Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style (20 page)

“Sure,” Rock said as he followed the black servant, who pushed the Premier-of-all-the-world in front of him. Zhabnov looked at them depart and suddenly felt terribly depressed. He had been left out again. When it came to real politics, to being
in
on the action, his uncle treated him like an imbecile. But not wanting to allow himself to get into a really bad mood—as he’d had so much fun until now, had been so proud of how his party turned out—he made himself turn back to the festivities. He ate yet another bowl of sweet turtle pudding—one of his favorites, he watched the Russians and Americans dancing furiously together and even mustered up the energy to bang his hand, but not too hard, on the cracked table before him.

Rahallah wheeled the aged Premier past the honor guards at every door who kept their eyes straight ahead, not moving an inch. Whatever the many presidential guards who had accompanied Vassily all the way from Moscow, who lined every entrance, every stairway, thought of all this—none was saying. But then it was not in their way of thinking to question what their leadership did. Such thoughts led to the noose, the firing squad.

“Ah, here,” Rahallah said, finding the door to the library that the Premier had taken over as his own the last few days as they had waited for Rockson to show up. The black servant pushed it open with one arm, while guiding the Premier in with the other. It was filled with books—leather-bound, gilded copies of all the world’s greatest classics, row after row that ran from floor to ceiling in the large, ornately furnished room, decorated with nineteenth-century antique chairs and tables. The Premier was never comfortable around men—just books. A great and avid reader of literature and history, he fancied himself one of the greatest minds who had ever lived. Great men had to know the lives of other great men to understand their own situations, the many problems that confronted them. Running an empire was a hard task. No one understood, no man. Except for those who had done it before—Alexander, Caesar, Hitler. It was these men he read when he needed escape, understanding.

“Please be seated,” the Premier said in a hoarse whisper and Rockson could see that the festivities had tired him greatly. He looked gray, like dirt at twilight. “I’m sorry I can’t give more of my energies to the festivities, but . . .” He shrugged one shoulder.

“I was kind of getting a headache myself,” Rock said, sitting back in a plush velvet loveseat that smelled of centuries past. Though he was the “guest,” Rock knew that the library, the books, the portrait of Lincoln staring down, were all
his—
more than the Russians’. They had stolen it. Someday he would take it back—all of it. Thus he eyed the room with an almost proprietary air—as if wanting to make sure that everything was in good condition, had not been harmed.

“Brandy?” Rahallah asked Rockson after he handed the Premier a small snifter of the golden beverage. “It is the best,” the black manservant went on, holding the silver flask in his hand. “From a private vintage that Napoleon himself had hidden away—before the Premier’s procurers found it. Please.” He held out the shimmering glassful and Rockson took it. The man had a way about him, an ingratiating, ultra-civilized attitude that made one relaxed, at ease. Rockson could see why the Premier valued him so.

“And you, too, faithful one,” the Premier said. “Please—take some yourself. There are only the three of us here—we need keep up no airs.” Rahallah poured himself some, but kept standing by the Premier’s side. Rockson noticed that he never sat—but always waited attentively, ready to aid the Grandfather in any way. Somehow it annoyed the Doomsday Warrior, this slavelike devotion. But he knew as well that Rahallah was an extremely intelligent and cunning man—who had his own hidden agenda.

“I—I just wanted us to have a few moments to chat, before I retire,” Vassily said, taking a second quick little sip of the brandy. “Aah,” he whispered. “So good, so good. A man my age has very few pleasures anymore. Really, it is quite sad. Women are of course out—my heart would explode at the first embrace,” he laughed lightly, and Rock couldn’t help but grin. “Food—I can barely touch anymore, but for specially prepared dishes that look like oatmeal and taste like cardboard. Thus,” he went on, starting to grow a little pale again, “this one little glass of brandy is all that I have to look forward to each night.” If the Premier was expecting Rockson to feel heartache for his predicament, he didn’t. But he did raise his glass slightly in toast:

“May the good will that you feel at your nightly brandy make you generous toward my people,” Rockson said softly, staring the ten feet or so that separated him from the Premier with burning eyes.

