In any normal circumstances, such a sum must have constituted a copper-bottomed, gilt-edged insurance. But Pol was a long way away; and whoever had mounted this coup was playing for stakes worth not thousands, but hundreds of billions of pounds.
He had wondered at one time how easy it would be to get to the Embassy. But what would he tell them? What would that crimped diplomatic mentality make of his presence with no luggage, no visa, no entry stamp? If he told them everything, he was likely to meet little sympathy; for Packer was part of a conspiracy to commit murder and high treason, and if Sarah had succeeded in her mission the two of them could expect little mercy.
It was the thought of Sarah, alone in that beleaguered, silent palace 700 yards away, that decided him.
The presence of Ryderbeit, back on the salt-pan with the refuelled Fieseler Storch, he took oddly for granted. Ryderbeit had said that he would not wait more than ten minutes: but Ryderbeit was a soldier — if only a soldier of fortune — and the idea of his deserting his post at the final hour struck Packer as not so much improbable, as totally out of character. Ryderbeit might be capable, as well as guilty, of many infamies; but he would never run the risk of being called a coward.
It happened so quickly, and with such planned precision, that his suspicions were only strengthened. Across the blinding, dusty street ahead a tiny figure had appeared, walking awkwardly, heavily, as though wading through water. She was bare-headed and wore a long dress.
He leaped out and waved, frightened to shout. She saw him and began to run; tripped and nearly fell, then caught sight of the row of miniature black corpses. Her hand flew up to her mouth and she stumbled forward and reached him, gagging, her make-up streaked with sweat. For several seconds she clung to him, and he felt her whole body quivering as he dragged her up into the Range Rover.
He started the engine and reversed back up the street. As they passed the two dogs, who had been joined by several others, he put his arm round her and told her to close her eyes. It was some minutes before she could speak.
He was driving through a network of small streets, shadowy and deserted, following a route which he had already prepared from the map. He drove fast, without using his horn, and hardly checking the intersections before racing across, burrowing into another tunnel of alleys and crooked backstreets between shuttered shops and bazaars.
She sat pressed against him, still shaking, and began, in hushed breathless sentences, to tell him what had happened. His attention was distracted before she had finished. In the mirror he had caught sight of a long black car. It was the only vehicle he had seen moving anywhere in the city. He doubled back down a one-way street, the wrong way, and turned up a steep alley so narrow that the sides of the Range Rover scraped against the shutters of the shops. He came out on to a bare yellow square with a humpbacked mosque. The car behind had gone.
But now something else was beginning to worry him. The needle on the temperature gauge had crept up to maximum and was almost touching the red warning zone. The radiator would have been filled with a chemical cooling fluid which could not boil; but he knew, from his experiences in Aden, that under intense heat it could evaporate.
He slowed down, avoiding low gears wherever possible, and cut through a couple of side streets to join the main avenue to the north-west, out towards the desert and the salt-pan. Somewhere to his left a great fire was burning, and the air was full of coils of oily black smoke that left flakes of soot clinging to the dust-caked windshield.
There was a roadblock ahead, and as he prepared to stop he saw the officer in charge wave him on. Again, it happened too smoothly, too easily.
He was now driving through the Armenian quarter, where there were tanks and troop-carriers drawn up in the side streets; but everywhere was the same macabre stillness; again no one stopped him. The atmosphere in the Range Rover was suffocating, as though drained of all oxygen; when he again tried opening the windows he was blinded by dust, and the air blew in with a baking heat that was not like air at all, but hot gritty fumes.
He had been going for half a mile along the avenue when he saw the black shape shimmering again in the mirror. It looked like a Cadillac or a Lincoln, but it was still too far behind for him to make out how many people it carried. He guessed that it could easily outpace the Rover, and so made no effort to lose it; instead, over the next couple of miles, he waited to see what it would do. Sarah did not seem to have noticed it, and for the moment he did not draw her attention to it.
But he did reach down for the MI6, which he kept balanced across his knee.
