Devil May Care

and wrenched the wheel from side to side to make himself a harder target. Then came the heavier wheeze of a hand-launched rocket, and the road in front of him exploded into a ball of spitting rock and sand, shattering the Jeep’s windshield and filling his eyes with dust. Bond dashed his sleeve across his eyes to clear his vision. A long shard of glass had cut through his cheek and impaled itself there, with the sharp end in his gum.
    Gunfire started from the hill to his right, and he became aware that another vehicle was close behind, though he had no time to check if it was the next of Gorner’s Jeep convoy or an enemy bandit pursuing him. He knew only that he had to keep going. Automatic fire intensified from the hills to his right, and ripped through the flimsy passenger seat-back, ricocheting from the steel frame. It seemed the whole landscape had come alive in its insane hunger for the drugs he was carrying. Bond’s knuckles stood white on the wheel and blood ran down his cheek on to his sweat-drenched workshirt. He thought of Gorner’s face, of Scarlett on the walkway and Poppy held captive in the belly of the desert. He roared loud in anger and defiance, then rammed his right foot flat down against the floorboards while the dense gunfire hit the body of the Jeep like mad sticks clattering on a snaredrum.
    Suddenly Bond was in the air, catapulted from his seat by a grenade explosion beneath the axle. He landed on his left shoulder, agonizingly, rolled over and made for the cover of a rock. He glanced back to see his Jeep upside down on the road, the wheels turning frantically under the command of the trapped accelerator. As a bullet embedded itself in a crevice of the rock behind him, Bond looked round and saw the raised molehill of an access point to a quanat, the underground water system that must run to Zabol. Sprinting zigzag across the stony ground, he ducked down behind the raised earth, and found a sheet of corrugated iron across an entrance. Hurling the sheet aside, he lowered himself in and dropped fifteen feet into cold water.
    For a moment, he had time to think. It was possible that no one had seen him, though he doubted it, since Hellfire Pass seemed at that moment to be the most populated part of Persia. He guessed that he had been sent as a decoy while the other Jeeps went through a safer route, north of the narrow defile, to regroup at the main transport lorry. The important thing was somehow to get back to Gorner’s lair. Stranded in the desert, he was no use to Scarlett, or to Poppy, or to the Service. Somehow he had to find a way back to Chagrin’s men.
    The water was waist-high and cold. Bond lowered his face into it and carefully withdrew the piece of glass from his cheek. Then he snapped it into two jagged pieces of about two inches each and stowed them carefully in the buttoned breast pocket of his shirt.
    A pistol shot disturbed the surface of the water. Someone was at the quanat access point, firing down. Bond began to make his way upstream, fording through the water from the distant mountains. The current was such that it was hard tomake progress. He ducked beneath the surface and swam for as many strokes as his lungs permitted, but when he surfaced he could see that he had managed only a few yards. Another shot went past him. They were in the water with him. Bond pushed on with all his strength, but soon noticed something else was happening: the water was rising. This could only have happened by human intervention, he thought. There could not have been a sudden extra burst of snowmelt in a far-off mountain gully, so there had to be some sort of sluice that someone had closed downstream or a gate upstream that had been operated to divert more water. But he could see nothing in the darkness of the torrent.
    He put his hand above his head and felt the roof of the narrow channel only a few inches above him. If the flow increased much more, he would drown. He couldn’t turn back, into the teeth of his armed pursuers, so he had no choice but to continue.
    Forging onwards, with his hands ahead of him, Bond felt the water rising to the level of his mouth. He dipped his head beneath the flow and swam again, hoping to find a place where the uneven passage would be higher and so give him air above the surface. But when he came up, the headroom was so tight that he had to bend his neck sideways to breathe. Thrashing desperately now, Bond made one last push forward with his arms in the