by Dana Fredsti
“Only one, sir, the wall cannot be flanked by armor units.” On the left-hand, the city wall ran all the way to the sea. He turned his gaze to the great freshwater marshland and lake on the right-hand. A herd of long-necked brontosauruses leisurely grazed there.
He stared, dumbfounded, then swallowed and cleared his throat.
“Deep water hazards on both sides.”
“Any other opposing cover?”
“Yes, sir, plentiful. Statuary, many mausoleums and temples, and several other smaller buildings—shrines, charnel houses, perhaps.”
“That’s where the snipers will be positioned—blast every structure you see to the ground.”
“Jawohl, understood.”
“Your armor will advance, Commander, keeping out of arrow range to protect the troopers on foot. Use the firedrakes to cover the infantry’s advance. When you have come to one-thousand-meters range, sweep the ramparts and cavalry with machine-gun fire, and proceed through city gates for stage two.”
“Understood. Disposition of prisoners, sir?”
“Standard. March them away from the city under guard and set up a stockade area.”
Another voice abruptly cut in.
“Disregard that order! No prisoners.” It was the field marshal’s new advisor, Herr Doktor Mehta. The foreign Schwarzer.
“Sir?” Dietrich asked. Who the hell is commanding this operation? he thought. There was an uncomfortable pause before Rommel’s voice returned.
“You heard the order, Commander,” the Generalfeldmarschall confirmed. “No prisoners.” Dietrich stiffened, then collected himself.
“Jawohl, Generalfeldmarschall, understood,” he responded, his voice flat. So, it was to be a massacre. Rommel had never authorized such a thing before. It had always been a point of pride that his units did not operate like an SS division.
“HQ out.” The wireless went silent again.
Dietrich noticed the rest of the tank’s crew exchanging uncertain looks. The commander didn’t have the luxury of doubt. Showing anything less than absolute certainty would be a dereliction of duty. Time to slip on the mask of command and go to battle.
“Driver, advance!”
The vanguard moved into action.
* * *
Atop the ramparts, not a single figure stirred, while below them, just outside the gates, the Alexandrian cataphract cavalrymen struggled to hold their line, calming their increasingly nervous mounts. All were armed with peculiar new lances, hurriedly crafted the night before, though no one was certain any of them would work as promised.
Further beyond the safety of the city walls, concealed in freshly excavated trenches, other defenders of Alexandria listened to the unending rumbling of the approaching monstrosities. A fearsome and unearthly sound, like stretched-out thunder, growing louder with every passing moment. Worse than the ominous tramp of marching feet or the din of charging chariots, and louder than either, building continually.
The Magna Germanian war engines were unbelievable. They almost looked like war-elephants, with their long trunk-like pipes. But they were bigger than elephants, and entirely shod in gigantic plates of iron. Strangest of all, they traveled not on wheels, but on great banded belts of metal.
Scores of the Germanian soldiers marched alongside the hulking vessels or rode atop them like fleas. None bore shields or armor, except for funny little half-helmets. All were armed with the deadly hand weapons that killed instantly with a thunderclap.
As the rumbling grew, each soldier felt the squeeze of panic building in his chest. With a low moan, one let his bow fall from his trembling hand and turned to clamber out of the trench. A cooler head snatched him by the collar and tugged him back down.
“Urion, stay down,” the older man hissed. “Remember what the barbarian Blake said. Keep out of sight. If we run, they see us, and if they see us, we die.” The younger man nodded silently, ashamed. Beads of sweat trailed down his forehead.
“Forgive me, Obelius. I—” His words were cut off by a loud, cracking roar no more than a few paces away. A tall granite statue of Zeus-Ammon fragmented into a thunderous spray of gravel, debris, and smoke.
* * *
“Feuer!” Dietrich shouted again. A high Greek-style mausoleum standing on a low hill to their right fell under the crosshairs of the Panzer’s 50mm main gun, only to vanish in a roaring cloud of fire. The other tanks joined in the barrage, targeting any stone structure bigger than a gravestone and blasting them all to pieces of rocky shrapnel.
