Support and Defend by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney Page B

some groceries because she knew Dom wouldn’t have anything fresh in his condo. Dom thanked her for the call, but he told her his next-door neighbor was running errands for him right then.
    It wasn’t true. Dom just didn’t feel like having any visitors. Yesterday afternoon he got up and moved around a little more. He took the elevator downstairs to the tiny market in his building, and he came back up to his place with two plastic bags full of canned food, yogurt, sodas, and beer.
    He picked at a can of tuna and another of peaches in sugary syrup, drank a beer, and went back to bed.
    Dom was determined to do something productive today, despite the aches and pains. He started his shower, then took the bandages off his chest and forearm. He stood there with his sore body pressed up against the cold tile next to the shower for several minutes, until finally he stepped into the water.
    The hot spray stung his wounds, but it went a long way toward making him feel human again. After the shower, he changed the bandages on his forearm, drank coffee, and went into his living room. He had all the lights off in his place now because the lights added to his headache, so he sat in the dark with his laptop on his couch and spent the early part of the morning reading everything he could find online about the attack in India. Much had been written on the subject, but the vast majority of it was sensationalized, editorialized, or simply conjecture, and so much of it—he knew because he had been there and seen it firsthand—was dead wrong.
    He had to turn his computer off after an hour or so. The images from the event and the speculation about it only forced his brain to relive everything that happened, to experience again the moment as a virtual after-action report.
    With this “hot wash” Dom inevitably analyzed his own actions in the most critical way possible. He told himself now he should have gone upstairs with Yacoby from the beginning, covering the stairwell and keeping the other attackers downstairs instead of splitting their access points. He should have dispatched the poorly trained attackers in the kitchen more quickly than he had. He should have anticipated that the terrorist with the knife in his chest would not have died quickly, and therefore remained a threat.
    There were a lot of things he could have done differently, and now, as he sat on his couch in his fifth-floor D.C. condo, he wished he’d done them all.
    The more Dom thought it over, the more certain he became of one thing.
    He had failed Arik and his family.
    The death of Dom’s twin brother, Brian, played out in his mind in much the same way. He’d spent the intervening years dissecting every aspect of the event, judging himself to be responsible. He could have been faster, if not in the gunfight itself then at least in his treatment of Brian’s gunshot wound. He could have saved him.
    Dom knew he had done his best, but both in Libya and in India, his best just hadn’t cut it.
    At a little after nine he shook the images and anguish out of his mind long enough to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee, his third of the morning. He’d just lowered himself back down to his sofa with his laptop when his phone chirped. He looked down and saw it was Adara Sherman calling, no doubt checking up on him again. He let the call roll to his voice mail.
    Soon after this, his doorbell rang. The chime made his head throb. He rolled his eyes, thinking it must have been Sherman, which would mean she was efficient as hell in her efforts, though he expected nothing less. But when he opened the door to the bright hallway, standing in front of him was a fit-looking man in a suit and tie under a trench coat, wearing a perfect part in his dark hair. He was taller than Dom by several inches, with big round shoulders that his coat could not conceal. The man said, “How ya doin’, Dominic?”
    Dom knew this man, though he hadn’t seen him in several years. “It’s Albright,