Читать книгу Legacy of the Grand Master - William Speir - Страница 11

Jamie loved the University of Alabama. The combination of old-world charm and modern ingenuity blended into an environment where Jamie learned about engineering and life in general. It was her first time away from home, and though she missed the ever-present support that her parents provided, it was good to learn to stand on her own two feet.

The campus, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, sat on the banks of the Black Warrior River. At the center of the campus, where her dad’s old ROTC buildings sat on either side of the library, was the quadrangle, or “Quad,” where Confederate military cadets marched and drilled every day during the early 1860s. Across from the library was the famous Denny Chimes tower. Jamie liked to sit in the shade of the tower between classes, either working on her homework or just watching her fellow students enjoying the sun and the grass.

There was a martial arts studio near campus that her teacher had recommended where she could keep up with her studies and practice. There were also running trails all around campus where she could clear her mind from the pressures of class. She usually ran with one or two running buddies, since it was never wise for young women to run alone through some of the darker and more hidden trails. Jamie remembered her dad telling her stories about some of his female friends getting attacked while running in the early mornings or late evenings down by the river, and while she was certain that she could handle herself if attacked, she couldn’t see any reason to be reckless.

Jamie quickly made friends with her fellow students, including one who loved to skydive. Not one to shy away from new adventures, Jamie accepted an invitation to go with him one Saturday and learn how. After the first two jumps, which were done with an instructor, Jamie found that she loved the sensation of flying, falling, and being suspended high above the earth. Soon she was jumping solo and encouraging her other friends to try it. She didn’t get to jump often, but she made a point to go as often as her schoolwork and other activities allowed.

She came home for Christmas break, and she and her parents went to the gun club almost every day so she could practice her shooting. She didn’t have enough time to practice shooting at college, and she didn’t want to get rusty. Her parents were pleased that her aim seemed to improve by the end of the holidays, and they were sad to see her leave to return to school in early January.

Tom and Emily were getting used to being “empty nesters,” but they missed their daughter very much. Still, there was the Order, which kept them both busy. Emily was responsible for surveillance training for the Order, and Tom traveled with her whenever she had to visit some of the Commanderies that were far away from the Headquarters. Emily was also a senior executive for SignalCorps and actively involved in the development and marketing of the new versions of the surveillance system that she had created. Tom was the one who seemed to have the most time on his hands, and he filled his days by poring over intervention and intelligence reports from the other Commanderies so he could stay informed about what was going on around the world.

That summer, Jamie took the opportunity to defend her title at the regional, state, and national Tae kwon do tournaments. She won all three, adding several more trophies to her bedroom at home. The next week was the family gun tournament, where she did much better than in previous years. She beat all of her family in pistols except for Tom and Emily, and she came in fourth in the long arms categories, only losing to Tom, Emily, and her Aunt Sophie.

The week after the gun tournament, Jamie took the box and letter from her grandfather off the bookshelf and read the letter again. She had made a commitment to do as her grandfather asked, but so far, she had been unable to find ways to help others. She thought about doing volunteer work, but somehow that didn’t seem to be what her grandfather was suggesting. Jamie looked at the box again, trying to find a way to open it, but she still couldn’t figure out how a silk cord could be part of any lock or key, and she couldn’t figure out how the wax seal, which still hung at the end of the silk cord, could be any sort of key. Frustrated, she put the box and letter back in their camouflage coverings and put them back on the bookshelf, vowing to work harder to do as her grandfather asked.

Shortly after returning to campus for her sophomore year, Jamie found herself in an unexpected position to help someone.

Every evening after class, Jamie and one of her best friends went running along the trails around the outer edge of the campus. Even though there were tracks and trails closer to the populated parts of the University, neither Jamie nor her friend liked the attention they got from the boys when they ran there. The outer trails were quieter and gave them the opportunity to work out their frustration and tension without distractions.

Around the beginning of October, Jamie was working on a project that would take most of the night to complete. She told her friend that she couldn’t run that night and went back to working on her project. It wasn’t due for another couple of days, but Jamie didn’t like waiting until the last minute.

She was working on a stubborn calculation when her cell phone rang. Looking at the caller id, she saw that it was her friend, so she answered the call. Her friend was crying, and Jamie immediately knew that something was wrong.

“Where are you?” Jamie demanded.

“I’m at DHC Hospital on University,” the crying friend replied.

“Are you all right? What happened?”

Her friend was crying so hard that Jamie couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“Just stay there. I’m on my way,” Jamie said, ending the call and grabbing her purse and keys.

A few minutes later, she arrived at the emergency room entrance and asked the receptionist where her friend was.

“Are you a relative?” the receptionist asked.

“No, I’m her friend.”

