Belcher nodded at Charlie, and the big tattooed man came up behind Chapel and put a thick arm around his throat, choking off his airway. Charlie pulled upward like he wanted to pull Chapel’s head off his neck. Chapel had no option but to stand up, his shoes kicking at the floor. His vision started to go red, and he felt his chest heave for breath.
The Rangers had trained him for this exact situation, drilling him endlessly in combative moves to escape even a sleeper hold. He shot his left elbow backward, straight into Charlie’s groin, and immediately felt the big man’s grip loosen. But apparently Charlie had been in a few fights before, himself. He stepped backward, pulling Chapel with him and keeping Chapel from getting his feet planted on the floor. He made a fist of his free hand and pounded Chapel hard in the kidney—a move that could kill if it ruptured a blood vessel. Chapel felt his head reel from the pain and thought he might throw up, but he still refused to submit, reaching up with both hands to grab the back of Charlie’s neck, trying to bring the big man down, so he could get his footing.
Then he stopped, because Belcher had come forward and stuck both barrels of his shotgun into Chapel’s stomach.
“I need you alive,” Belcher said, “but you can survive with half a colon. Maybe now it’s your turn to cooperate.”
Chapel lifted his hands in front of him, calculating the odds. If he could grab the shotgun and twist it to the side, so its blast struck Charlie instead—
Unlikely. Belcher was ready for something like that. He would probably pull the triggers the second Chapel started to move.
So instead, he lifted his hands higher, in surrender.
Charlie squeezed his neck, hard, and Chapel fell into unconsciousness in seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Chapel woke to feel hands dragging him, pulling him through a narrow opening. Sunlight flickered across his eyelids, and he opened his eyes, not without some effort. His arms felt sore, so he wriggled them and found he couldn’t move them at all.
“Stop squirming,” Belcher said. It was Belcher who was dragging him, pulling him out of a car door. His belt snagged on something, but then it pulled free, and he felt himself falling, tumbling into the dirt.
He was bound. Belcher hadn’t just tied his hands—Chapel knew a way to get out of that kind of restriction, using his artificial arm. Instead, he’d been tied up cowboy style, with a rope wrapped around and around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides. It had been done well, and Chapel knew he couldn’t wriggle out of it.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Chapel asked. “You can’t tell me you’ve really thought this through.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Chapel rolled over on his side, trying to get his bearings. He’d been driven out into the desert maybe a quarter mile from the town—he could see the white houses off in the distance. He was on top of a low rise on the far side of the town from the road, a place with a good view of a lot of nothing. A single tree stood out from the top of the rise, and in its wavering shade stood a block of granite that looked like a gravestone.
Chapel doubted very much that he’d been brought up here to be buried. Belcher had said he needed Chapel alive, and Chapel had no reason to doubt it. But what, in fact, they were doing up on the rise he had no idea.
Belcher reached down and grabbed the rope that bound Chapel. He grunted and swore as he dragged Chapel a few feet farther through the dust. Then he lifted Chapel’s shoulders and helped him sit up.
“You were only out a little while. Long enough for us to get ready.” Belcher pointed over at the town, and Chapel saw cars and trucks moving between the white houses. It looked like every single person in town was out and moving, loading up the vehicles with long boxes or steel drums, or just running from one place to another. Chapel could see a bunch of children being herded into one of the warehouses by a blond woman, while other women headed over to the clinic building.
“You’re evacuating?” Chapel asked. “Getting everyone to safety before the troops arrive?”
Belcher grinned. “Not exactly. I want to thank you, Agent. I’ve been waiting a real long time for somebody like you, somebody to come along and give me the kick in the backside I needed. The somebody who would tell me my time had come.”
Chapel had no idea what Belcher was talking about, and he had no interest in riddles. “You plan on going down fighting?” he asked.
“How about you worry a little less about what I have planned?” Belcher asked. “I would think you’d have more important things to worry about. Like what’s going to happen to you.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Chapel said.
“No? Given your current predicament—”
“Not as long as my drone is still up there,” Chapel interrupted. The Predator was still circling the town, giving no sign it had seen anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t need to. Chapel was certain Angel had already spotted him and knew he was in trouble. She would already have put out the call for help.
“Huh,” Belcher said. “Yeah, I guess that thing’s served its purpose.” He took a cell phone out of his pocket and sent a quick message.
Down in the town someone—it might have been Andre, but at that distance Chapel couldn’t see the mustache tattoo—stood up in the bed of a pickup. Then he hefted a big tube onto his shoulder and pointed it at the drone. A line of smoke jumped out of the tube’s mouth, and, a moment later, the drone exploded in midair, bits of it pinwheeling in every direction and seeming to hang in midair for a moment before they started to rain back down to earth.
Chapel knew that wasn’t Angel up there—the drone had just been a machine—but he couldn’t help wincing as if it were his operator who had been blown up, not just some very expensive military hardware.
“Was that a Stinger missile?” he asked.
“Favorov wasn’t the only arms dealer I bought from,” Belcher explained.
