Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller

by Stephen Leather

  Nothing else had caught his attention by the time, forty minutes later when, through the open window, he heard the drone of an aircraft approaching from the south-east. He spotted the familiar shape of a C-47 outlined against the deep blue of the sky and watched as it banked around and then disappeared from sight as it came in to land. Scouse had heard it too and had sat up and brought his seat back to the upright position.

  ‘Are we off?’

  ‘We’ll give it another ten minutes,’ Harper said. ‘He’ll need to refuel and the less time we spend hanging around there, the less chance there is of someone spotting us.’

  He waited ten minutes, then re-started the engine and drove back to the main road. He took a careful glance up and down it before emerging and then headed east towards the landing strip where Randy had dropped him, Lupa and Ricardo on their way in to La Paz.

  As he turned onto the track leading to the strip, he could see the C-47 at the end of the runway and the dark outline of Randy inside the cockpit, leaning forward as if checking something on the instrument panel. There were no other aircraft or vehicles in sight and no sign of the guy who operated the fuel pump.

  ‘I hope he’s got enough fuel on board to get us over the border,’ Harper said as he braked to a halt, in the shadow of the aircraft.

  ‘What’ll we do about the car?’ Scouse said.

  ‘Just leave it here. Randy can have it if he wants to come back for it, but if not, it’ll be a nice little bonus for the guy who pumps the fuel. Come on.’

  They got out and walked towards the aircraft. Randy remained unmoving, still head down over the instrument panel. ‘Randy!’ Harper said, as he swung himself up through the doorway. ‘Does fifteen hundred bucks not even buy us a meet and greet?’

  There was silence from the cockpit, and as Harper looked towards it, he saw that the Texan was slumped forward over the joystick. A small round hole had been punched through the back of his head and the bullet, exiting through his face, had blown his blood and brains all over the instruments.

  Harper froze for a millisecond and then span around to get out of the aircraft and back to the car. There was no time to lose.

  ‘What’s up with…?’ Scouse started to say as he tried to clamber up after Harper and instead found him coming the other way at top speed.

  ‘Back! Get back in the car NOW!’ Harper shouted and dived for the doorway himself, almost bowling Scouse over as he hesitated for a fraction of a second before jumping down again. As Harper emerged from the plane, he heard the noise of engines and saw the two Landcruisers he had seen earlier come racing around the crumbling airstrip buildings. They roared across the airstrip towards them. Harper jumped into the Mercedes and was already revving the engine as Scouse scrambled into the passenger seat, and he was in second gear before Scouse had managed to slam the door shut.

  There was the sound of gunfire and rounds began kicking up puffs of dust from around them as Harper accelerated away. He was cursing himself for not trusting his instincts when he’d seen the Landcruisers passing their lying up place earlier on. Relying on his instincts had kept him alive before and he was bitterly aware that having ignored them now, might just have cost him his life.

  He was certain that the rough landing strip and dirt track they were driving along would make accurate shots from a moving vehicle almost impossible, but just in case, he kept swerving the Mercedes from side to side as he burned up the strip with the Landcruisers close on his tail. The men in the back of them were leaning on the roof of the cabs to try and steady themselves as they fired their rifles at the Merc.

  Going flat out, Harper picked his moment and suddenly threw the car into a screaming handbrake turn. He reached across to the wrong side of the steering wheel with his right hand, then jerked it hard right with that hand, while hauling on the handbrake for a split second with his left and then switching to the gear shift as he stamped on the clutch, changed down and then hit the accelerator again. The Merc skidded and fish-tailed as the tyres struggled for grip on the dirt, then roared away, back past the Landcruisers. Their drivers, slow to react at first, skidded past the Merc with screeching brakes and then lurched around to follow Harper. One of the gunmen in the back lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the Landcruiser into the dirt, but his comrades simply abandoned him there, speeding off after the Mercedes.

  As Harper approached the dirt road leading off the airstrip, he glimpsed the body of the fuel pump attendant, half hidden behind the fuel bowser. There was no time to spare him another thought as they hit the dirt road, trailing a dust cloud as they tried to out-run their pursuers. There was a crack as a bullet smacked through the back window, starring the glass before striking the metal frame of the passenger seat and ricocheting away to bury itself in the upholstery of the back seat.

  Scouse slid down, trying to hide himself on the floor of the footwell. ‘It was a lucky shot,’ Harper said. ‘No one can fire aimed shots from a vehicle bouncing around like those two are.’

