Shielding Instinct, page 10
Chapter Thirteen
Hawkeye
Hawkeye stood on a rough boulder, his gaze tracking down the footpath to the sea.
Men and dogs lay in the sand, relaxing under the bright Caribbean sun.
It was a gorgeous scene right out of a travel brochure, with bright crystalline waters touching a line of turquoise to the sweep of cloudless azure at the horizon.
A white pleasure cruiser bobbed in the distance. A streamer of red flags, standing out in bright contrast to the blues, flapped sharply in the wind.
Hawkeye was walking on air. He felt amazing.
He wanted to remember every moment of this, he thought as he reveled in the warmth of the sun, smelling the salty air.
Today was an excellent day.
He was in the good company of his new band of brothers here in St. Croix, doing his job of teaching Cooper to surf.
It was fascinating to him that this was the way he earned his paycheck.
And most of all, this morning, Petra’s medical mystery seemed to have an explanation. She was seemingly okay and had been okay the whole time.
Petra was better than okay; she was astonishing.
How did he get so lucky as to be sitting next to her on the plane?
Hawkeye wasn’t the only one who thought that. Cooper—who was aloof with strangers—had all but crawled onto her lap.
With Petra, there was none of the warm-up time Cooper needed with all the women Hawkeye had dated in the past. No, “He’ll come around after he gets used to you,” explanation when Cooper would show indifference to their high-pitched baby talk.
Yeah, Cooper’s reaction to Petra from the get-go was telling, wasn’t it? An entire plane filled with the passenger’s explosive reactions and tumult. Cooper wasn’t focused on any of it. His muscles were loose, his attention sleepy. In dog behavior, that meant Cooper felt like things were under control. And the only reason he would think that was Petra.
That Cooper treated her with such relaxed acceptance was unprecedented—that was how Cooper reacted among people he considered part of his pack.
Hawkeye tipped his chin back and filled his lungs with fresh sea air, thinking, “This is amazing. It’s a miracle of a day.”
With a whoop of joy, Hawkeye bolted down the hill over the sandy berm and surface dove into the sea.
The water was luxuriantly warm and shockingly clear.
He took a few strokes out until he could stand chest-deep in the waves, feeling the buoyancy of the salinity as he bobbed with the tide flow.
The strength of the current brushed sand over his feet and dragged his board shorts against his thighs as the water sloshed past him.
Squinting against the sting of sea salt. Hawkeye shook his black hair like a dog to shed the excess water before scanning the beach.
To the side was a cart that held five neatly stacked surfboards, painted in the vibrant colors of island flowers. Sitting against the side in the shade of the equipment was an islander who looked perfectly at ease watching the waves roll in.
Hawkeye found Reaper sitting on the rock outcropping near where the waves broke in a plume of frothy white. Cooper lay on the sand at his feet.
Big old bear that he was, Cooper’s coat was caramel with black tips. It was ideal for camouflage. On the dark rocks, he was all but invisible.
Cooper found Hawkeye first; the sudden pink of a tongue helped Hawkeye home in.
Standing and stretching, Cooper meandered to the water’s edge in front of Hawkeye, his tail wagging with slow contentment.
It seemed to be a good day all around.
“Glad you’re here,” Reaper said as Hawkeye waded onto the shoreline. “Everything go okay this morning for Petra?”
“The doctor said go on about life with sunglasses on. Go back if she wasn’t a hundred percent before she gets back on a plane.”
“I guess that’s the best one could hope for. Glad to hear it.” Reaper turned to the team. “Rest time’s over. I want to get the dogs on the boards and be out of here before low tide makes things tricky.” He lifted the plastic phone holder to read the time.
Every Iniquus operator was contractually obligated to keep their phone within arm’s reach at all times.
If they were in a body of water—from pool to lake, from ocean to sea—the phone went with them.
Even in the absence of connectivity, they still had the use of apps and, to a limited extent, satellite. They still had beacons to help Iniquus find them and bring them home.