Chapel shook his head. “You really think that helps anything?”
Belcher came and squatted next to Chapel, so they could speak face-to-face. “You seen anything since you got here makes you think I’m an idiot?” he asked. Chapel didn’t answer, but Belcher didn’t seem to need a reply. “I was army, just like you. I know how this works. Your bosses in Washington, DC, saw that, sure. They probably saw me haul your heavy ass out of that warehouse fifteen minutes ago. But I figure they weren’t expecting this.”
“Oh?”
“You came out here thinking you could talk me into just handing the rifles over if you talked tough enough. But I could tell—the reason you came alone was you wanted to do it quietly. I don’t know why you need those guns back now, but you do, very badly, and you need to make sure nobody finds out they were ever here. Don’t bother telling me if I’m right, I know I am. That means you don’t have an infantry battalion waiting just over the next hill. I’m sure now that things have gone sideways, your people will start mobilizing everything they’ve got to get you back. In fact, I’m counting on their doing just that—I hope they send every goddamned soldier in Colorado after me. But I also know how long it takes the army to do anything. They’ll have to get orders from DC. Then they’ll have to send those orders down the chain of command. Then they’ll have to muster the troops, arrange transportation for them, issue them weapons . . . it’s gonna be an hour or two before they can even get a helicopter out here to take a look. I’ve got time to do what I need to do. Just.”
Chapel knew Belcher was pretty much right. The need for complete secrecy on this mission had meant Hollingshead couldn’t let the local armed forces bases in Colorado even know that Chapel was in their state, much less give them orders to stand by in case they were needed. Help would be slow in coming, indeed.
“What if you’re wrong?” Chapel asked. “What if they move faster than expected?”
Belcher waved a hand in front of his
face as if Chapel’s protestations were flies that merely annoyed him. “Then I die early, and everything I’ve built over the last fifteen years will have been for nothing.” He shrugged. “You can plan for everything, you can plan for anything, but sometimes planning isn’t enough. I’ll take my chances.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chapel said nothing. He bent all his energy instead to testing the knots that held him, seeing if he could wriggle his wrists around enough to get some fingers free. It was a pointless task—as soon as Belcher saw him make any progress, Chapel knew the white-supremacist leader would simply retie him more securely. But it was better than doing nothing, maybe.
“No thoughts? No protests, no insults?” Belcher asked. “I’m surprised, Agent. I thought you’d try to talk your way out of this.”
“No,” Chapel said, with a sigh of resignation. “I’ve got your measure now. You’re a suicidal madman. A zealot. I learned in Afghanistan how worthwhile it is to try to talk reason to somebody who’s willing to die for some idiotic cause.”
That made Belcher laugh. “I hear you. I learned that lesson, too. From my father.” He reached down and grabbed Chapel again and started dragging him across the dirt toward the gravestone under the tree.
Chapel knew better than to think he was being shown the gravestone just to intimidate him. Nor was he surprised to see whose it was. The stone was a simple affair, carved mirror smooth on the sides but left rough on top. The legend read:
KENDRED BELCHER
PATRIOT
The name was surmounted by a swastika.
“That word should never be on the same piece of rock as that symbol,” Chapel pointed out. “The Nazis weren’t even patriots in Germany. They were thugs and gangsters who seized control from the democratically elected government by force.”
“That word means something to you, huh?” Belcher said. “Patriot. That’s what they called me when I joined the army even though I hadn’t shot anybody yet. This man—my father. He taught me everything I know. He taught me how to organize people. How to use words to make them believe. How to stand up for what you know is right.”
Belcher unzipped his pants and took out his penis. With a grunt, he let fly, urinating all over the gravestone.
“I’ve hated that man, and everything he stood for, for as long as I can remember. Couldn’t resist getting in one last crack at him,” Belcher said, zipping back up. “That’s why I brought you up here.”
“To confuse the hell out of me?” Chapel asked.
“To explain everything you’re going to see today.” Belcher smiled down at Chapel. “We’ve only got a few minutes, so save your questions until the end, right?”
Chapel just shook his head.
“He used to beat the crap out of me. I was just a kid—I assumed I deserved that. He would hit me if I got a bad report card and tell me I was failing to demonstrate a racially superior intellect. He would hit me if I didn’t win a Little League game—and if there were black kids on the other team, he would hit me, and he wouldn’t stop. It took me way too long to realize that everything in his life, everything he did and said and thought, was about hatred. About how somebody else was letting him down, or actively conspiring against him. He was fucking crazy is my point. When I finally did understand that, when I was a teenager, I decided I wouldn’t waste my life on that kind of bitter nonsense. But, see, I’d never heard any other point of view. He wouldn’t let me talk to anyone who didn’t agree with him one hundred percent. I was pretty sure that the Jews didn’t actually run the government and that black people weren’t all thieves or lazy idlers, but I had no way of knowing what those people were really like. So I did the only thing I could—I went off and joined the army.”
