Then he was gone. Still armed and dangerous, still out there. Ben looped the rifle’s tactical sling around his shoulder, scrambled down from the ridge and ran back to rejoin Jude.
‘Where did you get that thing?’ Jude asked in astonishment, gaping at the rifle. He obviously hadn’t noticed the corpse lying just a few yards away.
‘From the sniper up there,’ Ben said.
‘You mean you just took it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Who are you?’
‘We don’t have time for a conversation,’ Ben said. ‘Grab the dog and let’s go.’
They ran back towards the car, Ben cradling the rifle, Jude clutching Scruffy to his chest. At the top of the slope overlooking the road, Ben caught Jude’s arm and pulled him to a halt.
‘Shit,’ Jude breathed as he saw the Range Rover and the two men standing by the Mazda.
‘Turn away,’ Ben said.
‘What?’
‘Don’t look.’
Jude understood and turned away. Ben dropped to one knee, levelled the rifle and fired. Slid the bolt smoothly back and forth and fired again. ‘Now move,’ he said to Jude. The rifle’s magazine was empty. He let the weapon drop as they ran down the slope towards the car.
‘Are they dead?’ Jude gasped when he saw the two bodies lying in the road.
‘You want to take their pulses?’ Ben said. ‘Then get in the car and stay there this time.’ Jude obeyed numbly as Ben retrieved the things the men had taken from the Mazda. One corpse had the shotgun slung over his shoulder. The other had Ben’s bag, with Simeon’s laptop still inside. Ben quickly tossed the bag and the sniper rifle into the back of the car. He racked the pump of the shotgun and aimed it at the radiator of the Range Rover. There was still at least one guy out there on the moor, but an ounce of solid lead through the engine block ought to prevent anybody following them.
Before Ben could squeeze the trigger, a ripping burst of machine gun fire tore up the road at his feet. He threw himself back behind the Mazda, yelling at Jude to keep his head down. He blasted three shotgun slugs up the hillside, more to cover himself as he retreated to the driver’s door than to hit anything. And he hadn’t hit anything, because in the next instant another sustained burst of gunfire from the hillside punched a line of 9mm holes through the bodywork of the Mazda and shattered the back window. Jude let out a yell from inside the car.
‘Are you hit?’ Ben shouted.
‘No! Get us out of here!’
Ben clambered in behind the wheel, dumping the hot, smoking shotgun in Jude’s lap. He twisted the key. The Mazda’s starter motor turned over but didn’t fire.
Bullets raked the side of the car and shattered the side mirror. The dog was howling in Jude’s arms. Ben threw a glance back and saw two men racing down the hillside towards the Range Rover. He twisted the key again.
This time, the Mazda rasped into life. Ben revved it into the red, popped the clutch and the spinning wheels threw up a tide of mud as the car slewed out of the ditch and went skidding away down the road. But something was wrong. The handling was way off, the car pulling badly to the right. Ben realised that both right side tyres were shredded. He put his foot down and wrestled with the steering wheel.
In moments, the two men had reached the Range Rover and were giving chase, headlights dazzling now that they had nothing more to hide. Ben threw the Mazda hard into the bends, but the car was in danger of sliding right off the road on its flat tyres if he drove too fast, and the Range Rover began steadily overhauling them. Its passenger was leaning right out of his window, the wind tearing at his clothes as he let off several three-round automatic bursts from his weapon. Ben felt a bullet punch through the head restraint of his seat, an inch from his ear. The Mazda’s windscreen suddenly became a white mass of fissures. Without hesitating or taking his foot off the gas, he grabbed the shotgun from Jude’s lap and swung it one-handed at the windscreen, punching a hole that he could see through to drive. The inside of the Mazda became a howling tornado of freezing cold wind. Narrowing his eyes against the icy blast, he lobbed the weapon back into Jude’s hands. ‘Shoot!’
‘I can’t!’ Jude yelled back.
‘Point it, hold on tight and pull the damn trigger,’ Ben shouted at him as he struggled to keep the car on the road through a hairpin bend. There was a loud crunching scrape as the back of the Mazda broke out of line and hit the barrier at the side of the road. Ben couldn’t see beyond the barrier. At this moment, he didn’t even want to know what was beyond it.
Terrified, Jude twisted round and poked the shotgun through the gap between the front seats. The car filled with a deafening blast and a white-orange flash as the gun went off like a bomb. Ben saw the Range Rover swerve in his rear-view mirror, then come on again. ‘Keep firing,’ he yelled at Jude.
But now the Range Rover came roaring right up behind them at full throttle and rammed into the rear of the Mazda with brutal force. The shotgun spun out of Jude’s hands as the impact sent him sprawling half over the seat. The Mazda careened all over the road, and Ben couldn’t hold it any more. There was a jarring crash as its front end smashed through the roadside barrier. For a second, the vehicle bucked crazily as it hammered over a stretch of bumpy grass. Too late to do anything about it, Ben realised they were heading straight for a sheer drop.
Then the Mazda’s nose dipped violently downwards, and they were falling over the edge.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
For a heartstopping moment as the car tipped over, Ben thought they were about to sail right off the edge of a precipice – but then the front wheels touched solid ground with a jarring thump and they were racing down a near-vertical slope, crashing over rocks and ruts. The Range Rover cleared the edge of the drop and came roaring after them, its four-wheel drive and elevated ride height enabling it to negotiate the extreme slope with greater control. More strobing white muzzle flashes burst from the passenger window. Bullets punched into the Mazda. The dashboard blew apart in front of Ben. Sparks began to fizz from mangled wiring.
‘Do something!’ Jude screamed.
There was nothing Ben could do, except pray that the bullet-torn car wouldn’t start to tumble end-over-end, destroying itself and battering them to death inside. But even as the worst seemed inevitable, the slope suddenly began to level out. Open moorland was ahead of them, a few isolated copses of wind-ravaged trees flashing by in the headlights. Down here on lower ground, the going was much less rocky and much more marshy. Ben kept his foot to the floor and the engine revved into the red as the wheels spun in the mud. The front of the car threw up a constant fountain of brown spray that spattered the broken windscreen and half-blinded Ben as he kept doggedly surging ahead at over sixty miles an hour.
They were driving into a real marsh now, thick with clumps of reeds and ancient, rotted tree stumps that stuck up out of the mud like gravestones. Ben only just managed to prevent the bucking Mazda from crashing straight into one.
More gunfire exploded from the Range Rover. Bullets ripped through the Ben’s window and door. A red-hot sear of pain made him glance down and see the blood on his forearm where a round had grazed him, splitting the flesh.
A few more seconds of this and they were dead.
But then, suddenly, their pursuers seemed to be falling back. Ben twisted his head round to look out of the shattered rear window, and saw that the Range Rover had veered off course and was wallowing badly in the marsh, its passenger still hanging out of the window trying to fix the Mazda