Doomsday Warrior 10 - American Nightmare (20 page)

“This is all we have,” Barrelman looked sad.

“But you must know where police weapons are stored. You’re up on the surface enough.”

Barrelman nodded. “It’s true. We have quite a spy network. We know where
everything
is in the city.”

Rockson grabbed Barrelman by the shoulders and shook him. “For God’s sakes, why didn’t you
tell
me?”

Barrelman stuttered, but Rockson cut him off. “Never mind. Just tell me where to find
real
weapons.”

“If we steal them, they’ll be missed. A search will be called.”

“By the time anyone knows they’re gone,” said Rockson, “it won’t matter. Listen, I left a very
special
gun in the crypt in the Tabernacle. Can your men up there get it for me unobserved?”

Barrelman said, “Darryl once worked as a janitor there. He can get it for you. I know the gun is powerful, but can you really— Can
we
really defeat the Chessman?”

“Didn’t the Founder tell you to trust the White King who came to set the city free?”

Barrelman nodded solemnly. He ordered Darryl to fetch Rockson’s compound gun. Rockson took a measure of this man Darryl. He was a trusted aide of the Barrelman, a small fast man with strong, steady brown eyes. He might pull it off. Darryl left on the run, saying, “I’ll get it, don’t worry.”

“Now,” Rockson ordered, “let’s get you
all
guns.” Barrelman, Rockson, and three other Runners wound their way through the smelly sewer system. The air warmed as they traveled, turning the chilly dampness into a cloying, humid heat. They gathered more recruits as they walked, as the news spread of the advent of the “White King” at last. It was hot, but Barrelman seemed immune to the heat and the smell. A life as a garbage-scrounging derelict, living in the sewers, was a life that immunized you to petty annoyances.

About seventy-five of the Runners had pledged their support for an assault on the Tower. All of them had to be properly armed if they were to stand a chance against the Chessman’s militia.

Barrelman stopped beneath a skinny tube similar to the one he and Rockson had descended from the street level. “The arsenal is above,” he said. “We cannot talk loudly here.”

“We will all pass weapons and ammunition down to one another—a human chain,” whispered Rockson.

After a brief ascent, they reached a small grating in the cement floor of a dark room. The spill-hole was barely big enough for the average man to squeeze through, but Barrelman, despite his stocky bulk, managed. Water trickled past them.

Rockson crawled up second. He heard Barrelman moving softly about the room, low scrapes punctuating the silence. Then Barrelman began handing him cold metallic objects and wooden boxes. Rock took all he could hold and then climbed down to deposit the goods into waiting hands, then returned for more.

He made at least a dozen trips up and down the arsenal until he was satisfied. He could hardly see, but he knew the feel of submachine guns and ammo boxes.

When they reached the bottom of the tube, Barrelman sighed. “That was all I could risk taking from one place at one time,” he explained. “Hopefully, the loss won’t be noticed when the morning guard shift comes on—they always check the arsenal. They might not notice until inventory—which, if we’re successful, will never happen.”

“We’ll be successful,” Rockson vowed.

“There are several other depots that we know of,” Barrelman said.

“Forget it,” Rock said. “Everyone: the assault team will assemble in the headquarters cavern.”

The men loaded up their booty and carried it back to the cavern headquarters of the Runners. There Rockson spread everything out and examined the pieces. Some of the weapons seemed crude compared to those he was familiar with in his “real” life. He recognized some as M16s and a few AK47s—crude, but they’d do.

Then Darryl came running in a crouch down the long pipe. “I got it. I got Rockson’s weapon from the crypt!”

Indeed he had. Rockson thanked Darryl profusely and fondled the compound gun.

Then he put it aside—for the moment. Rockson snapped a magazine into each regular submachine gun and handed them out.

Barrelman looked on in amazement. “A C.P.A. wouldn’t know so much about weapons—you truly are ‘the White King’!”

Rockson shrugged. “You said it, citizen. I’m the one.” He examined the firing pin. “There isn’t enough time—or necessity—for everyone to have a compound gun like mine. I’m sorry, but the rest of you will have to do with conventional weapons.”

“They’ll be enough. I feel braver by the minute!!”

