Minotaur

by David Wellington

  “I said—­”

  Chapel turned to face the man. He saw a middle-­aged guy in a suit, a pistol clutched in both his hands. He saw the barrel pointing at his face. The guards would have orders not to kill Chapel if it could be avoided, he knew. He had no idea how this guard would interpret those orders.

  There are rare times in life when you just have to act, and not consider the consequences. Chapel grabbed the pistol grip of his rifle and fired three rounds at the guard, pulling the trigger three times. One, two, three.

  19.

  Red spots appeared on the guard’s forearm, shoulder, and waist. He dropped his gun and spun around, clutching at his arm as he tumbled to the floor. “Oh God!” he screamed. “Oh God, I’m going to die!”

  None of those wounds was fatal, by the look of it, but Chapel didn’t disillusion the man. If he was scared enough to make him stay down, good. He scuttled sideways, never quite standing up, and grabbed the guard’s pistol. He was getting a decent collection of weapons, now.

  He moved over toward the crates again, because they would give him better cover. Edged around the sides of them so that he was almost, but not quite, exposed. “Hold your fire,” he shouted over the noise of the guns.

  Surprisingly, it worked. The guards stopped shooting, though Chapel could still hear them moving around, their shoes squeaking on the floor.

  He didn’t want to have to kill or even injure these men. Maybe they could be reasoned with, he thought. “Michael!” he called out. “Michael, I know it’s you leading this bunch.”

  “How the hell do you know my name?” Michael replied. Chapel couldn’t see the man’s face. He couldn’t read his body language, and his voice wasn’t giving away anything. He didn’t know if he was scared or resolute or who knew what. “Whatever. Are you giving up, now?”

  “Nope,” Chapel said. “Not tonight. I hope your boss won’t be offended that I borrowed some of his arsenal.”

  “I’m sure he’s got other things on his mind,” Michael said. “Listen, we aren’t going to hurt you if you just drop your weapons and come out. I promise. Maybe I owe you an ass-­kicking for what you did back in the billiards room. But that would be worth my job, so you get a free pass.”

  Chapel smiled to himself. “I was about to make you the same offer.”

  “Ha ha. Listen, guy. I talked to Stephen. I know you’re hurt bad. You’ve probably lost some blood, you’re probably not thinking straight—­”

  “One of the first things,” Chapel interrupted, “that they taught me in the Rangers was that a wounded man with a gun is still a man with a gun.”

  “Okay. I hear you. Maybe you get one or two of us before we take you down. But in that case you’re going to die, buddy. We’re supposed to bring you in alive but none of us here is stupid. If you come out of there guns blazing, we’re going to shoot back. And there’s a lot more of us.”

  Chapel leaned his head back against a crate. He suddenly felt very tired. He didn’t like how this was shaping up, not at all. But he would do what he had to do. “You know you’re already out of a job, right? If your boss gets out of here alive, he’s never coming back. And I doubt there’s room for all of you on his yacht.”

  “Have you seen it, man? It’s pretty big.”

  So much for reason. “Okay. This is how you want to play it, I guess. A big showdown. Last man standing walks out of here. Your guys all agree with you?”

  “I’m afraid so. This is on you, Ranger.”

  “I kind of had a feeling,” Chapel said.

  He adjusted his grip on the rifle. Checked the fire selector, moved it into the middle position for full auto. Shifted the pistols in his belt around where he could grab them easily.

  And then he stepped around the side of the crate, already firing.

  20.

  Chapel had no idea what kind of training Michael had, or whether he’d ever led men into combat. Somewhere along the line he’d gotten a few basics down.

  As Chapel came around the corner, rifle blaring and jumping in his hand, he saw immediately that the guards were all behind cover, keeping their heads down. He had expected as much—­mostly he was just laying down suppressing fire as he sprayed bullets over their heads. But now he knew where they were. Two were hiding behind a shelf over by the stairs. One was crouching behind the side of the workbench. A fourth had his back up against the maze of crates, facing away from Chapel.

  That one nearly killed him. The guard had been creeping up on his position, probably intending to get the drop on him while he was still talking to Michael. When Chapel came out from behind the crates he was nearly behind Chapel, flanking him, and he didn’t waste time on being surprised. He lifted his pistol and fired even before Chapel had taken his finger off his own trigger.

  The bullet tore through the silicone flesh of Chapel’s artificial bicep. He felt it tug him around, to the side, but he threw himself the other direction and rolled onto his back on the floor. The flanking guard shifted his aim, lowering his arm to hit Chapel where he lay. Chapel didn’t give him the chance. He lit up the guard with a quick burst from his rifle and saw the man dance like a marionette on strings.

