Doomsday Warrior 01 (46 page)

Forty

U
llman and ten of the Technicians came to the surface to see Rockson and his party off. The rest stayed below. They were still frightened but they were learning, learning the truths of survival that Rockson had taught to Ullman.

“Goodbye,” Ullman said, looking up at Rockson and the others who were all mounted and ready to ride. The two remaining pack ’brids were loaded with Particle Beam pistols and rifles—five of each. It was just a start.

“We’ll be back to get more weapons,” Rockson said. “Once the other Freefighters of America get wind of these, they’ll be banging down your doors.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” Ullman said. “It is time my people had intercourse with the outside world. We can remain moles, hidden deep underground no longer. Life = sensitivity of sensory receptors x new experience + pleasure/ pain factor of .3332.”

“We’ll meet again,” Rock said, smiling.

“Again, Ted Rockson.” Ullman let his ever-serious, pencil mark of a mouth bend open into a smile. The Freefighters rode off into the falling night.

The next few days were good. The men were all in excellent moods from their successful mission. They had gone out to get something and had done it. A mission that might well someday go down in the history books, equal in importance to the ride of Paul Revere or the crossing of the Delaware. The Freefighters were filled with a bursting pride to have contributed so much to their country.

They rode single-file almost due east, retracing their steps. It took nearly a day and a half to get out of the black soot that surrounded the silos, and both the men and the ’brids were glad to see it go, as the fine-particled dirt got into every pore, every mucus membrane of the body. But the black turned to gray and then to an orange-green as they reached some flatlands, dry but covered with a fuzz of vegetation, an occasional prairie cactus with its dark violet flowers on the top. Rock was much more relaxed than he had been on the outward journey. And thank God he didn’t have to worry about Perkins and Lang. Both were regaining their strength daily. Lang’s leg was nearly back to normal, though it was slightly scarred. Plastic surgery back in C.C. would take care of that. Perkins’s lung was functioning almost perfectly. Slade took daily stethoscope checks and reported that the rasping sound of air being drawn through a punctured lung was gone. “Should be good as new,” he told the patient. Rockson wished they could have taken one of the medical machines, but the things weighed nearly half a ton when they were all hooked up. That would have to wait.

It was the weapons that were the priority. Just the feel of the Particle Beam pistol on his left hip brought a smile to his face. Rockson knew what it could do. The knowledge was awesome. He still carried the shotgun pistol on his right side. It was too familiar to discard. Besides you never knew when one of these new-fangled weapons was going to go haywire. No, he’d keep both.

All the man were now armed with the beam weapons but were unable to get rid of their lifelong pistols and rifles. They rode along with their double sets of weaponry. Only Archer and Chen stuck to their tried and true ways, and refused the new devices—Archer preferring his crossbow and hands, and Chen his martial arts, nunchakas and the exploding star-knives which had proved their worth in the parakite attack.

As they reached the outer edges of the blasted terrain Rock realized the place was familiar. There—ahead. Bones. A field of bleached bones, looking like a dinosaur graveyard. Only the fossils were Russians. The Freefighters rode past, looking down on the huge carcasses of their pack ’brids. The rib cages of the animals were enormous. No wonder they were so strong, their bones were thick as small trees. Then past the dead squad of commandos. They lay right where they had fallen, each one posed in some bizarre frozen moment of death. Only there was not a trace of flesh on them. The buzzards and rodents and trillions of bacteria in the air had licked their bodies down to gleaming white skeletons, grinning the eternal smile of death. Their empty eye sockets, an occasional worm crawling through, stared up at the Freefighters as they rode past. The dead and the living taking each other in. But it was the living that Rockson watched for. The dead hadn’t hurt him yet.

“We have them now, sir,” Major Chernik said to Colonel Killov. “It’s air reconnaissance reporting in from thirty thousand feet above the graveyard of our parakite commandos. They’ve picked up a line of men atop mutant horses, heading directly past the spot. Heading east, sir.”