The attack was methodical, thorough, and merciless, the march of destruction slowly steamrolling across the grounds from building to building. By the time they were finished, the City of the Dead would be completely razed, down to the blackened and smoldering earth.
9
Within the city walls, on the high rocky hill that overlooked the southwestern Rhakotis quarter, Nellie Bly watched from the upper reaches of the former Serapeum. According to Hypatia, once it had been the largest and most magnificent of all temples in the Greek quarter, for centuries unrivaled by any building in the world but the Capitol in Rome. Now it was a ghost of itself, long abandoned and fallen into disrepair.
Still, it made a perfect watchtower for keeping tabs on the German advance. She had felt a certain fatalistic thrill in watching the slow sandstorm drawing closer. Now they were close enough to the city’s sprawling necropolis that she could make out their hulking war machines, great, lumbering land-dreadnoughts.
Then the bombardment commenced.
She and Hypatia rushed down the staircase and outside, heading for the agora. Time to finalize the defenses for the battle to come, the one that would be fought on the city streets.
Dietrich gave the cease-fire order and emerged from the turret to check their handiwork. The necropolis was littered with smoking debris. Apart from the pathetic wooden barricades, no structures were left standing. He scanned the grounds with his binoculars, thorough as a hawk searching out a scuttling mouse, but could find no traces of dead bodies. During the attack, there had been no signs of fleeing defenders, either.
Strange, that.
Had he only imagined the concealed spearmen? Surely the defenders weren’t all cowering behind the city walls, leaving only their doomed horsemen outside, shivering at the gates. Perhaps there were survivors still huddled behind their sad little wooden fortifications. Poor bastards.
Time to end this ugly business as quickly as possible.
Blowing his whistle, he gave the hand signal for the infantry. Panzergrenadiers dismounted from the tanks and joined the other troopers already on foot, moving quickly to hunt down their prey. Three specialists took point, fanning out to cover more ground as they boldly advanced on the nearest wooden barricades. “Firedrakes,” the other soldiers called them.
Horrifying gusts of destruction roared as the trio brought their flamethrowers to bear, scouring what remained of the tattered wooden barricades with coldly efficient surgical bursts.
* * *
Stretched painfully thin along the city wall, the armored cataphracts on their increasingly panicky horses stared in growing terror, watching the distant plumes of unnatural fire incinerating the barricades. Each pile of wreckage went up like torchwood, spewing thick, black clouds of billowing smoke. It was all the horsemen could do to keep their lines in good order and their mounts pacified.
The entire body of the enemy—every soldier armed with a long-range killing-lance—advanced directly toward their line, the three scythes of flame in the forefront, clearing the way. Blake had warned them how the Germanian weapons could kill from a great distance. With the pale northern barbarians closing in on them, the cataphracts reached their limit.
It began with a single rider, then another, then another. Then, as if on cue, the entire cavalry force split and bolted away in wild disorder like a flock of startled ravens, half fleeing for the seashore, and the other half for the banks of the lake. If any of the implacable soldiers standing fast on the ramparts
tried to call them back, none of the fleeing cavalrymen took heed.
* * *
A harsh chemical stench of burning tar and gasoline poisoned the air as the firedrakes left blazing timbers in their wake. The other Panzergrenadiers escorted them at a safe distance, wary as cats, fingers on their triggers as they stalked through the cemetery grounds. Spears and bronze swords didn’t scare them—but the enemy commandos could be in hiding anywhere. They needed to root them out.
The centermost firedrake made another exploratory sweep of the burial grounds, probing for hidden targets. Ahead lay more lines of wooden barricades, extending back all the way to the city gates. Though the stone structures in the necropolis were nothing but strewn rubble, there was still plenty of cover for an ambush.
