He peered back across the dunes and this time saw the Cadillac lurch to a standstill, its nose buried in sand, under a pall of black smoke. Its windows and doors were still closed.
He tried to position himself against the rear wing of the Rover, but burned his hand and elbow on the metal. He would have to fire from a standing position, using the sling as his only support. He had brought the muzzle up, when two things happened.
A voice began yelling from somewhere behind him, and two bullets clanged into the back of the Range Rover. A second later a double crack reached him from the direction of the Cadillac. The voice yelled again, ‘Packer, you crazy bastard —!’
Sarah had climbed out on her side and was scrambling up the steep dune. On the ridge, against the glaring grey sky, stood the tall thin figure of Ryderbeit. Packer, half blinded by sweat, blinked at him, just as a spurt of sand appeared a couple of feet away from him and another sharp crack came from the Cadillac.
He began to run, stumbled, and fell on his hands and knees. There was another shot and he heard the second, smaller crack of the bullet’s sonic boom as it passed by his ear.
He was crawling up the dune on all fours, hardly feeling the pain in his burned fingers. He heard more shots, but they seemed to come from a great distance, like echoes; and the dune was becoming steeper, until he felt as though he were clawing his way up a sheer wall of sand. His fingers and face were burned raw, and he could feel the searing heat through his shirt and trousers, and a deep dull pain in his back and belly.
A pair of boots came slithering down beside him, kicking hot sand into his face. Hands grabbed him under the armpits and he heard Sarah crying, sobbing, ‘Oh my God, no! Is he all right?’
Then Ryderbeit: ‘Shut up, and give me a hand!’
They dragged him between them, down the spoon-shaped bowl of the salt-pan, across the fifty yards to where the Fieseler Storch stood ready for take-off.
Sarah, in her preposterous evening dress, was almost too weak to climb aboard; and it was Ryderbeit alone who hauled Packer’s inert weight up into the oven-hot Perspex capsule of the cockpit, where he dumped him down in the observation seat. Packer found that he had lost all sensation from the waist down; and when he opened his eyes he noticed that there was blood on Ryderbeit’s hands and shirt — only Ryderbeit wasn’t bleeding.
Packer sat propped against the flimsy door, feeling nothing. A long sleep came over him. It was only when Sarah squeezed herself awkwardly in beside him, having to sit half in his lap, that she realized that Packer’s dreamy expression was one of death.
She did not move, did not shift her hand from the pool of blood that was seeping on to the seat beneath them. Her hands closed round Packer’s head, and she began rocking it, weeping with no sound above the roar of the engine.
They took off at a steep angle, and far below could see the two cars, tiny and remote, like a pair of dead insects caught in the vast grey wilderness of the desert. Ryderbeit began to laugh. Sarah did not seem to hear him.
‘There’s a certain lovely poetry in it!’ he yelled.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
Ryderbeit shook his head, still laughing, and jabbed his thumb at Packer’s upright body. ‘That bullet is going to work out pretty bloody expensive. In fact, it’s going to cost Fat Man three-quarters of a million fucking quid!’
He was laughing again when they landed in Beirut; and Sarah began to cry again.
***
Want to carry on the adventure? Read DEAD SECRET — Book Five in the Charles Pol Espionage Thriller series.
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ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS
THE CHARLES POL SERIES
Barbouze
The Tale of the Lazy Dog
Gentleman Traitor
Dead Secret
Holy of Holies
OTHER NOVELS
Long Run South
The Widow’s War
Snake Water
The Beria Papers
The Brotherhood
Published by Sapere Books.
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United Kingdom
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Copyright © Alan Williams, 1976.
Alan Williams has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.
eBook ISBN: 9781913518561
