Doomsday Warrior 13 - American Paradise (18 page)

Rock couldn’t divert any of his men to help the other groups, for they were staring down the gun barrel of fifty KGB killers.

The KGB opened fire in return as the attackers spread out and continued to fire from cover. The Bushido were using ancient large-barrelled, single-shot pistols from the Meiji Era. Amazingly, they were taking out as many KGB as the Freefighter’s Liberator submachine guns.

As the remaining KGB broke and ran, the Bushido lept forward and caught up with them, slashing them down like wheat at harvest time in hell. The Bushido, at the same time, dodged sniper fire.

“God, we could use fifty of ’em,” McCaughlin yelled.

“Stop shouting and start shooting!” Rock spat back, slamming another full clip in his Liberator’s hot breech. With the big submachine gun on his hip, he stood up, firing a waist-high series of bursts. The explosives bullets cut the numbers of KGBers in half.

But there were Soviet troops on all sides now—coming out of
holes.
The Freefighters were encircled, in the open.

A steel rattrap!

Crossfire raked the area; two of the brave Bushido fell, jerking like bewitched dolls.

This isn’t working, Rockson thought, as he ejected a spent magazine and slammed another from his belt pack into place. Just in time, he opened up on two KGBers who had gotten just twenty feet away. They stumbled forward, their stomachs afire from the explosive bullets’ heat, and collapsed at his feet.

Seeing no other shelter from the rain of bullets except their bodies, he dropped behind them. The KGBers carcasses were still gurgling blood. Rock emptied his rifle once more, then he took up the Kalashnikov one of the dead soldiers had dropped.

The Russian weapon was the equal of the Liberator and had a bigger clip, half expended. Shots were flying everywhere. The only good thing about the cross fire, Rock thought, was that many of the Reds were being shot down by their own side.

But the Sovs had the numbers; they could afford losses. Rockson’s group was being whittled down bit by bit.

Rock was amazed to see Archer suddenly walk right out into the open. The bearded near-mute’s leather hat blew off—or was shot away—but he didn’t flinch. Was Archer
mad?

“Archer,”
Rock yelled, “get the hell
down!”

No reply. The mountain man was headed toward the tower entrance and drawing more and more fire. Had he snapped? Rockson tried to pick off some of the shooters peppering Archer, who didn’t even wince as bullets pinged all around him.

The maze of small quartz crystals buried in Archer’s head—ever since a life-saving operation to repair a battle wound—started
glowing.

Archer’s tiny head crystals suddenly took in a bright blue, waving line of electrical discharge
coming from the tower.

Leilani was huddled down behind a turned-over Toyota Camry near to Rockson. He crawled over to her and put her helmet back on her head; the helmet had come off. She had that odd far-off look in her eyes.
“Leilani—
what’s happening to Archer—do you know?”

“Crystal . . . help . . . him . . . now,” she said softly. “Crystal . . . is . . . powering Archer. Through his head crystal. The Gnaa crystal is . . . protecting him. So we can come . . . and destroy it.”

“It
wants
to die?”

“It’s in pain . . . oh such
pain!” A
tear edged down from each of her doe-eyes. “It helps us—through Archer.”

“So
that’s
it,” Rock exclaimed. “Well—we can use the crystal’s help in this battle. How long will it power Archer?”

“Few . . . more . . . minutes . . .”

Rock looked up and saw that the red, yellow and blue lines of force were feeding from the giant crystal weapon into Archer.

The Doomsday Warrior saw Archer lift up the rear bumper of an abandoned truck and twist his arms. The bumper bent and tore off the truck. The mountain man, grinning from ear to ear, walked toward a group of advancing KGB troops, ignoring their fire. He swished the bumper back and forth, knocking the troops down. They fell like tenpins, still holding their smoking submachine guns, with astonished looks on their faces.

Archer had been hit a hundred times, and yet he lived! He picked up one of the spilled-soldier’s weapons. He raised the Kalashnikov to fire point-blank at another Red that rolled from behind a charred truck to the right. The new opponent levelled his big-barrelled submachine gun at Archer. The burst of .50 calibre slugs hit the near-mute square in his fat gut,
but with no results.
Archer’s return fire threw the KGBer’s body back like a loosely stuffed scarecrow of death.

