He slowed down a little more and sat up straighter in the seat, scanning the surrounding area, trying to pick an alternative route to take. He nodded as if he’d made up his mind, swung the steering wheel to the right and began heading south, away from the direct route to the Kuwait border.
‘If you keep going in this direction we won’t get to Kuwait at all,’ Stephen pointed out. ‘The next border we cross will be into Saudi Arabia, and doing that would be a really bad idea for a whole number of different reasons.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘We won’t be going anything like that far,’ he replied. ‘I just want to move far enough away from your normal route to ensure that we don’t get jumped by another bunch of guys hefting Kalashnikovs. I reckoned if we could head south for about five miles, then we could change direction back to the east and that would be enough of a safety margin to keep us out of trouble.’
About fifteen minutes later, Bronson pointed at the speedometer and began turning the vehicle to head east.
‘We’ve covered just over seven kilometres since we turned south,’ he said. ‘That’s not quite five miles, but it’s probably enough of a buffer, and the terrain over to the left looks a bit easier to navigate than what’s right in front of us.’
‘You can navigate just with the compass,’ Angela said, unclipping the GPS unit and doing something with the keypad to deselect the navigation feature. ‘All it’s displaying now is our geographical position as a lat and long, and the direction we’re heading. And I suppose the good news is that if you’re in this part of Iraq and you point the nose of your vehicle east, it’s impossible to miss Kuwait. It’s just too big,’ she added with a faint smile, the first improvement in her mood that Bronson had noticed since they’d stumbled into the appalling carnage of the archaeological site.
He gave an answering smile, then switched his attention back to the terrain in front of them, picking the best route over and around the uneven dunes, now keeping the speed down to avoid creating a dust cloud that would be visible for a far greater distance than the vehicle itself.
Three minutes later, it became obvious that their problems were far from over.
16
Khaled ordered the driver to stop the jeep near the crest of a range of dunes so that they could try to spot the vehicle they were chasing. Given the time they’d wasted searching for the sat phone at the archaeological camp, the only sign of the missing Toyota had been a distant cloud of dust and sand, and a few minutes later even that had disappeared from view.
At first, Khaled had assumed that the vehicle had just slowed down, to avoid being quite so visible, and would be continuing to follow the same track. But what now bothered both him and Farooq was what looked like a recent set of tyre tracks — or to be exact faint depressions in the sand that could have been tyre tracks — that led away from the established route and down to the south.
‘If that is them,’ Farooq said, scanning the horizon in a fruitless attempt to spot their quarry, ‘they’re heading straight for the Saudi Arabian border.’
‘They won’t go there,’ Khaled said, with a confidence that Farooq suspected was not entirely justified. ‘They’ll still have to cross the border into Kuwait. All they’ve done is turn off route in case we were following them.’
‘So do we follow these new tracks?’
‘No.’ Khaled shook his head firmly. ‘We’d have to go too slowly if we were going to follow them. We’ll stay on the original route and keep the speed up. The second lorry must be somewhere down to the south of us by now. Contact the driver on the walkie-talkie and tell him we think the 4x4 might be somewhere near him. And keep trying to raise the other lorry as well, because that’s still in the best position to stop these people.’
A few seconds later, the driver steered the jeep off the dune and back on to the track towards the Kuwaiti border.
17
‘I think there’s a truck behind us,’ Bronson said. ‘It’s quite a long way back, but it looks as if it’s travelling pretty quickly.’
Angela and Stephen both turned round in their seats to stare out of the side windows of the Toyota.
‘Are you sure?’ Stephen asked. ‘I don’t see anything.’
But even as he spoke those words, he saw a dark-coloured vehicle appear on the crest of a dune over to their right and then disappear from view as it drove down into the dip below.
‘Now I see it. It could just be a supply vehicle of some sort,’ he suggested. ‘Or even a bunch of Bedouin on their way somewhere. We needn’t assume the worst.’
‘Of course it could,’ Bronson agreed, ‘but I really don’t want to take the chance that it isn’t, so I’m going to keep up the speed and maintain a decent distance in front of it.’
It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Trying to hide among the dunes was never going to work. The only thing that could save them, assuming that Bronson’s concern about the possible identity of the people in the vehicle was correct, was speed. That it would make them visible to their pursuers was both inevitable and unavoidable.
He pressed his foot down on to the accelerator pedal and watched as the needles on the speedometer and rev counter rose in a synchronized movement.
‘You’re kicking up a big cloud of dust again,’ Angela warned him.
‘I know. But there’s nowhere we can hide out here, so what we have to do is move as quickly as we can. We can’t hide but we can run.’
Although there was no way of keeping out of sight, Bronson did his best, sticking to the dips between the dunes rather than driving up and over the crests.
But it was quickly obvious to all of them that the intentions of the people in the lorry behind them — and it was now closer and its size and shape could be seen — were probably hostile, because as soon as Bronson had increased speed, so did the other vehicle.
‘Hang on,’ Bronson said grimly, accelerating down the side of a dune and on to the level ground at its base. ‘This is going to get rough.’
18
In the cab of the lorry, the driver was following the very specific orders he had been given. As soon as they’d seen the Toyota, a couple of miles in front of them, he’d increased speed to try to get as close to the target as he could. The obvious problem was that although the lorry was, like all vehicles adapted for use in desert conditions, fitted with a permanent four-wheel-drive system and, in this case, a big turbo-charged diesel engine, its sheer weight and bulk meant that it was never going to be as fast as the vehicle they were pursuing. Although it had got closer to the target, the tail chase was a contest that the lorry was slowly losing.
But Farooq had passed one other piece of information to the driver, and as the front of the lorry crashed down over the top of a dune and he accelerated down the slope in front of him, he also snatched a glance at his GPS unit. Moments later he steered the truck over to the right, down a long narrow gully that ran fairly straight for about a hundred yards.
‘Where are you going?’ the man sitting beside him demanded, one hand clutching the fore-end of his Kalashnikov while he held on to the dashboard grab handle with the other.
‘I’m following my orders. Wait and you will see.’
At the end of the gully, the ground sloped gently upwards on the left-hand side. The driver took another look at the display on his GPS then steered the truck up the slope. At the top, he hit the brakes briefly, then swung the steering wheel to the left and accelerated again. Immediately, the bone-crunching ride that everyone in the vehicle had been enduring eased noticeably, despite the fact that within a few seconds the lorry was travelling even faster than it had done before.