Something is binding up! Now Craig could smell red-hot metal from the damaged front end
"Timon, hand me up a rifle! They were still well out of range of the AK 47, but the burst he fired made him feel less helpless, even though he could not even mark the fall of his bullets. They roared around the horn of the salt-pan, in the stink of hot metal and dust, and Craig looked ahead while he reloaded the rifle.
How far to the border now? Ten miles perhaps? But would a punitive patrol of the Third Brigade, given the "leopard" code, stop at an international border? The Israelis and South Africans had long ago set a precedent for "hot pursuit" into neutral territory. He knew they would follow them to the death.
The Land-Rover lurched rhythmically now to her unbalanced suspension and for the first tim Craig knew that they weren't going to make it. The realization made him angry. He fired the- second magazine in short-spaced bursts, and at the third burst the Toyota swerved sharply and stopped in a billow of its own dust.
"I got himP he bellowed exultantly.
"Way to go!" Sally-Anne shouted back. "Geronimo!"
"Well done, Mr. Mellow,jolly well done." The truck stood mass iNly immobile while the wreaths of dust subsided arounf it.
"Eat thad" Craig howled. "Stick that up your rear end, you sons of porcupines!" And he emptied the rifle at the distant vehicle.
Men were swarming around the cab of the truck like black ants around the carcass of a beetle, and the Land Rover limped away from them gamely.
"Oh, no," Craig groaned.
The silhouette of the truck altered as it turned back towards them, once again dust rose in a feathery tail behind it.
"They are coming on!" Perhaps he had fluked a hit on the driver, but whatever damage he had inflicted, it was not permanent. It had stopped them for less than two minutes and now, if anything, the truck was coming on faster than before. As if to emphasize that fact, another burst of heavy machinegun fire hit the Land-Rover with a crash.
In the cab, somebody screamed, and the sound was ask, shrill and feminine. Craig went cold, not daring to clinging to the roof tack frozen with dread.
and Craig's "Timon's been hit." Sally-Anne's voice heart raced with relief.
"How bad?"
"Bad. He's bleeding all over."
"We can't stop. Keep going." Craig looked desperately ahead, and there was a great nothingness stretched before him. Even the stunted trees had disappeared. It was flat and featureless, the reflection from the white pans turned the sky milky pale and smudged the horizon so that there was no clear dividing line between earth and air, nothing to hold the eye.
Craig dropped his gaze, and shouted, "Stop!" To enforce the order he stamped on the roof of the cab with all his strength. Sally' Anne reacted instantly, and locked the brakes. The crippled Land-Rover skidded broadside, and came up short.
The cause of Craig's urgency was an apparently innocuous little yellow ball of fur, not as big as a football. It hopped in front of the vehicle, on long kangaroo back legs, totally out of proportion to the rest of its body, and then abruptly disappeared into the earth.
"Spring hare! Craig called. "A huge colony, right across our front."
AA
"Kangaroo rats!" Sally-Anne leaned out of the window, the engine idling, turning her face up to his for guidance.
They had been fortunate. The spring hare was almost entirely nocturnal, the single animal outside the burrows was an exceptional warning in daylight. Only now, under close scrutiny, could Craig make out the extent of the colony. There were tens of thousands of burrows, the entrances inconspicuous little mounds of loose earth, but Craig knew that the sandy soil beneath them would be honeycombed with the inter linking burrows, the entire area undermined to a depth of four feet or so.
That ground would not bear the weight of a mounted man, let alone the Land' Rover With the engine idling, Craig could clearly hear the roar of the truck behind them, and machine-gun fire whiplashed over them, so close that Craig ducked instinctively.
"Turn left! "he shouted. "Back towards the pan: They turned at right, angles across the front of the approaching truck, machinegun fire goading them on, Timon's groans reachirg Craig above the engine beat. He closed his ears to them.
"There is no way through" Sally-Anne called. The spring-hare burrows were everywhere.
"Keep going," Craig answered her. The truck had swung to cut them off, closing very swiftly now.
"There!" Craig cried with relief. As he had guessed, the spring, bare colony mopped short of the salt, pan edge, avoiding the brackish seepage from the pan. There was a narrow bridge through, and Craig guided Sally-Anne into it. Within five hundred paces they were over the bridge with the ground firm ahead. Sally-Anne pushed the Land Rover to its limit, directly away from the pursuit.
"No! No!" Craig called. "Turn right, hard right." She hesitated.
"Do it, damn you!" And suddenly she saw what he intended, and she spun the steering-wheel, running ite direction across the front Of the back in the OPPOS approaching truck.
Immediately the truck turned to head them off again, turning away from the pan, and from the bridge of firm ground through the subterranean maze of burrows. It was so close that they could see the heads of the troopers in the open back, catch the colour of a burgundy-red ge, hear the beret and the bright spark of a silver cap-bad fierce, bloodthirsty yells, see an AK 47 rifle brandished triumphantly.