The Tomb Of Hercules

12

Buggeration and fuckery!” Chase yelled.

“Just for show, huh?” Nina said sarcastically as she ducked back behind the seat.

He didn’t reply, instead pulling frantically at the wheel to turn the truck off the road, trying to put the high fence and the raised dirt berm between himself and the tanks to block their line of fire. A single tank shell hitting the front of the truck would destroy the engine-but that would hardly matter, as both he and Nina would already be dead. He looked out of the side of the cab. One tank had disappeared behind the fence, but the other was still tracking him with its gun-

The shot didn’t come. The tank crews might have been fast enough off the mark to block the road, but hadn’t yet managed to load their guns. It wouldn’t take long, though.

Yuen’s helicopter was now out of sight behind the corrugated fence. Either it had landed or was just about to, and considering the circumstances the pilot of Yuen’s private jet was probably gearing up for a very fast takeoff. There didn’t seem to be any way Chase could rescue Sophia.

But he still had to try…

“How are we going to get out?” Nina asked.

He nodded at the fence on the crest of the sloping wall of earth ahead. “You ever seen The Great Escape?”

“Yes-no,” she gulped, realizing what he had in mind. “No, you’re not seriously going to-”

Chase grimly set his jaw. “Hope we do better than Steve McQueen. You know how you think that pendant of yours is lucky?”

“Yes?”

“Now’d be a good time to use it. Hang on!” He floored the accelerator.

The truck charged forward like a bull, moving at over thirty miles per hour and still gaining speed as it hit the bottom of the berm and shot upwards. Clutching her pendant, Nina screamed-The fence blew into fragments as the truck plowed through it, over six hundred tons of metal and rubber and stone airborne as it jumped over the top of the obstacle…

Then it hit the ground, the force of the impact so huge that the foot-thick tires rippled. A massive spray of dust erupted from beneath the wheels, the shock wave running like a mini-earthquake through the ground strong enough to knock soldiers and security guards off their feet and flip 4×4s parked at the gate onto their sides. Car-size boulders were tossed out of the truck and smashed into the ground like meteorites.

Both Nina and Chase screamed as the front end of the truck bounced back up into the air. It crashed down again, throwing a choking wave of dust and broken stones over the front of the tipper and into the cab. Partially blinded, Chase battled to keep hold of the wheel, turning it in the general direction of the runway.

“Nina! Are you okay?”

“Oh, super fine,” came an angry voice from the floor behind his seat, “except for my shattered pelvis!”

“You’re okay.” The dust blew away as the truck picked up speed once more, the banner flapping in the wind. He could see the airfield ahead. There was TD’s plane parked among the others-

And a sleek private jet, already moving into takeoff position.

Chase had no doubts whose plane it was. “He’s taking off!” Heat plumes flared and rippled from the jet’s engines, dust kicking up behind it.

“You can’t catch up!” Nina yelled. “We’re too far away, we’ll never make it in time!”

“I’ve got to-”

She grabbed his shoulders and shook him, her mouth almost against his ear. “Eddie! You can’t reach her. You can’t.”

Chase looked into her eyes, not wanting to accept her words even as he knew they were true. “You can’t,” she repeated. Torn, he looked back at the runway. The plane raced away from him.

Too fast to catch.

He finally admitted defeat. “Fuck!” Nina released him. “We’ve got to get to TD’s plane,” she said, “and get the hell out of here before they-”

With a deafening boom, an explosion ripped a crater out of the ground just ahead. Sand showered into the cab.

The tank gunners had loaded their weapons.

Chase turned sharply away from the airfield, trying to keep the back of the truck to the tanks-

Something shot past, more felt than seen as a displaced wave of hot air blew into the cab. A second later, another shell hit the ground ahead of them, this time farther away. The gunner in the first tank to fire had been aiming low, trying to take out one of the truck’s wheels.

The second had been aiming higher, going for its driver.

“Shit!” Nina stared at the crater in disbelief. “They’re shooting at us, there are fucking tanks shooting at us!”

