Myrmidon

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

It wasn’t a lot of ground to cover, just a few hundred yards. The drone moved at full speed, nearly twenty miles an hour, through perfectly clear air, the wind right on its tail. Chapel curled up into the smallest ball he could, keeping his body completely on top of the drone, with nothing sticking out, where it could be shot off.

He had never had such a wild ride in his life. The second the drone popped into the air over the ruin of the building, the neo-Nazis started trying to shoot it down. A storm of bullets came racing up to meet it, skidding off its round propeller ducts, smashing up the advanced optics mounted on its undersides, chewing through its body. Chapel saw one bullet come screaming through one of its fans and thought he was a goner, but the bullet was moving fast enough that it managed to pass through the propeller without actually touching any of the blades.

Below him, on the ground, hell had broken loose. The army was pouring every explosive round it had into the blinds, and neo-Nazis were flying up in the air, twisting around on broken limbs as orange mushroom clouds spat up out of the soil. Chapel saw a Stryker vehicle come racing through the blinds, its plow nose smashing through anyone who stood in its way, its top-mounted machine gun blazing with fire as it cut through Belcher’s ranks. But before it could even smash through the last of the blinds, it was met with grenade and rocket fire, and half its wheels came up, bouncing and spinning across the battlefield, and its cockpit lit up as a molten-copper antitank round burst in among its crew and burned them alive in their seats.

Army infantrymen came pouring onto the battlefield, their body armor almost useless against the sustained fire of so many AK-47s. They spun and fell and died even as more of them came on from behind, stamping through the dust like a human river. A whole squad of them overwhelmed a blind and trampled the neo-Nazis behind it, then dropped to the ground on top of the bodies and started firing prone, taking any target they could find.

A faulty antitank round rose from the blinds, and Chapel could actually watch it as it twisted around in a spiral in the air. Too late, he saw it coming right for him, and he just managed to duck behind a propeller duct as it glanced off the drone’s body. It exploded a fraction of a second later in midair, showering him with burning shrapnel that he used his artificial hand to brush away. He whooped, not in exultation but in the sheer adrenaline rush of realizing he’d survived such a close call, but the shout of joy died in his throat as Angel’s amplified voice drove every thought from his head.

“That was it,” she shouted. “Chapel, we’re going down!”

“Just get me as close as you can,” he shouted back, though he knew she would do exactly that.

The drone started slipping out of the air, one of its propellers skipping and stuttering and coughing up smoke. The drone twisted around, trying to capsize itself, but Angel pulled some fancy maneuver and kept it from driving itself right into the ground. Chapel couldn’t do anything but hold on to the nylon loop, his legs swinging out over open air, then bouncing down toward one of the ducted fans so he had to pull his feet back to keep them from being cut off.

“This isn’t going to be a soft landing,” Angel warned him. “Protect your—”

Her voice was cut off as a bullet from below neatly severed one of the wires connected to the drone’s speakers. Chapel grabbed on tight and brought his knees up to his chest, his head down between them as the drone slid at an angle through the air, heading right for the hard-packed desert soil. He could see the igloos just ahead, well clear of the blinds and the worst of the fighting. He could see—

Then he saw nothing, as the drone plowed into the earth. Chapel fought his instincts and let go of the nylon loop, of the fan ducts, of everything. The drone stopped suddenly as it crumpled into the ground, but Chapel kept moving, bouncing off the top of the thing, then coming down hard on his artificial shoulder. He felt the robotic arm take the impact and heard parts of it snap and shatter inside its silicone sleeve, but he was still bouncing, rolling now to hit the ground with his face, then his good arm, then his legs. He slid through the dust, skin burning off his face through pure friction. The pain was incredible, enough to block out the noise of the battle, the agony of his wounds, and all thought whatsoever.

It took him a while to realize he’d stopped rolling and that the twisting, gut-churning sensation he felt was just dizziness. To realize he was down on the ground and still alive.

He lifted his head and saw the igloos right in front of him, their open doorways yawning like dark mouths in the sides of artificial hills.

He should not have been able to get up after that crash. If he hadn’t landed on his artificial arm, he probably would have broken half the bones in his body. Even with the prosthesis taking the brunt of the impact, he could have internal injuries, massive blood loss from the skin he’d lost, a concussion or a spinal fracture or who knew what.

He had no choice. He climbed to his feet, a pistol in his good hand, and he ran straight for the igloo where Belcher had gone to ground.