The road seemed to be leading back towards the edge of the city. Walls and railings and gateways flashed by, too fast to see anything except the speeding tunnel ahead, Ben wrestling the wheel to keep it between the hedges as he ripped a racing line through one twisting bend after another. The Volvo kept falling back, shrinking away in the rear-view mirror. Ben felt a smile spread over his face. Bye-bye, you bastards. They wouldn’t catch him now.
That was when a new warning light in the instrument cluster began flashing urgently at him to catch his attention, and he tore his eyes away momentarily from the road to glance at it. What he saw there clenched at his guts like an icy fist.
A bullet must have clipped the Audi’s fuel line or holed the tank. The gauge was almost at zero. The car was running on fumes and very soon it was going to run out altogether.
Chapter 37
Ben had barely processed the realisation in his mind when the engine coughed and seemed to falter for a moment before it caught again. That was the kind of warning he couldn’t ignore. Not good, he thought. He slackened his pressure on the gas, afraid to use up what little was left too soon.
By now, the chase had carried them into some kind of sprawling industrial zone on the outer reaches of Ankara. Snowy-roofed factories and warehouses, huts and store buildings and chain-link fences rimed with white zipped by, all in darkness like a ghost town. Ben had no idea how long his remaining fuel would last, but before too long at all he was going to have to abandon this car and either find another or look for a place to hide.
Anna squirmed out of the footwell and into the passenger seat, looking tousled and frightened as the questions poured out of her. ‘What’s happening? Where are we? Are we getting away?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ he said. Glanced in the mirror and saw the Volvo’s lights growing larger again as its driver came on like a demon, rapidly closing the gap.
Definitely not good.
‘Buckle up,’ he told her. ‘This isn’t over yet.’
The network of roads and alleyways branching off in all directions between industrial buildings large and small was like a maze. Ben turned left, right, right, left, picking junctions at random and throwing the car into one after another, not slowing down, kicking up sprays of ice and powder snow as the Audi fishtailed crazily through the bends. Strapped into her seat, too terrified to look, Anna was clutching the door handle and had her eyes clamped shut. Behind them the Volvo skidded, spun on the ice, lost ground, came after them again. The Audi’s engine gave another faltering cough. Air in the fuel line. Ben was pretty sure all he had left was whatever remained in his carbs. Any moment now, the engine was going to die. That was if the fuel pump didn’t overheat and seize up first from lack of lubrication.
A long straight rushed towards them, with no side roads to duck into, nowhere to hide. The Volvo was coming up fast. Its rear tyre was completely shredded and flapping off its wheel, but the driver was thrashing it on like the coachman from hell. His two guys were hanging out of the side windows, their jackets and masks covered in snow. More shots snapped off. Ben’s remaining door mirror blew apart. He didn’t need it. Didn’t need reminding of what was behind him.
Or, of the fact that they were now heading right into a dead end. The way ahead was barred by a massive chain-link fence that was heavily padlocked. Anna opened her eyes at the wrong moment and let out a cry as she saw the gates coming and realised he was going to crash right through them.
They hit the gates with a shattering clang of metal on metal and went tearing on through, bits of ripped wire and metal fencepost trailing along behind them as they entered a separate section of the industrial park. To their left as they raced up a narrow alley were unbroken, uneven rows of what looked like disused railway sidings and maintenance sheds, with piles of rusty equipment and lengths of dismantled aluminium barrier and sleepers and other assorted junk. To their right was a long, tall ribbon of wire fence that ran on beyond the reach of the car’s headlights.
The Audi began to splutter and shake. The Volvo was gaining fast. Bullets punched into their tail. Ben felt the back tyres go and the rear of the car begin to sway like a pendulum. Heard Anna yelling his name, but barely registered it. They were going to die unless he did something right now, but he didn’t know what.
Not yet.
