Allahu Akbar!

He didn't fill either one of them instead opting to take 800mg ibuprofen tablets, the cure-all choice of 'medications' of Navy doctors and corpsmen everywhere. He was sore but not sore enough to take something he had no desire to take unless the pain became unbearable.

His own townhouse had just gone on the market the week before, and in this seller's market it had been snapped up in a bidding war on day one. Patterson had a taxi driver take him to the Sheraton Hotel right across from Headquarters Marine Corps Henderson Hall and adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery.

He hated missing the reunion, but he was in no condition to fly. With the high-dose ibuprofen the pain was bearable but just barely so. He flipped through the cable channels and found a ball game on ESPN then grabbed a cordial-sized bottle of Scotch from the mini bar and sipped it straight.

He wasn't paying any attention to the game, but when he heard someone talking about 'the recent terror attack at Reagan National Airport' he did his best to sit up and listen.

As the reporter recounted the events of that day, none of it moved him until Patterson saw the image of the tiny body underneath a sheet or cloth with a grieving mother beside it.

"Fucking animal," he said to himself.

Patterson didn't hate Muslims. He didn't hate anyone. But he hated evil and these jihadists were the personification of evil; driven by a kind of religious zealotry that mattered more to them than life itself. He'd long ago concluded the only way to end this scourge was to kill them all as there was no talking to or negotiating with anyone who valued death over life. And because they so sincerely believed God was behind their cause, compromise was out of the question as they beheaded, burned to death, and even crucified children in their unholy wake.

He was reaching for the remote to switch channels when he saw a woman who looked to be around 70 or so saying, "We watched that brave young man move right in front of her just as they got to the ladies room—right over there."

She was pointing to the restroom Patterson vaguely remembered when she said, "He was shot in the side or the chest and fell down right there while the young woman he was protecting made it inside. I just crouched down over behind those chairs over there and watched the whole thing and prayed to the Lord for protection. That young man is a hero in my book."

"Yeah, that's me," Patterson said cynically, unimpressed by the coverage. He did wonder, however, if the girl...what was her name? Oh, right—Ashely. He wondered if she was okay and whether or not she made it to her reunion.

He killed the Scotch, downed one more, then very slowly lowered himself onto the bed not bothering to even remove the comforter and tried to find a position that didn't hurt too badly.

Unlike Ashley, Patterson had seen people killed in real time. He'd been involved in several firefights during his year in Afghanistan, and had seen no less than a dozen dead bodies. Ten of them had been jihadis. Two of them had been U.S. Marines from his company. One of them had also been a close friend.

He rarely let himself think about that fateful day because there was nothing he could do to change it. And it was still just as painful some ten years later whenever he did think about his friend laying there next to him—dead, his eyes wide open, the pupils blown, and the feeling of helplessness that had engulfed him after he'd done everything he could to stop the bleeding after his leg had been severed by an RPG in a pre-planned, well-coordinated ambush by another faceless group of Muslim fanatics.

He was buried just a few hundreds away from where Patterson was laying. Even though he'd gone to pay his respects four different times over the years, he thought about going again the next day no matter how he felt. He ended up not going as he felt a whole lot worse the next day, but even that barely assuaged his guilt.

He had no idea what time it was when he woke up the following morning, but he thought someone was trying to break down the door before he realized it was someone knocking.

"Colonel Patterson? It's Karen McDowell from CNN. Are you in there?"

"You've gotta be shittin' me," he said to himself as he slowly rolled over before standing up even more slowly.

"Hold on!" he called out as he reached for something to put on. "I'll be right there."

*****

"Ashley?" she heard a familiar voice behind her say.

"Oh, my goodness! Ronnie! How are you?" she said as they hugged one another.

"You look fantastic," he told her truthfully.

"You, too!" she said back in spite of his thinning hair and growing paunch.

"You're still single?" he asked.

She held up her left hand and said, "Yep. How about you?"

"Divorced," he told her. "I married Candace Jennings about a year after I saw you that one time."

"Oh, right. Yeah, I remember her," Ashely said. "Do you have any children?"

"One. A boy. He's four now and he's gonna be starting Kindergarten this Fall."

