"Turn left!" Craig yelled. Always turn towards the fall of shot. The gunner will be correcting the opposite way, and the dust will help obscure his aim.
The next burst fell right and very wide.
"Turn right!" Craig shouted.
"Shoot back at them!" Sally' Anne stuck her head out again. She was obviously recovering from the head knock, and getting fighting mad.
"I'm giving the orders," he told her. "You keep driving." The next burst was wide again, a hundred feet out.
"Turn left!" Their weaving was confusing the gunner's aim, and their dust obscuring the range, but it was costing them ground. The truck was gaining on them again.
The salt-pan was close ahead, hundreds of bare acres shimmering silver in the path of the sun. Craig narrowed picked up the tracks where his eyes against the glare, and rface. Their a small herd of zebra had crossed the smooth su hooves had broken through the salt crust into the yellow mush beneath. It would bog any vehicle that attempted that deceptively inviting crossing.
"Angle to miss the right edge of the pan left! More!
More! okay, hold that," he shouted.
There was a narrow horn of salt-pan extending out towards them, perhaps he could tempt the pursuit to take the cut across it. He stared back over their own dust cloud and said, "Shit!" softly.
The truck commander was too canny to try to cut across the horn. He was following them around, and a burst of I around them. Three rounds machinegun fire fell al ed craters crashed into the metal of the cab, leaving jagg rimmed with shiny metal where the camouflage paint flaked off.
"Are you okay?"
"Okayr Sally-Anne called back, but the tone of her cky. "Craig, I can't keep her voice was no longer so co going. I've got my foot flat and she is slowing down.
Something is binding up! Now Craig could smell red-hot metal from the damaged front end
"Timon, hand me up a rifle! They were still well out of range of the AK 47, but the burst he fired made him feel less helpless, even though he could not even mark the fall of his bullets. They roared around the horn of the salt-pan, in the stink of hot metal and dust, and Craig looked ahead while he reloaded the rifle.
How far to the border now? Ten miles perhaps? But would a punitive patrol of the Third Brigade, given the "leopard" code, stop at an international border? The Israelis and South Africans had long ago set a precedent for "hot pursuit" into neutral territory. He knew they would follow them to the death.
The Land-Rover lurched rhythmically now to her unbalanced suspension and for the first tim Craig knew that they weren't going to make it. The realization made him angry. He fired the- second magazine in short-spaced bursts, and at the third burst the Toyota swerved sharply and stopped in a billow of its own dust.
"I got himP he bellowed exultantly.
"Way to go!" Sally-Anne shouted back. "Geronimo!"
"Well done, Mr. Mellow,jolly well done." The truck stood mass iNly immobile while the wreaths of dust subsided arounf it.
"Eat thad" Craig howled. "Stick that up your rear end, you sons of porcupines!" And he emptied the rifle at the distant vehicle.
Men were swarming around the cab of the truck like black ants around the carcass of a beetle, and the Land Rover limped away from them gamely.
"Oh, no," Craig groaned.
The silhouette of the truck altered as it turned back towards them, once again dust rose in a feathery tail behind it.
"They are coming on!" Perhaps he had fluked a hit on the driver, but whatever damage he had inflicted, it was not permanent. It had stopped them for less than two minutes and now, if anything, the truck was coming on faster than before. As if to emphasize that fact, another burst of heavy machinegun fire hit the Land-Rover with a crash.
In the cab, somebody screamed, and the sound was ask, shrill and feminine. Craig went cold, not daring to clinging to the roof tack frozen with dread.
and Craig's "Timon's been hit." Sally-Anne's voice heart raced with relief.
"How bad?"
"Bad. He's bleeding all over."
"We can't stop. Keep going." Craig looked desperately ahead, and there was a great nothingness stretched before him. Even the stunted trees had disappeared. It was flat and featureless, the reflection from the white pans turned the sky milky pale and smudged the horizon so that there was no clear dividing line between earth and air, nothing to hold the eye.
Craig dropped his gaze, and shouted, "Stop!" To enforce the order he stamped on the roof of the cab with all his strength. Sally' Anne reacted instantly, and locked the brakes. The crippled Land-Rover skidded broadside, and came up short.
The cause of Craig's urgency was an apparently innocuous little yellow ball of fur, not as big as a football. It hopped in front of the vehicle, on long kangaroo back legs, totally out of proportion to the rest of its body, and then abruptly disappeared into the earth.
"Spring hare! Craig called. "A huge colony, right across our front."
AA
"Kangaroo rats!" Sally-Anne leaned out of the window, the engine idling, turning her face up to his for guidance.
They had been fortunate. The spring hare was almost entirely nocturnal, the single animal outside the burrows was an exceptional warning in daylight. Only now, under close scrutiny, could Craig make out the extent of the colony. There were tens of thousands of burrows, the entrances inconspicuous little mounds of loose earth, but Craig knew that the sandy soil beneath them would be honeycombed with the inter linking burrows, the entire area undermined to a depth of four feet or so.
That ground would not bear the weight of a mounted man, let alone the Land' Rover With the engine idling, Craig could clearly hear the roar of the truck behind them, and machine-gun fire whiplashed over them, so close that Craig ducked instinctively.
"Turn left! "he shouted. "Back towards the pan: They turned at right, angles across the front of the approaching truck, machinegun fire goading them on, Timon's groans reachirg Craig above the engine beat. He closed his ears to them.
"There is no way through" Sally-Anne called. The spring-hare burrows were everywhere.
"Keep going," Craig answered her. The truck had swung to cut them off, closing very swiftly now.
"There!" Craig cried with relief. As he had guessed, the spring, bare colony mopped short of the salt, pan edge, avoiding the brackish seepage from the pan. There was a narrow bridge through, and Craig guided Sally-Anne into it. Within five hundred paces they were over the bridge with the ground firm ahead. Sally-Anne pushed the Land Rover to its limit, directly away from the pursuit.
"No! No!" Craig called. "Turn right, hard right." She hesitated.
"Do it, damn you!" And suddenly she saw what he intended, and she spun the steering-wheel, running ite direction across the front Of the back in the OPPOS approaching truck.