“A well-put thought,” the Premier said as if gaining suddenly in strength. “I want you to know that I
want
peace this time,” Vassily went on. “I am willing to make many concessions, many agreements with you. I ask only that you hear me out. Not tonight, of course; tomorrow we shall have our conference. Your delegates and my staff—aboard my ship docked just a few miles from here on the Potomac. There we shall have no distractions. But I wanted to just talk with you first, Rockson. Wanted to plant the seeds of peace in your thoughts, in your dreams. For I believe that inside you are a deeply civilized man—like myself.”

Both men stared at one another for a few long, hard seconds. They both realized that, in spite of their total adversarial relationship, they were actually quite similar. Both were powerful, with wills that could dominate those around them. Both had survived hardships, trials, conspiracies, attacks, that had destroyed those around them. They were the top of the line that the human species could produce. Men who could see straight ahead when others were blind. And perhaps in that instant they both saw that, had things been slightly different, they might be sitting in opposite chairs. It was a strange and, for a moment, quite a disquieting thought for both of them.

“It’s not a question of being civilized,” Rock said softly, breaking the silence as both the Premier and Rahallah looked at him hard. “It’s a question of implementing that ‘civilization.’ While you talk of peace, Americans are enslaved everywhere, are dying at this very moment within the walls of the city of Washington. Words are one thing—the suffering of human flesh is another.”

“Rockson, I swear to you on my mother’s grave,” Vassily said with great intensity, “we are cleaning things up. I instructed President Zhabnov to halt all executions, torturings and other like manner of treatment of American citizenry here in Washington—just for this Peace Conference. To extend an olive branch to the Freefighters. I think if you went out there you would find already that things are different than they have been. Not wonderful, by any means, but at least less brutal-heading in a positive direction.”

“I wish that were true, Excellency,” Rockson said, staring into his brandy snifter in whose swirling golden liquid he could see the world on fire. “I wish it were—but I fear—”

“Peace, Rockson—we
must
have peace,” the Premier said loudly, seeming to grow agitated. “Don’t you understand that if I die and peace has not been worked out, the whole world will erupt in flames the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great War? That’s why I have come, that is—” He stopped suddenly in mid-sentence, and his brandy glass seemed to tremble in his hand. Rahallah rushed around to the front of the wheelchair and took the glass from the white-faced Grandfather. He checked his pulse and then turned to Rockson.

“You must leave now. The Premier tires easily. I’m afraid his enthusiasm over this meeting, over his hopes that you two will at last achieve peace, has overexerted him. Please—” He pointed to the door. Rockson quickly rose and walked toward the ornately framed portal. He turned and stared back for a moment, and it was a sorry sight. The man had turned white as chalk, his mouth trembling, a little bit of spittle drooling down onto his chin and chest. Rahallah looked angrily at Rockson and stood in the way of the Doomsday Warrior’s eyes—and the Premier. He would let no man see the Grandfather in such a state. It was too degrading—all men must see only his power, or there would be anarchy. Only he, of all people, could see the truth.

“Sorry,” Rock said, not even sure himself what he meant by the words, and he turned, heading back out toward the noisy festivities three rooms down. Rahallah shut the door firmly and tended to the Premier, giving him several of his heart pills and a tranquilizer. Within a minute or two Vassily’s color returned and his trembling ceased. He looked up at the black servant with thanks.

“Ah, I am so old, I can barely converse with another man without nearing death. It is pitiful. Ridiculous. Did I not have so much responsibility, such weight on my shoulders—I would have killed myself long ago.”

“Grandfather,” the black man said, scolding the Premier as he pushed his wheelchair in front of the electric fire behind fake logs that were in the fireplace, the hearth in front of which Kennedy, Roosevelt, old Honest Abe himself, had warmed their feet, had tried to collect their thoughts. “Please, it is bad to even talk like that. You’re tired because you have had a hectic schedule, done things in the last few weeks that would tire a man fifty years your junior. Even I have felt myself weary to the point of fainting several times,” the African prince lied. “As the Americans are fond of saying—don’t kick yourself in the ass.”

The Premier laughed out loud at the words and then shook his head softly. “Ah, faithful Rahallah, what would I do without you? You get me through the worst, the darkest of times.” He looked up at the black man with wistful eyes—as if somehow he wished he could undo all that history had wrought, but knew at the same instant that nothing could be undone.

