohio, was a Naval Academy graduate, and her degree was in computer theory. She was an only child and had grown up with her single mother. Her mom sometimes worked 18 hours a day to make sure they had a roof over their heads. “Mom was at my commissioning, sitting in the second row with the senator that had endorsed me to attend the academy. I’d never seen her so proud of me before.” Simone told me. She started to tear up when she said that there was no one else in the audience but her mom when she walked across the stage. She passed away from breast cancer right after Simone reported to her first duty station. She said, “I put my diploma and the picture of us holding it together in with my mom so I could make sure she would always be proud of me.” I’m not afraid to admit it; I was tearing up a bit also.

She went on to tell me that she had finished her Master’s degree in Cyber Security from Penn State and was third in her class. I asked her if I needed to erase all my porn sites from my browser and she said, “Nah, it wouldn’t do you any good. I could recover them pretty quickly.” We both laughed.

I told her about growing up in North Georgia and running through the woods with my German Shepherds as a boy. She asked me why German Shepherds, so I told her, “My dad never got anything but Shepherds. He said that he wanted to know for sure that his family would be protected. He also thought that little ankle-biter dogs were good for making noise, getting stepped on, and that’s it.”

I also told her about my parents and the guy that hit them was doing life in prison and how I had found out that he had been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life due to pissing off the skinheads. I told her about my time in the Rangers and at Fort Bragg. “I always loved hanging out with my soldiers more than I did other officers. I was so pissed off when I was called to see my battalion commander. He told me that I had to stop spending so much time with my men and more time with my fellow officers.”

Simone asked me what I did about that. I told her that I showed up at the next Officers call, and stayed for 10 minutes. “I got a call from the First Sergeant telling me that he was initiating a company level call out and I’d need to be there for it.” She laughed and asked how that went over. “I was commended for training my men so well.” I told her.

Simone stopped talking for a minute and looked at me. She then asked why it felt so right when we looked at each other in the briefing two days ago. I looked at her and said, “It’s only natural to be attracted to a real man, and not the pussies you call men in the Navy.” She punched me in the arm and we laughed.

2 hours later she looked at her watch. “Shit, my Captain is going to kill me. I’ve got a conference call with Langley about last night in 15 minutes.” She said. I thanked her for a great time and told her I wanted to do this again. She told me she’d come to visit me at my compound this weekend.

Sunday morning, my guys and I were flown to a Forward Operating Base in the middle of the desert for some range time. It was the only spot where we could stay hidden from prying Afghan eyes. We brought all our primary and secondary weapons and basically wasted ammunition for about 5 hours.

After we finished, we caught a ride from a Chinook and were flown back to our camp. We were all sweaty and exhausted. I managed to get our support people to grab some steaks, potatoes, veggies and had the cooks work their magic for us. I walked into the kitchen area and asked OIC what time chow was. And then I made sure my guys all knew and finally went for a shower.

After I made sure that all my guys had eaten, I was sitting and enjoying a rather delicious steak and a freakin’ huge baked potato when Simone put a plate down across from me and sat down to eat. “We have to quit meeting like this or people are going to talk.” I said to her.

“Let them, I don’t think I could care much less than I do.” She said to me.

“You don’t have any briefings to attend do you?” I asked. She said that she was off for the next 2 days since she was ahead on all her work. I asked her why she worked so hard and all she said was “So I can spend as much time as I can with you.”

After we rotated home, we kept in contact and tried to see each other whenever we could. We met quite a bit over the next few years. I flew to her place in San Diego a few times, and she came to see me at Fort Bragg and in Washington DC when I was working at the Pentagon. I never really got into texting on a phone much ... until I met Simone. We must have sent a hundred texts back and forth daily.

She told me that there was this one time when she was in meeting with the Generals and Admirals that her phone went off. She was trying to shut it off when the Admiral running the briefing said, “Why don’t we take 10 minutes so LT Jordan can text her sweetie back.”

About a year into my job at the Pentagon, I and 4 co-workers up from Bragg, were working with some people from another 3-letter agency, training them on weapons and tactics. I watched as three black Tahoe’s pulled up at the shooting range we were at. She got out of the last vehicle in the convoy. She was wearing kitted out body armor with all the things she’d need if she was going into combat, carrying an M4 across her chest and a leg holster with a Glock in it. Of course, she had her Ohio State hat on as well. She’d cut some of her hair off and it fell just to the top of her shoulders.

“Lieutenant Jordan, how are you? It’s been awhile.” I said to her while smiling my best Cheshire cat grin. She grinned, made a note on a piece of paper, folded it up, and winked at me. As the day progressed, her boss, Captain Gregory Miller (who is a Seal Captain I know from earlier in my career), told me that he thought one of his people could outshoot me.