“Yeah, I noticed!” Chase looked at the video screens. In the view directly behind, he saw the two tanks turning to pursue them. Their turrets remained almost stationary, the gunners tracking the fleeing truck. That both tanks had missed suggested they lacked modern computerized targeting systems, but they wouldn’t be aiming manually-at the very least, they would have laser range finders, meaning all they had to do was keep their sights on the truck and the automatics would do the rest.

The airfield-and TD’s plane-were no longer options for escape. He’d been lucky with the first shot, turning just enough in the brief period of the shell’s flight for it to miss. If he headed back to the runway, he’d be an easy target, broadside-on to the tanks’ guns. Not even the massive tires could withstand a 105mm shell.

“I need you to watch them,” he told Nina, jabbing at the screen, “tell me what they’re doing.”

“Well, right now they’re chasing us!”

“Thanks for that, Dr. Obvious. I mean, tell me when they fire!” Chase checked the landscape ahead. They were heading roughly north, the sweeping green marshlands of the Okavango Delta taking over from dusty desert on the horizon. The flat terrain they were currently traversing would start sloping down to the huge river system in a mile or so-

“They’ve fired!” Nina shrieked. On the screen, the gun of one of the tanks flared with a huge burst of orange flame.

Chase yanked at the wheel, spinning it to the right as hard as he could. The truck swayed, threatening to tip onto its side.

A shell whined past to their left, exploding about a hundred yards ahead. Struggling to stay upright as she watched the screen, Nina saw the second tank fire. “Incoming!”

The truck swung back to the left as Chase spun the wheel again. But not fast enough-

The entire truck jolted as if slammed by a blow from a giant’s hammer, the explosion ringing through every inch of metal. The side windows shattered. “Oh my God!” Nina screamed. “They got us!”

“We’re okay, we’re okay!” Chase checked one of the other monitors, the camera mounted above the tipper and looking down at its contents. A huge plume of dust trailed out behind them-the shell had impacted inside the load bed and blown one of the boulders to pieces. “It hit the rocks in the back!”

He started a mental count. How good were the gunners? How long would they take to reload?

“I think they’re catching up!” Nina warned. Chase glanced at the rearview monitor. The tanks were in hot pursuit, larger on the screen than before. A Leopard could manage around forty miles per hour over flat terrain-faster than the truck.

Faster than the laden truck…

“Nina! These controls for the tipper-”

“For God’s sake!” she interrupted in accusatory disbelief. “You’re still going on about that?”

“No, no! It’s a good job you didn’t empty it before! Tip it out, dump the load! We need to go faster, and it’ll work like a smoke screen!”

Ten seconds had passed, and neither tank had fired again. An automated loader would have done the job by now. That meant the reloading was being carried out manually, which even for a highly skilled crew in a stationary tank was a cumbersome process, and the jolting of the vehicle over the stony ground would add another couple of seconds…

Nina braced herself against the control panel with one hand, the other hovering over the levers. She found the most likely candidate and pulled it down.

A warning buzzer rasped in time to the flashes of a red light on the panel-operating the tipping mechanism while the truck was in motion was not recommended.

But it wasn’t prohibited either. A squeal of hydraulics came from behind the cab. Chase glanced at the screens. The camera looking down into the dumper was fixed relative to its subject, so the ground appeared to be tilting underneath it.

The rocks shifted-

“Incoming!”

Chase turned again, going right. Nina was thrown against him-

Another slamming impact, much harder than before, the crack of shattering rock beneath the boom of the explosion now joined by a screech of wounded metal. The dumper camera flickered, then came back to life, revealing a jagged hole at the bottom of the still rising tipper.

The gunners were refining their aim, trying to take out the rear wheels. The tipper had acted as a shield as the hydraulics pushed it into the air, its back end behind the fulcrum and partially covering the tires. The shells could penetrate armor much thicker than the dumper bed; the rocks it was carrying had absorbed the full force of the explosion.

But the rocks wouldn’t be there much longer, already shifting and sliding as the tipper rose…

Fourteen seconds, Chase counted. It took the Leopard crews fourteen seconds to reload after each shot. That was how much time he had to come up with a plan.

