Myrmidon by David Wellington

Author:David Wellington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.