Myrmidon (8 page)

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

“G
et moving,” Belcher told his underlings. “Get these doors open.” Two-­man teams spread out among the igloos, already kneading their lumps of plastic explosives in their hands. Belcher started to give more orders, but at that moment Charlie, the big, tattooed guy, came running up to bring some news.

“We've got helos coming in from the north, sir,” he said.

“Already?” Belcher asked. He checked his watch. “How many?”

“Just two so far,” Charlie said.

Belcher nodded. “Those are just doing recon. The main force is still on its way. We need to bring those two down—­get men with Stingers up on the administrative buildings. Tell them not to fire until the helicopters are well within range. We can't afford to waste any of those missiles.” He turned to look at Chapel. “I don't want your friends just paving this place over with bombs. I need to discourage them from committing air support.” It seemed he wanted Chapel to know every detail of his plan. So, afterward, he could explain how it had gone down, of course. A witness was only as good as the things he saw or heard.

“A good bombardment on the igloos would be perfect for dispersing the gas,” he told Chapel. “But then I wouldn't get as many infantry in my cloud. No, I need them to commit ground forces. If I shoot down enough helicopters, they'll bring in the troops, if just to take out my missile positions.”

“They can do that with snipers, or artillery,” Chapel said, wishing it were true.

But Belcher had been in the army. He knew standard operating procedure. “Too much ground to cover, and they know what I have here. They can't afford to put us under siege and wait us out—­they'll need to make a full assault.”

“Drone strikes. Hellfire missiles are pretty accurate,” Chapel countered.

Belcher smiled. “Are you actually giving me advice?”

“I'm trying to convince you this isn't going to work,” Chapel said.

“Well, you can stop. I know the majority of the drone forces are already tasked overseas. What they could bring to bear here would be just a handful of old, first-­generation Predators, and that would never be enough. I'm going to get my infantry attack, one way or another.”

He walked away from Chapel then to greet a line of men coming up with wheelbarrows. They were hauling hundreds of identical parcels, and when they came close enough, Chapel saw what gifts they bore. Each of the parcels was made of a small oil drum with a cheap cell phone duct-­taped to it. Homemade bombs, probably stuffed full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. The cell phones would be wired to detonators—­as soon as someone called their numbers, they would set off the explosives. They had hundreds of the bombs, enough to put one in each igloo. They weren't very big, but they didn't need to be. The shells stored in those igloos were all loaded with explosive warheads of their own. Once the bombs went off, they would trigger a chain reaction inside the igloos, cooking off the shells like strings of firecrackers. The igloos' reinforced walls were designed to contain such a blast, but with the doors open, the shock waves of the repetitive explosions would only push the gas out faster, turning each igloo into a jet of dense mustard gas.

Another group of men came up pushing carts full of what looked like army uniforms, until Chapel saw the gloves and hoods attached to them. A neo-­Nazi held one up by its shoulders to show Belcher, and Chapel got a good look at it and confirmed what he'd suspected. They were NBC suits—­nuclear bacteriological chemical protective suits—­designed to protect soldiers from the very sort of weapons stored at the depot. Chapel had trained in such a suit back in basic, years and years ago, and knew they were clunky and uncomfortable and got ridiculously hot, but they were far more flexible and tough than civilian hazmat suits. Like all the best army technology, they were heavily overdesigned. They were airtight, with an integrated rebreather system built into a backpack, so the wearer didn't need to rely on outside air that might be tainted or full of radioactive dust. The suits inflated slightly when you put them on, giving them a positive internal pressure so even if they were pierced—­say, by an enemy bullet—­your air would leak out and the contaminated air outside wouldn't leak in. The uniform parts were even lined with a thin sheet of lead to keep out ionizing radiation.

It made sense that a good supply of the suits would be on hand in one of the otherwise-­empty warehouses back by the administrative buildings—­if anyone was ever going to need them, it would be the guards who worked at the depot. Chapel was surprised, though, to see that Belcher had called for them.

