Myrmidon

by David Wellington

  There was no gate in that fence, no way in or out at all. The detainees never left, and nobody ever went in to check up on them. That was how it stood when Sergeant Lourdes was assigned to this job. That was how it was supposed to be forever.

  As of tonight all bets were off.

  Lourdes grabbed at a tree root and hauled himself across the rocky ground. The wire in his leg felt like it was on fire, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. He was trained for this. Trained to keep going, no matter what. Trained to know his duty. He dug his fingers down into the dirt and pulled himself another yard. The sentry box—­and his phone—­was getting closer.

  Three years in that stupid box. Three years working the easiest and most boring job Lourdes had ever had. Every morning he had shown up at oh six hundred and logged himself in, then logged himself back out at eighteen hundred sharp. Twice a day he walked his mile-­long section of the fence, checking the chain link, making sure animals hadn’t burrowed underneath it, looking for signs of rust or damage. The rest of the time he just sat watching the trees beyond the inner fence, looking for any sign of movement. If he saw a bird in there, or a fox hunting for eggs, he checked a little box on a form on his computer screen and clicked the trackpad to file it. And that was it. There had never been any sign of the detainees. Wherever they were in there they kept to themselves. He’d never gotten so much as a glimpse of any of them.

  Three years when nothing—­nothing happened.

  And then tonight, not an hour after his day started, before the sun even came up, everything changed. A Predator drone had come in just over the tree line, a sleek little machine that flew so low he didn’t even hear its engine until it was almost on top of him. The laptop computer in the sentry box had lit up with warnings and alarms, but by then Lourdes was already jumping out of his box, running to see what was going on.

  The drone was only overhead for a second. He just had time to identify it as an unmanned aircraft. But it’s one of ours, he’d thought. It’s the good guys, just checking up on the camp. He lifted one hand to wave at it, thinking that he would get a call on his radio at any second explaining what the drone was doing there. Instead, the Predator had attacked without warning. Rockets had streaked from pods slung under its fuselage—­Hellfire missiles that slammed into the ground like giant hammers beating on the earth.

  After that things got very loud and very painful. The fence exploded outward, barbed-­wire shrapnel scything through the air, tearing branches off trees, making the dirt boil and jump. The drone was gone before Sergeant Lourdes even knew he’d been hit. Just before the pain started, just before he collapsed to the ground in a blubbering heap, he saw what the chopper had wrought.

  A section of both fences maybe a hundred yards wide was just . . . gone. The minefield was a series of craters, entirely neutralized. On the far side of the fence a stand of trees had been knocked down, and Lourdes could see all the way in to a clearing lit only by starlight.

  Lourdes had been told what to do if something like this happened, given instructions by the same LT who had promised him it never could happen. The satellites watching Camp Putnam, the cameras on the fence, would take care of almost everything. Automatic alarms would switch on and soldiers would be summoned; backup defenses would activate without anyone needing to push a button. But there was one thing he had to do. He had to pick up the phone and call a man in Virginia, a man who would need to know the fence was down. A man who could make everything okay, fix everything, but who needed to hear from an actual human being, needed an eyewitness account of what had happened, before he could get to work. Sergeant Lourdes just had to make that call—­he just had to pick up the phone.

  The phone—­the satellite cell phone he was supposed to keep on him at all times—­was back in the sentry box, only a few dozen yards away. Lourdes pulled himself another ­couple of feet. The pain didn’t matter. The blood he’d lost didn’t matter.

  He was so close now. He felt like he could almost reach out and touch the wall of the box. Just a few more yards and—­

  “There,” someone said, from behind him. “Another one.”

  “This one’s mine,” a second voice said.

  Sergeant Lourdes closed his eyes and said a quick prayer. Then he rolled over on his back and pushed himself up on his elbows. He had to see. Three years of his life making sure these bastards didn’t get out. Three years making sure they didn’t end the world. He had to know what they looked like.

  There were six of them, standing in a rough line near where the fence had been just a few minutes before. Big guys, young looking. Muscular, but not exactly Schwarzenegger types. Their hair was long and unkempt, and they had scraggly beards and their eyes—­

  Something was wrong with their eyes.

  Lourdes couldn’t quite make out their faces. They were silhouetted against the burning trees and the orange smoke that masked the stars. But their eyes should be glittering, reflecting some of that light. Shouldn’t they?

  “Freeze right where you are!” Lourdes shouted, and he grabbed for his sidearm. He lifted the heavy pistol and pointed at the closest one, the one who was already jogging toward him. He fired three times, forcing himself to aim with each shot.

