by James Becker
Suddenly, he saw the unmistakable figure of a gunman appear near the top of the dunes behind them.
‘Hang on. Put the belts on.’
Bronson swerved to the right, straightened up briefly, then swung the steering wheel left, then right again, all the time doing his best to keep the big diesel engine running at high revolutions and the vehicle travelling as fast as possible.
He was acutely aware that the Toyota offered a much bigger target to the gunmen than the three of them had when they’d run from the camp, and he also knew that the metal bodywork of the Land Cruiser would offer about as much protection to a bullet from an assault rifle as a sheet of cardboard.
It wasn’t like in the movies. In real life, bullets don’t bounce off cars. They go straight through them.
But what he was really trying to do, apart from giving the gunmen a difficult, fast-moving and manoeuvring target, was to generate a big enough cloud of dust and sand to make the 4x4 virtually invisible. And judging by what he could see in the mirrors, he had certainly achieved that. The gunman he had seen on the dune had now completely vanished behind the yellowish-brown haze created by the speeding vehicle.
But even over the roaring sound of the big diesel engine, the repetitive crack of an assault rifle was still audible, some distance behind them. Bronson continued manoeuvring the heavy off-road vehicle as violently as he could, while still covering the ground as quickly as possible.
He glanced in the interior mirror at Stephen who was as white as a sheet. Angela, in contrast, looked remarkably calm, one hand holding the grab handle above the door, and the other braced against the dashboard as she stared out through the windscreen at the seemingly endless and largely uniform range of dunes that stretched out ahead of them.
‘I don’t know how to work the satnav, the GPS, I mean,’ Bronson said to her, changing up a gear, ‘so can you input the next waypoint or whatever it is you would normally do to get back to Kuwait City?’
Angela nodded, used her right arm to brace herself against the dashboard of the car while she unclipped the unit from its windscreen mount with her other hand. She began altering the programming, a task with which she was obviously quite familiar. It took her less than a minute to change the route and destination, then she nodded and reattached the unit to the mount, and checked that the power cable was still connected.
‘That’s done,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is follow the arrow on the screen. That’ll take us back to the border crossing point into Kuwait. Assuming these people don’t catch and murder us first, of course.’
‘But I can’t even see them,’ Stephen said from the back seat. ‘They’ll never catch us now.’
‘Don’t be too sure about that,’ Bronson replied. ‘Those two men didn’t walk to the camp. They probably arrived in that vehicle we saw driving past on the road out to the west, and my guess is that by now they’ll have gone back to it and they’re already chasing us. I can’t tell, because of all the dust we’re kicking up at the moment, and I’m certainly not slowing down just to confirm that particular piece of bad news.’
14
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
In fact, although Khaled had told the driver of the 4x4 to head straight to the encampment, Farooq and Mahmoud had still not climbed into the vehicle.
Mahmoud was following his latest orders, lying at the top of the sand dune aiming his Kalashnikov at the rapidly diminishing cloud of dust being thrown up by the speeding Toyota, and rhythmically firing rounds straight at it, guessing where the invisible target was most likely to be. There was always the chance that he might get lucky, but both he and Khaled knew that the vehicle was now so far away that there was almost no possibility of hitting it. And even if he did manage to do that, there was no guarantee the relatively small bullet from the assault rifle would do enough damage to actually stop the vehicle.
‘I don’t think that sat phone is here,’ Farooq said, stepping out of a tent near the edge of the camp. Between them, he, Khaled and the driver had checked every single tent. ‘We’re wasting our time. We need to move out right now if we’re going to catch them.’
The second lorry, Farooq knew, was already heading east on what they hoped would be an intercept course to catch the fleeing Toyota, but the chances of the truck being able to match – or even get close to – the speed of the Land Cruiser were extremely slim. Realistically, their best hope – in fact their only hope – was to contact the men in the lorry they’d sent off to wait near the track the archaeologists used in their journeys between the encampment and Kuwait City.
And without a satellite phone, that wasn’t going to be easy.
Farooq jogged back towards the jeep, Khaled following close behind him. The camp looked almost exactly the same as it had when they’d left it a few hours earlier, apart from the sheets that had been placed over the bodies and weighed down with rocks. Neither man gave the sheeted corpses much more than a glance. Their concern was only with the living, with the female archaeologist whose knowledge of the discovery had to die with her – and as quickly as possible – and the two unidentified men who were with her and who would therefore suffer precisely the same fate.
Moments later, all four men climbed back into the jeep, the driver gunned the engine and with a sudden spray of dust and sand from all four wheels the vehicle accelerated away, across the open ground beside the encampment and then turned down the slope that led away from the tents. The driver was well used to driving in the potentially treacherous desert conditions – he’d been doing it since his early teens – and he had no doubt that he could catch the fleeing Toyota.
‘Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and we’ll be right behind them,’ he said confidently.
Khaled nodded, but then shook his head.
