The Babylon Idol

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.