The Iron Dream (32 page)
He chanced to look at Best; the young hero was married to the controls of the tank and to his machine gun.
His face was set in a steel grimace of determination; in his 207
blue eyes was a fierce and iron ecstasy. For an instant their eyes met and they were united in the comradely communion of battle, transfigured together in a red mist beyond time or fatigue. Through the metal of the tank, the common weapon which they shared, their souls seemed to touch and merge for an instant in the greater communion that was the racial will. All this took place in the blink of an eye; their beings were not for an instant distracted from the sacred task.
The individual acts of heroism of thousands upon thousands of Helder soldiers merged into a racial epic of superhuman fanaticism, and transcendent glory. Motorcycle SS in sleek black leather plunged straight into the guns of the enemy, smashing reeking hairy legs and crushing Warriors with their machines, dispatching dozens of the monsters with th^ir truncheons even as bullets tore their flesh asunder. Helder tanks rammed their Zind counter-parts, overturned them, then set them ablaze with flamethrowers. Dive-bombers dropped death on the enemy from above; crippled planes deliberately dove straight into Zind tanks and war-wagons, going out in a bright blaze of glory. The motorized infantry left their trucks and dashed straight into the battle in wave after wave, perish'ns; in great numbers, but taking thousands upon thousands of Warriors with them down to final destruction.
The mystic merger between Peric, his heroic troops, and the racial will of Heldon was total; the Helder army fought as one unified organism with the will of Peric Jaggar at its heart. Not a man paid the slightest heed to his own life or personal safety; fear and fatigue were unknown.
Slowly, foot by foot, the Helder army pushed its way forward against the full weight of the gargantuan Zind horde. The forward ranks of the horde were reduced to an enormous herd of puking, gibbering, spitting, defecating, brainless red-eyed monstrosities running totally amok, hurling their huge naked bulks straight at the steel tanks, dashing directly into the muzzles of the Helder guns, slaying Helder and their own comrades with equal abandon. Flames were everywhere and the air was one great cloud of reeking smoke. Every Helder tank, each individual true human hero, was covered with a thick coating of enemy blood. Feric felt the racial will course into his body, through his muscles, and out the red-hot 208
muzzle of his roaring machine gun. He himself was naught but a weapon fired by something beyond himself. The hundreds of tanks and hundreds of thousands of men ripping the enemy to bloody fragments were extensions of his own being, fingers, arms, pseudopods, as he himself was in turn the highest expression of the racial will of his people. Together, this vast organism was Heldon, the hope of the world, the master race of destiny, chewing its way into the vitals of the foul racial enemy.
Through the night and into the next day, the incredible carnage wore on. Merged as he was into the communal organism that was his army, Feric could viscerally sense that the Helder forces were pushing their way north and east toward Bora. Like sense organs of his own body, the aerial scouts reported that the far east and west flanks of the great Zind horde were flowing around either end of the Helder line like the enveloping pseudopods of a great amoeba.
"It's hard to say whether we're being enveloped or whether we're cutting the horde in half," Feric observed to Best.
"My Commander, I've got Waning on the radio!"
"Let me hear him on the tank circuit."
Waffing's hearty voice filled the tank; in the background, Feric could make out the sounds of battle. "My Commander, we've reached the oil fields and are engaging the enemy. I hope to be able to report the capture of our objective by tonight at the latest."
"Good work. Waning!" Feric said. "I must sign off now: as you can hear, we've got some action of our own here!"
Waffing's call gave Feric pause. Perhaps the Zind flanking maneuvers were nothing less than an attempt to go around the obstacle that the Helder armv imposed so as to reinforce their small battered forces holding the key oil fields. In this case, thev must be thwarted at all cost!
Flying in the face of his own battle instincts, Feric went on the radio and ordered the redeployment of his forces into defensive positions; a line must be established and held south of the Zind horde that could be neither outflanked nor broken. The horde must be pinned down until Waffing had completed his mission and linked up with the main Helder army.