Reaper lifted a hand to the guy at the surf cart. “T.J., we’re ready for you now.”
“This is fantastic,” TJ called out. ‘I’ve never seen a dog use one of our surfboards before.” The guy couldn’t have been more than a teenager. His long limbs were smooth and thin.
As TJ approached with a board, Hawkeye said, “This tide is a lot stronger than I thought it would be.”
“Christmas Winds. They ease up around mid-January.” T.J. held the boards upright and stared past it. “This is stronger today than normal, I think.” He grinned as he handed the board over to Hawkeye. “But it makes for good waves.”
Hawkeye turned his attention to Halo, reaching a fist out for a return bump. “How’d Cooper do this morning?”
“Ash ran right into the waves like you did just now, whooping it up. Hoover raced in after him like it was nothing at all. The dogs watched for a half-second to make sure all was good, then they got up to some good shenanigans for about an hour. They all had some fresh water, a bit of a laydown, and here you are. Perfect timing. Petra’s good?”
“Running theory that she touched her motion sickness patch, then rubbed her eye.”
“Wait.” Ash came over. “Say what now?”
“Petra was wearing a motion sickness patch on the plane yesterday. We think she touched it in her sleep, then rubbed her eye. On contact, the medication can blow out a pupil like that. No way to prove that right or wrong. But nothing else is making any sense to the people who should know.”
“Where is she now?” Levi asked.
“She was signed up for a tour that took her to the tidepool. She said she felt fine. Last night, the doctor didn’t put any restrictions or offer any cautions. This morning, the ophthalmologist asked her to keep sunglasses on today. Other than that, everyone’s kind of thrown up their hands.”
“How’s she taking all this in? I mean—thinking back on the scene—the consensus was, ‘child, you’re about to die.’” Reaper said.
“She’s FBI. I think she’s already put it in her rearview.” Hawkeye smoothed a hand over the citrus orange and lemon surfboard TJ had brought him. It had been a long time since he’d been surfing. It was hard to find a good wave on the East Coast.
“All right, listen up,” Reaper said, and the men formed a semi-circle around him. “From training in the Cerberus pool, the dogs already know how to get on and off the boards in deep water. They’ve practiced holding steady on the board’s surface on waving water. This experience in the sea is still going to be new for them. Tiny advances. We’re building confidence through success. If you push your dog, you’re going to develop anxiety, and we cannot have a Cerberus K9 who is anxious around water. It comes into play too often on our missions. You know your dog. If things feel tight. Stop. Go grab a ball and do some fetch in the water to get them happy again.”
Hawkeye cast his gaze around until he found a towel with a neat pile of hot pink tennis balls and the atlatls they used to toss the ball further.
Reaper flicked a finger toward the water. “Ash how about you go ahead out with Hoover and the board and do a little surfing. Lots of high-pitched praise for Hoover. Though he doesn’t need it, we want the other dogs to see what Hoover is doing and that it comes with a prize.”
Ash tucked his board under his arm and ran down to the surf with a whistle for Hoover.
“Ash is going to put Hoover on in knee-deep water. I don’t want the water coming over your dog’s chest. See how Ash presses the back of the board down in the water? That keeps it from nosing out in a wave.”
“Hey!” Ash called. “Currents picking up.”
“We still good?” Reaper called back.
Ash glanced toward the horizon, then slid his gaze from left to right. “Yeah. The waves might get a little higher than they’ve been today. But right now, it’s manageable.”
Hoover scrambled onto the board and Ash started pushing out past the break.
“Hoover got on himself,” Reaper said. “I want you to lift your dog on. They need the experience of being hoisted out of the surf so they don’t scramble and can relax their bodies. Lift them onto the back in that sweet spot we practiced back at Headquarters.”
Cooper was a natural.
He lounged on the back of the board as Hawkeye pushed him out.
It was surprisingly easy.