  The detainee ducked sideways each time, as if he were just stepping out of the way of the bullets. That was when Lourdes realized just how fast the asshole was moving. Time had slowed down, and even his racing heartbeat sounded like a dull, thudding bass line.

  The detainee was on top of him so suddenly he didn’t have a chance to breathe. The guy stank, but Lourdes didn’t care about that so much after the detainee’s thumbs sank into his windpipe and pressed down, hard.

  Lourdes tried to raise the handgun again, but he couldn’t feel his arm. Couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. His vision was going black.

  The last thing he saw was the detainee’s eyes, staring down into his. Eyes that weren’t human. They were black, solid black, like an animal’s eyes.

  The detainee leaned in harder with his thumbs, but it didn’t matter to Lourdes. Sergeant Brian Lourdes, U.S. Army, was already dead. So he didn’t see what happened next. He didn’t see his killer’s face split down the middle with a cruel smile.

  FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+3:17

  Three hundred miles away in an office cubicle, Captain Jim Chapel was trying not to fall asleep at his desk. It wasn’t easy. It was too early in the year for air-­conditioning, so the air in the office building at Fort Belvoir was still and lifeless, and the only sounds he could hear were the noise of fingers clacking away at keyboards and the low buzz of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

  He sensed someone coming up from behind him and sat up straighter in his chair, trying to make it look like he was busy. It wouldn’t do to have some civilian bigwig come in here and see him slouched over his desk. When the newcomer walked into his cubicle and leaned over him, though, it wasn’t who he’d been expecting.

  “So are you going to ever tell me what you did in Afghanistan?” Sara asked, her breath hot on Chapel’s neck. She laughed. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Chapel didn’t move an inch. Sara—­Major Sara Volks, INSCOM, to be proper about it—­was leaning over his shoulder, theoretically looking at the same computer screen he’d been staring at all morning. It was displaying yet another memo about the technical details of a weapons system under development by a civilian contractor. He doubted very much she was interested in what it had to say.

  Still, old habits die hard. In his head he matched up the required clearance to look at this memo with what he knew of her clearance. She was a major in INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Which meant it was fine, she was more than qualified to see this, and he relaxed a bit.

  Then he realized she was leaning over his shoulder, her mouth only about half an inch from his ear, and that she smelled really, really good. After t
hat he didn’t relax at all. “You know I can’t talk about that,” he said. “Ma’am.”

  Chapel moved office every few weeks as his job demanded, and every time he found himself a new cubicle he ended up having a new reporting officer—­a new boss, for all intents and purposes. Major Volks was hardly the worst of the lot. She was capable and efficient enough that she didn’t need to yell at her ­people to keep them working. She was also an audacious flirt . . . at least as far as Chapel was concerned. He hadn’t seen her make eyes at any of the other men in the office, and he was pretty sure he was the only soldier in the fort who got to call her by her first name. The way she spoke to him was ridiculously unprofessional and probably enough to get both of them written up and reassigned, if he’d wanted to make a stink about it.

  Not that he minded. It didn’t hurt that her regulation-­cut hair was platinum blond, that she had big, soulful eyes and a body sculpted by countless hours in the fort’s excellent fitness center. Or that she had a mischievous grin that made Chapel’s knees go a little weak.

  Up to this point she’d kept her comments suggestive rather than brazen. She’d asked him a lot of questions about himself, always prodding for information she had to know he couldn’t give her—­like his wartime record, and what exactly his job description was now. It was the kind of flirting ­people in Military Intelligence did because they spent so much of their time staying secret that even the hint of disclosure was exciting.

  She’d also asked him what he liked to do when he went home at night, and whether he enjoyed Italian food. There was a nice Italian restaurant not a mile outside of the fort—­the implication was clear.

  So far he hadn’t taken the bait.

  “We are silent warriors, right?” she said, a hint of a laugh in her voice. “That’s the creed of the MIC.” She leaned in closer, which he hadn’t thought was possible before. Her shoulder touched his back. “All right. Keep your secrets. For now.”

  Chapel was no shrinking violet, and he was sorely tempted. And this was definitely the moment. She’d opened a door—­it was up to him to walk through. He could ask her out on a date and he knew she would say yes.

  Or he could say nothing and keep things casual and flirtatious and harmless between them forever.

  Initiating things would put his career at risk—­his career, such as it was. A series of boring desk jobs doing oversight on weapons contractors until he retired on a comfortable little pension.

  Go for it, he told himself. “I will tell you one secret,” he said. “I love Italian. And, in fact, I was thinking—­”

  Was it possible she could lean in even closer? She was almost rubbing his back with her shoulder. “Yes?” She reached out one hand to put it on his.

  His left hand.

  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 inju
red 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.