Myrmidon

by David Wellington

  “The ATF must have their suspicions,” Hollingshead suggested.

  Chapel nodded. “They keep tabs on every white-­power group in the country, just on principle. Three times in the last ten years, they’ve tried to place an undercover agent in the SAF compound, but it’s never worked. That’s mostly because of this man.”

  On the screen, a picture of a middle-­aged man appeared. He had a rugged face, not too handsome, but his sharp features gave him a striking look. His eyes were a piercing gray that seemed to look out of the screen in silent judgment.

  “Terry Belcher. The head of the SAF and, from all accounts, the charismatic leader of the group. SAF members worship the man. He vets every new recruit personally, and so far he’s caught every ATF plant before they could even get through the front gate.”

  “What have you found out about him?” Hollingshead asked.

  “He’s white-­power royalty, basically. His father was Kendred Belcher, who was a ranking member in the KKK until he split with them in the eighties because he felt they were more interested in media attention than direct action. Kendred wrote one of the seminal books that influences white-­power movements to this day. Originally, Terry Belcher here rejected his father’s teachings. He split with his father’s group and joined the armed forces, intending to put white-­power politics behind him.”

  “Dare I ask which branch of ser­vice?” Hollingshead asked.

  “The army,” Chapel said, though he hated to admit it. “He fought in the First Gulf War. Afterward, he was dishonorably discharged for beating his CO nearly to death. He did a short prison term for assault and was released in 1998. I don’t know what changed his mind, but after he got out of prison, he seems to have embraced his father’s teachings once again. He’s been putting the SAF together, piece by piece, ever since, and now he’s built quite the empire. Officially, he preaches nonviolent protest against the government. He was quoted in a magazine interview as approving of domestic terrorists, however—­he once said that Timothy McVeigh was the greatest American patriot since Ethan Allen. His message seems to appeal to a certain kind of man—­typically, ­people who belonged to groups that have already been wiped out by the ATF or other federal agencies. The best report we have suggests that Terry Belcher commands a group of nearly two thousand white supremacists, almost all of them living and working on his compound.”

  “And now he has enough guns to arm them all,” Hollingshead said.

  Chapel nodded. “We need to get me inside that compound. The original plan,” he said, being careful—­it had been Hollingshead’s plan, after all—­“was for me to pose as a disaffected white supremacist looking for something new to believe in. I was supposed to sneak in there, find the guns, and blow them up. But I don’t think I could have done that successfully, sir. Terry Belcher would have had to approve my joining the group. And I believe he would see right through me.”

  “So what is your solution—­if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  Chapel took a deep breath. “Sir, you know I was taught by the best instructors the Army Rangers had. They told me one thing I’ve always held to be axiomatic—­if the enemy is attacking from the left, strike from the right. If they believe you can only hurt them one way, show them you can think outside the box. Do the opposite of what they expect.”

  Hollingshead raised an eyebrow.

  “Terry Belcher expects his organization to be infiltrated by an undercover agent. He’s been working at preventing that for years, and he’s built an exceptional defense against that kind of attack. He’s also expecting an ATF raid at some point. I think he stockpiled all those guns to be ready when a massive force of agents shows up at his front door. He’s ready to fight that kind of war, too. So I needed to find the one method of attack he’s not ready for, the one thing he would never expect.”

  “Let me guess,” Hollingshead said. “You’re going to walk up, ring his doorbell, and ask if you can have all of his guns.”

  Chapel had to remind himself to breathe.

  “Well . . .” he began.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chapel set down in Pueblo, Colorado, first thing in the morning, but when the door of his plane—­Hollingshead’s private jet—­popped open, it was already as if he’d opened the door of an oven. It had to be ninety degrees outside, but it was a dry heat that made the skin of his face shrivel. He’d been expecting mountain weather—­Pueblo was nestled in the foothills of the Rockies, a mile above sea level—­but the first thing he did was shed the fleece he’d brought.

  In his ear, Angel was there with an explanation, as if she’d read his mind. “Pueblo’s in what is called a banana belt, sugar. But don’t expect to find any palm trees. That just means that because of a fluke of geography, it’s warmer than the surrounding region. Drier, too—­the mountains over there scrape off all the clouds, so moisture from the Pacific never makes it this far.”

  Chapel could believe the mountains could scrape the sky clean. As he stepped off the plane, he felt like he could reach out and touch them—­a wall of rock and trees that stuck up almost straight out of the ground. It was an optical illusion but one hard to dismiss. They towered over him until he could see almost nothing else. Yet if he turned around and looked east, the world seemed as flat as a pancake.

  Overhead, the sky was a pure and unbroken blue, and it looked about twice as big as the sky he’d left behind in Virginia. The ground was a sandy brown, dominated by scrub grass and stands of wildflowers and, off in the distance, a single tree. It wasn’t exactly high desert, but it was close. “Cowboy country,” Chapel said. “This all looks like the set for a Western.”

