by Ryder Stacy
The X-shaped roof got larger and larger as the chopper they had stolen circled in on a landing approach. There was tension inside the craft that you could cut with a knife. None of them really looked like the grim-faced KGB or even regular Soviet Red army for that matter—their uniforms didn’t fit well and some of them still had holes. The uniforms had been taken from Century City supplies, collected over the years from encounters with the enemy. But it wasn’t exactly a tailor shop, and somehow everyone’s outfit either draped loosely over their shoulders and shoes, or seemed skin tight. It would have to do; they didn’t intend to spend much time on the landing pad anyway. And after that—well, they hadn’t come to talk fashion.
Rock let the chopper hover right over the large rubber mat in the center of one of the arms of the X as a Red landing man flagged them down. The helicopter hit the roof with a hard thud and McCaughlin glanced over at Rock, who muttered, “I’m not good on parking.” He cut the engines and the big blades sputtered to a stop. McCaughlin rubbed his rabbit’s foot in his pants pocket and hefted his equipment over his broad shoulder.
The eight Freefighters and Rock looked silently at one another as they stood by the side door. They knew that this could well be the last time some of them were ever seen again, and with their tense but fierce eyes they quickly looked in each face as if to say, Goodbye, pal. Rock opened the door, and the crew stepped out onto the wind-swept roof. The ground crewman, his work done, had already stepped away. Somebody in a work smock covered with grease came over to Rock and asked in Russian with a thick Afghan accent if he needed any work on the chopper. Rockson just nodded no and the worker checked something off on a clipboard and walked away into the wash of another chopper making a descent.
The nine Attack Force members walked quickly over to the main exit door, not daring to look up at the control tower staff who, in fact, paid them no mind at all. Not having ever had an attack mounted on their citadel of death in the fifty years of its existence, other than an occasional bagman throwing a bottle at the ground-level electrified gate, they were not exactly alert.
Rock swung the thick black door open and they entered a dimly lit stairwell. They couldn’t risk going past the main checkpoint to the elevators. At least not now. Rock stared down the central space of the stairway, some forty flights down. They had to move. They sped down the stairs, guns and packs filled with explosives shaking on their backs. Rock took the lead, then Detroit and Chen, his nunchakas now out and ready. McCaughlin was rear guard, his big burly frame lurching from side to side as he raced frantically after the others.
Things went fine until they reached level M where three Blackshirts suddenly opened one of the hall doors and saw the motley crew rushing by. They were rising young professionals of murder, and their sharp eyes instantly took in the unusual appearance of the strange hallway assemblage. The tallest of the KGB officers, with a narrow face like a weasel, grabbed Rock by the shoulder and spun him around.
“Hey, who the hell are you fools? You’re regular army—not even allowed in these sections.” Rock’s right hand, holding his .12-gauge shotgun pistol, came up in a blur of motion. He let the Red death-mechanic have a full barrel inches from his face, splattering brains and blood like a sickening taffy onto the institutional brown walls behind him. The two others reached for their pistols in terror. Detroit’s gun butt hit one of the KGB square in the neck, sending him to the concrete floor gurgling blood. The third Blackshirt had barely lifted his pistol from a hip holster when Chen’s nunchakas swung through the air with the whooshing sound of a helicopter blade. It caught the cold-eyed Red in the temple. His eyes rolled up and he slumped to the ground in a broken heap.
“Damn, I hope no one heard that bullfrog of yours, Rock,” said McCaughlin. They waited for a moment. All seemed still. They stepped over the bodies that now littered the landing and proceeded down the cordite-smelling stairs.
Eighteen
It took them four minutes to reach B-Level. They had to guess—Rock decided to proceed to the lowest level, A. Just outside the exit, he gathered the men together for a final briefing.
“You all know the plan, but let’s go over it once more quickly. We free every American still alive. Arm them—with Red weapons if possible—and then we break into three teams. Sanford heads the team that exits out A-Level. He cuts through the barbed wire around the armory and plants the charges. You, McCaughlin, head the second team. You get to the control tower on the roof, secure it, give cover fire to Sanford and keep out any visitors who might show up with your RPGS and the Liberators—long-cartridge loaded. Detroit, Jergins, Chen and I hit the computer room and do our thing to the building. Then all three teams take out as many Death’s-Heads as possible and meet on the helipad for home at 0500—that gives us exactly thirty minutes. Good luck, men. We’ll need it.”
