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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.
    “D id 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