Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style

FREEDOM’S CHALLENGE

Russia’s nuclear first strike against an unprepared United States has turned the land of the free into the home of brutal hordes of Soviet invaders intent on enslaving all who survived the atomic holocaust. But out of the radioactive rubble emerges a heroic leader of American rebels who choose to fight for freedom’s cause or die in the attempt. He is the ultimate soldier of survival, the Doomsday Warrior himself, Ted Rockson.

After years of hard-fought resistance against the hated Red oppressor, Rockson’s band of Freefighters have forced the highest authority in Moscow to convene a peace conference in the ruins of Washington, D.C. But the renegade leader of the KGB, Colonel Killov, has other plans. If his insurgent terror-commandos capture the Russian Missile Carrier anchored in the Potomac River, Killov’s maniacal dream of world domination—and the destruction once and for all of his greatest enemy, Ted Rockson—will be within his grasp. Once again the clouds of deadly radiation will drift across the ravaged land. America’s last and only hope for peace and freedom is the . . .

DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR

DEATH FROM ABOVE

Ted Rockson looked up at the black SK-9 chopper with death’s head markings. It was bearing down on him, and Rock suddenly realized with horror that he had fallen into a trap.

He started to roll out of the way, but had gotten only a yard or two when the whole world erupted into brimstone and blinding light—and Rockson was suddenly spinning through the air, the water below coming at him like a gigantic mirror.

And then he was in the water, turning and rolling like a little boy caught in the big breakers at the beach. But the Doomsday Warrior knew this time he was way over his head. And probably wasn’t coming out!

ZEBRA BOOKS

are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

475 Park Avenue South

New York, N.Y. 10016

ISBN: 0-8217-2211-5

Copyright © 1987 by Ryder Stacy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

First printing: November 1987

Printed in the United States of America

One

“Here the waters lead toward Hell

a frightful ferryman keeps the river watch

a ragged horror whose eyes are flames

knotted rags hang filthy from his frame

he poles his craft, he tends its sail

and in its rusty hull he freights the dead

the leaky vessel groans beneath the weight

then passes across the river of death

from which none return
”

The Aeneid

T
he huge black tanker loomed through the fog like some spectral creature from a nightmare. It pushed on, steadily, patiently, through the thick mist that covered the Atlantic for hundreds of miles. It moved as if it could not be stopped, its great momentum of black steel carving a path through the dark green sea as wounded water foamed and leaped from its path. It carried no running lights, no flags of identification, not even a name appeared on its bow.

It was a monstrous vessel, a Universe-class oil tanker built in the Ishikawajima-Harima shipyards of Kune, Japan, in 2077
A.D.
It was one of the largest ships ever constructed by man.

Christened the
Mimbutsu,
it had since passed through several hands, becoming, in turn, the Greek
Pleiades,
the Argentinian
City of Bravo
and the South African
Boermaster,
before finally vanishing in an international shuffle of maritime papers. It had been purchased recently for gold by a Middle Eastern man.

Now, the tanker once again crossed the sea like some reborn serpent from the beginning of time, its long, hard, steel body disappearing and reappearing in the steaming clouds of fog that hop-scotched the ocean.

The crew of desert-browned men aboard knew the vessel as the
“Dhul Hajja—
The Carrier of The Prophet,” and indeed, it was a ship worthy of carrying the greatest of kings.

The
Dhul Hajja
measured, 1,213 feet in length and 206 feet in width. It stood tall as a ten-story building, while the radar towers at each end of the ship reached another 60 feet into the air. Its I.H.I. twin turbine engines churned out 63,900 horsepower that whipped thirty-foot propellers through the thrashing water. The tanker was of such weight that it consumed 17 gallons of oil just to move the distance of its own length through the water. Within its thick metal skin, the
Dhul Hajja
could, when fully loaded, hold 1,000,000 gallons of one of the most precious cargoes in the modern world—oil.

But today it did not carry this life’s blood of civilization. Today, as it moved steadily at 15 knots through the Atlantic’s dark waters slowly cooling from the summer’s heat, it carried death.

