Chimera (2 page)

Damn.

He felt her flinch. Felt her whole body tense.
“Oh,” she said.

His left arm wasn't there anymore. He could forget
that sometimes, because of the
thing
they'd given
him to replace it. Some days he went whole hours without remembering what was
attached to his body.

“It's . . . cold,” Sara said.

“Silicone,” he told her, his voice very low. “Looks
pretty real, right? They did a great job making it look like the other one.
There's even hair on the knuckles.”

“I didn't know,” she said. “You didn't say anything
. . .”

“It's not a secret. Though I tend not to mention it
until it comes up.” He lifted the hand and flexed the fingers for her. “State of
the art.” His heart sank in his chest. He could pretend it was normal, pretend
that there was nothing weird about his new arm. But he knew how it creeped
people out. “Almost as good as the real thing.”

“Afghanistan?” she asked, her eyes knowing and
sympathetic. He'd learned to dread that look.

The last thing he wanted was her pity. “Yeah. It's
not a big thing. Listen, as I was saying, I don't have any plans tonight
and—”

“I need to think about it,” she said. She stood up
straight. She wasn't meeting his eyes when she spoke to him, now. “Let me get
back to you. Fraternization isn't exactly permitted, after all, and—”

“I understand,” Chapel told her. And he did. This
wasn't what she'd been expecting. She'd been flirting with a professional
soldier, a strong, vigorous man in his early forties with just a touch of gray
at his temples. Not an amputee.

She turned to go, and he sighed in disappointment.
This wasn't the first time things had worked out this way. He'd had years to get
used to the arm—and how people reacted to it. But damn, he had really hoped that
this time—

“I, uh,” she said, and now she did look him in the
eye. “I didn't say no. I said, let me get back to you.”

“Sure,” he said.

She walked away. She looked angry. Like he was the
one who had brushed her off.

Well, in a couple of weeks he would be reassigned
to a new office, anyway. Probably one where his reporting officer was fat and
bald and smelled like cheap cigars. And it wasn't like it could have gone
anywhere with Sara anyway, not with both of them hiding a relationship from
their superior officers and hoping they never got caught.

He turned back to his computer and tried to make
sense of the memo on his screen. He got about three sentences in before he
realized he couldn't remember which weapons system this memo related to, or why
any of it mattered in the slightest degree.

Grunting in frustration he pushed himself up out of
his chair and logged off from the computer. There was no way he was going to get
any work done, not until he got his head clear, and that meant he needed to go
swim some laps.

Just as he stepped out of the cubicle he heard the
chime as his BlackBerry received a new text message.

“I cannot deal with you right now,” he told his
phone, and walked away.

FORT BELVOIR,
VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:02

When they flew him home from Afghanistan, one
of the first thoughts through Chapel's mind had been that he would never swim
again.

He'd grown up in Florida, swimming in the canals
with turtles and manatees. He'd gotten his SCUBA certification at the age of
twelve and his MSD—the highest level of nonprofessional certification—by
eighteen. He'd spent more of his youth in the water than on dry land, at least
according to his mother. He'd seriously considered going into the navy instead
of the army, maybe even becoming a frogman. In the end, he had only decided to
be a grunt because he didn't want to spend half his life swabbing decks. He had
learned quickly enough that the army liked soldiers who could swim, too—it had
been a big part of his being chosen for Special Forces training—and he had made
a point of doing twenty laps a day in the nearest pool to keep in shape. It had
become his refuge, his private time to just think and move and be free and
weightless. He'd never felt as at peace anywhere else as he did while
swimming.

Now that was over.

A man with one arm can only swim in circles, he'd
thought. He had been lying in a specially made stretcher on board a troop
transport flying into National Airport. He had spent most of the flight staring
out the window, feeling sorry for himself.

His life was over. His career was over—he would
never go back into the theater of operations, never do anything real or valuable
again. No one would ever take him seriously for the rest of his life—he would
just be a cripple, someone they should feel sorry for. He pitied himself more
than anyone else ever could.

That had ended when he got to Walter Reed and
started his rehabilitation. He'd been a little shocked when he met the man they
sent to teach him how to live with one arm. The physical therapist had come into
the room in a wheelchair because he was missing his right leg. He was also
missing his right arm, and his right eye. He'd been a master gunnery sergeant
with the Marines in Iraq and had thrown himself on an IED to protect what he
called his boys. Not a single one of them had been injured that day. Just him.
“Call me Top,” he'd said, and he held out his left hand for Chapel to shake.

Chapel had reached automatically to take that hand.
It had taken him a second to remember his own left hand wasn't there anymore.
Eventually he'd awkwardly reached over and shook Top's hand with his right.

“See?” Top had said. “You're already getting the
hang of it. You make do with what you've got. Hell, I should know it's not easy,
but then, I never expected life to be easy. I know you army boys think life is
one long vacation. In the Marines we have this thing called a work ethic.”

“In the army we've got this thing called brains; we
use that instead,” Chapel had fired back. When they both stopped laughing, there
were tears in Chapel's eyes. The tears took a lot longer to stop than the
laughter. Top let that go. He didn't mind if his boys—and Chapel was one of his
boys now, like it or not—cried a little, or screamed in pain when they felt like
it. “A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier,” Top had told him. “When
they shut up, when they stop griping, that's when I know one of my boys is in
trouble.”

There had been plenty of tears. And plenty of
screaming. The artificial arm they gave Chapel was a miracle. It would mean
living an almost entirely normal life. It functioned exactly like a real arm,
and it responded to his nerve impulses so he just had to think about moving his
arm and it did what he wanted. It was light-years beyond any prosthetic ever
built before. But being fitted for it meant undergoing endless grueling
surgeries as the nerves that should have been serving his missing arm were moved
to new places, as electrodes were implanted in his chest and shoulder.

