The Babylon Idol

  ‘Professor Manzini, your expertise is required. Would you please come and look at this?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Anna screamed back at him. ‘Don’t you know what’s happening? You think God can save you from tanks?’

  ‘Ugo, assist her.’

  Bozza was only too glad to oblige. He grasped Anna roughly by the upper arm and hauled her up the aisle. Usberti pointed to a nearby seat, opposite where Bellini had taken up his usual position, hands clasped in his lap, eyes darting nervously behind his thick lenses. Bozza dumped Anna into the seat. At the same instant, another rocket blast shook the RV from stem to stern and Groppione let out a yell of ‘Jesus!’ that drew a very disapproving look from his employer.

  ‘Now, Professor,’ Usberti said, handing her the camera, ‘our present circumstances dictate that you conduct your work with as much alacrity as possible. So please, get to it, and do not compel me to bring Ugo into this. Aldo, a little more haste from you would also benefit us greatly.’

  ‘It won’t go any faster, boss. Not on this surface.’

  The RV was going so fast, it felt as though it could shake apart at any moment. If a random tank shell didn’t reduce them to splinters first. Watching from the window, Ben sensed there was a roughly fifty per cent chance of that happening. The RV was widening their distance from the battle, but only slowly. It was mayhem back there. The Russian gunners were very, very good. Another rebel truck blew apart in a fireball that turned the snowy sky golden-red. Then another, in a solid hit by the turret machine cannon of one of the T-90s that set off its target’s fuel tank and blasted it into a tumbling wreck.

  But the insurgents were fighting back hard, even as they beat their retreat. Stabs of rocket fire erupted from the rearward-facing guns of the fleeing trucks. The leading tank burst into flame, rolled to a halt and sat there burning as its eight remaining platoon comrades rumbled and squealed past it, keeping up their steady fire. The Russians were getting more than they’d bargained for from the rebels, that was for sure.

  Not for long. The sudden screeching howl from above came out of nowhere and made everyone inside the RV except Ben, Bozza, and Groppione clap their hands over their ears at the sheer massive deafening noise. The Russian tank commander had called in air support. The jets had come streaking in so fast out of the night that not even Ben had time to recognise them as MiG 29 fighters – they must have deployed from a carrier off the Syrian coast.

  The air strike was over in seconds. The jets were already gone when a vast curtain of fire erupted into the sky in their wake. Like summoning the forces of death from the bowels of the earth to rise up and smite the enemy at a single stroke. Ben felt the heat on his face through the window as he watched dozens of armoured vehicles instantly vaporised in the awesome fiery blast. A hundred men blown limb from limb or reduced to a fine ash that was swept away by the desert wind. Maybe two hundred. Few people would ever know, fewer still would care, and a palatable version of their brutal destruction would be served up in the media soundbites, to be forgotten moments later.

  The RV bucked and bounced away from the carnage. Ben turned to see what was happening up front: Anna was being made to study the images on the camera; Bozza was standing menacingly over her, hanging on to a rail for support; Usberti had produced paper and pens for her to write her translation of the cuneiform inscriptions Ben had photographed, as if anyone could write or even read in a shaking, rattling bus hammering over unpaved wilderness at breakneck speed. A patient man, that Usberti.

  Then Groppione glanced in his remaining mirror, turned the colour of parchment and announced in a quavering voice, ‘Oh, no. Oh, shit. Boss, we g-got company.’

  Chapter 57

  Ben twisted back around to peer out of the rear window, and saw what Groppione had just seen. Vehicle lights in their wake: two sets of headlights supplemented with grille and roof spotlamps, all bobbing and gyrating crazily like Chinese lanterns in a storm. A pair of rebel trucks that had managed to escape the devastation of the MiG air strike had broken off from what was left of their fleeing column and were in pursuit.

  ‘What the hell do they want with us?’ Starace yelled.

  ‘Why don’t we stop and ask them?’ Ben said. ‘Maybe they’re lost and need directions. Or maybe they think we’re a bunch of coalition “spies” they can capture and do to us what you guys did to Ercan Kavur.’

