Doomsday Warrior 01 (19 page)

“Indeed, indeed,” Vassily mumbled, taking another sip, already lost in his own reveries. The servant silently exited the room, closing the door without a sound. Vassily took a book down from the shelf,
Notes from Underground
, by Dostoyevsky, and began reading where he had left off:

It was still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly, blanketing the pavement and the empty streets. There was no one in the street, no sound to be heard. The streetlamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer, I ran two hundred paces to the intersection and stopped short. Where had she gone? And why was I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse.

But before long, the aging ruler of the world dozed off, his head falling back on the shadowed pillow. The snow outside grew more intense; little dunes were forming in Red Square. The radiation level warnings were going up in Murmansk, the Sikhs were rioting in India in 120-degree temperatures. In South China a war lord was preparing his thirteen thousand fanatical horsemen—fanatical Moslem followers of the Muabir, the flame of Allah.

In Rangoon, Buddhist monks burned themselves to protest the new religious limitations and the machine-gunning of one hundred of their number just the day before.

And in the Kremlin, in the breasted snow of Russia, the leader of the empire, the supreme premier of all the Russias, a tired old man, slept with his face pressed into the yellowing paper of Dostoyevsky, page 345.

Fifteen

R
ona and Rock had to return to Century City by a fairly roundabout route, avoiding the high mountain passes and the waterfall trail which would be both too steep and too narrow for their heavily laden pack hybrids. The horses were tired, bone-tired after four days of carrying an inordinate amount of grizzly meat and pelts on their broad backs. Skinned and salted by Rock, and cut up into manageable chunks and put in the special airtight, plastic meat sacks that they carried, the grizzly meat would last days. They traveled in the mornings and the dark of the night to avoid the heat of the searing sun and the Red drones which were plentiful in the open country that they had to traverse due to the load. Each day they would set up camouflage netting under a thick grove of trees or a field of house-sized boulders spewed by an active volcano, and rest. Each day they made love. Rona had never felt happier in her life. Spending time with the man she loved, though she never said the words. She knew it would push him away like a frightened woods creature. The man was afraid of nothing on this Earth—no beast or soldier or KGB torturer. But he was afraid of women. Rock let himself enjoy her attentions. He knew there wasn’t much time for them. That he or she could be blown away in splatters of skin and blood, just like those grizzlies had. Death was near. Always standing behind one’s shoulder. Death had gravitated to Ted Rockson many times. Had come knocking on the door to take him away. And each time Rock had kicked it in the nuts and told it to fuck off, that he wasn’t ready to die. But even he knew that someday . . . someday. For in the game of death, the cards were stacked. Death won every hand.

At last they reached the southwest entrance to Century City, which was at a higher altitude though flatter terrain than the way they had departed. The hybrids huffed and wheezed with each step through the thin atmosphere. But soon, they were briskly walking down the final slope to the hidden city. Coming upon a grove of dark black spruce trees, Rock gave a sputtering larklike trill. He wasn’t as good as Detroit Green with these bird calls but he was getting better. The customary reply had been changed just last week, when it was feared that the captured Preston might betray the city’s location. So the lark got a reply from a starling, rather than an owl. A raucous squawk in three descending notes. A ten-by-ten-foot piece of what looked like solid turf suddenly opened up, rising on two metal poles at the end. Rock and Rona and their team of eight hybrids descended down a wooden ramp into an almost dark chamber. Rock knew that hidden eyes and hidden guns were trained on them at this very second, had been for miles. The entrance fell closed behind them and two guards ran over and knocked it perfectly into place, so that from above not a seam of human touch could be seen. The echoing hoofbeats of the skittish pack animals were the only sounds for a few seconds. Then greetings of, “Rock. Rock. Glad you’re back” came from all sides. Still the lights didn’t brighten. Torch-lit figures approached from the darkness. In the front ranks, his face garishly lit by the orange flames of his hand-held torch, was intelligence chief Rath.

Rockson took his side arm out, thinking trouble. “What’s the matter?” he asked, dismounting.

