by Scott Blade
His job was divided into two parts. First, he had to evaluate a location on short notice. This meant that he and his small team would scout out the locations where the president would be while he visited the region. He was responsible for evaluating the risks and concerns. His team would recon the locales and then coordinate with local law enforcement officials to have escape plans ready as well as arrange transportation details for getting to and from the locations.
Without the knowledge of local law enforcement agents, they always made secret backup escape plans of their own. Breaking laws or pissing off the local officials wasn’t their concern—protecting the president at all costs was.
Their second mission was to guard the locations and routes after they’d been analyzed. This was to ensure that the locations remained secure until after the president had come and gone.
Being on the advanced operating team meant that Rowley needed to remain on site. He had to live in South Africa as long as the mission was ongoing. He and his team had to remain in place at all times.
And when Nicole was still Nicole and not yet Raggie, she and her mother had to go and live in South Africa with her father. Not that this made much difference because even though the president didn’t visit the region that much, her father was always gone anyway. He was always too busy for her.
While Raggie was in South Africa, she made friends with some local girls. A small, tight group of them. Immediately, she picked up on something about these girls that set them worlds apart from the girls back home. These girls weren’t really girls at all. Not the baking cookies and wearing dresses kind. These girls were fun, and they tore down the American conventions of girls.
Nicole became good friends with them. Six weeks after the end of winter, they introduced her to something that would change her life forever. The girls were surfers.
It started as an exercise in trying to fit in with them, but over the course of that first summer, Nicole spent every afternoon—with or without her new friends—on the beach learning how to surf.
She loved it! Surfing was the thing that had been missing from her life.
That first time she caught a wave without tipping over or crashing into the unforgiving surf was one of the best moments of her life. She’d wished that Claire could’ve been there to know that feeling. To feel the rush of the wind and the unpredictability of the surf.
Even after her first injury from surfing, she’d longed to get back out into the waves. Before she understood how to ride a wave, she’d sprained her left knee trying to ride waves the wrong way. She had to stay out of the water for the rest of the summer, and it wasn’t until her thirteenth birthday that her mother had even let her return to the water.
Nicole spent her time away from the ocean thinking about the water and researching the sport of surfing. She watched videos on the Internet on how to surf. She even found a guy with a series of YouTube video—or a YouTube channel, as it’s known—who was a former pro surfer. He had great videos teaching techniques and tricks for getting the most out of a surfboard. The guy didn’t have a lot of followers, but he had an account with patreon.com so that he could accept donations from people to finance his lessons. And Nicole used her mom’s credit card to donate money to him on a regular basis. She had never met the guy, but she learned a lot from his lessons.
So when the first rays of warm weather hit the beach the following summer, she was ready to get back on the board. Nicole rejoined her friends and surfed every day. She even got good enough to look somewhat graceful. Her friends asked her how she’d gotten so good after her injury. And she replied, “How does anyone get good at anything these days? The Internet!”
Chapter 5
NICOLE WATCHED THE SURF from the shore. Her break was coming up. She knew it. She felt it in her bones. The wetsuit was form-fitting, but she didn’t have any form that would indicate she was a girl. She was thirteen years old and had a boy’s body—athletic arms, stringy legs, and a flat chest. She thought back to the girls back home in Virginia. She thought about Claire, who was at that very moment most likely praying she’d grow a pair of breasts and hoping for more curves to show off in a dress. She was probably trying to convince her mom to take her to Bebe or GAP or some department store and buy her some clothes that weren’t really appropriate for a girl who was barely a teenager. But that was how Nicole imagined the girls back home to be.
Right now, all she cared about was the surf. All she concentrated on was trying out the new trick that she’d been working on. She’d watched the advanced videos, and she’d practiced the jump every day during sunup. She practiced while the other girls were still asleep.
She wasn’t the only surfer around at sunup. In fact, most of the really dedicated surfers were at the beach by dawn. If midnight was the witching hour, then sunrise was the surfing hour.
Today was a weekday, and she had come early at dawn and practiced the jump, but she hadn’t done it in front of any of her friends yet. And they were there now. Three other girls stood in a circle behind her on the beach. Their surfboards were laid out on the sand like seals lying in the sun.
The tallest girl was Nicole’s closest friend out of the bunch. Her name was Saffron.
Saffron was fifteen and already had a sleeve tattoo—all tribal. And even though Saffron was her best friend, she was also the best surfer out of all of them. This was the reason Nicole had kept her new trick a secret from them. She wanted to impress Saffron. She wanted her to see her perform a jump that not even Saffron could do.
The trick was a high jump with the surfboard over a wave. It wasn’t anything special in the eyes of true-blooded surfers, but for a thirteen-year-old girl who’d had a knee injury several months before, it was pretty impressive.
Nicole watched for the perfect break. She’d been on the beach since sunrise, and now the sun was nearing sunset—not quite ready to set, but not far away. She didn’t have much light left to show her new skill.
