Myrmidon (9 page)

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­THREE

C
hapel could see the doubt in Andre's eyes. The kid with the Hitler-­mustache tattoo wanted so badly to skin Chapel alive, but he knew he shouldn't. He had his orders. Belcher must have really gotten through to him, to give a violent punk like this some sense of discipline—­but then, Belcher had been trained in leadership by the army, and Chapel knew how effective their lessons could be.

Andre pulled the knife away from Chapel's face and started to get back on his feet. If Chapel didn't push him again, the kid was just going to go back to guard duty, and Chapel would have achieved nothing but getting himself punched in the stomach.

Of course, if he pushed the kid too hard, Andre would just kill him.

When the Rangers had taught him this kind of psychological manipulation, they'd been very clear that it would backfire sometimes. But Chapel didn't see any other way to move forward.

“Huh,” Chapel said. “I see it, now.”

Andre squinted at him.

“It's subtle. I guess maybe just half.”

“What the hell are you jawing about?” the kid demanded.

“Your nose. I didn't really notice it before, but yeah, definitely. You're a little bit Jewish, aren't you?”

“Shut up.”

Chapel laughed. “Wow. Talk about overcompensating. Was it your mother or your father? If you tell me it was one of your grandparents, I'll believe you, but—­”

“Shut up!” Andre howled. “It just looks that way because it's been broken so many times!”

Ah. Chapel had hit a nerve. It had been a wild guess—­the kid's nose was a little bent, and for all Chapel knew, the explanation was correct. But in a group like Belcher's, such minor differences would always be observed and commented on. “If it was your mother, that technically makes you a Jew,” Chapel said. “If it was your father, then—­”

“I swear to God I will cut you open if you say one more word,” the kid shouted.

Chapel nodded. “I get it. You're no berserker after all. No wonder Belcher put you in here with me. Keep the untrustworthy types all in one place, right? It makes—­”

The kid was fast. He twirled around and fell right on top of Chapel and the knife went into Chapel's guts.

He had intended to get Andre to leave the room, to leave him alone so he could work on his bonds. If that didn't work he'd figured he would taunt Andre into fighting him, certain the kid's code of honor would mean Chapel had to be untied so it was a fair match. He had definitely not intended to be stabbed.

The pain was incredible. He felt like he was being sawed in half. Hot blood sluiced down his side toward the floor, and his lungs seized as his chest constricted, and for a second all he could see was red light. The knife came out of his body, and it was almost worse, the serrated edge tearing open whole new parts of him, and Chapel felt dizzy and nauseous and like he was going to die.

But then he felt something else. A strange looseness in his chest, as if he were falling to pieces. As if pieces of him were falling away. Maybe as if he were shedding his skin. His right arm, his good arm, felt sudden prickly and numb as blood coursed through its veins.

The knife, he realized, had cut more than his flesh. It had cut the ropes holding him, too.

Above him, Andre lifted the knife for another strike.

If he'd been anybody else, if he hadn't been Jim Chapel, that would have been it—­his death. He wouldn't have been able to fend off that blow. His right arm had fallen asleep long ago, losing all feeling where it was held against his torso.

But Chapel had a left arm that was made of servomotors and silicone and wires. That arm never went numb or got sore from being cramped in one position. That arm worked just fine.

The ropes twisted and fell away from his arm as he shot his artificial hand upward, trying to grab Andre's wrist. Instead, the point of the knife went right through the silicone flesh that covered the hand, grating as it slid between two metal fingers. For a nasty second, Chapel and Andre both stared at the knife impaling Chapel's hand. There was no blood, but Chapel could clearly see the point sticking through his artificial skin, and his brain immediately processed that information just one way: He'd been impaled. That was supposed to hurt. There were no pain receptors in his artificial arm, but his brain refused to be put off so easily.

He screamed. So did Andre.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­FOUR

A
little strength was returning to his right arm as fresh blood seeped through its capillaries. Chapel reached up with clumsy fingers and grabbed the hilt of the knife away from Andre. The boy was too shocked to resist. Chapel nearly dropped the knife as he pulled it free of his left hand, but somehow he held on to it.

“No,” Andre said. “No, you're some kind of a—­a—­”

There was no time to waste. Chapel turned the knife around in his hand and struck out hard, catching the kid across the temple with the knife's pommel. Andre howled in pain and threw himself to one side, off Chapel's body. Chapel threw the knife away and grabbed for the kid's neck with both hands. He knew exactly where to push, and soon he'd cut off the blood flow to Andre's brain. The neo-­Nazi's eyes rolled up in his head, and his eyelids fluttered shut as he dropped like a stone into unconsciousness.

