Angela nodded, used her right arm to brace herself against the dashboard of the car while she unclipped the unit from its windscreen mount with her other hand. She began altering the programming, a task with which she was obviously quite familiar. It took her less than a minute to change the route and destination, then she nodded and reattached the unit to the mount, and checked that the power cable was still connected.
‘That’s done,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is follow the arrow on the screen. That’ll take us back to the border crossing point into Kuwait. Assuming these people don’t catch and murder us first, of course.’
‘But I can’t even see them,’ Stephen said from the back seat. ‘They’ll never catch us now.’
‘Don’t be too sure about that,’ Bronson replied. ‘Those two men didn’t walk to the camp. They probably arrived in that vehicle we saw driving past on the road out to the west, and my guess is that by now they’ll have gone back to it and they’re already chasing us. I can’t tell, because of all the dust we’re kicking up at the moment, and I’m certainly not slowing down just to confirm that particular piece of bad news.’
14
In fact, although Khaled had told the driver of the 4x4 to head straight to the encampment, Farooq and Mahmoud had still not climbed into the vehicle.
Mahmoud was following his latest orders, lying at the top of the sand dune aiming his Kalashnikov at the rapidly diminishing cloud of dust being thrown up by the speeding Toyota, and rhythmically firing rounds straight at it, guessing where the invisible target was most likely to be. There was always the chance that he might get lucky, but both he and Khaled knew that the vehicle was now so far away that there was almost no possibility of hitting it. And even if he did manage to do that, there was no guarantee the relatively small bullet from the assault rifle would do enough damage to actually stop the vehicle.
‘I don’t think that sat phone is here,’ Farooq said, stepping out of a tent near the edge of the camp. Between them, he, Khaled and the driver had checked every single tent. ‘We’re wasting our time. We need to move out right now if we’re going to catch them.’
The second lorry, Farooq knew, was already heading east on what they hoped would be an intercept course to catch the fleeing Toyota, but the chances of the truck being able to match — or even get close to — the speed of the Land Cruiser were extremely slim. Realistically, their best hope — in fact their only hope — was to contact the men in the lorry they’d sent off to wait near the track the archaeologists used in their journeys between the encampment and Kuwait City.
And without a satellite phone, that wasn’t going to be easy.
Farooq jogged back towards the jeep, Khaled following close behind him. The camp looked almost exactly the same as it had when they’d left it a few hours earlier, apart from the sheets that had been placed over the bodies and weighed down with rocks. Neither man gave the sheeted corpses much more than a glance. Their concern was only with the living, with the female archaeologist whose knowledge of the discovery had to die with her — and as quickly as possible — and the two unidentified men who were with her and who would therefore suffer precisely the same fate.
Moments later, all four men climbed back into the jeep, the driver gunned the engine and with a sudden spray of dust and sand from all four wheels the vehicle accelerated away, across the open ground beside the encampment and then turned down the slope that led away from the tents. The driver was well used to driving in the potentially treacherous desert conditions — he’d been doing it since his early teens — and he had no doubt that he could catch the fleeing Toyota.
‘Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and we’ll be right behind them,’ he said confidently.
Khaled nodded, but then shook his head.
‘That might be too late because by then they’ll be at the border,’ he said. ‘But if we can get within walkie-talkie range of the other lorry, then stopping them will be easy. There’s nowhere they can run that the Browning won’t be able to reach.’
15
Bronson was trying to keep track of everything at once — the route ahead, the endless parade of dunes, the display on the GPS unit and the rear-view mirrors, though these were of little use right then because of the cloud of sand being thrown up behind the vehicle.
A thought occurred to him and he lifted his foot from the accelerator pedal.
‘What?’ Angela asked. ‘Please don’t tell me there’s something wrong with the car.’
‘Of course not. Toyotas don’t break, not even out here.’
He slowed still further and as the dust cloud to the rear of the vehicle diminished noticeably he checked all three mirrors carefully. As far as he could see there was nothing in view behind, which was not too surprising given the speed at which they’d been travelling, but a vehicle following them was not what he was worrying about.
‘So why have you slowed down?’
‘Because we might be playing straight into their hands. I was just trying to make sense of what must have happened back at the camp this morning. We saw two men armed with assault rifles, but there must have been at least one other person in that jeep because it kept on driving past us on the track. These men aren’t stupid.’
Bronson glanced at Angela beside him, and at Stephen’s face in the interior mirror. Both of them looked apprehensive.
‘Say there were two other people in the car as well, making five. I didn’t count the bodies, but there were at least a dozen corpses back there—’
‘Fifteen,’ Angela and Stephen said simultaneously, and then Angela added: ‘There were seventeen of us altogether in the team.’
‘If only five people had turned up waving assault rifles and confronted three times that number of men, I would have expected far more people in the group to run away. Or to try to, anyway. It’s the natural reaction. They would have known, once the first killing had taken place, that they were going to die, so why wouldn’t they run and at least try to escape? So I think there must have been far more people involved in the attack on the camp than we’ve assumed so far. If there were more of them, say twenty, then running wouldn’t have been an option because the archaeologists would have been completely outnumbered. That would explain why they died in that one small area. And if that is the case, I reckon there’s a very real chance that the rest of these killers are somewhere out here in the dunes, just waiting for a chance to take us down as well.’
Neither Angela nor Stephen responded to that remark and the bad news it implied.
‘Is this the route you always follow when you go to Kuwait City?’ Bronson went on.
‘Yes.’ Angela nodded. ‘It’s the straightest way of getting across the border, and most of the ground is reasonably hard, so there’s not much chance of getting bogged down in soft sand or anything like that.’
Bronson indicated the arrow on the GPS unit, which was pointing precisely in the direction the vehicle was heading.
‘So if anybody had been watching the camp, they would know what route you would follow on the journey.’ It was more of a statement than a question, but both Stephen and Angela nodded.
‘And that means,’ Bronson added, ‘that if there was a second group of terrorists out here in the dunes, all they would need to do is plant themselves somewhere near the route you always use and wait for us to drive into their ambush. And that’s exactly where I think we’re heading.’