Rock looked around and saw Killov’s troops abandoning their posts, fleeing Archer. The Freefighters were in
a
position to take the south leg of the tower and use its big guns to take out the other fortifications.

He saw a group of Surfcombers fling their power-tridents at a pair of KGBers. The Russians fell, spurting blood around the huge tines of the long forks. Polynesian paddle-bludgeons cracked heads right and left in close combat. Bullets howled.

Archer’s superman-act had turned the tide of battle.

Rock took up his binocs and scanned the other tower legs. He saw that Chen’s group was pinned down and taking heavy fire. Rockson had the option of either helping Chen’s beleaguered attack team, or advancing his own whittled-down force toward the tower building. A tough choice. But if he could add Chen’s group to his own
before
advancing on the building . . .

Rock glanced over at his strange mountain man friend. His head was still sparking with electrical discharges from the strange linkup with the tower crystal.

“Archer,” he ordered, “come on—let’s help Chen!”

Archer dropped the KGBer he was throttling and waved. “Okay!”

Somewhere up in the tower, a large calibre machine gun started raking the vicinity with explosive rounds. But the KGB bastards had trouble seeing because of the oil smoke, or else didn’t care. They hit several of their own men.

“Advance on the west tower leg,” Rock ordered his troops.

Taking advantage of the smoke conditions, the sprinting forces, with Archer in the lead, got behind the Reds on their left flank. Tridents flew again, Bushido cut down the dodging Reds. But Rock saw a tank coming into the square—
Damn, where the hell did they get that?

Archer turned to the tank, said something like “MEE GET!” and walked toward it, his head still sparking and trailing red, white and blue electrical discharges.

“Archer,
don’t—”
Rock shouted. But either the giant didn’t hear or didn’t obey. He and the tank were racing at one another like two mad bulls in a farmer’s field.

Only one would survive—and how could a human best a tank?

Yet, as they collided, it was the tank that lost and burst into smoke and then flames. Archer obviously had some sort of force field protecting him—a gift of the crystal. Cheering wildly, the Freefighter groups merged.

Rock saw Chen bounding rather gracelessly atop a Datsun X-7. What the hell was he holding? And what did he carry on his back?

Rockson soon found out. The Chinese-American let loose a sweeping hellfire of liquid napalm from his commandeered flamethrower, into the steel-rim holes dotted around the area.

Screaming, burning Russians rose up from their hidden positions and scurried helter-skelter. They were either cut down by their startled comrades or collapsed of their own volition. Other fighters, draining gasoline tanks, ignited other hidden rats. In the confusion of burning screaming runners, Rockson ran right at a machine-gun pillbox and dove in. He plunged his dagger into the nearest uniformed shape and, finding one other soldier still alive in the emplacement, twisted the blade out of the first body and stuck it deep into the second man’s windpipe.

There was a tripod-mounted .105 in the bastion. He took up the big gun and sighted down the hot barrel. Shells fed down the belt into his new sewing machine of death. Rock stitched out a fabric of destruction on the KGBers he sighted.

The Freefighters and their allies were winning now. And just in time, for Archer’s head suddenly stopped dancing with crystal power. The giant stood in the open, his skull top smoking slightly, a bedazed expression on his face.

“Archer, come over here—you’re not invincible anymore!”

The near-mute nodded slightly and walked slowly, like a zombie in thick mud, over to Rockson. The Doomsday Warrior pulled his friend down beside him behind the sandbag barrier wall and said, “Good work, Arch!”

“WHAAT HAPPEN?” Archer said, confused.

“You’re a hero! We’re winning, thanks to you.”

Now it was time to advance on the central building itself.

“Attack,” Rock shouted as he jumped up on top of a smoking, metal tank part. He waved his men onward, and then joined the run forward himself. The other victorious attack squads also advanced on the run toward the tower building’s steel-shuttered doors.

Killov’s steel trap was now just history.

“Detroit get the KGB positions at the door with your grenades. Morimoto! Get that contingent by the side with your men,” the Doomsday Warrior ordered.

As Rock led his four surviving Polynesian warriors forward around the KGB positions on the right flank, Detroit took out his grenades. Jumping on an abandoned jeep’s hood, he tossed the fused pineapples accurately at the six-inch-wide gun slits in the steel-shuttered lobby doors.

