Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America (20 page)

“We free the Polits,” Yuri said proudly, slamming his small hand down on one of the dynamite crates. “Cats be dancin’ in Chicago tonight.”

“And Down in New Orleans,” Rock added, remembering the snatch of song from an old Century City archive record. Rockson and his team loaded the wooden boxes filled with explosives on their backs and hefted their weapons from the gladiator fights. Only now they carried subs as well, courtesy of the dissidents’ stockpile.

They were led down one of the long tunnels, Archer growing nervous as they traveled through the darkness, remembering his encounter with the subway creature. Perhaps there were more. He shuddered, made sure his crossbow was loaded, and moved into the safe circle of light cast by one of the dissident’s round red globe lights that created dancing shadows on the smooth tunnel walls as they walked. They marched for nearly an hour, and the guide, Igor Brubeck, led them up a narrow manhole causeway, through which steam drifted up from large industrial pipes that fed the factories of the city above. The diminutive man pushed up on the steel manhole cover at the top of the ladder with a single thrust of his surprisingly strong arms and led the attackers to the surface.

They found themselves at the edge of an immense industrial park that stretched off in every direction. Here were some of the empire’s largest and most complex factories—turning out high-tech metals, alloys, computer chips, lenses, and oil-based plastics.

“The big daddy-o dome is over there,” the dissident said, lifting his hand from beneath his long black robe, and pointed a bony finger toward the horizon. The men turned. There it stood, like some impossible ball, a plaything of the Gods, only these Gods carried the power to ignite the world in a ball of atomic fire. The freed men, Rock, and Archer stared at the eight hundred-foot-high dome with consternation. It seemed impossible that they could destroy such a monstrosity of technology. It was a faded gray, ridged with radar screens and telecommunication bowls covering its smooth outer shell like metal warts, in communication with and sending constant commands to its still large fleet of killer satellites and tracking stations high above the earth. A crew of nearly five hundred technicians continuously monitored their courses through the heavens, making slight corrections from time to time. The Reds ruled the skies—through this. If any nation ever got uppity enough to get hold of a bomb or a missile and sent it toward Mother Russia, these sats could detect it and blast it from the sky with a single blast of laser power. This building made them the ultimate rulers of the earth.

Rockson looked long and hard at the huge radar center. He had never seen a structure so dense. It looked like a small mountain, thick and impenetrable. Guards stood on high towers circling the perimeter of the place. It was well protected. Too well, Rock thought, even for these battle-hardened fighters.

“Check you out later,” the guide said, descending back down the manhole opening. “And don’t play no flat notes.” The steel cover slammed shut. Rock and his crew were on their own. They started forward, leaping from shadow to shadow. It was almost two-thirds of a mile to the outer perimeter of the dome, but there was no point in giving themselves away with a glint of steel to one of the tower watchers.

At last they got to within about sixty yards of the darkest outer part of the fenced-in gate surrounding the complex. Rockson motioned them all to get down behind a large grime-coated metal dumpster that had been left outside with the base’s garbage. The Reds weren’t expecting an attack. There had never been one—not here in such a heavily guarded area. No one would dare. Rock knew the guards would be lax—maybe a little drink or two of burning Russian vodka to keep the chill off a man’s back.

“Can you get him?” Rock asked Archer softly, pointing to a lone soldier leaning on the edge of a guardpost some one hundred fifty feet away. The next tower was nearly one hundred yards off on each side. If they could just take this one out and quickly replace one of their own, Red uniform and all, they might be able to enter. Archer nodded without a word, loaded an arrow into his crossbow and squinted down the homemade sights of his deadly weapon. He had taken many a squirrel and duck down at a much farther distance. He relaxed his immense body, breathing out, and took aim. His ham-sized tongue licked quickly across his lower lip as he pulled the trigger. The sliver of steel hurtled through the air with the whisper of death on its spinning head. It buried itself dead center of the guard’s chest, and he fell backwards, an instant corpse. Rock edged toward the fence and then pulled himself up over the ten-foot-high link chain perimeter, coming down instantly on his feet on the inside of the military compound. He rushed toward the tower and through the wooden door at the bottom and quickly made his way up the circular staircase three steps at a time. He stripped the dead guard’s uniform from him and held it up to himself. Not too bad—the guy was broad shouldered if a little shorter than Rock. But then the disguise would have only to work for a few moments. The guard was a sergeant, Rockson discovered, suddenly noticing the stripes on his inner jacket shoulder. He finished changing, putting the Russian uniform on over his battle clothes. He covered the hole in the center of the breast pocket with the handle of the submachine gun the Red had been holding and then propped the dead man against one of the beams in a leaning position as if smoking a butt—just in case any of the other posts looked over.

