“Rubbish! Don’t talk nonsense. What kind of fatuous nobility is this? Are you tired of living?” Fank choked on his own shout and started violently coughing.
Maxim looked around. Pale-faced Gai was looking at him with his lips trembling, holding on to his sleeve—of course, he had heard everything. Two guardsmen were hammering a bloodied military convict into the next tank with their rifle butts.
“One pass!” Fank yelled in a strained voice. “One!” he held up one finger.
Maxim started shaking his head. “There are three of us!” He held up three fingers. “I’m not going anywhere without them!”
Zef’s massive ginger beard was thrust out of the side hatch like a twig broom. Fank licked his lips—he clearly didn’t know what to do.
“Who are you?” Maxim shouted. “What do you want me for?”
Fank briefly glanced at him and started looking at Gai. “Is this one with you?” he shouted.
“Yes! This one too!”
Fank’s eyes turned wild. He stuck his hand in under his raincoat, pulled out a pistol, and aimed the barrel at Gai. Maxim struck Fank’s hand with all his strength from below, and the pistol went flying high into the air. Still not understanding what had happened, Maxim pensively watched it go. Fank doubled over and stuck his injured hand under his armpit.
Gai dealt him a brief and precise blow to the neck, just like in the drills, and he collapsed facedown. Guardsmen suddenly appeared close by, sweaty and grinning with bared teeth after their work, looking haggard in their fury.
“Into the tank!” Maxim barked at Gai, bending down and grabbing Fank under the arms. Fank was bulky and he just barely fit through the hatch. Maxim dived in after him, receiving a blow from a rifle butt to his backside in farewell.
Inside the tank it was as dark and cold as in a crypt, with an intense stench of diesel oil. Zef dragged Fank away from the hatch and laid him out on the floor. “Who’s this?” he barked.
Maxim had no time to answer. Hook, who had been tormenting the starter for a long time with no success, finally got the tank started. Everything began shaking and rattling. Maxim gestured with his hand, clambered into the turret, and stuck his head out. There was nobody left between the tanks apart from guardsmen. All the tanks’ engines were working, there was a hellish roaring, and the slope was enveloped in a stifling cloud of exhaust fumes. Some tanks were moving, here and there heads were jutting out of turrets, and the military convict who was protruding from the turret of the next tank was making signs to Maxim and contorting his bruised, swollen features. Suddenly he disappeared, the engines started roaring with redoubled volume, and all the tanks simultaneously rushed forward, clanging and clattering up the slope.
Maxim felt himself grabbed across the torso and pulled downward. He bent down and saw Gai’s idiotically goggling eyes. Like the other time, in the bomber, Gai kept trying to catch Maxim in his arms, all the time muttering something. His face had become repulsive; there was neither boyishness nor naive courage left in it—only obdurate imbecility and the readiness to become a killer. It’s started, thought Maxim, squeamishly attempting to push the hapless young man away. It’s started, it’s started… They’ve turned on the radiation emitters, it’s started…
The tank scrambled up onto the crest, shuddering, with clods of turf flying out from under its caterpillar tracks. The blue-gray smoke obscured everything behind it, but ahead a gray, clayey plain suddenly opened up, and in the distance the flat hills on the Hontian side heaved into view, with an avalanche of tanks hurtling toward them, maintaining their speed. There were no rows any longer—all the tanks were rushing along, racing each other, brushing against each other, senselessly rotating their turrets…
A caterpillar tread flew off one tank traveling at full speed and the tank started spinning around on the spot and overturned; its other caterpillar track flew off and went soaring up into the sky like a heavy, glittering snake, the lead wheels kept on furiously spinning, and two little figures in gray popped out of the lower hatches, jumped down onto the ground, and ran forward, waving their arms around—forward, only forward, at the perfidious enemy…
There was a flash of fire, the sharp crack of a shot from a tank gun burst through all the clanging and roaring, and all the tanks started firing at once; long, red tongues of flame shot out of their gun barrels, the tanks squatted back and jumped up again, they were enveloped in the dense, black smoke of coarse gunpowder, and a minute later everything was obscured by a blackish-yellow cloud, and Maxim kept watching, unable to tear his eyes away from this spectacle that was so colossal in its criminality, patiently peeling away Gai’s tenacious hands, while Gai kept pulling at him, calling out, imploring, craving to shield Maxim from every danger with his own chest… Men, windup dolls, savage beasts… Men.
Then Maxim came to his senses. It was time to take over the controls. Holding on to the metal rungs, he went down inside, on the way slapping Gai on the shoulder—Gai started thrashing about in hysterical ecstasy. Maxim looked around in the cramped, lurching box, almost choking on the stench of gasoline, made out Fank’s deathly pale face, with its eyes rolled up and back, and Zef huddled up under a shell crate. He shoved aside Gai, who was devotedly clinging to him, and squeezed through to the driver.
Hook was jerking the levers back, putting on as much speed as he could. He was singing, yelling in such an appalling voice that he could actually be heard, and Maxim even made out the words of the Song of Thanksgiving. Now he had to somehow pacify Hook, take his place, and find a convenient ravine, or a deep hollow, or some kind of hill in all this smoke, so they would have somewhere to take shelter against atomic explosions…
But things didn’t go to plan. The moment he started cautiously unclasping Hook’s fists, which had frozen onto the levers, his devoted slave Gai, seeing his lord being defied, pushed his way in from the side and dealt the crazed Hook a terrible blow on the temple with a huge spanner. Hook slumped down, went limp, and let go of the levers. With savage fury, Maxim flung Gai aside, but it was already too late, and there was no time to feel horror and sympathy. He dragged the corpse out of the way, sat down, and took the controls.
He could see almost nothing through the observation hatch, just a small patch of clayey soil with a sparse covering of blades of grass, and beyond that a blank shroud of bluish-gray fumes. Finding anything in that was out of the question. There was only one thing left to do—slow down and keep cautiously moving while the tank traveled deeper into the hills. However, slowing down was dangerous too. If the atomic mines started exploding before he reached the hills, he could be blinded, or even completely incinerated.
Gai rubbed up against him from the right and the left, peering into his face, petitioning for orders. “It’s all right, old buddy…” Maxim muttered, elbowing him away. “It will pass… Everything will pass, everything will be fine…” Gai saw that Maxim was talking to him and shed a mortified tear, because once again, like the time in the bomber, he couldn’t hear a word.
The tank shot through a dense trail of black smoke—on their left a tank was on fire. They hurtled past it and had to abruptly swerve to the right, to avoid driving over a dead man squashed flat by caterpillar tracks. A crooked border sign emerged from the smoke and disappeared again, followed by tattered, crumpled tangles of barbed wire. A man in a strange white helmet stuck his head up for a moment out of an inconspicuous little ditch, furiously waved his fists in the air, and immediately disappeared, as if he had dissolved into the ground.
The shroud of smoke ahead thinned out a little, and Maxim saw round, brownish hills, very close, and the mud-spattered side of a tank that for some reason was creeping diagonally across the general movement, and then another blazing tank. Maxim steered away to the left, aiming his tank into a deep saddle, overgrown with bushes, between two of the slightly higher hills. He was already close when flames came spurting out toward him, and the entire tank rang from a terrible blow. In his surprise, Maxim switched to full speed ahead, the bushes and the cloud of white smoke hanging over them leaped toward him, he glimpsed white helmets, faces contorted in hatred, raised fists, and then something gave a metallic crack as it broke under his tank’s caterpillar tracks.