It was a logistics problem, where if you forgot to add things up right or carry the one, you were dead. You had to work it through like that.
Chapel had expended more than half of his rifle’s magazine. He had an unknown number of pistol bullets as well. He could collect more ammunition, but only once the six men in the cellar had been accounted for. So far he had disarmed one, wounded one, probably killed one. That left the two behind the shelves, and the one by the workbench.
Assuming there had been exactly six of them to start with, and not seven. Or more. Underestimating the number of opponents you faced was the absolute best way to get killed.
The second best way was to assume your opponents would stay put while you came and took them out one by one. If Chapel had some backup, someone to lay down suppressive fire while he moved in, that would be one thing. In this situation he had to accept that his targets would keep moving, that he was going to have to adapt and respond on the fly. Which meant the faster he moved, the more likely he was to live through this.
But they’d already seen him come around the corner, once. Their weapons would be trained on that position as they waited for him to show himself again. They might also logically expect him to go behind the crates to the far side, and come out guns blazing from that position. Appearing in either of those locations would get him shot. He needed a third option.
Time to head for higher ground.
21
“Did you see that?” someone whispered. “Marty winged him! He definitely hit him!”
“Yeah, and look what he got,” someone else said, in a panicked voice. “Jesus, Michael—let this guy go! Just—just do whatever he wants, get us out of here!”
“Shut up!” Michael this time. “You think he can’t hear you?”
“I don’t fucking care! I don’t want to die!”
The panicked voice was shut up by a nasty slapping sound. In his hiding place Chapel winced to hear it.
“That way,” Michael said, and Chapel heard the guards moving, coming toward him. Michael was smart enough to send them around both sides of the crate maze, so they could pin him in a crossfire. In a second they would come around the sides, shooting as they came, hoping to kill him before he could even react to a simultaneous attack from two directions.
It was a good plan, if you were thinking in two dimensions.
Wait for it, Chapel told himself. Wait...
He saw them coming, two from one side, one from the other. He saw them from so close he could make out the look of bafflement on Michael’s face, when he came around the side of the maze and there was no sign of Chapel. He waited a split second longer, then pushed.
Chapel had climbed up on top of the crate maze, getting as high up as he could. Then he’d braced himself against one crate while putting both feet on another. With all the strength in his back he pushed the second crate right off the top of the maze.
An AK-47 weighs more than ten pounds, and there were twenty of them in each of the crates. Add in the weight of the crate itself and you had more than enough mass to knock somebody down. Hit them in the head or neck with a weight like that, falling from a height of, say, three yards, and they won’t get back up.
One man went down, flattened by the crate. The guy next to him managed to jump back in time, to throw himself out of the way. But that left him exposed, his weapon pointing at the floor. Chapel had plenty of time to line up two shots—one, two—that left his arms useless as he fell to his knees, screaming.
The third man, the one who’d come from the opposite direction, looked up. Lifted his weapon. Aimed.
Chapel snaked forward, chest on top of the crates, and shoved the barrel of his rifle right into the man’s nose. He was holding it in his left hand, his artificial hand, while the pistol remained in his right. He had limited control of the artificial hand at the best of times and he was not at his best. Still. “I think if I pull this trigger, I’m not going to miss,” he said.
Michael—it was Michael—dropped his pistol and slowly raised his hands. “Pretty good,” he said. “Ranger, you said?”
“Yes,” Chapel said.
Michael nodded—carefully, as a man does when he has the barrel of an assault rifle in his face. “Sure. I was in the Air Force. They never taught us any of this stuff. Just how to fix planes.”
“So you’re military. It shows. You’re loyal, I’ll give you that. Not a lot of people would have stuck by Favorov, not through all this.”
“They taught us, you can be smart, or you can follow orders. And smart guys ended up peeling potatoes. So I made a point of following orders.” Michael shrugged. Again, carefully. “KP duty doesn’t sound so bad, right now.”
“You going to tell me where your boss is?” Chapel asked.
“Maybe, but—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence. At that exact moment another guard came running around the corner, his gun already firing.
Crap, Chapel thought. It was the one he’d disarmed, the one he’d bluffed with the empty AK-47. Somewhere he’d gotten another pistol.
“No!” Michael shouted. Maybe he expected Chapel to shoot him on principle.
Instead Chapel clubbed Michael across the neck with his assault rifle. But only because he was standing in the way. The re-armed guard below was shooting up, blind, not even bothering to aim. Chapel took his time, even as bullets tore up the wooden crates all around him, and put a tight burst of rifle fire right in the man’s center mass.
The guard kept shooting for a half second after he was already dead, but eventually, he went down.
“Now,” Chapel said, looking back down at Michael, “we were talking about—”
Then he grimaced, and maybe cursed a little. The re-armed guard had managed to put a hole in the back of Michael’s head and his brains were all over the floor.
22
For a second, just a bare second after all that chaos and noise, the cellar was quiet. Chapel was standing on his own two feet, in charge of the situation. His brain must have decided that the crisis was over, because a sudden wave of light-headedness and nausea washed through him.
He was tired. Very, very tired. Blood loss, being shot, having a concussion will do that to you. His hand, his real hand felt so weak it could barely hold his weapon.
Then someone moaned in pain, behind him. He spun around, ready to fight again. But it was only one of the men he’d wounded. “Damn,” he said. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want any of this.”
“You killed Marty,” someone said, very quietly. Not in an accusatory way. More like they couldn’t believe it.
Chapel bent to work. He found the wounded men and bandaged them as best he could, or at least showed them how to put pressure on their wounds so they wouldn’t bleed out. They stared at him as if he’d just fallen out of the moon. But despite what his bosses might think, Chapel’s job wasn’t to kill people. He wasn’t some glorified hit man wrapped in an American flag.
Sometimes he had to remind himself of that, too. So he was kind to the wounded men, even as he ignored the dead bodies and didn’t worry too much about who had killed who. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly—again, blood loss, etc. — but sometimes you needed fuzzy logic to keep moving.
“How many more of you are there?” he asked one of the wounded.
“Wh—what?”
“How many more guards, servants, whatever—how many more people work on this estate who will be coming for me with guns?”