The Steel Tsar Read Online Free Page A

from the worst of the impact. Gradually the feeling came back to my legs and I was able to stand, gritting my teeth against the pain. I looked around me.
    I was standing by the main wreckage of the ship on a mountain coated with streamers of yellow sulphur dust. Everywhere were bodies—crumpled, broken bodies of men, women and children, of patients in nightgowns and pyjamas, of wounded soldiers in tattered uniforms, of airship officers and crewmen, of nurses, orderlies and doctors. Nearly two thousand bodies and not one of them stirred as the wind moved the slow smoke over them, and the yellow dust swirled, and shreds of fabric fluttered amongst the crumpled ruins of the giant airship. Without hope I wandered through the piles of dead. Two thousand human beings who had sought to escape death in the fires of Singapore, only to find it on the barren, windswept rocks of an unknown Javanese hillside. I sighed and sat down, picking up a crushed packet of cigarettes I had seen. I opened the packet and took out one of the flattened cigarettes, lighting it and trying to think. But it was no good, my brain refused to function.
    I looked about me. Jagged holes gaped in the airship’s hull. Most of the gasbags had been ripped open and the helium lost. The wreckage covered a vast area of the mountainside. There was nowhere I looked which was not littered with it. And over it all moved thick ribbons of smoke from the volcano. The smoke stroked the broken bones of the ship, the smashed gondolas, the ruined engine nacelles, like the phantoms of the dead welcoming others into their ranks.
    I got up and put out the cigarette with a stained, scratched boot. I coughed on the fumes and shivered with reaction and with cold. The slope was probably a thousand feet above sea-level. It was not surprising that the overloaded ship had crashed. Numbly I continued my search for survivors but at the end of two hours had found only corpses. What was still more horrifying was that many had actually survived the crash. As I searched I found little girls and boys who had been shot through the head or had their throats cut, young and old women butchered by parangs, men who had been decapitated. The bandits had been through the survivors systematically killing all those who for one reason or another had been unable or unwilling to walk. As the horror increased I was suddenly seized by nausea and stood with one hand leaning on a rock while I vomited again and again until all that came out of me were dry, retching coughs. Then I walked back to the main wreckage and found a blanket and a plastic container of water. I stripped off my useless lifejacket and wrapped myself in the blanket, stumbling up the mountainside until I was clear of the corpses. Then I slept.
    * * *
    I awoke before dawn and was shivering. From somewhere below came a chilling howl which at first I mistook for that of a human being. Then I realized that the howl came from a wild dog hunting in the forest at the foot of the mountain. As dawn broke I went back to the wreck.
    By now I had worked out roughly what had happened. Plainly the crash had been witnessed by one of the many rebel gangs who normally occupied these heights and, from time to time, would raid the Dutch towns and farmsteads below. Inspired by the support of both the Japanese and their more sophisticated nationalist countrymen, these rebels had recently grown bolder and had come to offer a serious threat to the colonists. Whether they called themselves bandits, pirates or “nationalists”, all hated the whites in general and the Dutch in particular. They had captured the survivors probably as hostages or possibly to deliver to their Japanese friends in return for more guns or supplies. Possibly they might just want to take pleasure in killing them slowly. I couldn’t be sure. But I did know that if they found me I should suffer the same fate and none of the prospects were pleasant.
    There had been few weapons aboard the