They burst through the door onto the main floor. Damn, the place was decorated nicely. There were scenes of the American West from the “old days” on the wall: cowboys riding their rearing horses, buffalo. Throughout the dining area, “log” tables and benches were standing. Off-duty technicians—men and women in white smocks—and several KGB officers were dining around a pulsing fountain in the center of the room. Overhead, hanging from the high ceiling, the decorators had gone for the traditional trashy look of Soviet chandeliers, all gaudied with candelabras of electric bulbs. The nine blood-smeared, sweating Americans in their half-assed Red uniforms looked incongruous as they stared back at the pack of incredulous faces around the room.
“Everybody freezeski,” McCaughlin yelled in the worst Russian Rock had ever heard, “and you won’t get hurt.” The Red tech and the four officers who were present began diving for cover, reaching for their holsters. The bastards were armed under those white smocks—the men, not the women. Thirty rounds flamed from four Liberators and foolish Reds tumbled to the floor as the thin pops of the silencer-suppressed muzzles echoed softly off the muraled walls.
“Anybody else want to die?” snarled Rockson. A technician ran for the side door toward the other wing. Chen threw one of his two pairs of nunchakas like a bolo and the man fell screaming, his kneecaps shattered beyond repair.
“All of you into this room over here,” Rock ordered, holding his shotgun pistol at hip level as the other Freefighters kept their Liberators trained on the group.
He crowded the remaining Reds into a small game room, tabletops filled with chessboards and decks of neatly stacked cards. “Chen, you and Pasqual and Jergins keep this area free of vermin,” Rock said, pointing to the main dining area. Chen walked quickly over to the main entrance, took a nunchaka in each hand and stood just behind the door waiting for any soul unfortunate enough to suddenly have a craving for a snack.
Rock and the rest of Attack Force herded the Reds against the wall of the small red-walled room. He noticed a middle-aged technician with thick glasses and eyes that seemed to be trying to hide something. Rockson grabbed the profusely sweating tech by his white lapels and pulled him forward so that their faces were only inches apart.
“Where are the others? The American prisoners,” he snarled, feeling mean and not very generous.
“I’ll never talk—I’m KGB,” the tech said, halfheartedly, trying to work up a wall of bravado.
“You’ll never talk now, will you?” Rock asked, amused. He smashed his fist into the Russian tech’s face, smashing his nose into a flat, pulpy disk and knocking out three of the man’s front teeth. There wasn’t time for subtlety. The man fell to the floor from the blow and wiped a palmful of blood from his mouth.
The Russian started babbling immediately. A giver of pain he was—a receiver, no. “The interrogation section is one flight up. Level B, rooms one through thirty. The American prisoners are in B-28, at least they were yesterday.” Rock and the Attack Force exited the game room and McCaughlin ripped a leg from a table and thrust it through the outside handles of the doors.
“That should keep ’em playing cards till we’re finished,” he
said smugly.
“Come on,” Rock yelled, “we’re wasting precious time. We’ve already used up eight minutes.” They ran like bats out of hell, peering around corridors, blasting two Red security guards who were unfortunate enough to meet the kill-hungry Americans on the stairs leading to B-Level. They died without uttering a warning. The pistols and rifles of the Freefighters had silencers so there was only the sound of a cork popping when they fired—strangely innocuous in relation to the effect it produced in its targets, who were thrown backward, faces and chests instantly covered with rivulets of thick, red blood.
“So far, so good, men,” Rock said, crouching and peeking around the corner of the stairwell landing on B-Level. Across the hall and about forty feet away was the usual electrically controlled security door that every floor had, stopping access to the entire section. Foot-thick steel, it also served as a blast door, so strong it couldn’t be opened with a direct hit from a bazooka. Somehow they had to get past that final obstacle unobserved. Two white-smocked technicians carrying clipboards exited a room almost directly across from the stairwell landing and Rock eased the door shut, leaving a half-inch space to spy through. The Reds walked slowly toward the security door, chatting, laughing at each other’s sick jokes of torture and death.
