cab.
“Let’s give up now, before they kill us.”
“They’ve got no fighting men on board,” Gilly yelled back at him. “There’s nothing they can do.”
“Give up,” the doctor whined. “Let’s get out of this alive.” And
Gilly O’Shaughnessy threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“I’m keeping three bullets, doctor, one for each of us-“
“They’re right on top of us.” Gilly snatched up the pistol and once again thrust his head and right shoulder out, twisting to look upwards.
The eye-searing lights beamed down upon him, very close above. It was all he could see and he fired at them, the crash of the shots lost in the clattering whistling roar of the rotors and the tearing rush of the wind.
oised in the hatchway, Peter counted the bright orange spurts of gunfire. There were five of them, but there was no sound of passing shot, no thump of the strike.
“Get lower!” he shouted at the engineer, reinforcing the order with urgent hand signals, and obediently the big machine sank down upon the racing Austin.
Peter gathered himself, judging his moment carefully, and when it came he launched himself clear of the hatchway, and his guts seemed to cram into his throat as he dropped.
He dropped with all four limbs spread and braced to land together,
but for a moment he thought he had misjudged it and would fall behind the Austin, into the metal led roadway, to be crushed and shredded by the forward impetus of the low-flying helicopter.
Then the Austin swerved and checked slightly and Peter crashed into its roof with stunning force; he felt the metal buckle and sag under him, and then he was rolling and slipping sideways. His whole left side was numbed by the force of impact, and he clutched wildly with his right hand, his fingernails tearing at the paintwork, but still he slid towards the edge, his legs kicking wildly in dark rushing space.
At the last instant before he was hurled into the roadway, his clawed fingers hooked in the framework of the roof rack, and he hung bat-like from his one arm. It had taken only a small part of a second,
and immediately the driver of the Austin realized that there was a man on the roof. He slewed the little car from one side of the road to the other, short wrenching turns that brought her over on two outside wheels before slamming back and twisting the other way.
“The tyres squealed harsh protest, and Peter was flung brutally back and forth, the muscle and tendons of his right arm popping and creaking with the strain of holding on but feeling was flooding swiftly back into his numbed left side.
He had to move quickly, he could not survive another of those wrenching swerves, and he gathered himself, judged the Austin’s momentum, and used it to roll and grab with his free hand; at the same moment the toes of his soft boots found purchase on one of the struts of the roof carrier, and he pressed himself belly down, clinging with both arms and legs to the wildly swinging machine.
The Austin checked and steadied as a steep turn appeared ahead in the arc lights of the helicopter which still hung over them. The driver shot the car into the corner, and ahead of them was a long extended drop as the road twisted down the-hills towards the coast.
Peter half lifted himself and was about to slide forward when the metal six inches in front of his nose exploded outwards, leaving a neatly punched hole through the roof, and tiny fragments of flying metal stung his cheek; at the same moment the concussion of the pistol shot beat in upon his eardrums. The driver of the Austin was firing blindly up through the coach work and he had misjudged Peter’s position above him by inches. Peter threw himself desperately to one side, for an instant almost losing his grip on the struts of the carrier and another pistol bullet clanged out through the metal roof, that one would have taken him through the belly, and Peter had a fleeting image of the kind of wound that it would have inflicted, the bullet would have been mushroomed and deformed by the roof and would have broken up inside his body.
Desperately Peter threw himself back the opposite way, trying to outguess the gunman below him, and once again the crash of the shot and the metal roof erupted in a little jagged pockmark, flecking the paintwork away so the rim of the bullet hole shone like polished silver shilling. Again it would have hit him, if he had not moved.
Peter rolled again, tensing his belly muscles in the anticipation of the tearing, paralysing impact, expecting the gun shot which did not come. Only then he remembered the wasted pistol fire the driver had thrown up at the hovering helicopter. He had emptied his pistol and as the realization dawned on Peter there was another completely compelling sound, very faint in the drumming rush of the wind and the engine roar but unmistakable. It was the sound of a young girl screaming and it galvanized Peter as nothing else, even the threat of death, could have done.
He came up on toes and fingers, like a cat, and he went forward and to the right, until he was directly above the driver’s seat.
The girl screamed again, and he recognized Melissa-Jane’s voice.
There was no question of it, and he slipped the Walther from its quick-release holster and cocked the hammer with the same movement, one glance ahead and they were rushing down on another turn in the narrow road. The driver would be using both hands to control the swaying and bucking little machine.
“Now!” he told himself, and dropped forward, so that he was peering backwards and upside-down through the windScreen directly into the driver’s pale face and at a distance of only eighteen inches.
In the thousandth part of a second Peter recognized the dark,
wolfish features and the cold, merciless eyes of the killer. He had hunted this man for many years and studied his photograph endlessly when the hunting of the Provo terrorists had been his life’s work.
Gilly O’Shaughnessy was driving with both hands, the pistol still gripped in one of them and the chamber open for reloading. He snarled at Peter like an animal through the bars of its cage, and Peter fired with the muzzle of the Walther touching the glass of the windscreen.
The glass starred into a glittering sheet, white and opaque, and then it collapsed inwards with the force of the wind, filling the interior of the Austin with flying diamond chips of sparkling glass.
Gilly O’Shaughnessy had thrown up both hands to his face, but bright blood burst from between them, spattering his chest and soaking swiftly into the lank black hair.
Still hanging upside down across the Austin’s cab, Peter thrust the Walther in “through the shattered windscreen until it almost touched the man’s body and he fired twice more into his chest, where the explosive Velex bullets would break up against bone, and would not over penetrate to harm anybody else in the interior. Melissa- Jane’s screams still rang clearly in his ears, as he killed Gilly
O’Shaughnessy. He did it as coldly as a veterinary surgeon would put down a rabid dog, and with as little pleasure, and the bullets punched
Gilly O’Shaughnessy back on the bucket seat, head lolling from side to side, and Peter expected the howl of the engine to cut out now as the dead man’s foot slipped from the accelerator.
It did not happen. There was no change in the engine beat, the body had slid forward and jammed, the knee under the dashboard bearing down fully on the pedal, and the little car flew down the slope of the hill, the stone walls on each side blurring past as though down a tunnel in the depths of the earth.
Peter wriggled forward and thrust both arms through the shattered windscreen and caught the untended wheel as it began to spin aimlessly.
He checked the Austin and swung her back into the road but she had been driven to her limits, rocking and swaying crazily before she righted herself and flew down the hill.
It was almost impossible to judge the control needed to keep her on the road.
Peter was hanging head down, gripping only with knees and toes,
and he had to manipulate the wheel from this inverted position with his upper arms sawing across the teeth of jagged glass still remaining in the frame of the windscreen.
The wind whipped and clawed him, and Gilly O’Shaughnessy’s body flopped forward bonelessly onto the wheel, jamming it at a critical moment, so that while Peter used one hand to shove him backwards, the side of the Austin touched the stone wall with a screech of rending metal and a shower of orange sparks. Peter wrenched her back into the road, and she began a series of uncontrolled broadsides, swinging wildly from side to side, touching the wall with another jarring shock,
then swinging back sideways to bounce over the verge, then back again.
She was going over, Peter knew it, and he would be crushed under the metal roof and smeared along the
