Myrmidon

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Chapel grabbed a couple new guns from the floor, then hurried up the stairs after the drone. The building was only two stories tall, and the next stair landing opened onto its roof, a flat expanse of tar paper baking in the sun. A stray mortar shell had clipped one corner of the building clean off, leaving a jagged hole, where the roof sagged down into a roomful of office furniture and plaster dust. Otherwise, the roof was intact—and it gave an excellent view of the surrounding depot.

On one side were all the administrative buildings and the front gate. Soldiers crawled everywhere across that zone, setting up overwatch positions and advancing doorway by doorway. A line of tanks was rumbling its way down the main street between the administrative buildings, their big main guns swinging side to side, looking for targets. Behind them came a convoy of troop carriers and mobile artillery. The army had moved on the depot as if it were invading a foreign country. They weren’t taking any chances, and Chapel could understand why—the men he’d just killed or incapacitated, the ones on the floor below, had been set up in that room specifically to snipe at anyone who tried to get too close to the igloos. He was sure there would be other nests designed to provide similar resistance.

The army was advancing slowly, with a grim deliberation. There was no question that, given enough time, they would overpower the neo-Nazis and take back the depot. But that wasn’t the point, of course. As the troops inched through the base, they were always getting closer and closer to the trap. Chapel wasn’t sure exactly what Belcher had meant when he said he wouldn’t blow the igloos until he could see the whites of the army’s eyes, but every step a soldier took down there would bring that time closer. “You can’t get them to fall back?” Chapel asked.

The quadrotor dipped a little in the air, like someone lowering their head in apology. Then it buzzed over to the far side of the roof. Chapel ran over there and saw that he’d come to the end of the administrative buildings. Beyond lay the vast open ground where the igloos huddled on the desert floor.

What had been empty ground once was now an armed camp. Belcher was ready for a fight, and he meant to make it one the army would remember for years to come. A row of low structures faced Chapel, like a rank of shields set up against an advancing cavalry charge. It looked like they’d taken the doors off all the igloos and set them up as shooting blinds, propping them up with dirt and debris so that a couple of men could hide behind each of them. Smart, Chapel thought. Those doors were made of heavily reinforced steel, designed to hold tight even if every shell in an igloo went off at once. They would easily repel small-arms fire and maybe even light explosives like grenades or mortar shells. Heavier artillery would flatten them, but Chapel knew the army wouldn’t dare fire howitzers or tank guns so close to the igloos, for fear of setting off the chemical shells.

If Chapel had kept running down the street toward the igloos, he wouldn’t just have been picked off by the men in the room under his feet. He would have been running straight into the free-fire zone of every one of those blinds. When the army did finally get that far, they were going to be met with incredible firepower. It wouldn’t stop the infantry advance, but it would slow it down by a considerable margin.

Somehow, Chapel was going to have to get through that line. The only chance he had—the only chance Colorado and maybe Kansas had—was if he could get to Belcher before the man set off his bombs.

For the life of him, he couldn’t see how he would do it.