Back in the Real World

by Marvin Albert

  Behind the Audi was a four-door blue Fiat. There were two people in it, but I couldn’t make out if they were both men or a man and a woman. And I couldn’t read its dirt-smeared license.

  The third car was a tan Citroën Turbo, the very fast version the manufacturers named “The Demon”. There were two people in the front seat, and it was the best candidate for a car intended to stick with me and eventually overhaul me. But it was too far back. There were long curves in the road where it didn’t have me in sight for as long as a minute. Long enough for me to detour into a dirt side road without its spotting the move.

  Any of the three cars could be my tail. Or none of them. Morel could have decided on a different way of getting rid of me. Or his tail car could have lost me in the traffic coming up from the coast. Or…

  I slowed down, bringing the white Audi up closer. Its driver appeared to be wearing some kind of lumber jacket.

  I couldn’t make out his face, but the shape of his head and the girth of his shoulders were like Jacques Morel’s. That wasn’t likely. I didn’t see how he could have gotten out of his hotel and into a car close behind me before I’d driven out of Cagnes-sur-Mer. And the practical consideration still held. If you intend to overtake and attack another car, the professional technique is one man driving and a second man holding a weapon ready.

  The Audi slowed down before it could get any closer. Then it slowed more, increasing the gap between us. Possibly a nervous driver who didn’t approve of tailgating. The horn of the Fiat behind him blared angrily. The Audi pulled over and let it pass. That brought the Fiat close enough for me to see that its license plate was local. The people in it were a man and a woman. Women killers are not unknown. I accelerated, getting further ahead again. I didn’t intend to let any of those cars pull up alongside me.

  A couple miles further on there was a sharp turnoff from the D53 onto a narrower road, the D22. I took the turnoff. The D22 climbed straight for about six yards and then hair-pinned in the other direction, still climbing. When I was around the turn I slowed my Peugeot almost to a halt and looked down to my left. The Fiat stuck to the D53, going on past the turnoff toward the village of Peille. The white Audi followed it slowly. The tan Citroën Demon turned up onto the D22 after me.

  I accelerated, following the tight bends of the mountain road. It kept twisting its way upward, snaking towards the three-thousand-foot-high Col de la Madonna, a pass across the summits of this mountain chain.

  In every direction now the view was cut off abruptly by rising cliffs, peaks, ridges. There were no houses at all in sight anymore.

  The road grew much narrower. In places it was only a bit wider than my car. If two cars met, the one descending was supposed to back up until it reached a wider point where it could pull over and let the climbing car pass. But there were no cars coming down toward me. Only the one behind.

  It came into sight on a short straight stretch. Close enough to see the two people in it were both men. Close enough to read its license plate. It ended with the number 75—a car from Paris.

  It began gaining on me, but not for long. I twisted around another hairpin and it was lost to sight back there. The Citroën was a faster car than my Peugeot. On a straight road it would have caught up to me. But the D22 has a very few straight stretches. Most of it is one hairpin turn after another. The Citroën had trouble with bends that tight. My car did not. I’d done a lot of work on it, making it ready for mountain road rallies.

  After Attilio Bettega had crashed to his death in the last Tour of Corsica I’d pulled out of that rally and begun considering giving up rally driving entirely. But I still had experience with roads like this one, and I had a car capable of handling it. If that had been my aim, I could have reached the Col de la Madonna far ahead of the pursuing Citroën. But I didn’t want to lose the men in it. I wanted information from them.

  The road got steeper and tougher. In places it couldn’t get around the massive outcroppings of rock and had to go under them, via short, rough-cut tunnels. After each turn the sides of the narrow road changed. The slope rising steeply from one edge of the road would be on my right, and the one dropping below the other side on my left—and then, abruptly, the upslope would be on my left and the downslope on my right. The higher the road climbed the more savage the slopes became, with more of the rock showing its teeth through the heavy underbrush, and sharp stones on the road where there had been slides.

