Midnight Plus One

Another shot, from somewhere back up the road, slammed into the battered Renault beside me. And another. As if it were a signal – and it probably was – my first man jumped up from the rocks and started pumping shots past my head.

I jammed the Mauser into my shoulder, clamped my left hand on the magazine, and fired.

It went off in one shortbrrap, trying to rip out of my hands. The man was hit by a sudden wind: his arms flung out sideways, then his head snapped up, and he pitched back out of sight.

Through the ringing in my ears I heard Harvey saying: 'I keep telling you the war's over. Keep it single shots.'

'I got him.' I was trying to work out how many rounds I'd fired; I couldn't. The Mauser fires too fast for individual shots to echo in your brain. I guessed I'd fired ten – half the magazine.

Harvey said: 'I count three of them's showed so far.'

'Yes. Almost like a war, isn't it?'

'The hell with you.' He fired over my head, uphill. By my reckoning, the ranges were a bit long for his short-barrelled gun but he was aiming as carefully as if he'd had a big target pistol.

Then there was a pause. The mixture of three cars – the second Renault was jammed diagonally across the Citroen's nose – gave us a lot of cover. If whoever-it-was had thought to bring a few grenades, they could have blasted us out without showing themselves. But since they'd been showing themselves, it looked as if they'd forgotten the grenades.

A gun fired behind me. I'd thrown myself flat and twisted half round to look up the road before I realised the shot hadn't struck anywhere near me.

Standing there, in the middle of the road, was a man, holding a pistol aimed at the sky. He yelled:'Arvi!'

Through under the car, I saw Harvey's arm straighten and the little gun blurred in his hand. He fired three shots. When I looked back up the road, the man was just a heap.

Two more shots came from the hillside above me, one tearing into the Citroën's roof. Harvey fired back over the top of the car, then shouted: 'Give me that thing! '

I tossed the Mauser over the Citroen and he grabbed it and fired two short bursts up the hill.

Then he stood clear of the cars, still watching the hill. I climbed slowly on to my feet and walked round beside him, looking nervously over my shoulder. But the hillside was empty.

Harvey said: 'Last seen running like hell,' and gave me the empty Mauser.

'Glad you find it has its uses.'

He didn't say anything, just walked away up the road, thumbing fresh cartridges into the Smith and Wesson. I found the Mauser's spare magazine, clipped it in, and followed.

He was standing, staring down at the man he'd shot. 'The stupid bastard,' he said softly. 'What was he trying to do? -Standing there shouting at me. The damn stupid bastard.' He lifted his foot and I thought he was going to kick the dead face – but he just tipped the automatic out of the man's hand.

He looked up at me. 'You know him?'

I nodded. It was Bernard – one of the two top gunmen in Europe. One of the men I'd asked for in preference to Harvey himself.

Harvey said: 'Yeah, I knew him, too. He must've recognised me – shouted my name. What the hell did hewant?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe to arrange an armistice. Maybe he didn't believe in dog eating dog. We give him Maganhard, we get away safe.'

He stared. 'You think so?'

'Think up something better.'

He looked back at the dead man. 'The stupid bastard. Didn't he know it was serious?' Then his voice went soft again, almost puzzled. 'I didn't think I'd end up shootinghim.'

I didn't think Bernard had expected it, either – but all I said was: 'They sent in the First Team this time.'

Harvey nodded and walked back.

That left me and Bernard. I was in a hurry to get away from this place – anybody who'd heard my Mauser go off wouldn't have writtenthat down as a bit of poaching with a shotgun – but not in so much of a hurry to leave bodies in the middle of the road. I dragged him back up the road to where the downhill rock wall ended, then off it, and in among the rocks on the spur.

Then, where Harvey couldn't see me, I gave the pockets a quick once-over. I didn't find anything useful. I climbed down to the cars.

Maganhard was still sitting in the Citroen. The girl was out and, presumably because Harvey had told her to, was picking up the empty Mauser cartridge cases. Harvey himself was studying the Renault jammed across the Citroën's front.

I got into the car and tried the engine. It caught at once, so that at least was okay. I switched off and went round to the front.

Harvey said: 'We can bounce it clear.' The Renault looked as if it had been through the coffee-grinder. We'd punched in its back end, bounced its front off the rock wall, and then shunted it along ahead of us, sideways. Its rear left wheel was locked solid, wrapped up in torn bodywork like a chocolate in silver paper.

We grabbed it by the rear bumper and bounced. There was a tearing sound and it came away from the Citroen. It was a nice light little car; a few more bounces and it was at the roadside. I'd have liked to have rolled it over and down the hill, but the locked rear wheel wouldn't roll an inch.

I studied the front of the Citroen. We'd lost both our headlights, which didn't surprise me, and the wings around them looked fairly buckled, the left worse than the right. To me it looked as if it was touching the wheel. I looked underneath the car – and then knew what our real trouble was. There was a slow, steady drip into a sticky pink pool between the front wheels.

'We're bleeding,' I said. 'The main hydraulic reservoir's leaking. We won't get far – and if we want to get anywhere, we'd better start now.'

The car had been stabbed in its hydraulic heart; the fluid – the life blood – that powered the steering, brakes, springing, gear-change, was dripping away from the main tank. 'Right.' Harvey turned to the girclass="underline" 'All aboard.' She came up, white-faced, and clutching a double handful of empty shells against her stomach. I opened my briefcase and she poured them in.

Then she said: 'I'm sorry – I'm not used to this sort of thing. I didn't know it would be like this.'

'Nobody knew,' I said. She turned away and got into the back seat.

I put on my driving gloves and twisted the front wing clear of the wheel. The main reservoir was just behind the wheel, so it was the same shock that had punctured it. I thought about topping it up with the can of hydraulic fluid in the boot, but it would just waste time. I climbed in.

The hydraulic brake warning light came on – and stayed on. I shoved the lever into first gear, took a deep breath, and we crept forward. We weren't dead yet – but we were dying.

Maganhard asked: 'Can we get the car repaired quickly?' He sounded quite calm about it.

I said: 'No. We can't get it repaired at all. We daren't take it near a garage, not even through a village: we're full of bullet-holes, and the trouble with a bullet-hole is that it looks like exactly what it is.'

We had two holes through the windscreen on Harvey's side, from his own shots just before we crashed, one through the boot lid, two through the roof, and another through Maganhard's door.

'What do we do next then?'

'Get as far away as we can without meeting anybody, dump the car, find a phone, ring somebody up, and say "Help".'

I thought the next question would be 'Ring who?', and I hadn't worked that out yet. But all he said was: 'We'll be late, then.'

There wasn't any answer to that. I glanced at Harvey. He was just staring bleakly out ahead, his eyes searching. He hadn't forgotten there was still a gunman on the loose out there, though I didn't think we'd see him again.

I turned off up a narrow, winding road up over the hill. Already the steering was getting heavy as its power faded. Soon I'd have no gear-change left; then the springing would sag right down; finally, the power brakes would go, leaving just the mechanical foot-brake.