  ‘Outrun them,’ Usberti ordered Groppione.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Groppione yelled back, near panic.

  ‘Remain calm, Aldo. We are in no immediate d—’

  But now Usberti’s luck seemed to be running out at last. The flash of a grenade launcher from one of the pursuing trucks was followed almost instantly by a violent explosion right at the RV’s rear. Everyone went sprawling. Groppione was thrown hard against the steering wheel. The RV went into a weave that degenerated into another bad skid, and almost overturned before Groppione, gibbering like a lunatic and sawing at the wheel, somehow got it back under control and stamped his foot down even harder. The RV surged ahead, crashing and bounding insanely over terrain it was never meant to handle even at a snail’s pace.

  Ben struggled upright and looked to the rear. On the bright side, it looked as though the rebels had run out of rockets. On the pessimistic side, the RV’s massive bodyshell was made of flimsy stuff that even an air rifle could punch through. The grenade blast had torn a gaping hole in their tail end. The rear window was gone, along with a large section of bodywork. Ben could see exposed chassis members and ripped wiring and twisted brackets where light fittings used to be. Small fires were crackling everywhere and the smell of burning filled the vehicle. The electrics began to flicker. Bellini had been thrown out of his seat and was scrabbling around for his glasses. Usberti had managed to scramble back into his throne and was shouting at Anna, on her hands and knees in a sea of scattered paper.

  ‘You! Hurry up with that translation!’

  ‘Go to hell!’ she screamed back at him.

  The pair of rebel trucks were gaining fast, one taking the lead, the other right behind it. Their lights were glaring into the windowless back of the RV. Bozza staggered up the aisle to the rear, planted himself with his feet braced against the wild swinging of the vehicle, aimed his submachine gun through the ragged hole and rattled off its whole magazine at the lead truck. He couldn’t have hit much, because a second later the rebels returned fire.

  And they were packing somewhat heavier hardware. The snorting blast from the large-calibre machine gun ripped into the body of the RV, punching through it like an oversized cardboard box, shredding everything to pieces. Woodwork splintered. Bits of carpet and leather upholstery flew. Bozza flattened himself to the floor. Anna screamed. Starace screamed louder. Too slow to hit the deck, he caught a bullet in the throat and his blood splashed over the bullet-riddled sofa he’d been sitting on.

  Now the trucks were splitting up and overtaking the RV on both sides. Ben caught a clear glimpse of the rebel gunner on his side as the guy swivelled his machine gun around on its mount behind the cab. His face was covered with a cloth mask, just wild eyes and clenched teeth showing through the holes. Ben saw no more, because a millisecond later he was diving for cover as the machine guns poured fire into the sides of the RV, virtually ripping it in half horizontally.

  Groppione had lost control, both of himself and of the vehicle. In his panic, he let go of the controls and threw himself down under the dashboard as both side windows shattered simultaneously to his left and right, showering him with glass. He got himself wedged deep in the footwell and cowered there, one hip pressing the accelerator pedal hard against its stop, neither hand on the steering wheel. Ben glanced forwards. He saw Anna curled up in a foetal position on the floor. No blood. That was good. Then he saw the rocky outcrop racing towards them in the glare of the driverless RV’s headlights. That wasn’t good.

  It was the rebels who saved them from the head-on collision against the rocks. Maybe they were used to firing
on armoured vehicles that would offer a little more resistance to their bullets. Or maybe they were just incredibly stupid. Either way, as their two trucks sped in parallel up the flanks of the RV, pumping high-velocity machine-gun shells at point-blank range and in opposite directions at once through its flimsy skin, they hadn’t reckoned on where those bullets would go next. The occupants of the truck on the right soon found out. Bad timing. A tactical lesson in the risks of friendly fire. One of the most inappropriately named phenomena in the combat manual, because there was nothing remotely amicable or heart-warming about being shredded to bloody chunks by the firepower of your own inept comrades. Nor was it much of a practical lesson, if you died learning it.

