Chapter 7 - The Sky Above Seattle
Two weeks later, I stood on the flight deck of a heavy transport aircraft at Joint Base Lewis-Marchord, watching the grey Pacific coastline recede beneath our wings as we climbed toward the clouds.
My deployment orders had come down through command. A major humanitarian relief and rescue operation was spinning up in the South Pacific, where a series of catastrophic typhoons had devastated remote island communities, leaving thousands stranded without food, clean water, or shelter.
It was dangerous, exhausting, high-stakes work. Exactly where I belonged.
Master Sergeant Miller walked up beside me, handing me a fresh cup of black coffee as the twin turbines settled into a steady, rhythmic roar.
"Everything locked down in the cargo bay, Commander?" he asked over the intercom.
"Tether lines secure, pallets locked, crew is ready," I replied, taking the coffee and looking out the reinforced cockpit window.
Below us, the city of Seattle was fading away beneath a thick blanket of gray mist and morning fog. Somewhere down there, Aurora Tower was nothing more than a charred skeleton surrounded by police tape and lawyers. Somewhere down there, my parents were picking through the wreckage of their lives, and my sister was sitting in a holding cell, waiting for a cage that she had built for herself brick by brick, lie by lie.
They had tried to bury me in the rain six years ago. They had tried to strip away my name, my honor, and my family, leaving me to wander the world with a forged stain on my record.
But they had forgotten one fundamental truth about the path I chose.
You cannot destroy a man by throwing him into the fire, if fire is what he learned to breathe.
May you like
I adjusted my flight helmet, checked my harness buckle one last time, and turned away from the window, facing the open cargo ramp as the aircraft punched through the gray cloud cover straight into the blinding, brilliant blue of the open sky.
"Let's go to work," I said.