  Three miles above the point where I’d turned onto the D22, just below the Col de la Madonna, a side road cut away from it up to my right. As soon as the Citroën came in sight I turned up this side road.

  It had no official route number. Once it had been a military road leading to underground bunkers atop the mountain. The bunkers had been locked up long ago. The road remained, but it dead-ended in the middle of nowhere. It was used only by occasional small-game hunters now. There were signs beside the road warning that it was forbidden to hunt in this area. Each sign was riddled with bullet holes. The French have a contempt for laws that can’t be enforced.

  I heard the powerful engine of the Citroën behind me, increasing speed to catch up. This was a good place for them to finish with me. Nobody around to see or hear. Even if a rare passing motorist did hear gunfire here, it would be assumed that it was the shots of hunters and would be ignored.

  But the old military road was perfect for my purpose, too. And I probably knew it better than they did. I gunned the Peugeot’s engine and squealed around its tight turns, always climbing, staying far enough ahead as I neared the place I wanted.

  * * * *

  I drove around a long hairpin bend, stopped the Peugeot on the other side of it, and jumped out. A cliff formed a wall along the left-hand side of the road. I climbed down off the road on the right-hand side. I had to place each step cautiously. The two days of rain had washed earth away from the roadside and the slopes below it, exposing loose stones and shards of broken rock.

  I turned to face the road behind a screen of scrub brush and then hunkered down, holding the P7 ready in both hands and listening to the oncoming Citroën.

  The driver wouldn’t see my car blocking the way until he came around the bend. With no way around the Peugeot, he would have to brake to a very sharp halt to avoid crashing into it. That would stop the Citroën directly in front of me, with the busy driver on the other side. The man holding the gun would be on my side. When I straightened up I would be aiming my gun straight through the car window at his head, at a distance of about ten inches.

  That was the way it should have worked. It would have, except the Citroën came around the bend much too fast, tires squealing, and skidded on gravel on the road. The driver and his partner had gotten too eager to catch me. When he saw my car dead ahead the driver practically stood on his brakes. That made the Citroën skid worse, out of control—in my direction.

  The roadside had been undermined by the rain. When the weight of the heavy car skidded onto it the roadside collapsed. The Citroën slid off the road and down the slope toward me.

  I leapt out of its way. Stones rolled under my feet, and I fell, landing awkwardly on my side. Reaching out quickly with my left hand, I grabbed the base of a spreading juniper bush and stopped myself from sliding further. Tightening my right-hand grip on the pistol, I watched the Citroën go down the slope past me.

  It started the whole slope sliding after it: dirt, rock, and bushes. My juniper went with it, and so did I. The knuckles of my right fist cracked sharply across a rock, springing my fingers open. The P7 flew out of my hand.

  An instant later I had both feet braced against the trunk of a hip-high hermes oak, stopping my slide. Close below me the Citroën tilted over on two wheels and began to topple. The man beside the driver kicked open his door and started to jump out. The heavy car crashed over on its side on top of him.

  It continued to roll over on its roof and then came to a halt lying on its other side. The man who’d jumped out lay broken on the ground, a short-ba
rreled pump-action shotgun in the dirt near his lifeless hands.

  The driver appeared, climbing up out of the overturned car. His cheek was bleeding, but other than that he seemed undamaged. He was a squat man with apelike arms. His jacket was open, and I could see he was wearing a shoulder harness. But there was nothing in its holster or in his hands. He’d lost his gun somewhere inside the car.

  I was on my feet by then and looking for my own gun. I spotted it lying beside a tangle of buckthorn and wild strawberry bushes. But there was no time left to go for it. The squat driver was out of the Citroën and dashing toward the fallen shotgun. He was snatching it up with one hand when I did the only thing I could. I jumped and landed on him, ramming him to the ground under me.

  The shotgun jumped from his hand and skittered away from us. I surged to my feet to go after it. He came up just as fast and clouted me across the back of my skull, knocking me back down. I kicked his ankles out from under him and he fell over on me, away from the shotgun.

