Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur - Страница 75

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from the stupors of shock, and he reached up, unlatched the driver's

hatch and stuck his head out into the open air. At what seemed like

point-blank range, three full batteries of Italian field guns were

firing at him.

"Oh my God!" he gasped painfully, as another volley of high explosive

erupted around the rapidly circling car, the blast jarring his eyeballs

and rattling his teeth in his head.

"Let's go home!" he said and began to hoist himself out of the narrow

hatch-way. His feet came clear of the steel flooring of the hull only

just in time to save every bone below his knees in both legs from being

shattered into small fragments.

a thousand yards away across the plain Major Castelani was fighting for

control against the panic that the Count had instilled in his gunners.

They were loading and firing with such single-minded passion that all

the other refinements of gunnery were completely forgotten. The layers

were no longer making a pretence of seeking a target, but merely

jerking the lanyard at the very moment the breech block clanged shut.

Castelani's bellows made no impression on the half deafened and almost

completely dazed gunners. The Count's last injunction to death had

shattered their nerves completely and they were all of them beyond

reason.

Castelani dragged the nearest layer from his seat behind the gun

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.

"All right, Rassey." Gareth unwound the sham ma from around his head.

"You can come out now. Call your boys up, and tell them to get us out

of here." In the few moments of respite while the main body of

motorized infantry came through the batteries, Major Castelani hurried

from gun to gun, lashing with tongue and cane until he had contained

the infectious panic of his gunners and had them under his hand

again.

Then out of the dust clouds, appearing at short pistol range as

suddenly as a ghost ship, but with the Vickers machine gun in its

turret crackling wickedly and the muzzle blast flickering in an angry

throbbing red glow, was a second Ethiopian armoured car.

It was enough to destroy the semblance of control that Castelani had

forced heavy-handedly upon the gun crews.

As the armoured car swung across their line at point-blank range,

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