He tried not to think about that. He tried to keep one eye on his feet, watching for exposed tree roots or piles of leaf litter that could hide all kinds of obstacles. But the forest just wasn’t built for running.
“There,” Julia said, finally. She was out of breath, but she grabbed his arm with one hand and pointed with the other. “That shack. I remember it.”
Chapel could see why. It was a collapsed hovel like all the others they’d seen, maybe one of the places the chimeras had retreated to when Ian told them to split up. Only one wall remained intact, the roof having collapsed and taken the other walls with it. But the intact wall was decorated with hundreds of tiny skulls. They looked like fox skulls to Chapel.
“My God, it’s even creepier in daylight,” she said.
Chapel grunted in frustration. He looked up and saw the sun had fully risen. It was too late to try to just sneak out.
Even though they were so close to the gap in the fence. “That was the first shack we saw when we came in, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Julia said. “The fence is just a little ways over there.” She pointed at a stand of woods that looked like every other group of trees.
“It is?” Chapel asked. “How can you know that?”
“We came north by northwest when we entered. We’d gone less than a quarter mile when we saw this place.”
Chapel could only stare at her.
“What?” she asked.
“How could you know that?”
She just stood there for a while catching her breath. “Girl Scouts,” she told him. “Orienteering award.”
“You,” he said, “keep surprising me with just how incredible you are.”
“Sweet,” she told him. “Now. How do we do this without getting shot?”
Somewhere nearby someone stepped on a pile of pine needles.
Somebody who wasn’t one of them.
Chapel whirled around — and saw motion between two trees. It still wasn’t light enough for him to see what it was. Maybe an animal. Maybe Samuel.
He put out one hand to signal to Julia that she should stay very still and not speak. She seemed to get the point. Chapel closed his eyes and just listened for a moment. He heard more footsteps, coming closer. Very slowly.
“Damn,” he said, very softly. Mostly to himself. Then, much louder, “I am a federal agent. I am armed, but my weapon will remain in its holster. My companion is a civilian, and she is not armed.”
Julia stared at him like he’d gone crazy — at least, until a few seconds later, when soldiers poured out of the trees and surrounded them.
IN TRANSIT: APRIL 14, T+49:06
They took away Chapel’s phone, his hands-free set, the scuffed-up phone Samuel had called the Voice, and of course, his pistol. They left him his arm, even after one of the soldiers pulled the glove off his left hand and found what lay beneath. They handcuffed him with his hands behind his back, then forced him at gunpoint through the gap in the fence and into the back of an old M35 truck — a “deuce and a half,” a two-and-a-half-ton truck of the kind the military used all over the world.
What happened to Julia he didn’t get to see. None of the soldiers hit him or mistreated him in any way, so he could only hope they’d extended her the same courtesy.
He did not ask any questions or speak at all except when they demanded he identify himself. He gave them his name, his rank, and his serial number. They didn’t ask for anything else.
He got a good look at their uniforms and saw they were navy — most likely they’d been drawn from the Naval Support Unit at Saratoga Springs. Sailors, then, seamen rather than soldiers. They weren’t SEALs, he could tell that much, but they were well trained and efficient. They carried M4 carbines — but not M4-A1s, which meant they probably weren’t Special Forces.
Observing little details like that helped him keep his cool. Just like Julia had dealt with the horrors of Camp Putnam by falling back on her medical training.
Besides, he had little else to do while he waited to find out what was going to happen to him.
The back of the truck was cold and drafty — it lacked a hard top, instead just having a canvas cover. It smelled like grease and old boots. That was a comforting smell to Chapel — it reminded him of his early days in the army. It also made him think he wasn’t being detained by the CIA.
That was something, anyway. He consoled himself while the truck bounced and rolled over gravel roads, carrying him away from Camp Putnam.
In time the truck stopped and the engine was switched off. Chapel closed his eyes and listened to every sound he could hear. He heard the sailors moving around the truck, heard them click their heels as they saluted someone. He heard other vehicles moving around. And yes — there — the sound of a helicopter’s rotor powering down.
He heard boots crunching on gravel outside the truck. Heard sailors come closer, and he knew they were coming to get him. He had no idea what to expect.
He was unable to keep his jaw from dropping when Rupert Hollingshead jumped up into the back of the truck and stared at him with a cold and angry eye.
NAVAL SUPPORT UNIT SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+50:21
“Admiral,” Chapel said. “Please forgive me for not saluting.”
Hollingshead just glared at him for a while. The DIA director was wearing an immaculate suit with a perfectly folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His bow tie had a pattern of anchors on it, but otherwise he looked very much the civilian, just as he had the last time Chapel saw him, back at the Pentagon.
He was carrying a stool, a folding three-legged stool that he assembled and set down next to him. Eventually he sat down on it and crossed his legs, his hands gripping one knee. He said nothing, but he kept looking at Chapel, utter disappointment on his face.
The silence between them took on its own life. It made Chapel want to squirm. It made him want to explain himself. He did not do these things.
Eventually it was Hollingshead who broke the silence. “The life of an officer is quite lonely, at times. You see, son, an officer can’t afford to have friends.”
Chapel stayed at attention. He had not been put at ease.
“An officer always has a superior to whom he must report. No friends there, I assure you. Then he has men and women under his command. A good officer will have good people — if they aren’t good people when they are assigned to him, he turns them into good people. That’s what I was taught by my commanders, anyway. He learns to respect them, their hard work, their sacrifice; these things make them special in his eyes. They make him proud, and he comes to, ah, love them, in his very special way, I suppose. But he can’t ever forget he’s responsible for them. That their actions, in a very real, very concrete way, are his actions, and so — when it becomes necessary — when he must — he has to punish them. In accord with their offenses. When they break the rules, you see.”
When Chapel was sixteen he’d been caught, once, sneaking out of a girl’s bedroom window. The man who’d caught him was the girl’s father, who didn’t approve of her seeing Chapel. The girl’s father had been carrying a pistol at the time.
At that particular moment, listening to Hollingshead describe the burdens of leadership, Chapel remembered that long ago summer’s night with exquisite fondness. As scared as he’d been, as ashamed, it wasn’t a patch on this.
“I’d like you to answer some questions, Captain, just so I can sleep better tonight. So I can be content in knowing I did the right thing, here.”