Ash wrangled himself up on the board with Hoover and was looking around. He cupped his hands around his mouth so the wind wouldn’t snatch his words. “We’re not supposed to have low tide for another couple of hours. This is wrong. Something’s wrong.” He scooped his hand over his head in a motion that would send the team back. “Get back to the shore. Go back!”
And with his last word, screams rode the wind, coming from around the other side of the craggy ridge of stones.
The men stilled, assessing if those were shrieks of glee or danger.
The next scream was unmistakable terror.
Then shouts, very distinct yelling, “Help! Oh my God, Help!”
Reaper stood on the shoreline. His fingers at the corners of his lips, Reaper sent up the shrill whistle that superseded any other command. It told the dogs, “To me!”
The K9s were instantly off their boards and in the water, paddling for shore. The men watched until the dogs made it past the break, and Reaper grabbed their collars and hauled them in. “Go! Go! I’ve got them. Go!”
With Cooper safe, Hawkeye flattened on his board, spinning himself around to point toward the open sea. With his brothers moving up fast to join him, Hawkeye cupped his hands and dug into the water, pulling hard to propel himself forward.
Another scream went up. And Hawkeye could hear his heartbeat pounding over the roar of waves.
With adrenaline-fueled power, Hawkeye was driving hard to get around the rocky stack.
He had no idea what would meet him on the other side.
Chapter Fourteen
Petra
Petra wasn’t wearing the right shoes for this trek.
The website said there would be an adventurous trip through jungle-like St. Croix to the tidepool. Once there, it was a short walk to the pools.
Short walk, not a mountain climbing adventure.
There was another way out, which the website described as a short hike.
But Tamika was gung-ho on the adventure part. And she preferred her adventures while sitting down. She couldn’t see a reason to hike all that way for a tidepool. “Ride through jungle-like St. Croix. Now that’s going to be a memorable experience.”
And she was right. It was an experience. And Petra would remember it.
Her driver, Lucky, was a hoot and a half. Just a naturally easy-going, wry-kind-of-funny guy.
He was also an ace mechanic who got that engine humming again when everything cut off, which it did every time his tire slid into a rut. And his tire went into a rut every few minutes.
But he was having a good time of it.
And his happy-go-luckiness (the reason for his name?) was contagious.
Petra needed to cut off any Herb conversation and pretend he wasn’t even in the vehicle with her.
Something about Herb made Petra think of a man with a crowbar, who was looking for a crack to wedge into to pry a bigger opening.
Petra didn’t want to give him a sliver of space.
She regretted every word she said to the man.
Happily, though, as soon as Lucky parked their vehicle, Herb was darting toward the trail to get ahead of his family as they arrived and parked behind Lucky’s piece of shit vehicle.
With a bag slung over her shoulder and the kids in a hand-holding row, Petra followed the Johnson family, and the group moved out of the trees.
The trail was non-existent.
The way to get from dirt road to tidepool was to mountain goat it over the side of a cliff wall.
Normally, this would be easy enough. The wall was craggy, with plenty of handholds and footrests. But Petra was wearing flip-flops with her sundress.
She still had that wonky eye going on, making the light do funny things to her vision. And she, per doctor’s orders, couldn’t take off her extra-dark sunglasses. They were so dark that Petra couldn’t make out anything along the side of the cliff.
Lucky was patience personified as he talked her along. “Your foot needs to go a few inches more. Okay, now let go with your right hand, and I’ll put it in a new place for you.”
Seventeen? Eighteen? How had this kid learned to be so generous?
As they got to the ridge of the tidepool. Petra stopped and looked out. “Well, that isn’t good.”
“What is wrong, Miss Armstrong?” Lucky asked, and Beans swung his head around, then came to stand near her to listen.
“See that?” She pointed. “I thought this was high tide?”
“Yes.” Beans looked at Lucky. “High tide is now. Low tide will come this afternoon around two.”
