by Ryder Stacy
But Zhabnov knew the truth. The KGB, under Killov’s command and perhaps working with other Blackshirt forces as the KGB was also called back home in Moscow, were trying to wrest control of worldwide Empire from the Grandfather, Premier Vassily. Zhabnov was next in line to be premier—after all, he was the old man’s blood relative, his nephew. But Killov and his cronies had other ideas. They had destroyed Zhabnov’s Pavlov City, fearing it would make him too powerful with an army of zombie Americans under his control, and the KGB had recently even tried to assassinate the premier. Doctors working for the Blackshirt commander had tried to poison the Grandfather, but somehow the plot had been discovered in time—as the premier lingered on his deathbed. Vassily had formed mass execution squads in Moscow to kill the plotters in the KGB and among the power structure. He had purged the capital of the world, at least for the moment, of his enemies.
“Now, it’s up to me,” Zhabnov muttered to himself, tapping his fingers on the cherrywoood desk with the presidential seal inlaid on the top. “I must protect myself and my legitimate power as authorized by the Politboro, from those power-mad maniacs in the KGB. I must launch small attacks against Killov, until the Grandfather is strong enough to send more supplies and troops.”
Civil War—worldwide—within the Empire. It was happening. Unbelievable! At a time when the Empire was in grave danger—attacked by rebels everywhere. It was not the time to war among themselves. The entire planet seemed to be ready to die. It was as if all the subject peoples of the world were in touch with each other—which was, of course, impossible—and were planning their attacks in unison. In India the Sikh warriors with their long, curved swords were rioting again. They seemed to have no regard for their lives, attacking armored Red columns with hand weapons. Still, they made the Russian forces pay an ongoing price. In South China a warlord was creating a frenzy among his people—eighteen thousand fanatical Moslem followers of the Muabir, the flame of Allah. They had done serious damage to the occupying forces, armed as they were with only rifles and small explosives. They would sweep into Red encampments on horseback, screaming, unafraid to die, and decapitate every Russian they could lay their hands on. Zhabnov had seen secret papers and photographs of what they had done. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
It seemed to be that way everywhere now. The Zulu chief, Mobogutu, had managed to organize a ragtag but dangerous army of a number of different tribes; the British, the French, the Spanish—all growing stronger and bolder with every passing day. South America, passive for nearly a century, was now becoming a deathtrap for Red soldiers, who couldn’t walk down the peasant streets at night without getting their throats slit. And here in the U.S.S.A, a land that had been totally subdued for generations, Zhabnov was hearing disquieting reports about the increasing strength of the freefighters. This Ted Rockson of theirs had somehow become a national hero to the peoples of the hidden cities, and even the workers in the Russian Fortresses. Such a man was more dangerous than a whole army. He gave hope to the slaves, made cowards unafraid, gave unity to a land that had been nothing but isolated hamlets for many, many years. Times were changing, even Zhabnov could see that. He knew he was not as smart as Killov or Premier Vassily, but he could see the proverbial writing on the wall. He had tried to be a just conqueror. He made sure that the workers were fed, that, as much as possible, more nuclear weapons were not used—in the fight against the rebels. But . . . that would have to change now. If he was to survive, he must make himself as ruthless and bold as Killov.
He rose from the immense desk and walked around it to the nearly ten-foot-high mirror that sat between the portraits of Lincoln and Washington. He looked at himself—not bad for a man nearing fifty-five. He was very broad and meaty, with a typical Russian physique, big-boned, strong, and quite heavy. His face had a squarish bulldog kind of look, with thick black eyebrows and puffy hedonistic lips. Not bad at all, he thought. Not as fearsome-looking perhaps, as Killov, with his high cheekbones and piercing eyes and the scar along his cheek that according to Zhabnov’s spies had been placed there by none other than Ted Rockson. He lifted his shoulders, pulled in his stomach, and pretended to stare Killov down. Around him, the American presidents of past days fixed their oil eyes on him with cold accusation.
