“Well, that was certainly exciting,” Julie said, pushing her shirt into her jeans. “What now?”
Gideon considered. “If there was a phone booth we could use it to call the auto club,” he pointed out. “If there was an auto club.”
She gave him the look it deserved and slid to the right end of the seat to scan the barren, silent rock walls through her sunglasses.
He knew what was on her mind-the same thing that was on his: two days before, two English tourists had been shot to death by extremists in a remote canyon near the Valley of the Kings, only a few miles from where they were now. They had been in a hired van. The driver had mysteriously disappeared.
But there was something else on his mind too: a new thought, closer to home but no less nasty. Like Julie he searched the clefts and outcroppings, but without his sunglasses-they were back on the bureau at Horizon House, damn it-it was next to hopeless. The clefts were too many, the shadows too deep, the glare on the sun-bleached rock too blinding. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and pushed the fly-window open as far as it would go. The temperature had dropped to a seasonally normal eighty-five degrees, but under the desert sun the flat-roofed vehicle had begun to heat up the moment they had stopped, even with the driver’s door and all the workable windows wide open. Already he was imagining that his tongue had begun to thicken, the back of his throat to turn gluey.
“What we need,” Julie said, continuing to scan the cliffs methodically, side to side, down one face and up the next, “is a plan.”
He laughed. “My sentiments exactly. What do you say-”
“Look there.” She pointed upward and a little behind them. “On top, you see that formation like a-a long set of organ pipes?”
Gideon squeezed his way past her knees, crouched in the space next to the passenger door, and peered out, shielding his eyes against the blaze of sky and limestone. “Yes…”
“Just to the left of that and down a little, there’s a kind of hollow-”
Near his cheek something pulsed in the air, a vibration, a flutter, as of an invisible bird wing; a queer sensation he knew he’d never felt before. At the same time something thudded into the mess on the floor, and a fraction of a second later there was a crack from outside, followed by a diminishing grumble of echoes. Gideon had been half-expecting it, and still it took a blank, shocked moment to register. They were being shot at. Hurriedly, he pulled a similarly stunned Julie roughly away from the window, to the other side of the van.
“Are you all right?” he asked with his heart in his throat. “It didn’t-?”
She shook her head, her black eyes round. “No… I’m all right. ”I think it went between us.“
And without much room to spare, he thought shakily. Through the open window with about four inches on either side.
She was still staring at him. “I saw him,” she whispered. “I saw his face! I saw the gun-I couldn’t believe he was really going to shoot at us. Gideon, it’s-”
“I know. Forrest Freeman.”
“Yes! You saw him too?”
No, he hadn’t seen him, but he knew. It was Forrest who had the head, Forrest who had killed Haddon, Forrest who was up there now with a rifle-his trusty Anatolian boar-hunting rifle, no doubt-bent on killing them.
“You knew! she said with a flare of exasperation. ”How long have you-“
“About a minute and a half. Julie, I’d say this would be a good time to come up with that plan. We can’t just wait here for him to come and get us.”
“Agreed.”
Their eyes roved over the interior of the van. What they were looking for, Gideon hardly knew, but something -a decoy, a trap, a weapon… In the space behind the rear row of seats he found a jack, the handle of which was an angled tire iron about fifteen inches long. He pulled the iron out of the jack and hefted it. It would make a formidable club but how much help it was going to be against a rifleman shooting at them from behind a rock eighty feet above their heads was “I don’t believe it!” Julie exclaimed. “The key!”
He followed the line of her pointing finger and there- amazingly, wondrously-was the ignition key, trailing a six-inch piece of wood with a red enamel 2 painted on it, fixed firmly in the ignition slot. In his agitation Gawdat had either been unable to get it out or had forgotten about it altogether.
They looked at each other. They had a plan after alclass="underline" they could drive out of the box canyon.
“Okay, then-” he said.
The small, unopenable window in the passenger door exploded, scattering glass shards. A thread of dust puffed from the seat, exactly where Julie had been sitting moments before. For a couple of seconds they sat wordlessly, not moving, anticipating another bullet, but none came; only the single, desultory shot, as if Forrest merely wanted to let them know that he hadn’t lost interest.
They let out their breath. “Well, the angle’s the same,” Julie observed coolly, looking from the shot-out window to the hole in the seat. “He’s still in the same place.”
Gideon nodded. “It overlooks the entrance to the canyon. He figures he can catch us if we make a run for it.”
“Let’s hope he can’t.”
“At fifty miles an hour, I doubt it.”
The angle of the shots-which would be the same as the shooter’s angle of vision-also made it clear that Forrest couldn’t see them and wouldn’t be able to see the driver’s seat either. But all he had to do to change that was to climb down twenty or thirty feet. And that he would surely do, more likely sooner than later.
So it was time to go. He squeezed her hand and snaked between the front seats, sitting quietly for a moment to make sure he knew how the floor-mounted gear lever worked and just where the clutch and gas pedals were. He didn’t expect to have much use for the brake. He thought about pulling shut the driver’s door, left open by Gawdat, but decided he was better off not sticking his arm out into the open.
“Better get down, Julie. Get on the floor.”
He pressed on the clutch pedal, shifted reasonably smoothly from third gear, where the fleeing Gawdat had left it, to neutral, turned the key in the ignition, and held his breath. The engine hesitated, chittered, and caught. He shifted into first and stepped on the gas pedal. The car pitched forward, stopped, pitched, stopped, pitched “The emergency brake!” Julie shouted.
“Where the hell is it?” he yelled back, bumping his head as they jerked along in a sort of automotive seizure, but before he could find it something beneath the floorboard gave way and the van sprang powerfully forward at last, gathering speed. He shifted to second.
“You okay?” he called over his shoulder.
“Oh, fine,” came Julie’s voice from the floor. “Having a wonderful time.”
He thought he’d heard at least one shot over the start-up commotion but apparently the startled Forrest had missed, and now they were quickly putting distance between themselves and him.
That was the good part. There were several bad parts.
First, they were headed into the canyon, not out. To get out of it he was going to have to get the van turned around and come barreling back through the entrance, right under Forrest’s nose. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t see that there was any choice.
Second, the promised fifty miles an hour was out of the question. They were going to have to do it at no more than twenty. The canyon floor wasn’t made for anything less than a half-track, and he didn’t dare shift above second gear for fear of getting stuck in the loose, rough terrain. And even if he chanced that and got away with it, he’d wind up breaking their necks or cracking their skulls at anything faster. Already they were bouncing crazily along again, the way they’d been when Gawdat had been driving. And they were tipped precariously to one side, hugging the sloping, rocky scree at the base of the cliffs; it was the only way to get enough room to turn the van around without having to slow down even more, or backing up.