The car was now about 300 yards behind, and was still making no effort to catch them. Packer was puzzled, as well as worried. Sarah had told him how Shiva Steiner had said he wanted a scapegoat. Yet he had let her go. He had also greased the wheels for their escape, through the roadblocks in the dead city. An explanation dawned on him, with a nasty sinking in his stomach: they were being set up for the kill at the salt-pan. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and put his foot down flat on the floor.
The temperature gauge was now within the red danger mark; but he had already planned what to do. If they were waiting at the salt-pan he was going to put up a fight; but first he was going to try a diversion, in the hope of losing the Cadillac.
It was a desperate decision, but not totally irrational; nor was it dictated by fear, but by anger — a cold relentless fury at the treachery of Pol and his scheming Levantine master, Shiva Steiner. Or was he just panicking? And was the Cadillac behind just a friendly escort? He didn’t think so — but there was only one way to find out.
He had now reached the road out across the desert, and was driving flat out. He had unfolded the map over the MI6, and was calculating, from the kilometre gauge, his approximate distance from the salt-pan. At the same time, he noticed wisps of smoke beginning to drift up from under the bonnet. His view behind was obscured by a dense veil of dust.
After another four kilometres they were in open desert, and he could feel the engine starting to grumble; his foot was still right down on the accelerator, but their speed was slackening and the floor had begun to shudder.
His anger had given way to a sense of futile recklessness. He was now certain that they were driving into a trap; yet they had come so far that he was determined to get to the bitter end, and to take as many of Steiner’s henchmen with him as he could. He also had one immediate advantage. The Range Rover is probably the best equipped wheeled vehicle for negotiating the roughest terrain, in extremes of climate; while a Cadillac is built for highways and graceful forecourts. In the open desert it would be as helpless as an elephant in a dance hall.
Packer guessed that they would be expecting him to reach the salt-pan from the road, down the same route that he had followed last night. If he could approach it from another angle, he might have a small chance. At least he would try, or go down fighting.
He calculated that he was about three kilometres from the saltpan, when he swung the Rover off the road and felt the wheels spinning furiously as they plunged into the soft sand. Like a fox reaching a wood, he looked back and saw, through the trail of dust along the road above, the Cadillac slow to a halt.
The Range Rover’s four-wheel drive howled and skidded and slithered through two deep trenches in the sand. Ahead, the dunes rolled away like shorn sheep’s rumps into the blinding blur of the horizon. Packer steered in a direction parallel to the salt-pan, allowing the Rover to follow a course of least resistance between the white-hot dazzle of the dunes.
But even so he could feel the wheels sinking deeper, their speed down to walking pace, while the black smoke from the cooling fluid was now belching out of the bonnet. But as long as he kept moving, he thought — even if it was at no more than a mile an hour. For he knew that once they had stopped in this heat they would be dead before siesta time — even if the Cadillac didn’t get to them first.
Again he peered behind and saw, across a hump of sand, the dusty black snout of the Cadillac crawling i
nto view. Sarah now saw it for the first time, but made no comment. It was as though her capacity for fear was exhausted. She was breathing in short gasps. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to outflank the bastards. That big American job back there will burn up in no time — another five minutes and those fancy tyres will start melting like treacle.’
It was now almost impossible to see ahead, through the smoke and glare and clouds of sand churning round them. The temperature needle had passed right through the red zone and was off the dial; and the speedometer was registering zero. They both drank some water from the plastic canteen, but it seemed scarcely to moisten their mouths.
The heat had clamped round Packer’s head like a steel brace that was being slowly tightened. He leaned over the wheel, trying to steer the Rover’s deep sluggish course away from the banks of sand, where it would become landlocked for ever.
In the mirror he could just make out the black shape of the Cadillac sliding clumsily down the side of a dune, like a huge wounded beetle. When it had righted itself, he guessed that it could be doing no more than two or three miles an hour. The broad black bonnet was also wrapped in smoke, and with any luck the air-conditioner would blow, or the carburettors explode.
He gave a sudden, savage laugh. ‘Well, if we’ve done nothing else, we must have established a record for the world’s slowest car chase!’
At that moment the Range Rover bumped into a bank of sand, gave a clanking roar, and stalled. For a few seconds Packer rested on the wheel. He felt calm and very, very tired. Sarah drank some water, and Packer wasted some more by splashing it on his face and neck. It dried almost at once. Then he reached over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips and tongue were parched and did not respond.
