Алистер Маклин: The Way to Dusty Death

Not once, but several times, Mary cried out in fear as Harlow took the Ferrari down through the hairpins of the Col de Tende. Rory had his arm round his sister and although he did not voice his fear he was plainly just as terrified as Mary was. Dunnet, firing his gun through the empty space where the windscreen had been, didn’t look particularly happy either. Harlow’s face was still, implacable. To an observer, it must have appeared that the car was being driven by a maniac, but Harlow was in complete control. To the accompaniment of the sound of tortured tyres and engine bellowing in the lower gears, he descended the Col as no one had ever done before and, assuredly, no one would ever do again. By the sixth hairpin he was only a matter of feet behind the Aston.

‘Stop shooting,’ Harlow shouted. He had to shout to make himself heard above the sound of an engine at maximum revolutions in bottom gear.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s not final enough.’

The Aston, now only a car’s length ahead, slid desperately round a right-hand hairpin bend. Harlow, instead of braking, accelerated, spun the wheel viciously to the right and the car slid half-way round the corner on all four screaming, skidding tyres, at right-angles to its line of travel only a second previously, apparently completely out of control. But Harlow had judged matters to a hair-raising degree of nicety: the side of the Ferrari smashed fairly and squarely into that of the Aston. The Ferrari, already practically stopped, rebounded into the middle of the curve. The Aston, moving diagonally now and hopelessly unmanageable, slid out towards the edge. Beyond the edge there was a drop of six hundred feet into the darkened and unseen depths of a ravine below.

Harlow was out of the stopped Ferrari just before the teetering Aston vanished over the side. He was followed almost immediately by the others. They peered over the edge of the road.

The Aston, descending with apparently incredible slowness, turned slowly over and over as it fell. It disappeared into the depths and the darkness of the ravine. There was a brief thunderclap of sound and a great gout of brilliant orange flame that seemed to reach half-way up to where they stood. Then there was only the silence and the darkness.

On the road above, all four stood quiet and still, like people in a trance, then Mary, shuddering, buried her face in Harlow’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and continued to gaze down, unseeingly as it seemed, into the hidden depths of the ravine.