Assuming he survived the next shot from the second tank, which would come any moment.

He was already swinging the truck fiercely back to the left as Nina yelled a warning. With the dumper partly elevated, the Liebherr’s center of gravity was shifting, top-heavy. He could feel the massive vehicle shuddering, on the edge of control as it threatened to roll over-

Boom!

Part of the cab roof was ripped away as something punched through it. Not the shell-shrapnel, a chunk of steel torn from the front end of the dumper where the shell had blasted a hole straight through the metal.

He straightened the wheel, turning the truck’s back to the tanks once more.

Fourteen seconds to reload…

The steering wheel shook in his hands as the earth in the dumper finally succumbed to gravity and slid free.

Four hundred tons of dirt and rubble and rock cascaded out of the back of the truck. A huge amount of dust was kicked up, an impenetrable cloud roiling out in all directions. Boulders bounced through it, tracing their own lines of dust through the air like comet tails. They smashed onto the desert ground, kicking up still more dirt before being swallowed by the boiling cloud.

Both tanks lost sight of the truck, lost sight of everything beyond the opaque brown mass. One turned to swerve around the obstruction; the other plowed fearlessly into it. Big as the cloud was, it would still only take a matter of seconds for the speeding Leopard to pass through it, and the rubble the truck had strewn in a pathetic attempt to block it would do nothing more than make for a bumpy ride…

The driver saw something in his periscope, a huge dark shape suddenly looming through the swirling dust directly ahead of him, over him, but it was too late to stop-

The main gun was abruptly punched backwards into the turret as its muzzle slammed into a boulder as big as the tank itself. The gun’s loader barely escaped decapitation as the barrel speared over him, passing right between the legs of the seated tank commander and smashing into the back of the turret with a deafening clash of metal against metal. A moment later the Leopard’s prow hit the massive rock. The tank came to an extremely sudden stop.

“Did we get them?” Nina asked anxiously, watching the monitors. All she could see was dust, a trail still swirling from the now-vertical dumper.

Chase risked a look back from the side window. One of the Leopards emerged from behind the cloud, skirting it. “One’s still going,” he reported, leaning back to check the screens. Nothing emerged from the haze behind them. “Think we got the other one, though!”

“Well, great! Too bad we don’t have another truck full of rocks!”

Chase was about to shoot back a sarcastic comment when a thought struck him.

They didn’t have another truck full of rocks. But they still had the truck itself…

He confirmed the position of the remaining tank, then steered directly away from it. “Keep watching that screen,” he said. “Shout the moment it fires.”

“We can’t keep dodging it forever!” said Nina.

The desert earth below became darker, the muddy remnants of a small river feeding into the delta discoloring the ground. “We won’t have to,” Chase told her, turning the wheel back and forth so that the truck began a snaking motion. “One way or another.”

Nina grimaced. “I don’t like the way you put that-aah!”

Chase took that as a sign the tank had fired again and immediately jammed the truck into as hard a turn as possible. The horizon tilted ahead, its angle steepening as the truck began to overbalance. The steering wheel quivered, the wobble of the tires feeding back to him as both wheels on the inside of the turn left the ground-

Boom!

An explosion, frighteningly close, but on the far side of the truck from the tank. The shell had gone right between the front and rear wheels, under the truck as it almost tipped over.

Chase twitched the wheel to drop the T282B back onto all four wheels, but kept turning.

Fourteen seconds…

“What are you doing?” Nina asked, confusion joined by fear as she realized he was heading back towards the tank.

“It takes them fourteen seconds to reload,” Chase said. “If we can reach them in thirteen seconds, then we can squash ’em before they fire again!”

“And if it takes us fifteen seconds, they’ll blow us up!” Nina objected. The Leopard swung into view ahead, Chase aiming right at it. “How long have we got left?”

“Four seconds!” Truck and tank raced directly at each other, neither slowing. “Any last words?”

“Shitshitshit!”

The main gun rose, aiming at the cab.

