Chapel grimaced. “You all know the feeling, I’m sure. That cramp in your guts when you just know you’re being played. When shit is about to go down.”
The boys assented in a chorus of profanities.
“I didn’t see the Taliban. I didn’t have time to see anything. An RPG hit the jeep, getting in under the back of the undercarriage so the whole thing flipped over on top of me. Sounded like my head was an anvil getting hit with a big hammer. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything. I could smell lamb chops, though. Well-done lamb chops.”
Julia was surprised to hear some of the boys laugh at that. The thought of Chapel under the jeep made her sick to her stomach. But she supposed when you lived in constant danger you learned to find humor where you could.
“My contact — all the people I’d come to talk to — had already made up their minds. They were honorary Taliban by then, one hundred percent committed. Seconds after the jeep flipped, they were all over me, pulling on me, screaming in my face, asking me where my money was and saying they would let me go for a million dollars. I was hurt, bad, and I couldn’t do anything. They pulled me out of that wreckage, but they weren’t gentle about it and they left a big chunk of my arm behind.”
“How’d you get free?” one of the boys asked.
“I didn’t. They took me to that cave complex, the one I’d been headed for anyway. It was full of guys with AK-47s and RPGs and even just machetes. Even if the place had been guarded by kittens, I was in no shape to fight my way out. They held me there with no food, just a little water each day, and they demanded information. They wanted to know where our troops were, where they were headed. They wanted to know what locals we’d contacted and who was looking to betray them. They wanted to know every piece of information I could give them. They wanted to know a whole bunch of stuff I had no idea about, too, and they refused to believe me when I said I didn’t know.”
“Did they cut off your arm?” the burned sailor asked.
“No. No, they didn’t touch it. They beat me occasionally, and sometimes they… well, they tortured me. But they left the arm alone. That was intentional. They kept saying that it was getting infected. That it was going to die unless I got medical attention. They made me watch as it turned different colors. They pushed it in my face so I could smell it rotting.”
“They let gangrene set in?” Julia asked, horrified. “You could have died!”
“Probably would have,” Chapel said. “I got lucky.”
“How?” Ralph asked.
“The best kind of luck you can get — a SEAL team. It was just before dawn one day and my guards were already up, making breakfast. They liked to do that in front of me to remind me how hungry I was. One of them stood up to get some salt, and his brains came right out of his ear. The others ran for their weapons, but they were dead as soon as they moved. I was so out of it by then, so delirious, I thought it was all a trick. A ruse to get me to talk. I don’t remember much else until I was on a helicopter, headed to a field hospital. That was the last time I ever saw my left arm. They knocked me out for surgery, and when I woke up, I was about eight pounds lighter.”
“They couldn’t save the arm,” Chapel said, looking around at his audience. It had been a long time since he’d talked about this with anybody. A long time since he’d let himself think about it. “The gangrene had progressed too much. It was poisoning me, and leaving the arm on would just make it worse. They cut it off while I was still asleep. Then they shipped me to Walter Reed so I could get pumped full of antibiotics and that was where I met Top.”
“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.”