The headlights of the Cadillac tipped slightly upwards as it charged through the dip and reached the first rising ground. They all saw the road-block at the same moment.
It was flung up crudely across the road, oil drums, baulks of timber, iron bedsteads, sand-bags and household furniture obviously dragged from the cottages.
Sean swore loudly and with ferocity. I can turn now, Mark shouted. But they'll get us when we slow down, and we'll have to go back through the ambush. Watch the Cadillac, Sean shouted back.
The heavy black machine had not hesitated, and it roared up the slope at the barricade, picking the spot which seemed weakest. He's going to open a breach! Follow him, Mark. The Cadillac smashed into the road-block, and tables and chairs flew high into the night. Even above the roar of wind and engine, Mark could hear the tlearing crashing impact, and then the Cadillac was through and going on up the ridge, but its speed was bleeding away and a white cloud of steam plumed from the torn radiator.
However, they had forged a breach in the barricade and Mark steered for it, bumping over a mangled mass of timber and then accelerating away up the slope, gaining rapidly on the leading vehicle.
The Cadillac was losing speed, clearly suffering a mortal injury.
Shall I stop for them? Mark demanded. No, said Sean. We have to get the Prime Minister, Yes, said Smuts. We can't leave them. Make up your bloody minds, yelled Mark, and there was a stunned disbelieving silence in the back, and Mark began to brake for the pick up.
The machine gun opened from the scrubby bush at the base of the nearest mine dump. The tracer flailed the night, brilliant white fire sweeping down the road in a blinding storm, the high ripping tearing sound was unmistakable and Mark and Sean exclaimed together in appalled disbelief. Vickers! The Prime Minister's green and golden pennant on the bonnet of the Cadillac drew the deadly sheet of fire, and in the horrified micro-seconds that Mark watched, he saw the car begin to break up. The windshield and side windows blew away in a sparkling cloud of glass fragments, the figures of the three occupants were plucked to pieces like chickens caught in the blades of a threshing-machine.
The Cadillac slewed off the road and crashed headlong into the blank wall of a timber warehouse on the edge of the road, and still the relentless stream of Vickers fire -tore into the carcass, punching neat black holes into the metalwork, holes that were rimmed with bare metal that sparkled in the headlights of the Rolls like newly minted silver dollars.
It would only be seconds before the gunner swivelled his Vickers on to the Rolls, Mark realized, and he searched the road ahead for a bolthole.
Between the timber warehouse and the next building was a narrow alleyway, barely wide enough to admit the Rolls. Mark swung out to make a hay-cart turn for the alley, and the gunner guessed his intention, but was stiff and low on his traverse as he swung the Vickers on to the Rolls.
The sheet of bullets ripped the surface of the road, a boiling teeming play of dust and tarmac that ran down under the side of the car.
Before the gunner could correct his aim, the petrol tank of the ruined Cadillac exploded in a woofing clap of sound and a vivid rolling cloud of scarlet flame and dense black smoke.
Under its cover Mark steered for the alleyway, and slammed the Rolls into it although she was suddenly heavy on the steering, and thumping brutally in her front end.
Fifty feet down, the alley was blocked with a heavy haulage trailer, piled high with newly sawn timber baulks - and Mark skidded to a halt, and jumped out.
He saw that for the moment they were covered by the corner of the warehouse from the Vickers, but the timber trailer cut off their escape down the alley and it would be only minutes before the strikers realized their predicament and moved the Vickers to enfiltrade the alleyway and shoot them to pieces. One glance showed him that machine-gun fire had shredded the off -side leading wheel. Mark jerked open the rear door and snatched the Mannhcher from Sean, and paused only a moment to snap at the two Generals. Get the wheel changed. I'll try and hold them off. Then he was sprinting back down the alleyway. I shall have to insist that in future, when he gives me an order, he calls me sir, Sean said with thin humour, and turned to Smuts. Have you ever changed a wheel, Jannie? Don't be stupid, old Sean. I'm a horse soldier, and your superior officer, Smuts smiled back at him, with his golden beard looking like a refined Viking in the reflected headlights. Bloody hell! grunted Sean. You can work the jack. Mark reached the corner of the warehouse and crouched againstit, checking the load of the Mannlicher before glancing around.
The Cadillac burned like a huge pyre, and the stink of burning rubber and oil and human flesh was choking. The body of the driver still sat at the wheel, but the smoky red flames rushed and drummed about him so that his head was blackening and charring, and his body twisted and writhed in a slow macabre ballet of death.
There was a wind that Mark had not noticed before, a fitful inconstant wind that gusted and puffed down the ridge, rolling thick clouds of the stinking black smoke across the road and then changing strength and direction so that for a few seconds the smoke pall once again poured straight upwards into the night sky.
Over all blazed the flickering orange wash of the flames, uncertain light which magnified shadow and offered false perspective.
Mark realized that he had to get across the road into the scrub and eroded ground below the mine dump before he could get a chance at the Vickers gunner. He had to cross fifty open yards before he reached the ground where he could turn the clumsiness and relative immobility of the Vickers to his own account. He waited for the wind.
He saw it coming, rustling the grass tops in the firelight and rolling a dirty ball of newspaper down the road, then it picked up the smoke and wafted it in a stinking black pall across the open roadway.
Mark launched himself from the corner of the warehouse and had run twenty paces before he realized that the wind had tricked him. It was merely a gust, passing in seconds and leaving the night still and silent when it had gone, silent except for the snapping, crackling flames of the burning Cadillac.
He was halfway across as the smoke opened again, and the cold weight of dread in his belly seemed to spread down into his legs and slow them as he ran like a man in shackles; but the battle clock in his head was running clearly, tolling off the seconds, judging finely the instant that the Vickers gunner up on the dump spotted his shadowy running figure, judging the time it took for him to swing and resight the heavy weapon. Now! he thought, and rolled forward from the waist without checking his speed, going on to his shoulder and somersaulting, ducking under the solid blast of machinegun fire that came at the exact second he had expected it.
The momentum of his fall carried him up on to his feet again, and he knew he had seconds before the
