At this, Feric's own annoyance was lifted. Best was a good battle companion; the lad always saw the sunny side of things!
With every man in the army keenly alert, Feric led his troops further eastward toward the border of Zind itself.
By now the Zind forces in the border area must be fully alerted and as ready for action as they would ever be, and in a few hours the huge Zind horde to the north would be notified of the true situation and would begin to swing south. A great battle was clearly in the offing; it was essential that it take place as far north as possible and deep inside Zind itself.
Therefore, Feric wheeled his army slightly northward; once the border defenders had been smashed, it should be possible to penetrate several hundred miles into Zind toward Bora before the massive Zind horde to the north could swing around to block the advance. No time must be wasted dealing with the Zind forces at the Malax border; every hour of delay would place the great battle that much further from Bora. Leaving nothing to chance, Feric called for a fifty-plane air strike to pave the way into Zind itself with the broken bodies and smashed equipment of the defenders.
Half an hour later, ten V-fonnations of sleek, black dive-bombers roared over the Helder army, dipped their wings in gallant salute, and headed eastward across rolling hills thick with rank radiation jungle. Before the planes had disappeared over the hills, there was a sudden loud 199
whistling, and a brace of shells exploded in gouts of turf and smoke not three hundred yards in front of Feric's tank.
"Zind artillery!" Best exclaimed.
Looking east and upward, Feric spotted a tiny black speck high in the sky. Instantly, he was on the radio to the commander of the planes. "There's a Zind artillery spotter above us! Send a plane back to dispatch it. Send another plane forward above the Zind horde to broadcast range and bearings to our tank gunners."
"At once, my Commander! Hail Jaggar!"
Another barrage of shells burst in front of the tank, these several score yards closer. Then, low on the horizon, Feric spied a single flash of gleaming blackness zooming in from the east. Another barrage fell, closer still, peppering the armor of Feric's tank with bits of gravel. The tiny flash of black grew rapidly into a sleek black Helder fighter-bomber; the plane arced upward into the sun, then fell nearly straight downward at the Zind flyer in a swift power-dive. Feric could see the bright orange sparkle of the plane's machine guns; then the noxious Zind flyer folded and fell like a stone. The fighter roared low over the Helder army, executed a smart victory roll, then made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and returned to the fray in the east.
A fusillade of Zind shells ripped up the ground harmlessly nearly three hundred yards short of Feric's tank.
"The Zind gunners are blind now. Best," Feric said. "Increase our speed by five miles an hour and veer five degrees south; the swine will then be firing at phantoms."
A moment later, the Helder artillery spotter was on the air broadcasting coordinates. Over a distant rideeline, Feric could see flashes of explosions lighting up the sky and billows of smoke as the Helder dive-bombers pounded the enemy.
Then the very universe seemed to tremble with the incredible massed thunder of seven hundred Helder tank cannon firing in unison. The fusillade was visible as a flashing steel meteor swarm tearing through the sky toward the east. A moment later the sky beyond the hills became a vast aurora of orange flame and rich black smoke. Then a mighty rumble was heard; this was immediately wiped out by the gargantuan roar of the next barrage being fired.
Firing nearly once a minute, the Helder tanks swept 200
forward at fifty miles an hour, smashing through radiation Jungle, grinding pallid bluish grass beneath their massed treads, an irresistible juggernaut of fire and flesh and steel sending holocaust before it and leaving a wake of total destruction in its van. Soon Feric had led the massive strike force over the last ridgeline; the Warriors of Zind were suddenly visible in the valley below.
Havoc had already been wrecked upon this Zind horde.
The crest of the far ridgeline was a steaming junkyard of mangled and fragmented dreadnaughts and war-wagons.
In the valley itself, perhaps ten thousand Warriors had been arrayed in long ranks facing the Helder advance.
The bulk of these vile creatures had been converted to a midden of bloody bits and pieces that set off the gray lunar landscape of smoking shell holes and bomb craters with great smears of bright red. As for the rest of the ten-foot giants, more of them than not were running about aimlessly in all directions firing their rifles wildly in the air, spattering their fellows with acrid yellow urine, grunting, pummeling, and gibbering, for the valley floor was littered with the burnt-out hulks of dozens of war-wagons upon which their Dom controllers were now naught but charred corpses.
