The Way to Dusty Death Read online

  ALISTAIR MACLEAN

  Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

  By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

  By Alistair MacLean

  HMS Ulysses

  The Guns of Navarone

  South by Java Head

  The Last Frontier

  Night Without End

  Fear is the Key

  The Dark Crusader

  The Satan Bug

  The Golden Rendezvous

  Ice Station Zebra

  When Eight Bells Toll

  Where Eagles Dare

  Force 10 from Navarone

  Puppet on a Chain

  Caravan to Vaccarès

  Bear Island

  The Way to Dusty Death

  Breakheart Pass

  Circus

  The Golden Gate

  Seawitch

  Goodbye California

  Athabasca

  River of Death

  Partisans

  Floodgate

  San Andreas

  The Lonely Sea (stories)

  Santorini

  ALISTAIR MACLEAN

  The Way to

  Dusty Death

  STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  First Sterling edition 2012

  First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1973

  © 1973 HarperCollinsPublishers

  Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4027-9256-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4027-9257-1 (ebook)

  For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].

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  www.sterlingpublishing.com

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  To Mary Marcelle

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  CHAPTER ONE

  Harlow sat by the side of the race-track on that hot and cloudless afternoon, his long hair blowing about in the fresh breeze and partially obscuring his face, his golden helmet clutched so tightly in his gauntleted hands that he appeared to be trying to crush it: the hands were shaking uncontrollably and occasional violent tremors racked his entire body.

  His own car, from which he had been miraculously thrown clear, uninjured, just before it had overturned lay, of all places, in its own Coronado pits, upside down and with its wheels spinning idly. Wisps of smoke were coming from an engine already engulfed under a mound of foam from the fire extinguishers and it was clear that there was now little danger of an explosion from the unruptured fuel tanks.

  Alexis Dunnet, the first to reach Harlow, noticed that he wasn’t looking at his own car but was staring trance-like at a spot about two hundred yards farther along the track where an already dead man called Isaac Jethou was being cremated in the white-flamed funeral pyre of what had once been his Grand Prix Formula One racing car. There was curiously little smoke coming from the blazing wreck, presumably because of the intense heat given off by the incandescent magnesium alloy wheels, and when the gusting wind occasionally parted the towering curtains of flame Jethou could be seen sitting bolt upright in his cockpit, the one apparently undamaged structure left in an otherwise shattered and unrecognizable mass of twisted steel: at least Dunnet knew it was Jethou but what he was seeing was a blackened and horribly charred remnant of a human being.

  The many thousands of people in the stands and lining the track were motionless and soundless, staring in transfixed and incredulous awe and horror at the burning car. The last of the engines of the Grand Prix cars – there were nine of them stopped in sight of the pits, some drivers standing by their sides – died away as the race marshals frantically flagged the abandonment of the race.

  The public address system had fallen silent now, as did a siren’s ululating wail as an ambulance screeching to a halt at a prudent distance from Jethou’s car, its flashing light fading into nothingness against the white blaze in the background. Rescue workers in aluminium asbestos suits, some operating giant wheeled fire-extinguishers, some armed with crowbars and axes, were trying desperately, for some reason wholly beyond the bounds of logic, to get sufficiently close to the car to drag the cindered corpse free, but the undiminished intensity of the flames made a mockery of their desperation. Their efforts were as futile as the presence of the ambulance was unnecessary. Jethou was beyond any mortal help or hope.

  Dunnet looked away and down at the overalled figure beside him. The hands that held the golden helmet still trembled unceasingly and the eyes still fixed immovably on the sheeted flames that now quite enveloped Isaac Jethou’s car were the eyes of an eagle gone blind. Dunnet reached for his shoulder and shook it gently but he paid no heed. Dunnet asked him if he were hurt for his face and trembling hands were masked in blood: he had cart-wheeled at least half a dozen times after being thrown from his car in the final moments before it had upended and come to rest in its own pits. Harlow stirred and looked at Dunnet, blinking, like a man slowly arousing himself from a nightmare, then shook his head.

  Two ambulance men with a stretcher came towards them at a dead run, but Harlow, unaided except for Dunnet’s supporting hand under his upper arm, pushed himself shakily to his feet and waved them off. He didn’t, however, seem to object to what little help Dunnet’s hand lent him and they walked slowly back to the Coronado pits, the still dazed and virtually uncomprehending Harlow, Dunnet tall, thin, with dark hair parted in the middle, a dark pencil-line moustache and rimless glasses, everyone’s idealized conception of a city accountant even though his passport declared him to be a journalist.

