of petrol? Was he carrying any with him?
The KTM's tank probably held about nine lit res. Four-stroke engine, thirty miles to the gallon.. . say a hundred miles, max, before he needed to fill up again. If Meehan needed a refill before then, fine. Alex could ride in and shoot him with the silenced Glock at the petrol station. Ride away before anyone realised what had happened.
If Meehan didn't need petrol before Alex did, then Alex was in trouble. Meehan would simply outrun him.
He came to a decision. He would follow Meehan until his own petrol gage indicated half-full. Then he would call Dawn Harding on his mobile, give her Meehan's position and let her Service's people take over. This was their speciality, after all.
The arrangement was professionally responsible, but also gave him a reasonable chance of sorting the whole thing out himself, which he very much wanted to do. He needed closure, as he suspected did Meehan. Their destinies had intertwined. One of them had to kill the other.
TWENTY- SEVEN.
From Moretonhampstead the dark-blue BMW took the Exeter road and then turned sharply northwards up the valley of the river Exe towards Tiverton. Hanging well back in the half-dark, Alex was still fairly certain that he had not been seen.
At Tiverton the BMW turned eastwards again. He was making for Taunton, but it seemed that caution was leading him to avoid motor ways in favour of much smaller roads. From Taunton, Alex guessed, he would work his way across country to Salisbury.
At first it appeared that Alex was right. Meehan drove through Taunton and continued eastwards on minor roads for twenty-five minutes. And then, a mile or two short of the village of Castle Cary, Alex rounded a corner to see the BMW at a lay-by three hundred yards ahead of him. Meehan must be taking a piss, he thought, braking sharply.
Shit! The fact that he had stopped on seeing Meehan's car rather than driving straight past would unquestionably have set alarm bells ringing.
As nonchalantly as he could, he wrenched open the cotton bag, pulled out the jerry can and filled the KTM's half-empty petrol tank. Then he slipped the jerry can back in the bag, bungee-corded it to the back of the seat and stretched as if he'd only woken up ten minutes earlier. With luck, Meehan would mistake him for a local. The muddy trail bike was hardly the most likely pursuit vehicle.
A palely anonymous figure a figure that Alex had last seen lit by a trip flare exited the roadside hedge. Unhurriedly, Alex swung his leg over the KTM and pressed the start button,
intending to pull level with the car and shoot Meehan where he stood.
When he was still forty yards away, however, he saw Meehan turn towards him, handgun at full stretch. A series of rounds whipped past Alex's head, and as he desperately braked and ducked he saw Meehan leap into his vehicle and accelerate at high speed down the road.
Pulling out the Glock, Alex fired half a dozen rounds after him, but without visible effect. Right, he thought. Gloves off. Let's cock, lock and rock.
There was no hanging back now. As Meehan took the BMW screaming through the village at close to 80 mph, Alex followed close behind. For the first time in his life he prayed for a police vehicle. A whooping siren and a set of flashing blue lights and his problems would be over.
But of course there was no police vehicle to be seen. Instead, Meehan hurled himself northwards, pulling every trick out of the evasive driving handbook that he could remember. But Alex had done the same course with the same instructors and was driving the more manoeuvrable if also by far the more dangerous vehicle.
He quite simply locked on and stayed there, dropping back and outwards a few yards every time the road straightened in case Meehan slammed on the brakes at high speed generally considered the most effective countermeasure against a following motorcycle.
In this fashion Meehan racing ahead, Alex hanging grimly on to his tail they screamed up through Radstock and Weston to the M4. Still no police and precious little traffic. It was Saturday, Alex realised belatedly. And it couldn't be more than six thirty. Seven at the latest.
At junction 18 of the M4 Meehan pulled hard over on to the motorway and joined the slow-lane traffic at 70 mph. Flattening himself to the KTM's narrow seat, eyes streaming behind his goggles, Alex followed as the BMW swung across to the fast lane: 90 mph, 95. The vibrations from the KTM's tyres were turning his muscles to Plasticene. His body ached, he had a cracking migraine and was having difficulty focusing his eyes.
Touching 100 mph now.
Just hang on. One of us, sooner or later, is going to run out of petrol.
There was nothing, now, beyond staying with Meehan. It was all he had to do.
Just stay on.
The Severn Road Bridge. At breakneck speed, Meehan crashed the baffler and Alex followed. He had a momentary impression of a man in a fluorescent yellow rain jacket peering from a cabin, then the tableau was far behind them and they were swerving through the buffeting winds and rain of the westbound motorway towards Newport.
A screaming turn north next, up the Usk valley. Alex was all machine now and all pain. There was no thought beyond pursuit. At times it seemed as if he and the Watchman were one, controlled by the same hand, racing to a final rendezvous that they both craved.
Which of them would last longer? They roared through Usk, Abergavenny, Tredegar and Cefn Coed. And still the unearthly emptiness and the sense of driving the dawn before them. They were in the Black Mountain country now, among hills known by name to every SAS member, past and present. There was Cefn Crew, rearing blackly over the reservoir, there was the foreshortened bulk of Fan Fawr, there was the jagged ridge line of Craig Fan-ddu. These were the rocks that they had trained over, month after month, sweating and freezing and cursing as they dragged their aching bodies and their rock-filled Bergans over the windy granite peaks.
And then, as the dark blue BMW hurled up the thread-like Cwm Taf valley ahead of them, Alex suddenly knew where the story was going to end. For there, towering over them all, was the pitiless mother of all the Black Mountains Pen-yFan. Every SAS selection cadre knew Pen-y-Fan they were harassed up and down its grey, shale- strewn sides until they hated every unyielding inch of it. One of the final elements of selection into the Regiment was named 'the Fan Dance', as it started and finished with an ascent of the mountain.
The track briefly straightened. On the wet, potholed surface the trail-bike was coming into its own and the gap between the two vehicles was narrowing. Slamming to an angled halt, pulling out the Glock and wrenching the goggles from his eyes, Alex released a fast volley of shots at the disappearing BMW. The first few missed, ricocheting from the roadside shale, but then as Meehan threw the car into the approaching bend his rear driver's- side tyre was suddenly shredded rubber.
The BMW's overturning was both appalling and beautiful. The right-hand side of the car seemed to tuck into the shale-strewn verge for a moment and then the black guts of the machine were suddenly skywards, the roll completing itself with a shuddering crash back on to four wheels.
The vehicle came to a smoking rest beside the road, its windows glassless, then Alex saw the wiry figure of Meehan drag himself painfully out. The former agent was obviously injured, perhaps seriously, but he began climbing immediately, scrambling desperately over the rocks and fallen slates up the western face of the mountain. Slowly, warily, Alex rode the KTM towards the abandoned car.
Reloading the Glock and unscrewing the silencer silencers tended significantly to reduce muzzle velocity he set off after the fleeing figure.
The two men climbed for several minutes, Alex remaining a steady fifty metres behind Meehan, until the vehicles were toylike on the road below. As they climbed so the wind's roar grew, dragging at them, deafening them, and punching at their clothes. Meehan, despite his injury he seemed to be dragging a leg was setting a ferocious pace and Alex felt the sweat streaming down his back as he followed.
At a thousand feet a shadowy rain squall crossed? the face of the mountain.
Meehan turned, his face pale and contorted with pain, and sent several rounds spattering about his pursuer.
Granite chips flicked lethally about Alex's face and then a rogue shot, deflected by a rock, punched through the cor dura rucksack on his back. Ricocheting from the Maglite torch, the 9mm round tore downwards and outwards through the flesh of the SAS officer's back.
