doughty old stalwart of countless public transport services up and down the British Isles. And it was about to kill him on a mountain road in Hong Kong.
Carver could see the look of shock on the driver’s face as he registered the presence of a car hurtling towards him in the wrong lane. There was an elephantine squeal of protest from the bus’s brakes and tyres as he tried to check its momentum. But a Dart bus is around thirty feet long and weighs seven tons unladen. Basic physics dictate that it’s a hard beast to rein in, particularly when descending a steep hill. The driver also had the corner to consider. He started turning into the bend, cutting across Carver’s path, blocking off his escape route to the left-hand lane.
Now Carver had to make an instant choice. He could hit the brakes as hard as his right foot could manage and just pray that the car either halted or at the very worst collided with the bus at a sub-fatal speed. Or he could apply an equally powerful force to the accelerator on the outside chance that he could avoid the oncoming bus entirely.
He hit both.
First he yanked on the handbrake, drastically slowing the front of the car. The back end, however, kept moving, swinging round until the Honda was positioned sideways across the carriageway.
The bus was looming above Carver so close he seemed almost in touching distance. He had let go of his wheel and thrown his hands up over his face in an instinctive gesture of self-protection. As the bus, too, slewed round, Carver could see passengers screaming in terror. He couldn’t blame them. He was tempted to scream too. He just didn’t have the time.
He released the handbrake and hit the gas. The front wheels regained traction and the car shot forward, heading straight for the far side of the road… and the two motorbikes that had been riding behind him up the hill.
Carver heaved the steering wheel to the right, missed the leading bike by a whisker, hit the kerb on the side of the road and carried on over it so that his outside wheels actually rode up the earthen banking on the inside of the corner. The Honda tilted so far over it seemed on the verge of toppling on to its roof before Carver regained some measure of control and brought the vehicle crashing back down on to the road again. He took a deep calming breath, slowly exhaled, then raced away again.
Mabeki had gained a few extra seconds. But the chase was still on.
68
Patrick Tshonga had a safehouse, a detached villa standing in a half-acre of gardens, half a mile from the centre of Sindele. It was one of several he had used over the years as he moved from place to place, evading the attentions of Henderson Gushungo. Only his closest associates knew of its existence, and of these only the most trusted had any idea of its precise address. He had decided that this was the best place to be when the news came through that Broadcasting House had been captured and it was safe for him to make his first public appearance as leader of a free nation.
At 02.30 hours, a small detachment of Malemban special forces personnel had arrived in the streets that surrounded the safehouse. To their military training, patterned on the example of the SAS, they added their own, innate skills. They could run for hours at speeds no European could match; track human or vehicle trails over the roughest, stoniest landscape; and move as silently and invisibly as wraiths, so that their enemies died before they even knew they were in danger.
Just as the first grenades exploded outside Broadcasting House, two three-man teams blew the locks off the front and back doors to the house, entering through the front hall and kitchen respectively. A third team was positioned in the garden, waiting to cut off anyone attempting to escape from a window on the ground or upper floor.
The kitchen and hall were secured. There were two reception rooms on the ground floor. They too were checked. Both were empty.
Cautiously, each man, waiting for the first sound of a round being chambered or a gun being fired, dreading the impact of bullets into his own flesh, made his way upstairs. They had all seen copies of the plans. They knew there were three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a large storage area in the attic. None of them showed any sign of human occupation.
Only as the soldiers were leaving the building, feeling frustrated and even cheated by their lack of success, did one of them notice the tiny videocam positioned high up on the hall wall, just below the ceiling.
They knew then that Patrick Tshonga had been watching them. The unit commander immediately called his base to alert them to the likelihood that Tshonga had anticipated he might be betrayed. When the conversation was over, the commander summoned his men to gather round him.
‘The traitor has escaped for now,’ he said. ‘He is laughing at us. But we will catch him and we will make him pay for that in blood.’
69
For all its magisterial size and dignity, a Rolls-Royce Phantom can be surprisingly nimble up a steep, winding road. Moses Mabeki was enjoying his Sunday-morning drive, staying well within the Phantom’s capabilities and taking Route Twisk at a pace calculated to enable Carver to catch him if he pushed his car to the limit.
The pleasure was made all the greater by the updates from Malemba that Mabeki was receiving through his Bluetooth ear-piece. The feeble attempt at a coup had been utterly crushed. Patrick Tshonga’s escape was a considerable irritation, but all his allies had been killed or captured. Those in custody were being questioned by interrogators untroubled by any concept of human rights, or any squeamishness about the use of torture. It would only be a matter of time before one of them gave up the information needed to track Tshonga down.
The news in Hong Kong was just as satisfactory. Mabeki had already contacted Zheng Junjie and updated him on Carver’s absurd disguise and the pathetically inadequate car he had chosen to drive.
In his jacket pocket, Mabeki had the phone Carver had given Zalika Stratten. He wondered what Carver would think if he knew it was no longer in her possession. He would probably be shocked; certainly surprised. But then, that was the least of the surprises Moses Mabeki had in store for Samuel Carver.
70
They played cat and mouse as Mabeki came to the end of Route Twisk and kept driving south. Carver followed him along an urban motorway between two long lines of tower blocks that rose on either side. The road fed like the tributary of a great river into another, even mightier highway that followed the coastline down towards the port of Kowloon. As he dodged between the thickening traffic, steadily closing the gap on Mabeki, Carver saw vast yards filled with rusting containers, and barges with cranes painted in vivid combinations of red, white, yellow and blue.
Up ahead towered the sixteen-hundred-feet-high ICC Tower, the tallest building in Hong Kong. It looked like a glass rocket, sitting on its launch pad, counting down to blast-off, and for a moment Carver wondered if Mabeki had somehow arranged for a chopper to pick him up from its roof: it was a suitably melodramatic location for a man who had chosen to live as the star of his own private horror movie. But no, Mabeki kept going towards the toll leading to the Western Harbour Tunnel that linked the mainland to Hong Kong Island.
As he approached the toll, Carver finally caught sight of the Rolls-Royce for the first time since it had left the Gushungos’ driveway. It was about two hundred yards up ahead, caught in a line of cars all waiting for their turn at the tollbooth. Carver was close enough to get out and run. Every protective instinct he felt for Zalika urged him to do it. He’d surely reach Mabeki before he could get through the toll. But then what? The Rolls was virtually