“A power outage, Rock. It’s been going on for nearly twenty hours and looks like it could go on for days. We’ve got no lights, no power at all, other than the emergency generators which are just keeping life-support systems in the hospital and our defensive electronic apparatus functioning. I’m really worried about the hydroponics. They say another twenty-four hours without any juice and it’s all over for everything in there.”

“What the hell happened?” Rock asked, putting his .12-gauge pistol smoothly back into its bed of dark leather. “A diode generator blew?”

“Nothing like that, Rock. It’s crazy. It—it was the Reds, although they don’t know they caused the trouble. One of their big Stalagva airlifters lost an engine—the damned thing fell right off and the ramjet nose-dived into our main solar collector on Ice Mountain. The place is a mess up there. All our solar units, our circuitry, step-up transformers,
everything
—gone. We’ve sent up three teams already to begin replacing destroyed parts and making whatever emergency repairs are possible. But it’s hard going. It’s storming up there tonight. We set up a fogger to shield all the activity from the damned drones they sent out to look for the airlifter. It must have gone down a few miles down the road. Their stupid inefficiency has dealt us a blow this time. If they find that camouflaged power installation they’ll follow the buried cables to Century City itself. So while two teams are installing new solar panels—disguised, like the old ones, as ice formations—the two other teams are cutting up the wreckage and dumping it down crevasses. If the Reds don’t see any pieces up there they won’t even come down to investigate.”

Rockson took it all in while tying up the hybrids to nearby posts. Rath tried to lighten the mood momentarily by admiring their tremendous bounty of bear meat, but Rockson was scarcely listening. It sounded like everything that could be done was being done—but he had to see for himself. Besides, it would be good for the men’s morale up there in that freezing hell to have Rock join them. A leader should be with his men in the best and worst of times.

In an hour he was suited up in nylon double-insulated climbing gear, spiked boots and goggles. He and another ten-man team headed across the two sparsely wooded meadows that separated Century City from the midway point up Ice Mountain. Ice Mountain—19,890 feet high, the top several thousand feet sheer rock face. There was a field of glacial ice atop it exposed to the harsh sunlight virtually every day. The very next peak over, about a mile, from the mountain beneath which Century City was built, the Freefighters had realized almost a decade earlier that it was the perfect spot for a solar generating unit. Small at first, consisting of just a few cells, the power unit had been built up over the years until it supplied nearly seventy-five percent of the city’s power. A far better situation than when they had to use gas-powered generators which meant raids on Red gasoline-truck convoys weekly and a tremendous loss of life. The solar plant had made them independent for the first time. It had been a milestone in the history of Century City. And there the unit had been humming away until the crash.

Rock and the climbing squad, loaded down with both climbing tools and packs filled with emergency repair equipment, reached the top tree line of Ice Mountain within an hour. Then they climbed up a slowly steepening ridge for a good two hours more. Finally they reached the base of the fifteen hundred feet—a wall of rock towered straight up above them, rising like an impossibility into the clouds.

Rock immediately saw the spikes that the other climbers had left in the sheer rock face. Foot holds, and eye sockets for securing their nylon climbing ropes. The wind howled around their bundled ears. Pockets of snow were already falling on the team, ice forming so rapidly on their equipment and goggles that there was the immediate danger of being weighed down, of losing balance.

Rock went first, tethered to Carruthers, Sanchez, Moore and the rest by thin but ultrastrong thousand-pound test climbing rope. Each man was connected to the next. If one slipped, it was the other’s desperate duty to pull him back or perish. That’s the way Freefighters were in all endeavors—they would never let a buddy down. Soon they were moving smoothly if slowly up the side of the nuclear-bomb-created mountain. Rock would follow the holds already made, secure himself at the next possible ledge, tie a safety rope on, and head further up. He knew the team, equipped with laser cutting tools, had to reach the peak soon. Without the tools the job would take until daybreak—and in the daytime the repair crews would certainly be spotted by either the drones or Red planes searching for wreckage. And the fogger couldn’t be used. Fog never existed naturally that high up during the day. The Russians would notice the aberration and send a massive force to annihilate the repair crews—and trace the cables back to the city. He pushed himself harder.