“That’s them.” Killov’s eyes burned with murderous fire. Rockson—he had a chance to get Rockson now. Somehow he knew that the man was in that group. “Excellent. Let’s go.” The two men headed out to Killov’s staff car, waiting directly outside the Center, and were whisked to the Denver KGB airport. Killov had insisted that he have his own airfield as KGB maneuvers occurred at odd times of the day and night. Zhabnov had acquiesced. And now Mr. President had tried to have him eliminated. Killov smirked. He had to hand it to Zhabnov for guts. He hadn’t thought the fool had it in him. The only question was whether Vassily was in on it too. If that was the case, it would call for drastic countermeasures. Actions Killov had hoped he wouldn’t have to carry out.

But, all that was for later—after this Ted Rockson was captured. That would break the back of the American resistance. He could put Rockson behind bars and televise it every night. Show them what power their “hero” had now.

The staff car screeched to a stop just behind the fence that ran the perimeter of the KGB runways. Killov was greeted by the commander of the helicopter Death Squad, Captain Potavka.

“We’re ready, sir. The helicopters are warmed up and ready to go.”

Killov looked at the ten waiting Soyuz II jet attack helicopters, part of the Death Squad’s fleet. “Are they equipped with everything I asked for—? The gas—everything?”

“Down to the finest detail, sir,” Potavka reassured him. He led Killov to the lead helicopter, its blades trembling slightly, waiting for activation. The KGB colonel slid into the seat next to the pilot and waved his hand in an upward motion.

“Go! Go!” The pilot spoke into his chin mike and started the engines. The rotors above spun faster and faster until they were a blur in the night air. The other nine attack craft roared into life, gunners already at their posts in large, plastic bubbles on each side, dual machine guns poking out.

Clearance was given from the control tower for takeoff and the lead chopper tilted up into the air, joined by the other nine helicopters, right behind it. They reached a speed of 200 mph and then threw on the jet engines in the rear. The craft lurched forward and tore into the clear, purple-tinged night at 425 mph. They flew in a V-formation with Killov’s helicopter in the lead, about one hundred feet apart, a flock of black hawks with red stars on the side.

Killov looked down over the countryside, the vast dead stretches of land mute testimony to the damage the Russians had done. And there would be more, much more to come. They flew for two hours, the pilot at last announcing to Killov that they were within thirty miles of the reconnaissance sighting. The KGB colonel pulled the mike down from the black helmet over his head and spoke, “This is your leader, Colonel Killov,” he announced to the other craft. His voice boomed out from speakers on each helicopter. “You’ve all been trained for this mission. You are elite troops so I know that you are ready. But let me stress once again that this Ted Rockson must be taken alive. Try to take the others prisoner, but if you can’t— But Rockson must not be hurt. That’s why we have the gas and the netting. The man that takes him alive will get one hundred thousand rubles and the Medal of the Supreme Soviet Hero. The man who kills him will die the most excruciatingly painful death ever experienced on this Earth. That is all.” He lifted the mike from his lips and stared out through a polarized blue visor at the rapidly brightening land below as the sun began its trillionth climb into the terrestrial sky.

The Freefighters rode past the dead KGB commandos and on toward the fogbanks ahead. “We’ll get to the edge of the fog and then rest for the morning. The ’brids have been going for nearly fourteen hours,” Rock told the men as they marched toward the rising sun, strangely twisted into a flattened pancake shape by the thick, radioactive mists on the far horizon.

Suddenly Rock’s senses went on full alert. Something was wrong. Something was going to happen at any moment. He threw his hand up, and the party came to an abrupt stop. Rockson looked around the land ahead for a possible ambush. No, not there. From the sky.

“Dismount! Quickly, men, and get out your Particle Beam rifles.” Although they saw nothing, the men followed Rock’s command instantly. They had been through too much with him not to totally trust his instincts. They had just hit the ground and were unwrapping their plastic Black Beam weapons when the unmistakable deep rumble of a jet engine reached through the morning air. More than one—many. In seconds the sound grew louder and off in the distance Rock could see, through the scope on his Particle Beam rifle, the fleet of helicopters coming at them.

