Saint and the Fiction Makers (23 page)

He shoved the coated glasses back on his nose as he ran and without a moment’s hesitation more or less dived on to the rollers of the bridge, launching himself like a torpedo so that he shot along the aluminium rails and was almost to the other side before even the most alert gunman could have reacted to his appearance and taken aim.

Simon was pulling himself the last feet of the way to the truck with powerful clutches of his fingers when he heard Warlock shouting hysterically behind him. The pistol cracked twice, undoubtedly aimed in the Saint’s general direction, but without any more effect than Warlock’s words. Then, incredibly, he felt a violent shaking of the bridge.

‘Damn you!’ Warlock was crying. ‘I’ll get you! Nobody beats Warlock! It has to be like the book! It’s real!’

Simon could not raise his head to see the man, who was trying to kick the supporting legs from under the inner end of the bridge. But Warlock had arrived too late. Simon was already rolling through the fence into the dark protection of the van.

It was only then that Warlock seemed to recover his reason enough to realize that he was kicking down his own means of escape. He clambered on to the bridge, his arms stretched in front of him along the rollers, his pistol aimed at the van. He fired even as he dragged himself along, and the bullet ripped up through the roof of the van.

Suddenly a voice more like the voice of a machine than a man resounded from a loudspeaker within the wall of the dome.

‘Halt there or we’ll shoot! Give yourselves up. You have no way of escape.’

Warlock floundered along the rollers with greater urgency.

‘Don’t shoot,’ he screamed. ‘Don’t shoot me!’

‘Halt!’ bellowed the loudspeaker.

Warlock stopped midway across the bridge, clutching the rails desperately even as he took aim against Simon.

‘I’ve stopped! Don’t shoot!’

That was when Simon moved his foot to push the lever which controlled the bridge. Slowly the electric motor began to draw in the rails. The supporting legs at the far end grated and creaked. Warlock, as he realized what was happening, squirmed and bellowed. His eyes rolled wildly as he clawed at the rails and tried to haul himself forward.

Then the already precarious support of the metal legs gave way, and the bridge tilted and sagged. Through his glasses Simon could see Warlock roll with flailing arms into the web of light beams—the last, almost immaterial wisps of reality with which Warlock would ever have to deal.

A series of explosions erupted across the mine field with a volcanic thunder that buried all other sound. Simon dived for the floor of the van as he saw the bridge blasted into flying, twisted shreds. Stone, turf, and metal rained down on the van’s roof and on to Simon’s back. Then, the instant the rain of debris ended, he rolled over and swung himself to the ground, taking advantage of the cloud of smoke and dust which enveloped the whole area to make a dash into the woods. He could only hope that Nero Jones had not managed to get to the car ahead of him.

4

As Simon raced around the van into the dense wood, an unworldly silence suddenly replaced the bedlam of bells, sirens, gunfire, and explosions. Hermetico’s alarm system had been shut off, and there was nothing left in sight for the guards to shoot at. The only sound the Saint heard behind him now were the distant muffled sounds of Hermetico personnel.

He hurried on stealthily into the darkness of the wood, straining his eyes to try to see whether or not the police car was still parked in the clearing where it had been left. It was, and there was no sign of Nero Jones, who easily could have made it back to the car before Simon. Either Jones had been shot by the guards from their posts in the dome, or he had come to the car, found that it had no key, and escaped on foot.

But there are ways of starting cars without keys, so it was most likely that Jones had been hit by the withering fire from Hermetico before he ever got to the trees. The Saint quickened his stride to a run. The luminous dial of his watch told him it was ten minutes before three. Every step of the operation had taken longer than anyone had foreseen. Still, if he could start the police car Simon knew he could get back to Warlock’s estate before the three-thirty deadline.

Then to his right he saw a smear of white weaving irregularly among the black tree trunks. Almost immediately there was a sputtering flash of pale fire from directly beneath the bobbing white smear, and the silence was blasted by the voice of Nero Jones’s tommy gun.

