Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur - Страница 71

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the horsemen.

"Giuseppe," he gasped. "Take us away from here fast!

Very fast." This was the sort of appeal that went directly to the

driver's heart. He spun the big car so nimbly that the Count's

considerably weakened legs collapsed and he fell backwards onto the

leather seat.

Spread over a front of a quarter of a mile behind and on each side of

the Rolls came thirty of the dun coloured Fiat troop-carriers.

Despite their most fervent efforts, they had lost ground steadily to

the thrusting Rolls and they now lumbered along almost a thousand yards

behind. However, the excitement of the chase had affected the

occupants and they had climbed up on the cabs and cupolas, and hung

there hooting and yelling as they watched the sport, like runners at a

fox hunt.

This solid phalanx of vehicles, advancing almost wheel to wheel over

the rough ground, at a speed which would have horrified the

manufacturers, was suddenly faced with the urgent necessity of

reversing its headlong career without any loss of speed.

The drivers of the two leading trucks whose need was most critical

solved the problem by spinning_ the wheels to hard lock, one left and

the other right, and they came together radiator to radiator at a

combined speed in excess of sixty miles per hour. In a roaring cloud

of steam, splintering glass and rending metal, their cargoes of black

shirted infantry men were scattered like wheat upon the earth, or

impaled on various metal projections of the vehicle bodies. The

trucks, inextricably locked into each other, settled slowly on their

shattered suspensions, and no sooner had the dust begun to drift away

than there was a belly baking thump as the contents of their shattered

fuel tanks ignited in a tall volcanic spout of flame and black smoke.

The other vehicles managed to reverse their courses without serious

collision and streamed away into their own dust-clouds, pursued by a

horde of galloping, gibbering cavalry.

Count Aldo Belli could not bring himself to glance back over his

shoulder, certain that he would find a razor-edged sword swishing

inches from his cringing rear, and he leaned over his driver, spurring

him to greater speed by beating on his unprotected head and shoulders

with a fist clenched like a hammer.

"Faster!" shouted the Count, his fine baritone rising to an uncertain

contralto. "Faster, you idiot or I will have you shod" and he hit the

driver again behind one ear, experiencing a small spark of relief as

the Rolls overtook the rear vehicles in the disordered herd of fleeing

trucks.

Now at last he judged it safe to look back, and his relief was more

intense when he realized that the Rolls was easily capable of out

-running a mounted man. He experienced a warm flood of returning

courage.

"My rifle, Gino," he shouted. "Give me my rifle." But the

Sergeant was trying to focus his camera on the pursuing horde, and

the

Count hit him a blow over the top of his head.

"Idiot. This is war," he bellowed. "And I am a warrior give me my

rifle!" Giuseppe, the driver, hearing him, reluctantly decided that he

was expected to slow the Rolls to give the Count an opportunity to

follow his warlike intentions but, at the first diminution of speed,

he received another lusty crack on the centre of his pate and the

Count's voice went shrill again.

"Idiot," he screeched. "Do you want to get us killed?

Faster, man, faster!" and with unbounded relief the driver pushed his

foot flat on the throttle and the Rolls leapt forward again.

Gino was down on his hands and knees at the Count's feet, and now he

came up with the Mannlicher in his hands and handed it to the Count.

"It's loaded, my Count."

"Brave boy!" The Count braced himself with the rifle held at his hip,

and looked about for something to shoot at.

The Ethiopian cavalry had fallen well behind at this stage, and the

Rolls had overtaken most of the troop-carriers they were between the

Count and the enemy. The Count was considering ordering Giuseppe to

work his way out on to the flank, and thus give him an open field of

fire weighing the pleasure of shooting down the black riders at a

respectable range against any possible physical danger to himself and

he turned on his precarious perch in the back seat to look out in that

direction.

He stared incredulously at what he saw. Two great humpbacked shapes

were sailing in across the open grassland. They looked like two

deformed camels, coming on swiftly with a curious loping progress that

was at once comical and yet dreadfully menacing.

The Count stared at them uncomprehendingly, until with a sudden jolt of

shock and a new warm flood of adrenalin into his bloodstream,

he realized that the two strange vehicles were moving fast enough and

at such an angle as to cut off his retreat.

"Giuseppe!" he shrieked, and hit the driver with the butt of the

Marmlicher. It was not a heavy blow, it was meant merely to attract

his attention, but Giuseppe had already taken much punishment and was

by now lightly concussed.

He clung to the wheel with white knuckles and roared on directly into

the path of the new enemy.

"Giuseppe!" shrieked the Count again, as he suddenly recognized the

gaily coloured flashes on the turret of the nearest machine, and at the

same instant saw the thick stubby cylindrical shape that protruded

ahead of it. It was fluted vertically and at the far end a short pipe

like muzzle thrust out of the heavy water-jacket.

"Oh, merciful Mother of God!" he howled as the machine altered course

slightly and the muzzle of the Vickers machine gun pointed directly at

him.

"You fool!" he shrieked at Giuseppe, hitting him again.

"Turn! You idiot, turn!" Suddenly through the tears of pain, the

singing in his ears, and the blinding terror that gripped him, Giuseppe

saw the huge camel-like shape looming up ahead of him and he spun the

wheel again just as the muzzle of the Vickers erupted in a fluttering

pillar of bright flame and the air all around them was torn by the hiss

and crack of a thousand bull whips.

Castelani stood on the cab of his truck, and peered disapprovingly

through his binoculars into the distant clouds of rolling dust where

confused movement and shadowy indistinguishable shapes flitted without

seeming purpose or pattern.

It had required all of his presence and authority to restrain the ten

trucks which carried the artillery men and towed their field pieces, to

keep them under his personal command and to prevent them joining in the

wildly enthusiastic rush after the small contingent of

Ethiopian horsemen.

Castelani was about to give the order to mount up and cautiously follow

the Count's charge into history and glory, when he raised the

binoculars again and it seemed that the pattern of dust-obscured

movement out there had altered. Suddenly he saw the unmistakable shape

of a Fiat transport emerge from the dust bank, and move ponderously

back towards him. Through the glasses the men who clung to the canvas

roof were all staring back in the direction from which they were coming

at speed.

He panned the glasses slowly and saw another truck lumber out of the

dust-mist headed back towards him. One of the soldiers on its roof was

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