Rock could pull them into the stairwell when they passed, if they passed. But the men paused twenty feet away, shook hands and split up. One of them took his security card, hanging from a cord around his neck, and inserted it into a little slot next to the blast door. He punched in a four-number code on a row of dials and the door slid open, closing as he entered. Rock stared through the crack of the landing door, frustrated. He glanced down at his watch: twelve minutes gone.
The other technician began walking at a snail’s pace, deep in his own thoughts, back toward the stairwell door. “That’s it, you bastard, just a little closer,” Rock whispered under his breath. Behind him, Detroit said a silent prayer, staring over Rockson’s shoulder at the Red. The clock was ticking away. The technician stopped again and wrote a brief message on the paper attached to his clipboard. Damn! It was only a matter of seconds until one of the KGB building security patrols—four men armed to the teeth—would come down the stairs. Rock knew that from their intel reports. They made the rounds every fifteen minutes, covering every damned part of the building. They would find the dead technicians and the carnage on the floors below any minute now and then . . .
“Come on, you bastard,” Rock prayed, as the Red bent over and took a long drink from a water fountain. Behind Rock, the Freefighters were starting to sweat profusely from the maddening tension. Slowly the technician extracted a handkerchief and dabbed at his lips, folded it back into his pocket and suddenly headed in the Freefighters’ direction, walking briskly.
Ten feet. Five. Now! With a grunt of exertion, Rock leaned a big hand out and whipped the Red into the stairwell. He ripped the card key from the man’s throat—but that wasn’t enough. They needed the code, the four number code. McCaughlin, with his huge, toothy grin and steel eyes, stared the trembling man in the face as they leaned him against the concrete-block walls of the landing. Detroit whipped out a silver-plated KGB Tokarev pistol he had snatched from one of the dead Reds and held it to the Russian’s forehead.
“One yell from you and no brains,” he said in broken Russian. “Comprendez?” The man nodded frantically, his face growing paler by the second.
“Now, I’m going to ask you just once,” Rock said with a deadly tone. “The code. What’s the code—and don’t give me something I can’t use. Don’t give me a number that sets off an alarm, because you’ll be with us and if anything, I mean anything, goes wrong—” he lifted his eyes to McCaughlin—“my buddy here likes to kill Russians. Don’t you, McCaughlin?”
“That I do, Rock. Only I likes to play with them first. Cut their balls off and sew them into their mouths.” He pulled out a razor-sharp hunting knife and turned it slowly before the Red’s huge eyes.
The Russian gulped several times and, barely able to speak, said, “OK, OK. Three, twelve, four, two. And once inside the security door just the card will open all the B doors. Are you going to kill me? Please, I’ve got a wife and children. I—” Chen deftly cut off his protests with a clunk from one stick of the steel-tipped nunchakas.
“That should hold him for at least half an hour,” the lean Chinese fighting master said.
“Let’s off him,” Detroit said, holding a pistol to the Red’s head.
“He’s just a light bulb changer,” Rock said, pushing the gun lightly away. “Let the poor sucker live. His own people will do him in anyway for giving us the card key. Let them take care of each other. Less work for us.”
The Freefighters ran, hellbent for leather to the security door. Rock jammed the plastic card in, pressed the code and the thick door swung open easy as pie. They knew that almost all of the doors on each side of the long corridor were torture chambers so Rock stuck the card into the slot of each one and the Attack Force rushed in, guns at the ready. The first eight doors, B-1 through B-8, produced nothing but empty rooms. But on nine they hit pay dirt. Rock, the first one in, could instantly see that the room was filled with KGB and some half-dozen technicians. Behind a glass wall sat someone, strapped into a Mind Breaker. He didn’t look in good health. Detroit and McCaughlin rushed in just behind Rockson and, seeing the welcoming committee, put their Liberators on auto and fired in a full arc around the room as the Reds futilely reached for their weapons. The hot muzzles of the American rifles poured out a rain of death, splattering the nice, white antiseptic walls with a Pollock painting of blood madly twisted into abstract shapes.
