The siren was howling. Blanc honked his horn whenever he dared take a hand from the steering wheel, which wasn’t often. He raced down the hill on the route départementale. When he came to a straight stretch, he spotted the two cars for a second or two, maybe five hundred yards in front of him. The white Audi almost filled the width of the road, the Citroën tight on its tail. Lafont had the more powerful car, but Aveline was the more audacious driver. He watched as both cars came to a crossing and swerved onto an even smaller rural road, one he had never taken before. “Merde!” he swore. With every second he fell farther behind both of them. By the time they reached the next roundabout, he would have lost sight of them altogether. He was having so much trouble keeping the Mégane on the track that he didn’t dare make a grab for the radio to call for backup.
He reached the first roundabout and turned. Suddenly there was a yellow mail van to his right. He spun the wheel at the last moment, sending stones flying on either side of the road. For a fraction of a second he glimpsed a young, blond woman behind the windshield, her mouth wide open in a ghostly silent scream. She braked so hard that the van slid obliquely across the road, its tires smoking.
Blanc glanced into the rearview mirror to check that the mail van hadn’t actually hit a tree. His ears echoed with the howl of the siren, his hooting of the horn, the roaring of the vehicle’s overstressed four-cylinder engine, the hammering noise still coming from under the hood. Then there was smoke, thin ochre plumes drifting between the pine branches on either side, at head height above the ground. There was a burning smell in the air. “This old crate’s going to blow up on me,” Blanc shouted out to nobody.
He stood on the brakes. The tires screamed in protest. Right in front of him on either side of the track were two wrecks. The Audi Q7 had gone nose-first into a ditch by the roadside, its wheels in the air, still spinning. The driver’s door hung open. The Citroën had traveled a few yards farther into the undergrowth. Its windshield was shattered. The doors were closed. Blanc had passed the wrecks before the Renault came to a halt. He ran back, jumping over the ditch. “Aveline!” he called out, ripping open the driver’s door.
She was conscious, though a little line of blood ran down from her left temple. The deflated airbags covered the steering wheel and door frame. He pushed them out of the way and felt for her seat belt. “I’m fine,” she mumbled woozily.
“Yeah, right, you look like you’ve just returned from vacation.” He pulled her out of the seat belt. “What happened?”
“I rammed Lafont.”
Blanc didn’t reply, thinking he couldn’t have heard right. He still had the damn mistral rushing through the trees in his ears. The rustling branches. He felt faint.
“There was no way I could get past that fat crate of his,” Aveline continued. She was gradually coming back to reality. “I was afraid Lafont would sooner or later stop hurtling along blindly through the countryside, but would think it through. What would I have done in his position? I would have turned down the next forest track. In that four-by-four of his he could have carried on forever, while my sedan would eventually have got stuck in the ruts. So I just crashed into the rear of the Audi when he braked to take a corner. I rammed him into the ditch.”
“And damn near broke your neck in the process,” he exclaimed. “It’s not far to the patrol car. You can lie down in it. I’ll call paramedics and backup. Lafont is on the run on foot. He won’t get far.”
She shook her head and gave him a pained smile. “This isn’t the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris, mon Capitaine.”
“The forest isn’t that big.”
“The forest is on fire,” she shouted at him. “Don’t you see the smoke? Don’t you smell anything? There’s a fire raging somewhere out there.”
He shrugged. “That’ll just cut off Lafont’s path.”
“And ours. If we aren’t lucky. The mistral fans the flames. They’ll rush through the undergrowth faster than you can run. A lot faster. We have half an hour at most to find Lafont, then we need to be out of here.”
Blanc stood up. He had heard a crackling noise in the forest, almost as loud as gunfire. “We don’t have half an hour,” he whispered. “The flames are almost here.”
* * *
The track stopped just a few yards beyond where the two wrecked cars had come to rest. Already the ground started to dip where the Citroën lay. A few paces beyond it fell steeply downward for maybe a hundred feet. The ground was covered with macchia bushes and knee-high thistles, with a few stunted oaks clinging to the slope. The red sandy soil had been blown away in places to reveal gray rock. The valley below was more thickly wooded and dropped away in terraces down to the Étang de Berre. The sky above them was still crystal clear and blue, but down below clouds of smoke were gathering like dirty cotton wool. The center was almost black while the mistral was blowing yellowish plumes into the air. Blanc noticed an old pine burst into flames. Then a bubble of resin exploded into a red ball of fire, the wind bringing the sound like a gunshot up the hill to them.
“There he is,” Blanc called out. Standing by the side of the road he had spotted Lafont’s massive shape halfway down the hill. He had discarded his linen jacket, and his white shirt stood out like a semaphore flag. The mayor was stumbling down the slope, not bothering to look around him. And ran straight into the cloud of smoke.
“Marcel has a habit of making mistakes under pressure,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre said calmly. “The fire will have him.”
“He’s still only halfway down the slope.”
“The wind will soon blow the flames uphill.”
A second tree burst into a flaming torch: an oak, its leaves turning into black, oily smoke. Reddish-yellow flames were now glowing amidst the smoke. The first yellow plumes had risen so high into the air that they now obscured the sunlight above their heads. The bitter stench was getting worse by the moment. Blanc could feel the heat on his skin and a choking sensation in his throat. It was as if someone had opened a giant oven door, closed it, then reopened it and closed it again. And every time the oven remained open for a few seconds longer. He wasn’t even sweating anymore—the wind and the heat had dried his skin.