The beach had been crowded, but not many people had been out in the surf because of the warning flag. There was a small crew of lifeguards on duty, and one of them had spotted dark shadows about a hundred yards down the beach. The shadows were probably from a school of fish or a group of sea turtles—it could’ve been anything really—but the beach wasn’t far from a place known for the likelihood of spotting Carcharodon carcharias. Which is the scientific name for the Great White shark. So whenever there was the tiniest possibility that one had been spotted, the lifeguards threw up a red flag. Which meant danger. Which usually meant shark. And today, for the last hour, they’d had the red flag up.
Nicole watched out over the sea and saw her waves coming and crashing down. The perfect chance. No one else was on the water, nothing between her and her chance to show off her new jump.
She ignored the flag and went out onto the water.
Chapter 6
NICOLE PADDLED OUT PAST the first crashing waves and the shallowest parts of the beach. She felt the waves underneath the board. She cleared her mind and paddled forward. First she passed the three-foot depth and then five and then seven, and she kept going. She felt no fear. She’d practiced and practiced the jump and was ready to do it in front of her friends.
She passed the ten-foot depth and then the twelve and the fifteen.
The ocean wasn’t too brutal, but the surf was much higher than normal. Of course, she was getting further out so that she could ride in longer and then take a deep breath and find the right wave to jump from. She paddled, feeling her arms strain. Her elbows bent, fighting the current. The water splashed her face. Her eyes blinked involuntarily every time, and she forced them back open and stared ahead.
She got to a comfortable place and stopped paddling. The waves splashed in over her, and she held her breath and held onto her board with each pass. She came out of the other side and was ready for her wave. It barreled toward her. She grabbed the board, turned back to the shore, and paddled. Her hands pounded into the water and her feet kicked
and kicked. Her left knee started to throb from the old injury. She continued to kick and kick.
The wave swept up underneath her, and she leaped to her feet. Both feet landed on the board at the same time, like they were supposed to do. She balanced and was riding the wave.
She looked to the shore and saw her friends leaping and waving their hands. At first, she thought they were cheering her on. A split second later, she noticed the bystanders were joining in on their cheers.
She looked for the opportunity to make the jump, her instincts controlling her every move. She was ready.
But suddenly, she saw the lifeguards speeding out to her on wave runners. There were two of them—on red machines with white stripes on the bottom. They were still close to the shore and far from her. The closest one must’ve been going full speed, bouncing and crashing back down into the water. The idiots were headed right for her. The worry that they’d crash into her swept over her like a sudden swell of high water. Then she feared they’d ruin her jump, and next she feared they were headed toward her for breaking the rules and going out while there was a red flag.
At the moment before she had planned to jump, something big and dark and rough slammed into her board. The force of the blow knocked her clear off of her board, and she was instantly plummeting into the wave. Her body crashed and sank. She felt the safety string jerk at her leg from the surfboard as it, too, was dragged down into the ocean like a rag doll.
Under the surface of the water, she must’ve flipped and twisted several times. She hadn’t had much time to take a breath before she’d been pushed into the water, and she hadn’t had much air. Her lungs pounded worse than her knee injury, and she swallowed salt water for a second before she closed her mouth. Her eyes stung from the sudden impact of the water. She shut them tight and tried to stay calm. She knew that the first thing to do was to remain calm. In the ocean, panic could cause death faster than anything else.
She let the water pummel her and then what she took to be the undertow dragged her down.
Suddenly, a shooting pain came from her wrist. She thought it must’ve been the pull of one of the lifeguards as he dragged her back to the surface. She strained and opened her eyes. Under the ocean and the booming of the waves, there wasn’t much to see, but the one thing that was still visible and recognizable by human eyes was light and darkness. The light was the last rays of the sun, and the darkness was the depths. She didn’t want to go to the dark side—that she knew for sure. So she stared back at the reddish hues of distorted light that fish-bowled into her sightline.
The thing that immediately confused her was that the lifeguard was supposed to pull her to the surface. He should’ve been pulling her up and not down. But then again, she was disoriented and may have had her directions completely wrong. She might even have had her sense of sight wrong. She was snaking and flipping so much that maybe the red hue from the sunlight was below her and not above her.
Nicole reached up or down—she really wasn’t sure—toward whatever was clenching down on her arm. She reached toward it and found something rough and dry even in the water, like sandpaper suspended underwater.
She felt around it and looked for her hand. She couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, it was wrapped around her hand and wrist. She jerked and wrenched and couldn’t get free.
Seconds turned into minutes, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that it had been several minutes. Nicole’s personal record for holding her breath was under a minute, but she was certain she had been underwater for much, much longer. Probably, it had been at least two minutes.
Suddenly, whatever the sandpapery thing was that held onto her moved, and she felt the unmistakable brush of a huge dorsal fin whipping past her head like a rotor.
Chapter 7
NICOLE THOUGHT SHARK! And she accepted her fate.
