The Babylon Idol

Chapter 58

Ben opened his eyes to a glare of white light. He looked down at the floor and realised his back was stuck to the ceiling. Then he blinked, and realised that he was actually lying on his back looking up at the floor, because the floor was above him. It took a moment for his brain to orient itself and remember why that was, and why his hands were pinned together under him.

He squirmed and elbowed himself up onto his knees and looked around him at the wreckage. The source of the bright light was the remaining headlamp of the rebel truck whose crumpled front end and still-turning front wheels were buried in the overturned wreck of what used to be the luxury motor coach. Most of the RV’s bodywork was an unrecognisable rumpled mass of plywood and aluminium. Smoke and dust drifted through the smashed interior. He could smell diesel oil fumes and toilet chemicals and battery acid, all mixed together in a sour olfactory cocktail with the stink of death. Starace’s body was hanging, gently swinging, from the upside-down floor, arms outflung as though he’d been crucified, bug eyes staring blind, a leg trapped in the broken frame of the sofa on which he’d died, its leather upholstery smeared with his blood. More was dripping down to the inverted ceiling.

‘Anna,’ Ben said.

She was curled up among the wreckage nearby. Her face and hair were grey with dust. At first he thought she was dead, too; then at the sound of his voice, she pushed herself up onto one elbow, looked at him with dazed eyes, and broke into a fit of coughing.

‘Lord be praised, we are alive,’ Usberti said, getting to his feet. He had the camera in his hand. A cut above one eye was dribbling blood down his cheekbone. He wiped it with his fingers and flicked them clean. ‘Ugo, Silvano, Aldo, Maurizio… Maurizio? Ah, there he is.’ He gazed up for a brief moment at the hanging corpse as though Starace were some dead crow stuck in a tree. ‘No matter. He was of little use in any case. Silvano, are you badly hurt?’

‘I don’t think so, Excellency,’ Bellini replied, dusting himself off. His glasses were bent out of shape, perched unevenly on his nose.

‘Help the others to salvage what weapons and supplies we can. We must continue on our way.’

‘You could do with an extra pair of hands to get us out of this,’ Ben said to him. ‘How about letting me loose from these cuffs?’

Usberti shook his head. ‘You do not think me that stupid, surely. Now would be the perfect time for you to try one of your tricks.’

‘I’m just as invested in getting out of this situation as you are,’ Ben said. ‘Especially as we won’t be alone here for long. See there.’ He couldn’t point, so he nodded his head towards the smashed front end of the RV, which now faced in the opposite direction. There was just a big ragged misshapen hole where the windscreen had been. Through the hole, still a long way off in the distance but approaching at some speed, more vehicle lights were visible. ‘Looks like more of our friends are about to join us.’

‘Then there is not a moment to lose,’ Usberti said. ‘Ugo, see how serviceable that truck is.’

Bozza seemed as unfazed by the incident as he was unhurt. He waded through the wreckage to get to the half-buried Syrian rebel truck and pulled away the remains of Usberti’s leather throne that was lying upended across its cracked windscreen. Both the driver and the gunner were dead, but the front passenger was still alive, blood all down his front from his broken nose and smashed teeth. Bozza wrenched open the door, grabbed him by the collar, hauled him out of the cab, dumped him in a heap and drew out a pistol. The guy groaned and tried to move.

‘Don’t kill him,’ Anna pleaded, but it was to no avail. She looked away, screwed her eyes shut and covered her ears as Bozza put the gun to the Syrian’s head and pulled the trigger twice. It was cold and brutal, but Ben reckoned it was probably a more humane end than came to most of Bozza’s victims. Bozza walked around to the driver’s side, hauled out the dead man behind the wheel and clambered inside the truck. He used his pistol to knock away the remains of the windscreen glass, then twisted the key to restart the stalled engine. The front of the truck was buckled and twisted, but its heavy-duty grille bars had taken most of the brunt of the impact. The engine coughed into life. Bozza put it in reverse and, with some effort, managed to disentangle and back it out of the wreckage.

Usberti turned to Bellini and tossed him a torch. ‘Silvano, go and check the other vehicle back there. Six are too many to travel in one truck.’

‘How about we kill this fucker?’ Groppione said, pointing his gun at Ben. ‘Then there’s only five of us to worry about.’

‘He may yet be of use to me,’ Usberti said. ‘This is not over yet.’

Bellini reluctantly obeyed the order. He limped his way out of the wreck and picked a hobbling path off through the darkness towards the rocky outcrop where the other truck had crashed. Ben watched his torch beam dart around the vehicle. Bellini didn’t look as though he had the physical force to haul out the driver the way Bozza had, but as the guy had already exited via the windscreen, he didn’t have to try. Moments later, the truck fired up in a cloud of blue smoke. The rattle coming from under the crumpled bonnet didn’t sound too terminal. Both its headlights were smashed, but the two roof-mounted spotlamps that hadn’t been knocked askew by the gunner’s flying body still worked fine. Their light shone brightly over the slick of blood that three dead men had left all over the rumpled bonnet and the rock in front of it. Bellini engaged reverse and gingerly pulled away from the mess.

