The Templar Heresy

20

The first bullets from the half-inch machine gun mounted behind the cab of the second lorry chewed up the sand less than thirty feet in front of the Toyota.

Their only defence — apart from simply driving out of range, which wasn’t going to happen any time soon — was to get out of sight. To drop down into the gullies that lay between the dunes.

Bronson hit the brakes and swung the wheel hard over to the right. The Land Cruiser lurched and swayed, and then headed straight down the slope.

He’d reacted as quickly as he could, but he still thought it might have been too little, too late, as he saw the explosions in the sand marching steadily towards them.

A second later the back of the vehicle seemed to lift up bodily into the air from some immense impact. The rear window shattered, greenish-blue jewels of safety glass flying in all directions.

Angela wasn’t a screamer, but she instinctively ducked down in her seat and squealed in terror. Stephen dived for the floor, shouting expletives.

When Bronson took his eyes from the terrain in front of him for the briefest of instants he could see the exit hole punched through the roof of the Toyota.

‘We’re okay,’ he said. ‘One bullet hit the car, but no serious damage.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Stephen said, the terror in his voice obvious.

‘Stay low, both of you,’ Bronson instructed in the chaos. ‘I’m going to try to keep in the valleys, where the dunes will hide us. Or at least hide most of the vehicle.’

But already he was running out of options. The valley down which he was driving was rapidly coming to an end, and in front of them was the side of a gently sloping dune.

Stopping wasn’t an option. Instead, Bronson dropped the Toyota down a gear, and pressed his foot hard on the accelerator pedal. The big turbo-charged diesel engine roared its defiance and the 4x4 powered up the slope, clouds of sand being blasted away from the low-pressure tyres.

‘Hang on!’

Angela and Taverner gripped whatever they could find as the Toyota again powered into the air over the crest and crashed down on the opposite side of the dune, the impact driving the breath from their bodies.

Bronson lifted his right foot from the accelerator as the vehicle lifted off the ground, but immediately pressed it down again the instant the tyres were back in contact with the sand. He was concentrating on getting the hell out of the killing ground as quickly as possible, but still found a second to take a look out of the side window to check the lorry whose inhabitants were determined to murder them.

The faint flicker from above the cab told him that the weapon was still firing, but the lorry was on the move now, the driver obviously trying to close the distance between them.

As long as the lorry was moving, Bronson knew that there was less chance of the machine gunner — no matter how good or competent he was — being able to hit them. Angela was quite right: trying to hit a moving target from a moving vehicle was as near impossible as made no difference unless they were really close together, and Bronson estimated that they were already almost half a mile apart.

But even as that thought crossed his mind, another salvo of bullets from the heavy machine gun tore up the sand just feet behind the Toyota. It seemed that the gunner was more competent — or simply a lot luckier — than Bronson had anticipated.

Then the Land Cruiser dropped down the slope, the dunes on its left-hand side providing a natural barrier impervious to even the heavy-calibre bullets being fired from the truck, and for a few precious seconds they were safe.

It was a cat-and-mouse game they were playing and Bronson guessed that there was only one possible outcome. The gunner on the lorry now knew the direction they were heading, and every time the Toyota drove out of one of the dips between the dunes, as it inevitably had to do, there was a greater and greater chance of him hitting the vehicle with his next salvo. And when that happened, they were as good as dead.

Even if they weren’t killed by the bullets that would perforate the thin steel of the Toyota, Bronson had no doubt that the men in the back of the truck would arrive within a few minutes to finish the job with their assault rifles or pistols.

What he needed, apart from a miracle, was some way of keeping out of sight, of keeping the vehicle below the top levels of the dunes until he could drive out of range of the weapon. The problem was that the dunes simply marched like a giant frozen sea, each crest followed by a dip and then by another crest, and in order to get away Bronson was being forced to continually climb over crests before descending into the relative safety of the shallow valleys beyond.

Again he powered the Toyota up the side of the dune in front of him, and again he felt the unmistakable sensation as it left the ground, and then the crash as the tyres hit and the suspension compressed all the way to the stops.

Even over that noise, the hammering of the machine gun was still audible, and again the Toyota shuddered as another one of the heavy bullets smashed into it.

Glass from one of the side windows at the back of the vehicle sprayed all around the interior. And at the same instant the opposite window blew out as the bullet continued its journey through the Toyota before burying itself in the sand a few feet away.

This time Angela screamed.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Stephen shouted again, the panic evident in his voice. ‘I felt that go right over my head.’

But again they’d been lucky. Any lower and, as Taverner had just pointed out, the bullet would very probably have killed him. And a couple of feet lower than that and it could have taken out the drivetrain or gearbox, which would have signed a death warrant for all three of them.

