“Where?” I managed to croak the words.
A shake of the woman’s head meant she didn’t know.
I didn’t know how long we’d stayed like that, myself in the sand as the waves washed up around me, freezing around my skin before departing. My thoughts wouldn’t work, nor would my body.
But a sound gradually made its way into my mind. At first, it was a buzz in the back, a trickle of something. Then, slowly, my tired thoughts grasped onto the sound of water above the sound of the waves on the shore.
A rush of water.
I wasn’t sure how I hauled myself to my feet, nor how I managed to lurch across the small beach towards the sound. Behind several large boulders, we finally found the source; moonlight glinted off a small waterfall, rushing down from one of the low cliffs that enveloped the beach on which we’d landed. It trickled into a pool of brackish water before joining and swirling with the current that would take it out to sea.
The woman and I knelt side-by-side, dipping our hands into the frosty waterfall, then bringing cupped palms to our mouths. With my muscles screaming at me and my mind still full of the terrible hardships of the day, I hadn’t paid attention to my other bodily needs, such as how thirsty I was. Everything had been bent on escaping and survival.
Now, I couldn’t seem to get enough, and I drank greedily, handful after handful of the crystal-clear water. The woman did the same, the water running down her mouth, hands, and arms in rivulets, droplets catching the light of the moon and shimmering on her skin.
Finally sated, we made our way back to the beach and the rowboat. I collapsed back onto the ground, the sand both soft and prickling against my skin. My eyes drifted closed, the lids too heavy to keep open any longer. I was aware of the woman moving around, shuffling through the bottom of the boat. I didn’t know what for because there was nothing in it, but then I heard a shift as she lay one of the blankets on the sand beside me.
Right. Blankets.
I rolled onto my stomach without even opening my eyes. The night was chilly, but I couldn’t even seem to move my arms to draw it up around me.
For the first time since I was a four-year-old, flailing with water closing over my head, I had felt that this was it. I’d really thought I was going to die.
The attack had come so suddenly. If I hadn’t delayed looking more closely at the cables, I would most likely be dead, too. Nothing in any of the intelligence reports had held any warning of an imminent attack. It had been, quite simply, a wrong-place, wrong-time situation.
Our mission had been for reconnaissance, with orders to take out anything we found. But we hadn’t even gotten a chance to carry out the surveillance. Had the terrorists been there already? Had we stumbled into one of their self-appointed missions? Or had they seen the small research station as we had and zeroed in on it?
Then again, the fact that the other members of the woman’s team had died a day before told me they’d been there for longer. Watching. Waiting. But for what? Were they always on the island, their headquarters somewhere around where we had landed? Which meant my plan to wait out the heat and return to the island for rescue wasn’t going to work.
There was no way to know, not right now. Now with my body and mind so fatigued, I felt like stone, unable to lift even a finger. Not with the sight of my dead teammates swimming in front of my eyes.
Everyone talked about the missions, but no one talked about what happened after. Some SEALs could turn it off, could compartmentalize their Navy SEAL life from their life at home. But I had never been one of them, as hard as I’d tried. My father had never been able to drill that one into me. Like Miller had said to me on the trawler, looking out over the ocean, motoring to our fate, I was always on. For some people, that meant being a Navy SEAL always. But for me, it meant there was no separation between this and the rest of my life. I carried those failures with me and remembered faces in my dreams. Maybe that was the part of me that took after my mother.
I’d really thought I was going to die.
We still could.
I didn’t know where we were, beyond an unclaimed territory too far from either Russia or Japan to be of any help. I didn’t know how to get rescued without alerting the enemy, either. Was this island under any flight path? Certainly, not any military planes, and a commercial flight would most likely be too high to see anything. And the only option open to me at the moment was an enormous bonfire, which probably wouldn’t work anyway, and in the process, would alert the terrorists to our exact location.
Pilots and passengers wouldn’t be looking, but the terrorists would.
And how were we going to survive in the meantime?
I knew nothing about this island. It had fresh water, but what else? Was there anything I could make a fire out of, or was it only cropped grass and wind-scoured lichen? I could fish, but fish and water didn’t mean survival.
In the morning, at least, I would make what shelter I could using the rowboat.
But that was all for the morning. Right now, we were alive, and I would have to take that for what it was.
The woman was saying something, but I didn’t hear—my mind was shutting down, and then there was nothing.
I woke up suddenly, the world coming back to me in a rush, the buzzing of night insects, the waves against the shore lapping rhythmically, gently against the beach, the lack of any type of city noise buzzing in my ears. A billion stars spread across the inky black sky above me, the sight so different from even the small town where my parents lived.
Turning my head, I looked beside me, expecting to see the woman asleep on her blanket. But instead of a human-shaped mound, the beach was empty.
I was on my feet instantly, my gaze sweeping the small beach without seeing her anywhere.
Where was she? Had the terrorists found us? Had the day been too much, the reality facing us too much, and she’d walked into the ocean?
It flashed through my mind that I didn’t even know her name to call for her.
My heart hammering in my ears, I searched the beach wildly for her footsteps and found them leading back towards the waterfall. I followed at a fast clip to the waterfall, then past it. It was too dark to see her path through the foliage, but I kept going, pushing branches and leaves out of my way until I suddenly found myself in a clearing.
The woman was standing in the middle of a grove of trees, her hands to her mouth, holding what looked like a piece of fruit. The moon's silver light shimmered over her bare curves, her long torso, her thighs, her long legs, and the swelling curve of her bottom and chest.
As I watched, she took a bite, the juices dribbling down her chin and her arms.
It might have been my exhaustion, it might have been the roller coaster of emotion from the day, but suddenly my heartbeat wasn’t hammering in my ears out of adrenaline.