“But you see what I’m seeing? There’s that channel of water over there. See how choppy it is? See the different colors like a streak of one kind of blue flowing through a different color blue? There. And there. And there. Look at that foam and the seaweed. See how it’s getting pulled out? Those are—”
“Rip currents. And very bad ones. They shouldn’t be here like that this time of day,” Lucky said, holding the flats of his hands over his eyes like a visor.
“It’s the wind,” Beans told Lucky.
“The Christmas Winds?” Petra asked. “They make rip currents?”
“They can,” Beans said. “But this time of day?”
“I haven’t seen this before,” Lucky said as he turned to the people at the tidepool. “Hello!” he called, raising a hand in the air. “My friend Beans and I are looking at the sea. It is very rough and dangerous. We can see what looks like rip currents. If you are not from a place with seawater, you should know that these currents can pull even a very good swimmer like Beans here out to sea. You become so exhausted from the struggle that, unless there is a boat right there to help, it is possible to drown. This is your vacation, and you will do as you wish. We want everyone to have a wonderful time. But you should know that Beans and I cannot swim after you to save you. Please stay here, safe in the tidepool, and choose a different day to go into the sea.”
“You did a good job with that, Lucky.” Petra’s gaze was on Herb. He had to have heard, but he didn’t cast his gaze around to check on his children or wander over to have a little talk to make sure they didn’t climb over the rocks to the shore.
Jenny seemed to have taken up the task as the kids circled around her, and she was pointing and talking, then collecting shirts and shorts as the kids peeled down to their swimsuits, then walked away with a rolled beach blanket.
They left their necklaces on. And that bothered Petra in ways that she couldn’t identify.
So, yeah, she was going to be nosey.
Petra decided to let Jenny settle, then she’d lead with the conversation she and Herb had started, the one where she was an author and, “Your husband says you like to read. He also told me you do international adventure races…”
Petra did write. She just wasn’t an author.
It wasn’t everyone’s definition, but to Petra’s mind, an author was paid for their work.
She was a writer, someone who put words on paper in the form of stories. By design, nothing she wrote was for public consumption, and she had no desire to expose herself to public scrutiny.
She wrote because, at night, her mind liked to ruminate, to go over every conversation to pick it apart, to second guess, to dig up some memory from her past. Memories from when she was two years old and that thing that happened.
That thing that someone said.
Ruminating. Ruminating.
Too often, the topic set on replay was from her time in Afghanistan, listening to the soldiers vent to her in their counseling sessions about the horrors that they lived through—about their friends who didn’t live through them. About holding their buddy's arm and then realizing it wasn’t attached to their friend’s body anymore.
She didn’t have PTSD.
She had neurodivergence, and the processing and reprocessing and the reprocessing of the repossessing was all part of that packaging—not to say that one diagnosis precluded the other. Just to say that Petra personally didn’t fit the criteria for PTSD.
What Petra had was an overly rambunctious mind.
Petra started writing following Rowan’s good counsel from back in their days at university, when he told her he handled the memories of his time in the military by writing about it.
When Petra could motivate her butt into a chair and her fingers around a pen, it had proved a successful strategy.
Instead of gnawing at the bone of some emotion, witnessing injustice, or re-evaluating some conversation, Petra could give that experience to her characters, and her characters could work it out.
Petra could chase down all the different ways things could have turned out and follow them to their likely conclusion.
A cognitive trial-and-error written out in long hand.
Petra knew she’d picked that bone clean when she was bored and wanted a new experience.
And so, with the Kennedys as friends—Rowan, the private writer, and Avery, the public editor—it made sense for Petra to make her public cover story that she was an author when she wanted the anonymity of an unexposed life.
Petra had both the lived experience of struggling to get words on a page, and all of the background words and industry updates in her back pocket to sound convincing as she told people things like what she was now saying to Jenny as they sat side by side with their feet in the tidepool, “I was talking a bit with Herb on the way here and he says you like military romance novels.”