  He locked his hands around my neck and dug his thumbs into my throat. I shoved both forearms up under his jaw to force his head back and make him let go. He was enormously strong. His thumbs didn’t dig in deeper, but he didn’t let go. We rolled over a couple times, away from the shotgun, fetching up against a boulder.

  I rammed the heel of my left hand against the base of his nose, smacking his head against the boulder. His grip on my throat loosened, and I struck at his throat with the edge of my right hand. He sideslipped the blow and scrambled to his feet. I scrambled to mine. He crouched a little, fists cocked, left foot pointing toward me and right foot braced a bit behind, neatly balanced. He had the battered face of an ex-boxer. But I wasn’t going to box with him.

  I bent forward and rushed him, head down. A fist glanced off the back of my head, and then I had him trapped against the boulder and was working in close, bringing my knee up into his groin, and kidney-punching him at the same time.

  He groaned but didn’t go down. And he knew dirty infighting, too. He tried to smash my instep with the heel of his shoe. I avoided it, but that gave him a little room between us. One of his hands grabbed my ear to yank my head forward while his other hand drove two stiffened fingers at my eyes.

  I twisted against the grip on my ear, and the fingers struck my forehead. I caught one of them in my right hand and bent it all the way back and heard it snap. He screamed and yanked the injured hand away from me, trying to get further away, but he was stopped by the boulder. I chopped him across the throat while he was trying and hit the target this time.

  He made a gagging noise and reached up with both arms when I feinted another strike at his throat. I hit him in the belly. Three times, as hard as I could and very low: left, right, left.

  He sagged to his knees, arms hanging to the ground, head lolling. He wasn’t out—but he was finished. I crouched in front of him. He tried to say something, but the pressure of blood pounding inside my ears made it impossible for me to hear him. Taking slow breaths to bring the pressure down, I went through his pockets looking for identity papers.

  I hadn’t found anything when he started talking again. This time I could make out his thick whisper:

  “We’ll get you…traitor.”

  I stared at him. “Traitor? To what?”

  “France…

  “I can’t be,” I told him. “I’m not French. I’m American.”

  He peered at me blearily. “But…he said… Before I could ask who he was talking about, he was no longer looking at me. He was looking at something behind and above me. It was an old trick, but I was sure he was in no condition to pull it off. So I turned to look.

  A rifle cracked from the road above.

  The bullet ripped the front of my shirt and burned across my chest.

  Chapter 24

  It could have been worse. Like being dead instead of stung. If I hadn’t turned in that instant, the shot would have broken my spine. As it was, it only gouged some of my skin away—before smashing through the ribcage of the man I’d been questioning and entering his heart.

  I was sprinting away around the boulder when he slumped over on the ground. Another rifle shot kicked up dirt between my legs just before I swung behind the protection of the boulder.

  I stayed there, crouched and breathing hard again, for a few seconds. Then I went flat on the ground and snaked to the other side of the boulder. Staying low, I edged my head forward just enough to squint one eye up at the road.

  A white car was up there at the turn of the bend. The man standing beside it with the rifle, wearing a lumber jacket, was Jacques Morel.

  That was how they’d stayed close enough, when I was driving up through traffic, to tail me without my spotting it. Morel in the white Audi and the other two in the Citroën, taking turns coming near and dropping back. The two cars in radio contact.

  Morel raised his rifle and took aim at me. I ducked back just in time. The bullet spanged off the edge of the boulder, almost exactly where my head had been, chopping off chips of stone. He couldn’t possibly have seen that small part of my face from his position up there. He’d just guessed where I’d be.

  That made him a very good guesser. I’d have to do some smart calculating of my own to get to him or away from him. I preferred trying to get to him first. But he had that rifle, and I didn’t have anything.

  The shotgun was nearest. But it was out in the open. I’d never live to get near it, against a marksman like Morel.