Usberti smiled. ‘Two working vehicles. Professor Manzini, you will accompany me in the first. Aldo, you will drive us. Ugo, you drive the second with Silvano and the major. Stay close behind us. We will find a place to shelter for the night, where the professor can finish her translation. Come morning, we will complete our quest.’

The approaching lights were getting gradually closer. The way they were moving suggested that they belonged to a larger, slower transport, maybe a troop carrier full of Syrian rebels fleeing from the Russian tanks. Ben was no more anxious to hang around and find out than the others. The pickup truck’s bench seat was just about wide enough for three. Usberti hurried Anna to the passenger side of the first truck and pressed his bulk in after her, making her squash up in the middle as Groppione loaded bags from the wrecked RV into the pickup bed and took the wheel from Bozza. Bozza pointed his pistol at Ben and walked him to the second truck where Bellini was waiting. Bellini climbed out of the driver’s side. Bozza gave him the pistol, then got in behind the wheel.

‘After you,’ Bellini said, training the gun on Ben’s head.

‘Are you sure you know how to work that thing?’ Ben said.

‘Well enough. Get in, please. I don’t want to have to shoot you.’

‘All the better for you,’ Ben replied. He squeezed in, hands painfully trapped against the seat in the small of his back, one foot either side of the transmission tunnel, his left shoulder pressed against Bozza’s right. It felt like granite. Bellini stiffly clambered into the passenger seat to Ben’s right. The door mechanism had been damaged in the crash and wouldn’t close, forcing Bellini into an awkward position with his arms crossed over his lap, holding the door handle shut with his left hand so he could keep the pistol pointed at Ben in his right.

The lead truck took off into the darkness, its single working headlight bobbing and bouncing as Groppione hustled across the desert as fast as he could. Bozza followed, silent and grim as ever.

‘Talkative, isn’t he?’ Ben said. ‘Once you get him started, you can’t shut him up.’

‘Ugo doesn’t speak,’ Bellini said. ‘Not to me, not even to Usberti. Least of all to you. He’s taken a vow of silence. And I would advise you to follow his example. Don’t make this worse for yourself.’

They kept moving fast over the desert. It was a rough ride, but Ben had had rougher. A blast of freezing wind, snow and dirt kicked up by the wheels of the lead truck whistled through the broken windscreen and all around the inside of the cab. The bobbing tail-lights ahead were barely visible. Meanwhile the headlights behind them gradually receded to pinpoints in their wake and finally vanished altogether, leaving their little convoy alone in the vastness of the night.

Ben was picturing Anna sitting there in the lead truck next to Usberti, wondering what the bastard was saying to her, wishing he could have done something to prevent the situation getting so bad. And he was thinking about all the possible ways he could disarm Bellini and kill both him and Bozza without using his hands.

The first part wouldn’t have been too hard. Speed and surprise would be half the battle. Ben’s upper body was already canted slightly forwards out of his seat because of his cuffed wrists in the small of his back, which potentially gave him an advantage. A violent curved lunge to the right, one good solid head-butt straight to Bellini’s forehead, and he could smash the guy’s glasses off, break his nose, then use his elbow to knock the weapon out of his hand before he pulled the trigger, and then flip himself around to kick hard with both boots and send Bellini flying right out of the damaged door. One down, maybe three seconds.

But taking on Bozza no-handed was a different matter. It would be the most efficient form of suicide imaginable. Ben closed his eyes, willed his mind and body to relax, and resolved to wait for a better opportunity.

After a few more minutes he sensed that they were slowing down. He opened his eyes again, expecting to see the lead truck doing the same. It wasn’t. The gap between them was widening, Usberti leading further and further ahead. For a moment Ben thought something was wrong with the engine, even though the rattle from under the bonnet hadn’t got noticeably worse. It wasn’t fuel, either. The gauge was reading a third full. Then he realised that Bozza was deliberately slackening his pressure on the gas. The speedometer needle dropped to forty kilometres an hour. Then thirty-five. The dirt spray from the lead truck would obscure most of what Groppione would be able to see in his mirrors. They wouldn’t know what was happening behind them.

And something was happening, for sure. Ben could sense it almost telepathically, just like he could feel the strange energy emanating from the silent killer sitting next to him.

‘Ugo, why are we slowing down?’ Bellini said. He was shivering so much from the cold that his voice was full of tremors. ‘What are you doing? I don’t understand.’

But Ben understood.

He wasn’t the only one planning his moves, waiting for the right moment.

Bozza let the truck roll to a halt.

Then he turned off the engine.