“Got a fight coming. Big one,” Rock said to the others. “But they’re in for a big surprise. Now we’ve all been working with these but they’re still new. Just remember not to fire ahead of the choppers as you would with a machine gun. These babies are instantaneous.” The Freefighters found what cover they could in the low bushes and got into good firing positions, lying on their stomachs, setting the rifles on their front tripods as they had practiced. Even Chen grudgingly took a rifle and set it up.

The helicopters came in fast, shutting their jet engines only when about a mile away. They spread out from a V to a straight-line formation, headed down to an altitude of a hundred feet and came in for the kill.

Three of the Freefighters fired at the closest two choppers. The black beams hung in the air for the merest second and then were gone. Both helicopters exploded in midair, sending out balls of fire in every direction, nearly igniting the craft to each side of them. They plummeted to the earth like meteors, crashing in flaming wreckage. The radios of the helicopters blared, screaming at one another, “What the hell is going on?”

Rockson and Berger sighted up the helicopters on each end of the advancing line of KGB jetcraft. They gently squeezed the triggers and the Particle Beams shot out as silent as a ray of light, finding their targets some two thousand feet away. Both choppers disintegrated into a screaming, burning metal high in the air. They fell in a shower of glowing parts to the orange-lit ground, growing ever brighter from the now-full sun.

Panic set in among the Russian helicopter crews. Nearly half their number had been blasted out of the sky in a matter of seconds.

Killov looked over at his pilot and motioned with his eyes to turn and move back. The chopper pilot wordlessly responded, taking the lead craft into a sudden dive and turning at a sharp angle around and underneath the still-advancing attack force. Then he tore off straight back, out of range of whatever weapon was being fired.

The pilot of the second command ship screamed out orders over the mike. “Fuck taking anybody alive. Fire. Fire those damned missiles. Whatever’s shooting at us is in that grove of trees right ahead.” In each ship the men prepared to fire the air-to-ground missiles as the helicopters rushed forward drawn like moths to a flame.

On the ground, the Freefighters took careful aim and squeezed off another series of shots. Eight beams of the blackest light ever seen on Earth shot out in an absolutely straight line at the helicopter fleet. Four craft were hit. They exploded as one, sending a wave of white-hot shrapnel into the air and to the ground. The crews of the disintegrated helicopters barely had time to scream before their bodies were melted into the atoms of steel walls and rotors in the burning hell that consumed them.

The pilot of the sole remaining craft opened his eyes wide in horror. He was the last. The rest were all gone. Every one. What in his mother’s name was going on? It was survival time. He tilted the control stick full forward and the chopper broke into a steep dive. He pulled the rear gyro as hard as he could to the right, whipping the craft into a full circle. Keeping just feet above the ground and pulling the control shaft of the chopper madly from side to side to avoid being a clear target, the sole surviving helicopter of the elite KGB attack squadron fled for its life. The pilot threw the jet engine of the craft on, knowing that he might lose control. The helicopter shot forward, barely skimming little copses of trees. Yes, they would make it, they—

The Freefighters fired at the fleeing Red chopper, this time four black beams finding the target at once. The craft evaporated into gas from the combined energy of the shots. Not even wreckage—just a flaming vapor that quickly burned itself into nothingness.

Killov watched with long-range binoculars from some eight miles off where he had had the helicopter pilot stop and hover for a minute. His face was livid, his body shaking uncontrollably. The pilot looked at the KGB leader with terror. Every one of the fleet was gone, smoking ruins on the ground. He had almost lost his life. That Ted Rockson was among the bandits who had fired on them—of that he was sure. But what weapon could do damage like that? The Russians had nothing in their arsenals to match it. Killov had never even heard of such a weapon. A black beam that destroyed anything.

“Denver, Denver!” he yelled at the pilot and the craft tore off toward the East and thickening clouds. He was shaken to his core. Things were worse, much worse than he could have imagined. If the rebels had weapons like that, it could change the entire balance of power in the world. Could mean the end of the Soviet Empire. He and Zhabnov and Vassily would have to stop their bickering and ally themselves together to fight this common threat. Or else they’d all go down in the blast of the black beam.

The Freefighters rose from their firing positions and looked at the piles of smoking debris that littered the hills ahead of them. Rockson clicked the safety on his Particle Beam rifle and turned to Detroit.