Outside, the sound of heavy machinery building the defensive fortifications came blasting through the windows, disturbing Zhabnov and his narcissistic reveries. He rushed over and pulled the thick purple floor-to-ceiling drapes closed. He was besieged! On all sides. He had ordered his generals and security staff to ignore the growing menace of Rockson and the freefighters and instead to concentrate on Killov as their most probable attacker. In the East here, in New Lenin, he would be safe—unless someone undertook a suicide mission: a truck full of high explosives driven by some drug-maddened minion of the Blackshirt commander, or a plane. The president began growing nervous as he thought of all the possible ways they would try to get him. The air cover around the White House—planes, Laser cannon, rapier missiles—were enough to ward off that menace. But . . . a human bomb, a Brutus among his cabinet . . . He had to get Killov before the madman got him, it was simple. Kill the head of the hydra and you kill all its appendages as well.
From outside he heard what sounded like singing. The American slave laborers were singing some sort of song. Singing was forbidden. Why were his guards allowing it? The words cut through the thick drapery like rapier blades.
The sun sets on the Red Empire
Like it is setting now
Arise ye prisoners of starvation
What was a king is now a clown
The mighty of the earth now tremble
Neath the rifles of Ted Rockson’s men
The Doomsday Warrior will triumph
The Red rule of death is at an end.
Zhabnov slammed his thick fist down on the intercom button.
“Grudonov, get those workers outside to stop singing. Have the guards shoot a few of them. I must concentrate!” Shortly, there were a few bursts of gunfire and the singing ceased.
He took out a folder marked TOP SECRET from his desk and looked through it for the twentieth time that day. Plan Jefferson. Colonel Killov thought he had the monopoly on terror and murder, but Zhabnov was about to join that club, too. Plan Jefferson—an elite deadly hit squad whose sole purpose was to assassinate the Blackshirt commander. Zhabnov had read once how super commandos in WW II had gone after the Reichsfuehrer of Czechoslovakia and had succeeded in killing him. British commandos. It had worked then, and it would work now in the Post WW III world. He liked history—if one knew where to look, it was full of instruction.
For three months seventeen specially selected men from Red Army Elite forces had been training in Langley Virginia, at the old CIA headquarters, now a Soviet Army espionage and counterinsurgency commando school. They had been narrowed down to the best, the toughest, of the lot—four men, deadly efficient men of high intelligence, with a deep hatred for the KGB stemming from events in their own pasts—early KGB purges that had claimed family members or loved ones. They were more than ready and willing to give their lives to take out the ruthless Blackshirt commander.
The door knocker rapped twice and the immense oak door swung open. His male secretary, Gudonov, said, in his strangely high-pitched voice, “They’re here, Mr. President,” Zhabnov brushed his graying hair back, adjusted his medals, and announced in his most presidential timbre, “Send them in!”
Four large men walked into the Executive Office, led by General Zhilinsky, head of Espionage, a short, totally bald man in an impeccable gray uniform, carrying a leather attache case. The four men walked up in front of the long desk and stood at attention. Zhabnov looked them over appraisingly. They were big—so big that they looked almost American—with blond, rugged features. They remained absolutely silent, staring straight ahead.
“Dragnov, Stepsky, Kironin, and Andreyov, Mr. President,” General Zhilinsky said crisply. “These are our best.”
“Very well
,” Zhabnov said, suddenly growing nervous at the thought of the countermeasures Killov would take if the death squad failed. “What is their training—can they do the job? Sit, Sit, all of you,” he said, pointing to a French Provincial couch off to the side.
“The men will stand, thank you Mr. President,” the general said. “They are not used to relaxing. But I will sit, thank you.” He pulled over one of the “Jackie chairs”—English Tudor—selected by the famed wife of one of America’s most popular presidents. “These are their dossiers,” Zhilinsky said, handing a sheaf of folders to the president. “I think you’ll find their training has been more than adequate. These men are perhaps some of the most highly trained killers in history. Each has learned numerous techniques of assassination, and each has become an expert in one particular weapon of his choice.”