Chase released the wheel and yanked Nina down across his lap, throwing his upper body onto hers to protect her-

Collision!

The Leopard weighed forty tons-but even unloaded the T282B was more than five times its weight, and far larger.

The tank’s gun bent like a cardboard tube as it stabbed through the truck’s bodywork to hit the unyielding diesel block within. An instant later, the truck rode up over the Leopard’s sloping front, stamping the tank down into the soft earth up to the base of its turret. The gun was ripped away, crushed under the Liebherr’s enormous tires and left poking out of the ground in a mangled U-shape.

Over the obstacle, the truck bounced back down onto the ground, turning again as the steering wheel whipped around.

Nina opened one eye, finding herself lying over Chase’s lap, her head in the footwell. She felt his weight on top of her, holding her in place. She couldn’t tell if he was moving, or even breathing. “Eddie?”

A long silence, then: “I thought somebody with your education’d come up with better last words.”

She flapped at him with her hands. “Get offa me!”

Chase sat up, letting her push herself upright before retaking the wheel. He immediately realized that the steering had been damaged; it felt slack, unresponsive. With some effort, he managed to straighten the vehicle, seeing through the broken windshield that they were now heading north again, towards the delta.

He lifted his foot off the accelerator…

Nina ran her hands though her hair. “Jesus! I really thought we were going to die back there.” She was about to begin a tirade against Chase’s insane actions when she took in his expression. It was one she’d seen before.

And it was never a good sign. “What?”

He pointed at the floor. “See my foot?”

“Yes?”

“See how it’s not on the accelerator?”

“But we’re still going-oh my God!” She looked at the dashboard. Several of the instruments had been damaged by bullets, but the speedometer was still intact-and she instantly translated the reading of sixty-six kilometers per hour into imperial units. “We’re doing over forty!”

“The throttle’s jammed,” said Chase. The pedal was stuck firmly against the floor; he’d already tried to lift it with his foot, but to no avail. “Hold on to the seat; this might get bumpy.”

“Get?” But she obeyed, crouching behind him.

Chase pushed the brake. The truck shook, a deep grinding noise coming from the wheels below. He watched the brake temperature gauges. One was no longer working, but the other three rose with worrying speed towards the red zone.

The speedometer dropped, but not by much.

He pushed harder. The cab rattled, what little glass remained in the windows finally falling free. The speedometer needle juddered, dropping in jerky steps as the brake gauges flicked higher…

A noise like scrap metal in a tumble dryer made them both cringe. There was a sharp bang, then something clattered against the wheel below them and fell away.

Nina looked out of the window. Smoke billowed from the wheel hub. “What the hell was that?”

“The brakes!” One of the temperature needles had flicked instantly back down to zero. “They’ve burned out!”

Nina reached over and grabbed the gearshift, trying to force it into the neutral position. It refused to move. “Dammit!”

Chase eased off slightly on the brakes in the hope that their temperature would fall while the truck still slowed, but all that happened was that the speedometer rose again-the temperature gauges remained in the red. “Bollocks!” He changed tack and stamped on the brake pedal as hard as he could. The truck swayed violently, the steering wheel writhing in his grasp.

Something crunched unpleasantly, then there was a dull crack from under the dashboard and the wheel immediately became still.

The brake needles rose higher, but the truck was shedding speed…

Another disc blew apart, shards of red-hot steel banging around inside the wheel hub. The speedometer needle moved back up.

Chase kept his foot pressed down in the vain hope that the two remaining brakes would stay intact. They didn’t. Within seconds of each other they exploded under the stress.

“No hand brake?” Nina asked, not sounding the least bit hopeful.

“Nope.” Chase narrowed his eyes against the wind and surveyed the landscape ahead. If there was a steep enough slope, he might be able to aim the truck up it and cause it to slow so they could jump off…

There was a potential candidate some distance to the right. But he realized that he wasn’t going to reach it when he turned the steering wheel… and nothing happened. The wheel was no longer connected to anything-the steering column had broken.

Chase stared at it in horror. “Buggeration and fuckery!”

“Oh, that’s never good to hear,” Nina said, wincing.

