What Came After (18 page)

Penny said if he was in such a hurry to talk with them, then he should just finish up what he was doing and come on home. Her mother laughed but there was sadness in it. He laughed too and said that he thought that was a good idea. A first-rate idea. He’d come on home just as soon as he could.

*

A month would pass before he was ready to move on south. A month spent in the weight room and on the road and at the target range. A month spent studying under tough men who’d devoted their lives to tough jobs. And a month spent chowing down on the healthiest diet he’d ever eaten, dishes absolutely unknown where he’d come from, in quantities beyond his imagination. Banquets, one after another.

Above all, it was a month of being torn in multiple directions. To stay or to go, to keep improving himself or to be tested, to persevere or to risk everything. He let himself call the hospital no more than every third day, because it was too difficult to see Liz and Penny for a moment and then to stop seeing them. Each time he pushed the button that ended the call, he thought he might die. Some of the soldiers said that to toughen himself he shouldn’t call at all, and others counseled that he should call every single day if it hurt all that much because the pain would keep him sharp. But they didn’t know what they were talking about. They weren’t Henry Weller. They weren’t Liz’s husband and they weren’t Penny’s father and they didn’t know. So he called every third day. It was the compromise that pained him the least.

Toward the beginning of the fourth week he noticed a definite change in Penny. Her eyes didn’t seem to have that swimming quality they’d always possessed. Not so much anyhow. There was more purpose to their movement. It couldn’t be his imagination. She had a stack of crayon drawings she’d been making, some kind of therapy her mother said, and she was showing them to him one by one. Pointing out details. This one showed the view out the window and the next one was a portrait of one of the nurses and the one after that was their house back in Connecticut. What she could convey of it. Some of the details were more imaginary than real and all of them were colorful. He marveled as she chirped on in her high voice. Not only over what she’d drawn, but over her mere presence. The breaths she took. After she ran out of pictures she disappeared into the other room on some errand and he asked Liz if she’d seen what he was seeing. Was their daughter actually improving?

She said she was. Most of this had happened in the last couple of days. A corner Penny had turned. She’d gone crazy waiting for his call. And had he noticed the other thing? Had he noticed that she’d grown three or four inches?

No, he hadn’t. Blame it on the television. The lack of any context.

Trust her, she had. She’d grown three or four inches and she was filling out some and getting stronger than she’d ever been in spite of being indoors all day out of the sun and the fresh air. Lying in bed half the time, hooked up to an IV. But getting stronger. As Liz leaned toward the camera he couldn’t help noticing that she was looking stronger too. There was more color in her cheeks. Her hair was glossier. A little bit more meat on her bones unless he missed his guess. Half of him wanted to run back to her and the other half wanted to put it off as long as possible. Let her keep on eating whatever it was they were feeding her in New York. Build up her strength for whatever lay ahead. The rest of their lives.

*

Liz and Penny weren’t the only ones getting stronger. “I must say you’re looking fit, my boy,” Bainbridge said as he joined Weller in the mess one morning. Finished with their run and out of the showers and stoking up for the day.

“You think so?”

“By all means.”

“I’m giving myself another week,” Weller said.

Bainbridge nodded. “Suit yourself. May I add that you’re doing nicely with that .38 special.”

“I guess. Thanks.” Reaching for more toast. “Honestly, what do you think are the odds that I’ll need it?”

“They’d better be slim. If there’s any serious shooting to be done, you’re going to be outnumbered and outgunned. Marlowe’ll have guard towers, snipers, the whole nine yards. Then again, maybe not. Nobody’s done any recon down there in years. He might have given up on all that stuff. He might have put a welcome mat outside the front door. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Right.”

“My money’s on the middle ground, though.” Starting to tick ideas off on his fingers. “Tripwires. Listening posts. A handful of men on the roof, lightly armed but well trained and wound up tighter than ticks.”

“That’s how you’d do it.”

“That’s
exactly
how I’d do it.”

