Chimera

by David Wellington

  “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.”

  The agency guy shook his head, slowly. And then he started to laugh. His whole body shook as he guffawed and chortled and chuckled.

  Chapel swam over to the edge of the pool and dragged himself out. Water poured off him in torrents as he stormed around the side of the pool, headed straight for the laughing bastard. If fraternizing with Sara could cost him his career, punching out a CIA man could get him thrown in the brig, but at that moment he did not give one good goddamn. Nobody laughed at Jim Chapel like that.

  Before he could land the punch, though, the CIA bastard lifted the BlackBerry he was holding and held it up at Chapel’s eye level. Chapel saw that it was his own smartphone. The one he’d left at his desk when he headed for the pool.

  The screen said he had twenty-seven new text messages, and three new voice mails. Chapel grabbed the phone and scrolled through the phone’s logs. Every single message had come from the same number. There were e-mails, too, from a military address he didn’t recognize, but he knew with a cold certainty they came from the same person who’d sent all those texts.

  “When you didn’t answer,” the CIA man said, still burbling with mirth, “they sent me to come find you. We have to go. Now. The man who’s been trying to contact you is not the kind of person you keep waiting.”

  Chapel stared into his eyes. They were hazel, green in the middle and gold around the edges, and they were full of laughter, still.

  “Give me that,” Chapel said, and grabbed the towel.

  FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:03

  Chapel read one of the e-mails for the third time, still not sure what the hell was going on. It went on for pages, but most of that was just boilerplate confidentiality statements—legalese describing what exactly would happen to anyone who forwarded or printed out the e-mail. Standard stuff for military intelligence. The only real content of the e-mail was a single line of tersely written text:

  Report instanter DIA DX Pentagon for new orders. Reply to acknowledge.

  Chapel understood all that just fine. DIA was the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top level of the military intelligence pyramid. DX was the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT—HUMINT being Human Intelligence, or good old-fashioned spycraft. DX was the group that used to give him his orders back when he was a theater operative in Afghanistan, but he hadn’t worked for them for a long time—these days his work was handled directly by INSCOM, and he hadn’t so much as spoken to anyone in the DIA in five years.

  Technically, of course, he still had to answer all the way up that chain, and if somebody at the DIA wanted him to show up at their office and get new orders, he was required to do so. But what on earth could they want him for?

  “You know anything about this, Laughing Boy?” he asked the CIA goon.

  Laughing Boy shook his head. The very idea seemed to set him off on another chuckling fit. “I just do as I’m told.”

  Chapel stared at the man. His involvement in this—even if it just came down to fetching Chapel when he wouldn’t answer his phone—added a whole new wrinkle of weirdness. On paper the DIA and the civilian CIA worked hand in glove, but everyone in the intelligence community knew there was a permanent divide and lasting hatred between the defense department and the civilian intelligence organizations. They never shared anything with each other unless they were legally required to. If the CIA and the DIA were working together, then that could only mean something really bad had happened and that rivalry had been put aside long enough to clean it up.

  And somehow that meant they needed a one-armed captain from INSCOM to hold the bucket and the mop.

  Chapel rubbed vigorously with the towel at the skin on the left side of his chest. Laughing Boy raised an eyebrow and Chapel grunted in frustration. “My skin has to be dry or the electrodes don’t work right. Do you mind? I need to get dressed.”

  Laughing Boy kept giggling, but he stepped aside to let Chapel head for the locker room. Chapel sat down on a wooden bench inside and picked up the arm. It only weighed nine pounds—lighter than the original. Its silicone cover looked exactly like a real human arm up until you reached the shoulder, where it flared out into a pair of molded clamps. Putting it on was simplicity—he simply drew it over the stump of his shoulder until it fit snugly. The arm recognized automatically that it was on and the clamps squeezed down gently on Chapel’s flesh until it was locked into place.

  As he did every time he put it on, he ran it through a quick check to make sure everything was working all right. He lifted the arm and then swung it backward, made a fist, and then straightened his hand out like he was about to deliver a karate chop. Finally, to check the fingers he touched each of them in turn with the thum
b.

  Living nerves in his shoulder and chest had been rewired to replace the ones he’d lost. Sensors in his new hand sent messages to those nerves through subcutaneous electrodes. The neurosurgery had gone so smoothly that now when Chapel touched his artificial thumb to his artificial index finger, he actually felt them rubbing against each other. He could pick up a playing card with those fingers and feel the smooth coating of its lamination, or touch sandpaper and feel how rough it was.

  He thought about what Top would say. “There’s guys out there with two hooks instead of hands that learn how to make omelets in the morning without getting egg all over their shirts. You, my boy, are living in science fiction tomorrowland. Is it not a glorious thing to be living in George Jetson world?”

  “Sure is, Top,” Chapel said, out loud.

  Jerks could laugh at him all they wanted for being a freak. Jim Chapel was whole. Top had taught him that. He was whole and vital and he could do anything he set his mind to. Whatever the DIA wanted him for, he was ready.

  He dressed himself hurriedly and then tapped a message on the BlackBerry acknowledging that he was on his way. To the Pentagon.

  Coming out of the locker room he found Laughing Boy waiting for him. “All right, you delivered your message,” Chapel said. “You can go now, I’m being a good boy.”

  Laughing Boy shook his head and chortled a little. “Nope. I’m supposed to drive you there myself. Make sure you show up.”

  “I know how to follow orders,” Chapel insisted. Laughing Boy didn’t even shrug. “Fine. We’ll go in just a second. I need to let my reporting officer know where I’m going—”

  Laughing Boy shook his head.

  So it was one of those kinds of briefings, then. The kind where you just disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody knew where you went. This was getting weirder by the minute.