Then Daz stood up on his footpegs and backhanded the bottle he was holding straight down onto the windscreen directly in front of the driver, like he was christening a battleship.
Even from our position, we saw the paint spray up.
“Bull’s-eye!” I heard Daz yell. “He’s all yours!”
The Merc had began to snake wildly, scrubbing off speed until it was down to less than fifty. We dropped our own speed back to match and I held my breath hoping the van would stop of its own accord. After a few seconds it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. They must have known this was an ambush now, and their only chance to avoid disaster was to keep moving.
“Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Sean’s voice said in my ear. “You ready?”
“Lead on,” I said, terse.
Sean ripped away the tape holding Paxo’s Zippo lighter to the headstock of the Blackbird. He already had a row of the mini sparklers we’d taken from the hotel dining room jammed in around the bike’s clocks, where the rake of the fairing would keep them more or less out of the buffeting wind.
In this comparatively sheltered zone, Sean persuaded the Zippo to hold a flame at the third strike. He thrust his hand in among the forest of sparklers and kept it there until half a dozen of them had fizzed into life. We’d timed them back at the hotel and knew you got an average twenty-second burn out of each of the magnesium-coated rods.
He swung his bike in on my right, close enough to hand over two of the lit sparklers. I leaned across to grab hold of the stems with my left hand. Even though I knew it was just about impossible for the wind to extinguish them, I ducked my hand into the shelter of the ‘Blade’s fairing, just in case.
“OK,” Sean said, seemingly right inside my head. “Remember Charlie, eight seconds maximum, OK?”
“OK,” I repeated.
“Sure?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Sean,” I growled, “let’s just do this thing and go home, all right?”
I glanced sideways as I spoke and realised he was grinning at me. In spite of everything.
I grinned back and touched the burning end of the sparkler in my hand to the one poking half out of the bottle top in my tank bag. For a moment nothing happened, then it flared and caught in a glittering shower of tiny shards of light.
One thousand, two thousand . . .
I grabbed the bottle and yanked it free with my left hand, snapping the power on with my right and shifting my bodyweight to guide the FireBlade up the passenger side of the van as I did so. I felt rather than saw Sean doing the same on the driver’s side.
Four thousand, five thousand . . .
As I pulled alongside the cab window, I could see through it to the smeared mess that was the front screen. The guy nearest me turned to stare as he caught the high rev of the ‘Blade’s engine, his mouth rounding in panic as he saw what I was holding.
Seven thousand, eight thousand . . .
I pulled past, twisting in the seat to lob the bottle clumsily over my right shoulder as I did so, in much the same way that Paxo had done. The difference being that I wasn’t relying on the impact to shatter the glass.
We’d pushed the sparklers halfway down inside each bottle, which we’d filled to about the two-thirds level – partly with petrol drained from Gleet’s Suzuki, and partly with the sugar Sean had appropriated from the hotel kitchen.
Petrol in liquid form doesn’t burn easily. It’s the vapour that’s highly inflammable and we’d left a good-sized air gap at the top of each bottle to allow it to build up. The long ride up from Dublin, sitting on top of a hot motorbike with the sun on it, had done the rest.
As soon as the sparks from our improvised fuses dipped under the taped-down caps, the petrol fumes went up. A fraction of a second later, the burning vapour ignited the liquid fuel, creating an unstoppable twin-stage explosion of dramatic proportions. The sugar helped, of course. It made the petrol burn hotter and faster, which was part of the reason we’d added it.
Both bottles detonated with a thunderous incendiary clap, the second coming almost as an echo of the first.
Mine went up first. It had already hit the left-hand side of the front end when it disappeared in an instant supernova of heat and light. I felt the concussive blast at my back, even as I whacked the ‘Blade’s throttle right round to the stop and catapulted out of the way.
Despite his own instructions, Sean had held onto his bottle a second or so longer. The modified Molotov cocktail went up, still in the air, less than a metre from the driver’s side of the front screen. The deadly mixture was already a scorching boiling mass when it plastered itself onto the glass.
I held the FireBlade at full chat for another two seconds, peripherally aware that the front end of Sean’s bike had popped up level with my knee. It was only then that I backed off long enough to risk putting my head into the vicious slipstream to glance in my mirrors.
The Merc van was on fire. The whole of the front end seemed totally engulfed in dirty orange flame, even the tyres. That was the other reason for the sugar. It glued the blazing petrol to whatever it touched, like napalm.
As I watched, the van swerved violently onto the other side of the road, into the path of a truck heading in the opposite direction. The truck locked up and the trailer stepped out, narrowly avoiding a jack-knife.
The Merc locked up, too, broadsided, skidding back across to its own side of the carriageway and carrying on without stopping. It shot straight across the hard shoulder and bounced violently down the short embankment, crashing through the wooden fence at the bottom and ripping out half its front suspension in the process. It finally came to rest, still on fire – and, remarkably enough, still on what was left of its wheels – about a hundred metres into the field.
As soon as we saw the van was going to crash, both Sean and I had grabbed for the brakes. I’d always thought the cross-drilled discs on my Suzuki had been good until I’d found out just how amazing the FireBlade’s brakes were. I felt the compression in my arms as the front forks dived, my belly wedging hard against the back of the tank.
The road was wide enough to swing round, even on a modern sports bike with no steering lock to speak of. We flashed back to the point where the van had left the road, pulling the bikes to a jerky stop on the hard shoulder. A car had already stopped there and the elderly man inside was just climbing out as we roared up. He asked us something but we didn’t stop to find out what it was.
The embankment was steep enough that Sean and I had to slide and slither our way down it, vaulting the fence at the bottom and breaking into a flat run across the field. Sean outstripped my pace easily, unbuckling his helmet as he went, yanking the radio wire out of his leathers and stooping to place rather than throw it down onto the ground. I followed suit.
The front of the Merc van was still ablaze. It was surface burn, not close to touching the inside of the engine bay or the fuel system, but Hollywood has implanted the idea that any vehicle on fire is likely to explode at any moment. I could hear shouts and screams from the men inside.