“Really? One of your Intel weenies wants to step up? Do they even know which end the bullet comes out?” I sarcastically asked him. He went over to his vehicle and pulled out a bottle of 12-year-old Highland Park scotch and sat it on the hood. Who am I to turn down a bottle of great Scotch?

I recognized a couple of people in Greg’s group. Both of them had been on the Teams before getting commissioned. I had figured that one of them would do it. Shock doesn’t begin to describe it when Simone walked over and started reloading her rifle and pistol magazines. When she was finished, Simone started taunting me, “Big bad soldier boy, you ready to get your dick handed to you by a sailor? You won’t be able to show your face at Bragg if you lose to a woman.” All I did was smile and chuckle as I put my gear on. As I was kitting up, the bets were starting. The general consensus was that I was going to wipe the floor with her. One of my partners that was down helping with the training walked up and told me that I wouldn’t have a problem with her.

“Billy, look at her body armor and kit and tell me what you see and don’t see.” I said to him. He looked for a couple of seconds and finally saw what I had noticed. Simone had set up her gear like someone that was going to fight would. Nothing un-necessary was on there and everything was positioned so that she could get to it as fast as she needed it. Everything was tied down and nothing was loose or constricting on her. Someone had taught Simone the fine art of tactical shooting.

I’d like to say that I ran circles around her that day, but I didn’t. She gave me a run for my money. Every weapon that we had out there, she excelled at. I beat her with the M4 rifle. She kicked my ass with the P90 submachine gun. We pretty much tied on the shotguns and Glocks. In the end, I let her win by a couple of shots. It cost me a bottle of Scotch, but it was worth it to watch her as she celebrated her win over the Army.

After we cleaned up, I asked Greg where she learned to shoot so well. He told me a story about Simone. He said she came to him after her first assignment was over and asked if he had any slots for Intel people. So, he gave her a chance to prove herself, and apparently, she did.

As she got better acquainted with the Teams, she made a couple of friends and asked if they could teach her some shooting skills. Long story short, they taught her almost everything they knew about every weapon system they had in their inventory. She even learned fighting skills from them. In the mornings when PT was going, you could find her working out with the same operators.

“We talked about why she was working so hard with the Teams. She told me that she wanted to be able to live inside the mind of a shooter and it was important to know what was going through their minds as they operated. But afterward, she bowed her head and told me that the real reason she did it was because at the first Marine Corps ball she ever attended, her date tried to rape her. After it was over she didn’t want to feel THAT powerless again.” My mouth was hanging open from his revelation.

“Mike, I know how you both feel about each other. She keeps a picture of you on her desk and even in the SCIF so you’re never too far away from her. Don’t tell her I told you this, but I made some discreet inquiries about that night, and apparently, the Marine in question has had more than one ‘incident’ like this. He’s in Leavenworth for rape and sexual assault.” Greg told me.

I shook his hand and thanked him for the information. I NEVER looked at Simone Nicolette Jordan the same way EVER again. She was a fighter and a warrior in the truest sense of the word. She brought herself back from nothing to where she is now and wanted no one’s pity.

The Navy was getting ready to leave when I heard her yell, “Major Atkinson, I almost forgot to give you this.” So I walked over and she gave me a piece of paper. All it said was “You’re SO getting laid tonight.” She winked at me as she rolled up her window and drove off.

I finally got back on operational status about 9 months later and was back at Fort Bragg. I had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and was in charge of a full Delta squadron. We had just finished a 2-month long mission to someplace hot and jungle-like, and I was mentally and physically exhausted. It had been hard on all of us.

I was sitting alone in my hot tub at my house in Anderson Creek NC. “Hey, how much room you got in that thing?” A feminine voice said to me. Startled, I turned around and there was Simone leaning on my fence. How does she manage to sneak up on me all the time? What she had on was so freakin hot. Daisy dukes, a tank top and some wedges. “Are you deaf or do I need to slap you to bring you back to Earth?” She asked me.

“Being the consummate gentleman that I am, I have to inform you that I’m not wearing anything. I wasn’t expecting any visitors today.” I told her. She opened the gate, stepped out of her shoes, and said, “Good, it’ll save time.”

She dropped her pack and walked to my hot tub while pulling her tank top off as she moved. Needless to say, she was perfect. No bra, she didn’t need it. Her breasts were probably a large B or small C. She was standing next to my hot tub while she slid her shorts teasingly down her legs and off; she wasn’t wearing anything under her shorts either. I guess my staring clued her in that I was a bit surprised at that. “I learned a while ago that you grunts were right, commando is the way to go.” She said.