Chase spun the useless control back and forth to no effect, then angrily set it whirling like a roulette wheel. “Okay, so no brakes and no steering. I’m open to any ideas.”

“Could we jump off?”

“We’re going too fast. I might be able to land okay, I’ve had training, but you haven’t.”

“Well, I’m going to have to chance it, aren’t I?” Nina opened the cab door and went onto the walkway, looking over the flapping banner still caught there at the stairs below. “Or maybe not!”

“What is it?”

“No stairs! They must have gotten wrecked when you drove into that helicopter!”

“Oh, right, it’s all my fault!”

Nina ignored him, an idea coming to her. She looked back at the raised tipper, then returned to the cab and worked the hydraulic controls. The huge load bed began to descend. “Give me a hand!” she called.

“Doing what?”

“Help me with this!” She pointed at the banner.

Chase hesitated, then decided that since he had no control over the truck there was little point staying in the driver’s seat, and joined her.

“It’s catching the wind, look,” Nina explained, putting a hand against the banner where it bulged between the railings. She quickly pulled it over the guardrail, bundling it up.

“Yeah? So? Are you going to just float off the side of the truck with it? I don’t care what Dan Brown says in Angels & Demons, you can’t use a tarpaulin as a parachute!”

“I know,” she replied, a flare of anger in her eyes. “But I wasn’t thinking of using it to fly-all it has to do is slow us down!”

Chase made a sarcastic snort. “Hate to tell you, but this thing’s not going to slow down a two-hundred-ton truck!”

“I didn’t mean the truck!” The flat front end of the tipper banged down into place above them to form a roof over the walkway, warped steel claws twisted around the hole made by the tank shell. “I just meant us! Although I’m tempted to leave you behind,” she added, scowling.

He suddenly realized what she intended. “You mean, use it like a drogue to pull us off the back of the truck?”

“Yes, exactly! It won’t stop us-but it might slow us enough to survive the landing.” Nina pulled the end of the banner onto the walkway and checked the lines from which it had been suspended. Nylon with a core of steel wire, strong enough to withstand the winds that blew across the mine.

“Not from the back of the truck, we won’t-it’s over twenty feet high.” Chase looked ahead-then stiffened. “Although I think we should give it a try, right now!”

“Why?” Nina saw what he had just seen. “Oh!”

Ahead of them, a line bisected the landscape: before it the dirt and stone of the edge of the Kalahari, beyond, the verdant sweep of the Okavango. It only took a moment for her to see a definite parallax shift, the desert seeming to move faster than the delta… because there was a height difference between the two sides.

They were heading straight for the edge of a cliff.

“Get up there, now!” Chase shouted, lifting Nina onto the railing and cupping his hands to give her a leg up onto the top of the dumper. She scrambled over the metal edge, then turned and peered back down at him, holding out her hands. Chase picked up the banner and hurriedly fed it up to her. “Open it out a bit, but for Christ’s sake don’t let it blow away!”

Nina looked ahead. The cliff edge was approaching fast, the truck speeding uncontrollably towards destruction. “What about you?”

“I’ll be up in a second! Put your legs over the edge, and hang on!”

She hooked the backs of her knees against the forward edge of the dumper and did the best she could to unfurl the banner. The wind immediately snatched at it, trying to pull it from her grip.

Chase rushed into the cab and slammed down the lever controlling the hydraulic lifter, then ran back out and scaled the railing to climb onto the dumper about eight feet from Nina. “Give me one of the ends!” he called, putting his legs over the edge as the dumper began to rise.

She tossed a section of banner to him. He quickly wrapped the end of the line a few times around one wrist before grasping it in that hand, then used the other to drag more of the material to him.

Nina saw what he was doing and copied him. The pressure on her legs increased as the dumper tilted backwards, gravity pulling her down. She looked back over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t. The ground was now at least thirty feet below her, and she was still rising.

Wind swirled over the front-now the top-of the dumper, catching the banner and inflating it. The sudden jolt almost pulled her from her perch.

