The speed had risen a fraction but it didn't affect things very much: it was just a question of how steady the target was when he lined up the next shot and I didn't like this because if I tried to jazz the thing around to spoil his aim I increased the risk of crashing it and giving him a sitter.
Very close and glass flew and I felt the sudden air-rush from the hole in the windscreen so it was the rear side-window he'd smashed. The two windows on the other side were still all right so he was firing from a position well above the horizontal and the explosive shattering of the glass had covered the noise of the secondary impact on the inside panel of the door.
Almost certain the observer at the Royal Sahara had picked up the telephone when he'd seen me getting back into the 220 but this ambush must have been set up before tonight because it carried communications and it wouldn't have been any use without them: this marksman had been installed as soon as they'd established that my travel-pattern included the only road between the hotel and the major intersection in the town centre, but they'd waited for tonight.
I'd used this route six times since I'd arrived in Kaifra and they'd waited for the seventh and given him the signal that I was just leaving the hotel and he'd gone up to the roof and checked his magazine and the 220 was rocking again as the third shot smashed into the door-pillar and pain stabbed into my scalp but there was no concussion: it was a group of metal splinters and not a ricochet of the shell itself.
This would be the long gun they'd used for the breaking of Fyson's nerve and this time they wanted to kill with it and there wasn't anything I could do except keep all four wheels on the road and hope to survive.
He wasn't an international. He was trained and experienced because the target was now traversing at right-angles at twenty feet per second and the only lighting was back-glare from the headlamps and there were trees at intervals across his field of fire but if he'd been an international the first shot would have neutralized: there's a conceit among the top-flight professionals like Molinari and Kuo and Tomlinson that they only ever use one bullet for each assignment.
This man'sforte was fast use of the automatic reloader: by the dull thump of the last shell after the ricochet had left it almost inert I'd say he was using something like a.44 Magnum, a brush-country weapon with enough power to drive its ammunition through a six-inch pine tree in full sap, and he'd been firing with a controlled rhythm that had kept him on the target throughout the period of three or four seconds following his first shot. I couldn't tell how long he'd be able to maintain fire and I didn't want to give myself any false hopes because it could be anything up to a twelve-shot rotary magazine and he was working at roughly one per second and if he had nine shells left he'd be using the last one while I was still in murderously close range at a hundred and eighty feet.
A hole appeared in the scuttle three inches forward of the windscreen and both the aural and visual effects resembled those from a blow with a pickaxe and it confirmed what I'd thought about the size of this gun: it was really quite big.
He'd overcorrected but this time the error was dangerously narrow: the third shell had hit the rear window approximately forty-eight inches from my head and this one had drilled the hole in the scuttle eighteen inches in front of me and it would have worried me but there were so many factors in play and one of them was the possibility that he hadn't seen where the shell had gone in because it hadn't made so much of a mess as the one that had smashed the window.
I could feel him thinking.
We were very close, he and I. Not close friends but close enemies. The total energy of his brain was devoted to the intricate equations governing our shared situation: speed of target in traverse, speed and extent of movement laterally as the target wavered, horizontal angle of fire, vertical angle of fire and the incomputable factors presented by the configuration of the palm-trees and the movement of the light from the headlamps, so forth. And the result of this mental energy was being expressed by the flight of the cylindrical objects whose accuracy was linking us closer and closer together, moving us nearer the point at which there would come profound personal involvement as the intention in this man's brain exploded in my own.
The more difficult phase of this operation is getting you to the jump-off point without attracting surveillance or obstructive action.
Put it like a schoolmistress but when it came to the crunch the terms were simpler: flesh and blood and a bullet, the will to live and the urge to kill, the moment of truth.
Oh Christ he was close and I felt the air-wave across my eyes and the force smashed the facia and sent splinters whining past my face as we drifted badly because of the shock and I tried to pull her straight and for the first time cursed him, being afraid and needing to diminish him by names. The trees swung and the lights sent their shadows lurching as the tyres lost their hold on the sandy surface and the back end broke away and I brought it straight and used the throttle for traction and got it and piled it on.
Five.
He'd brought down the error from forty-eight inches to less than one and he'd done it in two shots and I sat waiting for it, listening to the whistle of the wind through the can in the screen and watching the dips and hollows of the road as the lights pooled shadows there and then swept them away, his image in my mind, a dark face pressed to the gun, its eye brilliant in the light on the road ahead of me that was gathered by the telescopic lens and focused on the pupil, thrown on the screen of the retina for interpretation by the brain: higher and to the right — fire.
Six and the impact and a ricochet and fine glass fragments shivering in the air from the instruments and then a shoulder-blow as the shell doubled and I took the last of its inertia and the wheel jerked and I lost it, the lot, spinning once over the loose sand and rocking across the edge of the macadam with the vibration shaking the granules from the frame of the screen and the windrush sending them past me in a stream of flying hail as the flank of the 220 struck across a tree-trunk and we pitched the other way and found the road and bounced there with a tyre bursting and a headlight blacking out.
Lost it again and we spun with the last of the screen fragments shaking awayand falling across me while I dragged the manual into low to kill off the rest of the speed but the front end wouldn't respond and a palm-trunk ripped a wheel panel off and left the front fender creased backwards and howling on the tyre with its shrill note rising as I got traction in low and brought her back on to the road and shifted the lever and took the speed up again through the early range with the stink of heated rubber fouling the air.
The howling noise was very loud, marking my passage through the night, but if I slowed he'd take his time and set up the final shot and I kept up the speed, drifting crabwise with the burst tyre dragging and the one headlight slanting away from the road. Something important was trying to get my attention but brain-think was at a discount and the oasis road came up before I realized that it was a six-shot and he was changing magazines.
Half a kilometre from the Mosque Hamoud Pasha the front tyre melted through and burst and a lot of the howling stopped but the steering was very awkward now and it was really a question of howlong it would take him to get into his car and come up on me with a full magazine.