There were moments in life that defined the person you were.
Significant, priceless moments for which memories stood out in your mind.
The day my father died.
The day my mother smiled again.
The day I signed my life away to the Navy.
The day I signed my life back into the world.
Moments that make you up.
Memories that break you down.
Challenges that define your character.
I joined the Navy to preserve my father’s legacy.
I stayed in it because I found where I’d belonged.
I left because I had to –
But the skills I gained were engrained in my psyche, at my core.
So when something felt off, something was off.
In SoCal, the Santa Ana winds were caused by the high pressure in the Great Basin and the lower pressure off the coast. The wildfires that raged through the area typically occurred during Santa Ana wind events, when the offshore winds from the Northeast pass through the canyons to the mountains, dropping humidity levels and causing a rise in the temperatures.
These nuggets of data may not seem significant to most people, but to a former (yeah it still creates a fucking hole in my heart to say it) special ops guy like me, it’s extremely important.
Wind direction becomes paramount when you’re trying to protect a moving target.
As soon as I’d left Athena and her friends in the paintball field, the feeling in the pit of my stomach grew. She’d been wanting to have fun with her friend, Dyan, since it was her birthday, and I wasn’t about to get in the way of that.
She was more than allowed to proceed with what they had planned. Dyan had invited Liam and I, and Liam probably thought I was going to go negative, but I’d figured that Liam wanted to participate in the mock war game.
And it would give me a chance to closely watch Athena and ensure that she didn’t get hurt. Paintballs didn’t hurt until they socked you in an area of your body that wasn’t protected. Depending on the rate and distance of where you were hit, those pellets could hurt like a motherfucker.
“Boss, I got news for ya.” Tony’s voice cut through the line. Liam and I were in the northwest corner of the field, in an area that’s slightly elevated so we could keep a close eye on what was going on. Dyan had just been shot by her redheaded friend and she was making a commotion out of it. Commotion meaning she was pretending to kick her friend in the foot. Liam watched in amusement as he shook his head. For the life of my Sig Sauer, I’d never guess that Dyan had caught Liam’s eye, in a woman-I’d-like-to-sleep-with kind of way.
“Hit me,” I said into the phone. We would have been out there on the field with Athena right now, but I had to take this call from Tony – he’d texted ‘urgent’ just as I was parking my car.
“Dr. Bridges has been getting emails to his personal account,” Tony replied, the constant familiar buzzing around him was now a regular accompaniment to his calls. “At first I was like, dude, whatever – I couldn’t really tell if they were important or not. But I dug deep, super deep, as deep as the cavern in Minecraft, man those game architects are freakin’ good –”
“Tony…” Gaming made a genius lose focus.
“Alright alright. Sorry boss, I’m just saying… Anyways, I thought they were phishing scams, the first few emails, you know? But then I was bored one day and I grouped them, created a sample, used language patterns and boom – there was an anonymous proxy service used and I linked it to a few potential authors.”
“Plain language, Tony,” I commanded, checking out Athena’s location. She was still hidden in the old bunker, and from what I could see, her goggles were safely secured on her face. Good girl.
Liam kicked a rock with his shoe, appearing to be carefree yet I knew he was closely attuned to the phone call. He couldn’t hear Tony, but he could hear my reaction.
“Okay okay, too much pressure okay?” The guy needed to lay off those energy drinks. “I wasn’t snooping on Dr. Bridges’ emails, but when I came across a small bit of data that was eerily linked to his email, I had to check on it. It took me a few days and I think I finally hit the nail on the head. Our friends across the borders are not asking for money, which I figured you’d know by now. They have boatloads of Columbian pesos which when converted to US dollars could bankrupt the whole Colombian banking system.”
Of course I knew it wasn’t about the money, Felipe David had money that equaled the King of Dubai’s, so for an evil man like him, money wasn’t the driving force. “Got that.”
“They’re after Dr. Bridges’ formula.”
I knew that too.
“They want to use it to transport body organs on the black market.”
I had a hunch about that too.
“They want to use Dr. Bridges’ findings to broker a deal with Asia and Europe’s leading cosmetic providers.”
What the fuck? “What?”
