Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘So if west, south and east are no good, that seems to leave us with heading north as our only option?’

‘Hey, that GCSE in Geography hasn’t been wasted, has it?’

Scouse glared at him. ‘We’re being chased by some guys who want to kill us, we don’t seem to have much of a plan to get away from them and yet you’re still taking the piss.’

‘Of course,’ Harper said. ‘It’s what I do best. Now make yourself useful. There are some maps in the glove-box and I’m hoping you remember enough of the map-reading you learned in the Paras to be able to find us a plausible route out of there. I’d do it myself, but as you can see, I’ve got my hands pretty full at the moment. I’d say our best plan would be to let our pursuers keep us in sight long enough to convince themselves that we’re definitely heading east, and then all we have to do is burn them off, break north-east into the mountains, using minor roads, and then ditch the car into a ravine or some place where the cartel’s sicarios won’t spot it easily. Then we travel on foot, heading north-west, until we cross the Peruvian border. Can you find us a route to do that?’

‘I can plot us a route, yes,’ Scouse said in a slightly injured tone. ‘I haven’t forgotten everything I learned in the army, but as to crossing the mountains… I’m not sure. I never did have much of a head for heights, I’m not exactly in prime physical condition and, correct me if I’m wrong, but the Andes are seriously bloody high.’

‘Yeah, some of the peaks are more than twenty two thousand feet high but we just need to find a lower way through the mountains. If we stick to the plains, they’ll catch us for sure, but they’re not mountaineers or off-road trekkers, so we’ve more of a chance of escaping them if we escape through the mountains.’

There was a long silence while Scouse pored over the maps and Harper kept the Merc well ahead of the pursuers, who were still just in sight, but now out of rifle range. The flat lands and thin, dry air of the Altiplano and the dust cloud they were trailing behind them meant they were visible from over a mile away.

CHAPTER 19

Harper slowed slightly as he approached the junction with the Ruta Nacional , ready to change plan if there was any sign of a roadblock or ambush ahead, but the way was clear and he accelerated again, swerving out on to the highway, and heading east. He then floored the accelerator to open up as big a gap as possible on the pursuit, overtaking and cutting up a series of trucks making for or coming from La Paz to the accompaniment of a deafening salvo of air horns as some had to swerve to avoid him.

‘Have you found us a side road to the north to turn on to?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Scouse checked the map again. ‘This road runs broadly east for about twenty miles and then turns due north, but just before that, there’s a smaller track running east and then north. We’re into some serious mountains pretty much all the way from here, so there should be somewhere to dump the car and bale out along there.’

‘Just as well,’ Harper said, glancing down at the fuel gauge, ‘because we’re going to run out of petrol not long after that. My bad, I should have filled the tank on our way out of La Paz this morning, but I was expecting that we’d only need it to get to the landing strip. No matter, we’d have to dump it anyway, petrol or no petrol, before too much longer.’

Scouse nodded. ‘Okay, so about twenty miles from here, there should be a small church and a cluster of houses and then a few hundred yards beyond it, there’s a sharp right turn.’

‘Good work,’ Harper said. ‘And you’ve got a route beyond that?’

‘I’ve got the first part of it and I’m working on the rest. If this car wasn’t bouncing around so much, it would be a lot easier.’

‘It would be a lot easier for the sicarios to put a bullet through your head too, so try to manage.’

The Ruta Nacional was surfaced with tarmac and they covered the twenty miles to the turn-off in less than fifteen minutes, speeding along the highway until Harper spotted a group of buildings ahead of them. The church Scouse had mentioned was now a ruin but the stone cross on top of its one remaining wall confirmed its former use. ‘That’s it,’ Scouse said, ‘watch out for the right turn ahead.’

Harper checked his mirrors. There was no sign of the Landcruisers behind them, but the dust trail the Mercedes would leave as they drove up the dirt road, might well be enough to show the sicarios where they had gone.

Peering at the map, Scouse counted Harper down to the turning. ‘Five - four - three - ready?’ he said. ‘About one hundred yards. See it?’

‘Got it,’ Harper said, braking viciously and throwing the Merc into a hard right turn almost under the wheels of an oncoming truck. He glimpsed a face, mouth open in fury or fright, and heard the blare of a horn, and then they were shooting off the highway on to a frighteningly rough and narrow dirt road, clinging to the almost sheer side of one of the mountains of the Andes that was rearing high above them.

Harper accelerated away again, the car bumping and jolting over the rough, rock-strewn surface. ‘Keep an eye out behind,’ he said, ‘and see if they make the turn after us.’

‘I’ll try,’ Scouse said, ‘but the dust trail we’re making is as thick as a London fog, so I can’t guarantee it.’

Unsure whether the sicarios were still tracking them or had been too far back to realise they had turned off, Harper kept his foot down as much as he could, but the road was following a very erratic course, twisting and turning to keep to the contours of the mountain. There were very few guard rails above the sheer drop on the outside of the road, while potholes and rocks jutting out of the dirt surface only made things more dangerous. Even worse, a series of nerve-wracking blind corners around the shoulders of rocky outcrops left their hearts in their mouths, because only in the very occasional passing places was the road wide enough for two vehicles to pass. ‘If we meet something coming the other way round one of these bends, we’re dead,’ Scouse said. ‘It looks like you could plunge so far down the mountainside that you might never be found.’

‘Then let’s pray if it happens, it’s the other car and not us,’ Harper said, ‘because from what I’ve seen of Bolivian drivers, they all go like shit off a shovel and don’t slow down for anything, even including blind corners. And if we do meet one and by a miracle we both survive, then someone is going to have to reverse until we come to one of the sections that’s wide enough for the other one to get past; and we definitely don’t want to be trying to do that with the sicarios breathing down our necks.’

The road climbed steadily higher for a few more miles, deeper into the mountains, but then began a twisting, switch-backing descent. Far ahead they could see the serpentine line the road took, cutting across the barren rock faces of the higher slopes of the mountain, then disappearing into the cloud forest lower down the slopes, with the emerald green canopy of the rainforest lower on the slopes still and just visible in the far distance.

As they crested a last rise and saw the road ahead dropping steadily away in front of them, Harper braked to a halt for a few moments and looked back behind them. As their dust trail swiftly dispersed on the wind scouring over the rock face, he caught a glimpse of another pall of dust at least a mile behind them, but definitely heading the same way.

‘Shit,’ he said, as he gunned the engine again. ‘It’s too much to hope that’s just some farmer or off-roader, so we’ve got to assume that the cartel’s boys are still on our trail.’ He kept the Mercedes bucketing on, spinning its wheels on the gravel on some corners and bouncing off some of the ruts and potholes in the surface of the road with teeth-loosening jolts and thuds.