The Saint’s nearest protection was the police car itself, which was far from being the ideal sanctuary, since once he had reached it there was nowhere else to go, but at the moment he was delighted to put it between himself and Jones’s bullets. As he squatted by the rear wheel he heard the lead pellets shattering glass and ripping into metal on the other side.

Nero Jones obviously had been wounded as he crossed the open field on his way to the wood. During a break in the fire, Simon hazarded a glance around the rear of the car and saw his enemy standing slumped against a tree at the edge of the clearing, completely careless of the target he himself was presenting. Since he could not know that Simon was unarmed, it was apparent that Jones was in such a bad way that he scarcely knew what he was doing.

With that in mind, the Saint tried something he might otherwise have hesitated to risk. His peek around the back of the car had brought on another blast from the tommy gun. A few seconds later, hearing nothing more from Jones’s direction, he deliberately exposed his head and shoulders again. Jones was limping cautiously forward from the trees. He fired from the hip, seeming barely able to support the weight of the gun. Simon screamed in mock pain, stiffened to his full height with his hands clutching his head, and fell back out of Jones’s sight again behind the car.

Even as he went through his performance, he managed to get a glimpse of the wounded man coming forward at a staggering run. Simon rolled under the car and watched Jones’s feet approach until they were within a dozen inches of the door. The shoes were splattered with blood. Nero Jones could scarcely drag himself forward. Simon felt liquid spreading over his own lower leg and wondered fleetingly whether he had been hit without realizing it. But he had no time to wonder now. He thrust himself from under the car and grabbed both of Nero Jones’s ankles, jerking both his feet completely out from under him.

Jones crashed over backwards, his shoulders and head striking the ground first. Simon had already clutched the barrel of the tommy gun. He wrenched it from Nero Jones’s hands, raised himself on his knees, and without bothering to turn the weapon around to firing position, swung it as a club. The stock smashed against Jones’s skull. He shuddered and lay still.

Simon, still on his knees, caught a deep breath. Jones would never exercise his skill as a torturer of women again, and as much credit went to Hermetico’s guards as to the Saint. The albino’s chest had been torn open by rifle fire, one of his arms was drenched with blood, and the flesh of one of his legs had been hit by several bullets.

Jones’s wounds reminded Simon of the moisture he had felt on his own leg. He quickly checked, and what he found made his heart sink. He would almost have preferred finding his own blood. His trousers were soaked with gasoline. He lay flat again and confirmed that the police car’s gas tank had been shot through and by now was completely empty.

Simon got to his feet and looked closely at his watch. It was six minutes before three. He had no chance at all of getting back to S.W.O.R.D. headquarters in time to save Amity if he walked to some paved road and tried to get whatever transportation he could from there. There was only one way he might get to her in time, and that was by taking the van which was still parked next to the Hermetico fence. The odds were in favour of there being a key in the ignition switch, since the van’s electrical system had powered the aluminium bridge, and Simon knew that the rear of the van had not been seriously damaged in the explosion which had killed Warlock. The gas tank was safely forward near the engine.

Sirens were wailing in the distance, growing louder. The police were on the road to Hermetico—or maybe they were reinforcements for police who had already arrived. Whatever the situation, Simon had no intention of saving his own skin by running—which he easily could have done—and leaving Amity to be slowly broiled by Galaxy Rose. He grasped the tommy gun in firing position and ran back through the wood towards the van.

There were several things in his favour. The Hermetico guards’ primary responsibility was the defence of the vault. By coming out of the building and giving chase to intruders they might play into the hands of a clever enemy.

The sounds of gunfire continuing to come from the wood had probably given them additional reason for caution, otherwise they could easily have been swarming around Warlock’s police car before this. The Saint could assume that they were still inside Hermetico, waiting for the police to search the surrounding area and give an all clear.

Simon had decided that his best weapon under the circumstances was sheer audacity. He did not hesitate as he approached the nose of the van, but bore down on it at a dead run. Smoke still hung in the air, but he could see clearly. So could the guards, no doubt, but he hoped to take them completely by surprise. There was nobody near the van, though flashlights were approaching around the side of Hermetico’s dome. Someone called out.

