Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

All this I saw in the four or five seconds it took me to bring the shuddering skidding Chevrolet down from 70 to 30 m.p.h., the high-pitched scream in our ears token of the black smoking trail of melted rubber that we were leaving on the white road behind us. I saw, too, the policemen, one crouched behind the bonnet of the police car, a second with his head and right arm just visible above the boot: both of them carried revolvers. A third policeman was standing upright and almost completely hidden behind the nearest petrol pump, but there was nothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal of all close-quarters weapons, a whipper, a sawn-off handgrip shotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.

I was down to 20 m.p.h. now, not more than forty yards distant from the block. The policemen, guns levelled on my head, were rising up and moving out into the open when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the girl reaching for the handle of the door and half-turning away from me as she gathered herself for the leap out of the car. I said nothing, just leaned across, grabbed her arm, jerked her towards me with a savage force that made her gasp with pain and, in the same instant that I transferred my grip to her shoulders and held her half against half in front of me so that the police dared not shoot, jammed my foot flat down on the accelerator.

"You madman! You'll kill us!" For a split second of time she stared at the row of fifty-gallon drums rushing up to meet us, the terror in her face accurately reflecting the terror in her voice, then turned away with a cry and buried her face in my coat, the nails of her hands digging into my upper arms.

We hit the second drum from the left fair and square with the centre of our fender. Subconsciously, I tightened my grip on the girl and the steering wheel and braced myself for the numbing shattering shock, the stunning impact that would crash me against the steering-wheel or pitch me through the windscreen as the 500-lb. dead weight of that drum sheared the chassis retaining bolts and smashed the engine back into the driving compartment. But there was no such convulsive shock, just a screeching of metal and a great hollow reverberating clang as the fender lifted the dram clear off the road, a moment of shock when I thought the dram would be carried over the bonnet of the car to smash the windscreen and pin us to the seat. With my free hand I jerked the wheel violently to the left and the cartwheeling drum bounced across the nearside wing and vanished from sight as I regained the road, jerked the wheel in the opposite direction and straightened out. The oil drum had been empty. And not a shot had been fired.

Slowly the girl lifted her head, stared over my shoulder at the road-block dwindling in the distance, then stared at me. Her hands were still gripping both my shoulders, but she was completely unaware of it.

"You're mad." I could hardly catch the husky whisper through the crescendo roar of the engine. "You're mad, you must be. Crazy mad." Maybe she hadn't been terrified earlier on, but she was now.

"Move over, lady," I requested. "You're blocking my view."

She moved, perhaps six inches, but her eyes, sick with fear, were still on me. She was trembling violently.

"You're mad," she repeated. "Please, please let me out."

"I'm not mad." I was paying as much attention to my rear mirror as to the road ahead. "I think a little, Miss Ruthven, and I'm observant. They couldn't have had more than a couple of minutes to prepare that road-block — and it takes more than a couple of minutes to bring six full drums out of store and manhandle them into position. The drum I hit had its filling hole turned towards me — and there was no bung. It had to be empty. And as for letting you out — well, I'm afraid I can't spare the tune. Take a look behind you."

She looked.

"They — they're coming after us!"

"What did you expect them to do — go into the restaurant and have a cup of coffee?"

The road was closer to the sea, now, and winding to follow the indentations of the coast. Traffic was fairly light, but enough to hold me back from overtaking on some blind corners, and the police car behind was steadily gaining on me: the driver knew his car better than I did mine, and the road he obviously knew like the back of his hand. Ten minutes from the road-block he had crept up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us.

The girl had been watching the pursuing car for the past few minutes. Now she turned and stared at me. She made an effort to keep her voice steady, and almost succeeded.

"What's — what's going to happen now?"

"Anything," I said briefly. "They'll likely play rough. I don't think they can be any too pleased with what happened back there." Even as I finished speaking there came, in quick succession, two or three whip-like cracks clearly audible above the whine of the tyres and the roar of the engine. A glance at the girl's face told me I didn't need to spell out what was happening. She knew all right.

"Get down," I ordered. "That's it, right down on the floor. Your head, too. Whether it's bullets or a crash, your best chance is down there."

When she was crouched so low that all I could see was her shoulders and the back of her blonde head I eased the revolver out of my pocket, abruptly removed my foot from the accelerator, grabbed for the handbrake and hauled hard.

With no tell-tale warning from the foot-operated braking lights, the slowing down of the Chevrolet was as unexpected as it was abrupt, and the screech of tyres and violent slewing of the pursuing police car showed that the driver had been caught completely off balance. I loosed off one quick shot and as I did the windscreen in front of me shattered and starred as a bullet went clear through the centre of it: I fired a second time, and the police car skidded wildly and finished up almost broadside across the road, the nearside front wheel into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road. It was the sort of uncontrollable skid that might have come from a front tyre blowout.

Certainly no harm had come to the policemen inside, within a couple of seconds of hitting the ditch all three were out on the road, squeezing off shots after us as fast as they could pull the triggers: but we were already a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away and for all the value of revolvers and riot guns in distance work of this kind they might as well have been throwing stones at us. In a few seconds we rounded a curve and they were lost to sight.

"All right," I said. "The war's over. You can get up, Miss Ruthven."

She straightened and pushed herself back on the seat. Some dark-blonde hair had fallen forward over her face, so she took off her bandanna, fixed her hair and pulled the bandanna on again. Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down.

When she'd finished tying the knot under her chin she said in a subdued voice, without looking at me: "Thank you for making me get down. I — I might have been killed there."

"You might," I agreed indifferently. "But I was thinking about myself, lady, not you. Your continued good health is very closely bound up with mine. Without a real live insurance policy beside me they'd use anything from a hand grenade to a 14-inch naval gun to stop me.'"

"They were trying to hit us then, they were trying to kill us." The tremor was back in her voice again as she nodded at the bullet hole in the screen. "I was sitting in line with that."

"So you were. Chance in a thousand. They must have had orders not to fire indiscriminately, but maybe they were so mad at what happened back at the road-block that they forgot their orders. Likely that they were after one of our rear tyres. Hard to shoot well from a fast-moving car. Or maybe they just can't shoot well anyway."