Devlin was closest, hidden behind a statue of Venus. As the bike flashed past him, the Irishman acted in a heartbeat and launched himself at the rider and knocked him clean off the bike. The machine revved wildly and slammed into the coy pond, and then the two men rolled to a stop at the base of one of the hedge walls, engaged in a bitter fist fight.
Reaper moved to help him, but Devlin handled things fast. He raised the man’s head off the ground by gripping his helmet and then twisted it hard to the right, breaking his neck. The rider’s lifeless body slumped down to the concrete paving as Devlin dusted his hands and ran back over to the others.
“Two down and one to go,” he said.
“Plus the Goonies over there in the Viking,” Hawke said.
“Plus the Goonies, sure,” Devlin repeated.
The Viking SSV was almost at the maze, but now the final rider appeared. Seeing his dead associate he turned and disappeared into another maze pathway, but Scarlet saw a way to head him off.
She grabbed the trident and sprinted to the far corner of the central section where she slipped out into the pathway. She waited for a second until the man turned the corner, and when he did he was met with the trident’s prongs hard in his chest.
Knocked clean off his bike, he hit the grass with the trident still sticking out of his body. He howled and grunted as he wrenched the metal spikes from his chest, but Scarlet was in no mood for mercy.
He got to his knees and raised two palms of surrender, but she lashed out, kicking the wounded man in the stomach and sending him flying into the hedge. He howled again in triple agony at the force of the kick, the trident wound and the thorns now tearing into his back. Another kick to the face sent him off to dreamland and she headed back to the others.
When she got there, she found the Viking was parked up in the trail of destruction just behind the Lexus and the goons inside were engaged in a full-scale brawl with the ECHO team. Worse, smoke was spiralling up from the Lexus’s engine compartment and the tires were all blown out.
Lea was fighting a woman, and expertly blocking a rapid succession of strikes from her. She was good, but Lea was better and for several seconds the two of them took each other’s blows and bobbed and weaved in the chaos of the maze. Their macabre dance of death was brought to a swift conclusion when Devlin threw a knife into the woman’s back.
It thudded into the muscle, hard and deep and it was obvious that the blade had pierced her heart when she fell down onto her knees with blood frothing around her mouth.
“I had her, Danny!” Lea said angrily.
“Just lending a hand, Lea.”
One of the men rushed Scarlet, hooking her foot out from under her and making her tumble backwards. She reached out for something to grab but he finished the job by powering a palm strike into her solar plexus.
She hit the dirt floor of the maze with a thud. She was on her back and vulnerable to attack, but just as the man lunged toward her, the tall broad figure of Reaper appeared behind him. His shovel-like hands gripped the man by his shoulders and spun him around as if he was a child.
“Ça va?” he said, and rounded the question off with an eye-watering uppercut punch. It crashed into his face, immediately dislocating his jaw and shattering several of his teeth.
Scarlet winced. “Ouch. That’s gotta be like getting hit in the face by a massive French legionnaire — oh, wait…”
The man was on all fours now, spitting teeth and foamy blood from his mouth. He began to stagger to his feet but Scarlet leaped up and kicked him in the face. She pulled her leg back just as the now-unconscious man’s body slumped into the side of the hedge. He slid down to the dirt, the thorns scratching deep lines into his back as he went.
She got herself back together and saw Hawke and Lea crossing the center of the maze, they were followed moments later by Ryan, Devlin and Kim. Across the other side of the maze’s heart, Mack had wrenched a club from the statue of Heracles and was screaming at one of the men from the Viking. “You asked for it, ya tadger, so you’re gonnae get it!” He swung the club and knocked the man out with one blow, then strolled over to the others with his hands in his pockets.
“Aww, the family’s altogether again,” Scarlet said. “The Viking crew?”
Hawke smiled. “You and Mack just knocked the last ones out.”
“Good job,” Kim said.
“Always a pleasure,” Scarlet said, kicking one of the unconscious men in the balls.
Devlin winced. “He’s gonna love waking up to that.”
Hawke and the other men shared a look of understanding, then Scarlet turned to the other unconscious man and gave him the same treatment. “There,” she said, dusting her hands off. “They can share the pain, and you know what they say: a problem shared is a problem halved.”
“You are literally unbelievable,” Kim said.
“Oh, she’s real all right,” Ryan muttered. “Just ask that bloke there when he wakes up to find a couple of watermelons in his pants.”
“Just not funny,” Kim said. “It’s a British thing, right?”
They climbed into the Viking SSV, and with Hawke at the wheel they raced up the smooth slope leading away from England’s largest maze. Up ahead was Horak’s enormous ivy-clad Georgian mansion.
And Dirk Kruger.
“So how are we going to play this?” said Lea.
“We initiate Secret Plan A,” Hawke said.
“You mean burst in and just start shooting and punching with minimum finesse and zero tactics?” Scarlet said.
Devlin chuckled and Ryan rolled his eyes.
Hawke sighed. “That was the secret plan. How did you know about it?”
She shrugged. “Just a lucky guess.”
Up close, the property was even more impressive than it had looked from the western edge of the estate. There was a main house with two large wings and jumbled around them were several outbuildings, including what they now saw was definitely a stableblock and also what looked like some kind of studio. The honey-colored Cotswold stone reflected the heat of the summer’s day and the sun flashed on the lead-lined windows.
Hawke pulled the Viking up on the gravel drive and killed the engine. “So this is how the other half live!”
“Sadly yes,” Scarlet said. “This house has only got three storeys. Spence’s has five.”
Hawke gave her a look but made no reply. After everything she had gone through as a girl, it was good she could joke about her family. Holding onto one of the roll bars he pulled himself out of the Viking and his boots crunched on the gravel. The others joined him and they stared up at the house.
“Doesn’t look like the fracas back at the maze caused too much consternation,” Scarlet said.
Devlin looked at her. “Fracas?”
“The bunfight back there.”
“Don’t count on it,” Hawke said. He stepped in the flower bed running around the base of the main house and cupped his hands against a window. “If they’re around the back they wouldn’t have heard a little upset like that.”
“A little upset!” Kim said. “You guys really are crazy.”
Cupping their hands against the lead-lined windows they saw the typical English country house with oak panelled doors and a wall of library books.
“I keep expecting Lara Croft to swing into the picture on one of those chandeliers,” Ryan said, staring up at the ceiling.
“Expecting, or fantasizing?” Scarlet purred, giving him a seedy wink.
“Give it a rest, Cairo,” he said. “But yeah, fantasizing.”
Suddenly they all saw a blue flash emanating from one of the downstairs windows in the west wing.
“Holy shit — the sword!” Kim said.
“All right,” Hawke said. “Time for us to crash this party. Kruger and Zito and the rest of their baboons are in this house, and so is Horak. It’s possible they’re coercing him, or he may be complicit. We also know they’re planning on escaping using the chopper, so we’re going to need to split up. One team goes into the house, gets Kruger and the sword, and the other heads over to the hangar compound and makes damned sure none of the helos are taking off today.”