Myrmidon

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Chapel heard the helicopters coming and looked up, but it seemed he was the only one. The neo-Nazis were too busy cutting up NBC suits or moving bombs into igloos. They had jobs to do, and none of those jobs included watching the sky.

Chapel, whose only job was to watch and remember, saw it all.

There were two helos, one slightly ahead of the other. They had the tandem cockpits and underslung chain guns of AH-64 Apaches, and they were moving fast. Because they were heading straight toward Chapel, though, they seemed to just hang in the air as if they were defying gravity, slowly getting bigger as they approached.

He expected them to switch on their loudspeakers and broadcast a warning, but it looked like they weren’t taking any chances. The one in the lead had two Hellfire missiles and a pair of Hydra 70 rocket pods mounted on its hardpoints—before Chapel even thought it was in range, it opened up with the rockets, smoke whipping out of the pods’ barrels and wreathing the aircraft before the rotor wash could whisk it away. The rockets moved too fast for Chapel to see, but he felt the ground shimmy as one after another of them hammered home. In the distance, he heard someone scream.

One or two of Belcher’s workers glanced up, but there was nothing to see, so they went back to their tasks. Andre handed Belcher a cell phone, and he listened to it for a moment, nodding. “Wait for it,” he said, though not into the phone. “Let them get just a little closer…”

The lead Apache loosed its Hellfires, and Chapel could see them coming in, arcing down toward the administrative buildings over by the main gate. He didn’t know what the helicopter’s gunner was choosing to target—maybe it was trying to clear the truck Belcher had left stuck in the gate—but this time the ground shook like it had been hit with an enormous mallet. As soon as the Hellfires were free, the helo backed off, shrinking in the distance as its partner moved in.

“Don’t let him get away,” Belcher shouted. There was no way the Stinger teams up near the gate could have heard him, but at that same moment one of them launched, the surface-to-air missile streaking up toward its target on a finger of smoke. The helicopter tried to maneuver, swinging sideways in the air, but the Stinger was heat-guided and compensated effortlessly. It took the helicopter in the tail section and sent its fuselage spinning up in the air before the helicopter dropped like a rock.

Chapel closed his eyes. He knew the helicopter’s crew had just died to make a point—the attack with rockets and missiles had been the equivalent of a shot across a ship’s bows, a declaration of hostilities. The helo crew couldn’t have guessed that Belcher had the kind of firepower that could take them down.

They were soldiers. Chapel knew they’d sworn an oath to protect their country, just as he had. It still didn’t make it easy to think about how they were dying on the desert floor, crushed under the weight of their own vehicle.

The crew of the second helicopter, the one that had just started its attack run, was smart enough to abort and swing away, trying to maneuver back out of range of Belcher’s antiaircraft weapons. They didn’t quite make it. A second Stinger touched the helicopter’s skids, and Chapel saw smoke and light fill its cockpit. Instead of spinning down to a crash, the machine disintegrated in midair, raining down components and burning fuel. It had never had a chance to fire off a single munition, and its rockets and missiles burst in the air as they tumbled toward the ground.

Four men dead already, and the real fight to reclaim the depot hadn’t even begun. Belcher grunted once in satisfaction and got back to work as if nothing had happened. Andre handed him a new phone, a top-of-the-line smartphone that looked like it had just been unboxed.

“I’ve added all the detonators as contacts,” Andre told his leader. “All you have to do is send a single text message to all contacts. The message doesn’t matter. All you need to do is make the detonator phones beep, and they’ll kick off.”

Belcher looked at the smartphone in his hand for a while as if he were a kid being handed the key to a toy store. Then he smiled at Andre and patted him on the cheek. “Good work. Are the bombs all in place?”

“Just finishing up the last of them. When are you… I mean, when will you send that text?” Andre asked, and Chapel thought he looked a little bit nervous.

“Not until we see the whites of their eyes,” Belcher told him. “Head back to your station now and get those Brownings unlimbered, okay?”

Andre bowed his head and nodded, then ran off at a good clip, anxious to do his master’s bidding. When he was gone, Belcher walked over to where other minions were cutting up the NBC suits. They were making slow progress, but he smiled and gave them a few kind words, and that seemed to spur them on.

Chapel glared at the man. “You going to save one of those for me?” he asked. “I can’t be much of a witness if I die in your cloud.”

Belcher laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got some protection for you, Agent.” A couple of his men laughed along, as if they got the joke. One of them had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He took something dark and flexible out of it and handed it to Belcher, who brought it over to Chapel. “See? You’ll be nice and safe.”

Chapel couldn’t figure out what he was holding for a second. Then he saw the heavy, drooping canisters and small round eyeshields of a gas mask. The kind one of those World War I soldiers might have worn in the trenches.

“Very funny,” Chapel said. “You know as well as I do those were useless against mustard gas.”

“That’s not true. This is going to keep you from breathing the stuff. So you won’t choke to death on your own burned lung tissue. It’ll keep you from being blinded as well, so you can see everything.”

Chapel shook his head. “But the gas will seep right through my clothes. I’ll be burned all over the rest of my body.”

Belcher shrugged. “I said you would live through this day. I didn’t say you wouldn’t wish you were dead.” He lifted the mask and pulled it down over Chapel’s head, then pulled the straps tight to hold it in place.

With it on, Chapel’s visual field was reduced to two small circular windows that cut all of his peripheral vision and made it impossible to look down. The heavy canisters pulled at his chin, making it hard to even lift his head. The mask stank of old rubber and someone else’s dried spit. He could hear almost nothing but his own heavy breathing.

“It’s about to get too dangerous for you out here in the open,” Belcher told him. “It’s time for you to bunker up.”