“Not yet!” Chase yelled, leaning forward as far as he could. The cliff was coming up far too fast, but if they let go before the dumper reached a steep enough angle, they’d end up trapped inside it.

His leg muscles strained to hold him in place, the edge of the tipper digging painfully into his tendons. Just another few seconds…

The cliff passed out of sight behind the metal as the tipper kept rising, now at nearly a forty-five-degree angle-

“Now!”

Chase flung the flapping banner up into the air behind him, simultaneously straightening his legs and falling backwards. Nina did the same. The banner snapped open between them, the racing wind catching it and yanking them both back off the top of the dumper.

But it wasn’t large enough to support their weight. They immediately fell, landing painfully on the steepening metal slope of the tipper and skidding helplessly down it.

The banner held taut-

Nina and Chase shot off the back of the speeding truck, the swath of material acting as a makeshift air brake to cancel out some of their forward momentum.

But not all.

“Roll!” Chase screamed to Nina, more as a plea than as an order as they hit the ground at twenty miles per hour.

She managed to tuck up her legs, free arm raised to protect her head as the other kept hold of the banner. Chase bounced alongside her, rolling like a log. They tumbled along, stones pounding them mercilessly at every impact before they finally came to a battered, dusty halt.

Head spinning, Chase looked up-just in time to see the truck shoot over the edge of the cliff and plunge out of sight. A couple of seconds later, there was a colossal crash that they felt through the ground, followed by more heavy booms and crunches as pieces of the shattered vehicle came to rest.

“Ow,” Nina said, shaking the line loose from her arm and making a feeble attempt to sit up. Chase fought past the pain he was feeling in seemingly every single part of his body to roll over and look at her. Her clothes were ripped, crimson stains visible through the dirt around several of the ragged holes, and an especially nasty-looking cut across her forehead just below the hairline was already leaking blood down her face.

“You’re bleeding,” he grunted.

She looked at him, eyes widening in shock. “So are you!”

He raised a hand to a particularly painful spot on his cheek, fingers coming away smeared with blood. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. Probing with his tongue, he realized that one of his back teeth had been jarred loose, held in place only by a few strands of tissue and rasping against its neighbors as he touched it.

“Shit,” Chase muttered, spitting out blood. “I hate going to the dentist.” Nina tried to stand, holding in a gasp of pain as she put weight on her left foot. “Are you okay? Is it broken?”

“No,” she said between her teeth, “I just think it’s-aah!-twisted. Ow, crap, oh.” She hesitantly lowered her foot again, wincing. “I can walk. Or hop, anyway. What about you?”

He pushed himself onto his knees, then took a deep breath and stood up. His legs wobbled for a moment. It felt as though he’d been beaten all over with truncheons-but nothing seemed broken. He took a few experimental steps, then went to Nina. “I’ll live. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving. It won’t take ‘em long to catch up.”

Nina looked back at the plain they had just crossed. A plume of dust rose into the air in the distance where the truck had dropped its load, and there were much smaller clouds of drifting dirt on the horizon-other vehicles coming after them. “Where do we go?” she asked, putting a hand to her head and cringing at the sudden sting of pain as she touched the bloody cut. “We’re never going to be able to get back to the airfield now.”

Supporting her, Chase moved closer to the cliff edge, looking out over the spectacular view before them. From here, the Okavango stretched as far as they could see, expanses of grassy savanna surrounded by dense marshes and broad, lazy rivers. Compared to the dusty desert behind them, the colors were almost overwhelmingly vivid. In the far distance was an aircraft, a white spot low and slow in the deep blue sky. “First thing we need to do is find some transport.”

“Easier said than done.” Nina leaned cautiously over the edge to look down at the smoking wreckage of the truck, now lying on its back like a dead animal with all but one of its wheels missing.

“Oh, I dunno.” Chase sounded oddly enthusiastic, and she gave him a curious look. He pointed off to the right. The slope of the cliff became more shallow, a hill leading down to a lake-on the shore of which was a wooden building, a short jetty leading from it into the water. A boat was tied up at the end. “You ever been on a river safari?”