Then to his right he saw a smear of white weaving irregularly among the black tree trunks. Almost immediately there was a sputtering flash of pale fire from directly beneath the bobbing white smear, and the silence was blasted by the voice of Nero Jones’s tommy gun.
The Saint’s nearest protection was the police car itself, which was far from being the ideal sanctuary, since once he had reached it there was nowhere else to go, but at the moment he was delighted to put it between himself and Jones’s bullets. As he squatted by the rear wheel he heard the lead pellets shattering glass and ripping into metal on the other side.
Nero Jones obviously had been wounded as he crossed the open field on his way to the wood. During a break in the fire, Simon hazarded a glance around the rear of the car and saw his enemy standing slumped against a tree at the edge of the clearing, completely careless of the target he himself was presenting. Since he could not know that Simon was unarmed, it was apparent that Jones was in such a bad way that he scarcely knew what he was doing.
With that in mind, the Saint tried something he might otherwise have hesitated to risk. His peek around the back of the car had brought on another blast from the tommy gun. A few seconds later, hearing nothing more from Jones’s direction, he deliberately exposed his head and shoulders again. Jones was limping cautiously forward from the trees. He fired from the hip, seeming barely able to support the weight of the gun. Simon screamed in mock pain, stiffened to his full height with his hands clutching his head, and fell back out of Jones’s sight again behind the car.
Even as he went through his performance, he managed to get a glimpse of the wounded man coming forward at a staggering run. Simon rolled under the car and watched Jones’s feet approach until they were within a dozen inches of the door. The shoes were splattered with blood. Nero Jones could scarcely drag himself forward. Simon felt liquid spreading over his own lower leg and wondered fleetingly whether he had been hit without realizing it. But he had no time to wonder now. He thrust himself from under the car and grabbed both of Nero Jones’s ankles, jerking both his feet completely out from under him.
Jones crashed over backwards, his shoulders and head striking the ground first. Simon had already clutched the barrel of the tommy gun. He wrenched it from Nero Jones’s hands, raised himself on his knees, and without bothering to turn the weapon around to firing position, swung it as a club. The stock smashed against Jones’s skull. He shuddered and lay still.
Simon, still on his knees, caught a deep breath. Jones would never exercise his skill as a torturer of women again, and as much credit went to Hermetico’s guards as to the Saint. The albino’s chest had been torn open by rifle fire, one of his arms was drenched with blood, and the flesh of one of his legs had been hit by several bullets.
Jones’s wounds reminded Simon of the moisture he had felt on his own leg. He quickly checked, and what he found made his heart sink. He would almost have preferred finding his own blood. His trousers were soaked with gasoline. He lay flat again and confirmed that the police car’s gas tank had been shot through and by now was completely empty.
Simon got to his feet and looked closely at his watch. It was six minutes before three. He had no chance at all of getting back to S.W.O.R.D. headquarters in time to save Amity if he walked to some paved road and tried to get whatever transportation he could from there. There was only one way he might get to her in time, and that was by taking the van which was still parked next to the Hermetico fence. The odds were in favour of there being a key in the ignition switch, since the van’s electrical system had powered the aluminium bridge, and Simon knew that the rear of the van had not been seriously damaged in the explosion which had killed Warlock. The gas tank was safely forward near the engine.
Sirens were wailing in the distance, growing louder. The police were on the road to Hermetico — or maybe they were reinforcements for police who had already arrived. Whatever the situation, Simon had no intention of saving his own skin by running — which he easily could have done — and leaving Amity to be slowly broiled by Galaxy Rose. He grasped the tommy gun in firing position and ran back through the wood towards the van.
There were several things in his favour. The Hermetico guards’ primary responsibility was the defence of the vault. By coming out of the building and giving chase to intruders they might play into the hands of a clever enemy.
The sounds of gunfire continuing to come from the wood had probably given them additional reason for caution, otherwise they could easily have been swarming around Warlock’s police car before this. The Saint could assume that they were still inside Hermetico, waiting for the police to search the surrounding area and give an all clear.
Simon had decided that his best weapon under the circumstances was sheer audacity. He did not hesitate as he approached the nose of the van, but bore down on it at a dead run. Smoke still hung in the air, but he could see clearly. So could the guards, no doubt, but he hoped to take them completely by surprise. There was nobody near the van, though flashlights were approaching around the side of Hermetico’s dome. Someone called out.
“Look! Over there!”
The Saint was already at the door of the van. He flung it open and leaped into the driver’s seat as the shouting increased.
“There’s one of them!”
“Stop him! Shoot if he won’t stop!”
Simon’s fingers gratefully closed on the ignition key. The engine chugged unenthusiastically and failed to start. He tried again. The three or four seconds that passed seemed as large and heavy as the columns of Stonehenge. Simon braced the tommy gun against the seat and aimed it into the air through the window.
The men near the building were running towards him, shouting.
“Stop! Come out of there or we’ll shoot!”
With one hand he fired his gun harmlessly at the sky as the van’s engine at last rumbled to life. The men who had been racing towards him reversed direction and raced back for cover, and there was answering fire from up in the dome. But by then the van had jumped forward and was disappearing into the trees.
Simon kept his head low, and within seconds he was out of danger of being hit by the fire from behind. A large number of very solid trees were acting as his rearguard. He drove around Warlock’s police car. Shortly he bounced out into the open field and headed in the direction of the hole in the fence. It was just three o’clock when he finally reached it. He might still get to Amity in time.
He swung out on to the paved road and started back towards Warlock’s house by the same route the group had followed on the way to Hermetico. There were much faster roads in the vicinity, but they would be thick with police cars by now, and even on a perfectly normal night the sight of a black van riddled with bullet holes would have been enough to arouse a law officer’s interest and cause fatal delays.
So Simon had to go through the agonizing process of travelling winding country lanes at twenty miles an hour when he urgently wanted and needed to be travelling at seventy. Then the process became even more agonizing. About two miles from Hermetico he caught up with a creeping Fiat with a large ‘L’ on its rear bumper. The road was too narrow to allow Simon’s van to pass even that minute vehicle, whose driver was apparently not only learner, as his ‘L’ testified, but also an arthritic octogenarian trying very hard to disguise the fact that he was purblind drunk.