Runners loaded clips into the submachine guns as Rock instructed. In a few minutes Rock taught them the bare rudiments of firing them.

The Runners babbled in a mixture of excitement and apprehension. No one in the history of the Holy Regime had ever attempted a revolution. And who would suspect the lowly bag people of plotting such a crime? Success would bring complete freedom for everyone in Salt Lake City. Failure, they knew, would doom the Runners to torture that was worse than death, and punishment to the innocent, tranquilized citizens as a “lesson.” There was a great deal at stake.

The Runners outfitted themselves with their stolen goods. Besides guns, bullets, and a few grenades, they had a few stolen flak jackets and close-fitting helmets made out of a high-impact, heavy plastic. One small crate had held fifty good chronometers—military watches with sweep second hands. Every other Runner—and Rockson—got one and all were synchronized to Barrelman’s Seiko. Each jacket and helmet, Rock noticed, bore the insignia of a chess rook. That wasn’t a very high rank. Rock wished they had some blue blazers and insignias of the consultants.

“First of all,” he said to Barrelman, “we need a map of the Tower compound, and its defenses—do you have such a thing?”

“You bet. We have the very blueprints—stolen from the basement of the city planning office. The founder said to prepare for the day the White King cometh. He said to prepare weapons and secure the plans to the Tower. You didn’t like our weapons, but I think you will like these drawings.” Barrelman snapped his fingers, and the omnipresent Darryl rushed away with his long, loping, stooped-over gait down the duct. In less than five minutes he came back with rolls of blueprints, some a bit dog-eared and brittle.

Rockson laid them out on the table. Perfect. Only it didn’t look like there was any chance of breaching the defenses.

There were three heavy steel-alloy doors inside the main entrance to the Tower, probably heavily guarded. Three checkpoints, where an army of Freefighters might bog down, let alone a make-do army of derelicts. According to the specifications of the sliding steel doors, not even RPGs or a tank shell could penetrate them. Ditto for the Tower itself, a triple-reinforced marvel of strength.

Rockson sighed. As for a lone infiltrator bluffing his way through the three doors, without the proper codes, without the proper fingerprints—for there were fingerprint-verification locks on all the checkpoint doors—it was impossible.

Rockson was open to suggestions.

Darryl piped in, “Why can’t we fire some of those RPGs right into Chessman’s window?—the window at the top of the tower? Why assault the tower at all? Just blast the shit out of the window. The Chessman is always in that room, operating his equipment—whatever that is—and enjoying the overlook. Why do you have to get in the Tower at all?”

Rockson thanked Darryl for his suggestion, and said, “I have to make sure he’s dead. We don’t even know if that window at the tower-top is breakable. The plans say it’s an ordinary stained-glass window, but I think it might have been reinforced.”

“He’s been seen at the open window,” said Rosa. “He stands there sometimes, in his mask, he does. Looking out over his city. It’s a window, all right.”

“Did you see him?”

She shook her head, “Not I, but the Professor, my old friend, now dead. He was a wise one. He watched the Tower, sometimes, through some old field glasses he had. He was always studying, figuring things. He was a great man . . .” She looked down sadly. “He died, saving me and my friends.”

No one else had ever seen the Chessman in the window. But Rockson believed Rosa’s story. “Well, assuming it’s a window, and that Chessman is there in the Tower, I still want to confront him personally. I have to know the secret of the Veil, how to turn it off. I have to know who the Chessman is. I know his voice from somewhere. And most of all, I must be sure he’s killed—I will kill him myself.” A glow came into the eyes of the Doomsday Warrior. “And I think I know how to get to him.

“First we must get into the compound. Besides the wall and the guards, there are the elaborate detectors to knock out.

“You and your people will use your greatest talent—stealth. It won’t be a frontal assault—we will garrote the guards, cut the detectors first—you know where the electric cables are?”

Barrelman nodded. “They are aboveground—except for a short segment that runs underground. There’s no way to kill the circuit—there are backup systems all over. The Chessman takes no shortcuts when it comes to his security.”

“Maybe you can’t kill it, but could you interrupt it? A few seconds, a minute, and I can get past it.”

