The Templar Heresy

15

Bronson was trying to keep track of everything at once — the route ahead, the endless parade of dunes, the display on the GPS unit and the rear-view mirrors, though these were of little use right then because of the cloud of sand being thrown up behind the vehicle.

A thought occurred to him and he lifted his foot from the accelerator pedal.

‘What?’ Angela asked. ‘Please don’t tell me there’s something wrong with the car.’

‘Of course not. Toyotas don’t break, not even out here.’

He slowed still further and as the dust cloud to the rear of the vehicle diminished noticeably he checked all three mirrors carefully. As far as he could see there was nothing in view behind, which was not too surprising given the speed at which they’d been travelling, but a vehicle following them was not what he was worrying about.

‘So why have you slowed down?’

‘Because we might be playing straight into their hands. I was just trying to make sense of what must have happened back at the camp this morning. We saw two men armed with assault rifles, but there must have been at least one other person in that jeep because it kept on driving past us on the track. These men aren’t stupid.’

Bronson glanced at Angela beside him, and at Stephen’s face in the interior mirror. Both of them looked apprehensive.

‘Say there were two other people in the car as well, making five. I didn’t count the bodies, but there were at least a dozen corpses back there—’

‘Fifteen,’ Angela and Stephen said simultaneously, and then Angela added: ‘There were seventeen of us altogether in the team.’

‘If only five people had turned up waving assault rifles and confronted three times that number of men, I would have expected far more people in the group to run away. Or to try to, anyway. It’s the natural reaction. They would have known, once the first killing had taken place, that they were going to die, so why wouldn’t they run and at least try to escape? So I think there must have been far more people involved in the attack on the camp than we’ve assumed so far. If there were more of them, say twenty, then running wouldn’t have been an option because the archaeologists would have been completely outnumbered. That would explain why they died in that one small area. And if that is the case, I reckon there’s a very real chance that the rest of these killers are somewhere out here in the dunes, just waiting for a chance to take us down as well.’

Neither Angela nor Stephen responded to that remark and the bad news it implied.

‘Is this the route you always follow when you go to Kuwait City?’ Bronson went on.

‘Yes.’ Angela nodded. ‘It’s the straightest way of getting across the border, and most of the ground is reasonably hard, so there’s not much chance of getting bogged down in soft sand or anything like that.’

Bronson indicated the arrow on the GPS unit, which was pointing precisely in the direction the vehicle was heading.

‘So if anybody had been watching the camp, they would know what route you would follow on the journey.’ It was more of a statement than a question, but both Stephen and Angela nodded.

‘And that means,’ Bronson added, ‘that if there was a second group of terrorists out here in the dunes, all they would need to do is plant themselves somewhere near the route you always use and wait for us to drive into their ambush. And that’s exactly where I think we’re heading.’

He slowed down a little more and sat up straighter in the seat, scanning the surrounding area, trying to pick an alternative route to take. He nodded as if he’d made up his mind, swung the steering wheel to the right and began heading south, away from the direct route to the Kuwait border.

‘If you keep going in this direction we won’t get to Kuwait at all,’ Stephen pointed out. ‘The next border we cross will be into Saudi Arabia, and doing that would be a really bad idea for a whole number of different reasons.’

Bronson shook his head.

‘We won’t be going anything like that far,’ he replied. ‘I just want to move far enough away from your normal route to ensure that we don’t get jumped by another bunch of guys hefting Kalashnikovs. I reckoned if we could head south for about five miles, then we could change direction back to the east and that would be enough of a safety margin to keep us out of trouble.’

About fifteen minutes later, Bronson pointed at the speedometer and began turning the vehicle to head east.

‘We’ve covered just over seven kilometres since we turned south,’ he said. ‘That’s not quite five miles, but it’s probably enough of a buffer, and the terrain over to the left looks a bit easier to navigate than what’s right in front of us.’

‘You can navigate just with the compass,’ Angela said, unclipping the GPS unit and doing something with the keypad to deselect the navigation feature. ‘All it’s displaying now is our geographical position as a lat and long, and the direction we’re heading. And I suppose the good news is that if you’re in this part of Iraq and you point the nose of your vehicle east, it’s impossible to miss Kuwait. It’s just too big,’ she added with a faint smile, the first improvement in her mood that Bronson had noticed since they’d stumbled into the appalling carnage of the archaeological site.

He gave an answering smile, then switched his attention back to the terrain in front of them, picking the best route over and around the uneven dunes, now keeping the speed down to avoid creating a dust cloud that would be visible for a far greater distance than the vehicle itself.

Three minutes later, it became obvious that their problems were far from over.