Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

“I can’t see anything,” said Nina. There were no cars or 4×4s anywhere in sight.

“What, are you blind?” Chase pointed at the huge yellow Liebherr dump truck approaching the building. “What do you call that?”

She blanched. “A very bad and stupid idea?”

“My speciality. Come on.” Ignoring Nina’s protests, he ran towards the truck, waving his arms for it to stop.

The driver, twenty feet off the ground in the cab, gestured furiously for him to get out of the way, but Chase stood his ground. Brakes squealing, the truck slowed but didn’t stop, still coming right at him.

Chase began to think that Nina had been right. “Oh. Oh, shit.” He hopped back a few steps, then started to run as the truck’s angular shadow swept over him. “Oh, shit!”

The tumult of a massive diesel engine filled his ears, almost drowning out the piercing screech of the brakes. Nowhere else to run, Chase threw himself flat on the ground and covered his ears as the giant vehicle swept overhead…

And stopped. Chase let out a relieved breath. He was under the front of the truck-but, he realized almost with amusement, he had only needed to crouch to fit safely beneath it. He moved back into the open and headed for the steps leading to the cab.

Nina joined him. “Idiot!” she snapped, hitting his arm.

“Ow! What was that for?” The steps-almost steep enough to qualify as a ladder-crossed the front of the radiator grill, which itself was the size of a panel truck. Chase hurried up them, Nina following.

The driver came down, jabbing an angry finger. “What the hell are you doing? And why aren’t you wearing a hard-”

“Sorry, mate,” said Chase, punching him in the groin. He let out a pathetic little groan and bent double, and Chase tossed him bodily over the railing.

“Why did you do that?” Nina said. “You have a gun, you could have just told him to get out!”

“We’re kind of in a rush,” Chase replied as he ran up the remaining steps into the cab. “Anyway, he’ll be okay. As long as I don’t run him over.”

“Do you even have a clue how to drive one of these things?”

Chase took in the controls. Steering wheel, accelerator, brake pedal, a number of levers that he assumed controlled the dumper, and several monitor screens showing the view from video cameras all around the vehicle. Judging from the surprisingly carlike lever beside the driver’s seat, the transmission was entirely automatic. “I think I can manage.”

“How the hell did they escape?” Yuen demanded.

“They had help,” Fang said painfully on the other end of the phone line. “Somebody shot my men. A sniper.”

“What? Who?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him. He got away.”

“Find them! And kill them! If any of these bastards get away and tell the U.N. about the uranium mine, we’re all fucked!”

He slammed down the phone, looking up to see Kamletese flanked by two security guards in the office doorway, face full of bewilderment. “Uranium mine?” asked the minister. “What uranium mine?”

Yuen pressed a palm to his forehead. “Aw, hell,” he sighed. “Minister, I don’t suppose you’d be open to a very large bribe, by any chance?”

Kamletese boggled. “What? No, of course not! What’s this about a uranium-”

“I thought not.” Yuen picked up Chase’s Wildey from the desk and shot him. “You,” he said to one of the guards, who looked almost as surprised as the late government official, “go give the president the tragic, tragic news. A pair of diamond thieves called Eddie Chase and Nina Wilde have just murdered the minister of trade!” When the guard didn’t move immediately, he frowned and waved the smoking gun in his direction. “Well, go on!”

“Yes, sir!” gulped the guard, stepping over the dead body and hurrying from the room.

Yuen wiped his fingerprints from the gun, then dropped it and took the briefcase containing the Hermocrates pages. “Take me to my wife,” he ordered the other guard.

Figuring out the surprisingly simple controls for the mammoth T282B truck was one thing. Actually controlling it was something else entirely, Chase rapidly discovered. With its load bed filled with more than four hundred tons of earth and rock it took a long time to build up speed-and just as long to lose it. One of the largest warning gauges on the dashboard showed the brake temperatures of each of the twelve-foot-diameter wheels, and every time he touched the brake pedal to slow for a turn, the needles shot up into the red.

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.