The receptionist pointed to a waiting area. “Then you’ll have to wait over there until the doctors are finished examining her. I’ll call you when you can go back.”

Jamie wrote her name on the sign-in sheet and sat down in the waiting area, worried about her friend. She took out her cell phone and sent her friend a text, letting her know that she was at the hospital. Then she waited.

Thirty minutes later, the receptionist called her name. She walked up to the receptionist’s desk and was directed to an examination room down the hall. When she got there, she looked in the window and saw her friend sitting on the edge of an examination table, wearing a hospital gown and talking with two police officers. Jamie knocked on the door and stuck her head inside.

“Is it okay if I come in now?” she asked.

Her friend held out her arms and nodded. Jamie came in, and her friend hugged her tightly, tears running down her face.

“I guess we have all we need for now, miss,” one of the police officers said. “Do you need a ride home?”

“I’ll drive her back to the dorm,” Jamie said.

“Very well,” the officer replied. He handed Jamie one of his cards. “If she remembers anything else, please have her call me at this number.”

“I will,” Jamie promised.

When the two officers had left the examination room, Jamie sat down on the table next to her friend and put her arm around her shoulder. “What happened?” she asked softly.

As it turned out, her friend had decided to go running alone along the outer campus trails. “I know I should have just gone to the track, but I needed to clear my head and wanted to be alone. I was so busy thinking that I didn’t see them until it was too late.”

Three young men had jumped out of the bushes and pulled her into the woods before she could react. “They threw me down on the ground,” she said, sobbing. “Two of them held me and the third pulled down my shorts.”

She shuddered, as if it were happening to her all over again. “And then they raped me!” she spat out. “All three of them! And they were laughing the whole time!”

Jamie held her friend as she started crying uncontrollably again. She wondered what would have happened if she had gone running with her that night. Would two girls have been enough to prevent the attack, or would the three men have attacked both of them? As Jamie thought about this, somewhere deep inside of her a fire started to burn.

After a while, her friend was able to stop crying. Jamie helped her get dressed and drove her back to the dorm. The next day, her friend’s parents came to take her back home. Her friend withdrew from school and never came back.

Jamie kept in touch with her friend and learned that, even after a month, the three men hadn’t been caught. The fire that burned in her since she found out what had happened to her friend started to grow. Jamie wanted justice for her friend, and the more she thought about it, the more she knew that this was what her grandfather had been talking about.

Jamie started working out at the martial arts studio as often as she could, convincing the owner to let her spar with multiple partners like she had done before her first national tournament. In part, this was to help her release her anger at her friend’s attackers, and in part it was to prepare her for a plan she had been working on in the back of her mind. After a few weeks, she felt that she was ready. She started running the outer trails alone in the early morning and late evening every day. If the three men wanted to attack someone again, she’d give them something to attack. Normally, she ran as a way to clear her mind, but now she was maintaining a heightened sense of awareness of her surroundings so she’d be ready if anything happened.

She checked in with the police to see if there were any updates, but they confirmed that the men were still on the loose. There had been two more attacks, and each was on or near the outer campus trails. The police warned her to make sure that she always ran in groups of at least four to be safe.

After a couple of weeks of making herself a target, her plan worked. She had just rounded a bend in the trail that was in the middle of a wooded area when she saw two men step out onto the trail in front of her. Without turning around, she knew that a third was behind her and moving quietly forward. She stood still, calming her nerves as she waited for the man behind her to get closer. Just as she felt him reaching for her, she struck.

Her right heel came up and back, catching him in his groin full force. As he doubled over in pain, she charged forward – not to escape as the other two men thought, but to attack. She leaped up and planted both of her feet in the center of the left man’s chest, sending him flying.

She turned to face the third man. He swung his fist, but only hit air. Jamie dropped into a split and drove her fist in his groin as hard as she could. As he bent over, she hit him in his lower jaw, rolled to the side, and jumped back to her feet.

The first man was moving toward her, and she did a reverse somersault kick that drove her foot into his lower jaw, breaking the jawbone and sending him onto his back. She leaped up and landed with both feet on his rib cage. She heard a cracking sound. She then turned to continue the attack on the other two men.

The first two men were trying to get away when Jamie caught up to them. They clearly had no martial arts training whatsoever and had no way to defend against her attack. Her hands and feet connected with them repeatedly until they were both lying unconscious on the ground. Looking around, she knew that it would be some time before any of them would be able to move again. She walked over to a nearby tree, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed a number.

“Yes, I’d like to report that the men who have been attacking runners near the campus have just tried to attack someone else. They weren’t successful this time. You might want to send an ambulance and pick them up. I think they’re seriously hurt.”

An hour later, she was sitting in an interrogation room at the police station. The officer who had responded to the scene of the attack first was sitting across the table from her.

