It was game time.
Nina sat on the back steps, smoking the one last cigarette allowed to the condemned. Except, in this case, to face the firing squad, she had to take off the blindfold. For the first time since the veil of darkness had cloaked ordinary life, she didn’t avert her eyes. She looked at her sorry ass directly, like a tactical problem.
Among her talents was an unique ability to get inside an opponent’s time, his intent and tactics. Disrupting them. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Boyd’s celebrated OODA Loop. This reflex, which they now taught at the service schools, was hardwired in her synapses. It had made her military reputation.
Instinctively she understood how to defeat the depression. It required a simple trick of personal jujitsu.
All she had to do was face in the right direction, meet head-on the thing she dreaded more than her own death…
Admitting weakness. Admitting defeat.
She had been here before.
That summer in 1988, the Olympic swim trials were held at the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center, University of Texas at Austin.
One of the fastest pools in the world.
Nina Pryce had finished her sophomore year in Ann Arbor. She had medaled in three events in the NCAA nationals, forcing herself through a grueling season, living on Darvoset to block the persistent bursitis in her shoulder.
Mind over matter. Make the cut. Next stop Seoul, Korea.
She knew the shoulder was a time bomb, and she kept it from her coaches. Hell, they’d done a lot to create the problem-an absence of moderation in the weight room, when they threw the girls at free weights with the football team. A dedicated Title Nine
Hari Kari, she held nothing back. Probably the bench press did the damage. Along with too much weight on the fly machine.
Seeded second in the 200 butterfly. Her best event.
Only the top two would go.
She ignored her coach’s advice to go out smooth, stay with the pack for two laps, and make her move on the third lap. Then bring it home hard. Once she got up on the starting blocks and took her mark, she only knew one way forward-get out in front from the buzzer and stay there.
The humid air is charged, drenched with chlorine. The tiled walls rock with applause from the sweating bodies in the stands. In the pool, the quiet blue world of racing water churns with silent screaming muscles. Bursting hearts. Leading the pack, going into the wall on the third lap, she felt the shoulder start to freeze. Ignore it.
Don’t quit, don’t cry.
Make the turn. Now. Bring. It. Home. In mid-lap the shoulder locked. She thrashed on, lame on one flipper. Finished third.
Missed a seat on the Olympic plane by four hundredths of a second. Pride. Vanity. That last obstinate twenty-five meters did more to wreck her than all the previous wear and tear.
Who she was.
It took a year with trainers to rebuild the inflamed muscles and ligaments around the shoulder. At a sobering meeting, the sports doctor stoically told her she had the shoulder of a thirty-five-year-old woman.
You keep pushing like this, it’ll only get weaker, not stronger.
Stubborn, she took her middle-aged shoulder back to swimming after rehab and was still fast enough to make the final heat. But she was never able to coax that extra surge from the shoulder-the surge it took to win. She never medaled again. Just outside lanes. After she graduated, she’d put the Olympic dreams away and joined the Army. There were other medals.
Not even Broker knew how far she’d stretched the rules. He thought the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on her right shoulder was bravado going into Desert Storm. The tat disguised the needle marks from years of black-market cortisone injections, as she trail-blazed through the Army.
Jump school. Ranger school. HALO. SCUBA.
Desert Storm. Bosnia three times. Classified stuff in the Philippines. Undercover games in Italy, chasing the elusive Russian suitcase.
A triumph of will, steroids, and prescription-strength Tylenol.
After 9/11 she was invited into a clandestine Delta subset that eventually took the field as Northern Route. Before deploying, she discreetly met with an Italian physician in Lucca and wheedled a prescription for narcotics to control the pain.
Now she had the shoulder of a fifty-year-old woman. No cushion left. She bowed to the needles one last time.
Nina Pryce took a deep last drag on her cigarette and flipped it into the snow. Made a face. Kit would lecture her about littering. What would she say if she found out her mother, the steroid junkie, had been living a lie?
She didn’t shy away from a nauseous wave of remorse, guilt, and shame. It was time to accept it, all her petty selfishness. Christ, she still had her arms and legs and fingers and toes. Men and some women were being blown to pieces in Iraq this very minute. Maybe people she knew.
After the nausea came the wringer of self-pity. Broken wing. You’re never gonna fly again, girl; not like you used to. Never gonna get it back. Never rope out of a Blackhawk again in full gear. The fucking men always watched her for the slightest sign of weakness. They’d never let her back on the teams with a bum shoulder. Hell, she wouldn’t let herself back…They’d give her a desk for pasture. Training cadre maybe.
Forget that.
After self-pity, the bile of resentment. She whipped her head around, throwing a rueful glance at this rented house Broker had brought her to. Good for housework, maybe. He’d like that. Down deep she sensed he’d always wanted her to fail. Like all of them.
Finally the emotional binge dissipated. She stood up and dusted herself off.
No, he was different. He’d exhausted himself caring for her. More than father, husband, lover, and friend. Her buddy.
By midafternoon the sun had passed overhead and had started to decline in the west. The darkness, which had been driven into the woods, now regrouped, emerged from hiding, and started to creep out from the tree line, to counterattack over the ground it had lost during the day.
Watching the clock, Nina showered, washed her hair, and drew it back in a clean ponytail. Then she dug in a drawer and found the clean, carefully folded sweat suit. ARMY in crisp black type across the front. Absolutely focused, she pulled it on, tied her running shoes, and went outside.
She approached the somber western woods.
Egged on by the lowering sun, a ragged phalanx of shadows now extended from the trees and lengthened across the snowy lot. Pointed toward the house.
She lit a cigarette, paced, then walked right up to the farthest extension of the shadows and placed her foot inches from the tip.
Waited as it slowly, relentlessly crept toward her.
The shadows would cross the yard, mob the house, and penetrate the walls. They would fill the air, bleeding black, and finally find their way into her flesh and drain their darkness into her blood.
Not today.
“Fuck you,” she told the shadows.
Okay, she’d come halfway back. Now for the rest. Get real, Pryce. Listen to your body. Her body told her she had turned into the thing she feared most in her life.
She was weak.
She saw it in her daughter’s eyes. In Broker’s. A mix of pity and shallow empathy. Nina had raised Kit to be strong and compassionate toward the weak-to an extent. But the fact was, as Nina had now discovered, that the strong, even as they vow to protect the weak, do not understand them.
Nina took a deep breath and said aloud, “It’s over.”
She opened her arms and walked forward, and as she embraced the shadows, she felt the last weights sloughing away. Unencumbered, she tilted up her face and felt the fading sunlight sink into her like an invigorating current. Lightly, she walked into the deep snow and the close-packed trees, breathed in the cold dark air. She turned, came out into the deep black hedge of shadows, and twirled; then, arms spread behind her, she ran in circles. Like Kit might do, enjoying the sheer kinetic thrill of motion.
No more medals. Just outside lanes.
Her soldier days were over.
It was time to come home.