In such extreme situations, the average human brain easily becomes so flooded with acute stress and terror that it can cease to function properly. Rational faculties and decision-making ability are overwhelmed by panic as the heart rate shoots into the red, hyperventilation causes dizziness and weakness, neurochemical connections fire off too fast for thoughts to be processed and a massive overload of sensory impressions quickly leads to total mental shutdown and physical paralysis.
But Ben Hope’s was not the average human brain. The way his mind worked, the closer he came to impending violent death, the more extreme the immediate threat, the more relaxed he became. In this moment, speeding into darkness at over a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour with automatic gunfire hacking and chopping the car to pieces around him and the engine screaming its last before it ran out of gas and Anna shrieking in his ear, he felt as calm as if he was lounging in a hammock on a lazy summer afternoon, lulled half-asleep by the singing of the birds in the trees above, a cool drink in his hand. Everything slowed down. Seconds became minutes. He had all the time in the world to figure out a plan.
And then it came to him.
Crazy. Utterly insane. But he’d had crazier ideas in his life, and he was still here.
To his right, the other side of the mesh fence and running parallel with it, the rough ground sloped upwards into an embankment that a snatched glance out of his shattered window told him was a section of the Ankara high-speed railway line that skirted the city. That explained two things: first, the presence of the rail maintenance sheds and train-related junk on the left. Second, it explained the fact that the sudden dazzling brightness of the light filling the back of the Audi couldn’t only be coming from the headlamps of the pursuing Volvo.
A train was approaching. Moving fast. Roaring up on their right rear quarter, set to overtake and come ripping past at any moment, just a stone’s throw beyond the fence.
And in his slowed-down ultra-calm near-death state of mind, Ben had also noticed what lay ahead. A dumper truck had tipped a massive load of gravel on the inside of the fence; a whole hill of the stuff, spilled against the wire and bulging it outwards. Presumably some crew of workers, now most likely fast asleep in their beds, were meant to come and spread it or make whatever use of it was intended, but for the moment it had just been left there. As had the lengths of aluminium railway barrier that had been carelessly dumped across the mound at an angle, ramped diagonally upwards towards the fence. It had been there long enough for the snow to drift thickly up against its base and freeze hard, glittering like a small sugar mountain in the headlights of the speeding cars and the glare of the approaching train.
Ben saw his chance. Thought, fuck it, and stamped his foot on the gas and veered the car a few degrees to the right to steer straight for the base of the ramp. Whatever last few dribbles of fuel remained in his carburettor float bowls propelled the Audi towards it like a rocket.
And whatever words were about to burst from Anna’s screaming mouth, it all happened too fast for them to come out. The Audi smashed up the ramp in a storm of exploding ice and snow, so hard that it felt as if its wheels had been ripped off. The brutal wrench of the impact almost tore the steering out of Ben’s clenched fists. He felt his body pressed back into the seat and his stomach sink as the car left the ground and its nose tilted towards the sky and it hurtled upward at a forty-five-degree angle. The revs soared up an octave, one final tortured howl before the last drop of fuel finally burned away.
The car launched into space. Its momentum carried it straight into the mesh fence and beyond as it ripped a hole right through the wire and sailed high over the snowy embankment and over the tracks
in an arcing parabola. An unguided missile, carrying Ben and Anna with it.
Straight into the path of the oncoming train.
Chapter 38
The giant monster was almost on them. An unstoppable force moving so fast that its driver could have done nothing to scrub off the slightest bit of speed as the car came bursting out of nowhere across his path, sailing high over the tracks. The train’s blinding white glare filled the inside of the airborne Audi like the flash of a nuclear explosion. The thunderous roar was the loudest sound Ben had ever heard. Louder than an artillery battle at close range. It completely drowned Anna’s scream, filled every space and vibrated every cell inside his body.
And then they were dead. Or they should have been, the car squashed flat on impact and then smashed down onto the tracks and pulverised by the train’s wheels, their bodies reduced to mincemeat in a fraction of a second.