“So let me get this straight,” he said, checking his notes again. “You were just running alone when they jumped out at you?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did they say anything?”

“No, they just tried to grab me.”

“Did you know that they intended you any harm?”

“Well, they raped my best friend about two months ago and two other girls since then. Given the way two were blocking my path and one was coming up behind me, I’m fairly sure that they weren’t just stopping me to ask for directions.”

“How do you know that these men were the rapists?”

“How did I know that they weren’t?”

“How were you able to take them down?”

“I’m a nationally ranked third degree black belt. I train with multiple opponents all the time. Taking these losers down was easy.”

“So you say that your friend was attacked two months ago?”

“Yes she was.”

“Isn’t it more likely that you decided to get some revenge for her and went out looking for three men to beat up?”

Jamie laughed at that. “If I were just going to beat three random men, I’d have done that long before now. They attacked me. I defended myself. End of story. Why would you even ask such a thing? Is one of them related to you?”

At that moment, the door to the interrogation room opened and a senior police officer stuck his head in.

“I need to see you now,” he said to the officer sitting across from Jamie. The officer stood up and stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the senior officer asked.

“I’m interrogating a suspect in the assault of three individuals,” he replied angrily.

“Are you out of your mind?!” the senior officer demanded. “That girl was attacked by three men – probably the same three men who have been gang raping women for months near the campus. She’s not a suspect, she’s a victim who got lucky and took them down before they could do something even worse to her. She deserves our thanks and our praise, not our suspicions and accusations. Your investigation ends now. Go thank her for what she did, congratulate her on helping us solve this crime, and make sure that she gets home safely and quickly. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the officer responded sullenly as the superior officer stormed away.

An hour later, Jamie was back at her dorm talking to her friend on the phone. “Guess what?” she asked.

“What?” her friend responded.

“Those three guys who hurt you got a serious beat down tonight.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, they decided to attack someone who was ready for them. They lost.”

“You didn’t…”

“I did.”

“Where are they now?”

“Still in surgery I suspect. From what the police told me, one has a broken lower jaw, two have ruptured testicles, and all three have broken ribs, not to mention some other broken bones, cuts, and bruises here and there.”

“You did all that?”

“Well, I was mad. I was mad at them for what they did to you, and I was mad at them for what they were trying to do to me. I guess it’s a good thing I’m a nice person or I might have really hurt them!”

Her friend laughed. It was the first time Jamie had heard her laugh since before she had been raped, and it was a welcome sound.

“Are you okay?” her friend asked.

“Perfectly fine,” Jamie replied. “They never laid a finger on me.”

“Thanks, Jamie. I think I might actually sleep tonight without the nightmares.”

“That’s what friends are for,” Jamie replied.

“That’s what best friends are for,” her friend corrected her.

Over the next two years, Jamie found other opportunities to help people who needed justice, although none of those opportunities ended quite so dramatically as the first one. The years she had spent playing surveillance games with her Mom gave her a unique talent to get into places unseen where she could find things and learn things that would help other people. As her grandfather predicted, she enjoyed helping other people – even when it was done anonymously. It wasn’t praise she craved; it was knowing that someone was better off because of her actions that made her feel good about what she had done. As much fun as she was having working on her own, she wondered what it would be like to be part of a team working together to help someone. That must be what Granddad meant when he said I’d need the Order to move forward.

During her summer breaks, Jamie spent most of her time at the martial arts studio learning Em-An-Jitsu. Tae kwon do was a great sport and a great discipline, but Jamie now wanted to learn a combat style of fighting. Her mom taught her as much as she could, given that she had never documented her fighting style, and the owner was able to fill in the rest of the blanks. Her dad also helped out, teaching Jamie some of the techniques he had learned in the military and showing her how to blend that with the other techniques she was learning.

“The key is to adapt on the fly,” the owner said to her one morning when they were upstairs training. “You have to be able and willing to abandon an attack mid-stream and totally change your strategy to take advantage of an opening that wasn’t there an instant before. Never get so locked into one train of thought that you overlook opportunities to dominate your opponent that present themselves unexpectedly.”

Jamie’s naturally aggressive style, coupled with her ability to read people, made her adept at Em-An-Jitsu. The week before she was returning to campus to start her senior year of college, the owner decided that it was time to see just how good she had become.

Tom, Emily, and the owner were all kneeling in a circle around Jamie, who was kneeling in the center of the mats in the upstairs room. Her parents had wooden practice swords, and the owner held fighting sticks. Jamie was unarmed, but there were weapons all along the walls that she could use if she could get past her opponents to reach them. Knowing how fierce the sparring could be, everyone wore special gear to protect themselves. Jamie wished that she didn’t have to wear any protective clothing, preferring to feel the exhilaration of total vulnerability, but the owner wouldn’t allow it.

