David Wellington
Chimera
For Dad
PART ONE
CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+0:00
The forest was on fire, and the sky was full of orange smoke. Land mines kept cooking off and exploding in the distance, making Sergeant Lourdes jump every single time — and regret it every single time, since it made the barbed wire imbedded in his leg snag and tear some more.
Sweat poured down his face, chilling instantly in the cool night air. There was blood — blood everywhere — but he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about what had happened to him, about his injuries, about what was going to happen to his family without him. He couldn’t think about how he probably wouldn’t make it to see morning.
All he could think about was the sentry post, twenty-five yards away. The cramped little box he’d been stationed in for three years now, the box he’d come to loathe, then tolerate, then start to think of as his home away from home. There was a picture of his baby girl taped to one window. There was a flask of coffee in there and right now he was so thirsty, his mouth felt dry as a bone and—
— and he couldn’t think about that. Because his uniform jacket was in there, too, hanging on the back of his wooden chair. And in the pocket of that jacket was his cell phone, his direct link to his superiors. To the people who had to know what had happened. To the people who could fix this, who could make everything okay, if he could just tell them.
Just tell them the fence was down, the perimeter defenses compromised, and the detainees were free.
Sergeant Brian Lourdes had a pretty good security clearance. Not enough to know why those seven men had been locked away so tight. Not enough to know why they were so dangerous they could never be set free. But enough to know what would happen if they ever did get out. Enough to know it could mean the end of America.
Of course that was never supposed to happen. When Lourdes first came to the facility in upstate New York, he’d been amazed at the level of security on Camp Putnam. The razor-wire fences stood twenty feet high, two layers with a fifty-yard stretch of minefield in between. Twenty men monitored that fence rain or shine, every day of the year. There were more than seven hundred cameras mounted on the fence posts, trained in every direction, watching every corner of that fence that surrounded over a hundred acres of forests and fields.
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.