The Cyclops Initiative (25 page)

“Sucks,” Ralph said.

“Yeah, it did,” Chapel agreed.

“I can beat it, though.”

Chapel couldn't stop the grin that spread across his face. “You think so?”

“You know what an antitank weapon does?” Ralph asked. “I got to find out. I was driving an M1 Abrams TUSK; that's a kind of tank you can drive right through a city. There's a crew of four in one of those, with three folks stuck up in the turret. Driver gets the best seat, which isn't saying much. You have to drive leaning way back, like in a dentist's chair, and all you can see is what your periscopes give you. All around you there's piles of armor plate, thick enough to stop just about anything. On the outside you got reactive tiles, and those protect you from mortar fire.”

Chapel looked over and saw Julia's eyes glazing over. She didn't have much patience for technical discussions of weapons systems, as he knew all too well. Still, she seemed to sense what was going on here—­why Ralph was telling this story—­and he knew she wouldn't protest.

“So you're just about invulnerable in there, and you can just laugh at enemy infantry,” Ralph went on, “except then they went and invented LAWs. Light antitank weapons. A thing just a little heavier than a rifle that any dumb grunt can carry. There's no point throwing a bomb at a tank—­hell, those reactive tiles are basically bombs themselves. So instead your LAW has a nose cone that's made out of pure copper. When it hits the side of a tank, it doesn't explode, it vaporizes. Heats up about as hot as the sun and just melts its way through your armor, like a blowtorch. When it gets through, when that jet of superhot metal gets inside the tank hull, it's still hot enough to flash fry every single asshole in the crew.”

“So you got hit by one of those?” Angel asked. “How did you survive?”

“I got lucky. The second-­best kind of luck you can have, I guess. It was somebody else's turn instead of mine. The LAW hit the turret, not the hull. The other three guys—­my commander, the gunner, and the loader—­they were crispy critters in milliseconds. Down in the driver's seat, right underneath them, I just got a little cooked. I would have been fine, except for how I was sitting, almost lying on my back. Molten metal dripped down out of the turret, right on my shoulder. There was no way I could get out of there, no way to even move out of the way. I watched it drip down over me, drop by drop.”

“Oh my God,” Angel said. “Oh, I'm so sorry—­”

Ralph shrugged, his artificial arm clicking as it fell back against his belt. “Yeah, so you lost an arm to gangrene, well, you were asleep for most of that,” Ralph said. “Me, I got to feel the whole thing. Then I sat there for sixteen hours because all the comm gear was burned out and my superior officer assumed I was dead, too, so they didn't bother prying me out of there until they wanted to take the tank apart for scrap. When they got to me, I was pretty much dead, yeah. They scraped up what was left of me and shipped me home and that was how I got to meet Top.”

Chapel looked the veteran right in the eyes and nodded. “You're right. That sucks more than mine.”

“Oh, please,” Suzie said. “What a bunch of crybabies.”

Chapel looked over at her. He raised his voice so she could hear him all right. “I notice you still have both arms,” he said.

She stalked over to the bed and stared down at him. “Helicopter pilot, right? I did a bunch of milk runs, supposed to be easy flights. Of course we got stuck in sandstorms all the time, which clogged up our engines and screwed our visuals until half the time we didn't know if we were flying upside down. Plus the friendly locals used to take potshots at us. You ever hear of a ballistic blanket? It's a sheet of Kevlar you put down like carpeting inside the fuselage of your aircraft. Any bullets that come up through the floorboards, it stops 'em so they don't hit you. I used to fly over perfectly nice and civilized towns and afterward I would shake out my blanket and twenty or fifty spent rounds would come clanking out. They weren't shooting at me to kill me, see, just to let me know they were there. You can't put tank armor on a helo, so they gave us bulletproof floor mats instead.”

“A bullet get through one of those, or something?” one of the others asked.

