He pushed this setback, and the sharp burning sensation that came with it, out of his mind and squeezed harder.
It hurt more. He grunted with the pain but kept trying to crush the little racquetball in his fist.
His thumb seemed as good as new, his last two fingers compressed the ball nicely, and his middle finger formed around it, its mobility restored by the surgery, though it did not seem to retain much strength.
He squeezed tighter on the ball, and a sharp ache in the back of his hand grew. Clark winced, but squeezed harder. The index finger had stopped twitching and relaxed, the frail muscles exhausted, and it went almost ramrod straight.
His hand hurt from the wrist all the way to his fingertips while he squeezed now.
He could live with the pain, and he could live with a slight lack of grip strength.
But the trigger finger was all but nonfunctional.
John relaxed his hand and the pain lessened. Sweat had formed on his forehead and around his collar.
The ball dropped to the hardwood floor and bounced across the room.
Yes, this was just his first test after the surgery, but he knew. He knew without a doubt that his hand would never be the same.
John’s right hand was damaged now, but he knew he could shoot a gun left-handed. Every Navy SEAL, and every CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary operations officer, spends more time on weak-hand shooting than most law enforcement officers do on strong-hand shooting, and John had spent nearly forty years as either a SEAL or a CIA operator. Weak-hand fire was necessary training for every shooter, because every shooter ran a real risk of getting wounded on or near his gun hand.
There is a widely held theory behind this phenomenon. When faced with the imminent danger of a gunfight, a potential victim tends to focus acutely on that which is threatening him. Not just the threat of the attacker, but the threat of the weapon itself. The little fire-breathing, lead-spitting tool that is trying to reach out and rip the intended victim apart. For this reason it is disproportionately common for people involved in gunfights to take damage to their dominant firing hand or arm. The other gunfighter is looking at and focusing on the gun as he fires back, so it only stands to reason that much of his fire is directed right at the gun itself.
Weak-hand shooting is, therefore, an absolutely crucial skill to develop by anyone who might find him- or herself up against an armed opponent.
Clark knew he could fire a gun accurately again with his left hand if he stepped up his practice.
But it wasn’t just the hand. It was the rest of him, too.
“You’re old, John,” he said to himself as he stood up and walked out to the back porch. He looked out on the pasture again, watched the mist roll across the dewy grass, saw a red fox dart out of the trees and race across open ground. Pooled rainwater splashed into the air behind it as it skittered back into the forest.
But not
John thought he’d love to drink a beer with that guy, two tough sons of bitches sharing stories about the old days.
Age is just a number, John had always said.
But the body? The body was real, and as the number of years ticked ever higher, the mileage put on a man in John Clark’s profession wore the body down as certainly as a swiftly moving stream cuts a depression through a valley. Springsteen and Stallone and the other geezers out there jumping around for a living had jobs that did not require one-fiftieth the hardship that Clark had endured, and no amount of rationalizing could change that.
Clark heard his wife’s SUV pull up in the gravel drive. He sat down on a rocker on the back porch and waited for them to come in.
A man in his mid-sixties sitting on the porch of a quiet farmhouse created a vision of peace and tranquility. But the image was deceptive. Inside the mind of John Clark, his prevailing thought was that he would like to get his good hand around the throat of that son of a bitch Valentin Kovalenko, the opportunistic Russian snake who did this to him, and then he’d like to test the strength and mobility of that hand on that bastard’s windpipe.
But that would never happen.
“John?” Sandy called from the kitchen.
The girls came in through the kitchen door behind him. John wiped the last vestiges of his sweat from his forehead, and he called, “I’m out here.”
A moment later Patsy and Sandy sat outside on the porch with him, waiting for him to speak. They’d each spent a minute chastising him for not waiting on their return. But any frustration melted away quickly when they read his mood. He was somber. Mother and daughter leaned forward anxiously, worried looks on both their faces.
“It moves. It grips… a bit. Maybe after some PT it will improve a little more.”
Patsy said, “But?”
Clark shook his head. “Not the outcome we’d hoped for.”
Sandy moved to him, sat in his lap, and hugged him tightly.
“It’s okay,” he said, comforting her. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse.” Clark thought for a moment. His torturers had been about a second away from driving a scalpel through his eye. He had not told Sandy or Patsy about this, of course, but it did pop into his head every now and then when he was dealing with his battered hand. He had a damn lot to be thankful for, and he knew it.
He continued. “I’m going to concentrate on PT for a while. The docs have done their part to fix me up; time for me to do mine.”
Sandy released the hug, sat up, and looked John in the eye.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s time for me to pack it in. I’ll talk to Ding first, but I’m going to go in and see Gerry on Monday.” He hesitated a long time before saying, “I’m done.”
“Done?”
“I’m going to retire. Really retire.”
Though she clearly tried to hide it, John saw a relief in Sandy’s face that he had not seen in years. In decades. It was virtually the same as joy.
She had never complained about his work. She’d spent decades enduring his late-night dashes out of the house with no information as to where he was headed, his spending weeks away at a time, sometimes coming home bloodied and bruised and, more distressing to her, silent for days before he lightened up, his mind left the mission that he’d just returned from, and he could once again smile and relax and sleep through the night.
Their years in the UK with NATO’s counterterror unit Rainbow had been some of the best times of her life. His hours were almost normal and their time together had been well spent. But still, even during their time in the UK, she knew that the fate of dozens of young men rested on his shoulders, and she knew this weighed heavily on him.
With their return to the States and his employment at Hendley Associates, once again Sandy saw the stress and strain on his body and mind. He was an operator in the field again — she knew this without a doubt, though he rarely went into details about his activities away from home.
The previous year her husband had been dubbed an international outlaw by the American press, he’d gone on the run, and she’d worried day and night while he was away. The matter had been put to bed in the press quickly and cleanly with a public apology by the outgoing U.S. President and John’s life had been given back to him, but when he’d come back from wherever he’d been off to, it was not to come home. It was, instead, to go into the hospital. He’d been beaten badly, to within an inch of his life, one of his surgeons had told Sandy quietly in a waiting room while John was under anesthesia, and though he’d come out of his ordeal with a damaged right hand, she thanked God every day that he’d come out of it at all.
John talked it over with the two women in his life for a few minutes more, but any doubts he had about his