"They grow up so fast, huh?" she said not sure what else to say.

"Say? Do you maybe want to do something while you're in town?" he asked her.

"Oh, I don't know, Ronnie. Sorry. My mom said you go by 'Ronald' now."

"You can call me whatever you like, Ashley. You know, I...I never really got over you," he told her.

"Yeah, we were getting pretty serious back in the day, weren't we?" she said remembering those days in the back of his car or in one of their bedrooms.

Ronnie had been her first, and she'd always treasure the memories they shared. But seeing him put a kind of damper on them although she'd never admit it. Ashley worked so hard at keeping herself in shape, and while she didn't care about something like hair loss, she found it hard to be interested in anyone who didn't take the same kind of care of his body that she took of hers. If that was shallow then so be it. She never held anything against a person they couldn't help, but it was harder for her to overlook the things they could.

"I was stone cold in love with you back then," he told her making her feel a bit uncomfortable.

"That was a long time ago, though," she said politely.

"There's no reason we couldn't get that back again," Ronald told her. "I mean, unless you're seeing someone."

"Oh, no. I'm not seeing anyone," she told him. "My job keeps me pretty busy, and I have a couple of girlfriends I'm really close with so we hang out together and do a lot of stuff."

"Then what do you say? Do you want to see if the magic is still there?" he asked hopefully.

"I'm only here for a couple more days, Ronnie. It might be best if we just leave things the way we left them ten years ago," she said as nicely as she could.

"Okay. Well, you can't blame me for trying, right? I mean, you still look good, Ash. Really, really good."

"Ahh! Thank you, Ron...ald," she said putting her hand on his shoulder and kissing him on the cheek. "You take care of yourself and that little boy of yours, okay?"

As she watched her old flame walk away for the second time, she realized how fortunate she'd been that they'd ended things right after graduation. The thought of being back here, living in their small hometown, and married with a couple of kids sent a chill up down her back.

She grabbed a glass of white wine and made her way toward an area where there was a large flatscreen TV and heard someone say, "See! I told you that was Ashley."

"Our Ashley? Ashley Morgan?" another guy said.

"Yep. I knew that was her," the first guy said.

As she stood next to them the second guy said to the first, "Dude. Turn around."

"That is too weird," he said. "Ashley! You were just on TV. Well, a picture of you was. They didn't say your name, but I knew. I mean, you still look just like you did back in high school."

"Danny Turnbull," she said with a smile to the class clown.

"No, I'm not kidding. They were showing that airport shooting again and then this reporter was interviewing this Marine guy who they said jumped in front of you and got shot. They said he saved your life."

"Did they show his picture?" she asked now suddenly very interested.

"No. They showed him. He was on TV being interviewed in person in his hotel room somewhere right next to Arlington Cemetery. Why? Do you know the guy?"

"There! That's him!" the first guy said pointing to the screen.

Ashley looked up and instantly recognized him. The camera panned from him to the reporter as she wrapped up the interview.

"People are calling retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bart Patterson a hero for saving the life of a woman he only knows by her first name of 'Ashley'. Colonel Patterson humbly disagrees claiming he just stumbled into the line of fire. We'll leave up to you folks at home to decide which story you believe. For CNN, I'm Karen McDowell reporting live near Arlington National Cemetery."

"Dang, girl! You're famous!" Danny said wanting to high five her.

Ashley ignored him as her thoughts turned to the handsome retired Marine who very well may have saved her life. She assumed she'd never see him again as she expected he'd be back in Ohio by now. He'd looked a little rough around the edges in the interview, but that was understandable considering how he was nursing a gunshot wound.

"Guys? It was really great seeing you again," she told them both as she excused herself.

"Let me at least buy you a drink!" Danny called out as she walked away.

She held up her wine glass and called back, "Maybe at our 20th, Danny."

"I'm gonna hold you to that, Ashley!" he hollered as she set the glass down and got out her phone. Very quietly he said, "I just love to ****-ing hold you!"

It took her over an hour to get through the maze of phone calls and Ashley never did get ahold of the reporter she'd just seen on TV. She'd been patched through to a producer who let her know the network wanted to interview her very badly.