“But you’re old-fashioned.”

“Marlowe’s old-fashioned. Plus he’s got to be getting a little complacent by now. Put yourself in his shoes. His men haven’t taken a shot at anything more upright than a black bear since you were in short pants. Never mind the manpower it would take to mount a full watch twenty-four hours a day on a facility like that. My hunch is he’s gotten a little bored, and found some better things to do with his men.”

“But it’s just a hunch.”

“A solid gold, forty-year, five-star hunch. They don’t come much better.”

“How well did you know him, anyhow?”

Bainbridge was suddenly captivated by his oatmeal. “Well enough.”

“What does that mean?”

Bainbridge looked up. “What it means is that he was my friend. We went to the Naval Academy together, and the minute the shit hit the fan we both got hustled off to Iraq. I hated it. I hated the heat and the sand and the wind. I hated the noise worst of all. We lived in house trailers stacked up inside a big warehouse on an airfield in Qatar—can you picture that?—and the noise in that place never stopped. Generators going night and day. Lights everywhere that wouldn’t go off. The work wasn’t bad, son, but the living conditions were hell.”

“Right.”

“The thing was, Marlowe couldn’t get enough of it. He just thrived on that stuff. Some men do. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to figure out why that is, what traits might make a man go one way or the other. It would be useful to know that kind of thing, especially with an all-volunteer outfit. If you could figure that out, you’d have something.”

“So?”

“I still don’t have a clue. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I always thought that when I went one way and Marlowe went the other, he took the tougher road.”

“Maybe your road would have been harder for him.”

“That’s a lovely idea, buddy, but it doesn’t wash. I went looking for a great big desk to hide behind, and he went after the dirtiest work a person could get his hands on. Five years later, where were we? I was back in Washington on the way to my second star, and he was flying top-secret missions for SEAL Team Six. In case you don’t know, that means he was one tough sonofabitch. As hard as they come.”

“Is that so.”

“The stuff of legends. Marlowe may have reported to a desk jockey up the chain of command, a desk jockey like me, but he was never that man’s inferior. Not for one minute.”

“I sounds like he knew it.”

“You bet your ass he knew it. They all do,” said Bainbridge. “And the problem is, so do we.”

“So what happened?”

“Afghanistan happened. By which I mean Pakistan. He was one of the boys who went over the border in a couple of choppers and took out that fellow bin Laden. Remember him? Remember bin Laden?”

“It rings a bell.”

“Jesus. People always say that the victors write the history books, but there aren’t any history books anymore and there isn’t any history either. Nobody remembers anything. This bin Laden was a very big deal. A major terrorist, a major target.
Numero uno.
There were parties in the streets when we got him.”

“When Marlowe got him.”

“Right.”

“Then what?”

“Then Marlowe thought it was time to go home. He thought he was done.
Mission accomplished
and all that. He figured he’d bagged the number one target in the war on terror, and they ought to let him turn in his dog tags.”

“I can understand that.”

“Worst of all, he decided he had it coming. He let his ego get involved, which never ends well. SEALs aren’t even supposed to have egos. They’re supposed to do their jobs and maintain their anonymity and leave the hero worship for Superman.” He buttered his toast and stared at it. “Not Marlowe. Not after bin Laden. He wanted a goddamn ticker tape parade, and Uncle Sam didn’t give him one.”

“Aww.”

“Aww
is right. And do you know the saddest part? He sat right down and wrote me a letter. His old pal the general. It said he was up for another tour of duty and he didn’t think he should have to serve it on account of what he’d accomplished, but he couldn’t find anybody who’d let him out. He wondered if I would be so kind as to put in a word on his behalf.”

“Did you do it?”

“What do you think? He served two more consecutive tours whether he liked it or not, and then Uncle Sam made up his mind to get out of the soldiering business. Marlowe cashed out rather than going to work for Black Rose. It was beneath him. He wrote a book instead. I guess he thought it would sell a million copies, but nobody gave a shit anymore. Everybody was on to the next thing by then and Marlowe was old news.”