But the impact never came. The car passed in front of the train’s nose by a matter of inches and began to drop towards the ground. Its front wheels hit first, slamming into the downwards slope of the embankment on the far side of the tracks. Ben and Anna were hurled against their seat belts with the force of the landing. Behind them the train hammered past, the moving pocket of air at its nose slapping them like a shockwave as it came hurtling by. The car bounced and seemed about to flip and cartwheel; but then all four wheels were back on solid ground and they were moving again, rolling away from the roaring clatter that made the air tremble and blasted a blizzard of swirling snowflakes in its slipstream. The train kept coming and coming. The ground trembled as if an earthquake had struck.
‘Sei completamente pazzo!’ Anna yelled in Ben’s ear over the deafening noise.
Ben heard that one. He couldn’t agree more: he probably was completely mad, but at least they were still alive, just about. As Anna kept up a rapid-fire torrent of abuse about how utterly insane he was and how he’d almost killed them both, he grabbed the steering wheel and yanked the Audi’s gearstick into neutral. The engine had given all it had to give. The dead car began to roll faster down the slope of the embankment. The train was still clattering past, seemingly infinite in length – but all too soon it would be gone into the night and their pursuers stranded on the other side of the tracks would be able to find a way to come after them. Ben knew he had limited time to make his escape.
The rolling car picked up speed down the slope. It was steeper and longer than Ben had anticipated, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Bad, because the snow had drifted up thick against the side of the embankment making the terrain so treacherous that one touch on the brakes would send them into a sideways slide that would turn into a roll, and then a lethal tumble all the way down to the bottom of the hill.
Worse, the landing had destroyed the car’s headlights. They were free-falling blind, crashing through mounds of snow that splashed up all over the windscreen and obliterated what little forward vision they had. Moments earlier the Audi had been an unguided airborne missile – now it was an uncontrollable bobsleigh plummeting through the darkness, ripping through unseen shrubs and bushes as it went. Ben gritted his teeth and tried to steady the slithering, gyrating, bucking car, but it was out of his hands. If a tree or a rock were in their path, they wouldn’t even see the obstacle coming before the car came to a sudden, crunching halt, and maybe their lives with it.
When the crash came, it wasn’t a solid tree trunk or a boulder they hit, but an abandoned wooden storage hut at the bottom of the hill. It was a hidden rut beneath the snow that saved them from a head-on collision, bouncing them sideways at the last instant so that the car’s flank took the worst of the impact. Ben was flung against the driver’s door, and Anna against him. Ripped bits of planking flew all around as the car ploughed through the flimsy wall of the hut and spun through several full turns, demolishing the building totally before it finally came to rest on the snowy hillside.
Then there was eerie stillness, just the ticking of hot metal and the rasp of their breathing as they sat still for a moment in the darkness of the wrecked car, gathering their wits and slowly realising that they were still alive.
‘You okay?’ Ben said at last.
‘I think so,’ Anna replied shakily, not sounding too sure.
The driver’s door was too badly twisted to open, so the two of them had to scramble out of the passenger side. The snow was almost up to their knees, and fresh billows were still tumbling from the sky. The night air felt deeply refrigerated. Ben could already feel his cheeks beginning to tingle before they started going numb. He and Anna were still warm from adrenalin, but the cold would start getting to them quickly, especially her. He peeled off his leather jacket and, despite her protests, made her put it on and zip it up to her neck. He was worried about her feet, pressed deep into the snow. His own would stay warm and dry for hours in his heavy waterproof boots, even if the rest of him froze. Hers were almost totally unprotected in those flimsy little shoes.
Ben retrieved his bag from the back seat and shone the flashlight up and down the length of the car. Its rear bodywork panels were bullet-shredded and perforated beyond recognition. The front suspension had collapsed. A trickle of smoke was rising from its rumpled bonnet. Or maybe steam. Ben was far from being an expert mechanic, but he knew enough to recognise a vehicle that wouldn’t be going anywhere from here. He pointed the light beam up the hill, could see no lights, nobody coming after them. Not yet, but they soon would be.
