The Tomb of Hercules

by Andy McDermott

  But now the truck was on course for the administration building, and Sophia.

  “We’ve got company,” Nina warned nervously, gesturing at one of the monitors. A Land Cruiser was coming up fast on the truck’s left. One of its doors was partly open, a man’s head protruding through the window. “He’s going to try to jump aboard!”

  “Bloody fare dodgers,” said Chase. He spun the steering wheel, sending the truck lurching to the left. The Land Cruiser hurriedly dropped away.

  Nina grabbed the back of Chase’s seat for support. Even though he’d straightened out, the contents of the giant dumper were still shifting, the truck rolling like a ship in rough waters. “Jesus! I thought we were going to tip over!”

  “We need to dump the load.” He indicated the levers on the control panel. “See if you can work the tipper—Christ, he’s trying again!” The Land Cruiser pulled alongside, a security guard reaching out for a handrail.

  Chase turned again. This time, the Toyota’s driver wasn’t fast enough, and the truck’s giant front wheel clipped the back of the 4×4. The entire rear quarter sheared away, the guard barely managing to throw himself back inside the vehicle as the door was ripped from its hinges and crushed as flat as tinfoil. One wheel gone, the Land Cruiser flipped onto its side.

  Chase grinned. “Okay, next time I’m driving in London, I want one of these!”

  Nina pointed ahead. “Watch out!” Two more Land Cruisers charged down the dirt road at them, security men leaning out of the windows.

  Guns in their hands—

  “Duck!” Chase shouted, but Nina had already seen the danger and hunched down behind the seat. Shooting from a moving vehicle was a lot harder than Hollywood made it seem, but the T282B was not exactly a small target. Bullets clonked around the cab, one side of the windshield cracking as a shot punched a hole through it and hit the back wall.

  “Okay, you want it that way …” Chase growled. He pushed harder on the accelerator, the engine shrilling beneath him, and aimed the truck at the oncoming 4×4s. One of them immediately decided that survival outweighed orders and swung away, but the other kept coming. More bullets hit. A section of the windshield shattered, chunks of laminated glass showering over the dash. Chase flinched, but held his course.

  The Land Cruiser’s driver finally realized that he was playing chicken with an opponent three hundred times his weight and tried to turn away, but too late. The Toyota disappeared from view below the base of the windshield, but an explosive crunch of metal—and a very small bump—told Chase that he’d scored a hit. A moment later, the remains of the Land Cruiser appeared on one of the rearview monitors, only the severed wheel bouncing away from the wreckage giving away that the flattened roadkill had once been a vehicle.

  Chase winced. “Ouch.”

  The admin building was coming up ahead, the stage and marquee beyond it. He saw what he assumed was Yuen’s helicopter on the pad in front of the building, rotors whirling, figures running for it—

  “Shit!” One of the figures was very familiar. “They’re taking Sophia!”

  “Wait, what are you doing?” Nina asked as he changed direction, heading straight for the helicopter.

  “Stopping them from taking off!”

  “How? By crashing into them? You’ll kill her!”

  Chase knew she was right, but couldn’t think of anything else to do. “I’m not letting him take her!”

  “You can’t stop him!” The helicopter was already rising, dust swirling beneath its skids. “We’ll never get there in time!”

  “We’d be going faster if you’d dumped the load when I told you!”

  “Oh, don’t you start blaming me for this!” Nina snarled.

  Yuen’s helicopter cleared the pad and wheeled around, nose dipping as it turned for the airfield. “Shit!” said Chase, banging a fist on the wheel. He watched helplessly as the chopper gained height and flew over the marquee.

  “Eddie!” Nina pointed. President Molowe’s helicopter was parked in their path near the tent, its rotors building up speed, and in front of it was a line of soldiers.

  Taking aim …

  Chase didn’t need to issue a warning for Nina to throw herself flat on the cab floor. He dropped too, leaning almost horizontally to shield himself behind the dashboard as rifle bullets ripped into the cab. The rest of the windshield exploded, fragments cascading over the dash like a crystal wave. Shots punched through the cab’s steel walls, one of the video monitors blowing apart. The accelerator pedal kicked beneath his foot, the mechanism hit somewhere, but the engine kept roaring at full power.

  Unable to see, all he could do was hold the wheel steady and keep going—

  The firing stopped, the soldiers breaking ranks and running as the truck surged towards them. The helicopter’s main rotor hadn’t quite reached takeoff speed—the aircraft’s occupants jumped out of the cabin and fled in panic, a soldier practically dragging Molowe out of the juggernaut’s path.

  The rotor blades sliced into the front of the truck, ripping the stairs to pieces before striking the solid steel framework of the truck’s body and shattering like glass.

  An instant later, the Liebherr slammed into the helicopter.

  The chopper flipped onto its side, the fuselage disintegrating and the long tail boom snapping off to cartwheel away. Fire bloomed inside the engine compartment. The crushed wreckage was bowled along by the bumper for a moment—

  Then it exploded, a dull thump of igniting fuel followed almost instantly by a louder, sharper detonation as the engine blew apart. Debris showered the front of the truck.

  “Bloody hell!” Chase gasped as a burning shard of metal bounced off the cab roof and hit his arm. He kept the accelerator pressed down. There was a jolt as one of the wheels ran over the remains of the chopper, then the crushed wreckage was strewn out in their wake. He sat up—and saw something large directly ahead. “Oh, shit!”

  Nina had just raised her head when the truck swayed violently, banging her against the cab door as Chase tried to avoid the marquee.

  He wasn’t successful. The giant vehicle swept through the VIP end of the tent, tables and champagne bottles shattering beneath the mighty wheels. Nina caught a brief glimpse of the marquee’s interior, waiters fleeing for the exits at the far end, before the tent roof was ripped free and the whole thing collapsed.

  Checking the remaining video monitors, Chase saw the crumpled marquee falling behind, and beyond it the burning wreckage of the helicopter. “Great,” he moaned as he aimed the truck back towards the road, “that’s another African leader who wants me dead.” He squinted into the dry wind rushing through the broken windshield. Yuen’s helicopter was still in sight ahead, now descending at the end of its short flight.

  Nina levered herself upright. “He might still get the chance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got tanks at that checkpoint, remember?”

  Chase made a dismissive noise. “There’s no way they’ll be able to ready them this fast. Besides, they’re just for show.” He brought the truck onto the road to the airfield, hitting the celebratory banner spanning it like a runner breaking the tape at the finish line. The banner was ripped free of its support poles and snagged on the truck’s cab-level walkway, ropes snaking from it as it flapped furiously in the wind.

  He turned towards the gate—to see both of the Leopards moving to block the road beyond the checkpoint, turrets swiveling to bring their main guns to bear.

  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.