Weller shook his head.

“So there you have it. He broke cover and gave away everybody’s identity and not one person in the whole wide world even gave a damn. So much for his ticker tape parade. Next thing you know, he was knocking on the door at Black Rose with his tail between his legs.”

“Old soldiers, I guess.”

“Old soldiers. Exactly. What the hell else could he do?”

*

According to Bainbridge, outsiders called it Marlowe’s Retreat. The place and the action both. Where he ended up and how he got there. Word was that when he’d quit Black Rose he’d taken the toughest men with him. The misfits and the hard cases, culled from an operation where misfits and hard cases were the top of the heap. The men who understood that he’d blown his identity and blown everybody else’s identity in the process and didn’t care. The men who’d have done it themselves, given the chance. They’d have followed him into Pakistan and they would follow him now wherever he was going. All the way to Spartanburg.

Everybody in the Pentagon spoke of Marlowe’s Retreat with a mixture of derision and fear and grudging respect. He was a turncoat and a quitter, but he’d had the courage to be both. He’d risen through the system and then he’d thrown it all away, and then he’d risen through the system again only to throw it all away once more. The SEALs first and then Black Rose, and now he was freelance. Independent. A mercenary’s mercenary, when you got down to it.

But why Spartanburg? Why the hills of South Carolina of all places, when men that hard and that capable could have gone anywhere at all. Spartanburg certainly wasn’t paradise. Marlowe could have taken Cuba if he’d been after paradise. He and his men could have thrown out Castro and claimed the island for their own and nobody would have denied them. They’d spent their working lives overthrowing regimes like his and for what. A paycheck in the SEALs. A paycheck and immunity from criminal prosecution in Black Rose. Big deal. Try prosecuting Marlowe if you think he needs immunity. Try prosecuting any of them. Try giving a single one of of Marlowe’s men so much as a traffic ticket, and see how far you get.

Bainbridge said Marlowe had grown up in Spartanburg or somewhere right around there. He had a southern accent. The accent of a good old boy who wasn’t a boy anymore and wasn’t much good either, except by his own lights. Bainbridge had come to Annapolis with a diploma from Choate, and Marlowe had come from some regional high school south of the Mason-Dixon. A great big football-playing gum-chewing southern-fried tarheel, and Bainbridge had befriended him. Worse than that. He’d looked up to him, for possessing something that he didn’t. Something internal that drove him to achieve at the academy independent of Choate and the Bainbridge family tradition and the expectations of Beacon Hill society back home in Boston. And later on, too, for the mysterious quality that Bainbridge had spent all of these years trying to name. The personality trait that made a person take the most difficult path there was, simply because he couldn’t help himself.

Marlowe and his men had moved to Spartanburg when everybody else was moving out. When the car plant shut down and the other plants that had grown up around it shut down too. When the UPS trucks stopped coming and FedEx tailed off and then the mail. The U.S. Postal Service outsourced entirely and deliveries cut back to weekdays and then just two days a week. Mostly junk coming then, and soon enough not even junk since nobody had the money to buy whatever somebody else might be selling. There was nothing left but the Wal-Mart and the dollar stores selling imported goods that people used to make here better, like this was the third world. Like they’d had to invent a second third world since they’d worn out the first one. Other than low-end retail there was only fast food and health care, and those two seemed to go together. A match made in heaven. Until Medicare ran out and Social Security went bust and nobody had any use for the government anymore anyway. Why should you keep paying your taxes when there’s nothing coming back. How can you pay taxes when you’ve got no income. Congress tried, but it was blood from a stone. Then the people with the real power brought Angler back and called it quits. That was the signal for Marlowe and his army to go AWOL for good. To leave their Black Rose bases, both the new headquarters in Washington and the old place in Kill Devil Hills, and close in on what was left of Spartanburg. Like teams of murderous angels, swooping to their own rescue.