She heard the owner draw in a breath and surmised that he was about to announce the start of the match. She immediately rolled into a handstand and launched herself with her arms toward the owner, kicking his sticks out of his hands and knocking him backwards onto the mats. She grabbed two medium sized fighting sticks off the rack on the wall and turned to attack her dad.

Like Emily, Tom was carrying both a long sword and a short sword. His long sword was above his head and his short sword was across his chest, ready to defect or attack with either sword. Jamie ran towards him with her sticks crossed in front of her, but just before she was close enough to attack her dad, she turned and swung her sticks straight at her mom’s swords.

Emily wasn’t prepared for this change in attack, and her short sword was sent spinning. She clutched the long sword with both hands and counterattacked. Jamie watched her mom closely, looking for an indication of where the next attack would come from. She read one of her mom’s “tells,” and Jamie shot out her left foot behind her, catching her dad in his stomach as he was coming at her from behind. Jamie swung the stick in her right hand in a reverse arc and caught the owner in his shoulder. Jamie continued to parry her mom’s sword with the stick in her left hand. Reading one of her mom’s tells again, she dropped into a split and swung both of her sticks straight out to hit the owner and her dad in the knees. She rolled backward, jumped to her feet, and launched herself back at her mom.

From Tom’s perspective, it was like trying to fight a wild animal that could be in multiple places at the same time. One moment he was approaching Jamie’s exposed back, and the next moment Jamie was gone, and Tom’s leg, shoulder, or back hurt from her attack.

Jamie had knocked the fighting sticks from the owner’s hands again, and he returned to the match carrying a large staff, called a Bo, which is similar to the quarterstaffs used in medieval Europe. The Bo had a long reach, and Jamie felt that the time had come to change weapons again. She swung around suddenly, swept her mom’s legs, causing her to fall backwards, and raced to the wall to retrieve two large swords. Turning back to her opponents, she made a quick assessment and launched a fresh attack at her dad.

Jamie’s swords were a blur as she attacked and countered his attempts to attack. She slipped past his defenses and caught him along the neck, which was a kill and forced him out of the match. Spinning around, she moved out of the way just as the owner’s Bo struck at her. She deflected the blow, came in low, and caught the owner with a thrust to the chest, which was also a kill. As the owner and her dad moved to the far end of the room, Jamie turned to face her mom.

Emily had created the style of fighting they were using, but Jamie’s youth and aggressiveness more than made up for her lack of experience. The final two opponents were evenly matched, even though their fighting styles were completely different. Emily abandoned her short sword and was using two long swords like her daughter. The two were locked in a contest of incredible speed and motion. Tom and the owner couldn’t tell which sword went with which opponent. Emily swung with one sword while thrusting with the other. Jamie kicked her mom’s second sword out of the way and swept her mom’s leg to keep her off balance. Emily leaped forward, aiming her blows to Jamie’s head. Jamie dropped down and aimed for her mom’s stomach and inner thighs.

This went on for quite a while. In the end, though, Jamie’s youth and speed were the deciding factors. With a sudden double attack, she knocked one of her mom’s swords out of her hand. She dropped one of her own swords, grabbed her mom’s sword hand, and held it fully extended, pressing her own sword against her mom’s throat. Emily dropped her sword and relaxed, signaling that Jamie had won the match.

Jamie sat down in the middle of the mat as the owner tossed her a towel and a bottle of water. The four opponents removed their protective clothing and returned to their original positions. The owner, Tom, and Emily were kneeling with their heads bowed in respect to the winner.

“Congratulations, Jamie,” Emily said. “You’re the first to face three opponents, and the first to beat all of us. Either you’re the best student and the fastest learner ever, or we’re getting really old and slow!”

“I think that both of those are true, sweetheart,” Tom said. Turning to his daughter, he said, “Congratulations, baby girl! That was a great match!”

“I agree,” the owner said, clearly impressed. “I don’t know where you want your martial arts career to take you, but it’s clear to me that you’re now in a class all your own. I’m not sure that there’s anything more we can teach you, but I think that there’s a lot we can learn from you.”

Jamie was surprised but pleased to hear that. “I’m hoping that we can all keep learning from each other for a long time,” she said finally. Her parents and the owner nodded, and Jamie rolled onto her back and covered her head with the towel to wipe off the sweat running freely down her face.

In the semi darkness from the towel, she heard the owner say to her parents, “You know, if you ever want to get rid of her, I’ll be happy to take her off your hands.”

“Sorry, but they’re not getting rid of me that easily,” Jamie said.

They all laughed and started cleaning off the gear and putting it away.