  MacAlpine, a fire-extinguisher still held in one hand, turned to meet them at the entrance to the pits. James MacAlpine, owner and manager of the Coronado racing team, dressed in a now stained tan gaberdine suit, was in his mid-fifties, as heavily jowled as he was heavily built and had a deeply lined face under an impressive mane of black and silver hair. Behind him, Jacobson, the chief mechanic and his two red-haired assistants, the Rafferty twins who for some reason unkn
own were invariably referred to as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, still ministered to the smouldering Coronado, while behind the car two other men, white-coated first-aid men, were carrying out more serious ministrations of their own: on the ground, unconscious but still clutching the pad and pencil with which she had been taking lap times, lay Mary MacAlpine, the owner’s black-haired, twenty-year-old daughter. The first-aid men were bent over her left leg and scissoring open to the knee wine-red slacks that had been white moments ago. MacAlpine took Harlow’s arm, deliberately shielding him from the sight of his daughter, and led him to the little shelter behind the pits. MacAlpine was an extremely able, competent and tough man, as millionaires tend to be: beneath the toughness, as of now, lay a kindness and depth of consideration of which no one would have dared to accuse him.

  In the back of the shelter stood a small wooden crate which was, in effect, a portable bar. Most of it was given over to an ice-box stocked with a little beer and lots of soft drinks, chiefly for the mechanics, for working under that torrid sun was thirsty business. There were also two bottles of champagne for it had not been unreasonable to expect of a man who had just reeled off a near-impossible five consecutive Grand Prix victories that he might just possibly achieve his sixth. Harlow opened the lid of the crate, ignored the ice-box, lifted out a bottle of brandy and half-filled the tumbler, the neck of the bottle chattering violently against the rim of the glass: more brandy spilled to the ground than went into the glass. He required both hands to lift the glass to his mouth and now the rim of the tumbler, castanet-like fashion, struck up an even more erratic tattoo against his teeth than the bottle had on the glass. He managed to get some of it down but most of the glass’s contents overflowed by the two sides of his mouth, coursed down the blood-streaked chin to stain the white racing overalls to exactly the same colour as the slacks of the injured girl outside. Harlow stared bemusedly at the empty glass, sank on to a bench and reached for the bottle again.

  MacAlpine looked at Dunnet, his face without expression. Harlow had suffered three major crashes in his racing career, in the last of which, two years previously, he had sustained near-fatal injuries: on that last occasion, he had been smiling, albeit in agony, as his stretcher had been loaded aboard the ambulance plane for the flight back to London and the left hand he had used to give the thumbs-up signal – his right forearm had been broken in two places – had been as steady as if graven from marble. But more dismaying was the fact that apart from a token sip of celebration champagne he had never touched hard alcohol in his life.

  It happens to them all, MacAlpine had always maintained, sooner or later it happens to them all. No matter how cool or brave or brilliant they were, it happened to them all, and the more steely their icy calm and control the more fragile it was. MacAlpine was never a man to be averse to the odd hyperbolic turn of phrase and there was a handful – but only a handful – of outstanding ex-Grand Prix drivers around who had retired at the top of their physical and mental form, sufficient, at any rate, to disprove MacAlpine’s statement in its entirety. But it was well enough known that there existed top-flight drivers who had crashed or who had suffered so much nervous and mental fatigue that they had become empty shells of their former selves, that there were among the current twenty-four Grand Prix drivers four or five who would never win a race again because they had no intention of ever trying to do so, who kept going only in order to shore up the façade of a now empty pride. But there are some things that are not done in the racing world and one of those is that you don’t remove a man from the Grand Prix roster just because his nerve is gone.

  But that MacAlpine was more often right than wrong was sadly clear from the sight of that trembling figure hunched on the bench. If ever a man had gone over the top, had reached and passed the limit of endurance before tumbling over the precipice of self-abnegation and hapless acceptance of ultimate defeat, it was Johnny Harlow, the golden boy of the Grand Prix circuits, unquestionably, until that afternoon, the outstanding driver of his time and, it was being increasingly suggested, of all time: with last year’s world championship safely his and the current year’s, by any reasonable standards, almost inevitably his with half the Grand Prix races still to run, Harlow’s will and nerve would have appeared to have crumbled beyond recovery: it was plain to MacAlpine and Dunnet that the charred being who had been Isaac Jethou would haunt him for however long his days were to be.