When Simone went to climb in, the way she lifted her legs was almost predatory, slow, graceful, and without wasted movement. She came right over, straddled me, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me. As she was kissing me, she was moving her hips back and forth to rub her clit on my cock. After about 3 minutes of that, she used her legs to lift herself up and slid down all the way onto my cock. All I heard out of her at that moment was her mumbling “So good ... oh so good...”

The next morning, after an all-nighter, her stomach growling was what woke me up. She was spooning her back to my front and had her fingers interlocked with my right hand holding her breast. She turned her head over and looked at me sleepily smiling.

“Do you feed your stomach anything or does it starve all the time?” I asked her.

“I fed it 4 times last night as I recall.” She fired back.

“I’ll make breakfast and yell when the coffee is ready.” I told her.

“I’m in no hurry, I’ve got 10 days with you if you want me to stay.” She told me. Well duh, of course, I wanted her to stay and told her so.

“I do have to go into work for a bit this afternoon for a meeting about an upcoming operation, but I’m all yours after that.” and walked off into the kitchen to make omelets and bacon. She came out wearing a black string bikini bottom and a dress shirt of mine that was completely unbuttoned.

“What do you want for dinner? I’ll cook since you’re doing breakfast.” She volunteered. “I didn’t think you Intel people could cook anything other than microwave stuff, you’re all too busy hacking people’s webcams on their laptops.” I joked with her.

“I don’t have everyone’s laptop hacked, just yours.” She said. “By the way, I erased your browser history on Tuesday night after you finished looking at ‘big tits round assess’. You’re right, the redhead was pretty hot” I spun around with a look of shock on my face. How in the blue fuck did she know that? She looked over her shoulder with a Cheshire cat grin on her face as she walked out to her Jeep. Breakfast was interesting to say the least.

The Navy had assigned the newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Simone Jordan to Camp Lejeune as a Support Group Commander (She was in charge of all the paperwork going through for the Marine trainees to start basic training). Camp Lejeune is only an hour and a half from Fort Bragg, so she’d be with me on weekends and holidays. She was going to finish this assignment and then was planning on retiring. She said she was tired of moving from base to base, and wanted to be closer to me.

It wasn’t her first choice of a job to close out her career, but it was something to get her to 15 years so she could retire with her pension. Besides, she already had her resume out and had several companies interested in her particular skill set.

We got married about 8 months after she took command. We didn’t want a huge flower-covered wedding. Neither one of us had any living family so we flew to Vegas and did the Elvis Pressley wedding chapel thing. We spent 10 very awesome days in Vegas going to shows, seeing the sights, and even managing to win $2k off the poker and blackjack tables.

One afternoon, I called her from the base and told her, “I have to unload the jeep for the weekend we had planned”. That was the code we used for “I’m going off to do bad things to bad people.” She paused and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I heard her sniff and tell me to “I’ll lock the doors behind you.” That was HER code for “be safe and I love you”.

A month later, she got a visit from my CO. She told me that she saw who was at the door, she yelled the word NO, collapsed, and started sobbing. My boss told her that I was alive and stable, and when and where my flight was coming into Fort Bragg. She called her Commanding Officer and told him that I’d been wounded and when and where I was being flown into. All her CO said was, “Go, I’ll handle the paperwork and brief your Executive Officer.”

48 hours later, I finally arrived at Fort Bragg. Simone was standing on the ramp watching them take me off the Blackhawk helicopter that flew me in. I woke up and looked around, she was sitting in my room holding my hand looking very relieved. I had taken a sniper round to the front of my body armor and cracked 4 ribs; two of them had punctured my lung. My left arm and shoulder had been cut up by some asshole with a large knife that refused to die no matter how many times I’d shot him. “Is that all?” She asked me. “I bleed more than that when I have a papercut.” She put up a strong façade, but her hands were shaking a bit too much to fool me.

After I was back on limited duty and could take care of myself, Simone shredded her retirement packet and managed to finagle a job working for Langley again. Apparently, there was a man that no one knew for sure what his name was, but he was an information broker. All anyone knew was that he had virtually no electronic footprint (either that or his computer geeks were better than we thought.) and that he was German, Austrian, or Czech. Apparently, the man they were after was the same one that we were after the night I got shot up.

About a year after my “minor injuries” as she, even to this day, calls them, Simone was promoted to full Commander and was assigned to Spain as the Intel chief of her station. She looked at almost everything that came in from Europe. Simone spent many sleepless nights trying to find anything on “Fritz” as he was being called. When the CIA station chief asked if she was ever going to take a break and relax, she told him that no one hurts “her man” and gets away with it.

