Myrmidon (7 page)

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he convoy of cars, pickups, and SUVs roared through a residential part of Pueblo, unhindered by traffic lights or stop signs. Chapel saw ­people out on their porches catching an evening breeze. They watched the vehicles race past with looks of mild disapproval at most—­they could have no idea what they were seeing.

Chapel wished he knew himself. Belcher still hadn't revealed his plan, and there was nothing Chapel could do without knowing where they were even headed. The convoy blasted through town and didn't stop, and he racked his brain, trying to think of some target, some opportunity for mayhem just north of Pueblo . . .

“We've been training for this for years,” Belcher told him. “Running constant drills. Going over and over the plan, fine-­tuning every element. Hatred can fuel you through long nights and so many setbacks.”

“I understand,” Chapel said.

“Oh?”

“I understand your problem, now.” Chapel peered forward through the windshield, looking for any sign of their destination. It was useless—­all he could see was a pickup with a bed full of ex-­skinheads loosing a chorus of rebel yells. “You were raised on hate. Nobody ever gave you anything to believe in.”

“I believe in my ability to send a message,” Belcher told him. “The world is going to hear this one.”

Chapel nodded. “I'm sure. I even understand, a little. When I was in the seventh grade—­well, it wasn't a great time for me. I'd discovered girls, but they had yet to notice me. All the kids I'd thought were my friends turned out to be jerks. My grades suffered, and I didn't want to do anything but lie on my bed in my bedroom and listen to my heavy-­metal tapes. I used to think about blowing up my school. I mean, I really fantasized about it, about how I would do it, about all the teachers running away on fire. I never thought about how to get away with it without being caught—­I wanted the world to know who had done it. But I had good reasons
not
to do it, too. My family. The one friend I could actually count on, even if sometimes I wasn't a great friend to him. The history teacher who actually took the time to work with me, to figure out why my test scores were slipping. I figured blowing him up would be kind of, you know, ungrateful.”

“You're wasting your time, Agent. You're not going to psychoanalyze me out of doing this.”

“I know,” Chapel told him. “I just hope you'll have one moment of doubt, somewhere down the line. That you'll pause for half a second and wonder if you did the right thing, devoting your whole adult life to one colossally stupid act. By the way, when are you going to tell me . . .”

“Agent? You just kind of trailed off there.”

Chapel shook his head. No. It couldn't be.

A high-­value target north of Pueblo. The airport didn't count, it was too small to make a big splash in the news even if it were demolished by terrorists. There was an army depot north of the town, but it had barely been used in decades, except as storage for one thing. One leftover from World War I that nobody wanted around anymore, which had been scheduled for destruction for years . . .

“Belcher,” he said, very quietly. “Belcher, this is—­it's too much. If you blow up those igloos—­”

“Figured it out, did you?” Belcher asked. “Won't be long now.”

Up ahead, at the front of the convoy, someone leaned out of a truck window and started firing an AK-­47.

The attack had begun.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

C
hapel could see little from his position near the rear of the convoy, but he could guess what was happening from the noise and the shouts and the flashes of light.

Pueblo Depot had been a significant army base once, a munitions storage-­and-­maintenance facility that had supplied half the country with ammunition from bullets to guided missiles. It covered more than twenty-­four thousand acres, and had been one of the major dumping grounds for equipment coming back from World War II. The vast majority of the depot had been shut down over the ensuing decades, though—­it was so reduced in usage that big parts of it had been leased out to civilians as warehouse space, and what the military still owned was scheduled to be closed in less than five years. Now it was only lightly guarded, definitely not up to a concerted attack by two thousand neo-­Nazis. Belcher's men were overwhelming the gate guards and whatever reinforcements they could call up. The shooting was over in a few minutes, with what looked like only minimal casualties on Belcher's side.

Once it was clear, Belcher took his truck off the road and headed up toward the gate. Chapel got a good view of the gatehouse, a little booth enclosed in now-­shattered glass. An SAF guy in a leather jacket and Doc Martens boots had climbed up on top of the gatehouse and was firing his rifle in the air, while two others pulled the bodies of dead soldiers out of the way of the oncoming vehicles. Someone inside turned off the folding-­tire-­spike barrier, and pickups and SUVs moved quickly through the opening, spreading out among the buildings just past the fence. Belcher waved vehicle after vehicle through while he studied the road behind them, occasionally glancing at his watch.

