Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style

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Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style Page 18

by Ryder Stacy


  “I demand that you surrender now. Operatives are waiting to assume control of all Russian Army posts, military and governmental centers of command—and the Presidium in Moscow. Make no mistake about it—there can be no resistance, no negotiations. If you do not immediately agree to my requests I shall be forced to begin firing the missiles—one every hour. Moscow will be the very first target. If my orders are carried out, the Grandfather and President Zhabnov shall live—no missiles shall be launched. An orderly transference of power shall occur between Red Army and KGB-Qarnain forces. Three hours to decide, gentlemen! Surrender or die!” With that, the tape recorder stopped playing the message and white noise hissed out of it. Rahallah leaned down and clicked it off.

  “As I said, gentlemen, that was just about an hour or forty-five minutes ago. I have received word from some of the communications officers that the message was indeed relayed around the world. From the Dreadnaught, Premier Vassily made sure he had a communications set-up to the entire empire. Just in case there was trouble while he was sea or here in America. Secondly, from my sources at various major points, it would appear the madman may well succeed. There is some talk of resistance, but when the first missile is sent—I think we have no doubt that the Colonel will send it—resistance will crumble quickly.”

  “So it’s in our hands, isn’t it?” Rockson asked loudly from where he stood by the front window of the White House, looking for a second out the window at the gathering storm clouds. “Somehow we get to him, or basically it’s all over—the whole fucking ball game is over.” For Rockson knew what Killov would do when he came to power. He would nuke the whole damn Rockies just to get Rockson. And that was just for starters. The man was on a suicide run. He wanted to take the whole damned planet out with him. World War III, as bad as it was, would appear a picnic when the colonel was running the show. That, Ted Rockson knew with every bone in his mutant body.

  “Yes,” Rahallah replied, “it’s in our hands and—”

  “And we’ve got to move fast. Damned fast,” Rock said, his voice rising now as he walked into the center of the room, his head spinning madly as he began trying to formulate some kind of plan—some way to strike back—save Archer, the Premier, if they were in fact alive—and stop the firing of the atomic missiles. Sure—simple task. Every day before breakfast, at least twice.

  “I agree,” Rahallah said, bowing slightly to him as if deferring to his tactical knowledge. “Time is of the essence. And of equal importance is saving the Premier. I hope you understand that Rockson. There can be no quarrel about our common goal in all this. The Grandfather may in many ways be your mortal enemy—but he was here to negotiate and change things. You heard him just an hour ago, offering the boldest plan that has ever been presented in the post-war world. But beyond that, with the Premier dead, Killov will have no figure powerful enough to stand in his way to world domination. As you say—it’s the last ball game. The last inning, and the last strike—if my colloquialisms are accurate.”

  “Yes, quite.” Rockson agreed. “You sailed over on the Dreadnaught, right? You know the kind of firepower they’ve got, conventional as well as nuke. It’s like fleas against an elephant. Ideas?”

  “But perhaps fleas can penetrate into the cracks of the elephant’s toes, or as a saying of my Masai tribe goes—the mouse can dance between the elephant’s legs while the lion is grabbed in its trunk.” He walked dramatically forward, dressed in a fresh white tuxedo and gloves. Though it seemed a little strange to Rock and the team that the black man chose such garb, in fact he had dressed like that for over twenty years for the Premier. But now he would have felt naked without those clothes. Rahallah reached out and pulled down a cloth from a board, revealing a large, quickly sketched map of the ship and its different decks.

  “Though almost all the plans and architectural drawing are on the Dreadnaught itself, I was able to pick up these from some Elite Operations Officers who had been using it for security purposes.” Rock and his men looked closely. The entire team was there; MacCaughlin, taking up half a sofa, Chen, standing, as Rock did, near a lamp, always ready just in case, Scheransky and Detroit—sharing a loveseat where Lincoln had drunk himself sick during the worst days of the Civil War. Ten of the top elite officers took up the other side of the room. They all paid close attention, every man’s eyes wide open from the intensity of the situation and sheer adrenaline. They all knew they might be witnessing the beginning of the end.

  “There’s no way Killov can guard every single form of entrance to the ship. We’ve calculated from constant sightings that there can’t be more than a few hundred troops at most.”

  “At most . . .” Detroit echoed him, as if that was just a trifle.

  “Yes—and spread out everywhere,” Rahallah went on, waving his hands across the drawing of the boat. From the diagram on the 3x5-foot piece of gridded architectural paper, they could see that the thing was like a floating city, even larger on the inside than one could have imagined from her monstrous outer shell. There must have been a thousand halls and rooms, whole city blocks of nuclear engines, football-field long control rooms with independent manning of each of the different major weapons systems. It was true, Rock could see—Killov might be able to run some of the ships’ fighting systems, but not all, not by a long shot. Take away the men he’d lost already, plus those guarding prisoners or taking security positions around the dock, and it left him with less than a hundred spread over the entire battle machine. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe.

  “Let me turn things over to Major Shivarsky now—Chief of Operations for Vassily’s Elite Guard,” Rahallah said, standing back and letting his place be taken by a bull-chested Russian soldier, a red beard down to his chin. The man looked like he’d been through it all—but Rock sensed a certain basic rough honesty in the man’s face.

