by Sam Winston
“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 away all 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.
* * *
“I’ve got money.” Weller was talking to Liz on the phone. Penny in bed and Weller planning to leave before she was up. Not having told Liz much about the journey ahead, not eager to tell her much about it now, and keeping it as simple and upbeat as he can. “I’ve got plenty of money, but I don’t really think money’s going to do me much good.”
“You mean cash or credits?”
“Both. Cash and data. Better than cash, really. A whole pile of AmeriBank scrip. They sewed it into my pack just in case. The trouble is, the fellow in charge doesn’t seem like he’ll care all that much about money. If he’d wanted to sell those cars, I think he’d have parted with them a long time ago.”
“So?”
“So all I can do is talk with him. Appeal to his sympathy and see what it’ll take. Whatever he wants, Carmichael will make happen. Anything with a price tag on it. I’ve got a letter.” Not mentioning everything else he had. A carton of water purifying tablets and food to last a month and nearly enough parts to build a second Harley from the ground up. Tool kits and inner tubes and spare gas cans. A pair of .38s and a half-case of ammunition. Plus a satellite phone for calling in air support as long as the satellites weren’t down, and signal flares and smoke canisters just in case. Not mentioning that the air support counted only if he’d gotten his hands on the car he was after. They’d come for the car but they wouldn’t come for him. It was part of the package and he accepted it.
“So how long do you think you’ll be?”
“They’re flying me to Richmond, and after that I’m on my own. I figure a couple of days down and two or three days back, depending on the roads. Then there’s dealing with this Marlowe and fixing up the car if I need to fix it up. Which I probably will.”
“You’ll call, though.”
“I’ll call Bainbridge when I can. This phone doesn’t work on a civilian band. He’ll call you. He’ll let you know how I’m doing.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
“I miss you now, Henry.”
“I miss you too.”
“Be careful.”
“Of course.”
“Come back.”
“I will.”
EIGHT:
Old Royalty
The helicopter pilot asked if he had anything for snakebite, and Weller said he figured there must be something along those lines in the first aid kit. He’d been inoculated against tetanus, hepatitis, rabies, encephalitis, and typhoid, so somebody must have thought about snakebite. The pilot shook his head and said Weller must not know anything about using a snakebite kit if he didn’t even know what a snakebite kit looked like, and Weller said he guessed that that was so. The pilot yawned and said training in this outfit had gone straight to hell. Letting a man die of snakebite from pure oversight. Weller said he’d just look out for snakes, how about that. He said he’d put up with all of the training he could stand, and if somewhere along the way somebody’d forgotten about a little thing like a snakebite kit then so be it. The pilot said you won’t think it’s a little thing when one of those rattlers gets hold of you. Copperheads and timber rattlers and diamondbacks hanging from the trees like Spanish moss. Hiding under every outcropping that didn’t have a bear living in it.
Then Weller kickstarted the Harley and it roared to life and the pilot headed back toward the chopper and they parted company. The pilot turning on the iron step and hollering watch out for alligators while you’re watching out, and Weller not hearing him. Just smiling and waving him off.
The outskirts of Richmond looked bombstruck. Looted and hollowed out and used up entirely. The chopper had put Weller down in a rest stop near where Ninety-Five had once intersected with Eighty-Five, and he had a job scrambling past the barricades. Eighty-Five would take him to Greensboro and then straight on to Spartanburg. Three states or what passed for them, Virginia and both of the old Carolinas. He sat the Harley and watched the sun move across the ruins of a distant roadside industrial complex and drank the last of a bottle of water. Threw it over the guardrail and watched it vanish into the trees below. Then he set out.
The road had seen use for a few years longer than the greened-over highways around north Jersey, but the climate here was warmer and wetter and PharmAgra had been gone from the cultivated fields for a generation and the return of everything to some modified version of its of pre- or post-natural state had been faster. A chaotic green aggression overwhelming the rectilinear work of man. Willows and cottonwoods and vast sycamores arched over the highway, hung with peppervine and Virginia creeper and supplejack. Screening the world beyond the margin of the road and screening the road itself. He found that large sections of the pavement were more or less undamaged, but the track beneath his tires was roped over with vines and roots and after the conversation he’d had with the pilot each one of them looked like a poisonous snake. He wondered how great a striking range such a thing might have, and every time he stopped to hack clear a path through dogbane or kudzu he was careful not to waste the slightest time or motion. Crawling down the jungle road on a throttled-down motorcycle, dressed in his old engineer striped coveralls and a Black Rose helmet with his baseball cap jammed underneath it, a machete tucked into a pair of bandoliers crossed over his back. Glad of the food he’d brung and wishing he hadn’t been half so optimistic to Liz regarding his time on the road. If only he’d known.
Under the dark forest green it was always a kind of night, but true night came at last. When he couldn’t see to travel farther he set up camp in an open space and built a fire from deadfalls and stoked it high. He took out food for supper and slung the rest between two trees at the margin of the clearing, beyond the reach of the black bears that were common here once and had no doubt returned. He left the pup tent rolled up and lashed to the back of the Harley, thinking he’d sleep under the stars. Saving himself the time needed to stow it in the morning. Get back to Liz and Penny that much faster. He drew up a log and ate his supper and sat listening to the crackle of the fire. The burst of pine knots one after another. Looking up at the numberless stars and wondering how many more nights before he made Spartanburg.