‘That might be too late because by then they’ll be at the border,’ he said. ‘But if we can get within walkie-talkie range of the other lorry, then stopping them will be easy. There’s nowhere they can run that the Browning won’t be able to reach.’
15
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
Bronson was trying to keep track of everything at once – the route ahead, the endless parade of dunes, the display on the GPS unit and the rear-view mirrors, though these were of little use right then because of the cloud of sand being thrown up behind the vehicle.
A thought occurred to him and he lifted his foot from the accelerator pedal.
‘What?’ Angela asked. ‘Please don’t tell me there’s something wrong with the car.’
‘Of course not. Toyotas don’t break, not even out here.’
He slowed still further and as the dust cloud to the rear of the vehicle diminished noticeably he checked all three mirrors carefully. As far as he could see there was nothing in view behind, which was not too surprising given the speed at which they’d been travelling, but a vehicle following them was not what he was worrying about.
‘So why have you slowed down?’
‘Because we might be playing straight into their hands. I was just trying to make sense of what must have happened back at the camp this morning. We saw two men armed with assault rifles, but there must have been at least one other person in that jeep because it kept on driving past us on the track. These men aren’t stupid.’
Bronson glanced at Angela beside him, and at Stephen’s face in the interior mirror. Both of them looked apprehensive.
‘Say there were two other people in the car as well, making five. I didn’t count the bodies, but there were at least a dozen corpses back there—’
‘Fifteen,’ Angela and Stephen said simultaneously, and then Angela added: ‘There were seventeen of us altogether in the team.’
‘If only five people had turned up waving assault rifles and confronted three times that number of men, I would have expected far more people in the group to run away. Or to try to, anyway. It’s the natural reaction. They would have known, once the first killing had taken place, that they were going to die, so
why wouldn’t they run and at least try to escape? So I think there must have been far more people involved in the attack on the camp than we’ve assumed so far. If there were more of them, say twenty, then running wouldn’t have been an option because the archaeologists would have been completely outnumbered. That would explain why they died in that one small area. And if that is the case, I reckon there’s a very real chance that the rest of these killers are somewhere out here in the dunes, just waiting for a chance to take us down as well.’
Neither Angela nor Stephen responded to that remark and the bad news it implied.
‘Is this the route you always follow when you go to Kuwait City?’ Bronson went on.
‘Yes.’ Angela nodded. ‘It’s the straightest way of getting across the border, and most of the ground is reasonably hard, so there’s not much chance of getting bogged down in soft sand or anything like that.’
Bronson indicated the arrow on the GPS unit, which was pointing precisely in the direction the vehicle was heading.
‘So if anybody had been watching the camp, they would know what route you would follow on the journey.’ It was more of a statement than a question, but both Stephen and Angela nodded.
‘And that means,’ Bronson added, ‘that if there was a second group of terrorists out here in the dunes, all they would need to do is plant themselves somewhere near the route you always use and wait for us to drive into their ambush. And that’s exactly where I think we’re heading.’
He slowed down a little more and sat up straighter in the seat, scanning the surrounding area, trying to pick an alternative route to take. He nodded as if he’d made up his mind, swung the steering wheel to the right and began heading south, away from the direct route to the Kuwait border.
‘If you keep going in this direction we won’t get to Kuwait at all,’ Stephen pointed out. ‘The next border we cross will be into Saudi Arabia, and doing that would be a really bad idea for a whole number of different reasons.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘We won’t be going anything like that far,’ he replied. ‘I just want to move far enough away from your normal route to ensure that we don’t get jumped by another bunch of guys hefting Kalashnikovs. I reckoned if we could head south for about five miles, then we could change direction back to the east and that would be enough of a safety margin to keep us out of trouble.’
About fifteen minutes later, Bronson pointed at the speedometer and began turning the vehicle to head east.
‘We’ve covered just over seven kilometres since we turned south,’ he said. ‘That’s not quite five miles, but it’s probably enough of a buffer, and the terrain over to the left looks a bit easier to navigate than what’s right in front of us.’
‘You can navigate just with the compass,’ Angela said, unclipping the GPS unit and doing something with the keypad to deselect the navigation feature. ‘All it’s displaying now is our geographical position as a lat and long, and the direction we’re heading. And I suppose the good news is that if you’re in this part of Iraq and you point the nose of your vehicle east, it’s impossible to miss Kuwait. It’s just too big,’ she added with a faint smile, the first improvement in her mood that Bronson had noticed since they’d stumbled into the appalling carnage of the archaeological site.
He gave an answering smile, then switched his attention back to the terrain in front of them, picking the best route over and around the uneven dunes, now keeping the speed down to avoid creating a dust cloud that would be visible for a far greater distance than the vehicle itself.
Three minutes later, it became obvious that their problems were far from over.