If it hadn't been for Top, Chapel was pretty sure
he wouldn't have made it. He would have eaten his own sidearm, frankly. But Top
had shown him that life—even a life limited by circumstance—could still mean
something. “Hell, I'm one of the lucky ones,” Top had told him one day while
they were doing strength-training exercises.

“You've got to be kidding me,” Chapel said.

“Hell, no. Everything that he took away, God made
sure I had a spare handy. There's only three body parts you only get one of—your
nose, your heart, and one other one, and I got to keep all those. Now, my little
buttercup, shall we get back to work?”

It had taken a long time for Chapel to confess to
Top what he missed the most. “I wish I could still swim,” he said. “I used to
love swimming. I can't get my magic arm wet, though.”

“So take it off when you go swimming,” Top
suggested.

Chapel shook his head. “Won't work. I mean, I guess
I could kick my way around a pool if I had to. If my life depended on it I could
tread water just fine if I fell off a boat or something. But without two arms,
I'm not going to break any speed records. I'll never swim laps again. That was
the main way I got exercise before.”

“I always hated swimming, myself,” Top said. “Never
liked going in over my head and getting water in my nose. But okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, starting tomorrow, you're going to teach me
how to swim with one arm and one leg.”

“I can't do that,” Chapel said. “I don't think it
can be done. And anyway, I'm not a teacher.”

“So you got two things to learn with that big army
brain of yours,” Top said. “As usual, the marine is going to have to do the hard
part. And probably drown, too. Nothing new about that, either.”

Chapel had known exactly what Top was trying to do.
He had wanted to shake his head and say that kind of psych-out wasn't going to
work on him. But he trusted Top by then, trusted him more than he'd trusted
anyone before in his life. So the next morning they had gone down to the
hospital's swimming pool with a couple burly orderlies (who still had all their
limbs), and Chapel had taught Top how to swim.

Top did drown, twice. Each time he was
resuscitated, and each time he got back in the pool. He had to be dragged out of
the water by the orderlies so many times they refused to help anymore and quit
on the spot. Top put in a requisition for more orderlies, and they kept going.
The results weren't ever perfect. Top swimming with one arm and one leg looked
kind of like a drunk dolphin flopping back and forth in the water. He had a lot
of trouble swimming in a straight line, and even one lap of the pool left him so
exhausted he had to rest for an hour before he started again.

In the end, though, Top could swim. “I ever fall
off an ocean liner on one of those celebrity cruises, I guess I'll be okay,” Top
had said when he decided they were done. When he'd successfully swum ten laps,
in less than eight hours. “Now, Captain Chapel. Sir. You want to tell me why we
went to all this trouble? Sir, you want to tell me why I forced you to do this
demeaning task, sir?”

“Because,” Chapel had said, “if I can show an
enlisted man like you how to swim, sorry sack of guts that you are, I can surely
figure out how to do it with my own glorious and beautiful officer's body.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Top had said. “Now get in that
goddamned pool or I will throw you in.”

Now—years later—Chapel was up to twenty laps at a
time, in less than an hour. He would never do the butterfly crawl again, but
he'd mastered a kind of half stroke that used his arm mostly for steering and
let his legs do all the work. Fort Belvoir had a wonderful pool in its fitness
center, and he availed himself of it daily.

There was no feeling like it.

The blood-warm water streamed past him, buoying him
up like gentle hands. He didn't have to think about anything else while he
swam—he just focused on his body, on his movements. His muscles moved in perfect
concert, his arm and his legs snapping into an old familiar rhythm. His head
turned from side to side as he drew in each breath and let it out again in a
long, slow exhale. There was no better feeling in the world.

Thanks, Top,
he
thought, as he kicked off for the start of lap seventeen.

The last time he'd seen Top had been at the master
gunnery sergeant's wedding, less than a year previous. Top had walked down the
aisle with two legs and two arms—the only way anyone could tell he wasn't whole
was that he was wearing an eye patch. Chapel had gotten to know Top's bride a
little bit and she had turned out to be the toughest, most sarcastic woman he'd
ever met. She needed to be if she was going to keep up with Top.

Lap eighteen. Chapel would have stayed in the pool
all day if he could have. He needed to get back to work, though. The frustration
and boredom of his morning and of Major Volks's rejection were gone, or at least
he'd worked off enough of that negativity to actually start drafting some memos
of his own.

Still. Maybe he'd shoot for twenty-five laps
today.

Across the pool. Back. He kicked off for lap
nineteen.

And then stopped himself in the water before he'd
gone five yards out.

“Hello?” he said.

A man in a pin-striped suit was standing at the
edge of the pool, looking down at him. He had a thick white towel in his hands
and something else. A BlackBerry, maybe.

“Can I help you with something? Make it quick,
though,” Chapel said. “I'm pretty good on the straightaways, but treading water
isn't exactly my forte.”

Anyone wearing that kind of suit in Fort Belvoir
was a civilian, and Chapel had a bad moment where he thought the guy might be
some kind of CEO from one of the corporations he was watchdogging. The buzz-cut
hair said otherwise, though, as did the sheer bulk of muscle crammed into the
jacket.

Chapel was trained in Military Intelligence. He'd
studied all the different ways to put clues together, to draw conclusions from
scant evidence. From just the look of this guy he knew right away that he had to
be CIA.

The agency had tentacles everywhere, and there were
plenty of them wrapped around INSCOM and Fort Belvoir. They tended to stay in
other parts of the fort though, where Chapel couldn't see them, and he'd always
been happy about that. Military Intelligence and civilian spies never got
along.

“Listen, if you just came to watch the freak go for
a swim, that's fine,” Chapel said, because the guy still hadn't told him what he
wanted. “But then I'll just get back to it.”