The Babylon Idol

Chapter 57

Ben twisted back around to peer out of the rear window, and saw what Groppione had just seen. Vehicle lights in their wake: two sets of headlights supplemented with grille and roof spotlamps, all bobbing and gyrating crazily like Chinese lanterns in a storm. A pair of rebel trucks that had managed to escape the devastation of the MiG air strike had broken off from what was left of their fleeing column and were in pursuit.

‘What the hell do they want with us?’ Starace yelled.

‘Why don’t we stop and ask them?’ Ben said. ‘Maybe they’re lost and need directions. Or maybe they think we’re a bunch of coalition “spies” they can capture and do to us what you guys did to Ercan Kavur.’

‘Outrun them,’ Usberti ordered Groppione.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Groppione yelled back, near panic.

‘Remain calm, Aldo. We are in no immediate d—’

But now Usberti’s luck seemed to be running out at last. The flash of a grenade launcher from one of the pursuing trucks was followed almost instantly by a violent explosion right at the RV’s rear. Everyone went sprawling. Groppione was thrown hard against the steering wheel. The RV went into a weave that degenerated into another bad skid, and almost overturned before Groppione, gibbering like a lunatic and sawing at the wheel, somehow got it back under control and stamped his foot down even harder. The RV surged ahead, crashing and bounding insanely over terrain it was never meant to handle even at a snail’s pace.

Ben struggled upright and looked to the rear. On the bright side, it looked as though the rebels had run out of rockets. On the pessimistic side, the RV’s massive bodyshell was made of flimsy stuff that even an air rifle could punch through. The grenade blast had torn a gaping hole in their tail end. The rear window was gone, along with a large section of bodywork. Ben could see exposed chassis members and ripped wiring and twisted brackets where light fittings used to be. Small fires were crackling everywhere and the smell of burning filled the vehicle. The electrics began to flicker. Bellini had been thrown out of his seat and was scrabbling around for his glasses. Usberti had managed to scramble back into his throne and was shouting at Anna, on her hands and knees in a sea of scattered paper.

‘You! Hurry up with that translation!’

‘Go to hell!’ she screamed back at him.

The pair of rebel trucks were gaining fast, one taking the lead, the other right behind it. Their lights were glaring into the windowless back of the RV. Bozza staggered up the aisle to the rear, planted himself with his feet braced against the wild swinging of the vehicle, aimed his submachine gun through the ragged hole and rattled off its whole magazine at the lead truck. He couldn’t have hit much, because a second later the rebels returned fire.

And they were packing somewhat heavier hardware. The snorting blast from the large-calibre machine gun ripped into the body of the RV, punching through it like an oversized cardboard box, shredding everything to pieces. Woodwork splintered. Bits of carpet and leather upholstery flew. Bozza flattened himself to the floor. Anna screamed. Starace screamed louder. Too slow to hit the deck, he caught a bullet in the throat and his blood splashed over the bullet-riddled sofa he’d been sitting on.

Now the trucks were splitting up and overtaking the RV on both sides. Ben caught a clear glimpse of the rebel gunner on his side as the guy swivelled his machine gun around on its mount behind the cab. His face was covered with a cloth mask, just wild eyes and clenched teeth showing through the holes. Ben saw no more, because a millisecond later he was diving for cover as the machine guns poured fire into the sides of the RV, virtually ripping it in half horizontally.

Groppione had lost control, both of himself and of the vehicle. In his panic, he let go of the controls and threw himself down under the dashboard as both side windows shattered simultaneously to his left and right, showering him with glass. He got himself wedged deep in the footwell and cowered there, one hip pressing the accelerator pedal hard against its stop, neither hand on the steering wheel. Ben glanced forwards. He saw Anna curled up in a foetal position on the floor. No blood. That was good. Then he saw the rocky outcrop racing towards them in the glare of the driverless RV’s headlights. That wasn’t good.

It was the rebels who saved them from the head-on collision against the rocks. Maybe they were used to firing on armoured vehicles that would offer a little more resistance to their bullets. Or maybe they were just incredibly stupid. Either way, as their two trucks sped in parallel up the flanks of the RV, pumping high-velocity machine-gun shells at point-blank range and in opposite directions at once through its flimsy skin, they hadn’t reckoned on where those bullets would go next. The occupants of the truck on the right soon found out. Bad timing. A tactical lesson in the risks of friendly fire. One of the most inappropriately named phenomena in the combat manual, because there was nothing remotely amicable or heart-warming about being shredded to bloody chunks by the firepower of your own inept comrades. Nor was it much of a practical lesson, if you died learning it.

The badly judged storm of bullets from the left-hand truck passed straight through both sides of the RV and hit the right-hand truck, killing every rebel on board instantly. The truck skidded, hit a rut, flipped a somersault in the air and cannoned against the right flank of the coach with enough force to send it veering off course to the left. It missed the rocky outcrop by a matter of inches. It was the truck that hit it instead, with a crunch as the two dead soldiers up front went through the windscreen and the gunner in the back went sailing over the roof and his body broke on the rocks.

But the impact that saved the RV from a terminal head-on smash also caused it to go into a furious skid. It was a very large, very heavy vehicle with comparatively undersized wheels and lot of momentum. An experienced driver might have stood a small chance of correcting the skid and regaining control. With nobody at the wheel at all, there was less than zero chance. All six wheels lost traction in the soft sand and it began to spin on itself. In what felt to Ben like a slow-motion dream, the length of the shattered RV rotated anti-clockwise until it was skidding sideways like a ship about to broach. There was a tortured groaning and creaking from the twisting chassis, and then the world seemed to flip over as the thing crashed onto its side, rolled and rolled again in a tumult of self-destruction.

If the driver of the remaining rebel truck had reacted in time, he might have avoided the path of the crashing RV. He didn’t. The truck’s wheels locked up and its front end ploughed at high speed into the wreckage.

Then everything went still.