He made Anna lean against the side of the car and shone his torch over her to check for anything broken. He could find no damage. Lucky.
‘Still think this Babylon idol of yours is worth going after?’ he asked her.
She glared at him, her temper flaring up. ‘Do you think I would be so weak that I would give up, just because I’m a woman?’
‘Not in the least. I’ve known some pretty crazy women.’ He thought of Brooke, fighting her way out of the armed South American compound in which she’d been held captive and hiking alone through miles of Amazonian jungle. Roberta Ryder, picking up his Browning pistol in the middle of a firefight with multiple attackers after he’d been shot, and getting them both to safety. That made him think of Father Pascal, who’d looked after him during his recovery. That in turn made his thoughts cycle back to Jeff, picturing him lying there with the tubes and the needles, maybe never to regain consciousness. He sighed.
‘I won’t give up,’ Anna snapped, shooting daggers with her eyes. ‘I’m perfectly capable of seeing this through to the end. Besides, nobody could possibly be half as crazy as you, Ben Hope. What kind of deficiente would have done what you did back there?’
First he was called a lunatic, now he was a moron too. But he wasn’t in a mood to get offended. ‘Now you know why the car hire companies won’t touch me with a bargepole any more.’
‘It’s not funny,’ she fumed at him, in no way mollified. ‘And if you would mind not pushing and pulling me around and speaking to me as though I were one of your soldiers, that would also be very much appreciated.’
He spread his hands. ‘My apologies,’ he said graciously. ‘Now if you don’t mind, at the risk of telling you what to do, it’s my opinion that we should be getting out of here before our friends come looking for us. Can you manage to walk?’
‘I can manage fine.’
Ben wasn’t so sure that she could, but he said nothing.
Chapter 39
They abandoned the car and started making their way down the hillside, picking out a wandering path between the snow-laden conifers and thorny bushes that dotted the steep incline. If the hut hadn’t arrested their descent when it had, they might have come down the hill much more quickly, with a one hundred per cent chance of getting killed in the process.
Ben had no idea where they were going, just that they needed to keep moving in the hope of finding either some kind of shelter, or some kind of vehicle. But keeping moving in near-blizzard conditions wasn’t an easy thing to do. Without his jacket, he
could feel the killer cold gradually seeping into his body.
The ground levelled out into a wooded valley where the snow wasn’t quite as deep. Every so often a fallen tree blocked their way, making them skirt around or scramble over it. An hour passed. The going was slow and they hadn’t come far in real terms, but as the wilderness closed in around them Ankara could have been a thousand miles away. On the far side of the wooded valley the terrain became rougher and rockier, full of hidden boulders lurking beneath the snow that could easily trip an unwary foot. Ben walked behind Anna so that he could keep an eye on her. His relief at giving their pursuers the slip was overshadowed by his concern for how she was doing. Her temper had long ago subsided and she was very quiet as she struggled gamely on, kilometre after painful kilometre, stumbling more often and slowing her pace until she eventually halted and slumped on a big rock that jutted out of the snow.
‘My feet. I can’t feel them any more.’
Ben knelt in the snow in front of her, clamped his flashlight in his teeth to see by, unshouldered his bag and undid the straps. From inside he took out both pairs of spare thick socks. ‘Put your feet here,’ he said, pointing at his thighs, and she did. He pulled off each of her shoes in turn and tossed them away. They disappeared in the snow.
‘Those are Prada.’
‘I’m sure some fashionable Turkish lady will find them in the springtime and cherish them forever. You don’t need them any more.’ He rolled up the hems of her flimsy trousers, then peeled off her thin socks and threw them away too. They were soaking wet. Her toenails were carmine red, while the skin of her feet, ankles and calves was almost blue with cold.
The Babylon Idol Page 21
