“I hope you really do know this road,” Tammy said sceptically, and pressed the accelerator almost to the floor.
Simon heard one rifle shot over the steepening roar of the engine, and then the explosion of the left front tyre. Tammy screamed as her car tried to leap from under them like a shying horse.
2
At the instant of its skid the red sports car became a hurtling missile instead of a vehicle. All the Saint could do was to grab the steering wheel and keep Tammy from giving it a hysterical overcorrection that would have launched the car into a series of flips and turned its occupants into little more than unsightly stains on the upholstery.
The infuriating sense of powerlessness that overwhelmed him was at least shortlived. The buck and swerve of the car, the squeal of the tyres, the crazy Cossack dance of a hedge in the sweeping headlights, were all over in a jagged lightning-flash of time that ended in a strangely anticlimactic muffled thud, and total darkness.
The darkness, too, lasted a very short time. Even while the Saint was half stunned, every cell in his brain was struggling for life, clawing back to full consciousness. The distant sound of the rifle shot that had made the car veer off the road still echoed in his skull like a shouted word of warning bouncing down and down through a nerve-net of subterranean chambers. A less experienced, less finely tuned mind would not even have separated out and identified the gunshot for what it was; it would have been merely a meaningless part of the panic-fused sensation of what would later have been recognised as an automobile accident.
But for Simon the explosive crack still resounding in his head was a call to arms as clear as the blast of a trumpet. Unfortunately even his perfectly conditioned body was not immune to the effects of being thrown, encapsuled in steel, into a ditch at seventy miles an hour. It took him a few seconds to come fully back to awareness, and by that time the most prominent thing he became aware of was the long slender black snout of a rifle poking down through the car’s open window at the side of his head.
The lights had gone out, but the moon was bright, and when Simon’s eyes travelled up the barrel of the rifle to focus on the man who held it he had no trouble at all in recognising the face of none other than Mahmud the waiter, whose right arm was conspicuously free of splints, white bandages, or a sling.
“Are they d-d-d-dead?” inquired a rather thin male voice from offstage.
“No,” Mahmud answered with frank dissatisfaction.
“And the lame shall take up their guns and walk,” Simon said biblically.
The voice from the darkness of the car startled Mahmud, who jerked back, aiming the rifle more tensely.
“Go ahead — shoot them,” came the thin voice.
“No. Pull the girl out. And you come out, Mr. Templar, with your hands in front of you.”
The car had run into the shallow ditch at an angle, and it had come to rest with its right side higher than its left side. Simon was on the lower side. When he turned to look at Tammy she was already being half dragged, half helped out of the driver’s seat. Too dazed to comprehend what was happening, she put up no resistance. Simon might have tried some resistance of his own except for the fact that she was in the hands of the opposition before he had been able to fully collect his own resources.
“Out!” Mahmud repeated.
His voice was more frightened than menacing which Simon took to be a dangerous state of affairs. He would much rather have faced a calm professional killer than a scared amateur who might pull the trigger without even knowing it.
The Saint, accordingly, opened his door the short distance that the car’s inclined position allowed and squeezed himself out on to the soft damp cushion of leaves that filled the ditch. Mahmud moved back above the rim of the ditch, keeping the rifle pointed straight at Simon’s chest. Around the front of the car came Tammy, pushed by a man almost a head shorter than she was — the same man Simon had seen in the alley behind the Golden Crescent with the giant wrestler.
“What’s happening?” she asked groggily.
“Our friend Mahmud here has experienced a miraculous recovery and couldn’t wait for us to share his joy with him — so he shot out one of your front tyres and precipitated us into this pleasant glen.” He smiled at the tense Pakistani. “Good shooting, Mahmud, and how about introducing me to your faith healer?”
“Well, go on and do something!” squeaked the little man who was holding Tammy in accents that had more of Chicago than London in them. “They didn’t get killed, so you gotta kill ’em!”
“If I shoot, the police will know why it was done,” Mahmud said. “It must look like an accident, Kalki said.”
“Beat ’em on the head, then!” his partner pleaded. “Do something! Bash ’em with your gun butt! Just hurry up. I see lights! I see lights coming!”
“Through the hedge, quick!” Mahmud said. “Everybody, or I do shoot. This way.”
Tammy gave a faint yelp as her captor doubled one of her arms behind her back and shoved her stumbling up the side of the ditch. Simon followed at a more leisurely pace, looking over his shoulder to confirm for himself that the headlights of a car were flickering through the trees from a nearby bend in the road. If it had not been for Tammy he would have pitted his own speed and agility against Mahmud’s nervous marksmanship, but as it was all he could do was follow her through a gap in the straggly quickset and reflect on the instinctive wisdom which had led sailors through the centuries to regard a woman on shipboard as an infallible omen of disaster.
“Get your hands off me, you ape!” the female herself was protesting dizzily. “Where do you think we’re going?”
Nobody, including the Saint, bothered to answer her. They had hurried some distance into the field when Mahmud had ordered them all down on their knees. On the road, the lights of the approaching car zipped past without slowing. Mahmud started to stand up and then he squatted again as the sound of suddenly applied brakes squealed through the trees.
“They’ve seen it,” said Tammy’s diminutive escort. “Let’s beat it out of here!”
Mahmud did not argue.
“Hurry!” he said. “Run! That way.”
The Pakistani brought up the rear of the unevenly hasty procession, urging them on until Tammy almost collapsed for lack of breath.
“Over there,” Mahmud said. “Do not stop.”
Nowhere in that area is it possible to walk very far without coming to a road of some sort, and they soon reached the local limit of trackless wilderness. They came to a gate which let them out on to an unpaved lane. In a bay by the gate was a parked car. In the field opposite loomed the black shape of a barn. A gust of wind rattled branches overhead as the group stopped, and Mahmud peered anxiously through the darkness behind them. There were no sounds except the wind and Tammy’s almost sobbing gasps for breath.
“We’re okay now,” said the diminutive American. “Let’s finish with these characters and get out of here.”
Simon studied the man in the dim light of the moon. His face was skeletally thin, crowned with hair about an inch long which stood rigidly straight up on end.
“You must be Shortwave,” the Saint said cordially.
“You heard of me?” asked the little man with pleased surprise.
Simon nodded.
“What’s the latest from Radio Three?”
Shortwave grinned.
“You wanta know what I heard while we was running across here?”
He began to whistle.
“Quiet!” Mahmud snapped at him. “Everyone get into the car.”