already they were dropping shell close around the tiny target afforded
by the car's turret.
'Let's get the hell out of here.' He swung Priscilla hard and she
plunged down the side of the dune into the trough. As she crashed
through the dense dark scrub, Jake caught a glimpse of the men lying in
wait under the screen of vegetation. They were stripped to
loin-Cloths, huddled down over the long steel rails, and two of them
had to roll frantically aside to avoid being crushed beneath
Priscilla's tall, heavily bossed wheels.
The momentum of her charge down the side of the dune carried her up on
the second dune with loose sand pouring out in a cloud from her
spinning rear wheels. She reached the crest and went over it at
speed,
dropping with a gut swooping dive down the far side.
Jake cut the engine before she had come to rest, and he and
Gregorius sprang out of the opened hatches and went panting back up the
dune, labouring in the heavy loose footing, and panting as they reached
the crest and looked down into the trough at almost the same instant as
the four Italian tanks came over the crest opposite them.
Their racks boiling in the loose sand, they came crashing over the top
of the dune, and roared down into the trough.
They tore into the thick bank of scrub, and immediately the bush was
alive with naked black figures. They swarmed around the monstrous
wallowing hulls like ants around the bodies of shiny black scarab
beetles.
Twenty men to each steel rail, using it like a battering ram, they
charged in from each side of every tank, thrusting the end of the rail
into the sprocketed jockey wheels of the tracks.
The rail was caught up immediately, and with the screech of metal on
metal was whipped out of the hands of the men who wielded it, hurling
them effortlessly aside. To an engineer, the sound that the machines
made as they tore themselves to pieces was like the anguish of living
things, like that terrible death squeal of a horse.
The steel rails tore the jockey wheels out of them, and the tracks
sprang out of their seating on the sprockets and whipped into the
air,
flogging themselves to death in a cloud of dust and torn vegetation.
It was over very swiftly, the four machines lay silent and stalled,
crippled beyond hope of repair and around them lay the broken bodies of
twenty or more of the Ethiopians who had been caught up by the flailing
tracks as they broke loose. The bodies were torn and shredded, as
though clawed and mauled by some monstrous predator.
Those who had survived the savage death of the tanks, hundreds of
almost naked figures, swarmed over the stranded hulls, loolooing wildly
and pounding on the steel turrets with their bare hands.
The Italian gunners still inside the hulls fired their machine guns
despairingly, but there was no power on their traversing gear and the
turrets were frozen. The guns could not be aimed. They were blinded
also for Jake had armed a dozen Ethiopians each with a bucket of engine
oil and dirt mixed to a thick paste. This they had slapped in gooey