"We can have someone from our Seattle affiliate to your location in less than an hour," she'd been told.

Ashley was going to say 'no thank you' but instead said, "If we can do this tomorrow sometime that'll be fine. But I want something in exchange for the interview."

"Name it," the producer told her.

And just like that she had a promise they would give Bart Patterson her cell phone number with a request to call her. She sat there and thought about what happened again for a very long time before remembering it was well after midnight in the DC area. Then again, the producer didn't say he'd be passing on her info that very moment.

Ashely sighed then dropped her phone back in her purse and decided to try and enjoy what was left of her 10-year reunion.

She laughed when her mother was asleep in a recliner having tried to wait up for her daughter to come home. It was a little after 2am when she got in and her mom made such a loud snorting noise when she woke up, Ashley couldn't help herself and covered her mouth as she laughed.

"How was the reunion, honey?" her mom asked ignoring the laughter.

"It was okay, Mom," she replied.

"Just...okay?"

"Yeah. Not bad but nothing great, either. It was nice to see the old crew again, but, this just isn't home anymore."

Very quickly she added, "Except for you and Dad, of course."

"I'm really sorry to hear that, honey. Did you see Ronnie?" she asked forgetting she was the one who'd told her daughter he was going by Ronald now.

"I did. We had a short-but-nice little chat. I wasn't aware he'd gotten married. Or divorced. Or that he had a child."

"Oh, my. I didn't know that, either," her mom said. "So...did you meet anyone interesting?"

Ashley understood exactly what her mother meant. She wanted to know if perhaps her daughter had managed to somehow fall in love, get engaged, and might soon be having her first grandchild.

"No. No one special. I did have a nice, long talk with Darcy, though. It was like we were still best friends back in high school. Other than that it was mostly just, 'Hi, hello, what's new in the last ten years, take care, see you later, kind of stuff."

"Okay. Well, I guess I must have fallen asleep out here," her mom said as though it was just by chance. "I suppose I'll head on up to bed now."

Ashley hugged her mom and told her how much she loved her. She didn't say anything about her upcoming interview and assumed her mom hadn't been watching CNN when Bart's interview aired. Then again, she and her dad almost never watched anything but Fox News so that wasn't surprising.

She knew that if her mom had seen it she'd have driven straight to the reunion to make sure her daughter was okay as though the danger that existed in Washington DC might have suddenly popped up in Washington AC and right where her daughter was standing, of course. It would be bad enough when Ashley had to finally tell her, but at least she'd be there to mitigate the fallout.

"Sleep tight, dear," her mother told her.

"You too, Mom," Ashley told her before retiring to the room she'd lived in while growing up.

As she thought about the interview, and that caused her to once again relive the horror of the attack. They say time slows down in a moment like that, but to Ashley, the whole thing seemed to have taken just seconds. And when it was over, there was blood everywhere. People were crying and moaning, and that poor little girl and her mother...

She shuddered before forcing the scenes of death out of her mind and falling asleep.

By the time she woke up, Ashley was relieved she hadn't gotten a call from Bart. She barely knew him, and he was a married man. Yes, she wanted to thank him, but she also realized men like that didn't need personal thank you's. Guys like that would be okay by virtue of their knowing they'd done the right thing regardless of the consequences. Even so, at some point, she did hope to be able to thank him.

Maybe she was still overly idealistic, but Ashely couldn't help wanting to meet a man like that one day. There were all kinds of patriotic guys working all around her, but other than the uniform they wore, there wasn't really anything about them that set many of them apart from every other decent, patriotic American she knew.

But Bart Patterson was different, and she'd sensed that almost as soon as she'd sat down and started talking with him. In a word, she was more than a little bit envious of his wife and hoped she appreciated the unsung hero-husband to whom she was married. She also assumed that was the case as men like that tended to stay married to the kind of women who truly did understand the kind of man they'd pledged to love 'til death do us part. And thankfully, death hadn't taken him from her or their children.

Both of her parents were downstairs when she finished showering and getting dressed.

"Morning, Mom. Morning, Dad," she told them both before giving them both a hug on the cheek.

