Myrmidon

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Chapel said nothing. He bent all his energy instead to testing the knots that held him, seeing if he could wriggle his wrists around enough to get some fingers free. It was a pointless task—as soon as Belcher saw him make any progress, Chapel knew the white-supremacist leader would simply retie him more securely. But it was better than doing nothing, maybe.

“No thoughts? No protests, no insults?” Belcher asked. “I’m surprised, Agent. I thought you’d try to talk your way out of this.”

“No,” Chapel said, with a sigh of resignation. “I’ve got your measure now. You’re a suicidal madman. A zealot. I learned in Afghanistan how worthwhile it is to try to talk reason to somebody who’s willing to die for some idiotic cause.”

That made Belcher laugh. “I hear you. I learned that lesson, too. From my father.” He reached down and grabbed Chapel again and started dragging him across the dirt toward the gravestone under the tree.

Chapel knew better than to think he was being shown the gravestone just to intimidate him. Nor was he surprised to see whose it was. The stone was a simple affair, carved mirror smooth on the sides but left rough on top. The legend read:

The name was surmounted by a swastika.

“That word should never be on the same piece of rock as that symbol,” Chapel pointed out. “The Nazis weren’t even patriots in Germany. They were thugs and gangsters who seized control from the democratically elected government by force.”

“That word means something to you, huh?” Belcher said. “Patriot. That’s what they called me when I joined the army even though I hadn’t shot anybody yet. This man—my father. He taught me everything I know. He taught me how to organize people. How to use words to make them believe. How to stand up for what you know is right.”

Belcher unzipped his pants and took out his penis. With a grunt, he let fly, urinating all over the gravestone.

“I’ve hated that man, and everything he stood for, for as long as I can remember. Couldn’t resist getting in one last crack at him,” Belcher said, zipping back up. “That’s why I brought you up here.”

“To confuse the hell out of me?” Chapel asked.

“To explain everything you’re going to see today.” Belcher smiled down at Chapel. “We’ve only got a few minutes, so save your questions until the end, right?”

Chapel just shook his head.

“He used to beat the crap out of me. I was just a kid—I assumed I deserved that. He would hit me if I got a bad report card and tell me I was failing to demonstrate a racially superior intellect. He would hit me if I didn’t win a Little League game—and if there were black kids on the other team, he would hit me, and he wouldn’t stop. It took me way too long to realize that everything in his life, everything he did and said and thought, was about hatred. About how somebody else was letting him down, or actively conspiring against him. He was fucking crazy is my point. When I finally did understand that, when I was a teenager, I decided I wouldn’t waste my life on that kind of bitter nonsense. But, see, I’d never heard any other point of view. He wouldn’t let me talk to anyone who didn’t agree with him one hundred percent. I was pretty sure that the Jews didn’t actually run the government and that black people weren’t all thieves or lazy idlers, but I had no way of knowing what those people were really like. So I did the only thing I could—I went off and joined the army.”

Chapel remembered the briefing he’d given Hollingshead. Terry Belcher had turned against his father’s teachings and renounced them publicly, then he’d gone off to fight in the First Gulf War. That much he knew. “Don’t tell me you found out in Kuwait that he’d been right all along.”

“Far from it. In my unit, we had black soldiers, and Jewish soldiers, a couple of Asian kids. It was like the United fucking Nations over there, and we all had to live in the same tents, eat the same food, put up with the same goddamned heat and bugs and nothing at all to do. And we fought together, and not a single one of them wasn’t as brave and as willing to sacrifice himself for his buddies as anybody else. They were good people. Real people, who didn’t live for high, abstract ideals. They just wanted to do their jobs and go home. You know all this—you were a soldier.”

Chapel nodded. He had no idea where this was going.

“I loved those guys. Black, white, whatever. And I knew I’d made the right decision. I would have stayed over there in the desert for the rest of my life if I could, away from American bullshit. Well, the war didn’t last that long. We got the news the Iraqi army had surrendered, and we were going home soon. But then one day my CO, who was a real prick, came along and told us we needed to clear out this oil refinery where they suspected some holdouts were hiding, some idiots who wanted to keep fighting for Saddam Hussein or die trying. Our job was to go in there and roust them out. We did. Oh, boy, did we.

“We walked in there with M–16s and grenade launchers, and we met resistance right away, just suppressing fire, but it seemed to come from everywhere. We could have fallen back, let them keep shooting until they ran out of ammunition—we had only taken minor casualties, nobody was dead. But that idiot CO of mine, he decided we needed to scrub that place clean. So he called in some mobile artillery, and they lit that refinery up like Christmas. Of course, he didn’t stop to think that an oil refinery might be flammable. He killed every one of those holdouts, definitely. But the fire he started left six of my buddies in the infirmary, and two more dead. Some of those guys walked through the whole official war without a scratch on them—and suddenly they were going home with third-degree burns, they needed skin grafts and antibiotics and none of them were going to be movie stars. I was lucky, I was behind a Humvee when the torch went up, so I wasn’t hurt. But I bet you know how I felt afterward.”

“Like if you could have taken the place of one of the injured, or the dead, and they could be okay again, you would have done it in a second,” Chapel said. Survivor guilt was one of the toughest things about being a soldier.

“Yeah,” Belcher said, and he lowered his head as if he couldn’t help thinking back to that moment. “And I thought one other thing, too. That my prick CO was going to pay. I went and found him and told him exactly what I thought of him. Maybe I was going to leave it at that. But you know what he said to me? He said he was going to ignore my comments but not because of what had happened to my buddies. Because he knew who my father was. And even though he couldn’t say so in public, he was a fan.”

Belcher chuckled.

“A fan. You get that? My bastard of a father had fans. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know just how… inspirational his words had been. How many people had read his unreadable books and taken them to heart. But this CO of mine, he thought white people were the best kind of people because my father told him so.

“I beat him so hard I was sure he was going to die. I wanted him to. Some MPs came and pulled me off him before I could choke him to death. They had to tase me. They took me to the brig, then they put me on trial. They asked me if I had any kind of defense. I told them everything. I gave them the most impassioned, truthful speech I could possibly write. That’s when they told me how it really worked. It didn’t matter that my CO was an evil asshole. He was my superior. They love that word in the army. You know how much they love it. Superior. The prick had more gold on his lapels than I did, and that meant he was better than me. So I had to go to prison, not because I was wrong but because I was inferior.

“I’d heard that kind of logic before. I’d heard it from my father. He talked about who was superior to who all the time.

“That was the day I figured out what hatred was really for. That you can’t escape it because the world is just so fucked up, you’re going to feel it for one thing or another. You have to embrace it. Use it. And now I had two things to feel hatred for. White-power assholes, and the United States Army.”