Minotaur

44

Chapel turned on all of the sailboat’s lights, then made a call on its radio. When he was done he went back out on the deck and waved his arm at the sky. Within a few minutes a light pierced the darkness, and then he heard the roar of an approaching helicopter. Its searchlight pinned the sailboat to the rolling waves, glinted off the blood on the deck.

A stretcher was lowered on cables toward the boat. Chapel helped Favorov climb onto it. The bandage on the Russian’s leg was already soaked through with blood, but Favorov would live.

“I will be dead, in a few days,” he said to Chapel as the winches activated and the Coast Guard started hauling him up into the sky.

“You’re going to be fine,” Chapel told him.

Favorov gave him a crooked smile. “My leg will be fine. My heart will stop, when some Russian gangster shivs me in the prison yard. Or some marksman shoots me on the steps of the courthouse.”

“We’ll protect you,” Chapel promised him.

“You cannot.”

The stretcher rose into the sky.

A while later a cutter came alongside the sailboat, dwarfing the little Phaedra. Coast Guard sailors helped Chapel up onto the cutter’s deck, and they took him home.