Rock ran to the door of the glass-partitioned room and shot the lock off. Inside, strapped into a seat, with the huge, black Mind Breaker attached over his swollen head was Armstrong—or what was left of him. Thin needles of light were whirring into his brain, yet he wasn’t screaming. Not anymore. The once-proud Freefighter was drooling a green puke as pulpy pieces of gray brain tissue dripped from his sinuses. He had told them what he had told them. Either they knew where Century City was or Armstrong was the greatest hero America had ever known. Rockson looked into the man’s zombie eyes and, with tears in his eyes, held his Liberator to the Freefighter’s temple. “Goodbye, brave buddy.” He squeezed the trigger.
He rushed back into the other room where McCaughlin and Detroit were freeing the four other Century City prisoners, who were all smiles at their liberators’ appearance. The big Scot had the Red chief scientist, Letvok, cuffed.
“Thank God,” Gilhooley said, rubbing his wrists where manacles had been holding him pinned down for the fourteen hours since their capture. “You’re just in time, Rock,” he said, as the other men stood up and moved their aching legs and arms. “They did Armstrong in. But we could hear them trying to get anything out of him. Rock, he didn’t talk. I don’t know how in God’s name a man could take the kind of things they did to him. But he didn’t give them shit. They were just coming to get us. I was the next one, they kept telling me, trying to cheer me up, I guess. And I just don’t know if the rest of us could have gone out so . . .” He stared at Letvok. “He’s the one.”
Rock quickly told them of the plans and the freed Americans scooped up some of the Red weapons lying on the floor, wiped off the blood and grouped behind Rockson. “Gilhooley, you and your friends take charge of Letvok, and rip off one of those Mind Breaker machines. Bring it along.”
Chen was outside. “Who’s the prisoner?” he asked.
“Gilhooley said he’s Letvok. The torturer,” snarled McCaughlin. “We’ll bring him back with us—with his fucking machine.”
The men all smiled, scarcely able to believe that someone had the audacity to actually break into one of the biggest Red fortresses in America. They were now numerous enough to implement Plan Two. Rock was glad. Plan Two was one of three possible scenarios that would allow them to do utmost damage to the KGB center and its environs.
“Pl
an Two is in effect,” Rock said. “You all have your maps and know your jobs. Each group take your choice of our freed Freefighters here, and use them as best you can.” He turned around to McCaughlin. “You still got your mortar and the shells we loaded onto you?”
“Aye, these are just wee-bit toys to a fellow my size,” said the six-foot-five, 220 pound McCaughlin. “Hardly noticed I was carrying them. I picked up a few Kalashnikovs with grenade launchers and a satchel of grenades. Come on, Smith, let’s get moving, old buddy—and finish our job.”
“Can do,” Rock said. “Let’s move, men. I don’t know what the hell is going to happen in the next fifteen minutes but remember we reconvene on the roof helipad five at 0500. Don’t disappoint me now and get shot or something dumb like that.”
They gave short salutes and poured into different corridors and stairwells, each leader glancing at the little plastic maps that had been prepared from the underground reports. The Reds really should have done their own cleaning and vacuuming and laundry—especially laundry. For though every scrap that went in and out of the KGB center was checked for messages and visible writing, the invisible laundry marks made nifty maps. Some slaving American laundry woman had paid the Reds back in full for the gang rapes they had performed on her—once, when she was young and attractive. Now the Attack Force had all the locations.
Rock’s destination had to be penetrated or it could mean a quick and bloody end to the entire mission. The computer room that controlled the entire center’s operations. If he could get control, he could keep the Red troop movements inside the building under lock and key, barring movement from floor to floor. He ran up the stairwell headed for Level M with Detroit and Chen right behind him, Jergins, the computer man, taking up the rear. They had just reached Level J when a Red patrol burst through the landing door on routine patrol. The Reds and the Americans both looked surprised for a second, then reached for their guns. But the Americans were faster. Three of the Reds slumped to the concrete floor, bullets tattooing their twitching torsos. Chen stepped forward and took out the remaining pair with two lightning-fast spins of his nunchakas. This time he didn’t hold back. The KGB guards flew back against the wall, their skulls split open, a thin fluid pulsing out.
