Both tanks lost sight of the truck, lost sight of everything beyond the opaque brown mass. One turned to swerve around the obstruction; the other plowed fearlessly into it. Big as the cloud was, it would still only take a matter of seconds for the speeding Leopard to pass through it, and the rubble the truck had strewn in a pathetic attempt to block it would do nothing more than make for a bumpy ride…
The driver saw something in his periscope, a huge dark shape suddenly looming through the swirling dust directly ahead of him, over him, but it was too late to stop—
The main gun was abruptly punched backwards into the turret as its muzzle slammed into a boulder as big as the tank itself. The gun’s loader barely escaped decapitation as the barrel speared over him, passing right between the legs of the seated tank commander and smashing into the back of the turret with a deafening clash of metal against metal. A moment later the Leopard’s prow hit the massive rock. The tank came to an extremely sudden stop.
“Did we get them?” Nina asked anxiously, watching the monitors. All she could see was dust, a trail still swirling from the now-vertical dumper.
Chase risked a look back from the side window. One of the Leopards emerged from behind the cloud, skirting it. “One’s still going,” he reported, leaning back to check the screens. Nothing emerged from the haze behind them. “Think we got the other one, though!”
“Well, great! Too bad we don’t have another truck full of rocks!”
Chase was about to shoot back a sarcastic comment when a thought struck him.
They didn’t have another truck full of rocks. But they still had the truck itself…
He confirmed the position of the remaining tank, then steered directly away from it. “Keep watching that screen,” he said. “Shout the moment it fires.”
“We can’t keep dodging it forever!” said Nina.
The desert earth below became darker, the muddy remnants of a small river feeding into the delta discoloring the ground. “We won’t have to,” Chase told her, turning the wheel back and forth so that the truck began a snaking motion. “One way or another.”
Nina grimaced. “I don’t like the way you put that—aah!”
Chase took that as a sign the tank had fired again and immediately jammed the truck into as hard a turn as possible. The horizon tilted ahead, its angle steepening as the truck began to overbalance. The steering wheel quivered, the wobble of the tires feeding back to him as both wheels on the inside of the turn left the ground—
Boom!
An explosion, frighteningly close, but on the far side of the truck from the tank. The shell had gone right between the front and rear wheels, under the truck as it almost tipped over.
Chase twitched the wheel to drop the T282B back onto all four wheels, but kept turning.
Fourteen seconds …
“What are you doing?” Nina asked, confusion joined by fear as she realized he was heading back towards the tank.
“It takes them fourteen seconds to reload,” Chase said. “If we can reach them in thirteen seconds, then we can squash ’em before they fire again!”
“And if it takes us fifteen seconds, they’ll blow us up!” Nina objected. The Leopard swung into view ahead, Chase aiming right at it. “How long have we got left?”
“Four seconds!” Truck and tank raced directly at each other, neither slowing. “Any last words?”
“Shitshitshit!”
The main gun rose, aiming at the cab.
Chase released the wheel and yanked Nina down across his lap, throwing his upper body onto hers to protect her—
Collision!
The Leopard weighed forty tons—but even unloaded the T282B was more than five times its weight, and far larger.
The tank’s gun bent like a cardboard tube as it stabbed through the truck’s bodywork to hit the unyielding diesel block within. An instant later, the truck rode up over the Leopard’s sloping front, stamping the tank down into the soft earth up to the base of its turret. The gun was ripped away, crushed under the Liebherr’s enormous tires and left poking out of the ground in a mangled U-shape.
Over the obstacle, the truck bounced back down onto the ground, turning again as the steering wheel whipped around.
Nina opened one eye, finding herself lying over Chase’s lap, her head in the footwell. She felt his weight on top of her, holding her in place. She couldn’t tell if he was moving, or even breathing. “Eddie?”
A long silence, then: “I thought somebody with your education’d come up with better last words.”
She flapped at him with her hands. “Get offa me!”
Chase sat up, letting her push herself upright before retaking the wheel. He immediately realized that the steering had been damaged; it felt slack, unresponsive. With some effort, he managed to straighten the vehicle, seeing through the broken windshield that they were now heading north again, towards the delta.
He lifted his foot off the accelerator…
Nina ran her hands though her hair. “Jesus! I really thought we were going to die back there.” She was about to begin a tirade against Chase’s insane actions when she took in his expression. It was one she’d seen before.
And it was never a good sign. “What?”
He pointed at the floor. “See my foot?”
“Yes?”
“See how it’s not on the accelerator?”
“But we’re still going—oh my God!” She looked at the dashboard. Several of the instruments had been damaged by bullets, but the speedometer was still intact—and she instantly translated the reading of sixty-six kilometers per hour into imperial units. “We’re doing over forty!”
“The throttle’s jammed,” said Chase. The pedal was stuck firmly against the floor; he’d already tried to lift it with his foot, but to no avail. “Hold on to the seat; this might get bumpy.”
“Get?” But she obeyed, crouching behind him.
Chase pushed the brake. The truck shook, a deep grinding noise coming from the wheels below. He watched the brake temperature gauges. One was no longer working, but the other three rose with worrying speed towards the red zone.