“Your friends should be here soon, Agent,” Belcher said. “We're going to have to move quickly. But we've run enough drills we should be okay. My ­people know the layout of this base like the backs of their hands.”

“Those soldiers never did anything to hurt you,” Chapel insisted, watching a body get dragged up to the fence surrounding the base. A skinhead propped the dead man up to look like he was sitting, then slapped the dead face playfully. Chapel felt his stomach turn over. “You hated the brass in your unit in Kuwait? Fine, go get revenge on them. These were just kids, doing their job.”

“Nice speech,” Belcher said. “You have any more like that, why don't you save it for the media when this is all over? If you live through this, you're going to be a star. Every news outlet in the country's gonna want to hear your story.”

Chapel shook his head but said nothing.

Belcher got the last of his vehicles inside the fence, then pulled his own truck up to the gate. He waved at a neo-­Nazi in the gatehouse, and Chapel heard the sound of a hydraulic system starting up. Looking out his window, he saw the vehicle-­deterring spikes rise from the gateway, directly under Belcher's truck. A row of steel spikes on a hinge, they were designed to shred the tires of any vehicle stupid enough to try to charge the gate. They hadn't stopped Belcher's men, but now Belcher intentionally drove over them, first forward, then back, until all four tires of his truck popped with a noise like low-­caliber gunshots. The truck sank a few inches, one corner at a time.

Chapel knew what he was doing. Belcher didn't need the truck anymore—­he didn't plan on driving out of here—­so he had turned it into an obstacle. When the army arrived to retake the Pueblo Depot, they would find the truck sitting there on its rims, blocking the gate. It would take a real effort to tow it out of the way, especially if the tow truck was under heavy fire the whole time.

“We walk from here,” Belcher said. He jumped down from the driver's seat and ran around to Chapel's side to help him out of the car. Belcher kept a pistol in his hand the whole time as he gestured for Chapel to move forward, into the base.

He saw more bodies as he walked in, and bloodstains across the concrete. Up ahead, Belcher's private army were moving through a cluster of small buildings, checking every angle, breaching every door to make sure they'd gotten all of the base's soldiers. Belcher prodded Chapel down a wide thoroughfare with disused barracks buildings on either side. Before they'd gotten very far, though, he grabbed Chapel's shoulder to make him stop. Andre and a skinhead in a black polo shirt came running up, dragging another man between them. The man was balding, maybe fifty years old, wearing a short-­sleeved button-­down shirt and chinos. He didn't look like a soldier, in other words. He was weeping openly as he was pushed forward to fall on his knees in front of Belcher.

“Please,” he begged. “Please.” He couldn't seem to say anything else.

Andre smacked him across the back of the head, and he shut up. “We found him in one of the civvy warehouses, hiding under a forklift.” Andre laughed. “Picked the wrong day to do inventory, huh?”

“What's your name?” Belcher asked the man.

The balding man was too scared to answer. He put his hands together like he was praying and stared up at Belcher with hopeful eyes.

Chapel had to do something. “Come on, Belcher, he's nothing to you. Let him go.”

“He's in my way,” Belcher said, and pressed the barrel of his pistol against the man's forehead. “That's reason enough. I'm on too tight a timeline for any kind of distractions.”

“You said you needed witnesses,” Chapel pleaded.

“I've already got you.” He pulled the trigger. Chapel had seen enough men die in his lifetime. He turned his head and didn't look as the body fell to the concrete.

“Come on,” Belcher said when it was done. “I want you to see something real special.” He grabbed Chapel's shoulder and shoved him hard to get him moving again.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S
poradic gunfire made Chapel jump as he was herded through the base. He didn't know if the neo-­Nazis were shooting at anyone or just firing their guns in celebration. They lacked the discipline of real soldiers, but Belcher didn't seem to mind that they were wasting ammo and making way too much noise as they laughed and whooped with success. Maybe he figured they deserved to have a little fun since they were all going to die in an hour or so.