“Merde,” he said, pulling out his gun. “I’ll get the bastard.”
“We’ll get the bastard.”
“Lafont has killed twice.”
“All the more reason for there to be two of us.”
“But—”
“We’re not still living in the 1950s, mon Capitaine. I can look after myself.”
Blanc just shrugged, grabbed hold of the branch of a stunted oak, and began to make his way down the slope. He had to pause for breath. It was as if all the oxygen was being sucked out of the valley. The heat increased with every step he took. He was in danger of losing consciousness, and then the flames would take him. He shook himself. Keep going! Lafont was older than him, overweight, and clearly already exhausted. Blanc would catch him up before long. Keep going!
The roar of the mistral got worse, or maybe it was a different sort of roar: flames burning wood. Or there again, maybe it was the blood boiling in his head. Keep going. Behind him he heard the crack of a branch, and a suppressed cry from Aveline. Don’t turn round. Keep going. Blanc reached the bottom of the slope. The shrubbery was thicker, thornier, and gray trails of smoke billowed among the branches. A scorpion ran across his shoe, fleeing the flames, up the hill he had just come down. A snake as long as his forearm slid down the branch of a rosemary bush and stared at him with dark green eyes for a second. Keep going.
He heard another crack; a pine tree branch next to him broke. Blanc ducked to avoid the splinters. He was afraid the tree’s resin would explode any second, but then he realized that the tree had not burst into flames. It had been a gunshot. He threw himself down into the undergrowth. Down, onto the ground. The smell of old wood and pine needles.
“Get down,” he shouted to Aveline. He had no idea if she could hear his voice over the noise. The earth trembled. Panicking ants ran around dragging white eggs behind them. He peered through the undergrowth. There was no sign of Lafont amidst the confusion of wood, leaves, and smoke. Don’t let him pin you down, the flames are coming this way, he told himself. In any case it was better to have Lafont shooting at him rather than Aveline. He sprang to his feet and made a long dash to the next shrub. Another gunshot, from somewhere out there. Where was the bastard?
Blanc pressed his face to the ground again, trying to breathe more regularly. The earth was trembling more than ever. He could hear a buzzing like that of a swarm of bees. It got louder, deeper. Motors, he thought, confused. Then he recalled an image from his first year of service. Water cannons on their way to deal with a student demonstration in Paris, colossal machines rolling along slowly, making the shop windows and even the asphalt surface of the boulevards vibrate. Were they about to tackle the blaze with water cannons? He looked around nervously, but all he could see was smoke and branches. Pull yourself together!
The buzzing got louder. He could feel the vibrations now not just beneath his feet but throughout his body. Where was Lafont? Where was Aveline? The sky above his head turned dark. A giant shadow obscured the sun, cutting through the plumes of smoke like the wings of some immense pterodactyl. The droning had become so loud his hands were shaking. He looked up in shock: A huge yellowy-orange aircraft was flying just above the treetops, a cumbersome propeller aircraft, its wings bobbing in the rising hot air. All of a sudden a hatch in the rear opened out and he thought that at any moment a hail of bombs would begin to fall, like he had seen in old war films. But instead a great cloud emerged from the aircraft. Blanc pressed his face to the ground. A second later he was soaked. A wall of water descended on him, smashing branches, ripping apart leaves. For one surreal second he saw millions of drops battering down onto the rock-hard dry earth and bouncing up again, little pearls of glass in the air, before falling down again and turning the red soil to mud.
Blanc began coughing. For a few seconds he was shivering with cold until the heat dried out his clothing. Then he heard a fresh rumbling. Fire engines, he thought, when his head finally cleared. He should have got the picture straightaway. The fire-extinguishing aircraft down at Marignane, capable of carrying hundreds of gallons of water in their holds for dumping on flames. He’d seen their spectacular feats of low flying often enough on the television news. He tried to remember how many of the aircraft they had. Five? Six? Seven?
He saw the next shadow approaching. This time he was prepared. He kneeled down, his left arm shielding his head, his right hand holding the Sig-Sauer pistol in an attempt to keep the gun dry. When the droning became almost unbearable just before the water was released he sprang to his feet and looked around him. There was something white visible behind the trunk of a pine tree to his right, just slightly farther down the now gentle slope, no more than twenty yards away. Lafont. Blanc ducked down again and let the wall of water rush over him. He could hear it hissing as it fell on trees that were already alight.
Carefully Blanc crept forward through the undergrowth, hoping Lafont would not have moved, pinned to the ground by a combination of water, fire, and fear. He could hear the third aircraft approaching. This time he didn’t dare to try standing up again but got down on his knees and glanced toward the pine tree: Lafont, his face as red as a lobster, his shirt ripped, partly blackened. Behind him a bush was on fire. He could go no farther. He was only ten yards away now. Then the next wall of water hit.
More droning. A fourth aircraft on the way. A movement to his left. Blanc turned in confusion. Aveline! She was still bleeding from her temple, had lost her left shoe, and was limping. She was heading for an old tree to shelter from the next deluge of water, but she was slow. Blanc turned his head quickly and stared ahead of him into the smoke. Something had changed. Suddenly he saw Lafont’s huge frame emerge from behind the pine tree: an arm, a hand, a gun.
He sprang to his feet and fired, again and again and again, as the deluge of water poured over him.