Myrmidon

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It 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.