Sabatino, in nothing more than a reflex, swerved fiercely enough to the right, and jammed on the brakes, somehow preventing the Range Rover from smashing into them.
Instinctively, Sabatino had avoided a collision. But the bulking rear end of the Range Rover was now slap-bang in their way.
‘Fuck!’ screamed Sabatino at the top of her voice, wrestling the car back onto the proper side of the road, and changing down again. Then, the Range Rover, itself, swerved back over onto the correct side.
‘What the fuck’s going on here?’
Straker looked forwards and then backwards in his passenger-door mirror. ‘Holy shit. This is a tag team,’ he yelled. ‘It’s another of the scumbags.’
Looking backwards, he saw the first Range Rover rounding the corner and closing in fast behind them. ‘The other one’s coming right up behind us,’ Straker yelled. ‘We’re about to be in a Range Rover sandwich.’
‘Holy crap,’ Sabatino shouted. ‘This isn’t good.’
Straker looked ahead, trying to see beyond the back of the now-slowing car in front of them. ‘What about that turn — up ahead on the right,’ he shouted. ‘Can you cut down there?’
Sabatino clocked the turning, and then swore. ‘There’s something coming the other way.’
Sure enough, a second or two later, an oncoming car whooshed past — hemming them in — denying them the chance to peel off down that side road.
The Range Rover behind was taking advantage of their containment.
Sabatino looked in the mirror and yelled: ‘Holy Mother of God — brace yourself,’ when there was another deafening crunch. The Range Rover slammed into them again from the rear. Sabatino fought the wheel, double declutched, and tried to accelerate away, but there was nowhere to go. The second Range Rover was still completely blocking their way in front.
She made another attempt to overtake it.
Exactly as before, the Range Rover in front swung violently — straight across their path — blocking them in.
Sabatino was forced to tuck back into her side of the road again.
Seconds later, there was another almighty crunch from behind — as they suffered another ramming. This time, after the jolt of the impact, there came a sound of crunching — then straining, tearing — metal. Straker’s spare wheel had been caught in the bull bars. As the Range Rover disengaged, the tyre and the boot of the Morgan were brutally ripped away. Straker, despite the pain in his ribs, swung round, just in time to see the damage being wrought to his beautiful new car. Seconds later, the spare tyre and boot fell from the bars at the front of the Range Rover, and disappeared underneath it — its bulk only juddering slightly as it drove over and crushed the wheel and boot panel beneath its fat tyres.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Sabatino over the noise and the wind. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’
Straker looked across at her. He was staggered. Despite the urgency in her voice, her face was calm — albeit completely in the moment. Her eyes flicked between the road in front and the view in her mirror behind.
‘How are we going to do that?’
The three vehicles, line astern — Range Rover, Morgan, Range Rover — rounded the next right-hander.
The road ahead meandered gently left and right for the next half a mile or so. Sabatino looked behind, and winced as the Range Rover behind accelerated at them once again, clearly looking to slam them in the rear.
Suddenly Sabatino shouted: ‘Hold the fuck on!’
Straker didn’t know what she had in mind, but automatically found himself pulling upwards on that seat belt strap once more.
He heard Sabatino rev the engine, change down, and accelerate — heading straight for the back of the Range Rover in front. Straker braced himself against the door, the transmission tunnel — anything he could find.
Without warning, Sabatino jerked the steering wheel over the right — as if to overtake. The Morgan darted out into the oncoming lane.
Up ahead, at the end of the long left-hander, Straker suddenly saw the looming front of a lorry — coming the other way — heading straight at them.
‘Holy fuck!’ he shouted.
They and the lorry were less than two hundred yards apart, with a staggeringly high closing speed.
The inevitable was going to happen.
How could it not?
A head-on smash.
The startled lorry driver clearly thought the same — as he frantically blared his horn and flashed his lights.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ screamed Straker.
Sabatino, still accelerating, tried to build up speed.
They were drawing alongside the front Range Rover, now to their left, but were only about a quarter of the way up its length. The lorry was still coming the other way — straight at the Morgan.
And closing in fast.
But at least, this time, the front Range Rover wasn’t pulling out to block them. It certainly wasn’t going to try and head off the sports car with that lorry bearing down.
‘F U C K!!’ shouted Straker, bracing himself, despite his pain, against everything on the inside of the car. He couldn’t believe it — what was she doing? They were never going to get past. The “window” was closing — the lorry was closing in far too quickly.
The Morgan clearly wasn’t going to get past the Range Rover in time.
Then — without warning — Sabatino heaved the steering wheel. Again to the right. Straker was flung over to the left, against the passenger door, as she drove the hurtling Morgan off the road altogether — pulling up onto the grass verge — on the opposite side of the road.
Travelling at such speed over the grassy surface, the sports car started bouncing and bucking violently over the bumps. Sabatino rapidly worked the wheel this way and that, fighting to keep the fast-moving car straight on the uneven and much slippier ground.
‘Hope we don’t hit a culvert or a ditch,’ she shouted with a laugh in her voice. ‘We might really take off.’
Straker couldn’t believe it.
They were travelling at over sixty miles an hour — along a grassy verge — on the wrong side of the road.
He was suddenly distracted — almost flinched — as, to his immediate left, the lorry, its horn still blaring, shot by — with a pronounced Doppler effect — right between them and the Range Rover.
Straker looked back across the road.
The Morgan, he suddenly realized, had got ahead of the Range Rover. More importantly, and spectacularly, the Range Rover, out of sheer self-preservation, had stayed — resolutely — on its own side of the road.
Sabatino swung the wheel to the left, dropped the Morgan back on to the tarmac, pumped power through the V6 — the revs of the engine screaming — before changing up and heading back over to the correct side of the road.
Quite astonishingly, they had passed the road-blocking Range Rover. Sabatino had done it — she’d got them in front of their tormenters.
Straker immediately examined the road behind via the passenger-door mirror. Because of their speed and the vibration, though, it was virtually impossible to see anything clearly in it, save the black foreboding shapes of the two Range Rovers still behind, still giving chase.
The Morgan was bowling on.
The road surface here was somewhat bumpy anyway but, at that speed, even the undulations were keenly felt as they sped along. The road started snaking here — left and right but also up and down — to form a succession of three-dimensional “S” bends.