Free Caravan to Vaccares by Alistair MacLean

if erroneously, suspected of being a party to his irritatingly interfering behaviour.
    He crossed the no more than ten yards of the flat limestone summit, lowered himself flat and peered over the edge. His circumspection was needless. There was an escape route, a very steep scree-laden slope that debouched gradually into an area of massive limestone boulders which in turn gave on to the Les Baux plateau massif itself. Uninviting but feasible.
    He made his way back to the cliff-side and heard voices, at first indistinctly, then clearly.
    â€˜This is madness!’ It was Hoval speaking and for the first time Bowman shared a point of view with him.
    â€˜For you, Hoval, for a mountaineer from the High Tatra?’ Ferenc’s voice. ‘If he went this way, we can too. You know that if we do not kill this man everything will be lost.’
    Bowman looked down. He could see Hoval quite clearly and the heads of Ferenc and Koscis.
    Koscis, apparently trying to postpone a decision, said: ‘I do not like killing, Ferenc.’
    Ferenc said: ‘Too late to be queasy now. My father’s orders are that we do not return until this man lies dead.’
    Hoval nodded reluctantly, reached down his feet, found the ledge and started to edge his way along. Bowman rose, looked around, located a limestone boulder that must have weighed at least fifty pounds, lifted it chest high and returned to the brink of the precipice.
    Hoval was obviously a great deal more experienced than Bowman for he was making about twice the best speed that Bowman had been able to manage. Ferenc and Koscis, heads and shoulders clearly visible now, were glancing anxiously sideways, watching Hoval’s progress and almost certainly far from relishing the prospect of having to emulate him. Bowman waited till Hoval was directly beneath him. Hoval had once already tried to murder and now was coming to try to murder again. Bowman felt no pity and opened his hands.
    The boulder, with a curious absence of sound, struck head and shoulders: the whole brief sequence, indeed, was characterized by an eerie silence. Hoval made no sound at all on the long way down and may well have been dead before he started to fall: and no sound of what must have been appalling impact came from either Hoval or the boulder that had killed him as they plunged into the olive groves so far away. They just disappeared soundlessly from sight, vanished in the darkness below.
    Bowman looked at Ferenc and Koscis. For several seconds they crouched there, their faces stunned, for catastrophe rarely registers instantaneously, then Ferenc’s face became savagely transformed. He reached inside his jacket, snatched out a gun, pointed it upwards and fired. He knew Bowman was up there but he could have had no idea where he was. It was no more than the uncontrollable expression of an access of blind fury but Bowman took a couple of rapid backward steps all the same.
    The gun introduced a new dimension. Clearly, because of their predilection for knives, they had intended to dispose of Bowman as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, but Ferenc, Bowman felt sure, did not carry a gun unless he intended to use it in the last resort and that was plainly at hand: they were going to get him at no matter what risk to themselves. Bowman reflected that whatever he had so nearly stumbled across must literally be a matter of life and death, then he turned and ran. Ferenc and Koscis would already be heading back through the tunnel on the assumption that there might be an escape route open to Bowman: in any event it would be pointless for them to remain where they were as any action they might try to take there would result in their untimely end. Untimely, that is, from their point of view.
    He ran down the steep slope of scree because he had no alternative but to run, taking increasingly huge bounding steps to maintain what was left of his balance. Three-quarters of the way down to the waiting jumble of