Myrmidon

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.