We both took a week of leave and I met her in Nice France. We got a room overlooking the beach on the French Riviera and had a good vacation. We met an American couple, Steve and Rochelle, at the casino we were at one night. Steve had been a Navy Master Chief and had retired after 30 years at sea. So, needless to say, Steve and Simone had a lot to talk about.

His wife was equally fun to talk to. She told us a story about the first time Steve came home from a float after marrying her. He walked into the house, threw his seabag on the washer. Then he grabbed a beer out of the fridge, went and sat in the recliner, and started to watch Hockey. Rochelle said she walked in, saw the mess he’d left, and yelled: “Get your LAZY ass off the fucking recliner, take your moldy crusty shit out of that stank-ass bag, put it in the fucking washer, and wash that shit NOW!” She said that he spewed beer all over the living room jumping up to go do what she told him to.

About an hour later, Simone walked over to the bar to order some more drinks. Apparently, there was a Nuevo riche Frenchman that thought he could love my wife better than I could and told her so. Being ever so polite, she told him that she was happy and to go away. He raised his voice a bit louder and Steve looked over at me. I smiled thinking about what was coming next. I looked at Steve and held my hand up. “Just relax, she can handle him.” I told him.

The Frenchman grabbed my wife’s arm ... BIG mistake. Simone grabbed him around the throat with her right hand, and jammed her thumb into the area right next to the jugular and pushed. The Frenchman dropped like a rock and was “escorted” out of the bar after he composed himself and stopped coughing. She asked the bartender if she could have our drinks brought to our table and he said no problem.

“See, I told you she could handle it.” I said to Steve.

Steve looked at her when she sat back in her own chair and said, “Hey Bruce Lee-Ann, who did you learn Dim Mak from?” She smiled at me and then replied, “I hang out with cool people.”

After 21 years in the Navy, Commander Simone Jordan retired. She dropped her paperwork about 2 years after our weekend in France. She said that it was time and she was tired of trying to keep up with “the next generation of nerds” as she called them. In truth, I think she was ready to call it a day. She’d been away from home for three years and missed being with me. Simone is a warrior, but she’s also a woman and had typical female emotions.

I retired another year after that and took a job near Richmond Virginia with a Government Contractor/Private Security company. My job description was actually oversight for the government contracts the company held. But there were times I was used to training assets for forward deployment. Simone went back to work for the Navy as a civilian, and after 9 months, was head of her section. She said that she loved the job, but it was even nicer now that she had people that could delegate the hard work to.

Simone is one of those people that has an incredibly analytical mind. She saw information like a puzzle and it was her job to put the pieces together. When we first got together, I used to joke that she was part microchip and could talk to computers. She’d then pretended to be upset, walk past the microwave and whisper, “Ok, go to plan B, he knows too much ... Ok, I will.” She’d turn around with a smile and say, “Love you honey.” then walk off.

Life was good after the military. Our first anniversary was, in reality, the honeymoon that we never had. We decided to go to Peru and see Machu Picchu and lots of other historical sites in South America. We took a detour to Southern California so we could catch the original line up of Guns N Roses in concert and spend a few days on the beach.

When we first moved into our new house in Virginia, I’d bought an oversized chair that we could both sit in. After we built the cover for the patio, I put the chair outside and we’d sit out in the backyard and just watch the fireflies. Simone and I would hold each other’s hands and not say a thing. It was one of those relationships that you never had to talk to the person because there was no need to. Both of us knew how the other felt. So, when I started to act strangely, I wasn’t sure what to think.

I ended up traveling a lot that the first year after I retired. I spent a month in Iraq. When that job was up and going I ended up being sent to South Africa for 6 weeks to oversee the new contract for security on all of their oil rigs. I wasn’t happy about spending so much time away from home, but I figured that we’d both be used to it since we did it for so long in the military.

I was sitting in my office one morning after I got back from 3 weeks in the Philippine’s when I got a text message from Simone. All it said was “I don’t think so, but I’ll give it a shot.” Puzzled I called her back and asked he what that meant. She said that she was sorry, and that was meant for one of her computer geeks. I blew it off at first. But then I remembered that she was an analyst and didn’t have any “computer geeks” working directly for her. They all worked directly for Naval Captain David Fung that oversaw that whole department.

So, one afternoon I ran over to the Base and was parked next to her Jeep when she came out of work. I got out and gave her a huge hug. I lifted her off the ground and swung her around a couple of times. She was laughing and telling me to put her down. She wanted to know what I was doing all the way down here. I told her that I’d made reservations at Byrd and Baldwin Brother’s Steak house and that I wanted to surprise her.