Zhabnov turned through the pages of the men’s personal and training history. All had killed numerous times in combat and during their training, all had been sent out to kill selected targets—American workers—to make sure they could do their jobs with the ruthless efficiency that would be required to take on Killov. They had murdered with guns, knives, their hands, and a number of other rather imaginative approaches to the cessation of life.
“Let them show you their specialties,” Zhilinsky said, with a thin, grim smile. Dragnov, the first of the men in line, stepped slightly forward and reached inside his loose-fitting fatigue jacket. He pulled out a long, glistening ice pick, nearly twenty-four inches in length. He moved his hand around in a blur of motion, stabbing at the air over and over again. Then, just as quickly, he returned the sliver of death to his inner pocket. Zhabnov was impressed. He hadn’t even been able to see the man’s hand move. Surely no one could evade a blade with such speed. The next in line, Stepsky, stepped a few inches forward and reached into his identical green-gray camouflage jacket. He came out with what looked like a blob of dark jelly, and held it up for the president to see.
“Plastique, Mr. President. Stepsky carries it throughout the lining of his clothing. It’s undetectable by metal-scanning devices, which we know Killov has placed at all the entrances to the Monolith. In fact, it’s so woven into the fabric, so stretched out, that even a frisking won’t reveal its presence.” Zhabnov smiled. He liked that one.
The next in line, Kironin, walked several inches ahead, and, as the others had done, whipped out his method of destruction—a long, thin flask containing an amber-colored gas.
“Poison, Mr. President,” the general said, raising a thick white eyebrow. “All he has to do is get within fifty feet of Colonel Killov and release this gas and—” he drew his hand across his throat. “One of the most deadly gases we’ve produced. Very painful and causes death within sixty seconds. We’ve been able to place Kironin as a clerk on Killov’s own floor. He begins next week. Should be very interesting.” The man stepped back and Andreyov, the largest of the lot, moved forward.
“And what is his little toy?” Zhabnov asked, getting into the deathly spirit of the proceedings.
“He needs no ‘toys’ Mr. President. May I have a piece of furniture you aren’t particularly fond of?” Zhabnov was puzzled by the request, but he looked around until his eyes rested on a thick dark coffee table off in one corner of the large rectangular room.
“That—over there,” he answered, pointing out the seventeenth-century antique. “I hate it.” The general rose and walked briskly over to the objet d’art and dragged it back until it was in the middle of the room. “Please,” he said to the muscle-bulging blond assassin, pointing a slightly trembling finger at the table. The man walked the few steps to it and without any sort of preparation slammed the blade of his hand down on the nearly inch-thick oak slab. It broke into pieces, flying off in all directions, splintered, jaggedly torn. The man stepped back in line. Zhabnov’s jaw dropped open as he imagined Killov’s head cracking like a rotten coconut beneath the power of that hand.
“Very good, general. Very good indeed. I’m quite pleased with the work you’ve performed here.” Zhilinsky stood tall, obviously pleased at the president’s commendation. “Now, if they can just perform their feats on Mr. Blackshirt. Just one of you has to succeed,” he said, walking up and down in front of them, inspecting them closely. “And I promise you this. Whichever man kills Colonel Killov will never have to worry about a thing for the rest of his life. He will have all that he wishes. That is my promise.” He looked into their eyes to catch a response to his offer, but could see only a vacuum within them—cold and dark as the reaches of space itself. A shiver ran down his spine. He was glad they were working for and not against him.
The president commended the general again and the five men exited, with assurances from Zhilinsky that the job would be done soon and that he would inform Zhabnov of all proceedings.
Zhabnov felt relieved for the first time in days. So, he would be able to eliminate the power-mad Killov after all. It seemed inevitable. He smiled and patted his bulging stomach. Now I can enjoy myself, he thought. If they have sent the right material to me. I’m so tired of these drugged-up American maidens. I need a real woman tonight. Someone with strength, someone who doesn’t cry, who doesn’t just lie there whimpering beneath me. He had been told by his procurer that a four-breasted mountain-mutant woman would be arriving that evening. Slightly sedated, she would be a delectable treat. And Zhabnov was suddenly very horny.