  ‘Lucky shots kill people too,’ Scouse said, remaining half-crouched on the floor. ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘Apart from the obvious? The Merc should be a good bit faster than them providing we don’t try to go cross-country, so we should be able to out-run them but we can’t risk staying on this road or in this car for too long. If they’ve got any comms - and I’m sure they will - they’ll already be reporting in and before long their mates will be setting up an ambush or a road block.’

  ‘So how do we get out of here?’

  ‘Well the obvious ways would be to pick up one of the main roads and either head west past La Paz and make a run for the Peruvian border, or south-west towards Chile. But if we want to stay alive, obvious is the last thing we need to be. If they don’t find a way to intercept us on the way there, they could certainly find a means to have us stopped at the frontier. And if we try to drive to the Argentinean, Paraguayan or Brazilian borders it’s going to be a couple of thousand kilometres drive to get to any of them. But we’ve got a couple of other options.’

  He was still driving flat out as he spoke and checking his rear view mirror to keep watch on the pursuers, who were slowly but steadily dropping back, but he was also scanning the way ahead for any sign of impending trouble from that direction.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Alternatives. Always assuming we can stay ahead of those guys, we can loop around and head broadly west, passing north of La Paz and then trying to make for Lake Titicaca. We could buy or steal a boat with an outboard, or a dugout canoe or even one of those ones made out of woven reeds, and try to paddle up or across the lake until we’re in Peruvian territory, because the lake straddles the border. The only problems are that it is a very big lake - it’s 120 miles long - so we’d have to cover quite a distance, and there’s no hiding place out on the water, so we’d be dangerously exposed and very vulnerable if the cartel’s thugs came after us. As well as aircraft, they use fast speedboats to transport their cocaine, so they wouldn’t even have to shoot us. All they’d have to do is ram us and in the icy waters at this altitude we’d probably be dead from hypothermia before we could reach the shore.’

  ‘And the other options?’ Scouse said. ‘What if we head south?’

  ‘Then we’ll be equally exposed as we cross the Altiplano and even if we made it that far, we’d then be heading into a brutally arid region of desert and salt flats. If we break down or run out of petrol there, even if the cartel doesn’t get to us, we’ll die of thirst and wind up as breakfast for the condors because there’s precious little water and nothing much else there for hundreds of miles.

  ‘If we head east, even supposing we can get through the mountains, we’ll be into prime cartel territory, not just the towns and cities like Santa Cruz where they process the cocaine and launder their money, but the areas where they grow the coca, which is pretty much everywhere else. Even if we somehow manage to get into the jungle in theory we could eventually make our way across the border and int
o the Mato Grosso in Brazil, but there are thousands of miles of rainforest and jungle rivers to negotiate. Or we could work our way down one of the tributaries of the Amazon in a boat until we reach a large enough town, but whether we stick to the water or try to make our way through the rainforest, a pair of gringos like us will be vulnerable to attack by all sorts of different people, not just the cartel’s sicarios, but illegal loggers, farmers burning the rainforest to plant yet more oil palms or soya beans, and even indigenous tribes trying to protect their traditional lands or fight back against those destroying them. So whichever side of the border we are, gringos won’t be high on anyone’s list of potential best friends, and anyway, since the cartel we’re trying to escape from actually originated in Brazil, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to be heading in that direction.’

  ‘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 mi
le 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.

  ‘Should get a good price for this,’ Scouse said, ‘one careful lady owner and all.’

  Harper grinned. ‘That’s more like it. I was worried the old piss-taking Scouse had gone for good.’

  ‘Nah, not dead, just sleeping.’

  As they drove on, they passed a series of crosses erected at the side of the road, some still with sun-faded bouquets of plastic flowers at their feet.

  The road - though it was now so narrow and uneven that it barely deserved even to be called a track - became even worse and the large rocks protruding from the road surface and the cliff face added to its perils. In places the outer edge of the road had crumbled away altogether, as if some giant creature had been taking bites out of it. The Merc could only squeeze through those parts with its offside wheels within centimetres of a sheer drop that in places went on uninterrupted for almost a thousand metres. ‘Bloody hell,’ Scouse said, sweat pricking his brow as he tried not to look out of the window at the drop below them. ‘If we fall down that, by the time we hit the bottom, there won’t be enough of us left to make a meal for a budgie, never mind a condor.’