Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,93

him,' he said.

Porter was already doing so, but turned to him, his mobile phone in his hands.

‘I can't get through. There’s no signal his end,' he shouted.

'So let's go,' Fox said. 'We need to take a shortcut or beat them there.'

'We don't have time. They’re already way ahead of us,' Porter said.

‘What about these two?’ Nikki said, pointing at the distraught woman and boy.

Porter thought for a second.

‘Right, everyone in the car. It’s going to be a squeeze.’

Chalky and Fox guided the woman and boy to the car while Porter tried calling Cobb again.

'I still can't get through,’ he said, climbing into the driver’s seat and firing the engine.

'So what can we do?' Nikki asked, sitting on Chalky’s lap in the back seat and pulling the door shut. 'We have to do something. They'll kill him and his whole family.'

'Wait,' Archer said, from the front passenger seat.

The group looked at him.

'Go back to the station.’

'What?' Porter said, firing the engine. 'Why? We need to get over there, Arch.’

‘I know how we can get there ahead of them.’

*

Twenty minutes later, the streets of London morphing into countryside and fields shrouded by nightfall, the Black Panthers were making good time as they headed for Cobb's safe-house. They couldn’t miss it. Bug had found it on the map, isolated, a significant estate, no neighbours nearby or anyone to hear Cobb scream. The men were in two cars, all of them now dressed in black combat fatigues, silenced black sub-machine guns in their hands, magazines in the chambers, their faces grim. In the front passenger seat of the front car, Wulf shot his cuff, then lifted his mobile phone from his pocket and redialled Worm's number, keeping his sub-machine gun in his hand.

It rang through.

No response.

'Damn,' he said, in Albanian.

'What is it, sir?' Spider asked, behind the wheel.

'Worm isn't picking up the phone.'

'Maybe it's the signal. Pity. He's going to miss out.'

Wulf nodded.

'Drive faster.'

Spider put his foot down and the car roared on through the winding country lanes, heading closer and closer to Cobb and his family twelve miles away.

Who had no idea they were coming.

TWENTY EIGHT

An hour’s drive south of London, Hawkings Hall had been in Eleanor Cobb's family for almost seven hundred years. The property was stunning, surrounded by 200 acres of woodland and forestry, the main Hall itself built just at the end of the 14th Century. The building had been developed and added to over the years, and it had been passed down through the family from generation to generation. The Hall had twelve bedrooms, six bathrooms and three separate floors, but the pride of the house was a magnificent drawing room. With its large fireplace, antique furniture and beautiful mahogany walls hung with both family portraits and expensive paintings, the room was the centrepiece of the house, the jewel in the crown. The Hall had been featured in many magazines and newspapers over the years as one of the most famous of its type in the country, and given that Eleanor Cobb was an only child with no living male relatives, the entire property would one day be inherited by her and then on her death, passed on to her eldest son.

Upstairs, her husband had just finished putting his two boys to bed in two of the bedrooms. The boys were twelve and nine, and loved the times they were able to stay with their Grandparents at this house. On the way here their father had told them nothing of the seriousness of the situation, merely saying he had been granted an extra few days holiday and that he'd decided they should all go to stay at Granny and Grandpa's house whilst they were abroad.

But downstairs, out of sight of the two boys, Cobb's smile had faded.

He had methodically checked every possible entrance to the house to make sure they were all secure, ensuring every door and window was locked, a Glock 17 pistol from the ARU gun-cage gripped in his right hand. His wife had wanted to draw the curtains on all the windows but Cobb had refused. Not yet. If anyone was coming, he wanted to see who they were well in advance, friend or foe. It was a full moon tonight and the moon was low in the sky, which, despite some occasional cloud cover, was already lighting up the gardens and outer park of the estate like a giant silver floodlight. Given the Hall's position as the nucleus of the estate, Cobb wanted a head's