“I think I warned you about making speeches. If you try it again, I’ll have you gagged,” Belcher told him. “Now. Let’s get to the igloos. We’re burning daylight.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Belcher walked him at a brisk pace past a series of administrative buildings and civilian warehouses. Beyond those lay a vast open area with its own perimeter fence, a stretch of ground where sunflowers and scrub grass grew in wild profusion. The ground out there wasn’t flat but studded with row after geometrically precise row of low mounds, all the same shape. They had steep sides covered in grass, and they might have looked like a natural feature of the landscape except that each mound had a door set into one side, all facing the same direction.
As soon as Chapel had known Belcher planned on taking the Pueblo Depot as his prize, he’d known why. He’d understood that Belcher hadn’t built his town or gathered his army in Colorado by chance. He’d been planning this the whole time, because this was the one place he could find such easy access to weapons of mass destruction.
The mounds out there—the common term for them was igloos—might look like bunkers, but they were designed not to resist attack from outside but to contain an accidental explosion from within. Each of them was filled to capacity with artillery shells, and every one of those shells had a very nasty payload. This was one of only two remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons in the United States.
And now it belonged to Belcher.
The madman dragged Chapel over to the igloos and pushed him down to his knees in the grass and sunflowers, not fifty feet from one of the doors. Belcher waved over a couple of his men, and they moved quickly to the door. It would be locked, of course, sealed up tight, but they had an answer to that. One of them had a wad of plastic explosives that he molded around the lock. The other had a detonator.
Every muscle in Chapel’s body tensed as they prepared to blow the door. If the charge they used was too big, if it set off any of the rounds stored inside, poison gas would come billowing out of the doorway right in Chapel’s direction.
There was a sharp bang, and a little puff of smoke jumped away from the door. Belcher’s men moved in again and pried the door open with a crowbar. It was designed to be airtight, and it squeaked as they tore away the rubber seal around its edges. Finally, they got it open. No gas issued forth—they’d used just the right amount of explosive.
Belcher dragged Chapel back to his feet and pushed him forward, through the door, and into the dark chamber beyond. Its sloping walls loomed over him, pressing down on him, but claustrophobia was the least scary thing in that igloo.
Before him stood stacks of wooden pallets, lined up in perfect rows. Each pallet held sixty-four artillery shells packed tight together. The shells were painted bluish gray with green print on them, and each was labeled HD GAS.
“Mustard gas,” Chapel said.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the trenches of World War I, with soldiers in gas masks and Brodie helmets running away from yellow clouds that came streaming along the ground. Chapel knew his military history. He knew what that gas could do. It was a vesicant, a blistering agent—those were just technical terms. The gas burned human flesh on contact. It could blind you if it got in your eyes. If it got in your lungs, it could make you cough away your life. Even if you had a functioning gas mask, it would seep right through your clothes. Just standing in a cloud of it could leave you maimed and in agonizing pain for the rest of your life.
Any one of those shells was enough to poison an infantry battalion. This one igloo contained maybe a couple thousand shells, on pallets stacked four high. And there were hundreds of igloos—
“Doing the math in your head?” Belcher asked. “I’ll save you some time. There are about 780,000 shells stored in these igloos. About seven percent of all the gas shells this country ever made.”
Chapel knew exactly what Belcher planned to do with those shells. He was going to wait until he could get as many soldiers as possible in the vicinity, then he was going to set them off all off at once. The cloud would be too big, too dense for anyone to run away from it. All those soldiers, and all of his men, would be trapped under a choking, burning fog. The death toll would be unthinkable.
Except that Belcher had thought about it. He’d thought about it for fifteen years. He’d considered exactly what would happen. He’d figured out how to make it as deadly as he possibly could. And he’d never doubted that he had a right to do it, not for a second.
“I still can’t believe my luck,” Belcher said. He was beaming at the shells as if they were his children, and he was a proud papa. “They were supposed to destroy all these, you know. The government was going to incinerate them all by 2012. I was so worried that all my work would have been for nothing. But then government incompetence came to the rescue, and the deadline passed, and the shells remained. I probably would have had to declare my war soon, even if you hadn’t come along, Agent. I’m so glad you dropped by when you did.”
“Belcher, you need to stop this,” Chapel said. He would beg if he had to. “Gas isn’t like conventional weapons. You can’t control it. If the wind blows the wrong way, the cloud could spread. It could blow southwest and hit every single person in Pueblo, that’s a hundred thousand people—”
“No it won’t,” Belcher said.
“What?”
“You don’t know this land like I do,” he told Chapel. “This time of year, the wind never blows west. You know what a Foehn wind is? Maybe you’ve heard of the Chinook? The air hits the tops of the mountains, then gravity pulls it down fast, pulling it right across the plains, all in one direction.”
Chapel thought of the giant wind turbine he’d seen on the road outside of town. “Wait—so it blows eastward?”
Belcher nodded. “The people of Pueblo are probably safe. But given the size of the plume I’m going to make, anyone to the east might want to hold their breath. It’ll probably stretch as far as Kansas. Might hit Wichita or even Topeka before it dissipates.”
“Jesus,” Chapel said. “You could poison a million people—you have to stop this. You can’t be that evil, you must—”
“Agent, you’ve been talking to me all day. You know I have no problem hurting people. Killing them. My only regret right now is that I won’t be around to see just how bad things are going to get.”
“You’re willing to die for this? For just this?” Chapel asked.