“Stay sharp!” the corporal closest to him called out. Heeding his own advice, the man spied a toppled obelisk, big enough to hide a man. He halted, crouched down and stepped quietly toward the fallen pillar, eyes peeled for any sign of movement or a trap. Something snapped beneath his boot, and the trooper froze.
Scheiße!
The firedrake turned at the sound, and both men knew the score. If the corporal had just triggered a mine, a lethal burst of explosive shrapnel was coming in three seconds. It would kill him, the firedrake, and every other man within sixty feet. He had seen a whole British platoon wiped out by just one.
The corporal fought to concentrate on his training. He knew it took precisely twenty-one pounds of pressure to activate the spring-loaded plunger that would fire the ejector charge, launching the primary explosive seven feet in the air…
Standing still as a statue, he gently… oh so gently… leaned back, shifting his weight to relieve the pressure from his boot. There was another, almost imperceptible click as he raised his foot. He froze again. Now two of the other nearby soldiers had noticed the situation.
They froze, too.
He lifted his boot completely off the ground, exhaling sharply. Just a scrap of splintered shale. The corporal shook his head and gave a thumbs up to the relieved men around him before taking another step closer to the fallen obelisk.
A strange droning tone came from some point deeper in the cemetery grounds, like the rising whine of an engine powering up. Tensing, the corporal looked about to find the source. With a start, he recognized the skirl of a bagpipe—playing the call to charge.
Flashes erupted from somewhere along their flanks— bursts of submachine-gun fire. The firedrake’s dual fuel tanks ruptured, transforming him into a pillar of flame, before blossoming into a fireball that engulfed the corporal and the nearest pair of soldiers. Within a split-second of withering gunfire, twin explosions took the other two firedrakes.
* * *
The fragile stillness of the burial grounds shattered again into the howling bedlam of war. In the heart of the necropolis, four hundred paces away, eight hundred Alexandrian bowmen knelt, concealed in trenches. Their captain cautiously peered over the lip of the trench, using a simple but ingenious device introduced the night before.
Blake called it a periscope.
“Toxótes! Etoimos!” he cried out. The archers raised their bows to the sky.
“Véli!”
* * *
Dietrich only just caught himself from falling back into the turret as the stricken flamethrower teams blazed into a triple-inferno within the advancing infantry. Across the front, a dozen soldiers or more went down, either caught in the exploding flames, or the submachine-gun crossfire that had triggered them. The rest dove for cover and returned fire.
The Panzers opened up with their own machine guns, but no targets were in sight—where were their ambushers?
“Feuer einstellen!” Dietrich ordered into the microphone. “Feuer einstellen!” Cease fire! His order was lost amid the cacophony of automatic weapons fire.
As he blew his whistle to make himself heard, a flash of movement from inside the burial grounds caught his eye. Like a ghost, an Alexandrian youth wielding a torch had miraculously appeared out of thin air. With a defiant sneer, he touched his firebrand to one of the barricades. The timbers went up at once, as if saturated with oils, sending heavy black smoke roiling up into the air, and the phantom torchbearer disappeared once again.
All around the ruins, the commander spotted other hints of furtive movement as the other barricades ignited, one after the other. In a matter of moments, dense curtains of smoke obscured the necropolis.
Even as Dietrich tried to take in this new development, a whistling rush filled the air—all but drowned out by the thundering guns—as a sudden cloudburst of arrows dropped out of the sky straight down upon the Germans. His neighboring tank commander suddenly stiffened, a gout of blood jetting from an impaled eye socket. Dietrich jerked his head inside for cover as the arrows clattered off the tank’s armor plating like a hailstorm.
Caught outside, the vulnerable foot soldiers had no such luck. Those who dove to the ground for cover further exposed their bodies to the rain of missiles. A forest of arrow shafts sprang to life all around them—and plunged into the meat of thighs and torsos, puncturing arms and necks and lungs. The sound of gunfire gave way to shrill screams.
Moments later a second volley arrived, drawing more screams. The few troopers who could still move scrambled to seek whatever cover they could find, but none was left—the Germans had demolished it.