When it was done, when Andre was passed out and no longer a threat, Chapel let himself breathe. Just breathe, just pant for oxygen. The wound in his stomach was bad, and he was losing blood at an alarming rate.

He had to move. He had to keep going. He couldn't just lie there and die.

First things first. Andre wouldn't be out for long, he knew. He used the bloodstained rope that had bound him before and hog-­tied the kid. He pulled off Andre's boots and socks and used one of the socks to gag him.

The neo-­Nazi was already starting to wake up by the time Chapel was finished. When he opened one bleary eye, Chapel squatted down and stared into it.

“That's got to be the world's stupidest tattoo,” he said.

Andre struggled, but he couldn't escape his bonds. Good. That had been the point of taunting the kid. Chapel didn't want him getting loose and alerting Belcher to the fact Chapel was free.

He went through Andre's pockets and found a cell phone. For a second, he considered what to do with that, then he just pulled out the battery and smashed the screen with the pommel of the knife. If Belcher called Andre to find out what had happened, the call wouldn't go to voice mail now—­which Belcher would certainly take as a sign something had gone wrong. Instead, the call would just fail, which might mean anything.

Next, Chapel had to tend to himself. There was nothing he could do for the pain or the shock, but he had to stop the blood loss. He tore up his own shirt and made bandages he could wrap around his abdomen, pulling them so tight he nearly made himself pass out. He shoved Andre's other sock against the wound to add pressure. He might get an infection from that, but there was nothing for it.

He got up off the floor of the command bunker and pulled himself upright, using the console for leverage. He was having trouble breathing, so he pulled off the gas mask and put it aside. He had no intention of needing it.

Next thing was the phone.

He picked up the handset and put it to his ear. He reached to dial a number he'd memorized a long time ago, but it turned out he didn't need to.

“Chapel?” Angel asked, her sweet voice like music to him. She must have been monitoring all the base's phone lines, hoping he would pick one up.

“I'm here,” he said. “Alive and mobile.”

“Oh, thank God!” she said. “When you went into that building, then when they blew up my drone and—­”

“Angel, just listen! You need to hear me right now. Belcher's taken control of the Pueblo Depot. I'm sure you've figured that part out.”

“Yes,” Angel said. “I tracked your movements by satellite after he blew up the drone. When we saw where you were headed, the director put through the order for a full assault. We've got units from Fort Carson and Buckley Air Force Base converging on your position—­nobody's taking any chances.”

Chapel's blood was turning cold in his veins. It wasn't quite ice water yet, but it was getting there. Fort Carson was only forty miles north of Pueblo. “How many troops, Angel? How many infantrymen?”

“About three battalions—­a full brigade, they said. I'm not sure how many men there are in a brigade,” Angel said. “I know it's a lot.”

Chapel closed his eyes. That could mean three thousand men, or even more. Hollingshead had pulled out all the stops—­he must be working with the Joint Chiefs, and maybe even the president, to commit that many men to one operation. It made sense, of course. The chemical weapons stored at Pueblo Depot needed to be contained, and fast, and that was going to take manpower.

But it also meant those men wouldn't all be wearing NBC suits. There just weren't enough units trained in chemical warfare to fill those ranks.

“You need to pull them back,” Chapel said. “Get them to fall back and take up siege positions. This place is a trap—­Terry Belcher is in here sitting on a mustard-­gas bomb big enough to wipe out Colorado. As soon as he has those soldiers where he wants them, he's going to set it off.”

“Chapel,” Angel said, “I . . . I saw them take you into a little building in the middle of the camp. Doesn't it have windows?”

“No, no, it doesn't, but that doesn't matter,” Chapel told her, “you have to—­”

But something in her voice made him look up, at the television screens on the walls of the command bunker. The screens that showed views of every part of the depot and the surrounding area.

While he was struggling with Andre, it looked like the army had been busy.

Every screen showed troops in desert-­camouflage uniforms, clustering around the depot's fences, setting up mortar positions and machine-­gun nests, shouting orders he couldn't hear. The base was surrounded. They had already cleared the front gate, and soldiers were already streaming into the depot. Wave after wave of them, covering each other as they stormed the base.