Belcher put his hands on his hips and rolled his head on his neck. He was bursting with energy, with excitement. He looked like he might start salivating. Fifteen years of planning, and now his big day had arrived. “I’ve been beat up, abused, insulted for the whole length of my life. I don’t think I’ll miss it much. But this—this thing I’m doing today, well, that’s my legacy. After this, the whole world is going to know my name. They’ll forget that my father ever existed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Get moving,” Belcher told his underlings. “Get these doors open.” Two-man teams spread out among the igloos, already kneading their lumps of plastic explosives in their hands. Belcher started to give more orders, but at that moment Charlie, the big, tattooed guy, came running up to bring some news.
“We’ve got helos coming in from the north, sir,” he said.
“Already?” Belcher asked. He checked his watch. “How many?”
“Just two so far,” Charlie said.
Belcher nodded. “Those are just doing recon. The main force is still on its way. We need to bring those two down—get men with Stingers up on the administrative buildings. Tell them not to fire until the helicopters are well within range. We can’t afford to waste any of those missiles.” He turned to look at Chapel. “I don’t want your friends just paving this place over with bombs. I need to discourage them from committing air support.” It seemed he wanted Chapel to know every detail of his plan. So, afterward,
he could explain how it had gone down, of course. A witness was only as good as the things he saw or heard.
“A good bombardment on the igloos would be perfect for dispersing the gas,” he told Chapel. “But then I wouldn’t get as many infantry in my cloud. No, I need them to commit ground forces. If I shoot down enough helicopters, they’ll bring in the troops, if just to take out my missile positions.”
“They can do that with snipers, or artillery,” Chapel said, wishing it were true.
But Belcher had been in the army. He knew standard operating procedure. “Too much ground to cover, and they know what I have here. They can’t afford to put us under siege and wait us out—they’ll need to make a full assault.”
“Drone strikes. Hellfire missiles are pretty accurate,” Chapel countered.
Belcher smiled. “Are you actually giving me advice?”
“I’m trying to convince you this isn’t going to work,” Chapel said.
“Well, you can stop. I know the majority of the drone forces are already tasked overseas. What they could bring to bear here would be just a handful of old, first-generation Predators, and that would never be enough. I’m going to get my infantry attack, one way or another.”
He walked away from Chapel then to greet a line of men coming up with wheelbarrows. They were hauling hundreds of identical parcels, and when they came close enough, Chapel saw what gifts they bore. Each of the parcels was made of a small oil drum with a cheap cell phone duct-taped to it. Homemade bombs, probably stuffed full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. The cell phones would be wired to detonators—as soon as someone called their numbers, they would set off the explosives. They had hundreds of the bombs, enough to put one in each igloo. They weren’t very big, but they didn’t need to be. The shells stored in those igloos were all loaded with explosive warheads of their own. Once the bombs went off, they would trigger a chain reaction inside the igloos, cooking off the shells like strings of firecrackers. The igloos’ reinforced walls were designed to contain such a blast, but with the doors open, the shock waves of the repetitive explosions would only push the gas out faster, turning each igloo into a jet of dense mustard gas.
Another group of men came up pushing carts full of what looked like army uniforms, until Chapel saw the gloves and hoods attached to them. A neo-Nazi held one up by its shoulders to show Belcher, and Chapel got a good look at it and confirmed what he’d suspected. They were NBC suits—nuclear bacteriological chemical protective suits—designed to protect soldiers from the very sort of weapons stored at the depot. Chapel had trained in such a suit back in basic, years and years ago, and knew they were clunky and uncomfortable and got ridiculously hot, but they were far more flexible and tough than civilian hazmat suits. Like all the best army technology, they were heavily overdesigned. They were airtight, with an integrated rebreather system built into a backpack, so the wearer didn’t need to rely on outside air that might be tainted or full of radioactive dust. The suits inflated slightly when you put them on, giving them a positive internal pressure so even if they were pierced—say, by an enemy bullet—your air would leak out and the contaminated air outside wouldn’t leak in. The uniform parts were even lined with a thin sheet of lead to keep out ionizing radiation.
It made sense that a good supply of the suits would be on hand in one of the otherwise-empty warehouses back by the administrative buildings—if anyone was ever going to need them, it would be the guards who worked at the depot. Chapel was surprised, though, to see that Belcher had called for them.
“I thought you wanted to go down in a blaze of glory,” Chapel called out, trying to get Belcher’s attention.
The terrorist looked over at him with a grin. He didn’t answer—he didn’t need to. Instead, he took a combat knife from his belt and started slicing through the reinforced fabric of the suit his underling held. The suit was designed to resist punctures, and the lead lining would make it like trying to cut through a tin can. Belcher had to saw away for a while just to make a good hole in the suit, but when he was done, he held it up and showed it to all his gathered people. “When Cortez came to Mexico, when he knocked over the Aztecs, his men saw the odds against them,” he announced.
The neo-Nazis around him looked confused, but every eye stayed on Belcher, every ear strained for what he would say next.
“Cortez knew there could be no going back. So you know what he did? He went down to the ships that had brought his men to Mexico. And he set every one of them on fire. The message was clear. He was demanding nothing less than total commitment. That’s all I’m asking from you. There aren’t enough of these for all of us. So nobody gets one. Not even me!”
There was some cheering at that, though it wasn’t exactly the hooting and hollering Chapel had heard after the neo-Nazis first stormed the depot. Nobody complained or protested, though.
All these men were ready to die for their cause.
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.
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