Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur - Страница 68

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Vicky should have been inspecting the magneto, she found instead that

she was looking closely at the back of Sara's head which had been

interposed.

After she had forcibly elbowed her aside for the sixth time, she asked

with exasperation, "Do you know how to fire a Vickers machine gun?"

"I

am a mountain girl," boasted Sara. "I was born with a gun in one hand

and a horse between my legs."

"Or what have you?" murmured Vicky, and the girl grinned impishly.

"But have you ever fired a Vickers?"

"No," admitted Sara reluctantly, and then brightened.

"But it won't take me long to find out how it works."

"There!"

Vicky indicated the thick water-jacketed barrel that protruded from the

turret. "Go ahead." When Sara scrambled awkwardly on to the

sponson,

still favouring the leg, Vicky could return to her inspection. It was

another half hour before she exclaimed, "He has taken the carbon rod

out of the distributor. Oh, the sneaky swine." Sara's head popped out

of the turret. "Gareth?"she asked.

"No," answered Vicky. "Jake."

"I didn't expect it of him." Sara climbed down beside Vicky to inspect

the damage.

"They're all the same."

"Where has he hidden it?"

"Probably in his own pocket."

"What are we going to do?" Sara wrung her hands anxiously.

"We'll miss the battle!" Vicky thought a moment and then her

expression changed. "In my bag, in the tent, is an Ever-Ready

flashlight.

There is also a leather cosmetic case. Bring them both to me,

please." One of the flashlight dry-cell batteries, split open by the

curved blade of the dagger from Sara's belt, yielded a thick carbon rod

from its core, and Vicky shaped it carefully with the nail-file from

her cosmetic case, until it slipped neatly into the central shaft of

the distributor and the engine fired at the first swing of the crank.

"You are really very clever, Miss Camberwell, said Sara, with such

patent and solemn sincerity that Vicky was deeply touched. She smiled

up at the girl who stood above the driver's seat, her head and

shoulders in the turret and her knees braced against the back of the

driver's seat.

"Think you can work that gun yet?" she asked, and Sara nodded

uncertainly and placed her slim dark hands on the clumsy mahogany

pistol grips, standing on tiptoe to squint through the sights.

"Just take me to them, Miss Camberwell." Vicky let out the clutch and

swung the car in a tight lock out from under the acacia" trees and on

to the steep rocky track which led to the wide open grassland in the

funnel of the mountains.

am very angry with Jake," declared Sara, clutching wildly for support

as the car pounded and thumped over the rough track. "I did not expect

him to behave that way hiding the carbon rod. That is more like

Gareth. I am disappointed in him."

"You are?"

"Yes, I think we should punish him."

"How?"

"I think Gareth should be your lover," Sara stated firmly.

"I think that is how we will punish Jake." In between wrestling with

the heavy steering, and dancing her feet over the steel pedals of brake

and clutch, Vicky thought about what Sara had said. She thought also

of Jake's broad rangy shoulders, and thickly muscled arms she thought

about his mop of curly hair and that wide boyish grin that could change

so quickly to a heavy frown.

Suddenly she realized how very much she wanted to be with him, and how

she would miss him if he were gone.

"I must thank you for sorting out my affairs for me," she called to the

girl in the turret. "You have a knack."

"It's a pleasure, Miss

Camberwell," Sara called back. "It is just that I understand these

things." As the afternoon wore on, so thunderheads of cloud "Aformed

upon the mountains in the west. They soared into a sky of endless

sapphire blue, smoothly rounded masses of silver that rolled and

swirled with a ponderous majesty, swelling high and darkening to the

colour of ripening grapes and old bruises.

Yet over the plain the sky was open, clear and high, and the sun burned

down and heated the earth so that the air above it shimmered and

danced, distorting vision and distance. At one moment the mountains

were so close that it seemed they reached to the heavens and they must

topple upon the small group of men crouched in the shade of the two

concealed armoured cars; at the next they seemed remote and

miniaturized by distance.

The sun had heated the hulls of the cars so that the steel would

blister skin at a touch and the men who waited, all of them except

Jake Barton and Gareth Swales, crawled like survivors of a catastrophe

beneath the hulls, seeking relief from the unrelenting sun.

The heat was so intense that the gin rummy game had long been

abandoned, and the two white men panted like dogs, the sweat drying

instantly on their skins and crusting into a thin film of white salt

crystals.

Gregorius looked to the mountains, and the clouds upon them, and he

said softly, "Soon it will rain." He looked up to where Jake Barton

sat like a statue on the turret of Priscilla the Pig. Jake had swathed

his head and upper body in a white linen sham ma to protect it from the

sun and he held the binoculars in his lap. Every few minutes, he would

lift them to his eyes and make one slow sweep of the land ahead before

slumping motionless again.

Slowly the shadows crept out from the hulls of the cars, the sun turned

across its zenith and gradually lost its white glare, its rays toned

with yellows and reds. Once again, Jake lifted the binoculars and this

time paused midway in his automatic sweep of the horizon.

In the lens the familiar dun feather of the distant cloud once again

wavered softly at the line where pale earth and paler sky joined.

He watched it for five minutes, and it seemed that the dust cloud was

fading shrivelling, and that the shimmering pillars of heat-distorted

air were rising, screening his vision.

Jake lowered the glasses and a warm flood of sweat broke from his

hairline, trickled down his forehead into his eyes.

He swore softly it the sting of salt and wiped it away with the hem of

the linen sharnma. He blinked rapidly, and then lifted the glasses

again and felt his heart jump in his chest and the prickle of rising

hair on the nape of his neck.

The freakish Currents and whirlpools of heated air cleared suddenly,

and the dust cloud that minutes before had seemed remote as the far

shores of the ocean was now so close and crisply outlined against the

pale blue white sky that it filled the lens. Then his heart jumped

again below the rolling spreading cloud he could make out the dark

insect shapes of many swiftly moving vehicles. Suddenly the viscosity

of the air changed again, and the shapes of the approaching column

altered becoming monstrous, looming through the mist of duSt. closer,

every second closer and more menacing.

Jake shouted, and Gareth was beside him in an instant.

"Are you crazy?" he gasped. "They'll overrun us in a minute."

"Get started," Jake snapped. "Get the engines started," and slid down

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