He picked up the tall hump-backed shape instantly, standing high on the open plain, coming in fast with the strange bounding motion of a rocking horse, cutting boldly into the flank of the mass of soft-skinned Italian transports.
"Unlimber the guns," shouted Castelani. "Prepare to receive enemy armour." The Vickers machine guns in the turrets of the two armoured cars had ball-type mountings. The barrels could be elevated or depressed, but they could not traverse more than ten degrees to left or right, this being the limit of the ball mountings" turn. The driver had of necessity to act as gun-layer, swinging the entire vehicle to Within the limited traverse aim of the gun, or at least bring it of the mounting.
The Ras found this frustrating beyond all enduring. He would select a target, and shout in perfectly clear and coherent Amharic to his driver. Gareth Swales, not understanding a word of it, had already selected another target and was doing his best to line up on it while the Ras delivered a series of wild kicks at his kidneys to register his royal right of refusing to engage it.
The consequence of this was that the Hump wove a crazy, unpredictable course through the Italian column, spinning off at sudden tangents as the two crew members shouted bitter recriminations at each other, almost ignoring the sheets of rifle fire that thundered upon the steel hull from point-blank range, like hail on a galvanized roof.
Priscilla the Pig, on the other hand, was doing deadly execution.
She had missed her first burst fired at the speeding Rolls, and it had ducked away behind the screen of dust and bucking trucks. Now, however, Jake and Gregoritis were working with all the precision and mutual understanding that had developed between them.
"Left driver, left, left," called Gregorius, peering down the open sights of the Vickers at the truck that roared and bounced along a hundred yards ahead of them.
"All right, I'm on him," shouted Jake, as the vehicle appeared in the narrow field of his visor. This was a perforated steel plate that allowed only forward vision but once Jake had the truck centred, he followed its violent efforts to dislodge him, closing in rapidly until he was twenty yards behind it.
The back of the truck was packed with black-shirted infantry men. Some of them were directing wild but rapid rifle fire at the pursuing car, the bullets clanging and whining off the hull, but most of them clung white-faced to the sides of the truck and stared back with stricken eyes as the armoured death carrier bore down inexorably upon them.
"Shoot, Greg!" called Jake. Even through the cold anger that gripped him, he was pleased that the boy had obeyed his orders and held his fire until this moment. There would be no wastage now, at so short a range every round ripped into the Italian truck, tearing through canvas, flesh, bone and steel at the rate of seven hundred rounds a minute.
The truck swerved violently and its front end collapsed; it went over broadside, crashing over and over, flinging the men high in the air, the way a spaniel throws off the droplets from its back as it leaps from water to land.
"Driver, right," called Gregorius immediately. "Another truck, right, a little more right that's it, you're on." And they roared in pursuit of another panic-stricken load of Italians.
A hundred yards away on their flank the Hump scored its first success.
Gareth Swales was no longer able to accept the indignity of the Ras's flying feet, and his frenzied and completely unintelligible commands.
He left the controls of the racing car to swing an angry punch at the Ras.
"Cut that out, old chap," he snapped. "Play the game I'm on your side, damn it." The car, no longer under control, jinked suddenly.
Almost side by side with them sped a Fiat truck, filled with Italians, and the driver had not yet realized that there was another enemy apart from the pursuing hordes of Ethiopian horsemen. His head was twisted around over his shoulder at an impossible angle, and he drove by instinct alone.
The two uncontrolled vehicles came together at an acute angle and at the top of their combined speeds. Steel met steel in a storm of sparks and they staggered away from the blow, both of them veering over steeply. For a moment it" seemed that the Hump would go over; she teetered at the extreme end of her centre of gravity and then came back on to all four wheels with a crash that threw the men inside her unmercifully against her steel sides, before racing on again with Gareth wrestling at the wheel for control.
The Fiat truck was lighter and stood higher; the armoured car had caught her neatly under the cab and she did not even waver, but flipped over on her back, All four wheels still spinning as they "pointed at the sky, and the cab and canvas-covered hood were torn away instantly, the men beneath them smeared between steel and hard earth.
It was all too much for the Ras. He could no longer contain his frustration at being enclosed in a hot metal box from which he could see almost nothing, while all around hundreds of his hated enemies were escaping with complete impunity. He flung open the hatch of the turret and stuck out his head and shoulders, yipping shrilly with bloodlust, frustration, anger and excitement.
At that moment, an open sky-blue and glistening black Rolls-Royce tourer flashed across the front of the Hump. In the rear seat was an Italian officer bedecked with the glittering insignia of rank instantly Gareth Swales and the Ras were in perfect accord once again.
They had found a target eminently acceptable to both of them.
"I say, tally-ho!" cried Gareth, to be answered by a bloodcurdling "How do you do!" like the crowing of an enraged rooster from the turret above him.
Count Aldo Belli was in hysterics, for the driver seemed to have lost all sense of direction; now more than just a little concussed, he had turned at right angles across the line of flight of the Italian column.
This was as hazardous as running an ocean liner at full speed through a field of icebergs for the rolling dust-clouds had reduced visibility to less than fifty feet, and out of this brown fog the lumbering troop-carriers appeared without warning, the drivers in no fit condition to take evasive action, all looking back over their shoulders.
Ahead of them, two more monstrous shapes appeared out of the dust; one was an Italian truck and the other was one of the cumbersome camel-backed vehicles with the Ethiopian colours splashed upon its hull and a Vickers machine gun protruding from its turret.
Suddenly the armoured car swerved and crashed heavily into the side of the truck, capsizing it instantly and then swerving back towards the Rolls. It came so close, towering over them so threateningly, that it entered even Giuseppe's limited field of vision.
The effect was miraculous. Giuseppe shot bolt upright in his seat and, with the touch of an inspired Nuvolari, brought the Rolls round on two wheels, cutting finely across the armoured bows just at the moment that the hatch of the turret flew open and a wizened brown face, filled with the largest, whitest and most flashing teeth the Count had ever seen, popped out of the turret and emitted a war cry so shrill and heart-chilling that the Count's bowels flopped over like a stranded fish.
As the barrel of the Vickers swung on to the Rolls, the Ethiopian gunner ducked down into the turret, and the barrel elevated slightly until the Count found himself staring stupidly into its dark round aperture but Giuseppe had been watching also in the driving mirror, and now he spun the wheel and the Rolls flashed aside like a mackerel before the driving charge of the barracuda. The blast of shot from the Vickers tore down its left side lifting a storm of dirt and pebbles in spurting fountains high into the air.
The armoured car swung heavily to follow the Rolls" manoeuvre, the leaping dust fountains swinging with it, closing in mercilessly.