They climbed and climbed, the icy wind howling louder and louder, screaming like a pack of frost wolves in their ears. Occasionally they rested against the rock wall to hyperventilate, a trick the Freefighters had learned called Swant’s Breath. It opened their lungs to full capacity, enabling them to take in more oxygen and go without the cumbersome masks and tanks. At these heights even the toughened American lungs needed some assistance.

Rock was just reaching up for the next handhold when he felt a sudden jerk that nearly pulled him backwards. Carruthers, twelve feet below him, let out a muffled scream as he slipped and fell off the face of the mountain, only to be pulled short after only a five foot drop by the rope connected to Rock and the others. The second man reached out and grabbed hold of a spike and reattached himself, antlike, to the wall of the mountain. They continued on, through the howling wind, ice forming on gloves and goggles. Below Rockson was 5,670 feet of empty air. Above him was the most difficult part of the steep climb. The famed challenge called The Top Face had to be climbed “clean,” without driving steel pitons into the cliff wall, because the rock was a basalt-mica formation and the metal wedges would wiggle free in just seconds. For anchors and fall-stoppers, Rockson began using only the aluminum wedges and nuts that he and the team had dangling from their climbing belts. The aluminum jobs could be popped in and out of the numerous—and more sturdy—cracks with the fingers. On such devices, no larger than a finger nail, they were staking their lives and the hopes of Century City.

After nearly a half hour of muscle-numbing climbing, straining every fiber in their bodies, the team was in sight of the fogged summit. But from here on in, it would take every ounce of energy they had left. They stopped momentarily and chewed the cactus extract, a mild stimulant that gave them a carbohydrate boost. They could not afford the luxury of resting for more than a minute. If the wind should pick up or if a Red search plane dropped too low . . . The engineer who maintained the solar power units usually came around the mountain via a trail going up a fairly navigable route. But that took almost a full day, another luxury the repair crews didn’t have.

Rockson started up again, looking up the rock wall for any little opening for support. He found a winding eighth-of-an-inch crack that meandered along the face for about twenty feet. It was deeper than he could see into. He picked a tiny aluminum wedge from his belt clips and threaded a loop of rope through its eyelet. He threaded the wedge into the crack and tugged hard on it, as hard as he could. Solid. It would have to hold Rock’s full weight if he fell, and the others behind him if they should slip after him. Rockson took his pickax and snagged another, wider crack overhead and pulled himself up.

There were, unfortunately, no “chimneys” on this side of the mountain. That meant none of the crack systems led to a crevice wide enough to rest in, or to use to continue the ascent by pressing against the sides with shoulders, back, arms. The team had to use sheer muscle every inch of the way.

Much of a climb is reflective and silent. You can hear the wind, and you can hear grunts and breathing—but usually just of your own straining breath. However if you pause you can hear the others. It is a strange cacophony, those breaths and grunts. All you are aware of is that each moment is a lifetime in itself—or the moment of a death fall.

Rockson never felt so much like an ant dangling on a gossamer string as he did at these dizzying heights. And he had never seen strong men like Carruthers and Sanchez, coming up below him, look so fatigued. They pushed on ever upwards toward the dome of heaven itself. The moon set and pierced rapierlike through quick-flying narrow lines of clouds. It was growing darker by the minute though as bigger cumulus rumblers came pushing in from the west, meaning even greater menace. A slip or a rock fall at this time would mean disaster. Curse the damn Reds for their stupid luck.

Only the sheer tenacity of the American will to live enabled the whole team to reach the top safely. In the dimness of the green lights undetectable to the drones, amidst the rolling waves of fog from the four foggers that had been set up at the corners of the peak, the previous crews were solemnly working. Rock and the climbers stumbled over, almost wheezing as they tried to catch their breath.

“Here, we’ve got a lot of that fancy stuff you need—laser torches and metal-cutting clips,” Rock said to Saunders, the head of the repair crews, who stood supervising the demolition of the main piece of crashed ramjet.