“Mon Dieu!” Reaper gasped. “I’ve never seen such destruction.”
“Remind me again,” Kamala said. “This is what you do for a living, right?”
“Don’t worry,” Ryan reassured her. “We make it look harder than it is.”
Kamala fired two short bursts from the pistol Hawke had given her, but the mercs had regrouped after the mortar attack. “They’re heading over here again and they look pissed!”
Mercs streamed over the rocks and boulders they were using for cover. One of the new additions to the Blood Crew lunged at Reaper, but the Frenchman never flinched. He ran into the man with the full force of his substantial weight, twisting his body down and to the left at the last minute and shoulder-barging him off his feet and into the dark cave behind him.
On the ground now, the merc brought up his fist and pounded the Frenchman in the side of his head with all the energy he could muster. It was hard and heavy, but Reaper took the blow, absorbing some of the force by rolling his head to the side.
Now he was angry, but a savage headbutt down in the center of the merc’s face seemed to redress the balance. With the man’s nose smashed into a jelly pulp, he gave a shrill gasp of pain and reached his hands up to his face to feel the damage.
“Non, non, non.” Reaper recoiled his fist and aimed into the man’s face. For a moment both men felt time almost stop as the fist hovered in the air, awaiting its next command. Gnarled, bruised knuckles, on a filthy, dirt-covered hand, smeared in the blood of countless mercenaries recoiled like a spring-loaded weapon.
Then he unleashed it into the man’s face and knocked him clean out. Turning to check his friends, he saw Hawke fighting another merc. “You need some help?”
“Do I fuck,” Hawke said, wrenching his combat knife from his belt and slashing it through the air. It struck the merc’s knife and the two steel blades clashed in a small shower of sparks. Bringing his other hand up, he smashed an uppercut on the man’s jaw and sent him flying back into the rocky wall. When the merc struck his head on the granite, he was knocked out instantly and crashed to the floor in a heap in front of Hawke.
Behind him, Nikolai drew on his vast martial arts knowledge to dismantle two of the Mafia henchmen. It was an eye-watering display of controlled violence, ending in the stomach-turning sound of breaking bones and men howling in pain. The former Athanatoi monk showed no mercy. He brought up his leg and spun around on the spot, sweeping his heavy boot into the faces of both the kneeling men.
Across the chamber, Lexi was moving like a CGI demon, hop-skip-jumping from one merc to the next in a blur of one-eighty degree twists and turns and savage scissor kicks as she tore through them. A Belgian at the end dropped his knife and sprinted into the darkness of one of the tunnels, but Lexi was too fast.
She ran to him, launching herself into the air and running up his back as he fled. Using the fleeing man like a springboard, she leaped into the air above him and delivered a hefty kick with her left leg, knocking him out cold. He fell to the floor and she landed beside him in the gloomy, dusty cave.
“Too easy,” she said.
The bedlam worsened. Across the chamber, Kashala’s men had secured the entrance to the sanctuary and Dimitrov and Zhivkov were heading back inside under armed guard.
Heavily engaged in her own fight with a Belgian merc, Lea cried out in the searing heat and chaos. “They’re going inside!”
“We’re going nowhere until we’ve taken these guys out!” Lexi said.
Another jumped down from the rock and landed on the Chinese assassin, knocking her to the ground. She rushed to her feet, saving her life from a brutal knife attack. Then she pulled her knife and lunged at the man. He dodged the strike with a neat sidestep and brought his own knife hand up into the fight. Turning on her heel, she brought her other leg up into his face and knocked him off his balance. Arms flailing in the air, she took full advantage and mercilessly knocked the knife from his hand with a wrist strike.
Snatching up the weapon, she slashed it across his chest and gouged a deep cut in him. He howled in pain but was still tumbling backwards toward a ledge. Lexi flipped the knife in the air, caught it by the blade and then she threw it at him as hard as she could. The switch-blade’s heavy ivory handle struck the man in the forehead and knocked him out.
Lexi watched him tumble into the darkness behind the ledge and dusted off her hands. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Closer to the lava flow, Ryan was scrambling through the dirt and dust in search of his gun. He was fighting the female merc they had seen earlier with Kashala and she had kicked it from his hand and was closing in for the kill. He saw it now, glinting dully in the ambient light of the glow sticks, but just as reached out for it, the merc got to it first and kicked it away from him once again. Then she spun around and kicked him hard in the face, forcing his head back and nearly knocking him out.
Ryan saw stars. They spun around his head and flashed like aluminum countermeasure chaff in a bright sunny sky. Through the dazed confusion of his mind, he looked up and saw the unsmiling face of the female Congolese mercenary looking back down at him.
“You are a very naughty boy,” she said quietly. “You don’t know how to treat a lady, so let me teach you how.”
She reached down, clamping his head in her two hands and lifted him up until they were face to face, his legs dangling down in the air. He lashed out with fists squeezed tight, but she took the blows with barely a flinch. Craning her neck, she brought her face closer to his ear. Whispering, she said, “You fool with Nzuji and you pay with your life!”
Ryan fought back but she was too strong, and when she dropped him to the ground and pulled a hunting knife from her belt, he thought it was all over. She lunged at him, slashing the blade at his throat, but he rolled away and threw a handful of sand and dirt into her face.
As she cried out, he had time to snatch up the gun and crawled backwards as he raised the muzzle and aimed it at her face.
“Now, you pay with your life!”
He moved to squeeze the trigger, then everything changed.
“Everyone lay down your arms or the old man dies!”
Ryan looked through Nzuji’s long legs and saw Mukendi marching into the cave. He had the presbyter in his grip and a gun at his head.
“I’m sorry,” the old man said. “This man caught me on the road leaving the monastery and he put this gun to my head. He said he will kill me if you don’t lay down your guns.”
Hawke recognized the terror in the elderly churchman’s voice; he’d heard it many times before in his travels with ECHO and he knew it was authentic.
“Take your gun away from his head!” he shouted.
Kashala and his men laughed. “I think you’re the ones lowering their weapons.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Lea looked at Hawke with desperate eyes, and then back at the old presbyter. “You son of a bitch, Mukendi!”
“Tut tut, woman,” he purred. “Don’t make me laugh or I might pull this trigger and blow his head clean off his shoulders.”
Hawke knew he had only one play, and that was to obey Mukendi’s demand to lower his gun. As he released the weapon and let it clatter to the cave floor, he closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out of the situation.
Across the chamber, Nzuji sneered as she snatched the gun from Ryan’s hand and walked back over to the Blood Crew, and further back, a dazed Crombez staggered to his feet, rubbing his head where Reaper had hit him.
“Now,” Kashala said smugly. “You will hand over the mobile field generator cannister before His Holiness is executed by my men.”
With one look at the presbyter, Hawke didn’t hesitate. Pulling the cannister from his canvas bag, he walked it across to Kashala. The African general snatched it from him and delivered a hefty smack across Hawke’s face.