Vigilante (30 page)

This was bad. Nolan might be able to escape these kinds of odds on his own, but not unscathed, and only if he’d come alone. His friends would be lambs to the slaughter.

“What do we do?” asked Arjay, who was breathing faster than Nolan had ever seen him.

Branford kicked open one of the gun boxes and pulled out a Remington 1100 TAC 4 semiautomatic shotgun. He grinned as he picked it up, running a firm hand over its long black barrel. “Been a long time since I’ve seen one of these.” He retrieved a box of shells as well, and began loading the shotgun.

Nolan needed to buy some time. He had to keep Vasko talking.

“How did you know?” he called out, referring to his own attempt to destroy the storehouse tonight. An attempt that had quite spectacularly failed. “Is there really a secret vault?”

“I’d never have let you find out about it if there was,” replied Vasko’s magnified voice. “I’ve been waiting for you to try this for weeks. What took you so long? My man fed you the address days ago.”

Everything felt wrong. Nolan realized that it was Vasko who was trying to keep
him
talking.

Nolan switched to X-ray and saw the skeletons of Vasko’s five “guests” on the move. Their movements were smooth and fast, catlike yet completely silent. One was in the lead, pointing with a single hand down various aisles that he wanted his men to search, while he himself seemed to be on a straight course to intercept Nolan. Whoever this guy was, he knew what he was doing.

“Get ready to move,” Nolan whispered to his friends.

The odds were stacked against them, but Nolan Gray refused to lose to Yuri Vasko twice.

N
olan made instantaneous calculations, only barely aware of his friends and their rising anxiety levels. Arjay trembled, glancing around with a twitch, like a bird in a tree. Branford clutched his Remington with both hands like it was an old flame.

“What are we going to do?” Arjay whispered.

“Come on, Nolan,” said Vasko. “Let’s get on with it. I have an empire to run.”

“Well, gentlemen,” whispered Nolan, pulling out the grappler. “I think we’re finally going to find out just how much weight this thing will hold.”

He switched to X-ray again while whispering some instructions to his friends, and saw that the leader of the five-man group was almost upon them. He only needed to round the corner at the end of the aisle.

Nolan took aim at the ceiling with the grappler and fired. Retracting it only a little but holding on tight, he ran down the aisle toward the oncoming attacker and met him there just as he turned the corner, Nolan’s feet ramming into his chest. The man—a bodybuilder covered in tattoos—was flung backward, but he tucked in his feet and rolled back to a standing position. Nolan followed through, rising up into the air and swinging across the warehouse, but the man he’d slammed into emptied a Jericho 9mm pistol into Nolan’s armor-woven fatigues. Nolan heard the fast clicks of the Jericho being reloaded with a fresh magazine.

But Nolan had too much momentum, and with the grappler fully retracting, he swung high up toward the ceiling, right over Vasko’s head.

“Shoot him!” screamed Vasko, his voice echoing throughout the warehouse. His five men fired from their various positions, their bullets causing a tremendous noise as they bounced off the metal roof.

Nolan didn’t let himself reach the ceiling. Instead, firing and retracting the grappler over and over, he zipped through the vast room, staying one step ahead of the goons.

At last, Nolan retracted out of sight in a far corner, where there was too little light to be seen from ground level. He squared his shoulders and took a deep steadying breath. He would have only one shot at this. . . .

“Why have you stopped shooting?” Vasko thundered. “
Kill him! Now!
”

Seeing that his friends had come out of hiding and placed themselves in the spot he’d whispered to them about just seconds ago, Nolan kicked off from the wall and swung as fast as he could back across the room.

Arjay and Branford locked hands.

As the gunfire opened up again, Nolan swung directly toward his friends and grabbed them with his free hand. Together, the three men continued the motion, flying straight at the nearest exit.

The two extra men were heavy, and Nolan felt the strain on both his muscles and the grappler as they swung low, near the floor. But they were almost there. . . .

Something blindsided them hard from atop the crates nearby, and the three men rolled involuntarily as they crashed to the ground. Nolan was on his feet first, seeing that the man with the Jericho handgun was only inches away. He also held a twelve-inch knife, and Nolan saw that the grappler, lying useless on the ground, had had its line severed.

