The temperature gauge was now within the red danger mark; but he had already planned what to do. If they were waiting at the salt-pan he was going to put up a fight; but first he was going to try a diversion, in the hope of losing the Cadillac.
It was a desperate decision, but not totally irrational; nor was it dictated by fear, but by anger — a cold relentless fury at the treachery of Pol and his scheming Levantine master, Shiva Steiner. Or was he just panicking? And was the Cadillac behind just a friendly escort? He didn’t think so — but there was only one way to find out.
He had now reached the road out across the desert, and was driving flat out. He had unfolded the map over the MI6, and was calculating, from the kilometre gauge, his approximate distance from the salt-pan. At the same time, he noticed wisps of smoke beginning to drift up from under the bonnet. His view behind was obscured by a dense veil of dust.
After another four kilometres they were in open desert, and he could feel the engine starting to grumble; his foot was still right down on the accelerator, but their speed was slackening and the floor had begun to shudder.
His anger had given way to a sense of futile recklessness. He was now certain that they were driving into a trap; yet they had come so far that he was determined to get to the bitter end, and to take as many of Steiner’s henchmen with him as he could. He also had one immediate advantage. The Range Rover is probably the best equipped wheeled vehicle for negotiating the roughest terrain, in extremes of climate; while a Cadillac is built for highways and graceful forecourts. In the open desert it would be as helpless as an elephant in a dance hall.
Packer guessed that they would be expecting him to reach the salt-pan from the road, down the same route that he had followed last night. If he could approach it from another angle, he might have a small chance. At least he would try, or go down fighting.
He calculated that he was about three kilometres from the saltpan, when he swung the Rover off the road and felt the wheels spinning furiously as they plunged into the soft sand. Like a fox reaching a wood, he looked back and saw, through the trail of dust along the road above, the Cadillac slow to a halt.
The Range Rover’s four-wheel drive howled and skidded and slithered through two deep trenches in the sand. Ahead, the dunes rolled away like shorn sheep’s rumps into the blinding blur of the horizon. Packer steered in a direction parallel to the salt-pan, allowing the Rover to follow a course of least resistance between the white-hot dazzle of the dunes.
But even so he could feel the wheels sinking deeper, their speed down to walking pace, while the black smoke from the cooling fluid was now belching out of the bonnet. But as long as he kept moving, he thought — even if it was at no more than a mile an hour. For he knew that once they had stopped in this heat they would be dead before siesta time — even if the Cadillac didn’t get to them first.
Again he peered behind and saw, across a hump of sand, the dusty black snout of the Cadillac crawling into view. Sarah now saw it for the first time, but made no comment. It was as though her capacity for fear was exhausted. She was breathing in short gasps. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to outflank the bastards. That big American job back there will burn up in no time — another five minutes and those fancy tyres will start melting like treacle.’
It was now almost impossible to see ahead, through the smoke and glare and clouds of sand churning round them. The temperature needle had passed right through the red zone and was off the dial; and the speedometer was registering zero. They both drank some water from the plastic canteen, but it seemed scarcely to moisten their mouths.
The heat had clamped round Packer’s head like a steel brace that was being slowly tightened. He leaned over the wheel, trying to steer the Rover’s deep sluggish course away from the banks of sand, where it would become landlocked for ever.
In the mirror he could just make out the black shape of the Cadillac sliding clumsily down the side of a dune, like a huge wounded beetle. When it had righted itself, he guessed that it could be doing no more than two or three miles an hour. The broad black bonnet was also wrapped in smoke, and with any luck the air-conditioner would blow, or the carburettors explode.
He gave a sudden, savage laugh. ‘Well, if we’ve done nothing else, we must have established a record for the world’s slowest car chase!’
At that moment the Range Rover bumped into a bank of sand, gave a clanking roar, and stalled. For a few seconds Packer rested on the wheel. He felt calm and very, very tired. Sarah drank some water, and Packer wasted some more by splashing it on his face and neck. It dried almost at once. Then he reached over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips and tongue were parched and did not respond.
He looked back again at the Cadillac. It was moving so slowly that he thought at first it had stopped. His fingers tightened round the MI6, his thumb slipped it on to semi-automatic — five rounds a burst — and he got out. His hands