Inside the thick-­walled bunker, he hadn't heard a thing. If he listened closely now, though, he could hear the constant
pop-­pop-­pop
of a battle under way, the stuttering chatter of assault rifles firing in burst mode. He thought he could even tell the difference between the sound of the army's M4 carbines and the AK-­47 assault rifles of the neo-­Nazis.

Belcher had gotten his wish. The army had arrived.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­FIVE

“A
ngel,” Chapel said, “Angel—­”

“I'm here, Chapel. Tell me what to do.”

Chapel's brain was overloaded for a second by the enormity of what was about to happen. He had no idea what to tell her—­no way to fix things from a distance.

“Try—­try to get Hollingshead to recall these troops.” It was too late for that, of course. By the time the order went down the chain of command, Belcher would already have triggered his bombs. And even if somehow the soldiers could withdraw on a moment's notice, there was no way they could retreat faster than the poison cloud could spread.

He thought about the civilian population, then. He imagined them in the towns to the east, going about their business, having no idea what was coming for them. He saw them in their offices, or mowing their lawns, or picking up their kids from school. He saw them look up and wonder what the strange yellow cloud was doing blowing in from the west. He saw them start to choke, saw their skin blistering, saw them die.

“Get—­get the right ­people to . . . to evacuate every town east of here in Colorado.” A good plan, maybe—­if it was handled precisely right, which it wouldn't be. On such short notice, an evacuation could only lead to chaos and futility. Most likely a last-­minute evacuation would flood the roads with ­people who would end up just trapped in their cars when the gas cloud came, when they might have been safer holed up in their homes. “I just don't know, Angel.”

“We'll figure it out,” she said, though even she didn't sound very hopeful. “But what about you, Chapel? What are you going to do?”

Chapel stared at the screens on the walls. More soldiers were flooding into the base with every second that passed. Had Belcher already set off the bombs?

No. No, one of the screens showed the igloos. No yellow cloud was billowing out of those open doors. Not yet.

There was no time to explain things to Angel. He put down the phone, even as he heard her call his name again and again, trying to get his attention.

He had Andre's weapons, the hunting rifle, the pistol—­a big, clumsy revolver—­and the combat knife. He looked at the gas mask and knew it would just slow him down, hamper his breathing.

He grabbed up the weapons and kicked open the bunker's door. He half expected to see a hundred soldiers out there, with orders to kill anyone who showed his face and who wasn't wearing an army uniform. But instead, the door just opened on a stretch of paved road running deeper into the base.

He set off running.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-­SIX

I
t didn't matter if there was no chance, if he couldn't do anything. It didn't matter if he'd already failed.

Jim Chapel wasn't the kind of guy who just lay down and died. He had to do something—­anything—­no matter how pointless it looked.

He ran down the narrow road between two administrative buildings, his head swinging from side to side as he looked for threats and hazards. The fighting seemed to be happening behind him, back near the depot's main gate. Soldiers there were taking their time, clearing out one building after another as the neo-­Nazis took up positions where they could snipe and harass the oncoming troops. None of them, however, had been committed to defending the central part of the camp. Chapel could imagine Belcher's plan—­put some of his forces near the front to make the army think it was meeting real resistance. Then, when they reached the administrative buildings, let them sweep in unopposed. It was a trap, of course. The idea was to get as many soldiers as possible inside the depot's fences, where they would have a hard time running away.

The section of the depot nearest the command bunker looked like a ghost town. As he ran through it, Chapel didn't see another living person, just a few bodies—­most likely the bodies of the guards who had fallen in the first assault. He saw plenty of destruction, though. The road had been torn up in large circular craters by mortar fire. Smoke still rose from some of the craters. Some of the buildings around him had been damaged by artillery fire as well, and one building had been completely demolished, reduced to a pile of twisted rebar and broken bricks.

The army must have decided that the center of the depot was deniable territory. If they could clear out the middle of the base, then flood it with their own men, they could set up a beachhead and push the neo-­Nazis out, toward the periphery of the camp, where they could be picked off by snipers and machine guns. It was a good strategy, Chapel supposed, if you didn't know what Belcher had planned, that he wanted the army to concentrate in the middle of the camp in close proximity to the igloos.

Overhead, a dozen drones circled like crows, their camera eyes seeing everything, searching for targets. They must have seen Chapel. And it wasn't Angel watching him from up there. Whoever it was would only have seen a heavily armed man in civilian clothes running between the buildings. They must have assumed he was one of Belcher's neo-­Nazis, unwisely showing his face in that denied territory.

Because before he'd covered half the distance to igloos, they started firing on him.