  The badly judged storm of bullets from the left-hand truck passed straight through both sides of the RV and hit the right-hand truck, killing every rebel on board instantly. The truck skidded, hit a rut, flipped a somersault in the air and cannoned against the right flank of the coach with enough force to send it veering off course to the left. It missed the rocky outcrop by a matter of inches. It was the truck that hit it instead, with a crunch as the two dead soldiers up front went through the windscreen and the gunner in the back went sailing over the roof and his body broke on the rocks.

  But the impact that saved the RV from a terminal head-on smash also caused it to go into a furious skid. It was a very large, very heavy vehicle with comparatively undersized wheels and lot of momentum. An experienced driver might have stood a small chance of correcting the skid and regaining control. With nobody at the wheel at all, there was less than zero chance. All six wheels lost traction in the soft sand and it began to spin on itself. In what felt to Ben like a slow-motion dream, the length of the shattered RV rotated anti-clockwise until it was skidding sideways like a ship about to broach. There was a tortured groaning and creaking from the twisting chassis, and then the world seemed to flip over as the thing crashed onto its side, rolled and rolled again in a tumult of self-destruction.

  If the driver of the remaining rebel truck had reacted in time, he might have avoided the path of the crashing RV. He didn’t. The truck’s wheels locked up and its front end ploughed at high speed into the wreckage.

  Then everything went still.

  Chapter 58

  Ben opened his eyes to a glare of white light. He looked down at the floor and realised his back was stuck to the ceiling. Then he blinked, and realised that he was actually lying on his back looking up at the floor, because the floor was above him. It took a moment for his brain to orient itself and remember why that was, and why his hands were pinned together under him.

  He squirmed and elbowed himself up onto his knees and looked around him at the wreckage. The source of the bright light was the remaining headlamp of the rebel truck whose crumpled front end and still-turning front wheels were buried in the overturned wreck of what used to be the luxury motor coach. Most of the RV’s bodywork was an unrecognisable rumpled mass of plywood and aluminium. Smoke and dust drifted through the smashed interior. He could smell diesel oil fumes and toilet chemicals and battery acid, all mixed together in a sour olfactory cocktail with the stink of death. Starace’s body was hanging, gently swinging, from the upside-down floor, arms outflung as though he’d been crucified, bug eyes staring blind, a leg trapped in the broken frame of the sofa on which he’d died, its leather upholstery smeared with his blood. More was dripping down to the inverted ceiling.

  ‘Anna,’ Ben said.

  She was curled up among the wreckage nearby. Her face and hair were grey with dust. At first he thought she was dead, too; then at the sound of his voice, she pushed herself up onto one elbow, looked at him with dazed eyes, and broke into a fit of coughing.

  ‘Lord be praised, we are alive,’ Usberti said, getting to his feet. He had the camera in his hand. A cut above one eye was dribbling blood down his cheekbone. He wiped it with his fingers and flicked them clean. ‘Ugo, Silvano, Aldo, Maurizio … Maurizio? Ah, there he is.’ He gazed up for a brief moment at the hanging corpse as though Starace were some dead crow stuck in a tree. ‘No matter. He was of little use in any case. Silvano, are you badly hurt?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Excellency,’ Bellini replied, dusting himself off. His glasses were bent out of shape, perched unevenly on his nose.

  ‘Help the others to salvage what weapons and supplies we can. We must continue on our way.’

  ‘You could do with an extra pair of hands to get us out of this,’ Ben said to him. ‘How about letting me loose from these cuffs?’

  Usberti shook his head. ‘You do not think me that stupid, surely. Now would be the perfect time for you to try one of your tricks.’

  ‘I’m just as invested in getting out of this situation as you are,’ Ben said. ‘Especially as we won’t be alone here for long. See there.’ He couldn’t point, so he nodded his head towards the smashed front end of the RV, which now faced in the opposite direction. There was just a big ragged misshapen hole where the windscreen had been. Through the hole, still a long way off in the distance but approaching at some speed, more vehicle lights were visible. ‘Looks like more of our friends are about to join us.’

  ‘Then there is not a moment to lose,’ Usberti said. ‘Ugo, see how serviceable that truck is.’

