Below him, Gareth Swales leaned forward in the driver's seat peering shortsightedly through the visor, which narrowed his field of vision and partially obscured it as though he was looking through the perforated bottom of a kitchen colander. His eyes were swimming from the cordite smoke, the engine fumes and the dust-motes so that he blinked rapidly as he concentrated all his efforts in following the speeding ethereal shape of the Rolls. He did not see the waiting guns.
"Shoot, damn you," he shouted. "We are going to lose him." But above him the Vickers was silent, and from his seat low down in the hull, the slight fold of ground so carefully chosen by Major Castelani half-hid the batteries.
He raced towards them, drawn on inexorably by the fleeting shape of the Rolls dancing elusively ahead of him.
Good." Castelani allowed himself a bleak little smile as he watched the enemy vehicle come on steadily.
Already it was within comfortable range for an experienced gunner, but he knew it must be half as close again before his own crews could make any certainty of their practice.
The Rolls, however, was a mere two hundred metres in front of the guns, and coming on at a speed that could not have been less than sixty miles an hour. Three terrified and chalky faces were turned towards him in dreadful appeal and three voices were raised in loud cries for succour.
The Major ignored them and swiftly turned his professional eye back to the enemy. He found it was still two thousand metres out across the plain but closing satisfactorily. He was on the point of uttering another reassurance to his edgy gunners, when the Rolls roared through the narrow gap in the centre of his batteries.
The Count had at that moment temporarily found his feet and replaced his helmet on his head. Standing on the high platform of the Rolls, his voice, powered with adrenalin and shrill with terror, carried clearly to every gunner.
"Open fire!" shrieked the Count. "Open fire immediately! or I will have you all shot!" and then, realizing that they should be encouraged to remain at their posts and cover his withdrawal, he reached frantically for inspiration and flung over his shoulder one rousing "Death before dishonour!" before the Rolls bore him away, still at sixty miles an hour, towards the long distant horizon.
The Major lifted his voice in a great bugling bellow to countermand the order, but even his lungs were no match for the thunderous volley of nine field guns fired in as close to unison as they had never been in training. Each gunner took his Colonel at his literal word when he said "immediately" and such refinements as laying and aiming were forgotten in the dire urgency of firing as furiously and as fast as possible.
In the circumstances, it was nothing short of a miracle that one high-explosive shell found a mark. This was a Fiat troop-carrier which emerged at that moment from the dust clouds a quarter of a mile behind the Ethiopian armoured car. The shell was fused to a thousandth of a second delay; it went in through the radiator, shattered the engine block, disintegrated the driver, then burst in the midst of the group of terrified infantrymen huddled under the canvas hood.
The engine and front wheel of the truck kept going forward for a few seconds before beginning to roll and bounce over the irregular ground the rest of the truck and twenty men went straight upwards, fifty feet in the air like a troupe of maniacal acrobats.
Only one other shell came close to hitting the enemy. It burst ten yards in front of the Hump, emptying in a towering pillar of flame and yellow earth, and gouging a deep round crater, four feet across, into which the speeding car plunged.
The Ras, whose head was protruding from the turret, and whose mouth and eyes were wide open, had all three of these body apertures filled with flying sand from the explosion and his war whoops were cut off abruptly, as he choked for breath and tried frantically to wipe his streaming eyes.
Gareth also had his vision abruptly closed by the pillar of flame and sand, and he drove blindly into the shell crater.
The impact threw him out of his seat, and the steering wheel hit him in the chest, driving the wind out of his lungs before snapping off short at the floorboards.
With another bound, the Hump bounced jauntily out of the shell crater with streamers of dust and shell smoke swirling about her. She was hanging over on one side with her springs snapped off by the jolt, and her front wheels locked firmly to one side, yet her engine still bellowed at full power and she went into a tight right-hand circle, around and around like a circus animal.
Wheezing for breath, Gareth dragged himself back into the driver's seat, only to find that there was no longer a steering column and that the throttle had jammed at the fully open position. He sat there for long seconds, shaking his head to clear it, and struggling desperately for breath, for the hull was filled with dust and smoke.
Another shell, bursting somewhere close beside the hull, roused him 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.