Chapel remembered the briefing he’d given Hollingshead. Terry Belcher had turned against his father’s teachings and renounced them publicly, then he’d gone off to fight in the First Gulf War. That much he knew. “Don’t tell me you found out in Kuwait that he’d been right all along.”
“Far from it. In my unit, we had black soldiers, and Jewish soldiers, a couple of Asian kids. It was like the United fucking Nations over there, and we all had to live in the same tents, eat the same food, put up with the same goddamned heat and bugs and nothing at all to do. And we fought together, and not a single one of them wasn’t as brave and as willing to sacrifice himself for his buddies as anybody else. They were good people. Real people, who didn’t live for high, abstract ideals. They just wanted to do their jobs and go home. You know all this—you were a soldier.”
Chapel nodded. He had no idea where this was going.
“I loved those guys. Black, white, whatever. And I knew I’d made the right decision. I would have stayed over there in the desert for the rest of my life if I could, away from American bullshit. Well, the war didn’t last that long. We got the news the Iraqi army had surrendered, and we were going home soon. But then one day my CO, who was a real prick, came along and told us we needed to clear out this oil refinery where they suspected some holdouts were hiding, some idiots who wanted to keep fighting for Saddam Hussein or die trying. Our job was to go in there and roust them out. We did. Oh, boy, did we.
“We walked in there with M–16s and grenade launchers, and we met resistance right away, just suppressing fire, but it seemed to come from everywhere. We could have fallen back, let them keep shooting until they ran out of ammunition—we had only taken minor casualties, nobody was dead. But that idiot CO of mine, he decided we needed to scrub that place clean. So he called in some mobile artillery, and they lit that refinery up like Christmas. Of course, he didn’t stop to think that an oil refinery might be flammable. He killed every one of those holdouts, definitely. But the fire he started left six of my buddies in the infirmary, and two more dead. Some of those guys walked through the whole official war without a scratch on them—and suddenly they were going home with third-degree burns, they needed skin grafts and antibiotics and none of them were going to be movie stars. I was lucky, I was behind a Humvee when the torch went up, so I wasn’t hurt. But I bet you know how I felt afterward.”
“Like if you could have taken the place of one of the injured, or the dead, and they could be okay again, you would have done it in a second,” Chapel said. Survivor guilt was one of the toughest things about being a soldier.
“Yeah,” Belcher said, and he lowered his head as if he couldn’t help thinking back to that moment. “And I thought one other thing, too. That my prick CO was going to pay. I went and found him and told him exactly what I thought of him. Maybe I was going to leave it at that. But you know what he said to me? He said he was going to ignore my comments but not because of what had happened to my buddies. Because he knew who my father was. And even though he couldn’t say so in public, he was a fan.”
Belcher chuckled.
“A fan. You get that? My bastard of a father had fans. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know just how . . . inspirational his words had been. How many people had read his unreadable books and taken them to heart. But this CO of mine, he thought white people were the best kind of people because my father told him so.
“I beat him so hard I was sure he was going to die. I wanted him to. Some MPs came and pulled me off him before I could choke him to death. They had to tase me. They took me to the brig, then they put me on trial. They asked me if I had any kind of defense. I told them everything. I gave them the most impassioned, truthful speech I could possibly write. That’s when they told me how it really worked. It didn’t matter that my CO was an evil asshole. He was my superior. They love that word in the army. You know how much they love it. Superior. The prick had more gold on his lapels than I did, and that meant he was better than me. So I had to go to prison, not because I was wrong but because I was inferior.
“I’d heard that kind of logic before. I’d heard it from my father. He talked about who was super
ior to who all the time.
“That was the day I figured out what hatred was really for. That you can’t escape it because the world is just so fucked up, you’re going to feel it for one thing or another. You have to embrace it. Use it. And now I had two things to feel hatred for. White-power assholes, and the United States Army.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Chapel said. “You’re one of the most respected members of the white-separatist movement—”
“Nobody’s life makes sense if you just look at what they do in public, Agent. Especially if they’ve got a secret to keep.”
Belcher turned away from the tombstone. He reached down and picked Chapel up, setting him on his feet. “Get in the vehicle, all right? If you try to run or anything, you’re going to get hurt.”
Chapel knew better than to argue. He walked over to the car and—not without some difficulty—wedged himself into the passenger seat. Belcher climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car up. He headed north, across the desert. The car jumped and bounced until they got back on the road. “I wish I had more time to explain this all. Your part in it, especially. See, I’m going to die today, along with a lot of other people. But you’re going to live, I hope. You’re going to live so you can tell people who I really was. And why I did all this.”
“Did all what?” Chapel asked. “You still haven’t told me what you’ve got planned.”
“We’ll get to that. There’s more of my story still.”
Up ahead, on the road, Chapel saw a long convoy of pickups, cars, and panel trucks. He saw men crowded in the beds of the pickups and recognized some of them. It looked like every able-bodied man in the town of Kendred was on the road, headed north, back toward Pueblo. He was afraid to find out why they were going there. He was certain it wasn’t just that they wanted to get away from the attack that was sure to come after they blew up the drone.
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