“Read to me Rahallah, Son of the Plains Lion,” the Premier said, his voice growing weary again. “Read to me from where you left off last night. I feel the need for nourishment from the masters, from the past.”

“Of course, Grandfather,” the black man said, going to a small reading platform and taking up an old leather book in his spotless white gloves. He sat on the couch in front of the Premier and, opening the page to the marked spot, began where he had stopped the previous evening.

“Oh trumpeter, methinks I am myself the instrument thou playest,

Thou melts my heart, my mind—thou movest, drawest, changest them at will,

Thou takest away all cheering light, all hope

I see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the oppressed of the whole earth,

I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes all mine,

The revenges of humanity, the wrongs of ages, baffled feuds and hatreds—all become my possession.

Utter defeat upon me weighs—all lost—the foe victorious.

Yet amid the ruins Pride colossal stands unshaken to the last,

Endurance, resolution, to the last . . .”

Rahallah looked over to see if he should read on. But the Premier was already sound asleep, his head fallen to his right shoulder, like a child’s, his mouth and eyes strangely smooth and young looking in his sleep. The black servant put back the silk bookmark inside page 326 of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
and placed it as gently as if it were a fragile egg back on the cherrywood stand until it’s next use. Then he sat back on the velvet couch where John F. Kennedy and Jackie had once made love through a winter’s night—and watched as the Premier of all the Russias sank into deep sleep and dark, terrible dreams.

Twenty

D
hul Qarnain led his men in the death prayers. They kneeled before him on their prayer rugs, each unfolded out, so that two hundred squares of fabric with two hundred souls prostrate atop them filled the main quadrant of the oil tanker.

“Oh, Allah, we who are about to join you in Paradise send our prayers of thanks now—that you will allow us to die in your name, in your spirit.” He bowed toward Mecca as his followers made themselves even more prone, grinding their foreheads into the rugs and the hard steel beneath.

“We who are about to join you,” they all intoned as part of the sacred ritual.

“We are joyous, oh Allah,” Dhul Qarnain went on, spreading his arms wide to the heavens, as far above him steel covers were sliding back, revealing the star-spattered sky like an explosion of diamonds everywhere above them. “For we shall know Paradise. We shall know the dark-eyed houris, the pomegranates falling into our hands, the cool breeze of the afternoon, the call of the dove as our music, and the nectar of the angels as our wine. This, all this shall be ours, my loyal fighters for Allah.” He shook his fists dramatically as his long red robe—red for battle—swirled around him wildly as the night breezes came down through the ever-larger opening in the steel roof above them.

“All this shall be ours,” they sang as one. The warriors of Allah were dressed as well in red from head to toe; swords hung at their sides, long and curved, submachine guns and Kalashnikovs over their shoulders. Behind them the chopper fleet was already warming up, testing engines, the smell of petrol filling the large innards of the oil tanker in rolling clouds.

“Oh what a blessed dream to die the Warrior’s Death,” Qarnain continued, his eyes burning like the true fanatic. And thus it went as the Arab warrior exhorted his followers, told them why it was much better to live in the other world than this one. Made them get horny for death.

Hundreds of feet away, Killov stood in the bridge with the captain who was slowly pulling away from the moorings they had been anchored to for days. Killov could feel it now—so close. His heart was beating so hard he had to take an extra Motrilium to calm down. After a minute his heartbeat seemed to slow to jungle drum instead of the pounding locomotive it had been seconds before.

At last, revenge. How sweet it was. Literature had always said that it was bitter, and destroyed whole lives. But the colonel didn’t feel that way at all. Revenge was sweet. Sweet as sugar, as honey. He could taste it on his lips and it was delicious. He could see their faces as he stared ahead into the night sky, just beginning to break slightly into dawn as little edges and gulleys of violet appeared far off to the east. Could see their bloody faces in those crackling neon stars.
Zhabnov, Vassily, Rockson.
They were everywhere he looked—above him, around him. From defeat and total disgrace, he was returning to claim what was his. This would be the greatest day of his life.