None of them looked scared. None of them showed even an iota of regret. “What about their families?” Chapel asked, when none of them were in earshot. No women had come along for this particular bloodbath. “What about their wives?”

“The women who were dumb enough to marry skinheads and white-­power assholes?” Belcher asked, quietly. “They're still back in Kendred, armed to the teeth. When the ATF or the army or whoever shows up to investigate, they'll have a nasty surprise waiting for them. Those women are just as ready to die as their men.”

“What about all those kids you showed me?”

“They're being herded into an underground bunker where they'll be safe. Those kids still have a chance, if they can get away from their parents. The state will have to take care of 'em,” Belcher told him. “Find them nice new homes. Find them families who will teach them better than this lot could. Maybe they'll grow up not hating anybody. Doesn't that sound nice?”

“You're willing to sacrifice all these lives—­including your own—­just to make a point,” Chapel said, scarcely believing it. “You care to tell me what the point actually is? Beyond just how much you hate everyone?”

“Isn't that enough?” Belcher asked, then he laughed. “You've got me all wrong, Agent. You think I'm trying to send a message, here? That's a common misconception about terrorists.”

“So you admit that's what you are? A terrorist?”

“As in someone who uses fear as a weapon? Yeah, I accept that label. Your lot, the media, the vast majority of ­people in this country, they've got the wrong idea about terror, though. They think your suicide bombers, your hijackers, your abductors are political dissidents. That they're using TV and the newspapers to get their cause some attention. But you actually talk to real terrorists, that's not the word they use for themselves. They call themselves soldiers. I'm not here to tell America that white supremacy is
bad.
If they can't figure that out for themselves, they're too fucking stupid to understand anyway. No, I'm here to
punish.
”

“Punish? Punish who?” Chapel asked.

“The white-­power movement. The US Army. Everyone who ever wronged me. I don't claim to be a deep man, Agent. I live by a very simple code. You blacken my eye, I break your neck. My father's fans are going to die here today. The men who threw me in jail for beating up my CO will die here today.”

“That's it? That's all this is about?” Chapel asked. “You're just working out your daddy issues, and all these ­people have to die for—­”

Belcher's arm flashed forward, the butt of his pistol coming right at Chapel's mouth. Chapel had time to roll his jaw to one side, but nothing more, so the impact just tore open his cheek instead of breaking half his teeth. He staggered backward, trying not to fall down. It was tough with his arms tied, but, somehow, he managed. He turned to face Belcher again as blood dripped onto his shirt.

“I think I warned you about making speeches. If you try it again, I'll have you gagged,” Belcher told him. “Now. Let's get to the igloos. We're burning daylight.”

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

B
elcher walked him at a brisk pace past a series of administrative buildings and civilian warehouses. Beyond those lay a vast open area with its own perimeter fence, a stretch of ground where sunflowers and scrub grass grew in wild profusion. The ground out there wasn't flat but studded with row after geometrically precise row of low mounds, all the same shape. They had steep sides covered in grass, and they might have looked like a natural feature of the landscape except that each mound had a door set into one side, all facing the same direction.

As soon as Chapel had known Belcher planned on taking the Pueblo Depot as his prize, he'd known why. He'd understood that Belcher hadn't built his town or gathered his army in Colorado by chance. He'd been planning this the whole time, because this was the one place he could find such easy access to weapons of mass destruction.

The mounds out there—­the common term for them was
igloos
—­might look like bunkers, but they were designed not to resist attack from outside but to contain an accidental explosion from within. Each of them was filled to capacity with artillery shells, and every one of those shells had a very nasty payload. This was one of only two remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons in the United States.

And now it belonged to Belcher.

The madman dragged Chapel over to the igloos and pushed him down to his knees in the grass and sunflowers, not fifty feet from one of the doors. Belcher waved over a ­couple of his men, and they moved quickly to the door. It would be locked, of course, sealed up tight, but they had an answer to that. One of them had a wad of plastic explosives that he molded around the lock. The other had a detonator.

Every muscle in Chapel's body tensed as they prepared to blow the door. If the charge they used was too big, if it set off any of the rounds stored inside, poison gas would come billowing out of the doorway right in Chapel's direction.

