Maggie’s head snapped back, and she staggered away.
In an attempt to press her advantage, Sarah swung her other leg up for a kick, but Maggie deflected the blow at the last possible instant.
Maggie rushed forward, raining lightning-fast blows upon the smaller Sarah. When she raised her hands in defense, Maggie lowered her aim and pounded away on Sarah’s ribs.
Sarah doubled over to protect herself, and Maggie dropped back — but only for a second.
It wasn’t a retreat; she simply needed room to use the full range of her leg.
Maggie leaped forward, swinging her hardened shin into the side of Sarah’s head. The kick sent Sarah careening to the ground, but she rebounded beautifully. As Maggie moved in closer, Sarah sprang from her crouch and smashed the crown of her head into Maggie’s oncoming face.
Blood sprayed from her ruptured eyebrow and gushed down Maggie’s face. Snot dripped from her broken nose and mixed with the spit drooling down into the split in her chin. Her eyes were swollen and watery.
She staggered aimlessly, helpless against Sarah’s advance.
Feng’s chest pounded with excitement.
‘Finish her,’ he ordered. ‘Kill her. Kill her now!’
Sarah’s eyes glazed over with rage. Maggie’s deception had unleashed a hornet’s nest of pent-up frustration, a sea of simmering angst that had been bubbling since the catastrophic loss of their previous historian in the deserts of Egypt. Despite her opponent’s defenseless condition, wrath overwhelmed her.
The roundhouse kick shattered Maggie’s sternum.
The arm bar that followed collapsed her trachea and snapped her neck.
Maggie fell dead to the cavern floor as Sarah stood trembling above her.
She had won the fight, but the battle wasn’t finished.
Feng didn’t applaud her victory or wait for his enemy to regroup. He had never been interested in a fair fight; not when he could strike while his opponent was weakened. His sentiment toward life echoed his strategy in business: the strong prevail, while the feeble must be purged from existence.
The blow from him came silently, while her back was turned. Feng blasted a rock-hard fist into the flesh protecting her right kidney, dropping her to her knees as a wave of nauseating pain swept over her. She tried to stagger to her feet, but Feng delivered another vicious blow, this time catching her squarely on the backside of her lungs.
She gasped for breath, certain that at least two of her ribs had been shattered.
Feng grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face toward the floor. She desperately spun her head to keep her nose and teeth from breaking against the solid rock, but her temple still smashed against the unforgiving stone. She landed on her stomach, which drove the last of the air from her lungs in a tortured gasp. She rolled to her side in agony, trying to move further and faster to escape the deranged man about to kill her, but her body wouldn’t respond.
She felt Feng’s foot ram into her side, and another rib crumbled. She brought her knees up in a protective fetal curl, but the man’s foot drove down onto her throat, squeezing off her air. Sarah clawed at his calf, but the man’s leg was like granite, the muscles under his trousers corded and strong from years of training.
She tried to shove him off her, but it was like trying to move a tree.
Her eyes bulged from the sockets as her lungs sucked for fresh oxygen.
Slowly, her vision grew hazy around the edges.
A few moments more, and she would be gone.
In a last-ditch effort, she tried to swing her legs up behind the man and hook him with her heels, hoping that she could push him away, but he deflected each blow with a forearm. He leaned heavily into her, pressing his boot on her windpipe as if he were trying to ram his foot through her neck to the floor. She could feel herself losing consciousness, her resistance slipping with each passing second.
As her eyes rolled back, a final idea exploded in her mind.
The knife!
Sarah frantically dug into the folds of her pockets until her fingertips found her knife. Fighting the lack of air, she wrapped her fingers around the handle. With the last energy she could muster, she withdrew the blade and slashed the knife parallel to her throat. The only thing in her way was Feng’s Achilles tendon.
She sliced through it like tender veal.
Feng roared in agony and jolted backward from the pain. Though he landed on his feet, the sliced tendon gave him no support. He immediately toppled backwards, the pistol from his holster sliding harmlessly across the floor.
Sarah rolled to her side and forced herself to her knees, still clutching the knife. Her bruised neck throbbed as she sucked in huge gulps of air, but she was oblivious to the pain.
She was just happy to be alive.
As she rose to her feet, Feng clawed desperately for his pistol, which had fallen just beyond his reach. His hand strained for the weapon, his limb extending back as his nails dug into the grip. The tips of his powerful fingers inched the gun closer, until it was finally within his grasp.
She saw the entire scene in slow motion.
In response, she cocked her arm backward, the knife still in hand.
As Feng raised the gun, she let the blade fly. The knife tumbled end over end through the air for what seemed like an eternity, but her aim was true.
And so was the pistol’s.
The blade sank deep into his eye as a gunshot echoed through the chamber.
68
Sarah stared at the barrel of Feng’s gun. There was no fire. There was no smoke. There was no projectile hurling its way toward her face at the speed of sound.
The knife had sunk securely into his left eye, the blade tunneling deeply into his skull and the handle lodging firmly up against his orbital bone. Yet it was the right half of his face that had left her in awe. It wasn’t just damaged, it was shredded, the skull beneath having been pulverized into skeletal fragments.
The reality of the moment slowly crept into her brain.
Feng never got off a shot.
Someone else pulled the trigger.
Feng’s body tipped over to the side, and Sarah glanced over her shoulder to see who had joined the fray. She breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Cobb; she didn’t have the strength to fight more of the Brotherhood.
‘Nice timing,’ Sarah croaked before dropping to the ground in exhaustion.
Cobb raced forward to catch her, but she held up a hand to signal that she was okay. He crouched beside her. ‘I think what you meant to say was, “Thanks for saving my life.”’
Sarah grinned as she gulped in air. ‘Nah, I had him. The knife killed him first. You just made things messy.’
Cobb was about to laugh when he noticed Maggie’s crumpled body near the other side of the room. He sprang up to investigate, but Sarah grabbed the cuff of his pant leg.
‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘She’s not worth it.’
Cobb’s troubled stare told her that she needed to explain.
‘She was working for Feng. She sold us out for a paycheck, then she turned on me.’
Cobb was confused. ‘She couldn’t have been in his pocket all along. Not with all the help she gave us. That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I don’t know when he flipped her,’ Sarah admitted. ‘All I can tell you is that she definitely wasn’t working for us at the end. Xenophobia. Nationalistic fanaticism. I really don’t know. But it was either her or me.’