Leslie Charteris - The Saint And The Fiction Makers

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.

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.