We had to confront the Sandman and however many men he had left – it could be one, ten, or a hundred – and he had three hostages to use against us.
This was far from over.
Finding the house was easier than I expected – we could see it only moments after leaving the bunker behind. It was a manmade structure poking up through the trees less than a mile away. It took us under eight minutes to get there and would have been less if Basic could run faster.
I wasn’t going to complain, I had no right to say anything negative to a man who volunteered to put his life on the line.
We all had two radios now. Our own ones, and another one each taken from the monks in the bunker. It enabled us to listen in to their radio net though we dared not employ them yet. Just as we arrived at the front of the little house, the front door opened.
I watched them leaving the building, filing out in a long line. There were maybe a dozen idiots in their black monk’s robes, plus the man I met as Harry Hengist. He had a woman on his arm, and the sight of her face sent a shocking chill through me because I recognised her even with the terrible scars.
She’d aged since someone took the picture I’d seen in Harry’s bedroom, but then several decades had passed. However, there was no mistaking that I was looking at Valerie Mitchell, the Sandman’s wife. I was rooted to the spot for a beat while my brain worked the new information.
She wasn’t shackled in any way, and she did not look scared or upset unlike the three captives being hauled along by the Sandman’s acolytes.
Before I could consider it any further, the Sandman lifted his radio and spoke.
‘Bunker team, where are you? We are starting the ceremony with or without you.’
I pressed the button and felt a smile crease my mouth for the first time in days. ‘Oh, don’t do that.’
Big Ben took that as his cue and started running.
A supressed pfft, pfft, pfft noise was just about audible as Amanda, hidden from sight somewhere to my right began firing nails at the crowd. Gathered together as they were, they made an easy target and she scored multiple hits in the first seconds.
I was running too, closing the distance because this was a close quarter fight. The way to stop them using Jane, Jan, and Karen as hostages was to get them back before anyone knew what was happening.
Our strategy was to get the captives back. Nothing else mattered. That said, if I got a chance to kill the Sandman, I was probably going to do it and I doubted Big Ben was going to shake any hands.
The four of us had spread out so we came at them from multiple directions, all screaming like berserkers as we crossed the open ground. We were exposed once we left the shadow of the trees, but our attack came so fast and was so unexpected that we caught them completely unprepared.
I heard a roar on my left as Basic met the first of the Sandman’s men and saw the edge of a sledgehammer catch the light as it scythed over his head.
Half a second later it hit someone in the chest. That person went down like a cannonball had hit them and they did not get up.
Each of us had a specific target – one of the captives. Basic was getting Karen, Big Ben’s task was to free Jan. I was going for Jane, and each of us was going to do as much damage as possible so we stood some chance of escape.
Amanda was going to do what she could with the nail guns – their effective range was only about ten metres, and then she was going to call the police. We needed them here to make the arrests and take the Sandman and his men away. Once the captives were safely ours, there was no reason not to involve Quinn.
Just about to swing the pickaxe handle I’d chosen as my weapon for this fight, I was thrown completely by lights filling the air and a voice barking commands over a loudspeaker.
‘You are all under arrest! Lay down your weapons now, or I will give the order to open fire!’
I didn’t need Amanda to call the police. They were already here!
The voice being amplified by the loudspeaker needed no introduction; I knew Ian Quinn’s voice when I heard it. It came from my right, Quinn and his men emerging from the trees on a different flank to ours. They were moving fast, covering ground in a burst of movement the same way we were. How had they got here so fast? How had they got here at all?
Distracted by this unexpected ambush to my ambush, I missed my target – a man in a monk’s robe who was coming to intercept me – and tripped over a root or something poking from the dirt.
Jane was six feet away from me as I sprawled on the ground, but she was at the back of the line of people and nearest the house.
When we concocted our hasty ambush plan, we had no idea who might emerge in what order or even when they would leave the house. It was just bad luck that I got to aim my efforts at the one who was farthest from us.
The men holding Jane ducked back into the house, dragging her with them and from my vantage point low on the ground, I had to watch the Sandman and his wife escape inside too. At least one other acolyte got inside and then the door slammed