There was a sharp bang, and a little puff of smoke jumped away from the door. Belcher's men moved in again and pried the door open with a crowbar. It was designed to be airtight, and it squeaked as they tore away the rubber seal around its edges. Finally, they got it open. No gas issued forth—­they'd used just the right amount of explosive.

Belcher dragged Chapel back to his feet and pushed him forward, through the door, and into the dark chamber beyond. Its sloping walls loomed over him, pressing down on him, but claustrophobia was the least scary thing in that igloo.

Before him stood stacks of wooden pallets, lined up in perfect rows. Each pallet held sixty-­four artillery shells packed tight together. The shells were painted bluish gray with green print on them, and each was labeled HD GAS.

“Mustard gas,” Chapel said.

In his mind's eye, he saw the trenches of World War I, with soldiers in gas masks and Brodie helmets running away from yellow clouds that came streaming along the ground. Chapel knew his military history. He knew what that gas could do. It was a vesicant, a blistering agent—­those were just technical terms. The gas burned human flesh on contact. It could blind you if it got in your eyes. If it got in your lungs, it could make you cough away your life. Even if you had a functioning gas mask, it would seep right through your clothes. Just standing in a cloud of it could leave you maimed and in agonizing pain for the rest of your life.

Any one of those shells was enough to poison an infantry battalion. This one igloo contained maybe a ­couple thousand shells, on pallets stacked four high. And there were hundreds of igloos—­

“Doing the math in your head?” Belcher asked. “I'll save you some time. There are about 780,000 shells stored in these igloos. About seven percent of all the gas shells this country ever made.”

Chapel knew exactly what Belcher planned to do with those shells. He was going to wait until he could get as many soldiers as possible in the vicinity, then he was going to set them off all off at once. The cloud would be too big, too dense for anyone to run away from it. All those soldiers, and all of his men, would be trapped under a choking, burning fog. The death toll would be unthinkable.

Except that Belcher
had
thought about it. He'd thought about it for fifteen years. He'd considered exactly what would happen. He'd figured out how to make it as deadly as he possibly could. And he'd never doubted that he had a right to do it, not for a second.

“I still can't believe my luck,” Belcher said. He was beaming at the shells as if they were his children, and he was a proud papa. “They were supposed to destroy all these, you know. The government was going to incinerate them all by 2012. I was so worried that all my work would have been for nothing. But then government incompetence came to the rescue, and the deadline passed, and the shells remained. I probably would have had to declare my war soon, even if you hadn't come along, Agent. I'm so glad you dropped by when you did.”

“Belcher, you need to stop this,” Chapel said. He would beg if he had to. “Gas isn't like conventional weapons. You can't control it. If the wind blows the wrong way, the cloud could spread. It could blow southwest and hit every single person in Pueblo, that's a hundred thousand ­people—­”

“No it won't,” Belcher said.

“What?”

“You don't know this land like I do,” he told Chapel. “This time of year, the wind never blows west. You know what a Foehn wind is? Maybe you've heard of the Chinook? The air hits the tops of the mountains, then gravity pulls it down fast, pulling it right across the plains, all in one direction.”

Chapel thought of the giant wind turbine he'd seen on the road outside of town. “Wait—­so it blows eastward?”

Belcher nodded. “The ­people of Pueblo are probably safe. But given the size of the plume I'm going to make, anyone to the east might want to hold their breath. It'll probably stretch as far as Kansas. Might hit Wichita or even Topeka before it dissipates.”

“Jesus,” Chapel said. “You could poison a million ­people—­you have to stop this. You can't be that evil, you must—­”

“Agent, you've been talking to me all day. You know I have no problem hurting ­people. Killing them. My only regret right now is that I won't be around to see just how bad things are going to get.”

“You're willing to die for this? For just this?” Chapel asked.

Belcher put his hands on his hips and rolled his head on his neck. He was bursting with energy, with excitement. He looked like he might start salivating. Fifteen years of planning, and now his big day had arrived. “I've been beat up, abused, insulted for the whole length of my life. I don't think I'll miss it much. But this—­this thing I'm doing today, well, that's my legacy. After this, the whole world is going to know my name. They'll forget that my father ever existed.”