They were out of sight of the lorry again, Bronson steering the 4x4 along the bottom of a dip. This time he decided to stay down for longer, even though that would mean they weren’t putting much distance between them and their pursuers, because as far as he could tell that shallow valley ran like a section of an arc around the location of the lorry. But at least the gunner couldn’t possibly know where his target would appear next, and that just might give them an edge.

Bronson eased the vehicle further over to the left, picking his spot on the opposite side of the valley carefully, choosing the lowest dune that he could see, and then he steered the Toyota up the slope and over the crest and down into the next valley of sand.

This time, no shots followed as the 4x4 appeared from the dip. Bronson drove the Toyota down the opposite slope and at the bottom reversed direction to head back the way they’d come, hoping that the gunner would be expecting him to do the opposite.

Again he picked an area where the crests were the lowest, and accelerated the vehicle as hard as he could. As he steered it over the crest and down into the next dip, he saw the long barrel of the machine gun swing towards him, but too late for the gunner to open fire before the Toyota disappeared again. And they were about another couple of hundred yards away, and distance was vital. Distance would keep them alive.

Then, right in front of him, Bronson saw another valley in the sand that intersected with the one he was driving along, but this one tracked away from the position where the gunmen’s lorry was parked. He didn’t hesitate, just swung the Land Cruiser into it and accelerated hard.

It wasn’t all that long, and at the end another wall of dunes rose up, but that didn’t matter. They were now another couple of hundred yards further away from the lorry, and would — or so Bronson hoped — be coming back into view somewhere that the gunman wouldn’t expect.

And when he crested the dune, he was proved right. No shots came their way, and when he checked the rear-view mirrors he estimated that they were now about a mile, maybe even a little further, away from the armed lorry.

‘I think we’re clear now,’ he said cautiously, picking the straightest route he could and winding up the speed, while still weaving slightly from side to side, just to continue offering as difficult a target as he could. Though in reality he knew that the plume of sand the tyres were already chucking into the sky was probably their best defence.

Then through the blown-open window on the right-hand side of the vehicle Bronson heard another volley of shots, though he had no idea where the bullets struck. All three of them looked in that direction, to see the first lorry they’d avoided bouncing over the dunes straight towards them, but still about a mile away from the Toyota.

‘They’re wasting their time firing at us,’ Bronson said. ‘We’re right at the limit of his range and the truck’s all over the place.’

They continued to hear sporadic firing from both vehicles for another few minutes, but no other rounds hit the Toyota, and the sounds drifted further and further into the distance as they accelerated away.

Twenty minutes later, without further incident, they crossed the border into Kuwait and could all relax for the first time since they’d left the camp.

‘We should tell the Kuwaiti border guards what’s happened,’ Taverner said.

‘Probably not a good idea,’ Bronson replied. ‘I had a few dealings with Arabs when I was in the Army, and their mindset is very different to ours. If we tell them we’ve been shot at, the most likely outcome would be for them to arrest us, on the grounds that clearly some kind of crime has been committed and we were on the spot at the time. And if we were there, then we must obviously have been involved. Once news of the massacre at the archaeological camp breaks, we’d probably be the prime suspects for that as well. We’d be lucky to ever get out of jail.’

‘So what do we do?’ Angela asked.

‘We head for the hills,’ Bronson replied. ‘We’ve all got our passports with us — I hope — so we park this 4x4 at the airport in Kuwait City and buy tickets on the first flight out of Kuwait that isn’t going to another Arab country.’

‘Why?’ Angela asked.

‘Because if the Kuwait authorities are alerted and discover that we are on an aircraft operated by an airline based out here, they could always instruct the crew to turn it round and bring us back, or land somewhere else en route where we could be arrested. That technique is much less likely to work if we’re being flown out using a Western European airline. Even a fairly short-haul flight would do. Then, once we’re in Greece or Italy or wherever, we buy another ticket and keep moving until we get back to Britain. Then we go to the police and tell them what’s happened and let the authorities sort it out.’

‘Suppose they don’t believe us?’ Stephen asked. He had perked up considerably the moment they’d turned on to the road inside Kuwait that paralleled the border.

‘I’d rather take my chances with British justice than sit in an Arab court hoping for the best. I took a bunch of pictures of the dead bodies on my phone before we left the camp, and that will help establish our innocence. My arrival time at Kuwait Airport should be enough to prove that the killings must have taken place well before our arrival. I’ll take some shots of the damage to this jeep as well before we fly out, and that should substantiate what we tell them.’