The speedometer dropped, but not by much.
He pushed harder. The cab rattled, what little glass remained in the windows finally falling free. The speedometer needle juddered, dropping in jerky steps as the brake gauges flicked higher…
A noise like scrap metal in a tumble dryer made them both cringe. There was a sharp bang, then something clattered against the wheel below them and fell away.
Nina looked out of the window. Smoke billowed from the wheel hub. “What the hell was that?”
“The brakes!” One of the temperature needles had flicked instantly back down to zero. “They’ve burned out!”
Nina reached over and grabbed the gearshift, trying to force it into the neutral position. It refused to move. “Dammit!”
Chase eased off slightly on the brakes in the hope that their temperature would fall while the truck still slowed, but all that happened was that the speedometer rose again—the temperature gauges remained in the red. “Bollocks!” He changed tack and stamped on the brake pedal as hard as he could. The truck swayed violently, the steering wheel writhing in his grasp.
Something crunched unpleasantly, then there was a dull crack from under the dashboard and the wheel immediately became still.
The brake needles rose higher, but the truck was shedding speed …
Another disc blew apart, shards of red-hot steel banging around inside the wheel hub. The speedometer needle moved back up.
Chase kept his foot pressed down in the vain hope that the two remaining brakes would stay intact. They didn’t. Within seconds of each other they exploded under the stress.
“No hand brake?” Nina asked, not sounding the least bit hopeful.
“Nope.” Chase narrowed his eyes against the wind and surveyed the landscape ahead. If there was a steep enough slope, he might be able to aim the truck up it and cause it to slow so t
hey could jump off …
There was a potential candidate some distance to the right. But he realized that he wasn’t going to reach it when he turned the steering wheel… and nothing happened. The wheel was no longer connected to anything—the steering column had broken.
Chase stared at it in horror. “Buggeration and fuckery!”
“Oh, that’s never good to hear,” Nina said, wincing.
Chase spun the useless control back and forth to no effect, then angrily set it whirling like a roulette wheel. “Okay, so no brakes and no steering. I’m open to any ideas.”
“Could we jump off?”
“We’re going too fast. I might be able to land okay, I’ve had training, but you haven’t.”
“Well, I’m going to have to chance it, aren’t I?” Nina opened the cab door and went onto the walkway, looking over the flapping banner still caught there at the stairs below. “Or maybe not!”
“What is it?”
“No stairs! They must have gotten wrecked when you drove into that helicopter!”
“Oh, right, it’s all my fault!”
Nina ignored him, an idea coming to her. She looked back at the raised tipper, then returned to the cab and worked the hydraulic controls. The huge load bed began to descend. “Give me a hand!” she called.
“Doing what?”
“Help me with this!” She pointed at the banner.
Chase hesitated, then decided that since he had no control over the truck there was little point staying in the driver’s seat, and joined her.
“It’s catching the wind, look,” Nina explained, putting a hand against the banner where it bulged between the railings. She quickly pulled it over the guardrail, bundling it up.
“Yeah? So? Are you going to just float off the side of the truck with it? I don’t care what Dan Brown says in Angels & Demons, you can’t use a tarpaulin as a parachute!”
“I know,” she replied, a flare of anger in her eyes. “But I wasn’t thinking of using it to fly—all it has to do is slow us down!”
Chase made a sarcastic snort. “Hate to tell you, but this thing’s not going to slow down a two-hundred-ton truck!”
“I didn’t mean the truck!” The flat front end of the tipper banged down into place above them to form a roof over the walkway, warped steel claws twisted around the hole made by the tank shell. “I just meant us! Although I’m tempted to leave you behind,” she added, scowling.
He suddenly realized what she intended. “You mean, use it like a drogue to pull us off the back of the truck?”
“Yes, exactly! It won’t stop us—but it might slow us enough to survive the landing.” Nina pulled the end of the banner onto the walkway and checked the lines from which it had been suspended. Nylon with a core of steel wire, strong enough to withstand the winds that blew across the mine.
“Not from the back of the truck, we won’t—it’s over twenty feet high.” Chase looked ahead—then stiffened. “Although I think we should give it a try, right now!”
“Why?” Nina saw what he had just seen. “Oh!”
Ahead of them, a line bisected the landscape: before it the dirt and stone of the edge of the Kalahari, beyond, the verdant sweep of the Okavango. It only took a moment for her to see a definite parallax shift, the desert seeming to move faster than the delta… because there was a height difference between the two sides.
They were heading straight for the edge of a cliff.
“Get up there, now!” Chase shouted, lifting Nina onto the railing and cupping his hands to give her a leg up onto the top of the dumper. She scrambled over the metal edge, then turned and peered back down at him, holding out her hands. Chase picked up the banner and hurriedly fed it up to her. “Open it out a bit, but for Christ’s sake don’t let it blow away!”
Nina looked ahead. The cliff edge was approaching fast, the truck speeding uncontrollably towards destruction. “What about you?”
“I’ll be up in a second! Put your legs over the edge, and hang on!”