“Maybe it’s for a woman, maybe his wife needs cosmetic manipulation. I don’t know. Usually it’s for a woman but the only woman that popped up in relation to Felipe is his daughter. Felipe’s got a daughter, boss.” I’d relayed the information to Tony as soon as I’d landed from Virginia to check the connections between Felipe David and what his interests were with Dr. Bridges.
“I know.” A familiar chill ran through my spine. One that had been honed by battle, the alarm starting low in my stomach, then slowly spreading through my system.
Where the fuck is Athena?
Liam must have sensed the shift in my tone, raising quizzical eyes at me. I pointed with my head.
Whereas a minute ago, we could see the top of her head from the bunker, now she was nowhere to be seen.
“Boss, you there?” Tony inquired, the low hum on his end negligent to the sound my hearing had picked on in response to the change in air vibration. It was hard to focus on the sound with my other ear glued to the phone, but years and years of being in still silence and deafening gunshots had my body on high alert.
The presence of smoke and dust, in addition to today being a warm day, I could have spotted him easily if I had a scope in my hand, but as I looked across the field, I saw the small, inconspicuous shadow parallel to the wind, the tree branch swaying when he took the shot.
Fuck.
“Eleven o’ clock, low. Tree branch,” I said swiftly to Liam before my legs shot out to the field. Liam would engage the shooter.
“Boss?” Tony’s voice was loud enough for me to hear, but now was not the time to talk.
With my hand pressing end on the phone, my eyes, trained to pick out the smallest oddity, was now zooming in on where Athena was hiding last.
One, two, three –
Another shot rang through the air.
Not the sounds of the paintball pellets which were obnoxious, multiplying by the second as Athena’s friends screamed in play.
No, this one was worse.
The sound cutting through the wind was coming off an air rifle, not designed to kill yet it could inflict damage.
Soft as a whisper.
Loud as the banging of the drums in my heart.
Ten steps.
Nine, eight, seven.
Six.
I saw her sitting, on the dusty ground, her legs close to her chest, crouched low, waiting to be seen.
Expecting the other team to show up any minute now.
I couldn’t tell if she was hit.
Or if she was, it hadn’t registered yet.
The nerve impulse can travel at a sluggish rate, and for men like me, we can dull it down and delay the feed for even longer.
Her hands lifted to her side, and as I broke the last two steps to be at her side, I glimpsed at a color that wasn’t anywhere on the field.
Her goggles prevented me from seeing her full expression, but I heard her tiny gasp when she realized what had just happened.
Years ago, I’d stopped hearing the buzzing in my ears when I hit a target or when my team was on the hunt for perps.
I’d become numb to the thunder of missiles.
The barrage of ammos.
The roar of enemy planes.
It’s what the job does to you.
In order to fight back, you dehumanize the fighters on the other side of the fence.
But her…
The gasp, the fear slowly creeping into those damned beautiful eyes, the vulnerability lying in those quivering lips…
I heard it.
I saw it.
I felt it when I applied my hands to put pressure to where she was hit.
The first shot was nowhere near her.
But the second shot served its purpose.
The rage burning inside of me was masked by concern, “You’re going to be okay.”
It wasn’t a statement.
It was a promise.
Felipe David’s hoodlums had marred her beautiful skin, grazed her purity, that even in my dreams, I’d tried to protect.
The genteel nod of her head as I slowly assessed the damage below her shoulder created a momentary distraction from the snowballing truth.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said again, as if saying it a dozen more times would make it happen.
There was no question that Liam had neutralized the threat. He was a soldier after all. One of the best.
Which was why I rest assured that I could move Athena to the car, without alarming the rest of her friends.
The last thing I’d want was for her to be at the center of the turmoil that her father had unknowingly embroiled her in.
“Get me away from here.” Her soft voice wasn’t pleading.
Rather she was adamant that we go. “I don’t want them to be a part of this, whatever this is.”
Her friends, the people she valued, were going to be involved one way or the other.
It was inevitable.
Blowback.
She stood up on her own two feet, but it was all I would allow her to do.
I lifted her off of her feet, cradled her legs between my right arm and held the top part of her body with my left.