He looked back again at the Cadillac. It was moving so slowly that he thought at first it had stopped. His fingers tightened round the MI6, his thumb slipped it on to semi-automatic — five rounds a burst — and he got out. His hands and face burned under the sky as though they were being held under a red-hot grill. The air was full of the acrid fumes of the cooling fluid and the smell of scorched rubber.
He peered back across the dunes and this time saw the Cadillac lurch to a standstill, its nose buried in sand, under a pall of black smoke. Its windows and doors were still closed.
He tried to position himself against the rear wing of the Rover, but burned his hand and elbow on the metal. He would have to fire from a standing position, using the sling as his only support. He had brought the muzzle up, when two things happened.
A voice began yelling from somewhere behind him, and two bullets clanged into the back of the Range Rover. A second later a double crack reached him from the direction of the Cadillac. The voice yelled again, ‘Packer, you crazy bastard —!’
Sarah had climbed out on her side and was scrambling up the steep dune. On the ridge, against the glaring grey sky, stood the tall thin figure of Ryderbeit. Packer, half blinded by sweat, blinked at him, just as a spurt of sand appeared a couple of feet away from him and another sharp crack came from the Cadillac.
He began to run, stumbled, and fell on his hands and knees. There was another shot and he heard the second, smaller crack of the bullet’s sonic boom as it passed by his ear.
He was crawling up the dune on all fours, hardly feeling the pain in his burned fingers. He heard more shots, but they seemed to come from a great distance, like echoes; and the dune was becoming steeper, until he felt as though he were clawing his way up a sheer wall of sand. His fingers and face were burned raw, and he could feel the searing heat through his shirt and trousers, and a deep dull pain in his back and belly.
A pair of boots came slithering down beside him, kicking hot sand into his face. Hands grabbed him under the armpits and he heard Sarah crying, sobbing, ‘Oh my God, no! Is he all right?’
Then Ryderbeit: ‘Shut up, and give me a hand!’
They dragged him between them, down the spoon-shaped bowl of the salt-pan, across the fifty yards to where the Fieseler Storch stood ready for take-off.
Sarah, in her preposterous evening dress, was almost too weak to climb aboard; and it was Ryderbeit alone who hauled Packer’s inert weight up into the oven-hot Perspex capsule of the cockpit, where he dumped him down in the observation seat. Packer found that he had lost all sensation from the waist down; and when he opened his eyes he noticed that there was blood on Ryderbeit’s hands and shirt — only Ryderbeit wasn’t bleeding.
Packer sat propped against the flimsy door, feeling nothing. A long sleep came over him. It was only when Sarah squeezed herself awkwardly in beside him, having to sit half in his lap, that she realized that Packer’s dreamy expression was one of death.
She did not move, did not shift her hand from the pool of blood that was seeping on to the seat beneath them. Her hands closed round Packer’s head, and she began rocking it, weeping with no sound above the roar of the engine.
They took off at a steep angle, and far below could see the two cars, tiny and remote, like a pair of dead insects caught in the vast grey wilderness of the desert. Ryderbeit began to laugh. Sarah did not seem to hear him.
‘There’s a certain lovely poetry in it!’ he yelled.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
Ryderbeit shook his head, still laughing, and jabbed his thumb at Packer’s upright body. ‘That bullet is going to work out pretty bloody expensive. In fact, it’s going to cost Fat Man three-quarters of a million fucking quid!’
He was laughing again when they landed in Beirut; and Sarah began to cry again.
***
Want to carry on the adventure? Read DEAD SECRET — Book Five in the Charles Pol Espionage Thriller series.
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ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS
THE CHARLES POL SERIES
Barbouze
The Tale of the Lazy Dog
Gentleman Traitor
Dead Secret
Holy of Holies
OTHER NOVELS
Long Run South
The Widow’s War
Snake Water
The Beria Papers
The Brotherhood
Published by Sapere Books.
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United Kingdom
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Copyright © Alan Williams, 1976.
Alan Williams has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.
eBook ISBN: 9781913518561
Shah-Mak Page 36
