Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
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.
Tungata Zebiwe saw him coming and lifted the rifle one-handed, aiming over the bonnet of the jolting, roaring Land-Rover, but Sally' Anne threw herself across the weapon, clinging to it with both arms, her weight forcing the barrel down and Tungata could not take his other hand from the wheel as it kicked and whipped in his grip.
They were past the road-block now, and Craig was losing round to them; realizing with a slide in his chest that he could not catch them, he floundered along behind the roaring vehicle.
Sally-Anne and Tungata were struggling confusedly together, until the big black man tore his arm free and, using the hand as a blade, chopped her brutally under the ear. She slumped face forward onto the dashboard, and Tungata swung the wheel over. The vehicle swerved, giving Craig a few precious yards" advantage, and then it seemed to hover for an instant on the high bank beyond the road-block before it leapt over the edge and dropped into the roadway with a clangour of metal and spinning tyres.
Craig used the last of his reserves of strength and determination and raced forward to reach the place on the bank an instant after it had disappeared.
Ten feet below him, the Land' Rover was miraculously still the right way up, and Tungata, badly shaken, his mouth bleeding from impact with the steering, wheel was struggling for control.
Craig did not hesitate. He launched himself out over the bank, and the drop sucked his breath away. The Land, Rover was accelerating away, and he dropped half over the tail-gate. He felt his ribs crunch on metal, his breath whistled in his throat as it was driven from his lungs, and his vision starred for an instant but he found a " the radio set and hung on blindly. grip on He felt the Land-Rover surging forward under him, and heard Sally-Anne whimpering with pain and terror. The sound steeled him, his vision cleared. He was hanging over the back of the tail-gate, his feet dangling and dragging.
Behind him the army truck was swinging out of the road-block, engine thundering and headlights glaring in pursuit, while just ahead the main-road T-junction was coming up with a rush as the Land-Rover built up to her top speed again.
Craig braced himself for the turn, but even so when it came his upper arms were almost torn from their shoulder sockets, as Tungata took the left fork on two wheels. Now he was heading north. Of course, the Zambian border was only a hundred miles ahead. The road went down into the great escarpment, and there was no human settlement in that tsetse-fly-infested, heat, baked wilderness before the border post and the bridge over the Zambezi at Chirundu.
With a hostage it was just possible he could reach it. If Craig gave up, he could reach it or get himself and Sally Anne killed in the attempt.
By inches Craig dragged himself back into the Land Rover. Sally-Anne was crumpled down in the seat, her head lolling from side to side with each jerk and sway of the vehicle, and Tungata was tall and heavy-shouldered beside her, his white shirt gleaming in the reflected glare of the headlights.
Craig released his grip with one hand and made a grab for the back of the seat to pull himself on board. Instantly the Land-Rover swerved violently and in that same instant he saw the glint of Tungata's eyes in the rear-view mirror.
He had been watching Craig, waiting to catch him off balance and throw him.
The centrifugal force rolled Craig over and out over the side of the vehicle. He had a hold with his left hand only, and the muscles and tendons crackled with the strain as his full weight was thrown on it. He gasped with the agony as it tore up his arm into his chest, but he held on, hanging injured overboard with the steel edge catching him in his ribs again.