The black-clad ‘Servants of Death’ slowly walked the long deck of the tanker, heavy rifles slung around their shoulders, watching for any sign of trouble. But only a lonely seagull occasionally flew by, looking lost and far from home. The men could feel a constant shuddering vibration in the deck below their feet, where others of their group worked feverishly preparing for the Day of Judgement that was soon to come.

Here, in the middle of the vast ocean, it seemed strange, almost like a dream, to have spent the last years of their lives in the middle of the Libyan desert. They remembered—as their boots clanked across the steel deck—remembered the sand and the sun like a blast furnace, the scorpions scuttling along like angry crabs. They remembered the pain, the endless agonies they had endured.

The Servants of Death had been trained thoroughly in all the arts of killing. They had learned to shoot pistols and rifles and machine guns while running and while lying on their stomachs on the hot desert sand. They shot at dummies, piercing them with bullet holes until they looked rotted and worm-eaten, and until their own eyes burned in the shimmering rays of the North African sun.

They had learned how to stab and blind and kill with their commando knives in hand-to-hand fighting. It had been a very thorough course. Six of the trainees were killed in “mock” knife combat.

They had been taught to slide through bushes of thorns on their bellies, quiet as snakes, and garrote guards with four-foot pieces of piano wire. They had learned to use their feet and hands as weapons; how to kill with a single punch to the middle of the throat. Four men had died during this part of the training, their larynxes crushed like eggs, blood spurting from their gasping mouths.

They were pushed on relentlessly by their leader’s military commander, Colonel Killov, his skeletal figure unperspiring in the desert heat. Many times they had seen him high up on a sand dune, watching them through his binoculars as they suffered and struggled and nearly murdered one another—and they had hated him. But their master, Dhul Qaraain, had ordered,
ordained
it. This foreigner was to be the man who must train them in the ways of war.

They had crawled and run, and climbed and sweated their guts out, until they felt they could take no more. But they did.

They had been hand chosen, these elite terrorists, from Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and from Palestinians in exile. All were between the ages of 19 and 26. None was younger or older. They were all in perfect health and they all had two things in common—they were ready to die to return the stolen land to the Palestinian people, and they believed in Dhul Qaraain.

They had run obstacle courses of barbed wire and broken glass and scaled high cement walls that left them with broken arms and legs, and sometimes dead at the bottom of a wall, their necks snapped like chicken bones from the fall. Eight more men died here, under the cold eyes of the foreigner, Killov.

For the final test, each had walked halfway across the Libyan desert with only a knife and a small gourd of water at his belt. They slept in mounds of sand at night and, to stay alive, ate snakes and sipped the precious moisture from cactuses. Twenty of them never walked out again.

They had been chiseled and hardened and beaten and formed until they were as tough as steel, without an ounce of fat on their dark, muscled bodies.

Out of 500 men who had entered the training camp, only 200 remained after 34 months. Seventy-eight had died agonizing deaths, their bodies buried under the shifting sands. The rest had either fled into the black starry night or were thrown out of the elite cadre as too weak, too soft to endure another day of the pain.

At last their training had ended. A torch-lit night came when their master, Dhul Qarnain, summoned them. Qarnain—The Prophet, the Hand of Allah, the Mahdi.
Qarnain—
who, it was prophesied, had come to smite the infidel. Qarnain the Invincible. And next to him, the mysterious, gaunt stranger.

They stood before their master in five rows of forty men each. He looked at them all, slowly turning his head, savoring this moment of completion.

He spoke, “You are now the toughest fighting men in the world. You can do anything. Always remember that. You fight for Allah. This makes you invincible.”

He walked among them, this holy man with burning black eyes, and handed each a white robe, white as the desert sand with a single small red circle right above the heart.

“You have earned the Robe of the Holy Warrior,” he said. He kissed each man on the lips and looked deep into his eyes. He let them feel the full dark power of his soul.

“You now belong to the Prophet, blessed be his name. You are his warriors in the Jihad to come.”

When he had embraced every fighter in his holy army, and given them each the sacred robe and the gold medallion bearing his picture, they laid out their prayer rugs and bowed as one to the East, to Mecca, and prayed together.