shield, and prised open the man's death grip on the lanyard. Cursing
bitterly at the quality of the men under his command, he pedalled the
traverse and elevating handles of the gun with a smooth expert
action.
The thick barrel dropped and swung until the insect speck of the
armoured car loomed suddenly large in the magnifying prism of the
gunsight. It was tearing in a crazy circle, clearly out of control,
and Castelani picked up the rhythm of its circle and hit the lanyard
with a short hard jerk of the wrist. The barrel flew back, arrested at
last by the hydraulic pistons of the shock absorber, and the
fifteen-pound cone-shaped steel shell was hurled on an almost flat
trajectory across the plain.
It was aimed fractionally low. It passed inches below the tall
shuttered bows of the car, between the two front wheels, and struck the
earth directly below the driver's compartment.
The released energy. of the blast was deflected by the earth's surface
up into the soft underbelly of the hull. It blew the engine block off
its seating, tore off the big front wheels like wings from a roast
chicken, and stove in the steel floor of the hull with a great
Thor's hammer stroke.
If Gareth Swales's feet had been in contact with the steel floor of the
hull, the shock would have been transmitted directly into the bones of
his feet and legs, and he would have suffered that dreadful but
characteristic wound of the tank man below the knees his legs would
have been transformed into bags of shattered bone.
He was, however, suspended half in and half out of the driver's hatch
with both legs kicking frantically in the air, and the shock of the
blast came up like carbon dioxide in a bottle of freshly opened
champagne. He was the cork and he was shot out of the hatch, still
kicking.
The effect on the Ras was the same. He came out of the turret,
propelled high by the blast and he met Gareth at the top of his
trajectory. The two of them came down to earth simultaneously, with
the Ras seated between Gareth's shoulder blades, and the wonder of it
was that neither of them was impaled upon the war sword which went with
them and finally pegged deep into the earth six inches from Gareth's
ear as he lay face down and feebly tried to dislodge the Ras from his
back.
"I warn you, old chap," he managed to gasp. "One day you are going to
go too far." The sound of oncoming engines, many of them and all
roaring in high revolutions, made Gareth's efforts to dislodge the
Ras more determined. He sat up spitting sand and blood from his
crushed lips, and looked up to see the remaining Italian transports
bearing down on them like the starting grid of the Le Mans Grand
Prix.
"Oh my God!" gasped Gareth, his scattered wits reassembling hastily,
and he crawled frantically into the shattered and still smoking carcass
of the Hump, beginning to shrink down out of sight before he realized
that the Ras was no longer with him.
"Rassey, you stupid old bastard come back, he shouted despairingly. The
Ras, once again armed with his trusty broadsword,
was staggering out on unsteady stork's legs, stunned by the shell burst
but still fighting mad, and there was no doubting his intentions. He
was going to take on the entire motorized column single-handed, and as
he hurried to meet them, shouting a challenge, he loosened up with a
few hissing two-handed cuts with the sword.
Gareth had to duck under the swinging blade, going in low in a flying
rugby tackle, to bring the old warrior down in an untidy heap.
He dragged him, still shouting and struggling furiously, under cover of
the broken steel hull, just as the first Italian truck roared past
them. The pale-faced occupants paid them not the slightest attention.
they were intent on one thing only and that was following their
Colonel.
"Shut up!" growled Gareth, as the Ras tried to provoke them with some
of the foulest oaths in the Amharic language. Finally he had to hold
the Ras down, wrap his sham ma around his head, and sit on it while the
Italian Fiats thundered past, and the rolling clouds of dust spread
over them as though driven by the khamsin.
Once through the dust and confused stampede of trucks, Gareth thought
he glimpsed the hump-backed shape of Priscilla the Pig, and he released
the Ras for a moment to wave and shout, but the car disappeared almost
instantly, hard on the trail of a lumbering Fiat,
and Gareth heard the short crashing burst of the Vickers clearly, even
above the thunder of many engines.
Then suddenly they were all past, streaming away, the engine sounds
fading, the dust settling and then there was another sound,
faint yet but growing with every second.
Although most of the Harari and Galla horsemen had long ago given up
the pursuit in favour of the more enjoyable and profitable occupation
of looting the capsized and damaged Italian trucks, a few hundred of
the more hardy souls still flogged on their foundering mounts.
This thin line of horsemen came sweeping forward, ululating and
casually cutting down the Italian survivors from the destroyed trucks
who fled before them on foot.
