Myrmidon

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Belcher 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.”