After a minute and seventeen seconds of the shark thrashing and pulling her under, it bit off her hand and a significant portion of her wrist and swam away.
The first lifeguard to reach her leaped into the water without thinking of himself and grabbed her by the leg. He cut the rope to her surfboard and let it go.
She reached out to feel the remains of her hand. Nothing was left but bone and skin.
She clenched onto her exposed appendage and felt the lifeguard drag her through the surf back to the wave runner. She sucked up saltwater through her nose. He pushed her body over the hump in the back, and then he climbed up onto the machine and sat in the front.
She huffed and spit out the salt water. He turned to face her and examined her wound—quickly. He turned back to the front and started to search through a saddlebag for emergency bandages. He found the necessary equipment and wrapped her arm up as tightly as possible so that she wouldn’t lose any more blood, and then he cranked the throttle and took off back to shore.
Nicole’s eyes were open. She felt as though she were on the back of a horse as the wave runner galloped through the waves. She gazed back to the sea and watched her surfboard as it drifted away, and she saw the dorsal fin of the shark one last time as it swam off and was lost to sight.
Later, the doctors patched her back together—without her arm. Her friends visited her and brought her gifts and Get Well cards. She drifted in and out of sleep and awakened each time to a room filled with flowers and different family members. Sometimes she saw her mom and sometimes her dad. Sometimes they were together. Other times, it was just her uncle.
After she had recovered, her mother insisted that she never surf again, which wasn’t a possibility because the call of the ocean was a far stronger attachment than the attachment she’d had to her one arm. She fought her mother’s decision by attending surfing competitions as a spectator, but this was only so she could be closer to the sport.
Her friends who witnessed the whole thing told her that she was most likely attacked by a shark breed known as the Ragged Tooth Shark, which was the ugliest thing in the ocean and generally nocturnal, but still known to attack in all hours of the day. They were big sharks with a mouth full of so many crooked and ragged teeth that there was far more bone visible in their mouth than gums. This breed was common in the waters surrounding Durban’s beaches.
After a long time, the horror of the incident started to wear off, and Nicole started to recover. She began by leaving her room and venturing slowly into the rest of their rented house. She spent only a couple more weeks indoors with her mother, and that was enough to push her back out into public. She called her friends and met them out. Slowly, she started to stay out longer and longer, and before too long, she was involved again in their social gatherings.
Her friends renamed her Raggie, slang for the type of shark that attacked her.
Her father relocated and went back to the US the following year, taking on a more high-profile role in the Secret Service, and he brought with him some agents that were also his personal friends. Therefore, she had to relocate as well.
Raggie had to leave surfing and her friends in South Africa behind, but she took with her a love of the sport as well as her new name.
Chapter 8
A YEAR HAD PASSED, AND RAGGIE STILL kept in touch with her friends in South Africa. Her dad was busier than ever protecting the president, which she never really thought too much about—to her, it was everyday life. It was his job. No big deal.
Raggie sat in a café on the east side of DC. She wore stonewashed blue jeans with large slits cut into the knees. A gray skull cap was pulled down over her head, making her look slightly like a cancer patient, and her hair was stuffed underneath it. A light patina of makeup dusted her face—her mom didn’t like her to leave the house without it. She wore black Converse shoes with pink trim that she’d painted herself. It had originally come out of the box in white, but she liked to modify her clothes. She liked to make them a little more like herself.
Her handless arm was hidden under the long sleeve of a white hoodie. She dressed like a boy, and that was something she was proud of
. She liked being different than her American friends. Like her friend Claire who she rarely saw anymore. Because while Claire had become more like the girls that Raggie hated, Raggie had become more like her friends back in South Africa—and right then, she was missing them.
And her love of surfing was her reason for sitting at the café at a small round table with a MacBook Air in front of her, the Apple icon glowing white as she watched YouTube videos of surfing. She’d lied to her mother and Uncle Lucas that morning. She had told them she was going to meet with her friends and hang out with them that whole day. She’d told them she was going to the mall—as if she’d be caught dead walking around a stupid mall.
She was actually meeting a boy—well, not a boy, but an older man.
She was going to meet one of her idols—Jai Jai Slater. He was the guy who made the YouTube videos she liked and followed. She’d watched each of his videos dozens of times. He wasn’t related to Kelly Slater, a surfing legend and another hero of hers, but he was just a guy from DC who loved surfing. He spent his time between a part-time lobbying job and surfing in Mexico every summer.
A couple of weeks ago, Jai Jai had started communicating with her out of the blue. Probably because she had sent him big donations through the Internet to help fund his videos. It wasn’t a big deal to her. The donations were put on her mom’s credit cards. Her mom didn’t even notice.
Raggie and Jai Jai had talked on a daily basis. Now he wanted to meet her in person. He wanted to show his gratitude for her support—or that’s what she thought. Besides, she could use a new friend in the surfing community since all her old ones were more than eight thousand miles away. She liked Jai Jai. He was cool, and his surfing videos were informative.