He left the tower and began walking casually toward the dome.

The freed men dropped over the fence one at a time, throwing their explosives up to the next man. At last they were all over, even Archer, who nearly toppled the link fence as he lay scrambling on its top for a few moments. They waited in the inner shadows of the tower for Rockson to make his move.

The Doomsday Warrior walked across the open space between the tower and dome, well lit by spotlights that aimed down from the edge of the immense semi-globe, spaced twenty feet apart. He walked up a wide ramp, probably a main loading area, and knocked on the closed steel doors a good foot thick. A camera far above him swiveled toward Rock, and a tinny voice boomed out from a speaker on the wall.

“Orders?”

“Sergeant Vashnikov,” Rock said, having looked at the dead guard’s ID papers. “A delivery of radioactive tubes for the atomic generators.” There was silence for a few seconds. Then a confused voice shot back.

“We have no shipment of R-piping due today.”

“Look comrade,” Rock continued in his best mumbled Russian. “This guy’s got a whole trailer load of the things parked just around the building. These aren’t cans of paint.”

“The duty commander is not here right now,” the voice said nervously from the speakers. “I—I’ll let you in. I’ll call the unloading teams.”

“Thanks,” Rock said, coughing so the camera couldn’t look too closely at his face. The huge steel doors whirred silently apart and Rockson stepped through. A portly captain sat at a control booth up a set of concrete steps. He waved to Rockson to come into the office and the Doomsday Warrior, his hand firmly on the butt of the dead sergeant, headed up into the office.

“Sorry pal,” Rock said as he rushed toward the soldier. He smashed the surprised military bureaucrat on the side of the skull, knocking him cold. Rock turned and looked back into the vast warehouse beneath the dome, filled with row after row of supplies piled high on endless metal shelves. He could see movement far off in the dim flickering lights of the storage terminal. They’d have to move fast. He rushed back to the now fully opened warehouse doors. Rock motioned for the men to come forward. They dashed at full speed across the lighted sector just in front of the dome. They had almost made it when shots rang out from the next tower, to the left of the one Rock had left a cooling corpse in.

“Shit,” he muttered as two of the fighters fell. The rest made it in. The Doomsday Warrior pushed the Close button, and the two immense steel doors rolled back until they were fully shut. Outside, rifle butts banged against the metal creating loud, drumlike thuds.

“We don’t have much time,” Rock said, turning to the assembled men. He held up the map that the dissidents had given him of the plans of the structure’s support beams, found in a rotting library years before. “If we can just destroy three of the six main foundation beams,” Rock said, going over the plans once again, “the place should come tumbling down.” Should was the word that bothered him, but he didn’t mention his fears. “We’ll split into four teams of four men each. I’ve shown you how to place the explosives and set them. Any questions?”

“Nyet,” the men said in unison. They quickly split up and went their separate ways, having gone through the battle plans nearly twenty times. The Doomsday Warrior’s target was the computer complex itself—that way, if they failed to bring down the dome, at least the machinery inside, all of the advanced technology, would be blown to kingdom come. But they also had the farthest route to traverse. He was glad that he had Archer along and two stout-looking fellows carrying rapid fire Lavnikhov-18 subs. Each man carried a small crate of the dynamite over his shoulder, strapped around the back so as to give them movement and mobility. Archer carried two, one over each broad shoulder, and looked as if he could handle a few more.