“I thought you wanted to go down in a blaze of glory,” Chapel called out, trying to get Belcher's attention.

The terrorist looked over at him with a grin. He didn't answer—­he didn't need to. Instead, he took a combat knife from his belt and started slicing through the reinforced fabric of the suit his underling held. The suit was designed to resist punctures, and the lead lining would make it like trying to cut through a tin can. Belcher had to saw away for a while just to make a good hole in the suit, but when he was done, he held it up and showed it to all his gathered ­people. “When Cortez came to Mexico, when he knocked over the Aztecs, his men saw the odds against them,” he announced.

The neo-­Nazis around him looked confused, but every eye stayed on Belcher, every ear strained for what he would say next.

“Cortez knew there could be no going back. So you know what he did? He went down to the ships that had brought his men to Mexico. And he set every one of them on fire. The message was clear. He was demanding nothing less than total commitment. That's all I'm asking from you. There aren't enough of these for all of us. So nobody gets one. Not even me!”

There was some cheering at that, though it wasn't exactly the hooting and hollering Chapel had heard after the neo-­Nazis first stormed the depot. Nobody complained or protested, though.

All these men were ready to die for their cause.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­ONE

C
hapel heard the helicopters coming and looked up, but it seemed he was the only one. The neo-­Nazis were too busy cutting up NBC suits or moving bombs into igloos. They had jobs to do, and none of those jobs included watching the sky.

Chapel, whose only job was to watch and remember, saw it all.

There were two helos, one slightly ahead of the other. They had the tandem cockpits and underslung chain guns of AH-­64 Apaches, and they were moving fast. Because they were heading straight toward Chapel, though, they seemed to just hang in the air as if they were defying gravity, slowly getting bigger as they approached.

He expected them to switch on their loudspeakers and broadcast a warning, but it looked like they weren't taking any chances. The one in the lead had two Hellfire missiles and a pair of Hydra 70 rocket pods mounted on its hardpoints—­before Chapel even thought it was in range, it opened up with the rockets, smoke whipping out of the pods' barrels and wreathing the aircraft before the rotor wash could whisk it away. The rockets moved too fast for Chapel to see, but he felt the ground shimmy as one after another of them hammered home. In the distance, he heard someone scream.

One or two of Belcher's workers glanced up, but there was nothing to see, so they went back to their tasks. Andre handed Belcher a cell phone, and he listened to it for a moment, nodding. “Wait for it,” he said, though not into the phone. “Let them get just a little closer . . .”

The lead Apache loosed its Hellfires, and Chapel
could
see them coming in, arcing down toward the administrative buildings over by the main gate. He didn't know what the helicopter's gunner was choosing to target—­maybe it was trying to clear the truck Belcher had left stuck in the gate—­but this time the ground shook like it had been hit with an enormous mallet. As soon as the Hellfires were free, the helo backed off, shrinking in the distance as its partner moved in.

“Don't let him get away,” Belcher shouted. There was no way the Stinger teams up near the gate could have heard him, but at that same moment one of them launched, the surface-­to-­air missile streaking up toward its target on a finger of smoke. The helicopter tried to maneuver, swinging sideways in the air, but the Stinger was heat-­guided and compensated effortlessly. It took the helicopter in the tail section and sent its fuselage spinning up in the air before the helicopter dropped like a rock.

Chapel closed his eyes. He knew the helicopter's crew had just died to make a point—­the attack with rockets and missiles had been the equivalent of a shot across a ship's bows, a declaration of hostilities. The helo crew couldn't have guessed that Belcher had the kind of firepower that could take them down.

They were soldiers. Chapel knew they'd sworn an oath to protect their country, just as he had. It still didn't make it easy to think about how they were dying on the desert floor, crushed under the weight of their own vehicle.

