The Templar Heresy

13

Bronson would have been less worried if the men behind them had continued firing in their direction. The fact that they’d stopped meant that they were thinking. Instead of continuing to fire at them, the terrorists were clearly trying to close the distance as quickly as possible to get within range.

Their feet pounded on the hard surface as they headed down to the dip in the valley floor where they’d left the Land Cruiser. As the ground fell away, Bronson knew that they would no longer be visible to the two men who were chasing them.

‘Just run straight,’ he yelled, as the welcome bulk of the Land Cruiser came into view.

When they got about twenty yards away from the vehicle, Angela pressed the button on the remote to unlock the doors. The hazard warning lights flashed obediently. She reached out and grabbed Bronson’s arm and then pushed the key into his hand.

‘You drive,’ she gasped, her chest heaving as she sucked in air through her open mouth.

Stephen wrenched open the rear door of the Toyota and clambered into the back seat, while Angela climbed into the front.

Bronson pulled open the driver’s door, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it to start the engine even before he pulled the door closed. He engaged first gear, lifted his foot off the clutch pedal and simultaneously gave the engine full power, swinging the vehicle around to follow the faint tracks the Toyota had made when they’d arrived.

‘Keep low,’ he instructed as the vehicle surged forward.

He picked the obvious route, following the track and keeping the Toyota running in a straight line, to cover the maximum distance as quickly as possible, but he was watching the rear-view mirror at the same time, preternaturally alert for the first sign of danger. For the first indication that the pursuing men had reached a point from which they could see — and more importantly shoot at — the vehicle.

Suddenly, he saw the unmistakable figure of a gunman appear near the top of the dunes behind them.

‘Hang on. Put the belts on.’

Bronson swerved to the right, straightened up briefly, then swung the steering wheel left, then right again, all the time doing his best to keep the big diesel engine running at high revolutions and the vehicle travelling as fast as possible.

He was acutely aware that the Toyota offered a much bigger target to the gunmen than the three of them had when they’d run from the camp, and he also knew that the metal bodywork of the Land Cruiser would offer about as much protection to a bullet from an assault rifle as a sheet of cardboard.

It wasn’t like in the movies. In real life, bullets don’t bounce off cars. They go straight through them.

But what he was really trying to do, apart from giving the gunmen a difficult, fast-moving and manoeuvring target, was to generate a big enough cloud of dust and sand to make the 4x4 virtually invisible. And judging by what he could see in the mirrors, he had certainly achieved that. The gunman he had seen on the dune had now completely vanished behind the yellowish-brown haze created by the speeding vehicle.

But even over the roaring sound of the big diesel engine, the repetitive crack of an assault rifle was still audible, some distance behind them. Bronson continued manoeuvring the heavy off-road vehicle as violently as he could, while still covering the ground as quickly as possible.

He glanced in the interior mirror at Stephen who was as white as a sheet. Angela, in contrast, looked remarkably calm, one hand holding the grab handle above the door, and the other braced against the dashboard as she stared out through the windscreen at the seemingly endless and largely uniform range of dunes that stretched out ahead of them.

‘I don’t know how to work the satnav, the GPS, I mean,’ Bronson said to her, changing up a gear, ‘so can you input the next waypoint or whatever it is you would normally do to get back to Kuwait City?’

Angela nodded, used her right arm to brace herself against the dashboard of the car while she unclipped the unit from its windscreen mount with her other hand. She began altering the programming, a task with which she was obviously quite familiar. It took her less than a minute to change the route and destination, then she nodded and reattached the unit to the mount, and checked that the power cable was still connected.

‘That’s done,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is follow the arrow on the screen. That’ll take us back to the border crossing point into Kuwait. Assuming these people don’t catch and murder us first, of course.’

‘But I can’t even see them,’ Stephen said from the back seat. ‘They’ll never catch us now.’

‘Don’t be too sure about that,’ Bronson replied. ‘Those two men didn’t walk to the camp. They probably arrived in that vehicle we saw driving past on the road out to the west, and my guess is that by now they’ll have gone back to it and they’re already chasing us. I can’t tell, because of all the dust we’re kicking up at the moment, and I’m certainly not slowing down just to confirm that particular piece of bad news.’