Therefore, behind a screen of tanks and motorcycles, 209
the Helder infantry dug in along a broad front a mile to the south, setting up machine guns, cannon, howitzers, and mortars, digging trenches and foxholes, and anchoring either end of the line with a division of the most fanatic SS troops. Once this had been accomplished, the front-line motorcycle troops disengaged and retreated behind the fortifications, shielded by the tanks, which were the last to withdraw, behind a wall of fire created by their own cannon and machine guns.
Only when these maneuvers had been completed and his own tank secured behind an earthen embankment, did Feric pause to make an overall assessment of the strategic situation. Peering up through the open hatch of the tank, he saw that the Zind horde had not followed on the heels of the retreating Helder army, for its entire front line was a chaotic disaster area. Even at this distance, he could still see the solid dike of bloody mangled corpses that clogged the front to the north all along the line of battle to a depth of several miles. Hardly any Zind tanks were still in action and the Helder dive-bombers were dispatching these. Behind the great front of dead Warriors was a boiling chaos of uncontrolled Warriors, appearing at this distance for all the world like a vast swarm of crazed killer ants. Far behind this riot of brainless muscle was an endless sea of more disciplined forces. As for the Zind artillery, it had been entirely silenced by the Helder air force, and these same sleek black dreadnaughts had also swept the sky clear of Zind vermin.
The Helder motorcycle troops and infantry had sustained quite heavy casualties, but the Helder artillery was virtually intact, no more than fifty tanks had been lost, and the air force was as good as new. A great deal of ammunition and petrol had been expended—to telling effect—but when Walfing's reinforcements arrived, that problem would be ended.
"Our present task is crystal clear," Feric told Best. "We must hold this position at all costs until Waffing's troops arrive."
Best's reaction to this was something less than enthusiastic. "I'd far rather advance against the enemy no matter what the odds than hold a defensive line no matter how impregnable, my Commander," Best said.
Feric could only nod in agreement; this was nothing less than his own deepest feeling and the proper attitude for a Helder soldier. Still, there were times when the good of 210
the Fatherland required the relinquishment of one's own fondest desires. No doubt the troops, too, were less than happy at this defensive deployment Something must be done to maintain morale.
In order to maintain the fire of his troops, Feric quit his tank, donned a fresh black uniform and spotless scarlet cloak, and conducted an inspection tour of the front lines mounted on the black-and-chrome motorcycle of a fallen SS hero, with Best following behind on another cycle. He kept the Steel Commander always in prominent view, its thick silvery shaft and mighty headball newly polished and shimmering in the sun.
Although these troops had fought with ceaseless ferocity for nearly two days without sleep, to a man they expressed nothing but the keen desire to once more have at the enemy. This was evident in the fanatic determination burning in their eyes, the loving care they lavished on their weapons during this respite from combat, the snap and dash of their salutes, the fire with which they shouted
"Hail Jaggarl" and the spontaneous cheering that went up each time a Helder artillery barrage sent cannisters of death whistling overhead to burst in the midst of the enemy.
Feric had not been touring the lines for more than half an hour when a vast surge of forward motion became visible all along the front of the Zind lines.
"What is it, my Commander?" Best asked.
"It appears that we're about to have our thirst for battle quenched once more," Feric said. Wave after wave of Warriors bulled their way through the great carnage heap of their own fallen comrades and came running across no-man's land toward the Helder line with blazing submachine guns.
Feric set his own submachine gun in its firing rack; all along the line of Helder fortifications, tank cannon and field pieces were leveled at the onrushing enemy sea and tremendous barrages of high-explosive shells tore the creatures to pieces as they dashed across the desolated earth, while an endless chain of plummeting dive-bombers blasted great gaping holes in the backup formations.
Soon the great horde approached machine-gun and flamethrower range. "Open fire!" Feric roared.
At once, hundreds of thousands of machine guns opened up all along the Helder line. The first rank of 211
Warriors was quite literally blasted off its feet and smashed backward. The next rank suffered the same fate as the Helder troops continued to put out solid walls of hot lead all along the front, and the rank after that. But all the while the total Zind force advanced inexorably over the fallen bodies of their comrades straight into the mighty teeth of the Helder guns.