  He didn’t wait to see the man go down. Instead he rolled over on his side and dashed back behind the crates.

  Back in the relative safety of his previous position, he listened to the man moan and try to scream. He was pretty sure the flanking guard wasn’t going to survive.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think.

  You couldn’t think of them as human beings in a situation like this. It had been years since Chapel had fought in real combat but he remembered how it was done. They weren’t ­people with lives and families and maybe children out there. They were obstacles, deadly hazards strewn in your path, and you removed them from play as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  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?”

  The man was barely conscious. He wasn’t capable of lying. He seemed like he was just able to get words out. “Just us inside . . . maybe a dozen more out on the grounds. They’re supposed to watch the . . . the gate, the fence.”

  “What if they hear gunshots inside the house, think their boss is in danger?”

  “Might . . . come in. Maybe.”

  It was the best force estimate Chapel could expect. He asked more questions, as many as he thought he had time for, but got no answers that meant anything. None of the conscious guards in that cellar had any idea where Favorov was, or knew anything about possible escape routes from the mansion. They’d been waiting for the yacht to arrive, that was all. Michael might have known something—­the guards explained that Michael and Stephen had been Favorov’s personal bodyguards and heads of staff. But Stephen had fled, and Michael was very dead.

  He searched one of the dead men and came up with a cell phone and a hands-­free unit. Standard equipment for an executive bodyguard. The phone still had half its charge. Chapel wiped some blood off the hands-­free unit and, with only a little distaste, stuck it in his ear. He switched on the phone and dialed a number he’d memorized a long time ago.

  “Chapel,” Angel said. Nobody else had that number. “Chapel—­you’re alive!”

  “About half dead, I’d say,” Chapel told her. Maybe he was more woozy than he thought. “Never mind. I’m alive, and armed, and I’ve neutralized about a third of the forces here. Some of them are going to need medical attention. Others can . . . wait. I’m sure this isn’t a safe line but I don’t very much care at this point. I need intel, Angel. I need you sitting on my shoulder.”

  “You know you’ve got me,” she said. “I’ll always be here for you.”

  “I know. And I appreciate it. I’m in the cellar right now. Do you have floor plans for this house?”

  “I’m afraid not. They were never entered into the public record.”

  Chapel frowned. “They should have been, right? To get the permits to build this place, Favorov would have had to file something.”

  “Or he would have had to bribe a county clerk,” Angel suggested.

  “Sure.” Chapel ran his good hand through his short hair. “So what do you have?”

  “Satellite and thermal imaging. I can give you a rough idea of where ­people are in the house. But I can just tell you how close you’re gettin
g to a human being, not who they are or what weapons they’re carrying. I can tell you, because I know it’s your next question, that Favorov is still inside. I saw him peek out of a window not three minutes ago, maybe looking for any sign that he was about to get raided by SWAT teams.”

  Chapel nodded. “He’s probably wondering why it hasn’t happened already. Interesting . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Chapel said. “Like I said, this isn’t a safe line. I’m going to move now. I don’t have a lot of time left. You’ve got my six, all right?”

  “I’m always watching out for you.”

  Well, at least that was something.

  Chapel still had no idea what waited for him upstairs. He had no illusion that Favorov was as uninformed. There might be security cameras anywhere, even in the cellar. Favorov would know Chapel was still alive, and that he was armed, and that he was coming to capture him.

  Chapel was absolutely certain the Russian wouldn’t go quietly. Not now.

  He did one more thing before he left the cellar. He loaded up a pile of AK-­47 clips and stuffed them in a sack he could tie to his belt. Slung a pair of assault rifles over his shoulder. Took two pistols—­they were Glocks, pretty standard for executive security types—­and all the pistol ammo he could find. It made his pockets bulge and clank but he didn’t care.

  By the time he was ready to climb the stairs, he had enough firepower on him to knock over a Third World government. Well, he thought, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. There were places in the Third World where AK-­47s outnumbered the ­people. But Monaco or Luxembourg? No problem.

  23.

  When Chapel reentered the kitchen he found it deserted except for the cooling body of the cook, who lay slumped right where she’d died. The place was a mess, pots and pans knocked onto the floor, cabinets torn open and their contents strewn across the counters. Apparently when Michael and his men had come through, looking for Chapel, they had been careful to make sure he wasn’t hiding in any of the cupboards.