The crew of the second helicopter, the one that had just started its attack run, was smart enough to abort and swing away, trying to maneuver back out of range of Belcher's antiaircraft weapons. They didn't quite make it. A second Stinger touched the helicopter's skids, and Chapel saw smoke and light fill its cockpit. Instead of spinning down to a crash, the machine disintegrated in midair, raining down components and burning fuel. It had never had a chance to fire off a single munition, and its rockets and missiles burst in the air as they tumbled toward the ground.

Four men dead already, and the real fight to reclaim the depot hadn't even begun. Belcher grunted once in satisfaction and got back to work as if nothing had happened. Andre handed him a new phone, a top-­of-­the-­line smartphone that looked like it had just been unboxed.

“I've added all the detonators as contacts,” Andre told his leader. “All you have to do is send a single text message to all contacts. The message doesn't matter. All you need to do is make the detonator phones beep, and they'll kick off.”

Belcher looked at the smartphone in his hand for a while as if he were a kid being handed the key to a toy store. Then he smiled at Andre and patted him on the cheek. “Good work. Are the bombs all in place?”

“Just finishing up the last of them. When are you . . . I mean, when will you send that text?” Andre asked, and Chapel thought he looked a little bit nervous.

“Not until we see the whites of their eyes,” Belcher told him. “Head back to your station now and get those Brownings unlimbered, okay?”

Andre bowed his head and nodded, then ran off at a good clip, anxious to do his master's bidding. When he was gone, Belcher walked over to where other minions were cutting up the NBC suits. They were making slow progress, but he smiled and gave them a few kind words, and that seemed to spur them on.

Chapel glared at the man. “You going to save one of those for me?” he asked. “I can't be much of a witness if I die in your cloud.”

Belcher laughed. “Oh, don't worry. I've got some protection for you, Agent.” A ­couple of his men laughed along, as if they got the joke. One of them had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He took something dark and flexible out of it and handed it to Belcher, who brought it over to Chapel. “See? You'll be nice and safe.”

Chapel couldn't figure out what he was holding for a second. Then he saw the heavy, drooping canisters and small round eyeshields of a gas mask. The kind one of those World War I soldiers might have worn in the trenches.

“Very funny,” Chapel said. “You know as well as I do those were useless against mustard gas.”

“That's not true. This is going to keep you from breathing the stuff. So you won't choke to death on your own burned lung tissue. It'll keep you from being blinded as well, so you can see everything.”

Chapel shook his head. “But the gas will seep right through my clothes. I'll be burned all over the rest of my body.”

Belcher shrugged. “I said you would live through this day. I didn't say you wouldn't wish you were dead.” He lifted the mask and pulled it down over Chapel's head, then pulled the straps tight to hold it in place.

With it on, Chapel's visual field was reduced to two small circular windows that cut all of his peripheral vision and made it impossible to look down. The heavy canisters pulled at his chin, making it hard to even lift his head. The mask stank of old rubber and someone else's dried spit. He could hear almost nothing but his own heavy breathing.

“It's about to get too dangerous for you out here in the open,” Belcher told him. “It's time for you to bunker up.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­TWO

A
ndre shoved Chapel toward a small building near the center of the depot, shielded on all sides by various administrative buildings. It didn't look like much, and it was smaller on the inside, but that fact alone was important. The walls were made of concrete at least a foot thick, enough to keep out bullets and even small artillery rounds. There were no windows in the little building, but it was lined with television screens receiving a live feed from every side of the base. Clearly, it was a command post, from which the depot's commanding officer could keep tabs on everything that happened around him without having to stick his head out the door and look.

It looked like that hadn't been enough, though. A wide swath of blood painted the threshold of the door—­apparently whoever had been on duty in here had stepped outside when the attack started but hadn't made it very far. He'd left a coffee cup sitting on a control panel just to the right of the door. Whoever he'd been, Chapel uttered a silent prayer for his soul, by way of apology. He couldn't help but think he was responsible for the attack. Belcher probably would have stormed the depot eventually, but Chapel's arrival had prompted him, and for that he was distinctly sorry. How many men had already died? How many more would be lost before the day was over?