She tucked her head between my neck and shoulder and I felt that buzzing again.
Between my ears.
The sound reaching the hole deep within my chest.
I’d stopped feeling pain.
It was easy when you’d detached, desensitized yourself from it.
But as I watched the cloth that I’d torn from the bottom of my shirt, a tourniquet to keep her flesh wound from bleeding, slowly become tinged with red, my neurons started firing. Instantaneously at a million miles a second.
I sent a quick text to Liam to let him know that we were leaving.
He’d know what to tell the others.
“Thank you.” Her voice so small, her message sending shockwaves to my system.
I’d situated her in the front seat and before I started the car to drive, I let my right hand drift to her face.
I ignored my battle-ready signals today.
She could have been hurt. Much worse than what she had been.
I’d missed obvious signals because I’d allowed my emotions to cloud my objectives.
It won’t happen again.
I was here to protect her.
My hand disengaged from her face and I put the car in reverse.
“I’m not scared, Webb.” The calmness in her voice stilled me. “I’m not scared of them. I know I’m safe with you.”
I took a breath, “I failed today.”
“How?” Her eyes challenged me, “Because I got grazed by a pellet?”
“Because you got hit.”
“Am I alive?”
“Not the point,” I replied, barely controlling the edge in my voice.
“Am I breathing?” She refused to cower.
“You got hit.” I stated, my hands firmly locked on the steering wheel.
“But I’m okay.” The resolve in her voice was unflinching. “I’m here talking to you, slightly scratched, but I’m okay. It’s going to take a lot for me to be scared. Now I know that my dad has some bad people as enemies, I know that I have to be extra careful. If their goal was to scare me, then they’ve failed.”
“I fucking failed you, Athena.” The pot was now boiling over, the slow simmer now at a record-level heat. “I’m supposed to protect you. I’m supposed to keep you from getting harmed. To make sure that your goddamned skin is intact and not a hair in your head is out of place. That’s my job.”
The quiet whirring of the car’s engine failed to break the silence that ensued.
“Look at me, Webb.”
I said a lot but for her, it wasn’t enough.
I turned my face towards her, noting the way her eyes gleamed in dissent, a contrast to the softness that was abundant in her face. Her hair was slightly disheveled from when I’d held her in my hands.
“You think I’m this paper thin doll.”
I opened my mouth to object, but she lifted her pointer finger up in the air –
“I’m not. I’ve had tubes coming out of every orifice of my body to keep me alive. You know it’s true – I know you’ve seen my files.”
I had. Protocol.
“I had ten surgeries before I could even write in cursive. I’ve been the subject of years and years of medical research. My blood test results have been highlighted in medical journals. I’ve seen the walls of hospital rooms for more years than you had been in the warzone… I don’t know how long you were in the war… What I want to say and get through to you is that I’m not scared.”
She reached for my right hand and strategically placed it on her left wrist, where I could feel her pulse.
“My dad always told me, you could tell when a person’s scared with how fast their heart beats. Feel my heart, Webb.”
With my fingers, I could feel it – the rhythm of her heart.
Not erratic.
Not fast.
Strong.
Steady.
“I won’t fail you again,” I said, my fingers still feeling the flow of blood in her veins, the life beating inside her.
“You haven’t and you won’t. Failure is when I’m no longer here.” Her words were far from the voice of youth. They were the sounds of a woman who had been through a lifetime of pain yet managed to survive and actually live.
There were moments, shards of time that defined a person.
I allowed myself to gaze into her face, one more time, while I felt the warmth of her hands, the satisfying assurance that she was indeed here, breathing, living, sitting with me in the parking lot with the view of abandoned bunkers.
She wasn’t defined by moments.
Athena’s whole being was delineated by a lifetime of experiences.
She might be young, but her age belied the true steel that lined her spine.
At close view, you looked at her and you’d think she’d break, that the fragility in her eyes spread through her every pore.
But you couldn’t have been more wrong.
She was a survivor.
A woman who had defied the odds.
A woman who had kept all the good and banished all the pain from ruling her entirety.
She was beautiful.
Riveting.
And so alive.