He agreed to their request at the time, but now he realized he needed to do this by himself. He was too anxious to wait, he was too proud to strain and struggle in front of his wife and daughter, but more than this, he knew he would need to push himself much further than his daughter, the doctor, or his wife, the nurse, would allow.
They were worried he might hurt himself, but John wasn’t worried about pain. He’d learned to process pain better than almost anyone in the world. No, John worried he might fail. He’d do whatever he physically could to avoid it, and he had a feeling it would not be pretty to watch. He’d test his strength and mobility by pushing himself as far as humanly possible.
Standing at the kitchen counter, he unwrapped his bandages and removed the small metal splints from between his fingers. Turning away from the window, he left the dressings on the counter and moved to the living room. There he sat on his leather chair and raised his hand to examine it. The surgical scars, both new and old, were small and not particularly dramatic, but he knew they belied the incredible damage done to his hand. His orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins was regarded as one of the best in the world, and he had performed the surgery through tiny incisions, using laparoscopic cameras and fluoroscopic images to help him find his way to the damaged bones and scar tissue.
John knew that even though his hand did not look too bad, his chances for a complete recovery were less than fifty percent.
Perhaps if the blunt trauma had been just a little higher on the hand, then the joints of the fingers would have less scar tissue, the doctors had said. Perhaps if he had been a little younger, his ability to heal would be enough to ensure a complete recovery, they hinted without saying.
John Clark knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about either issue.
He pushed the poor prognosis out of his mind and steeled himself for success.
He picked a racquetball off the coffee table in front of him and he looked it over — his eyes fixed with resolve.
“Here we go.”
Clark slowly began closing his fingers around the ball.
Almost immediately he realized he was still unable to completely mobilize his index finger.
His trigger finger.
Shit.
Both the proximal and middle phalanx bones had been virtually crushed by the torturer’s hammer, and the interphalangeal joint, already slightly arthritic from a lifetime of trigger pulling, was now severely damaged.
As his other fingertips pressed into the little blue ball, his trigger finger merely twitched.
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.
Yeah, Clark told himself. He was old for operational work.
But not that old. John was roughly the same age as both Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, and they were still going strong in careers that required no small amount of physicality, even if there was no danger involved. And he’d recently read an article in the paper about a sixty-year-old Marine staff sergeant fighting in Afghanistan, walking daily mountain patrols in enemy territory with men young enough to be his grandchildren.
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.