spurted out of the instrument panel of the dashboard.
The cab was flooding.
Bruce twisted the handle of the door beside him and hit it with his
shoulder. It would not budge an inch. He flung all his weight against
it, anchoring his feet on the dashboard and straining until he felt his
eyeballs starting out of their sockets. It was jammed solid
by the immense pressure of water on the outside.
'The windscreen,' he shouted aloud. 'Break the windscreen.' He groped
for his rifle. The cab had flooded to his waist as he sat in
the passenger's seat. He found the rifle and brought it dripping to his
shoulder. He touched the muzzle to the windscreen and almost fired. But
his good sense warned him.
Clearly he saw the danger of firing. The concussion in the confined cab
would burst his eardrums, and the avalanche of broken glass that would
be thrown into his face by the water pressure outside
would certainly blind and maim him.
He lowered the rifle despondently. He felt his panic being slowly
replaced by the cold certainty of defeat. He was trapped fifty feet
below the surface of the river. There was no way out.
He thought of turning the rifle on himself, ending the inevitable, but
he rejected the idea almost as soon as it had formed. Not that way,
never that way!
He flogged his mind, driving it out of the cold lethargic clutch of
certain death. There must be something. Think!
Damn you, think!
The tanker was still rocking; it had not yet settled into the ooze of
the river bottom. How long had he been under?
About twenty seconds. Surely it should have hit the bottom long ago.
Unless! Bruce felt hope surge into new life within him.
The tank! By God, that was it.
The great, almost empty tank behind him! The fivethousand-gallon
tank which now contained only four hundred gallons of gasoline - it
would have a displacement of nearly eighteen tons! It would float.
As if in confirmation of his hope, he felt his eardrums creak and pop.
The pressure was falling! He was rising.
Bruce stared out at green water through the glass. The silver clouds of
bubbles no longer streamed upwards; they seemed to hang outside the cab.
The tanker had overcome the initial impetus that had driven it far below
the surface, and now it was floating upwards at the same rate of ascent
as its bubbles.
The dark green of deep water paled slowly to the colour of
Chartreuse. And Bruce laughed. It was a gasping hysterical giggle and
the sound of it shocked him. He cut it off abruptly.
The tanker bobbed out on to the surface, water streamed from the
windscreen and through it Bruce caught a misty distorted glimpse of the
south bank.
He twisted the door handle and this time the door burst open readily,
water poured into the cab and Bruce floundered out against its rush,
With one quick glance he took in his position. The tanker had floated
down twenty yards below the bridge, the guns on the south bank