Barrelman thought about it for a moment. “I think we could do that, yes. We know where the circuit breakers are. It would have to be precisely timed, of course. And you would have to move
very
fast.”

“Just take care of your end of the business,” Rockson said, “and I will get to the Tower.”

“How do you plan to
enter
the Tower?”

“By climbing it. The greatest talent a Coloradan has is climbing. I’ve scaled peaks that make the tower look like a toothpick. Admittedly, I had good equipment. Pitons, rope—and there had been some handholds. But I can do it.”

“And if something goes wrong—what about escape?”

Rockson’s face was hard as steel. “Nothing will go wrong, Barrelman.” He let the words sink in, then went on. “Now, you must tell me everything you know that isn’t spelled out on the drawings. How many guards. Where they’re positioned.”

Barrelman pointed to the places on the blueprints that were fortified pillboxes. Four corners of the compound had circular, walled structures for surveillance. The guards had been seen entering and leaving the enclosures, according to Rosa. “The Professor, he wrote it down. Here . . .” She pulled out a scrap of paper from a jacket pocket. “Here it is—the Professor gave me this schedule. He insisted that I keep it—for the time of the uprising. He believed that time would come. He was a great man.”

Rockson looked at the scrawled schedule. The Professor, whoever the hell he had been, had been thorough. He had tracked the movements long enough to notice that it was different on even weeks than on odd weeks. This was the second week of September; that meant, according to the scrawl, that guards were relieved at 6
P.M.,
2
A.M.,
and 10
A.M.
“Two
A.M.,”
Rock said, “We have to be as close as we can to the enclosures at Two
A.M.
That leaves just an hour to show you all how to conduct guerilla warfare. Long enough to learn the rudiments of garroting, and knifing a man so that he
doesn’t
scream.”

Barrelman, when he had finished, said, “It
will
work. But your clothes are unsuitable! Darryl—bring the White King’s garment!”

Darryl brought in a plain white karate-gi type of suit that he presented to Rockson with bowed head. “We made it for you, for when you came to release us from our bondage, as predicted by the Founder.” Rockson inspected the suit. It was large enough and loose fitting, a suitable climbing garment. He quickly shucked his own clothes in a corner and donned the outfit, not for its symbolic importance to the Runners, but because the suit, being white, was good camouflage for climbing the tower. It fit perfectly, oddly enough.

“Okay,” Rock ordered. “Get to your positions.” He had taught them what they needed to know. Practice would come in the field. The Runners filed out of the cavern room and through the sewers to positions close to the enclosures, and one man in front of each of the four teams opened up the manhole cover enough to see out. Exactly on schedule, the guards opened up the thick doors of the enclosures and new guards approached to relieve them. Rockson was relieved to see from his vantage point that there were only three occupants to his target. With the three replacements, that made six at each corner of the compound. He hoped to hell the other teams had learned their lessons well.

“Here goes nothing,” he whispered.

The guards were slow, and unprepared for the lightning attack, for the steel slamming into their backs, for the wire necklaces that strangled the life out of them. And through the doors of the four corner enclosures that guarded the Tower compound grounds, not guards, but free men, entered.

All of this was done in a matter of a minute or two. Rockson peered through the gunslit in his compound, and saw the winking flashlight beam in the gunslits across the way. He returned the prearranged signal. Sinking down in relief next to the bulge-eyed corpse of one of the guards, he waited for the moment that the compound’s intruder detectors would be momentarily cut off.
That
job was being done underground, by Darryl and his crew. The circuit breakers would be employed for a minute, no more. Hopefully, the personnel in the Tower would just think it an anomaly, if they were even looking at their readouts. Perhaps they too were as complacent as the corner guards.

Or maybe they were
waiting for him.

Fifteen

R
ockson opened the door on the Tower side and started his run. He ducked down low and cut away from his brave band of men. He knew that many might die to cover his assault, that Bravery hides its noble face behind the most unlikely appearances. The men had acted like trained, combat-steeled Freefighters, not like rag-clad derelicts. They had only needed a leader, a White King, to rally them to fight! Rock had instructed Barrelman to keep them hidden, ready to fire if he was detected.