Branford staggered to his feet, searching for the shotgun that had flown free from his hands, as the other four men rushed toward them both. Nolan noted that they were all tattooed, pierced, and bulging with rippling muscles, just like their leader, who stood pointing his pistol at Nolan’s chest. Nolan never hesitated; he spun and grabbed the gun, forcing it to one side just as it went off, missing him by a hairsbreadth. He brought a second hand in to jam it against the other man’s arm, hoping to force him to turn loose of the gun, but the move was anticipated and countered with a second hand of his own. Nolan got an elbow across the face, spinning him hard down to his knees.

As Nolan shook off the powerful blow, his eyes focused on something about twenty yards away. It was the exit, the one they’d been aiming for before being cut down. And hiding in the shadows near the door was Arjay.

Nolan and his friend locked eyes for a brief moment, and Nolan could see how much fear was written across Arjay’s young face. The unspoken question was there as Arjay glanced at the double doors leading out into the night. Nolan couldn’t fault him for wanting to flee; he had no training for combat and would be a very easy kill for any of Vasko’s men. His only chance was to run.

Discreetly, Nolan nodded. His hope was that in the commotion, Arjay would be able to duck through the doors and slip out into the night unnoticed. He would have to fend for himself against Vasko’s men standing guard around the perimeter, but he stood a better chance out there than if he stayed inside with these punk-rock guerrillas.

Nolan wanted to fight, to turn the tables on these five goons as they rushed in to surround him and the general, but the little resistance he offered was purely to keep their attention off of Arjay.

He took comfort in knowing that at least one of them had escaped with his life this night.

The man with the Jericho pistol, the one who’d cut them down from the grappler, stepped forward while another approached Nolan from behind and tugged on his hood until it fell down to his shoulders.

The leader inspected Nolan’s brutally scarred face with fascination. “Sloppy work” was his only comment, muttered under his breath. Nolan felt like his scars had just been appraised by an expert on the subject.

Vasko soon joined them, out of breath. He was pleased to see Nolan and Branford surrounded, their hands in the air. He watched as the mercenary leader leaned in and removed Nolan’s gear, including his retractable staff, gloves, glasses, and glass-cutting knife. Nolan refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing him flinch while his precious tools were ripped from his possession.

Something cracked against the back of his head, and he was unconscious.

T
he putrid odor of smelling salts snapped Nolan from the void and he awoke violently, jerking away from the smell as hard as he could.

He had no idea how much time had passed, and had no way of telling because he was blindfolded with what felt like duct tape. A gag of cloth knotted and filled his mouth.

He was wrestled into a kneeling position, his hands tied behind his back so tightly that they’d gone numb. Some sadistic member of Vasko’s crew had probably enjoyed watching them turn blue. Another rope went around his shoulders, pinning his arms to his body.

What was Vasko playing at? He could have killed Nolan while he was unconscious, so why didn’t he?

Was Branford still alive, or was he similarly trussed up somewhere nearby?

Nolan tried to make a sound, to at least offer some kind of grunting indication to his friend that he was still alive. But his mouth was so full of cloth that his voice was muffled too much to be audible.

Only smell and hearing remained of his senses, and the wet rot of the river confirmed they were likely still at the docks. His hearing was filled with a loud grinding or rumbling noise, like the ignition of a race car. But he didn’t feel like he was in motion. He was kneeling, and he could feel new ropes being applied liberally around his boots.

Vasko must have noticed his movements, because his duct-tape blindfold was suddenly ripped off.

Nolan blinked and looked into a bright light just overhead. It was one of the tall lamps on the edge of the pier. They hadn’t gone anywhere at all—they were just outside the warehouse, but back near the road.

“I want you to see something,” said Vasko. “Yes, you
will
die, quite horribly, in just minutes. I have something special in mind. But before I take your life from you just as you took everything from me, before I defeat you completely, there’s one last thing I want you to see with your own eyes.”

Vasko waved a hand for something to be brought to him. Nolan swallowed heavily and shivered from the biting cold as Branford was roughly pushed and pulled by Vasko’s mercenaries into position about ten feet away.

