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