She hooked the backs of her knees against the forward edge of the dumper and did the best she could to unfurl the banner. The wind immediately snatched at it, trying to pull it from her grip.
Chase rushed into the cab and slammed down the lever controlling the hydraulic lifter, then ran back out and scaled the railing to climb onto the dumper about eight feet from Nina. “Give me one of the ends!” he called, putting his legs over the edge as the dumper began to rise.
She tossed a section of banner to him. He quickly wrapped the end of the line a few times around one wrist before grasping it in that hand, then used the other to drag more of the material to him.
Nina saw what he was doing and copied him. The pressure on her legs increased as the dumper tilted backwards, gravity pulling her down. She looked back over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t. The ground was now at least thirty feet below her, and she was still rising.
Wind swirled over the front—now the top—of the dumper, catching the banner and inflating it. The sudden jolt almost pulled her from her perch.
“Not yet!” Chase yelled, leaning forward as far as he could. The cliff was coming up far too fast, but if they let go before the dumper reached a steep enough angle, they’d end up trapped inside it.
His leg muscles strained to hold him in place, the edge of the tipper digging painfully into his tendons. Just another few seconds …
The cliff passed out of sight behind the metal as the tipper kept rising, now at nearly a forty-five-degree angle—
“Now!”
Chase flung the flapping banner up into the air behind him, simultaneously straightening his legs and falling backwards. Nina did the same. The banner snapped open between them, the racing wind catching it and yanking them both back off the top of the dumper.
But it wasn’t large enough to support their weight. They immediately fell, landing painfully on the steepening metal slope of the tipper and skidding helplessly down it.
The banner held taut—
Nina and Chase shot off the back of the speeding truck, the swath of material acting as a makeshift air brake to cancel out some of their forward momentum.
But not all.
“Roll!” Chase screamed to Nina, more as a plea than as an order as they hit the ground at twenty miles per hour.
She managed to tuck up her legs, free arm raised to protect her head as the other kept hold of the banner. Chase bounced alongside her, rolling like a log. They tumbled along, stones pounding them mercilessly at every impact before they finally came to a battered, dusty halt.
Head spinning, Chase looked up—just in time to see the truck shoot over the edge of the cliff and plunge out of sight. A couple of seconds later, there was a colossal crash that they felt through the ground, followed by more heavy booms and crunches as pieces of the shattered vehicle came to rest.
“Ow,” Nina said, shaking the line loose from her arm and making a feeble attempt to sit up. Chase fought past the pain he was feeling in seemingly every single part of his body to roll over and look at her. Her clothes were ripped, crimson stains visible through the dirt around several of the ragged holes, and an especially nasty-looking cut across her forehead just below the hairline was already leaking blood down her face.
“You’re bleeding,” he grunted.
She looked at him, eyes widening in shock. “So are you!”
He raised a hand to a particularly painful spot on his cheek, fingers coming away smeared with blood. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. Probing with his tongue, he realized that one of his back teeth had been jarred loose, held in place only by a few strands of tissue and rasping against its neighbors as he touched it.
“Shit,” Chase muttered, spitting out blood. “I hate going to the dentist.” Nina tried to stand, holding in a gasp of pain as she put weight on her left foot. “Are you okay? Is it broken?”
“No,” she said between her teeth, “I just think it’s—aah!—twisted. Ow, crap, oh.” She hesitantly lowere
d her foot again, wincing. “I can walk. Or hop, anyway. What about you?”
He pushed himself onto his knees, then took a deep breath and stood up. His legs wobbled for a moment. It felt as though he’d been beaten all over with truncheons—but nothing seemed broken. He took a few experimental steps, then went to Nina. “I’ll live. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving. It won’t take ‘em long to catch up.”
Nina looked back at the plain they had just crossed. A plume of dust rose into the air in the distance where the truck had dropped its load, and there were much smaller clouds of drifting dirt on the horizon—other vehicles coming after them. “Where do we go?” she asked, putting a hand to her head and cringing at the sudden sting of pain as she touched the bloody cut. “We’re never going to be able to get back to the airfield now.”
Supporting her, Chase moved closer to the cliff edge, looking out over the spectacular view before them. From here, the Okavango stretched as far as they could see, expanses of grassy savanna surrounded by dense marshes and broad, lazy rivers. Compared to the dusty desert behind them, the colors were almost overwhelmingly vivid. In the far distance was an aircraft, a white spot low and slow in the deep blue sky. “First thing we need to do is find some transport.”
“Easier said than done.” Nina leaned cautiously over the edge to look down at the smoking wreckage of the truck, now lying on its back like a dead animal with all but one of its wheels missing.
“Oh, I dunno.” Chase sounded oddly enthusiastic, and she gave him a curious look. He pointed off to the right. The slope of the cliff became more shallow, a hill leading down to a lake—on the shore of which was a wooden building, a short jetty leading from it into the water. A boat was tied up at the end. “You ever been on a river safari?”
13
Aah! Slow down, slow down!” Nina gasped, her ankle throbbing painfully as Chase bustled her down the hill.