“This is a cistern?” Henry said, horrified.
“Well, it ain’t an indoor swimming pool,” Danny said with a grim little chuckle. “Once I find a way out, I can call Baron to come get us.”
Henry was flabbergasted. “You’ve got a waterproof phone?”
“No. I’ve got a regular phone in a waterproof case,” she said over her shoulder as she disappeared into the shadows, leaving Henry to wonder how the hell she’d slipped that past Junior.
Baron had been waiting almost twenty minutes in a back alley outside a disused service entrance to the catacombs before Henry and Danny appeared. Henry had one arm slung across her shoulders, leaning on her like a wounded soldier. That was curious enough but what made it genuinely strange was the fact that they were both wet. He couldn’t wait to hear that story.
“It’s not often you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents back to back. Hop in!” He opened the passenger-side doors. Henry sprawled across the back seat while Danny took shotgun. Baron closed the door for Henry, then hurried around the front of the car to hop into the driver’s seat. “Where to?”
For some reason, Danny found that funny; Henry didn’t. “Georgia,” he said wearily. “It’s where Verris is.”
This time, they were flying away from the oncoming day, chasing the night into the west while the clock ran backwards. Baron wasn’t singing, which Danny actually missed, while Henry resisted her attempts at first aid.
He didn’t have a whole lot of new injuries but she was concerned about the laceration on his neck. It wasn’t especially deep but it had been made with the jagged end of a very old, very dirty bone in a cistern and there was a high risk of infection. Henry had finally let her sterilize the wound and put a bandage on it. But every time she tried to check for inflammation, he waved her off.
“Advil?” she offered, showing him the bottle.
He shrugged. She gave him two; he held up four fingers so she gave him two more. The rule of thumb in the field was, doubling the dose of an over-the-counter medication made it prescription-strength. But another rule of thumb said this was only a stopgap and you were supposed to get out of the field ASAP. Danny didn’t know whose thumbs the rules were based on but she was pretty sure they weren’t Henry’s. He tossed back the four pills and chased them with whiskey. Well, at least alcohol was a disinfectant, she thought, and maybe its depressant properties would put him to sleep.
“Try to get some rest,” Danny said.
Henry didn’t answer. She hesitated, then decided to take her own advice in the seat behind him.
CHAPTER 18
Clay Verris was in his office watching feeds from several different pre-dawn exercises when the guard on the ground floor called to inform him Junior was on his way up with blood in his eye. She also advised the commander that his son had sustained a GSW in his left shoulder, although it didn’t seem to be serious.
Verris thanked the guard and made a mental note to leave a plus sign on the performance sheet in her file. He didn’t like being disturbed while he was monitoring exercises unless it was important. A less perceptive guard would have figured there was no point in interrupting him to tell him he was going to be interrupted; fortunately, this one knew Junior always took priority.
Junior had been very much on his mind since this second debacle with Henry Brogan. Verris had known full well that Brogan wouldn’t be easy to eliminate. But he’d been surprised when the kid had called him from Cartagena to report the target had gotten away.
Then again, it had been a rushed assignment. Brogan had to be neutralized as soon as possible and there hadn’t been much time for the kid to study up on him, watch footage, get acquainted with his moves. Not that Verris had really wanted Junior to get a close enough look at Henry to recognize him at that point—not until he was ready to know the truth about who he was.
Originally, Verris had planned to lay it all out for him on his twenty-first birthday. But when it had arrived, he was still so damned young. It wasn’t education and training that he lacked, Verris realized, it was seasoning.
Education had been important in Verris’s family. His father had always said that training without education produced a waste of good man flesh (women included). During Verris’s time in the Marine Corps, he’d seen how true that was. The problem, however, was not so much with the man flesh involved as it was with those in command. Most of them regarded soldiers as something to be supplied and replenished, one more military consumable: cannon fodder. Talk about a waste of good man flesh! They should have been producing warriors, not fresh meat for slaughterhouses like Vietnam or Iraq.
Long ago, Verris had come to the conclusion that just as war and other conflicts had many facets, so, too, were there different kinds of warriors. Junior was the warrior Henry Brogan could have been if he’d had the right education and guidance, while the guys he’d been watching tonight were another kind altogether. When they hit the ground in Yemen, the whole world was going to sit up and take notice, especially the US. They were going to see that Gemini warriors were the new and improved future of military man flesh, women included; women especially.
He would never have been able to accomplish this in the Corps, no matter how high he rose in rank. If he had stayed in the Marines, they only would have held him back. So he had quit and started Gemini. He had thought for sure that Henry would want to be part of it—the private sector had so much more to offer, starting with better pay. But Henry had chosen to stick with government work and let the DIA recruit him. He’d always had a thing about serving his country. He was committed to it and Verris hadn’t realized how strong that commitment was; Henry had never acted like a flag-waving robot.
It didn’t make any sense until Verris considered that this was what happened when kids grew up without a father. They had to put something in that empty space and for Henry, it was his country. Admirable? Maybe, but it meant that Henry would never be able to achieve his full potential. All things considered, he’d done pretty well, overcoming his deprived background and making something of himself.
Still, Verris couldn’t help thinking how much more Henry could have accomplished if he’d had the care and guidance of a father. Verris had promised himself that if he ever became a father himself, he would be right there in his kid’s life, 24/7.
As time passed, Verris had seen he wasn’t going to have a conventional nuclear family. If he wanted to be a father, he would have to adopt. That was all right with him but there seemed to be a shortage of newborns and adoption agencies tended to favor two-parent families, not single ex-military men who couldn’t talk about what they did for a living because it was classified.
Then he had gotten wind of Dormov’s work and right away he’d known this was how he could make his fondest dream a reality—he could give Henry Brogan a do-over. He could raise him right, make him into the warrior he should have been. He could train him to grow into his strengths unhindered by the psychological damage of a childhood and adolescence living in poverty without a father.
Henry Brogan 2.0—all of the shine, none of the whine.
The road hadn’t been completely smooth. But Junior was fast becoming the warrior Henry would never be; the kid was going to achieve the perfection that Henry had never had a chance at.