Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 014

The silence at the gate had people in it.

Soren didn't wait to find out how many.

"Lights off. Everyone upstairs. Now."

He said it loudly enough to carry through the room and was already moving before the words finished, drawing the Beretta 92F and stepping to the near side of the front door, both hands bringing the pistol up to chest level. The room went dark as Noah hit the switch. Father George stood in the middle of the floor looking as though the evening had taken a turn he was not theologically prepared for, and then Evan and Howard had him by both arms and were pulling him toward the stairs.

Mike crossed the room without a word, went straight to the bookcase, and reached up to the top shelf. What came down was a bolt-action rifle, long and lean, its finish worn to bare metal at the contact points: a Springfield M1903 with a mounted scope, the kind of weapon that hadn't been manufactured for decades and had clearly been maintained with deliberate care. He moved to the television cabinet next, reached behind it, and pulled out a locked iron box. He broke the lock with one sharp downward pull and opened it to find twenty-odd rounds of ammunition nested inside.

Noah had come halfway back down the stairs when he saw it.

"Dad. What is that."

It was not entirely a question.

"Get back upstairs and stay there until I call you," Mike said, with the flat authority of a man who had used that tone before and knew it worked.

Noah looked at the rifle, looked at his father, and went back up the stairs without further argument.

Mike began pressing rounds into the magazine well one at a time, steady and unhurried. He caught Soren watching him and offered a slight, slightly embarrassed smile. "When you're a long way from home, you keep something close."

He pocketed the remaining rounds, worked the bolt handle twice with a clean double-clack, and chambered the first cartridge. Then he moved to the window on the far side of the door, dropped to one knee, settled the rifle stock against his shoulder, and used the potted plant on the windowsill as a natural rest, the scope trained on the gate.

"You were military," Soren said. It wasn't a question.

"Army. Some years back." Mike didn't look up from the scope. "You?"

"Something like that."

Mike accepted this with the equanimity of a man who understood that some answers were the shape of their absence. "Fair enough."

Outside, the sound at the gate had resolved into voices and movement, and Soren caught enough of the tone, if not the words, to understand the situation clearly. Whoever was out there had come with numbers and with purpose, and they were not being quiet about either.

"Is there a rear entrance to the compound?" he asked.

"One. On the far side of the church. You'd have to go around."

"Good." Soren was already calculating. "That means they can't split the approach without losing line of sight on each other. Watch my back, Mike. If anyone draws a bead on me from outside, I need you on it."

"Understood."

Soren opened the door and went low, moving across the garden in a crouch toward the side entrance of the church.

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He understood his own situation clearly.

Staying in the house and waiting was a losing proposition, regardless of how it felt. The men outside had automatic rifles. He had a semi-automatic pistol with a partial magazine, and Mike had a bolt-action with twenty rounds and a good eye. In a sustained exchange, those numbers didn't work in their favor. Someone on their side would take a hit before the math resolved, and probably more than one.

But inside the church, the math changed.

The building was a close-quarters environment with multiple entry points, poor lighting, and a floor plan that rewarded the single defender who knew where to move over the group that didn't. His CQB skills and upgraded Firearms Proficiency had been built for exactly this kind of geometry: tight angles, short sight lines, the decision made in the half-second before the other man had finished processing the situation. Out in the open, those advantages evaporated. In here, they were everything.

He found the side door, eased it open, and checked the interior.

A kitchen. The light was still on. A plate of half-eaten tomato pasta sat on the table, the kind of detail that belonged to an ordinary evening. Through the rear window, the Hale house was clearly visible, which meant Father George had been watching from here earlier, waiting for Mike's light to come on.

Soren had one foot across the threshold when he heard it: footsteps outside, two sets, moving with the deliberate quiet of men who were trying to be careful and weren't quite managing it.

Two.

He moved to the left side of the kitchen door, dropped into a half-crouch, and waited.

The door handle turned. A g*n barrel came through first, black and probing, the way it always did when the man holding it was trying to be cautious without fully committing to entry.

Soren grabbed the barrel with his left hand and pulled.

The gunman came through the door off-balance, still attached to the weapon, and Soren brought the Beretta 92F up from chest height and fired twice into the man's torso. The double-tap dropped him before he could vocalize anything useful.

Soren pushed the body aside, stepped left across the doorframe, and came up in a triangle Weaver stance, both hands on the pistol, the second gunman already visible in the doorway and already reacting but not fast enough.

Two to the chest.

One to the head.

He turned back to the first man, who was still moving in the mechanical, purposeless way of someone whose body hadn't received the message yet, and put a final round through his skull.

Mozambique drill, both engagements. Clean.

He looked at the AK-pattern rifles on the floor for a moment, then left them where they were. Long weapons in a narrow interior were a liability for a single operator who needed to move fast and change angles quickly. The Beretta fit the space. The rifles didn't.

He was through the second door and into the church proper before the sound of the shots had finished echoing off the kitchen walls.

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Outside, the reaction was immediate.

Several of the gunmen converged on the kitchen entrance, found their colleagues, and the quality of the noise changed. There was a particular register to the voice of a man who has just discovered that the people he came to intimidate have already killed two of his team, and Soren could hear it clearly even from inside the nave.

"That's not a civilian. That is not a civilian. What the hell is going on?"

The squad leader's voice, cutting through the noise, making the call: search the whole building.

Soren was already moving through the side passage that connected the sacristy to the main corridor, using the darkness and the floor plan he'd memorized during the afternoon visit. The corridor ran along the interior wall of the nave, its right side broken by a row of leaded-glass windows that let in the moonlight in fractured, angled strips. His shadow moved ahead of him on the left wall, long and attenuated.

Nine rounds remaining.

Footsteps on the stairs above. Four sets, moving quickly, descending.

He stepped sideways into the shadow of a doorframe and went still.

The four gunmen came down the staircase at the far end of the corridor and called out toward the rear of the building: "Captain, second floor is clear." Then they turned and started moving toward him.

Four. At this range, in this light, with this corridor geometry, two of them would reach cover before he could work through all four at a controlled pace. If any of them got behind him, the engagement became unmanageable.

He didn't deliberate.

He stepped out half a body width, brought the Beretta up, and fired.

Five rounds in rapid succession, the shots spaced by half a breath each, the muzzle tracking left to right across the corridor.

The first gunman dropped where he stood. The second and third took rounds to the chest and abdomen respectively and went down hard. The fourth was fast, faster than the others, and found cover behind a stone pillar before Soren's line of fire reached him. The man came up with his rifle leveled, finger already moving.

The leaded window beside him exploded inward.

The gunman dropped without firing. A single round, through the glass, precisely placed.

Mike, from the house window, eighty meters away, bolt-action, one shot.

Soren stepped out from cover, crossed the corridor, and put two rounds into each of the two men who were still moving. Then he walked to the window, looked across the garden toward the Hale house, and raised his thumb.

A brief pause. Then a small light blinked twice from the darkened window. Acknowledgment.

He pressed his back against the wall, ejected the Beretta's magazine, confirmed the round count by feel, and reseated it. Tactical reload, muscle memory, done in four seconds without looking down. He'd taken the spare magazines from the glove compartment before leaving the truck, and the math was still workable: he had enough rounds to continue, provided he didn't get wasteful.

Six gunmen down. The squad leader was still out there, and he'd heard enough of the voice to know the man wasn't going to pull back.

Soren moved deeper into the church, into the dark, and waited for the next approach.