'Kill the lights!'

The command was barked from the back of the car, and the driver instinctively carried out the instruction. Too much initiative had been heaped on his shoulders before; now he was just able to obey, to react. Fifty metres in front of him the policeman disappeared into the blackness.

Almost immediately came the next order.

'On again, the lights.'

The driver shrieked with horror. Ten paces beyond the front of the car was the policeman, directly in their path, his sub-machine-gun close to his hip, pointed directly at the windscreen. He never fired.

The radiator of the car smashed into his upper thighs.

His body jack-knifed into the air. The car recoiled from the impact, then shuddered again as the policeman clipped the roof before spiralling over the top of the car. The driver swerved across to the right, late and with effort, just avoiding the blue patrol car parked at an angle and filling the road. The man beside him felt the nausea rising deep in his intestines and into the constricted pipe of his throat.

The third man had closed his eyes just before the fragile, toy-like figure was brushed aside, trying to shut out the vision of the gaping, incredulous mouth of the policeman.

As Roben hit the road surface, shattering his vertebrae, and destroying what faint source of life was left to him, Miniux opened fire.

From the car they saw the policeman who crouched back from the road and close to the ditch. At his shoulder was the steel-framed butt of the squat MAT 49. There were thirty-two nine-millimetre rounds in the magazine, and he fired them all at the car, moving his finger from the trigger only when the hammering kick of the weapon subsided. The bullets ploughed their way first into the engine of the car, then worked their pattern back toward the interior. The first to die was the front passenger, four shells hitting him in the chest. The driver too was struck, feeling the pain spreading from his left arm and then into the torn wounds in his side. But the man behind, protected by the bodywork and the seats of the car, survived the low velocity spray.