  Bozza seemed as unfazed by the incident as he was unhurt. He waded through the wreckage to get to the half-buried Syrian rebel truck and pulled away the remains of Usberti’s leather throne that was lying upended across its cracked windscreen. Both the driver and the gunner were dead, but the front passenger was still alive, blood all down his front from his broken nose and smashed teeth. Bozza wrenched open the door, grabbed him by the collar, hauled him out of the cab, dumped him in a heap and drew out a pistol. The guy groaned and tried to move.

  ‘Don’t kill him,’ Anna pleaded, but it was to no avail. She looked away, screwed her eyes shut and covered her ears as Bozza put the gun to the Syrian’s head and pulled the trigger twice. It was cold and brutal, but Ben reckoned it was probably a more humane end than came to most of Bozza’s victims. Bozza walked around to the driver’s side, hauled out the dead man behind the wheel and clambered inside the truck. He used his pistol to knock away the remains of the windscreen glass, then twisted the key to restart the stalled engine. The front of the truck was buckled and twisted, but its heavy-duty grille bars had taken most of the brunt of the impact. The engine coughed into life. Bozza put it in reverse and, with some effort, managed to disentangle and back it out of the wreckage.

  Usberti turned to Bellini and tossed him a torch. ‘Silvano, go and check the other vehicle back there. Six are too many to travel in one truck.’

  ‘How about we kill this fucker?’ Groppione said, pointing his gun at Ben. ‘Then there’s only five of us to worry about.’

  ‘He may yet be of use to me,’ Usberti said. ‘This is not over yet.’

  Bellini reluctantly obeyed the order. He limped his way out of the wreck and picked a hobbling path off through the darkness towards the rocky outcrop where the other truck had crashed. Ben watched his torch beam dart around the vehicle. Bellini didn’t look as though he had the physical force to haul out the driver the way Bozza had, but as the guy had already exited via the windscreen, he didn’t have to try. Moments later, the truck fired up in a cloud of blue smoke. The rattle coming from under the crumpled bonnet didn’t sound too terminal. Both its headlights were smashed, but the two roof-mounted spotlamps that hadn’t been knocked askew by the gunner’s flying body still worked fine. Their light shone brightly over the slick of blood that three dead men had left all over the rumpled bonnet and the rock in front of it. Bellini engaged reverse and gingerly pulled away from the mess.

  Usberti smiled. ‘Two working vehicles. Professor Manzini, you will accompany me in the first. Aldo, you will drive us. Ugo, you drive the second with Silvano and the major. Stay close behind us. We will find a place to shelter for the night, where the professor can finish her translation. Come morning, we will complete our ques
t.’

  The approaching lights were getting gradually closer. The way they were moving suggested that they belonged to a larger, slower transport, maybe a troop carrier full of Syrian rebels fleeing from the Russian tanks. Ben was no more anxious to hang around and find out than the others. The pickup truck’s bench seat was just about wide enough for three. Usberti hurried Anna to the passenger side of the first truck and pressed his bulk in after her, making her squash up in the middle as Groppione loaded bags from the wrecked RV into the pickup bed and took the wheel from Bozza. Bozza pointed his pistol at Ben and walked him to the second truck where Bellini was waiting. Bellini climbed out of the driver’s side. Bozza gave him the pistol, then got in behind the wheel.

  ‘After you,’ Bellini said, training the gun on Ben’s head.

  ‘Are you sure you know how to work that thing?’ Ben said.

  ‘Well enough. Get in, please. I don’t want to have to shoot you.’

  ‘All the better for you,’ Ben replied. He squeezed in, hands painfully trapped against the seat in the small of his back, one foot either side of the transmission tunnel, his left shoulder pressed against Bozza’s right. It felt like granite. Bellini stiffly clambered into the passenger seat to Ben’s right. The door mechanism had been damaged in the crash and wouldn’t close, forcing Bellini into an awkward position with his arms crossed over his lap, holding the door handle shut with his left hand so he could keep the pistol pointed at Ben in his right.

  The lead truck took off into the darkness, its single working headlight bobbing and bouncing as Groppione hustled across the desert as fast as he could. Bozza followed, silent and grim as ever.