  “The locals are supposed to be friendly.”

  “And well armed, I’m sure.”

  Angel cooed in his ear. One of the few perks of Chapel’s job was that he got to listen to that sexy voice all day. “You’d be surprised. About thirty-­five percent of ­people in Colorado own guns, but that’s exactly the same percentage as ­people in Pennsylvania.”

  Chapel checked his own weapon, nestled in his left armpit. He still wasn’t sure if he should bring it or not. Given the plan he’d chosen, by the time he needed it, he would already be dead. Still, walking into Terry Belcher’s domain without a weapon felt like the dumbest thing he could do.

  He still wasn’t sure that his plan wasn’t the second dumbest, but he was determined to give it a shot. At the airport terminal, he rented a car and headed south, through the city. Pueblo lay astride an actual river, the Arkansas, and as he got close to the water, he saw a lot more trees, but the second he passed beyond the city limits, the desert rose to meet him again—­that water only went so far. He headed down Route 302, through a corridor of washes and open prairie, and soon found himself in the midst of utter desolation. It looked like the country here wasn’t even used for farms.

  South of town, he passed by a three-­hundred-­foot-­high wind turbine that loomed impossibly high over the desert floor, its long vanes turning slowly in the sunlight. It didn’t look real, it was so big. Instead, it looked like some mammoth toddler’s pinwheel, dropped and left behind on the ground after the giant child moved on.

  Between the turbine and the mountains that filled half the western sky, the Colorado desert felt like a place not built to human scale. The land rolled away in every direction as far as he could see, desert unrelenting, unending, visible for miles in the clear air. Chapel felt tiny and insignificant as he drove south, like an ant crawling across an airport runway.

  Belcher’s compound lay only twenty miles south of town, but it wasn’t easy to get to. He had to leave the paved roads behind and take private trails out into the prairie, roads that would have washed away years ago if there had been any real rain out here. Without Angel whispering directions in his ear, he would never have been able to find his way.

  “You’re getting close, sugar,” she told him after he’d turned of
f onto yet another track through the scrub grass. He’d rented a four-­wheel-­drive SUV, but it still bounced and complained as he rocked along at twenty miles an hour. “Last chance,” she said.

  “Last chance for what?” he asked.

  “To turn back.”

  “So I guess you think I’m crazy, too?” he said. Hollingshead had felt this plan was pure folly and had been of a mind to forbid it—­he said he didn’t want to throw away his best operative on a harebrained scheme. Chapel had eventually talked him into allowing it simply by pointing out that there weren’t a lot of alternatives.

  “Every time you go into a dangerous situation alone, I worry,” she told him.

  “The fewer ­people who know what I’m doing here, the better,” he said. “We have to keep this thing secret. Besides, I’m hardly going to be alone. I never am when I have you looking out for me.”

  “There’s not much I can do if things go wrong,” she pointed out. “If I call in the local police, it’ll still take them the better part of an hour to respond. If we need any kind of military support, it’ll take even longer since nobody knows you’re here. Let’s abort this now and plan it again for a week from now, what do you say? I can have a whole battalion of troops waiting out here to back you up. I can have tanks and planes running support.”

  “Sure,” Chapel said, “and Belcher will see them coming. On land this flat, you can’t exactly hide an infantry platoon. He wants that, Angel. If we hit him with massed troops, that’s proof of every bit of propaganda he’s been spouting about the government for the last fifteen years. Where do I turn?”

  “Up ahead on the right. This is it.”

  Soon after he’d made the turn, Chapel saw the compound. A low rise in the earth had hid it before, but now it lay exposed in all its glory. It didn’t look like a survivalist enclave. Instead, it looked like Small Town USA, circa 1895. Single-­story frame houses stuck up from the sandy ground, all of them painted white with gingerbread decoration on their porches, all of their roofs covered in the same weathered shingles the color of the ground. In their midst stood a pair of stone buildings that might have served as a town hall and local fire department. The warehouses and workshops were on the far side of the town, shimmering in the distance.

  The only thing that immediately said compound was the chain-­link fence that wrapped all the way around the town, enclosing a ­couple hundred acres of wasteland. Low trees clung to that fence as if for support. A single gate broke its run, a chain-­link gate with reinforced supports straddling the road. A sign across the gate read Posted No Trespassing, which wasn’t exactly welcoming, but it didn’t say violators would be shot on sight. No sentries stood guard there, nor did anyone come running out as Chapel pulled up to the gate and stopped his car.

  He jumped out and walked over toward the gate, keeping his hands visible. He was certain someone would be watching him. He studied the ground just in front of the gate until he found what he was looking for.

  A thin strand of steel cable, maybe as thick as a pencil, had been stretched across the dirt, held at tension so it hovered an inch or so above the ground. Both of its ends disappeared into scrub grass on either side of the gate.

  “I really hope,” he told Angel, “that this doesn’t set off a bunch of land mines.” He kicked the cable as hard as he could, then moved back ten feet.