The two grenades went through the openings one after the other. There was a two second pause, then the steel doors blew outward, bits of flesh and bone among the shreds of metal shielding.

“Good work, Detroit,” Rock yelled. “Men—advance. The building is ours!”

That was not
quite
true. But it’s best, Rock thought, to be optimistic!

Twenty-Four

K
illov, cut off from the sounds of the desperate battle below by the steel-alloy walls of his control sphere, aimed a last “demonstration” shot. This one was toward Baltimore, Maryland. He had just positioned the crystal and space mirror to perfection and was about to pull the trigger when an annoying beep-beep-beep started on the control chair’s left arm.

“Damn,”
he cursed as the sudden noise made his arm jerk. His aim was sent way off as he hit the destruct button. He burned a hundred miles of the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Cuba, instead of his target.

Killov realized that the beeping noise was from the built-in red emergency phone on the chair’s arm.

Was there an emergency? He supposed that his troops were being engaged by some ragtag enemy. He had long expected the sullen natives to erupt in futile opposition to his rule. Well, his officers could handle it—at least for another five minutes. He had important things to accomplish—a whole world to bring to utter prostration, millions to incinerate. What could be more important?

Angrily Killov cut the sound switch on the phone without picking up.
Nothing
must interfere with his work!

Seventy-two stories below Killov’s insulated domain, his burly KGB chief, Igor Stepanovitch, let the telephone receiver dangle and started firing his Kalashnikov on full automatic. The strange intruders—a band of old Japanese men with swords, tall khaki-clad Caucasians, and near-naked South Sea islanders—had breached the security doors of the lobby and killed half the KGB force defending it. His clip jammed, and he ejected it, sliding another into his weapon. Now the intruders were pouring at him with blood in their eyes. He ducked bullets that clipped the marble wall where his head had just been. Stepanovitch pulled up his big submachine gun and let rip, smiling as two of the Japanese storybook swordsmen fell. But no—they hadn’t been hit, they had merely rolled out of his fire. Before he could reload again, Igor Stepanovitch felt a sudden sharp sting on his neck, then the world was swirling, whirling.

Why? Why was the world whirling?

As the roar in his ears rose, a red circle of gathering darkness was closing in on his vision, and he found out why the world had been whirling. Stepanovitch saw his own headless body crumpling to the ground. The KGB officer realized that he was now just a severed head, and he started to scream. Only a voiceless gasp came out. He was seeing the things of this sad globe for the last time, from bursting eyes in his bodyless head!

Fade to BLACK.

Morimoto wiped the sword blade on the headless corpse’s uniform jacket. To avoid the fire from another guard’s position, he again dove for cover behind a garbage dumpster. Blood trickled from a hit in his thigh.

Rockson, meanwhile, rushed for the silver elevator with a sixty-pound pack of high explosives over his shoulder. Chen and McCaughlin covered him as he bounded over spilled bodies and made it into the elevator area.

Two KGBers came running right at Rockson, with fixed bayonets. The Soviets were caught with the whooshing steel edges of Chen’s star-knives. Their deaths were instantaneous as the blades dug into their bodies and exploded.

There was too much action going on for praise, but Rock yelled out a brief “Good work!” to the Freefighter. “Get to the other end of the lobby and secure it: I’m going to head upstairs on the elevator.”

Rock had a simple plan—pick the lock again and ride the thing up. One flight past the madman’s suite, just under the tower roof, he would plant the explosives.

Ignoring the firefight raging all around, and the spatter of bullets that ricocheted around the lobby, Rock started to work, putting the heavy bomb satchel down for a moment on the marble floor. But he was not allowed a moment . . .

Careening around a corner swept a pair of ancient-looking nemesis. Not Russians—something worse!

Rockson now faced off against two Japanese samurai—two of the disgraced samurai’s, no doubt, that had thrown in their lot with Killov.

The keen-eyed thick-set men were naked to the waist. They drew their swords and shouted a challenge. Rockson frowned. No time for an elegant means of stopping them, not now. He felt foolish when he reached for his shotpistol and only found an empty holster.
Lost the damned thing somewhere!