They made their way through the endless storage terminal, moving just a few feet inside the main causeway, hidden behind rows of unpacked ten-foot-high crates of parts. Suddenly there was a flash of motion and guards were upon them—three Reds wearing the crossed electrical bolts on their sleeves, signifying the Elite Air Force Special Commandos. The men leaped in front of them, blocking their path. Rock and Archer fell to the floor instantly as the bullets of the three Russian subs spat out a storm of metal death. But the two freed men didn’t move quick enough. Their bodies were cut nearly in half, and they crumbled to the floor, dripping red bile through dissected body cavities. Rock fired three quick bursts from his own stolen submachine gun from a prone position on the cold concrete floor. The three Reds looked surprised for a moment, and then ghastly expressions crossed their pale faces. They fired wildly from arms that were no longer receiving signals from their dying brains and fell to the sawdust-strewn floor, dead as fallen trees.

Rockson grabbed the explosives crate from one of the dead freed men and quickly saluted them both. Two more unknown soldiers in the eternal war for freedom. He threw the crate over his shoulder, wrapping the homemade harness they had rigged up around his chest. Each weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and the two of them over his back made Rock feel as if he were dragging an elephant, but there was no choice. They needed every bit of “boom-boom” they could handle. He nodded to Archer and they ran like the wind down the center of the terminal. This was no time for subtlety. Rock twisted his head this way and that, one arm cradled around the sub, as they ran searching for more Reds. Far off in the distance he could hear the quick cracks of pistols and then the steady drone of automatic weapons. The others were meeting resistance, too. Just let them get the three beams, Rock prayed silently.

The dissidents, meanwhile, were trekking miles through the decaying underground railroad system with their death-dealing instruments. They pulled flat wooden railroad carriages about twelve feet long, loaded down with dynamite-filled crates, on long ropes that they had tied around their waists. They strained like a team of work horses, singing as they pulled. Two of them in the lead playing out a tune on their trombones at the non-lethal end of the sound spectrum, while the rest sang out in unison.

“A tisket, a tasket

A green and yellow basket

I wrote a letter to my love

And on the way I dropped it.”

There were nearly fifty of them, each armed with their own particular musical weapon. Clarinets, trumpets, flutes, tubas hung over their shoulders on colorful straps. Their flowing black robes covered their pasty white bodies. Their thick curly white hair stood up fluffy with sweat beneath their hoods. The dissidents’ huge black eyes, used to years of darkness, could see perfectly in the shadows of the tunnel system. They carefully kicked fallen bricks and dead molding rats out of their way as they pulled the two small-wheeled platforms along the rusted tracks.

At last they reached the intersection of five tracks—just above them they knew was the Moscow Prison. The “Hole of No Return” it was called by those unfortunate enough to have been sent there. The prison was notorious for, among other things, its roving packs of man-eating rats that the authorities did little to control, feeling it was fitting punishment for those who were sentenced to the three-hundred-year-old prison. The prisoners would just have to make friends with the toothy vermin. The dissidents stopped the cars just beneath what would be the central hall of the massive confinement and torture center thirty feet above them. They turned the fuses and set the timers on the nearly two tons of dynamite that would bring down the walls of terror forever—for one hour ahead—twelve noon. How many of them would still be alive no man could say. Just as the last timer was being placed, they heard a noise down the track and stopped dead in their places. Every man held his breath.

Suddenly from out of the winding subway tunnel came a wave of black furry bodies—rats—thousands of them. The dissidents swung their instruments around and pulled them to their lips. They formed a straight line so that their own wouldn’t be hit by the sounds and set their instrument levels—to kill. They blew out wild notes, a cacophony of jazz melodies from eons before. The wave of rats stopped dead in their tracks, the first few hundred of the fanged creatures falling onto their backs and kicking their feet in frenzied agony. But the dark, nearly two-foot-long meat eaters right behind them rushed forward, scampering over the twitching bodies. Again the dissidents blew their hot licks. The frequencies lashed out like invisible whips at the army of fur before them. Another twenty square feet of rats flew onto their sides, squirming, wriggling in death agonies. Now the rats slowed. Something was wrong. Their front ranks, the most aggressive of the rat pack, the highest of the rat-pecking order, were dead. A few hundred more made a half-hearted charge as the rest waited back in the darkness, watching. Again, the clarinets, the flutes, and trumpets blasted and again a battalion of rats flopped over on their sides, clawing at the air on the dark roadbed. The fanged army had had enough. They retreated, screaming out high-pitched squeaks of rage and confusion at not having their food.