The Babylon Idol

Chapter 38

The giant monster was almost on them. An unstoppable force moving so fast that its driver could have done nothing to scrub off the slightest bit of speed as the car came bursting out of nowhere across his path, sailing high over the tracks. The train’s blinding white glare filled the inside of the airborne Audi like the flash of a nuclear explosion. The thunderous roar was the loudest sound Ben had ever heard. Louder than an artillery battle at close range. It completely drowned Anna’s scream, filled every space and vibrated every cell inside his body.

And then they were dead. Or they should have been, the car squashed flat on impact and then smashed down onto the tracks and pulverised by the train’s wheels, their bodies reduced to mincemeat in a fraction of a second.

But the impact never came. The car passed in front of the train’s nose by a matter of inches and began to drop towards the ground. Its front wheels hit first, slamming into the downwards slope of the embankment on the far side of the tracks. Ben and Anna were hurled against their seat belts with the force of the landing. Behind them the train hammered past, the moving pocket of air at its nose slapping them like a shockwave as it came hurtling by. The car bounced and seemed about to flip and cartwheel; but then all four wheels were back on solid ground and they were moving again, rolling away from the roaring clatter that made the air tremble and blasted a blizzard of swirling snowflakes in its slipstream. The train kept coming and coming. The ground trembled as if an earthquake had struck.

‘Sei completamente pazzo!’ Anna yelled in Ben’s ear over the deafening noise.

Ben heard that one. He couldn’t agree more: he probably was completely mad, but at least they were still alive, just about. As Anna kept up a rapid-fire torrent of abuse about how utterly insane he was and how he’d almost killed them both, he grabbed the steering wheel and yanked the Audi’s gearstick into neutral. The engine had given all it had to give. The dead car began to roll faster down the slope of the embankment. The train was still clattering past, seemingly infinite in length — but all too soon it would be gone into the night and their pursuers stranded on the other side of the tracks would be able to find a way to come after them. Ben knew he had limited time to make his escape.

The rolling car picked up speed down the slope. It was steeper and longer than Ben had anticipated, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Bad, because the snow had drifted up thick against the side of the embankment making the terrain so treacherous that one touch on the brakes would send them into a sideways slide that would turn into a roll, and then a lethal tumble all the way down to the bottom of the hill.

Worse, the landing had destroyed the car’s headlights. They were free-falling blind, crashing through mounds of snow that splashed up all over the windscreen and obliterated what little forward vision they had. Moments earlier the Audi had been an unguided airborne missile — now it was an uncontrollable bobsleigh plummeting through the darkness, ripping through unseen shrubs and bushes as it went. Ben gritted his teeth and tried to steady the slithering, gyrating, bucking car, but it was out of his hands. If a tree or a rock were in their path, they wouldn’t even see the obstacle coming before the car came to a sudden, crunching halt, and maybe their lives with it.

When the crash came, it wasn’t a solid tree trunk or a boulder they hit, but an abandoned wooden storage hut at the bottom of the hill. It was a hidden rut beneath the snow that saved them from a head-on collision, bouncing them sideways at the last instant so that the car’s flank took the worst of the impact. Ben was flung against the driver’s door, and Anna against him. Ripped bits of planking flew all around as the car ploughed through the flimsy wall of the hut and spun through several full turns, demolishing the building totally before it finally came to rest on the snowy hillside.

Then there was eerie stillness, just the ticking of hot metal and the rasp of their breathing as they sat still for a moment in the darkness of the wrecked car, gathering their wits and slowly realising that they were still alive.

‘You okay?’ Ben said at last.

‘I think so,’ Anna replied shakily, not sounding too sure.

The driver’s door was too badly twisted to open, so the two of them had to scramble out of the passenger side. The snow was almost up to their knees, and fresh billows were still tumbling from the sky. The night air felt deeply refrigerated. Ben could already feel his cheeks beginning to tingle before they started going numb. He and Anna were still warm from adrenalin, but the cold would start getting to them quickly, especially her. He peeled off his leather jacket and, despite her protests, made her put it on and zip it up to her neck. He was worried about her feet, pressed deep into the snow. His own would stay warm and dry for hours in his heavy waterproof boots, even if the rest of him froze. Hers were almost totally unprotected in those flimsy little shoes.

Ben retrieved his bag from the back seat and shone the flashlight up and down the length of the car. Its rear bodywork panels were bullet-shredded and perforated beyond recognition. The front suspension had collapsed. A trickle of smoke was rising from its rumpled bonnet. Or maybe steam. Ben was far from being an expert mechanic, but he knew enough to recognise a vehicle that wouldn’t be going anywhere from here. He pointed the light beam up the hill, could see no lights, nobody coming after them. Not yet, but they soon would be.

He made Anna lean against the side of the car and shone his torch over her to check for anything broken. He could find no damage. Lucky.

‘Still think this Babylon idol of yours is worth going after?’ he asked her.

She glared at him, her temper flaring up. ‘Do you think I would be so weak that I would give up, just because I’m a woman?’

‘Not in the least. I’ve known some pretty crazy women.’ He thought of Brooke, fighting her way out of the armed South American compound in which she’d been held captive and hiking alone through miles of Amazonian jungle. Roberta Ryder, picking up his Browning pistol in the middle of a firefight with multiple attackers after he’d been shot, and getting them both to safety. That made him think of Father Pascal, who’d looked after him during his recovery. That in turn made his thoughts cycle back to Jeff, picturing him lying there with the tubes and the needles, maybe never to regain consciousness. He sighed.

‘I won’t give up,’ Anna snapped, shooting daggers with her eyes. ‘I’m perfectly capable of seeing this through to the end. Besides, nobody could possibly be half as crazy as you, Ben Hope. What kind of deficiente would have done what you did back there?’

First he was called a lunatic, now he was a moron too. But he wasn’t in a mood to get offended. ‘Now you know why the car hire companies won’t touch me with a bargepole any more.’

‘It’s not funny,’ she fumed at him, in no way mollified. ‘And if you would mind not pushing and pulling me around and speaking to me as though I were one of your soldiers, that would also be very much appreciated.’

He spread his hands. ‘My apologies,’ he said graciously. ‘Now if you don’t mind, at the risk of telling you what to do, it’s my opinion that we should be getting out of here before our friends come looking for us. Can you manage to walk?’

‘I can manage fine.’

Ben wasn’t so sure that she could, but he said nothing.