  Off in the distance, from the direction of the white houses, he heard a bell start to ring. It shut off as abruptly as it had started.

  “Now what?” Angel asked.

  “Now we wait,” Chapel told her. He had a feeling it wouldn’t take long.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His feeling turned out to be correct.

  About six minutes after he kicked the cable, he saw a ­couple of ­people pile out of one of the nearer houses and jump into a shiny, new pickup truck. The truck came rolling up toward the fence at speed, as if it were going to bust right through the gate and keep going. At the last minute, the driver slewed the vehicle around to one side, so it stopped broadside to the gate, rocking on its tires.

  The pickup had tinted windows, so he couldn’t see who was inside. He figured there would be at least one person with a rifle in there, the barrel trained on him. The driver’s side door opened, and he heard boots hit the dirt, but the driver was shielded from him by the bulk of the vehicle.

  “What do you want?” the driver demanded without showing himself. “You lost?”

  “Which question do you want answered first?” Chapel asked.

  Angel tsked in his ear. “Careful, honey.”

  The driver, who still hadn’t shown himself, seemed to take a second to decide what to say next. “This is private property,” he called out. “Unless you have a warrant signed by a judge, we retain the right to refuse entry.”

  Chapel smiled. “That would be true if I were with the police. I’m not.”

  “Then read the sign, asshole! No trespassing.”

  Chapel didn’t let his smile waver. Belcher had trained his ­people well and told them how to stay on the right side of the law. Apparently, that didn’t include basic hospitality. “I need to talk to Terry Belcher,” he announced. “I’m with the federal government.” Which was strictly true, since Military Intelligence was overseen by the executive branch.

  “Terry doesn’t want to talk to nobody from the government,” the driver shouted back. “You’d best head back the way you came.”

  “I have a message for him,” Chapel said.

  “Then write him a goddamned letter!”

  It took all of Chapel’s strength not to sigh just then. “He’s going to want to hear this in person. Tell him Ygor Favorov is dead.”

  “He don’t want to talk to no Commies, neither!”

  “Well, that’s really not the problem here. Since Ygor Favorov. Is. Dead,” he repeated. “Believe me, Belcher very much wants to know about that. And I can give him all the details if he’ll let me in so we can talk.”

  The conversation seemed to end there. The driver didn’t say anything more, and Chapel wasn’t about to give up any more details until he was talking to Belcher directly. He guessed they had a radio in the truck and were passing along his message, but for all he knew, they were waiting for him to reach for a gun, so they could shoot him and claim they’d been standing their ground.

  For a long while, Chapel just stood there, waiting. Sweating. Wishing he could get back in his rental, which had air-­conditioning and a case of bottled water in the trunk. Wishing something would happen.

  Nothing did. The sun made the landscape shimmer. The sky burned blue, unblemished by clouds.

  When the driver spoke again, Chapel nearly jumped he was so startled.

  “Are you claiming that you killed this Favorov?”

  Chapel’s eyes went wide. “No,” he called back. “He died in prison.”

  “Are you then claiming you are not a government assassin sent here to kill Terry?”

  Chapel bit his tongue before responding. “No, I am not a government assassin,” he said.

  “Put your hands on the hood of your vehicle and keep them there.” The driver came out from behind the pickup. He had a rifle—­a hunting rifle, not an AK-­47—­slung over one shoulder and a pistol in a holster at his hip. Neither weapon was pointed at Chapel, which was nice. The driver was just a kid, he saw next. Maybe nineteen, probably younger, with thin, almost rodentine features. He had crew-­cut hair, and he wore an oxford-­cloth shirt buttoned up to his neck and down to his wrists, even in the desert heat. Chapel figured that was to cover up identifying tattoos.

  There wasn’t much he could do about hiding the tattoo on his face, though. A patch of skin above his upper lip and under his nose had been tattooed solid black. It took Chapel a second to realize that it was supposed to look like Hitler’s mustache.

  “You couldn’t grow one of your own?”
Chapel asked, pointing at his own upper lip, which was cleanly shaven.

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “I can, and I did. Up in Bozeman, Montana, I had it just about perfect. Then government spies came and accused me of all kinds of things. They held me down and shaved me, directly violating my constitutional rights to free speech under the First Amendment and violating the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth. After that, I had this done so nobody could take it away from me again.”

  “They could zap it with a laser,” Chapel pointed out. He figured if he kept talking, the kid might not realize that Chapel had refused to put his hands on the hood of his vehicle. “Vaporizes the metallic ink, then your body absorbs it. Supposed to hurt like hell, though.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the boy said. “When I put ink on this body, I keep it there for life.” The boy kept glancing at the pickup, presumably looking toward someone who was still inside.

  “Are they calling down to the compound, finding out if I can come in?” Chapel asked.

  The boy’s face twisted with suspicion. “Don’t you worry about what we’re doing. Worry about whether you’re going to get out of here alive, friend.”