“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-