He hadn't given up hope—­he was too stubborn to ever do that—­but he had to admit the situation looked grim. He could see little through the eyeholes of the gas mask, and he was having trouble breathing through the heavy filters. The rope that bound him wasn't getting any looser. He was unarmed, and Andre, with his rifle and pistol, was standing between Chapel and the door.

And even if he could get away, if he somehow spontaneously developed the strength to break his bonds, what could he do? There were two thousand armed neo-­Nazis outside that door, all of them ready to shoot at the slightest provocation. And then there was Belcher. One quick phone call, and Belcher could unleash Armageddon on the state of Colorado and points east. Even if Chapel possessed a tank battalion to play with, he didn't know if he could stop the terrorist in time.

Chapel was, to put it one way, royally screwed.

As if to drive the point home, Andre slammed the door shut. He drew his pistol and leaned up against the doorframe, his eyes securely fixed on Chapel. “Might as well have a seat,” he said.

Chapel looked around the room for a chair. Without any peripheral vision, he'd taken in only a few details of his new prison cell. He found the chair almost right away, tucked neatly under the control panel, but while he was looking for it, he spotted something else. There was a telephone, a plain old-­fashioned handset receiver, mounted on the control panel. It had a keypad and looked like it was perfectly capable of making calls outside the base.

If he could only get in touch with Angel, his operator—­if he could tell her what was going on, get word to Director Hollingshead and tell him to pull back his troops, to
not
attack the depot, that would buy some time.

Of course, if he tried that, Andre would just shoot him.

“I don't suppose,” he said, “that this is the point where you tell me you're an undercover ATF agent, and this whole time you've been waiting to help me.”

Something suspiciously like a smile twisted the corner of Andre's mouth.

“Good one,” he said.

Yeah,
Chapel thought. That would have been too easy. “No,” he said, “you strike me as the genuine article. A purebred Nordic warrior type. The kind of guy who would have been in the front rank of a Viking raid, biting his shield and frothing at the mouth. A berserker.”

“You don't know shit about what that means,” Andre snarled.

“You think I didn't do my homework before I came out here? I know that most of those guys out there are just posers. They liked the look of the tattoos, or maybe they even thought Belcher was onto something with his talk of separatism. But they're not really committed, not like you. They don't feel it in their bones. They don't feel the need to fight for their heritage. When the time comes, you think they'll even fire their weapons? Or will they toss them down and put their hands up and say, ‘please, Daddy, I was just playing!' ”

Andre shook his head, but there was a sort of faraway look in his eyes. Chapel knew he'd touched on something there. Andre came from a macho culture that valued how hard a man was over all else. How well a man could hit, and how well he could take a hit in return. Men like that needed to constantly prove themselves. Guard duty wasn't going to sit well with him.

“Shame you're stuck here babysitting me, while the real action is outside,” Chapel said, choosing his words carefully. “You could be on the front lines, making a difference. Instead, you're here watching me, your biggest enemy, and making sure I don't get hurt like a bitch.”

“I've got my orders,” Andre told him.

“I guess Belcher figured he knew what you were worth,” Chapel said.

That did it. Andre was on him in a second, throwing him down on the floor and jumping on top of him. He rammed his fist three times into Chapel's stomach, knocking the breath out of him and making Chapel suck for air inside the stinking gas mask.

“You know nothing,” Andre howled. “You got no idea what it means to be a soldier of the white race!”

He reached down to his belt and drew a long, thin knife, something like a medieval dagger. He brought it up to tap the point on one of the gas mask's eyeshields. “I should mark you,” he said. “I should carve a swastika right on your chest, so you never forget who you fucked with.”

For the first time, Chapel wondered if he should have gone with the tattoos.