16
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
Khaled ordered the driver to stop the jeep near the crest of a range of dunes so that they could try to spot the vehicle they were chasing. Given the time they’d wasted searching for the sat phone at the archaeological camp, the only sign of the missing Toyota had been a distant cloud of dust and sand, and a few minutes later even that had disappeared from view.
At first, Khaled had assumed that the vehicle had just slowed down, to avoid being quite so visible, and would be continuing to follow the same track. But what now bothered both him and Farooq was what looked like a recent set of tyre tracks – or to be exact faint depressions in the sand that could have been tyre tracks – that led away from the established route and down to the south.
‘If that is them,’ Farooq said, scanning the horizon in a fruitless attempt to spot their quarry, ‘they’re heading straight for the Saudi Arabian border.’
‘They won’t go there,’ Khaled said, with a confidence that Farooq suspected was not entirely justified. ‘They’ll still have to cross the border into Kuwait. All they’ve done is turn off route in case we were following them.’
‘So do we follow these new tracks?’
‘No.’ Khaled shook his head firmly. ‘We’d have to go too slowly if we were going to follow them. We’ll stay on the original route and keep the speed up. The second lorry must be somewhere down to the south of us by now. Contact the driver on the walkie-talkie and tell him we think the 4x4 might be somewhere near him. And keep trying to raise the other lorry as well, because that’s still in the best position to stop these people.’
A few seconds later, the driver steered the jeep off the dune and back on to the track towards the Kuwaiti border.
17
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
‘I think there’s a truck behind us,’ Bronson said. ‘It’s quite a long way back, but it looks as if it’s travelling pretty quickly.’
Angela and Stephen both turned round in their seats to stare out of the side windows of the Toyota.
‘Are you sure?’ Stephen asked. ‘I don’t see anything.’
But even as he spoke those words, he saw a dark-coloured vehicle appear on the crest of a dune over to their right and then disappear from view as it drove down into the dip below.
‘Now I see it. It could just be a supply vehicle of some sort,’ he suggested. ‘Or even a bunch of Bedouin on their way somewhere. We needn’t assume the worst.’
‘Of course it could,’ Bronson agreed, ‘but I really don’t want to take the chance that it isn’t, so I’m going to keep up the speed and maintain a decent distance in front of it.’
It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Trying to hide among the dunes was never going to work. The only thing that could save them, assuming that Bronson’s concern about the possible identity of the people in the vehicle was correct, was speed. That it would make them visible to their pursuers was both inevitable and unavoidable.
He pressed his foot down on to the accelerator pedal and watched as the needles on the speedometer and rev counter rose in a synchronized movement.
‘You’re kicking up a big cloud of dust again,’ Angela warned him.
‘I know. But there’s nowhere we can hide out here, so what we have to do is move as quickly as we can. We can’t hide but we can run.’
Although there was no way of keeping out of sight, Bronson did his best, sticking to the dips between the dunes rather than driving up and over the crests.
But it was quickly obvious to all of them that the intentions of the people in the lorry behind them – and it was now closer and its size and shape could be seen – were probably hostile, because as soon as Bronson had increased speed, so did the other vehicle.
‘Hang on,’ Bronson said grimly, accelerating down the side of a dune and on to the level ground at its base. ‘This is going to get rough.’
18
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
In the cab of the lorry, the driver was following the very specific orders he had been given. As soon as they’d seen the Toyota, a couple of miles in front of them, he’d increased speed to try to get as close to the target as he could. The obvious problem was that although the lorry was, like all vehicles adapted for use in desert conditions, fitted with a permanent four-wheel-drive system
and, in this case, a big turbo-charged diesel engine, its sheer weight and bulk meant that it was never going to be as fast as the vehicle they were pursuing. Although it had got closer to the target, the tail chase was a contest that the lorry was slowly losing.
But Farooq had passed one other piece of information to the driver, and as the front of the lorry crashed down over the top of a dune and he accelerated down the slope in front of him, he also snatched a glance at his GPS unit. Moments later he steered the truck over to the right, down a long narrow gully that ran fairly straight for about a hundred yards.
‘Where are you going?’ the man sitting beside him demanded, one hand clutching the fore-end of his Kalashnikov while he held on to the dashboard grab handle with the other.
‘I’m following my orders. Wait and you will see.’
At the end of the gully, the ground sloped gently upwards on the left-hand side. The driver took another look at the display on his GPS then steered the truck up the slope. At the top, he hit the brakes briefly, then swung the steering wheel to the left and accelerated again. Immediately, the bone-crunching ride that everyone in the vehicle had been enduring eased noticeably, despite the fact that within a few seconds the lorry was travelling even faster than it had done before.
‘Now I see what you mean,’ the passenger said as he stared at the beaten track that stretched away in front of them. It was a long way from being a proper road, but it was relatively flat and level and mostly free of potholes and dips. ‘How far does it go?’
‘Only about three kilometres, according to Farooq, and then it turns away to the south. But that should be far enough for what he wants us to do.’