Beyond the circle of firelight, the uncontaminated darkness was loud with life. The scratching of insects and the creak of living green branches in soft wind. Small scurryings in dead leaves, and the underbrush crackling beneath some stealthy tread. The sudden rush of wings. He made up his bedroll and lay down and listened to a bullfrog calling from a culvert. The water in the culvert was stagnant and when the breeze was right it filled his nostrils with the stink of green mold and rusty black rot, and once from down in that dark place there came a dark splashing. A sudden movement of water and the chime of something hard raked across corrugated pipe.
If it was an alligator, he didn’t want any part of it. He didn’t want any part of it whatever it was. He got up and stoked the fire and unlashed the tent from the Harley. Switched on the flashlight and made his way to the edge of the woods, where he chose two trees to hang the canvas between. It made a makeshift hammock six feet off the ground, which he figured was enough. He scrambled in and looked up and saw no stars. Just the black canopy. So he dropped back down again and got another rope and shinnied up higher and slung the rope between the same two trees and draped his bedroll over it to keep off snakes.
* * *
Four days and nights of it altogether. The only change a cycling of the forest density that he could attribute to nothing in particular. Open stretches followed by stretches clogged with growth. He made time where he could and he chopped his way through where he had to. For the most part the road ran flat, rising up only now and then to accommodate some underpass or cloverleaf, and in these rhythms he felt the presence of the men who had come here before him. How they had built up one place and left another untouched. He began to sense the pulse of their engagement with this world, a faint but regular pattern that was the only sign remaining of their old dominion.
He noticed a rhythm to the way that his mind and his heart worked as well. How he awakened each morning thinking of Liz and Penny, how they drifted from his consciousness as the mechanics of the road took over, and how they returned to overwhelm him once more when the day’s work was done. Then the blackness of sleep and the night and the dawning of the day again and with it the two of them rising up. As if they were there already. As if they had awakened before him and drawn forth the day for his benefit. As a gift. A way of reminding him of their presence in the world.
On the third morning he dug out the satellite phone and called Bainbridge. The connection went through on the first try, which got him thinking how there were different satellites over different places on the earth and maybe he’d gone far enough that he was underneath a better one.
Bainbridge didn’t even say hello. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “What’s the fascination with North Carolina?”
Weller had forgotten about the GPS chip in the phone. How they’d know right where he was. “No fascination,” he said. “Just slow going.”
“What’d I tell you?”
Weller didn’t answer. He didn’t mention that Bainbridge and his people hadn’t actually said the first useful thing about how rough it might be down here in the wilderness. They’d been too busy obsessing over Marlowe.
Bainbridge was going on anyhow. Shifting gears. Bainbridge the motivator. Bainbridge the cheerleader. “You can handle it, though, son. No question about that. You can handle whatever North Carolina throws your way.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“We’re counting on you. Slow and steady. That’s our man.”
Weller watched the sun come up beyond the trees. This day that his wife and child had given to him. “Tell me the latest with Penny,” he said.
“Penny!” said Bainbridge. “Oh, my goodness. You ought to see the progress she’s making.”
“Honest?”
“Honest. Just these last few days.”
“Tell me.”
“The doctors are calling it a miracle.”
“How about the specifics?”
“Not off the top of my head. There were numbers. Measurements. You k
now, doctor talk.”
“Sure.” Watching that sun rise. His spirits rising with it. “It’s never the same as seeing for yourself.”
Despite the satellite connection, Bainbridge could hear the change in his voice. “Exactly,” he said. “So you’ve just got to buckle down now, buddy. Get your ass back home.”
“I will.”
“See your little girl.”
“I will.”
“ASAP.”
“I’m on it.”
“Because one thing I do know. She keeps on saying that she wants to see her daddy.”
* * *
There was thunder on the third night and hard rain. A protracted and furious storm that broke the humidity and the heat but not for long. A lightning strike woke him in the black middle of it all and he lay underneath his suspended bedroll with the rain pelting down in spite of the cover of trees, and in the morning when the storm was over the pelting went on. Rainwater dripping everywhere nonstop. He rolled his gear up wet and put everything on the Harley and filled the tank. Half of the gas used up already. Maybe not quite half, but close enough. He went on. He got up some speed on a bare stretch of road that arched high over a cloverleaf and spotted something he hadn’t seen in forever. A thin column of smoke rising, maybe half a mile away. In the stillness after the storm there was no wind and the smoke went straight up. Like a solid thing. He cut the engine and rolled to a stop and looked at it. Feeling himself badly exposed on the high road, but deciding that the feeling was only a reflex. He was just spooked. Accustomed to his solitude and taking any interruption of it as a personal intrusion. He watched the smoke standing grayblue against the green woods and decided what it was. The lightning strike that had jolted him awake. A tree set afire and still smoldering. That was all.
He went on. The underpasses were the hardest. Blind and overgrown caves where some other road ran above the road that he was on. Road or railroad trestle or both. They were black and ominous places, places absent any hint of distant light, places like mouths, and every time he passed through one of them without incident he could feel his luck diminish. As if he were using it up.