Machine-gun fire echoed in the Kremlin’s massive brick walls. Lines of KGB officers, hands tied behind their backs, fell like scythed wheat as chips flew off the wall behind them. Two hundred more had been executed in the last three days for crimes against the state. Premier Vassily sighed as he looked out the window, and then limped back to bed. Rahallah, his black servant, came quickly over and helped his master, still weak from the poison he had been given, up into the thick featherbed.
The “Conspiracy of the Doctors” was over. The back of the KGB-controlled assassination plot had been broken here in Moscow. But not in occupied America. Killov still lived—indeed was more powerful than ever—and in other parts of the Empire, Soviet army forces were openly or covertly battling KGB forces as well.
“But I am not dead!” he said in a hoarse whisper to his servant and main companion. “Moscow is secure . . . secure.” Slowly Premier Vassily drifted off to sleep with his black African servant sitting by the bed, looking down with the tender eyes of a parent. Outside, the bodies of the dead conspirators were loaded onto trucks and carted off to unmarked graves in the country. The spring thaw was in full force—birds began hesitantly singing within a minute or two after the echoes of the last machinegun volley died out. The cherry trees were blooming, pushing their delicate blossoms out like probing tongues into the warming air. While blocks away, inside the white marble Presidium building, fearful delegates were voting—unanimously—to reelect Vassily as premier-for-life.
On the eightieth floor of the black steel building that served as the headquarters for the KGB in the United States—the Monolith, as it was called—smack in the center of Denver, Colorado, Colonel Killov stared out at the purple-hazed mountains to the west. He ground his teeth as he watched the orange and brown clouds, which could mean an acid rain, move in over the towering peaks. He had just heard: a rout in Moscow, all his men, his spies, his agents, his lobbyists—dead. Vassily had reasserted his control with an iron fist. Killov felt a grudging respect for the doddering old Grandfather. He hadn’t thought the poetry-reading Ruler of All the World had the guts to do it. But he had! One of Killov’s few misjudgments. And now President Zhabnov, Vassily’s dear nephew—the fat lecher—was firmly in control of his regular army forces, as well, in the East and the South. Killov still controlled the North and West, with sporadic encounters with the Red Army in the Midwest. But no one dared launch an all-out attack. The smiles, the everything-is-okay chatter, still remained. Both he and Zhabnov had to bide their time. Neither was strong enough to vanquish the other in a military contest. And though the Red Army outnumber
ed his men by nearly ten to one, he knew that his staff and his fighting forces were vastly superior to the regulars, both in training, motivation, and ruthlessness. For Killov ruled by fear. Every KGB man in America knew that he had best carry out his orders—successfully—or face the wrath of the Skull, as his men called him behind his back in muted whispers.
“The fools—” Killov muttered, slamming his thin, veiny hand against the darkly tinted blue window nearly twenty feet long and ten feet high that gave him a panoramic view of half of Colorado. “To attack me when the freefighters—the American rebels—were so close to an attack.” Idiots. The KGB and Red Army should wipe out the real threat first, before they had a go at each other. Now all the Russian forces would be divided, even more vulnerable to rebel attack. He saw his reflection in the dark glass. His face was taking on a ghastly pallor, his cheekbones poking out like ivory knobs from his skeletal visage. The scar that Ted Rockson had given him the previous year ran nearly from his ear to his jaw, an ugly reddish purple reminder of their encounter that the colonel would carry with him to his dying day.
He had had a few setbacks recently, it was true—but by no means was he in real danger—or his power threatened. He could handle them—Vassily, Zhabnov, or whomever else came along. Because he was smarter than they—and because he would stop at nothing to achieve his ultimate goal—to be ruler of the world. Then things would be run his way. Atomic weapons would be used full scale to wipe out all opposition on earth. He would have the first empire without enemies—because they would all be dead. Peace—peace for the first time in history. Peace under his bloody rule. The peace of the gun and the cattle prod and the elimination of millions. But nonetheless, peace.