“Nope. I had the
worst
kind of luck,” Suzie said. “Which is when somebody else gets lucky when they weren't supposed to. One of those potshots hit my Jesus nut. That's the thing on top of the helicopter that holds the rotor on. You take that out, suddenly you are fifty feet up in a thing shaped like a school bus, not like a glider. You fall down and go boom. I was in my safety webbing, I had all kinds of fire suppression equipment and impact-­resistant gel under my butt, I was going to be okay. Then a piece of my rotor comes straight down through my canopy and then straight through my face. It was like getting chopped in half by a sword.”

She pulled the neck of her tank top away to show the scar that ran from her hairline down across the middle of her chest. Chapel was a little shocked, thinking she was going to expose her breasts—­until he saw that she only had one.

“Like the Amazons of old,” Rudy said, gasping.

“Shut the fuck up, you drunk,” Suzie said. She let her top fall back to cover part of her scar. “I was in traction for a year. They had me strung up in this frame, locked down so I couldn't even move my fingers. If I wriggled around too much, I would have fallen apart like an onion chopped down the middle. Yeah,” she said, “real fucking lucky. And yeah, that was how I got to meet Top.”

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 23, 21:47

One by one the others told their stories, each claiming they'd had it worse than anyone else, that they'd been lucky or unlucky in various measures, each one ending with how they'd come to meet Top. There were only two exceptions. One was an airman missing both legs below the knees. He started out strong. “Your stories ain't shit,” he said. “You want to talk real suffering—­”

But then he stopped. Chapel saw a look in the man's eyes he knew all too well. The airman couldn't see anything but the past. The worst moment in his life. “Never mind,” he said. “I'm not going to tell you.”

“That's okay,” Suzie said. “Nobody wanted to hear it anyway.”

Some of the others chuckled.

Rudy, the other exception, was the last one to speak. “I'm afraid you've all got it wrong,” he said. “All these tales of woe. Talking about how unlucky you sods were. Nonsense, every bit of it.”

“Let me guess,” Chapel said. “You had it worse than us.”

“I wouldn't say as much,” Rudy told them. “By fuck, I'd say you're all a bunch of sad sacks that make my own troubles seem like minor inconveniences by comparison. But I know you're the luckiest sons of bitches who ever lived. That antitank round, the helicopter blade that got you, Suzie my dear, the ammunition cooking off in your Stryker,” he said, nodding at a veteran with a white plastic hand. “In my day, those things would have killed you all stone dead. You're all here because medical technology has come so far we can save ­people who should have died.”

“You saying I should be dead?” Ralph asked.

“Son, your very existence is a blessing on us all,” Rudy said. He shook his head. “No, I'm saying you got lucky enough to be born when you were, that's all. I watched a lot of boys with injuries less severe than yours die back in 'Nam. There was a time when I wished I'd been one of them. I suppose there are times I still do. I couldn't handle it, you see. All the death. Every time one of my friends caught a bullet or stepped on a punji stick or just disappeared out in the jungle . . . I knew it wasn't going to stop. That kind of thing gets into a man's head. I came back from Southeast Asia without so much as a scratch on me, you know that? At least, none I could point to. No Purple Heart. No medals at all. But I came back and found that I'd brought a souvenir with me. No matter where I went here in the States, every time I met someone I'd look them in the eye and think, Are
you
going to die today? Are
you
? I couldn't care about anyone. I couldn't get attached, because they were just going to disappear, so I treated them like they already had. Made it rather difficult to find a job. Made it rather easy to find a bottle, since when I drank it didn't seem so bad.”

“You still feel that way? Even here?”

“I have my good days,” Rudy suggested. “And then sometimes—­”

A familiar voice boomed out from the stairway. “What do we have here?” Top asked. “I believe I said you all should stay out of this here basement.”

The boys got to their feet. They didn't quite stand at attention but they looked like they wanted to.

“Maybe,” Top said, “I'm getting senile in my old age. Dolores, honey, did I tell these ­people to stay out of the basement?”

“You did, Top,” Dolores called out from upstairs.

“And yet here they all are. What do you suppose we should do about this discrepancy?”

