The Templar Heresy

14

In fact, although Khaled had told the driver of the 4x4 to head straight to the encampment, Farooq and Mahmoud had still not climbed into the vehicle.

Mahmoud was following his latest orders, lying at the top of the sand dune aiming his Kalashnikov at the rapidly diminishing cloud of dust being thrown up by the speeding Toyota, and rhythmically firing rounds straight at it, guessing where the invisible target was most likely to be. There was always the chance that he might get lucky, but both he and Khaled knew that the vehicle was now so far away that there was almost no possibility of hitting it. And even if he did manage to do that, there was no guarantee the relatively small bullet from the assault rifle would do enough damage to actually stop the vehicle.

‘I don’t think that sat phone is here,’ Farooq said, stepping out of a tent near the edge of the camp. Between them, he, Khaled and the driver had checked every single tent. ‘We’re wasting our time. We need to move out right now if we’re going to catch them.’

The second lorry, Farooq knew, was already heading east on what they hoped would be an intercept course to catch the fleeing Toyota, but the chances of the truck being able to match — or even get close to — the speed of the Land Cruiser were extremely slim. Realistically, their best hope — in fact their only hope — was to contact the men in the lorry they’d sent off to wait near the track the archaeologists used in their journeys between the encampment and Kuwait City.

And without a satellite phone, that wasn’t going to be easy.

Farooq jogged back towards the jeep, Khaled following close behind him. The camp looked almost exactly the same as it had when they’d left it a few hours earlier, apart from the sheets that had been placed over the bodies and weighed down with rocks. Neither man gave the sheeted corpses much more than a glance. Their concern was only with the living, with the female archaeologist whose knowledge of the discovery had to die with her — and as quickly as possible — and the two unidentified men who were with her and who would therefore suffer precisely the same fate.

Moments later, all four men climbed back into the jeep, the driver gunned the engine and with a sudden spray of dust and sand from all four wheels the vehicle accelerated away, across the open ground beside the encampment and then turned down the slope that led away from the tents. The driver was well used to driving in the potentially treacherous desert conditions — he’d been doing it since his early teens — and he had no doubt that he could catch the fleeing Toyota.

‘Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and we’ll be right behind them,’ he said confidently.

Khaled nodded, but then shook his head.

‘That might be too late because by then they’ll be at the border,’ he said. ‘But if we can get within walkie-talkie range of the other lorry, then stopping them will be easy. There’s nowhere they can run that the Browning won’t be able to reach.’