12
As soon as the three figures appeared on the far side of the deserted encampment, the terrorist who had been running towards the tents — Farooq’s companion — stopped. He braced himself, legs slightly apart, left hand holding the wooden fore-end of his Kalashnikov, his other hand wrapped around the pistol grip. He reached up and shifted the fire selector from full to semi-automatic, then took careful aim at the running figures.
The people he was trying to kill were over a quarter of a mile away and appeared to be little more than distant blobs over the iron sights of the AK-47. It would have been a difficult shot to hit a paper target at such a distance even in the relatively calm surroundings of a range. The shooter was panting from his exertions. Running even a short distance in the punishing heat of the desert was debilitating, and his targets were moving in such an erratic fashion that holding even one of them within his sight picture for more than a second or so was almost impossible.
But he tried.
He took two deep breaths to try to control his breathing, aimed the weapon more or less at the middle of the three distant figures and squeezed the trigger gently. The Kalashnikov kicked against his shoulder as the gas-operated mechanism ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and loaded another round. He altered his aim slightly and fired again.
A few dozen yards behind him, Farooq mirrored his actions, firing single shots towards the fugitives.
But within seconds it became clear that the distance was simply too great and the targets far too elusive for there to be any realistic chance of cutting them down.
‘Save your ammunition,’ Farooq instructed, running up to his companion. ‘Get after them and do not shoot again until you are certain of a kill.’
The other man nodded and ran off towards their quarry. As he did so, Farooq pressed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie.
He knew that the three fugitives had already made a bad mistake. He could see that they had just run past the vehicle park and had continued out into the open desert, presumably intending to escape that way or hide among the dunes, and Farooq knew that that was never going to work.
They were unarmed and on foot, and the easiest way to run them down was simply to summon the 4x4 and the lorry that was waiting out to the west of the encampment. Because however far and however fast the three fugitives ran, they could neither out-distance the vehicles nor hide from Khaled and the rest of his men.
‘Yes?’ Khaled responded.
‘We see them, and Mahmoud is—’
‘What do you mean “them”?’
‘There are three of them. I think one is the woman.’
‘It had better be her,’ Khaled said. ‘Where are they?’
‘Mahmoud is following them, but they’ve headed off into the desert, out to the east. If you bring the 4x4 over here we’ll be able to catch them in a few minutes.’
Over the open mike of the walkie-talkie, Farooq heard Khaled instruct the driver to start the jeep and head towards the encampment.
‘You mean they ran out of the camp but didn’t take one of the vehicles?’ Khaled asked.
‘Exactly. They ran straight past the vehicle park. I think they probably panicked when we started shooting at them.’
Khaled didn’t respond for a moment, but when he spoke again Farooq could hear the urgency in his voice.
‘How many jeeps are in the parking area?’
Farooq scanned the flat ground to the south of the encampment. ‘I can see four.’
‘That’s why they’re run into the desert,’ Khaled snapped. ‘They have five jeeps. They must have one of them parked outside the camp. You have to stop them. Right now.’
Farooq clicked the microphone button once in acknowledgement, but he had already started running in the same direction as Mahmoud and the three fugitives.
13
Bronson would have been less worried if the men behind them had continued firing in their direction. The fact that they’d stopped meant that they were thinking. Instead of continuing to fire at them, the terrorists were clearly trying to close the distance as quickly as possible to get within range.
Their feet pounded on the hard surface as they headed down to the dip in the valley floor where they’d left the Land Cruiser. As the ground fell away, Bronson knew that they would no longer be visible to the two men who were chasing them.
‘Just run straight,’ he yelled, as the welcome bulk of the Land Cruiser came into view.
When they got about twenty yards away from the vehicle, Angela pressed the button on the remote to unlock the doors. The hazard warning lights flashed obediently. She reached out and grabbed Bronson’s arm and then pushed the key into his hand.
‘You drive,’ she gasped, her chest heaving as she sucked in air through her open mouth.
Stephen wrenched open the rear door of the Toyota and clambered into the back seat, while Angela climbed into the front.
Bronson pulled open the driver’s door, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it to start the engine even before he pulled the door closed. He engaged first gear, lifted his foot off the clutch pedal and simultaneously gave the engine full power, swinging the vehicle around to follow the faint tracks the Toyota had made when they’d arrived.
‘Keep low,’ he instructed as the vehicle surged forward.
He picked the obvious route, following the track and keeping the Toyota running in a straight line, to cover the maximum distance as quickly as possible, but he was watching the rear-view mirror at the same time, preternaturally alert for the first sign of danger. For the first indication that the pursuing men had reached a point from which they could see — and more importantly shoot at — the vehicle.
Suddenly, he saw the unmistakable figure of a gunman appear near the top of the dunes behind them.
‘Hang on. Put the belts on.’
Bronson swerved to the right, straightened up briefly, then swung the steering wheel left, then right again, all the time doing his best to keep the big diesel engine running at high revolutions and the vehicle travelling as fast as possible.
He was acutely aware that the Toyota offered a much bigger target to the gunmen than the three of them had when they’d run from the camp, and he also knew that the metal bodywork of the Land Cruiser would offer about as much protection to a bullet from an assault rifle as a sheet of cardboard.
It wasn’t like in the movies. In real life, bullets don’t bounce off cars. They go straight through them.
But what he was really trying to do, apart from giving the gunmen a difficult, fast-moving and manoeuvring target, was to generate a big enough cloud of dust and sand to make the 4x4 virtually invisible. And judging by what he could see in the mirrors, he had certainly achieved that. The gunman he had seen on the dune had now completely vanished behind the yellowish-brown haze created by the speeding vehicle.
But even over the roaring sound of the big diesel engine, the repetitive crack of an assault rifle was still audible, some distance behind them. Bronson continued manoeuvring the heavy off-road vehicle as violently as he could, while still covering the ground as quickly as possible.
He glanced in the interior mirror at Stephen who was as white as a sheet. Angela, in contrast, looked remarkably calm, one hand holding the grab handle above the door, and the other braced against the dashboard as she stared out through the windscreen at the seemingly endless and largely uniform range of dunes that stretched out ahead of them.
‘I don’t know how to work the satnav, the GPS, I mean,’ Bronson said to her, changing up a gear, ‘so can you input the next waypoint or whatever it is you would normally do to get back to Kuwait City?’