The rifle rode up high in Tungata's singlehanded grip.
Bullets smashed into the parked truck, leaving dark rents through the body work, each surrounded by a halo of bright bare metal. Peter Fungabera hurled himself aside, spinning away along the truck body to fall flat in the road and wriggle frantically behind the truck wheels.
Gunsmoke and dust shrouded the blazing headlights, and troopers scattered, blanketing each other's field of fire, while in the chaos, Tungata lifted Sally-Anne bodily and threw her into the passenger, seat of the Land-Rover. In the same movement, he" vaulted up into the driver's seat, threw the vehicle into gear and the engine roared as it leapt forward.
"Don't shoot!" Peter Fungabera shouted again, there was a desperate urgency in his voice. "I want him alive!" A trooper jumped in fk6nt of the Land-Rover, "in a futile attempt to stop it. "he impact sounded likea lump of bread-dough dropped "on the kneading board, as the bonnet hit him squarely in the chest and he fell. There was a series of jolting bumps as he was dragged under the chassis, then, he rolled out into the road and the Land-Rover was boring away up the dark hill.
Without conscious thought, Craig jerked open the driver's door of the abandoned ministerial Mercedes and slipped into the seat. He locked the wheel into a hard 180-degree turn and gunned her into it. The Mercedes" tail crabbed around, tyres spinning and he hit the high earth bank a glancing blow with the right front wing that swung her nose through the last few degrees of the turn. Craig lifted his foot off the accelerator, met the skid, centred the wheel, and then trod down hard. The Mercedes shot forward, and through the open window he heard Peter Fungabera shout, "Craig! Wait!" He ignored the call, and concentrated on the first sharp bend of the escarpment road as it flashed up at him. The Mercedes" steering was deceptively light, he almost over steered and the off-wheels hammered over the rough verge.
Then he was through the bend and ahead the red taillights of the Land-Rover were almost obscured in their own boiling white dust cloud.
Craig dropped the automatic transmission to sports mode, the engine shrieked and the needle of the rev the red sector above 5000, and she counter spun up into arrowed up the hill, gaining swiftly on the Land-Rover.
It was swallowed by the next turn, and the dust blinded Craig so that he was forced to lift his right foot and grope through the turn, again he almost missed it and his rear wheels tore at the steep drop, inches from disaster before he took her through.
He was getting the feel of the machine, and four hundred yards ahead he had a brief glimpse of the Land Rover through the dust. His headlights spotlit Sally-Anne.
She was half-twisted over the side, trying to climb out and m the fleeing vehicle, but Tungata shot throw herself fro out a long arm and caught her shoulder, plucking her back and forcing her down into the seat.
The scarf flew off her head, winging up likea night bird to be lost in the darkness, and her thick dark hair broke out and tangled about her head and face. Then dust obscured the Land-Rover again and Craig felt his anger hit him in the chest with a force that made him choke. In that moment, he hated Tungata Zebiwe as he had never hated another human being in his life before. He took the next bend cleanly, tracking neatly through and pouring on full power again at the moment he was clear.
The Land-Rover was three hundred yards ahead, the gap shrinking at the rush of the Mercedes, then Craig was braking for the next twist of the road and when he came out the Land-Rover was much closer. Sally-Anne was craning around, looking back at him. Her face was white, almost luminous, in the headlights, her hair danced in a glossy tide around it, seeming at moments almost to smother her, and then the next bend snatched her away.
Craig followed them into it, meeting the brake of the tail as she floated in the floury dust and then as he came through he saw the road-block ahead.
There was a three-ton army truck parked squarely across the road, and the gaps between it and the bank had been filled with recently felled thorn trees. The entwined branches formed a solid mattress and the heavy trunks had been chained together. Craig saw the steel links glinting in the headlights. That barrier would stop a bulldozer.
Five troopers stood before the barrier, waving their rifles in an urgent command to the LanRover to halt. That they hadn't already opened fire made Craig hope that Peter Fungabera had reached them on the radio, yet he felt a nauseating rush of anxiety when he saw how vulnerable Sally-Anne was in the opbn vehicle. He imagined a volley of automatic fire tearing into that lovely young body and face.
"Please don't shoot," he whispered, and pressed so hard on the accelerator that the cup of his artificial leg bit painfully into his stump. The nose of the Mercedes was fifty feet from the Land-Rover's tail and gaining.
A hundred yards from the solid barrier across the road was a low place in the right-hand bank. Tungata swerved into it and the ugly blunt-nosed vehicle flew up it, all four wheels clawing as it went over the top and tore likea combine-harvester into the high yellow stand of elephant grass beyond.
Craig knew he could not follow him. The low-slung Mercedes would tear her guts out on the bank. He raced past it, and then hit the brakes as the road-block loomed up and filled his windshield. The Mercedes broadsided to a dead stop in a storm of its own dust and Craig threw hi.
weight on the door and tumbled out into the road.
He caught his balance and scrambled up the right, hand bank. The Land-Rover was twenty yards away, engine roaring in low gear, crashing and bouncing over the broken ground , mowing down the dense yellow grass whose stems were thick as a man's little finger and taller than his head, weaving between the forest trees, its speed reduced by the terrain to that of a running man. Craig saw that Tungata would succeed in detouring around the road-block, and he ran to head off the Land-Rover. Anger and fear for Sally Anne seemed to guide his feet, he stumbled only once on the rough footing.