  Not that the signs hadn’t been there before for those with eyes to see them and most of the drivers and mechanics on the circuits had the kind of eyes that were required. Ever since the second Grand Prix race of the season, which he had easily and convincingly won unaware of the fact that his brilliant younger brother had been forced off the track and had telescoped his car into a third of its length against the base of a pine tree at something over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the signs had been there. Never a sociable or gregarious person, he had become increasingly withdrawn, increasingly taciturn and when he smiled, and it was rarely, it was the empty smile of a man who could find nothing in life to smile about. Normally the most icily calculating and safety-conscious of drivers, his impeccable standards had become eroded and his previous near obsession with safety dismayingly decreased while, contradictorily, he had consistently kept on breaking lap records on circuits throughout Europe. But he had continued on his record-breaking way, capturing one Grand Prix trophy after the other at the increasingly mounting expense of himself and his fellow competitors: his driving had become reckless and increasingly dangerous and the other drivers, tough and hardened professionals though they all were, began to go in fear of him for instead of disputing a corner with him as they would normally have done they had nearly all of them fallen into the habit of pulling well in when they saw his lime-green Coronado closing up on their driving mirrors. This, in all conscience, was seldom enough, for Harlow had an extremely simple race-winning formula – to get in front and stay there.

  By now more and more people were saying out loud that his suicidally competitive driving on the racetracks signified not a battle against his peers but a battle against himself. It had become increasingly obvious, latterly painfully obvious, that this was one battle that he would never win, that this last ditch stand against his failing nerve could have only one end, that one day his luck would run out. And so it had, and so had Isaac Jethou’s, and Johnny Harlow, for all the world to see, had lost his last battle on the Grand Prix tracks of Europe and America. Maybe he would move out on the tracks again, maybe he would start fighting again: but it seemed certain then that no one knew with more dreadful clarity than Harlow that his fighting days were over.

  For a third time Harlow reached out for the neck of the brandy bottle, his hands as unsteady as ever. The once-full bottle was now one-third empty but only a fraction of that had found its way down his throat, so uncontrollable were his movements. MacAlpine looked gravely at Dunnet, shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture of either resignation or acceptance and then glanced out into the pits. An ambulance had just arrived for his daughter and as MacAlpine hurried out Dunnet set about cleaning up Harlow’s face with the aid of a sponge and a bucket of water. Harlow didn’t seem to care one way or another whether his face was washed: whatever his thoughts were, and in the circumstances it would have taken an idiot not to read them aright, his entire attention appeared to be concentrated on the contents of that bottle of Martell, the picture of a man, if ever there was one, who desperately needed and urgently sought immediate oblivion.

  It was as well, perhaps, that both Harlow and MacAlpine failed to notice a person standing just outside the door whose expression clearly indicated that he would take quite some pleasure in assisting Harlow into a state of permanent oblivion. Rory, MacAlpine’s son, a dark curly-haired youth of a normally amiable, even sunny, disposition had now a dark thundercloud on his face, an unthinkable expression for one who for years, and until only a few minutes previously, regarded Harlow as the idol of his life. Rory looked away towards t
he ambulance where his unconscious and blood-soaked sister lay and then the unthinkable was no longer so. He turned again to look at Harlow and now the emotion reflected in his eyes was as close to outright hatred as a sixteen year-old was ever likely to achieve.

  The official inquiry into the cause of the accident, held almost immediately afterwards, predictably failed to indict any one man as the sole cause of the disaster. Official race inquiries almost never did, including the notorious inquiry into that unparalleled Le Mans holocaust when seventy-three spectators were killed and no one was found to blame whereas it was common knowledge at the time that one man and one man only – dead now these many years – had been the person responsible for it.

  This particular inquiry failed to indict, in spite of the fact that two or three thousand people in the main stands would unhesitatingly have laid the sole charge at the door of Johnny Harlow. But even more damning was the incontrovertible evidence supplied in the small hall where the inquiry was held by a TV playback of the entire incident. The projection screen had been small and stained but the picture clear enough and the sound effects all too vivid and true to life. In the re-run of the film – it lasted barely twenty seconds but was screened five times – three Grand Prix cars, viewed from the rear but being closely followed by the telescopic zoom lens, could be seen approaching the pits. Harlow, in his Coronado, was closing up on the leading car, a vintage privately-entered Ferrari that was leading only by virtue of the fact that it had already lost a lap. Moving even more quickly than Harlow and well clear on the other side of the track was a works-entered fire-engine-red Ferrari driven by a brilliant Californian, Isaac Jethou. In the straight Jethou’s twelve cylinders had a considerable edge over Harlow’s eight and it was clear that he intended to pass. It seemed that Harlow, too, was quite aware of this for his brake lights came on in keeping with his apparent intention of easing slightly and tucking in behind the slower car while Jethou swept by.