Dictator

67

Mabeki wasn’t making for the border. He left the highway at the first possible interchange, turned hard left, almost doubling back on himself, and drove away to the southwest. He was driving smoothly, not too fast.

Carver unconsciously clenched his jaw as the tension and concentration built inside him. Where was Mabeki going? He mentally pictured the maps of Hong Kong he’d studied, and skimmed the books he’d read. A name came to mind: Shek Kong, a former RAF base now part-used by the Chinese air force. Private aviation was allowed there, which it wasn’t at the main international airport. If Mabeki had arranged a plane to get him out of Hong Kong fast, on the first leg of the journey to Malemba, he’d very likely fly from Shek Kong.

Carver estimated that Mabeki was around three minutes ahead of him. If a jet was fuelled and ready to go, that was more than enough time to drive on to the tarmac, race up the steps, close the door and start rolling. Like Mabeki, Carver wasn’t keen on driving too fast, but for different reasons. He’d never wanted to be convicted for murder, just because he’d been caught breaking a speed-limit. But he couldn’t afford those niceties now. He had to narrow the gap.

The car showroom’s mechanics had done a good job. The Honda might have looked like a piece of junk on the outside, but it had all the acceleration its reputation suggested, the steering was precise, and the suspension nice and tight. Carver was enjoying himself, revving hard and relishing the angry buzz of the overworked, tuned-up engine as he darted in and out of the traffic on the highway before swinging left on to an off-ramp painted with go-slower yellow stripes.

There was a roundabout at the bottom of the ramp. Carver swung left on to a road that cut through a sprawl of low-density suburban housing before heading out into the country, following the valley floor for a mile or so between two lines of hills. The road was undemanding, with long straight stretches broken by gentle corners that he could take flat out. He had no trouble keeping his speed above eighty miles per hour, sometimes touching a hundred as he overtook slower vehicles, leaving trucks, buses and crowded family cars in his wake.

Carver had to slow his pace slightly as he re-entered a more built-up area. There was another roundabout up ahead. The road to the airfield at Shek Kong was the second exit – straight across. It took him a couple of seconds to register the fact that Mabeki had not taken it. He’d swung left again, going due south now, back towards Kowloon. And he’d taken the most remarkable and most dangerous road in the whole of Hong Kong: Route Twisk.

It had been built in the early fifties by soldiers of the Royal Engineers to link the British Army’s main base at Castle Peak in the Tsuen Wan district of the city with the RAF at Shek Kong. So the road was originally designated TW/SK, which soon became known as Twisk. Designed with inbuilt demolition chambers, which could be blown up to collapse the road in the event of a Chinese invasion, Twisk ran through some of Hong Kong’s most rugged and spectacular landscapes, past its highest peak, Tai Mo Shan. Barely four miles long, the road rose from sea-level up to twelve hundred feet and almost all the way back down again. It twisted and turned along and between the hills in a series of blind corners and hairpin bends. At the far end it was swallowed up by the urban highways and towering apartment blocks of modern Tsuen Wan.

By the time he got on to Route Twisk, Carver had cut the gap between him and Mabeki to a minute and a half. He wanted visual contact before they entered the maze of the city streets. Judging by the signal from Zalika’s phone, Mabeki was a little over a mile down the road. He’d been doing about fifty on the first steep but reasonably straight uphill section of the road, then slowed right down as he hit a W-shaped sequence of bends that led to the tightest hairpin of all. That was reasonably good going. But it wouldn’t be nearly good enough for Carver. He had no choice. He had to race all the way.

Ahead of him he could see the triangular peak of Tai Mo Shan rising like a huge grey-green pagoda against the clear blue sky. The road ran between two lines of shade-trees that for an instant reminded Carver of southern France: a gentle swing right, a nice stretch of straight road, then a quick chicane right, left and hard right again. There were a couple of motorbikes behind him, powerful ones by the looks of it, but up ahead the road was mercifully clear. So he could take the racing lines, cutting the apexes of the corners, barely applying the brakes at all and letting the gearbox and the accelerator pedal do all the work.

He jinked through the first hairpin and up a straight barely two hundred yards long before he had to hit the handbrake hard for the first time as he approached the first section of a tight double-S. He felt the car scrabble for traction as he kept the accelerator down, working the wheel and letting the car’s rear axle drift, carrying it round the bend. Same again on the next bend, and then he was into the third section of the W, drifting round the apex, swinging right out into the oncoming lane, letting the rear end of the car break free round the outside of the bend in a sort of semi-controlled anarchy.

And there was a bus coming the other way, downhill, heading directly towards him.

Carver’s instant reaction was not alarm but bemusement. The bus was a single-decker Dennis Dart, the doughty old stalwart of countless public transport services up and down the British Isles. And it was about to kill him on a mountain road in Hong Kong.

Carver could see the look of shock on the driver’s face as he registered the presence of a car hurtling towards him in the wrong lane. There was an elephantine squeal of protest from the bus’s brakes and tyres as he tried to check its momentum. But a Dart bus is around thirty feet long and weighs seven tons unladen. Basic physics dictate that it’s a hard beast to rein in, particularly when descending a steep hill. The driver also had the corner to consider. He started turning into the bend, cutting across Carver’s path, blocking off his escape route to the left-hand lane.

Now Carver had to make an instant choice. He could hit the brakes as hard as his right foot could manage and just pray that the car either halted or at the very worst collided with the bus at a sub-fatal speed. Or he could apply an equally powerful force to the accelerator on the outside chance that he could avoid the oncoming bus entirely.

He hit both.

First he yanked on the handbrake, drastically slowing the front of the car. The back end, however, kept moving, swinging round until the Honda was positioned sideways across the carriageway.

The bus was looming above Carver so close he seemed almost in touching distance. He had let go of his wheel and thrown his hands up over his face in an instinctive gesture of self-protection. As the bus, too, slewed round, Carver could see passengers screaming in terror. He couldn’t blame them. He was tempted to scream too. He just didn’t have the time.

He released the handbrake and hit the gas. The front wheels regained traction and the car shot forward, heading straight for the far side of the road… and the two motorbikes that had been riding behind him up the hill.

Carver heaved the steering wheel to the right, missed the leading bike by a whisker, hit the kerb on the side of the road and carried on over it so that his outside wheels actually rode up the earthen banking on the inside of the corner. The Honda tilted so far over it seemed on the verge of toppling on to its roof before Carver regained some measure of control and brought the vehicle crashing back down on to the road again. He took a deep calming breath, slowly exhaled, then raced away again.

Mabeki had gained a few extra seconds. But the chase was still on.