The boys filed out of the basement with bowed heads. When they were gone, Top glanced at Chapel. “You okay, Captain? They didn't suck up all your air?”

“Just having ourselves a bitch session,” Chapel told him.

Top nodded in acceptance. “Well, I suppose that's all right. You know what I always say. A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier. It's the quiet ones you have to worry about.”

Chapel smiled. “How was the movie? What did you see?”

“Something about a dog that learned how to work a computer or some nonsense. Didn't pay attention. But I'll go see anything's got a dog in it. Now, good night, my dear captain. You get some rest. That would be an order, if you didn't outrank me.”

“I'll take it as one anyway,” Chapel told him.

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 23, 21:53

When they were alone, just the three of them—­Chapel, Julia, and Angel—­he let himself be eased down into a prone position so he could go to sleep. “Tomorrow we'll talk more about that place in Kentucky,” he told Angel.

She nodded and then reached down to touch his cheek. “Good night.”

Julia watched her go. There was a funny look on her face.

“What's going on between you and her?” Chapel asked.

“Tell you in a minute,” Julia said, then held up one finger. Together they listened for the sound of the basement door closing. “Okay, first, what exactly just happened down here? With all the stories?”

“Sympathy,” Chapel said. “It helps to share, sometimes.”

“Including trying to one-­up each other with how bad your stories were, or Suzie telling ­people to shut up all the time?”

“What you saw,” Chapel told her, “is about the closest you can get to a pity party and still consider yourself a hard-­ass soldier. We all need to feel like we're not alone sometimes, but none of us wants to admit it.” He smiled at her. “Now. Are you going to answer my question?”

She looked away. “Angel has a crush on you.”

“Oh, come on. She and I flirt. It's harmless,” he insisted.

“You didn't notice how she was hovering over you? How she just touched your cheek? But of course, no, you didn't notice. Because you're an oblivious man.”

He shook his head. “Maybe you're jealous.”

“I'm trying to decide if I am or not,” she told him.

That made him want to sit up. He didn't, because he knew how much it would hurt. “Julia—­if you think you and I could maybe—­”

“Shush. Anyway, this isn't the time for that conversation. Or the place.”

He grinned at her. “I'm not going anywhere. Doctor's orders.”

“Veterinarian's orders,” she said. “Which might be fitting, considering what a dog you are.” She smiled when she said it, but then her face fell. “Okay. If we're going to do this, let me start. I'm not a jealous person. I don't like being a jealous person. And I am very angry at you for forcing me to be a jealous person.”

“You mean—­with Angel? I haven't done
anything
. Neither has she.”

“I'm not talking about Angel now. Try to keep up. I'm talking about the picture I saw, the one the guy showed me, the guy who told me to break up with you. The one of you and that—­that woman.”

Chapel felt like a deflating balloon. He had never wanted to talk about this, not with Julia. He'd also always known he would have to, eventually. “Her name was Nadia,” he said. “Do you want the details?”

“Absolutely not.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Jim. When I saw that picture, I hated you a little. I had no right to. I mean, I'd broken up with you. You were a free agent. You still are. I know that logically. But I couldn't help myself. I was
filled
with rage. You made promises to me.”

Chapel bit his tongue, at least metaphorically. He did not want to say out loud the words,
You're the one who refused my marriage proposal.
He wasn't quite that oblivious. So instead he said, “You're going to feel what you're going to feel.”

“That's really very big of you,” she said, sarcasm dripping from the words. “I was getting past it. I was pretty much going to let Badass Julia screw your brains out, because she really, really wanted to.”

“I like Badass Julia,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.

“Don't be so sure. Now Badass Julia is considering what her chances are if she's competing with a cute little twentysomething with daddy issues.”

“Now we're talking about Angel again,” he said.

“You're getting better at this game,” Julia told him. “I'm nearly twice her age. You can't possibly prefer me to her. Men don't work that way.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No,” she said, and he could tell she wasn't.

“Julia,” he said. “I love you.”