As Dietrich and his crew looked on in horror through the narrow vision-slits, the troopers who survived the first two volleys ran up in an effort to find shelter by the tanks, only to be struck down by a third volley. Some crouched dangerously close to the moving treads, while others tried to squeeze through rocky debris to get beneath the undercarriage. Others climbed for the unlikely cover of a turret or main gun. None succeeded.
The tankers inside could only watch as their comrades died, pleading for their help. There was nothing to be done for them, nor for the wounded casualties littering the bloodied earth.
“This is Wedge One,” Dietrich shouted into the wireless. “All advance full!”
Ignoring the dead and dying infantry, the V-shaped front column pushed ahead into the crumbled smoking ruins of the City of the Dead.
* * *
Secure for the moment in their trench, just an arcing bowshot from the enemy’s advancing war engines, the captain of the Alexandrian archers crouched and growled with frustration. Their fog of war had done its job too well. He could no longer see the enemy for the smoke, but he could hear their inhuman tread, could feel the rumbling of the earth beneath them.
Would there be enough concealing cover from the flames and smoke to protect his men if they retreated now? Only the gods knew. Taking a deep breath, he continued to call for one blind volley after another to be loosed.
He dared not stop.
10
Just south of the fringe of the necropolis and two hundred meters behind Dietrich’s Panzers in the front wedge, the reserve line fired up their engines and moved forward, following in their own V-formation. The mustard-colored dust kicked up by the tanks blended together with the black smoke spilling upward from the conflagration, gradually encircling the armored unit.
The hard, arid ground behind them trembled, but in their loud, lumbering Panzers the crews could neither hear nor feel the thundering of hooves. Nor could they see the charging Alexandrian cataphracts circling back around, flanking their blind spots from both sides.
* * *
On the western half of the cavalry’s pincer maneuver, Lucius—the scout rider Blake had rescued from the pit with Harcourt—rode at the head. Unarmored, he sped in front of the mounted cavalry, directing them around and inside the “V” of the rear tank column. Across the formation he could see the eastern half of the cavalry making the same approach on their end, led by the Zouaves—the three fearless French-Algerian troopers.
“Epitíthesthe!” Lucius shouted as his half of the cavalry rounded the hindmost tank. The lead cataphract charged up to it and flung his lance at the back
of the turret as he thundered past, followed by two more horsemen doing the same in quick succession.
* * *
“What the hell was that?” the forward gunner asked, craning his neck to catch a glimpse as an armored horseman flashed past his viewport, followed by another, then another. “Are they throwing spears at us?”
The crew broke into hearty laughter.
“Quit your verdammt braying and open fire on them!” their commander growled as another rider rode past and hurled a flaming torch. Smoke began pouring in through the ventilation grills, and the cabin suddenly burst into flame.
* * *
The line of riders continued their attack down both wings of the wedge, each warrior throwing his odd lance and peeling off again to attack another war engine further down. Instead of steel spearheads, their fragile new weapons were tipped with narrow glass amphora bottles, lashed in place and filled with a new mixture of sulfur, oil, and naphtha.
Once two or three lances struck their targets, shattering and spewing their contents, additional riders cast lit torches onto the mess. Half the tanks had been hit before the crew of the lead Panzer even realized the formation was under attack.
By then it was too late.
One by one, each tank erupted into flame as the liquid dripping down through gaps in the engine cover and air intakes quickly spread to spots of engine grease, machine oil, gasoline fumes, and any other flammables. The men in the stricken tanks tried to bail out, but it only took seconds for each interior to transform into an inescapable inferno.
The crews closest to the point of the formation rushed to turn their tanks and turrets around, even as the Alexandrian cavalry charged past them. Only the lead Panzer managed to swing their main gun around fast enough to face their mounted attackers. Undaunted, the lead cataphract hurled his lance straight ahead to shatter upon the turret face, just as the tank’s forward machine guns blazed to life and cut the man and his horse down.