Branford’s face was bruised purple, with trails of blood running down both corners of his mouth, and bloody scrapes all over. His eyes were almost swollen shut. The man limped as well, barely able to stand with the help of the mercenaries holding him up.

“Before you die,” said Vasko, “you’re going to watch as someone you care deeply about dies right in front of you. And you are powerless to stop it.”

As if to punctuate Vasko’s words, whoever was tying him up produced more rope and made another tight knot just above his knees. Another rope was then pulled through the one holding his feet together and cinched through the rope around his hands, and pulled Nolan’s heels until they touched his hands. He was completely immobilized, and being no longer able to kneel, he fell over onto the pier’s old wooden planks.

This new ground-level perspective showed him the source of the rumbling noise he’d heard earlier. A large truck of some kind had been backed up behind Vasko and Branford, and its engine was still running.

“Don’t look away now, Nolan,” said Vasko. “This is the best part.”

Vasko nodded to his mercs, and Branford was forced down onto his knees. With two of the muscular men holding him in place by gripping his arms on either side, the old man looked straight into Nolan’s eyes. Nolan was terrified of what the general must’ve seen in Nolan’s face; he knew he couldn’t hide the pain and horror and anger that were in his heart. The fear Nolan saw in the general’s eyes only heightened his own dread—he’d never seen Branford scared of anything.

The truck grew louder as some kind of tube was lowered from the back, and Branford was tipped backward so that his head was directly beneath it. The cold, white horror of understanding dawned on Nolan at last as thick, wet cement rolled down the tube toward Branford’s face.

Branford fought with all his might, but Vasko brought in more men to hold him fast—while insisting that no one block Nolan’s line of sight—and Vasko himself reached in to pinch Branford’s nose, forcing him to open his mouth. Once that was accomplished, the cement poured down faster, much of it running down the sides of the old man’s face and neck.

The general tried not to swallow, tried to spit and pull away from the cement’s flow, but he was outnumbered and overpowered. The stuff soon went down his gullet, and in seconds his fight was over.

Nolan was forced to watch through eyes blurred by tears, waiting for several minutes while the cement continued to pour. As what felt like an eternity passed, the cement was allowed to begin to set.

Vasko gave the final nod. Branford’s body required four of the burly men to lift, but they managed. And Nolan watched as his oldest friend was dumped over the pier’s edge into the East River.

Vasko reappeared and knelt beside Nolan, examining his face. But Nolan refused to look at him.

“There,” said Vasko softly. “Now you hate me. You want to kill me. Which makes us the same. The only difference between us is that I’ve beaten you.”

Something large was dropped onto the ground behind Nolan, but he didn’t bother straining to see what it was. He couldn’t move an inch, and felt like he never wanted to do anything ever again. Whatever terrible death awaited him, he was ready for it. He was done. He didn’t want to be in this world anymore.

“I read your debriefing from the war,” said Vasko. “The classified one, not the sanitized file that’s on public record. And I understand that you walked away from your experiences with an acute fear of small spaces. So when I was dreaming up ways to kill you—and I have spent many, many days doing nothing but that—exploiting that phobia rose to the top of my list.”

A number of hands squeezed in beneath him and lifted him up. He was carried in his painful, awkward position and laid sideways inside what he recognized as one of the storehouse’s green metal gun boxes. Secured as he was, he just fit within the box, which had been emptied out.

Vasko stood over him with a roll of duct tape in his good hand. He tore off a piece with his teeth and covered Nolan’s eyes again.

“It wasn’t enough for me to defeat you, you understand,” said Vasko. “I needed you to feel what I felt when you took my family from me. My worst nightmare come true. And now, I’m making yours come true as well. My men are going to weld shut the lid of this box and then throw it in the river. A few tiny holes have been drilled in the box’s sides so the water can enter. But it will happen slowly.

“Or with the river’s water just above freezing, hypothermia could set in before you drown. Either way, I want you to feel every moment of what’s about to happen, Nolan. Absorb it. Take it in. Your greatest fear is about to kill you.”