Path of the Tiger, стр. 443

make the decision; his strength was failing rapidly as blood leaked from his grievous wounds, and it was becoming ever more difficult to maintain his jiujitsu hold. With a grunt of effort, he released Njinga from the chokehold and lunged for the knife, gripping it and then swivelling around to aim a quick stab at the base of Njinga’s skull, where the first vertebra was located. Njinga, however, knew that the assassin had to be going for the knife when he relinquished his jiujitsu grip, for she had seen the weapon too, so at that instant she lurched backwards and up, rolling onto her back and causing the stab to miss its intended target. The knife glanced instead off the top of her skull, opening up a long cut in the process that quickly started staining her neon afro with dark blood.

Undaunted, CC-105 stabbed again, now going for Njinga’s throat, and she was only just able to raise her left hand to block the thrust, which stabbed through the palm of her glove and impaled her hand. The blade would have continued through her hand and transfixed her throat had it not been for the bulletproof armour on the top of the glove, which stopped the deadly trajectory of the knife. Njinga screamed with pain, but even as agony blitzed through her hand and arm she snatched at and grabbed CC-105’s wrist, preventing him from pulling the bowie knife out of her hand. CC-105 reacted with another jiujitsu grip, this one aimed at levering Njinga’s hand off of his wrist. Another wave of pain seared a crippling boost of debilitating agony through her arm, but adrenalin and a desperate urge to survive kept her fingers locked around her adversary’s wrist. At that moment, at the height of their mortal struggle, a realisation hit Njinga: she did actually have one more weapon on her that she could use. She jerked her left hand back, freeing it from the impalement of the steel, and then reached down with desperately fumbling fingers towards her hip.

However, now that she had removed her left hand from the equation, only her right hand, upon which immense pressure was being applied, was keeping the assassin from plunging the knife into her throat, and the blade was inching nearer and nearer towards this vulnerable area. As it did, the assassin’s bulging eyes began to shine with an ever-maddening fervour.

The point of the knife crept closer, ever closer, until the metal was pressing against Njinga’s skin, exerting an increasingly deadly pressure on the hollow at the base of her throat. This urgency heightened her panic, and she began to hyperventilate as her fingers scrambled below, around her hip, seemingly unable to locate the object they so desperately sought.

The assassin, growling and spitting blood all over her face, pushed harder, expending the final reserves of his strength in this final task of his, and his blade broke the skin of her throat as it pressed relentlessly downward. The sharp point slid into Njinga’s throat, the steel penetrating her flesh millimetre by agonising millimetre; soon it would cut into her windpipe, and once that had been opened the game would be over. The immediacy of death spurred one last boost of strength through her exhausted muscles, though. Screaming hoarsely, she stretched her arm and hand as far as it would go, and finally her fingers tightened around the object they had so desperately been seeking: a small gas-powered cigarette lighter. With one deft flick of her fingers the gas hissed and then roared flatly as the spark ignited it. Njinga wasted no time; she immediately thrust the blue flame into CC-105’s face. The gas fire was small but ferociously hot, and despite the assassin’s rigorous conditioning against pain, he could not resist this level of intensity; with a howl CC-105 jerked his head away from the lighter, and in that brief window of opportunity Njinga was able to snatch the bowie knife out of CC-105’s hand, spin it around, and then plunge it into the soft flesh under his chin. She kept shoving, screaming wordlessly like a madwoman caught in the throes of a psychotic episode, until the steel sank into the depths of the man’s skull. Finally, it penetrated his brain, and, panting with exhaustion, Njinga watched her adversary’s eyes roll back in their sockets. She did not, however, relinquish her pressure on the knife even as her enemy’s body became limp on top of her.

***

Sharaf checked the map as he stood pressed up against the wall. He knew something was wrong; the Huntsmen Board Members had neither come his way nor, presumably, William’s, since he had heard no firing from there, but there was no way he was going to allow them to escape. Whatever else happened, he was determined to make sure of one thing: tonight, he would pump some Huntsmen bodies full of jagged lead. The battle-wrath was boiling inside him, caustic and hot, despite not yet having fired off a single round.

That, however, was about to change. His AK-47 held thirty bullets, thirty little lead missiles, each longing for the warm body of an enemy into which it could burrow at hyperspeed, bouncing about in a gleefully destructive pinball hammering of broken bones and torn up vital organs.

‘You fucks aren’t escaping this place alive,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Not on my watch, not on my fucking watch.’

He shouldered the rifle as he prepared to step around the corner, and then breathed in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs. This was it – he was mere few feet away from the room in which his enemies had held their banquet. The ebb and flow of the emergency lights revealed no sign of life, and the silence here was as thick and present as liquid cement, dripping and oozing in a slow trickle. Something was wrong, very wrong, but Sharaf wasn’t going to just wait around to see what it was – he was going