They sprang from nowhere, one with the trees, rifles blasting. Bane felt the heat of the bullets ripping into his side and back but maintained his calm. The ambushers had expected to take him with the first burst. The need for a second gave Bane an advantage he was not about to squander. He cut down four as they stood, and another three while they reloaded. Two others rushed him with bayonets leveled. Thanks primarily to King Cong, though, that was hardly the way to take out the Winter Man, even from the front and rear simultaneously. Bane averted their charge with a deft move to the side once their move was made. He slit their throats with a single thrust of his knife, never taking his eyes from the clearing in case the other three soldiers who had fled reappeared.
How he’d then dragged himself five miles through dense jungle despite a half-dozen bullet wounds, Bane never remembered. Only figments and fragments of what had transpired remained in his memory. He couldn’t reach most of the wounds to stitch them as he’d been taught, so he left the bleeding alone, to stop on its own. When he wandered out of the trees white and dazed, children ran thinking he was some kind of ghost. They were not far off. There was no clinical reason for him to be alive.
Three weeks later Bane was transferred to a Washington military hospital where he lay supine all day and ate out of tubes. His nurse was a brown-haired beauty named Nadine, and what followed was a storybook romance. Bane fell in love with her, deeply and hopelessly. He had never considered himself capable of feeling any emotion so strongly. But necessity had forced him to expose himself to Nadine, both physically and emotionally. She was his physical therapist as well, and they shared the long, painful hours during which he struggled to regain his strength and mobility. Each session would end with her rubbing out his tired muscles, inevitably tracing the lines of his many scars both new and old. Her smile was alive and warm, and she had a peculiar laugh which Bane always focused on in the moments before sleep, hoping to dream of her.
He learned that her last name was Fisk and that her husband had been a paratrooper killed in Vietnam. She had a son named Peter, nearly ten, who took an immediate liking to Bane when Nadine brought him to the hospital one afternoon after school. The boy was painfully shy but flashed his mother’s smile often enough to tie Bane’s emotions in knots. Soon Bane was walking with a cane and then without, his recovery miraculous even by the most liberal standards. The months had passed, slow and long, and during them a bond had formed between him and Nadine that Bane could never imagine himself breaking. She was closer to him than any other person he had ever known and he didn’t want to lose that feeling, once avoided but now sorely required. He moved Nadine and Peter into a Washington brownstone with him two weeks after being discharged from the hospital. He married her before the month was out, in a simple ceremony with Arthur Jorgenson serving as the best man.
Bane laid the Winter Man to rest.
But it didn’t last. He moved his new family to New York after a few months to escape the governmental overtones of Washington. Once away from them, he hoped the urge to get back into the Game would diminish. It didn’t, despite the long workouts he started at the gym the King had opened with Bane’s money, or the love of the family he had found. Finally, after lying in bed three nights in a row in a cold sweat, he flew to Washington for a meeting with Arthur Jorgenson. He wanted to be the Winter Man again, on different terms now and not all the time.
Jorgenson was skeptical but relented and in the end his greatest fears were realized. Bane had something to lose now and he uncharacteristically bungled assignments and botched up standard procedures. What’s more, in the months he had been out of the Game more had changed than just his attitude. There were more codes, different ones, and worse, additional accounts to be made for all unsanctioned actions. Bane was confused, bothered. He missed his contact code once, and Harry the Bat flew to Berlin in his place to track down Trench and ended up getting his spine blown apart. Bane flew out after him to pick up the pieces.
He was walking through Kennedy Airport after his return flight when a New York state trooper approached him with the tragic news that his wife and stepson had been killed by a drunk driver on the interstate. Bane took the news with silence instead of tears, while inside he was ripping at the seams. His gut shook with fear. Death had struck him close to home and all at once his own mortality was obvious. He had, briefly, had something to lose, had lost it and all motivation as well. He wasn’t invincible; no one was. Death wasn’t pretty. He had caused enough, seen enough.
Bane mourned Nadine, Peter, and most of all himself. He grew tired, alone, and for the first time being alone bothered him. He spent long nights going to movies by himself, sitting through the same feature three, maybe four times. The only similar period of his life had followed the murder of his father. Then, though, he had thrown himself into his desire for revenge. Now there was nothing to revenge, nothing to throw himself into. He had exhausted everything. He withdrew into a shell, went to Arthur Jorgenson to be let out all the way, and was told in so many words that in his line of work that was impossible. They had to keep hold. It was the price you paid. Bane didn’t care, just plunged into his workouts at the King’s and picked up his check every other week at the Center.
Then Janie came into his life. Their relationship was slow to develop, with Janie having to pick and choose the moments to delve into Bane’s mind and his hurt. She was sympathetic, understanding, and above all patient. And Bane accepted her because she knew when to leave him alone. He didn’t love her and wondered seriously if he would ever be capable of loving anyone again. Janie understood and accepted this, hoping to heal the emotional wounds that had lingered long after the physical ones had closed.
Of course, fuller minds in Washington regarded Bane’s plight in a different way. His file described him as “traumatized and nerve shattered. Severe emotional handicaps brought on by overexposure to violence and acceptance thereof. Unsalvageable for field.” The file went on to say that the deaths of his wife and stepson had only speeded up an inevitable process.
The machine had become obsolete.
Until this morning.
Somebody had killed Jake Del Gennio and all of a sudden Harry the Bat was a part of his life again. Then seeing that boy at Rockefeller Center … Peter at fifteen …
The past might not be catching up but it was certainly making a determined surge. Bane felt different, changed, and it took him a while to realize he was moving forward in reverse, growing by going backward.
So as Janie rubbed his shoulders, he felt the old strength, the old senses coming back and he knew they hadn’t been dead at all — just dormant, in need of rest to recharge. They stirred slowly and Bane felt himself coming alive again.
“Any luck in pinning down the government group responsible for delaying Flight 22?”
Janie hesitated. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”
“I did.”
“What do you know about COBRA, Josh?”
Bane felt Janie release his shoulders. He turned to face her. “Not much, besides the fact that their stamp goes on half the sophisticated hardware that makes up our defense system.”
“Half is a conservative estimate,” Janie corrected. “To begin with COBRA’s letters stand for Control for Operational Ballistic Research and Activation. And let me tell you, every bit of ballistic research worth a damn for this country has come out of their base in San Diego.”