And with those words, Jack sprang out from behind the little stone altar and raced out of the chapel, out into the open, onto the slender ascending bridge, and into Rastor’s deadly field of fire.

Head bent, arms pumping, legs driving, Jack raced up the bridge.

Crouched in his sniper’s nest inside the temple, Rastor frowned.

West again.

Determined as ever. But this? This was madness.

Rastor shrugged.

And opened fire.

As he ran up the bridge, Jack found himself thinking of a bunch of things: Lily, Zoe, and, oddly, his old friend and mentor, Wizard, Professor Max T. Epper.

It had been Wizard who had invented the Warbler and the little device had saved Jack earlier inside this very Labyrinth and also, eight years ago, in the Israeli desert after Jack had found the tomb of Jesus Christ in an abandoned Roman mine.

But on both of those occasions, the Warbler had protected Jack from pistol shots.

Jack didn’t know if it would work against an assault rifle firing heavy-bore high-velocity rounds.

Help me now, Wizard. One last time, he thought.

And so Jack ran upward.

While Rastor fired downward . . .

. . . and the withering burst of tracer fire rained down on Jack as a swarm of sizzling-hot streaks . . .

. . . only to bend around him as they reached him!

It was a fucking astonishing sight: the figure of Jack racing up the stone bridge, into the rain of visible gunfire, only for the bullets to part in a V-shape—pushed away by the invisible electromagnetic field created by the Warbler—and whiz by Jack on both sides.

‘Thanks Wizard,’ Jack whispered as the white-hot streaks slashed past him and he bounded upward.

Rastor roared in pure rage as he saw his bullets diverge around Jack and then his clip ran dry and suddenly Jack was there, with him, inside the temple on the gigantic pylon.

Rastor threw his gun to the ground.

And rose to his full height. He still wore his black tactical vest over his grey uniform and he towered a full foot taller than Jack.

‘And so it comes to this,’ Rastor said. ‘The two of us. No weapons. No allies. Just one final hand-to-hand fight.’

‘I guess it does.’

‘You know you can’t beat me,’ Rastor said. ‘You can’t win this.’

‘I know,’ Jack said. ‘But I’ve been in fights like this going all the way back to my schooldays. So I’m gonna do it anyway.’

And with those words, they fought.

With a roar, Rastor came at Jack with a flurry of martial arts moves.

For a big man, he moved with incredible speed and precision and it was all Jack could do to avoid his blows.

Jack ducked and bobbed as Rastor’s fists and boots whistled by his ears or missed his face by millimetres.

And suddenly, deep in his heart, Jack knew.

He couldn’t beat this man.