  My own gun was further away. I might be able to get to it, however, using cover all the way. If I could, a handgun still wouldn’t be any good at that range against a rifle. But it wasn’t a shooting match I was after. Because I had two big problems at that point.

  The first problem, naturally, was staying alive. The second was allied to that and almost as important: Morel wanted to kill me—but I didn’t want to kill him. Dead, he was no use to me. If he died now, the truth died with him. My guesses would stay guesses, and Crow would stay in prison. I needed Morel alive to get information out of him, one way or another.

  If I could get my handgun, the object would be to try circling around behind his position and then to get in close to his back. Once I had the drop on him we’d find out if he could be forced to talk. I doubted it, but it was worth a try.

  Whether I could get close behind him depended on whether he was as good at stalking in this kind of terrain as I was.

  We’d see.

  Keeping low, with the boulder giving cover between me and Morel, I went down into a low forest of bramble, stubby spruce trees, mastic, and juniper. My gun was off to the left and about twenty yards further up the slope. I went left through the forest, my route diverging slightly whenever necessary to avoid forcing my way through tangles of bushes that would give my movements away.

  I went past the point where my pistol was waiting above. A few yards further on I found what I was hunting for: one of the trenches cut into the slope by runoffs of the rains. Downrushing water always seeks the easiest route, gouging out soft earth and loose stones, twisting its way around and between harder concentrations of rock.

  Using a clump of nettles as cover, I slipped into the trench and began crawling upward through it. It wasn’t deep, but as long as I stayed on my hands and knees it would shelter me. Whether it would also conceal me was another matter. The rains had been recent, but the trench was already bone dry. It was bottomed with a carpet of crumbled clay and fine grains of sand. There was no way to climb it without raising some dust.

  A little dust shouldn’t give away my position. It was unlikely Morel would be able to spot it from up there on the road.

  I reached the height where I judged my gun had fallen—and kept climbing the trench. There wasn’t sufficient cover outside the trench there. A little further up there would be.

  I was almost there when Morel’s rifle sounded again. The bullet slashed into the side of the trench a few inches above my back, showering me with dirt and pebbles.

&
nbsp; The shot hadn’t come from up on the road. Morel had climbed down to find me. He’d spotted that little bit of dust stirred up by my crawl. And he’d pinpointed my position exactly.

  Now I knew: He was good at this kind of stalk.

  But his judgment of how to use his advantage was dubious. Morel still couldn’t see me—just my position. He had tried for a lucky shot. Hoping the bullet would ricochet and hit me. Or scare me into jumping into his sights. He was anxious to finish me quickly. That can cloud a stalker’s tactical decisions.

  His error told me where he was: off to the left of my trench. That was fine, my gun was off to the right. I resumed my crawling climb. Raising more dust. He didn’t waste another shot. Probably Morel was climbing, too. Aiming to get up near where the trench flattened out so he could have a clear shot at me when I reached that point.

  But I didn’t go that high. I stopped when I reached a place where screens of high bushes almost met across the top of the trench. With that for cover I eased out on my belly. I snaked under the bushes to my right and looked down the slope.

  From there I could see the bushes below that concealed my gun. There was open space between them and the ones under which I lay. Speed would be the only cover across that space. And surprise: He was expecting me to continue trying to get to high ground, not back down.

  I got my feet under me and dove out of my screen, straight down toward the bushes below. I hit the ground on one shoulder and did a fast roll through those bushes with thorns scratching and tugging at me. Then I was through them—and there was my gun. As I grabbed it Morel fired through the bushes at me. The bullet whipped past my ear.

  No error on his part this time. The bushes concealed me but didn’t protect me. If he kept firing through them, one of the shots was bound to hit me. If I stayed put.

  I fired three fast shots at his position. Blind shots, to drive him to cover and give myself a half second’s grace while I jumped for the trench. It worked. I fell inside the trench and lay flat in the bottom for a moment. No longer. The object now was to keep things moving and changing rapidly, not giving Morel time to rethink his plans.