“That’s your idea of a plan?” Masaracchia said. “I don’t know whether this truck can even do ninety miles per hour.”

“I’m more worried about the timing,” Cannon replied, voice raised over the roar of the engine and the rattle of the suspension. “Burr, how are the Tommies doing?”

“Two hundred yards or so,” Burr said.

Directly in front of their truck, another British truck erupted from an alley, sending fragments of a rug merchant’s stall flying. Cannon ducked as pieces clattered to the bed around him, and then fell as Masaracchia spun the wheel to one side. Bullets snapped over his head and kicked up sparks from the cab. Scraping the wall of a building on one side and the nose of the British truck on the other, Masaracchia’s truck squeezed through the gap. In a scant few seconds, the British driver reversed and turned to chase Masaracchia.

di Giacomo opened up with his machine gun. Under the rapid-fire pops, a rolling boom echoed across Alexandria.

Charlie Henderson watched the thousand-foot fireball bloom into the sky in the mirror clipped to his cockpit frame, holding in a mad laugh. He hadn’t dared to hope that the Royal Air Force would have parked its fuel trucks next to the airfield’s fuel dump. The pillar of smoke behind him, and the concussion which had shaken his plane as he’d flown past, suggested they had. He pulled into a turn, watching down his win as flaming debris rained down on the airfield.

He grinned, then looked over his shoulder. Chuang Choufeng still hung fifty yards back at Henderson’s seven o’clock. “Why don’t you take lead for the next pass, Two?”