"Why are you all dressed up?" her dad asked after noticing she was wearing a dress and heels.

"Well, there's something I wanted to discuss with both of you," she said hoping against hope this would go well—or at least not blow up in her face.

"Sounds serious," her father said.

"Ashley? Did you meet someone last night you didn't want to tell me about? Is this a first date by any chance?" her mom asked with that 'I'm so excited' tone of voice.

"It's kind of serious, and no, I really didn't meet anyone, Mom."

Her dad put down the morning paper and said, "Okay, honey. Let us have it."

For the next couple of minutes she gave them the shortest, quickest explanation of what had happened she possibly could. Yes, they knew she was at the airport, but she'd never talked about what happened, mostly because she didn't know anything beyond what she'd seen. Even now, she refused to talk about the little girl or her mother, but she did explain about Bart, the interview on CNN, and the one she was about to give.

"Oh, my Lord!" her mother exclaimed. "You could have been killed!"

"Sounds to me like the young man who got shot protecting her is the one who almost got killed," her father said gruffly.

"How can you be so calm when our daughter almost died?" her mom asked now nearly hysterical.

"Because 'almost' means it didn't happen, that's why. She's fine. Stop blowing this out of proportion."

"Your father!" she said with a hint of disgust.

"Mom, he's right. I'm fine. And Bart will be too, according to what I heard. I'd just like to thank him and doing this interview seems like the best way to do that."

"I think it's a great idea, honey," her father said. "But if it's on CNN we may not be watching it."

"Oh, that's ridiculous!" her mom said. "I don't care if it's on that A-rab TV channel Al-Jazzy or whatever it's called. If our daughter is on television, we're watching it!"

Edwin shook his head but didn't reply. Thirty-five years of marriage told him when to leave well enough alone, and this was one of those times.

"So...anyway, I'm going over to the high school so they can use it as the backdrop for their 'local, small-town girl saved by hero' clip when they air it back in the DC area. Of course, I live in Arlington, Virginia, now, but that's not as interesting a story line, I suppose."

"DC doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground," her father snorted. "Then again, most of the idiots living within 50 miles of Seattle don't, either! This place has gone to hell in a hand basket since I was your age, Ash."

This time, Susan shook her head and Ashely smiled while trying not to laugh as she realized the more things changed the more they really did stay the same.

"Okay. I'll guess I'll see you both after the interview," she told them.

"The interview! Right! I've got to call all my friends from the church group. They're going to be so jealous when I tell them my daughter is going to be on TV!" her mom said, her concern for Ashley's safety suddenly replaced with glee.

A few minutes later, Ashley was standing directly in front of the school marquee and its Spartan logo as the local reporter asked questions.

"Were you ever afraid for your life, Ms. Morgan?"

Ashely wanted to say, "Oh, no. I have guns pulled on me every day, you fool!"

Instead she said, "I didn't have time to get scared until after I got inside the restroom."

"As you know, we've interviewed the man who may have saved your life. Retired Marine Colonel Bart Patterson took a bullet for you. What would you like to say to him right now?"

Ashley got more serious then said as she looked directly into the camera as though he were standing right there.

"Above all else I want to say 'thank you', Bart. Beyond that I hope you fully recover soon and, well, if you're ever in the neighborhood again, the next drink's on me. Both of us were planning on attending reunions and thanks to him, I was able to get home and attend mine and spend a few days with my family. I'm just grateful he was able to live to see his wife and family again."

The reporter saw a new angle open up and went in for the kill.

"So you know Colonel Patterson? Had you met prior to what we all thought was a chance encounter during the incident of workplace violence?"

"Workplace violence? Are you kidding me? Where do you people dream up that kind of nonsense?" she said with an edge.

Ashley took a deep breath to calm herself then said, "But yes, Bart and I had just met in an airport bar. It was very crowded and he let me sit next to him in the only available seat. We had a drink together and talked for a minute or two before he walked me to my gate and...a religious fanatic opened fire on a bunch of innocent people."

"So are you saying you felt some sort of romantic connection with him?" the reporter said ignoring the obvious dig about her network's take on the issue of Islamic terrorism, a term it would never think of using.