‘Look! Over there!’

The Saint was already at the door of the van. He flung it open and leaped into the driver’s seat as the shouting increased.

‘There’s one of them!’

‘Stop him! Shoot if he won’t stop!’

Simon’s fingers gratefully closed on the ignition key. The engine chugged unenthusiastically and failed to start. He tried again. The three or four seconds that passed seemed as large and heavy as the columns of Stonehenge. Simon braced the tommy gun against the seat and aimed it into the air through the window.

The men near the building were running towards him, shouting.

‘Stop! Come out of there or we’ll shoot!’

With one hand he fired his gun harmlessly at the sky as the van’s engine at last rumbled to life. The men who had been racing towards him reversed direction and raced back for cover, and there was answering fire from up in the dome. But by then the van had jumped forward and was disappearing into the trees.

Simon kept his head low, and within seconds he was out of danger of being hit by the fire from behind. A large number of very solid trees were acting as his rearguard. He drove around Warlock’s police car. Shortly he bounced out into the open field and headed in the direction of the hole in the fence. It was just three o’clock when he finally reached it. He might still get to Amity in time.

He swung out on to the paved road and started back towards Warlock’s house by the same route the group had followed on the way to Hermetico. There were much faster roads in the vicinity, but they would be thick with police cars by now, and even on a perfectly normal night the sight of a black van riddled with bullet holes would have been enough to arouse a law officer’s interest and cause fatal delays.

So Simon had to go through the agonizing process of travelling winding country lanes at twenty miles an hour when he urgently wanted and needed to be travelling at seventy. Then the process became even more agonizing. About two miles from Hermetico he caught up with a creeping Fiat with a large ‘L’ on its rear bumper. The road was too narrow to allow Simon’s van to pass even that minute vehicle, whose driver was apparently not only learner, as his ‘L’ testified, but also an arthritic octogenarian trying very hard to disguise the fact that he was purblind drunk.

Simon tried leaning on his horn, which only stirred the aged pilot of the Fiat to greater excesses of caution. By now the car and the van were moving a scant ten miles an hour … and they continued at that pace for five minutes. At last the Saint saw an opening and pushed his way past to the sound of indignant beeps from the Fiat. He then had to steer the van through a series of bends so sharp that having passed the other car proved to have done him almost no good at all.

It was quarter past three and he was not halfway to Warlock’s estate. He came at last on to a straight stretch, gathered speed, and swept around a broad curve, only to come face to face with two hundred sheep. The sheep were on a nocturnal stroll of obscure motivation which required that they cross the road en masse in order to get from one identical field to another. Simon tried to push his way through them without killing any, and soon was awash in a sea of angry baas. It was like riding a wave of sheep. For a while it seemed there were sheep in every direction as far as the eye could see. To run over them would soon have either capsized the van or brought it to a halt. There was nothing to do but press on with grimly slow persistence.

When Simon finally broke out of the mass of sheep and got up to speed again it was twenty-five minutes after three. There were no more delays, but even so he was doomed to be late. The hands of his watch indicated three-thirty when he was still a mile from Warlock’s house. He swerved around the last bend in the road and tore through the newly repaired gate of Warlock’s grounds without slowing down. Ignoring the driveway, he steered a direct path across the lawn to the front door and all but drove up the steps. A short blast from the tommy gun opened the locked door. He kicked it open and ran across the big reception room to the planning room, and then down the stairs to the cellar. To his horror, he could smell something like electricity in the air, then a high-pitched whine and hiss. He burst into the laboratory with his gun ready.

Amity Little turned from the control panel by the wall, where she had been standing adjusting some knobs.

‘Oh, Simon!’ she beamed, as if she were welcoming him to a cocktail party. ‘I’m so glad to see you!’

The whine from the electronic equipment dwindled to silence. The Saint’s powers of speech dwindled into the same state. He could only stare. Amity came towards him.

‘And I was so glad to hear you’d messed things up for Warlock. I knew you would, of course.’ She looked at him, pretending to be puzzled. ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’