Above Jake the Vickers roared, and the spent cartridges spewed down into the hull, ringing and pinging against the steel sides, while the sudden acrid stink of burned cordite made Jake's eyes sting and flood with tears.
Through blurred eyes he watched the electric white tracer arc out across the open ground, and fall about the leading tank. Even at that range, Jake made out the tiny spurting fountains of dust and dirt kicked up by the hose of bullets.
"Good lad," grunted Jake; it was accurate shooting from the bouncing, bounding car at extreme range. Of course, it could do no damage to the thick steel armour of the CV.3, but it would certainly startle and anger the crew, goad them into retaliation.
As he thought it, Jake saw the turret of the tank traverse around as the commander called the target. The stubby barrel of the Spandau foreshortened rapidly, and then disappeared. Jake was looking directly down the muzzle.
He counted slowly to three, it would take that long for the gunner to get on to him, then he yelled, "Disengaging!" and flung Priscilla hard over, so that she came up on two wheels, ungainly and awkward as she swung away from the enemy line. From the corner of his eye Jake saw the glow of the muzzle flash, and almost instantly afterwards heard the crack of passing shot.
"Son of a gun that was close!" he muttered, and reached up to throw the hatch and visor open. There was no point in closing down, these Spandaus could penetrate any point of the car's hull as though it were made of paper, and Jake would need a good and unlimited view during the next desperate minutes.
Running parallel to the Italian line, he looked across and saw that all four tanks were firing now, and they were bunching, each tank turning towards him as he raced across their front, losing their rigid pattern of advance in their eagerness to keep Priscilla under fire.
"Come along," muttered Jake. "Three balls for a dollar, gentlemen, every throw a coconut!" It was too close to the truth to be funny, but he grinned nevertheless. "Jake Barton's famous coconut shy." A shell burst close alongside, showering sand and gravel into the open hatch. They were ranging in on him now, it was time to confuse the range again.
He spat sand from his mouth and yelled, "Engaging!" Priscilla spun handily towards the Italian line, and went bounding in towards them with that prim rocking action, her ugly old silhouette grim and uncompromising as the visage of a Victorian matron.
They were close, horribly frighteningly close, so that Jake could hear the Vickers bullets hammering against the black carapace of the leading tank. Gregorius had picked out the formation leader by his command pennant, and was concentrating all his fire upon him.
"Good thinking," grunted Jake. "Get the bastard's blood up." As he spoke, there was a thunderous clank close beside his head, as though a giant had swung a hammer against the steel hull, and the car reeled to the blow.
"We've taken a hit," Jake thought desperately, and his ears buzzed from the impact and there was the hot acrid stench of burned paint and hot metal in his nostrils. He swung the wheel over and Priscilla responded as handsomely as ever, turning sharply away from the Italian line.
Jake stood up in his compartment, sticking his head out into the open and he saw immediately how lucky they had been. The shell had struck one of the brackets he had welded on to the sponson to carry the arms crates. It had torn the bracket away, and dented the hull, leaving the metal glowing with the heat of the strike but the hull was intact, they had not been penetrated.
"Are you all right, Greg?" he yelled as he dropped back into his seat.
"They are following, Jake," the boy called down to him, ignoring the hit. "They are after us all of them."
"Home and mother here we come," Jake said, and turned directly away from them, once again changing the range and aim of the Italian gunners abruptly.
Shot burst close, driving the air in upon their eardrums, and making them both flinch involuntarily.
"We are pulling too far ahead, Jake," called Greg, and Jake glancing up saw that he had his hatch open and his head out.
"Lame bird," Jake decided reluctantly. If they outstripped the Italians too rapidly, there was a danger they would abandon the chase.
Another shell burst close alongside, covering them with a veil of pale dust, and Jake faked a hit, cutting back the throttle so that their seed bled off, and he swung Priscilla into an erratic broken pattern of flight, like a bird with a broken wing.
"They're gaining on us now, "Greg reported gleefully.
"Don't sound so damned happy about it," Jake muttered, but his voice was lost in the whine and crack of passing shot.
"They're still coming," howled Greg. "And they're still shooting."
"I noticed." Jake peered ahead, still flinging the car mercilessly from side to side. The ridge of the first dune was half a mile ahead, but it seemed like an hour later that he felt the earth tilt up under him and they went slithering and skidding up the slip-face of the dune and crashed over the crest into safety.
Jake swung Nscilla into a broadside skid, like a skier performing a christy, bringing her to an abrupt halt in the lee of the dune and then he backed and manoeuvred up until he was in a hull-down position behind the sand, with only the turret exposed.
"That's it, Jake," cried Greg delightedly, as he found his Vickers would bear again. He crouched over it, and fired short crisp bursts at the four black tanks that roared angrily towards them across the plain.
From the stationary position behind the dune, Gregorius made every burst of fire sweep the oncoming hulls, driving the Latin tempers of the crews into frenzy, like the sting of a tsetse fly on the belly of a bull buffalo.
"That's about close enough," decided Jake, judging the charge of enemy armour finely. They were less than five hundred yards off now and 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.