There was no reply from the front. He cocked the gun.
From his office in police headquarters in St Omer, twenty-five kilometres to the north, the man who had been issuing orders for the last hour could plot exactly the position of the fleeing car. His size, not grotesque but huge, belied the efficiency of his work. The big wall map where an aide continually moved coloured pins demonstrated this. The position of the car, kept up-to-date by the constant radio calls from the pursuing police vehicle, was shown by a yellow marker; his own men, barely separated, by a red one. Stretched out ahead of the path of the three Arabs was a near-continuous line of blue pins, straddling the minor and principal roads that led to the coast and to the port of Boulogne.
He had not expected the car to turn off from the main coast road across which his major force was concentrated, but as a precaution he had placed single police cars, each manned by two officers, on all parallel B routes. It had been his intention that the car that held his interest would be unaware that it was under surveillance before it was stopped by any one of the sixteen blocks now in place.
The use of the pursuit car's siren and lamp had changed that.
It had been a brutal day's work since the teletype message bearing the instructions from Paris had forewarned him of the need to set a major operation in readiness. By late afternoon, at a time when he would normally have been thinking of home and his supper, the fleet of black Citroens had started to arrive in the discreet yard at the back of his headquarters. He had shaken several hands. Men from the Ministry, from the security services. There had been one who wore no tie, was dressed in creased jacket and slacks, and to whom everything was relayed. That one spoke his French adequately, but was not fluent, had a Central European accent and dangled a silver, six-pointed Star of David round his neck. He was treated with something close to deference.
The local man had been told little, informed of only a part of the background to the event, but had established, and forcibly, that if a car was negotiating his personal territory then it was preferable to have his own men on its tail.
'These lanes will swallow you up,' he'd said with the certainty of intimate knowledge. 'If you have no local experience, you will lose them, easy as a flea in a rug.'
The point had been accepted. One of the canniest of his drivers had taken over from the security services' surveillance that had shadowed the car across two-thirds of French territory. It had been going well, earning congratulations from the big men of the Paris counter-espionage division, until the angry and staccato bursts over the radio had warned of the intervention of the cows. But little, he had reflected, was lost. The men he hunted were still being shepherded into the fine mesh net that he had laid for them.
'When will they reach the blocking point, on their present route?' He spoke to his aide.
'Four to five minutes, sir. Not longer. Just the far side of Fauquembergues, at the cross-roads. Where the petrol station and the cafe are.'
'Two men?'
'Two, sir. Roben and Miniux. We're in touch with them.
They are alerted and have been told they have only to hold the fedayeen a few minutes. The larger force is already heading toward the point.'
'Tell them to go carefully,' he said, adding as an aside — because he too was now consumed with concern — 'it was not intended only two should make the interception.'
It was the driver who spotted the red light in the centre of the road.
It was being waved slowly up and down, the international sign to halt. As he closed the distance the gendarme's fluorescent arm-band gleamed back at him above the brightness of the torch. He shouted to the others.
'There in the front. A police check. They're waving us down.'
It was the moment for one of the three to take control.
The man in the back was the first to react, perhaps because it was he who clasped the only firearm in the car. Someone had to lead. There had been too much indecision in the previous few minutes, too many voices raised, his own among them. He leaned forward, head and shoulders pressing over the top of the front seat. His voice was shrill, but clear and commanding.
'Burst right past him. Don't hesitate, don't slow at all.
Go to his left and speed faster as we go by. He'll be armed, so keep your bodies low as you can… right down. Don't hesitate… and when you get very close, put down the front lights, then on again.'
The car hurtled towards the lone policeman, bearing down on him at some twenty-seven metres a second. The driver could see the whiteness of his face above the dark of the uniform and rain cape, could see the shape of the torch, beam now agitated, and the movement of the illuminated arm wrestling with the webbing strap across the right shoulder. The driver could see the fear fill the face, the eyes grow large. His feet were rooted to the ground, rabbit-like, transfixed.
'Kill the lights!'
The command was barked from the back of the car, and the driver instinctively carried out the instruction. Too much initiative had been heaped on his shoulders before; now he was just able to obey, to react. Fifty metres in front of him the policeman disappeared into the blackness.
Almost immediately came the next order.
'On again, the lights.'
The driver shrieked with horror. Ten paces beyond the front of the car was the policeman, directly in their path, his sub-machine-gun close to his hip, pointed directly at the windscreen. He never fired.
The radiator of the car smashed into his upper thighs.
His body jack-knifed into the air. The car recoiled from the impact, then shuddered again as the policeman clipped the roof before spiralling over the top of the car. The driver swerved across to the right, late and with effort, just avoiding the blue patrol car parked at an angle and filling the road. The man beside him felt the nausea rising deep in his intestines and into the constricted pipe of his throat.
The third man had closed his eyes just before the fragile, toy-like figure was brushed aside, trying to shut out the vision of the gaping, incredulous mouth of the policeman.
As Roben hit the road surface, shattering his vertebrae, and destroying what faint source of life was left to him, Miniux opened fire.
From the car they saw the policeman who crouched back from the road and close to the ditch. At his shoulder was the steel-framed butt of the squat MAT 49. There were thirty-two nine-millimetre rounds in the magazine, and he fired them all at the car, moving his finger from the trigger only when the hammering kick of the weapon subsided. The bullets ploughed their way first into the engine of the car, then worked their pattern back toward the interior. The first to die was the front passenger, four shells hitting him in the chest. The driver too was struck, feeling the pain spreading from his left arm and then into the torn wounds in his side. But the man behind, protected by the bodywork and the seats of the car, survived the low velocity spray.
The car veered first to the left, then wove a way down the centre of the road as the driver fought to maintain a direction against the contradictions of the damaged steering system. His head went down once, but he jerked it upward, taking in again the contours of road, hedges and fields. A few more metres, perhaps, but not a journey. He was incapable of that, he knew. Strong enough only to get clear of the awfulness of the noise of the bullets, and the smell that they brought, and the terror that followed the collapse of the windscreen and the side windows.
He managed another three hundred metres down the road, then with great effort dragged his foot across to the brake. It took so much force to bring the car to a stop.
Vermilion blood, his own blood, billowed and spilled across his knees, and ran to a pool on the rubber mat under his feet. That was death, he could recognize that.