As he watched his own bullets rip through half-a-dozen barrel-thighed naked monsters sending gobbets of flesh into the air as the creatures fell, Feric suddenly realized that there were no war-wagons in evidence.
"These are no ordinary Zind Warriors, Best!" he called out. The creatures were not marching forward in the usual utterly precise formations. Further, their heads, though shrunk far below the human standard, had larger craniums than those of the fighting creatures the Helder had thus far faced, and there was something about the jaws and mouth that set Feric's teeth on edge. Then the flamethrowers of the tanks obscured the front of the Zind assault with a tidal wave of flaming petrol, through which Feric could hear a terrible shrieking, howling, and moaning even above the sound of the guns.
Half-smoldering Warriors erupted through this curtain of flame, firing their submachine guns savagely in their death throes and pushing the Zind advance to within a hundred yards of the Helder trenches. Feric drew the Great Truncheon of Held, waved it grandly over his head, gunned his engine, and roared out of the protection of the fortifications straight at the onrushing masses of feral giants.
With a great cheer, a hundred thousand SS and army motorcyclists dashed out to join him. Thousands of these heroes were instantly felled by the guns of the Warriors; Feric could feel bullets whistling all around him. But in a few moments, the wave of motorcyclists had reached the Zind monstrosities. Guns were useless, and it was truncheon to truncheon.
Feric found himself in a forest of huge, filthy, hairy legs. Power surged through his being from the Great Truncheon; he swung his weapon through the air like a switch. The superhuman blow smashed through dozens of the vile limbs like so much rotten cheese, toppling a score of the howling obscenities to the earth, where they thrashed about like decapitated snakes. As he smashed the skulls of the crippled creatures like so many melons, he 212
noted that their eyes were glowing coals, their mouths frothed with blood and filled with razor-sharp teeth.
These creatures were a far different breed from the Warriors Heldon had previously faced. Each fought independently, and with the frothing battle frenzy of an enraged catamount, fearlessly pitting their massed brawn against the iron will of the Helder fanatics on their steel machines.
With great swipes of their huge truncheons, they dashed cycles and riders alike to pieces, a camelian drool spewing from their vile lipless mouths. But huge and ferocious as these monsters were, they fell far short of the superhuman heroism of the Helder soldier fighting at the side of his beloved Supreme Commander. These magnificent specimens in trim field-gray or tight black leather threw themselves at creatures twice their size with battle cries on their lips, fire in their blue eyes, and truncheons arcing through the air like hammers of doom. Attacking these racial heroes was like dashing into the whirling teeth of some great buzz saw.
Monster after slobbering monster ran howling at Peric only to be dashed to a pulp by the Great Truncheon of Held; soon the shaft of the Steel Commander was lubri-cated with thick red blood and the shiny black leather of Feric's uniform was set off with a hundred scarlet splat-ters. The hand-to-hand fighting went on for what seemed like days, but could hardly have been an hour. It was impossible for Feric to judge the course of the battle, for his universe was contained by solid walls of hairy, stinking, drooling giants with an unquenchable thirst for true human blood. As fast as these creatures smashed through the barricade of corpses that Feric had piled around his motorcycle, they themselves felt the bone-crushing wrath of the Steel Commander. Nevertheless, the creatures kept coming, as if filled with some crazed and powerful longing to meet their own dooms.
At length, Feric began to notice that fewer and fewer Warriors were coming at him with each minute mat passed. A half-dozen giants ripped aside the bodies of their comrades shrieking wordlessly; these Feric felled with almost foolish ease. Three more fell a few moments later. Then long moments passed during which nothing whatever happened. Feric was alone inside a great crater whose walls were the broken and bloody corpses of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the enemy.
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With hefty strokes of the Steel Commander, Feric smashed a path through the dike of dead Warriors and drove his motorcycle through the gap.
As far as he could see, the earth was piled high with dead bodies; most of them Zind Warriors, but not a few gallant Helder heroes who had given their last full measure of devotion to the Swastika. Moving throughout this massive midden were tens of thousands of Helder motorcyclists polishing off the wounded Warriors with their submachine guns.