  “This is the situation,” Shivarsky began immediately. He held a pointer in his hand. “We’ve sighted the main forces of Killov’s troops here, here and here.” He pointed three times—to each end of the Dreadnaught and to a long warehouse, which sat on the dock against which the great war ship was moored. “They are armed basically with what they brought with them with their chopper strike force—machine guns, mortars, Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles—and of course their helicopter fleet, of which they have approximately 23 left, a number having been shot down by navel troops and our own men. These Arab fighters or whatever the hell they are,” Shivarsky went on, “apparently don’t have any great technical know-how, because we haven’t seen any of the ship’s big cannons moving around. But—” he let the pointer drop slightly, “you never know.”

  “What of the ability of the colonel to actually launch the atomic missiles on board? Can he do it?” Rock asked. Every man in the room leaned forward. The possibility of being caught in a nuke blast can get a man’s attention like nothing else.

  “I’m afraid that our intelligence is minimal, to say the least,” the Russian went on. “But I would have to say yes, he can. The colonel, we know from past data, is himself capable of carrying out ship-launch. He might not be as fast as some technician, though. But—it’s something he took great interest in over the years, reading numerous technical manuals on the subject. He may, as well, have brought Russian technicians with him. There’s no way I can offer you conclusive data one way or another.”

  “What is our remaining manpower?” Rahallah asked, his arms folded across his shiny white tux. “If any?”

  “Of a total of about three hundred guardsmen who accompanied the Premier on his trip here—on the Dreadnaught or by separate transport—I would estimate we have approximately 70 to 80 left within the Washington area. Twenty of these are stationed around the ship, a dozen of the officers remaining are within this room and the rest are stationed around the White House to repel any attack by Killov.” He paused for a moment, then went on. “It’s not a hell of a lot—but these are tough fighting men. And every one of them is ready to die to save the Premier. I know—I
picked half of them myself.” The Russian officer stroked his thick red beard for a moment, as if searching for something inside it.

  “Any thoughts, Major?” Rockson piped up from near the window as he glanced away from the roses that lined the barbed-wire fence along one side. “On just how the hell we can crack that egg? You seem to have some knowledge of its security.”

  “Yes, I do have some thoughts,” the Russian answered quickly, glad someone had asked. He spoke quickly, whipping the pointer around the schematic. “Here and here are the weak points.” He placed the tip a few inches below the waterline, then at the bridge itself. “There’s an underwater door that opens out down here—it’s for repair crews to be able to leave in scuba gear should there ever be any problem with the propellers or anchor. And here, on the bridge, there’s an override system that controls not just the steering of the ship, but its weapons systems as well. Whoever controls the bridge systems in effect controls the Dreadnaught.”

  “And just how the hell do we get in both those places?” Detroit asked skeptically. When he spoke, Rock could see that the other Russians got a slightly distasteful look in their faces. Not only were they being commanded by a black, but they had to work alongside one, too. Strange times. But they were loyal men, for they had been rewarded highly to protect the Premier, had been given training, status far above the typical Russian soldier. Thus they gritted their teeth and pushed down their emotions. They were professionals, after all, every bastard one of them.

  “Five men from the Underwater Operations Squad have survived,” the major went on quickly. “They were carrying out security precautions about a mile down-river at the time of the attack. They have secured their position and are awaiting orders.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Rockson said slamming his fist into his palm. Suddenly his mood of abject despair was changing. Maybe they had a chance after all. The chance of a snowball in hell surviving and growing up to be a fat old snowman—but still a chance.

  “Are there any helicopters available?” Rahallah asked. “Referring to your idea of attacking the bridge. Perhaps—”

  “None—sir,” the man said with disgust. “The ship is filled with the damned things—but we can’t get to them. And Killov, master strategist that he is, sent out a few of his choppers to bomb the local airfield. The Red Army has a whole fleet about an hour from here, but they’re not prepared—there’s no battle plan worked out. I don’t think we can count at all on them. Not with the time parameters we’re dealing with. Killov could launch before we—”

  “What’s this?” the Doomsday Warrior asked, walking across the Persian rug on the briefing room floor and right up to the Russian officer. “You said a warehouse. How far is it from the ship?”

  “I’d estimate about seventy-five feet,” the officer replied, moving the pointer from the loading building to the ship and back again. “But we know that the commandos are stationed all along that side of the ship—in fact that’s where the main bulk of their visible guards are. Trying to get across by rope—or whatever—would be impossible.”

  “No, I wasn’t thinking of that,” Rockson said cryptically. “Tell me, how long is the width of this warehouse—I mean from the far side to the ship side. Maybe we could run a vehicle up—and make the jump!”

  “About two hundred feet,” Shivarsky guessed. “Give or take ten yards. But there is a long ramp running up the back of the building with an exit to the second and third floors. Though I don’t see what the hell you could do. Like I said—they’d blast any team that tried to pulley itself across like tin cans on a fence.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of going hand-over-hand,” Rock grinned with a strange twinkle in his mismatched eyes. “No, we got us this big old truck we—uh—borrowed. I was thinking maybe we could drive ourselves in—special delivery, Evel Kneivel style.”

  Twenty-Four

  An hour and a half later, with exactly twenty-seven minutes remaining before Killov carried out his threats, six men slipped into the waters of the Potomac about a half-mile from the ship. Five Elite Guards and Rahallah—clad only in leopard-skin loincloth—a “garment of magic power” worn these many years under his white man’s tux—and scuba gear. Bubbles were all that could be seen of their presence, had anyone been looking. But as the waters were getting a little rougher from winds down from the north, the bubbles disappeared among the foaming crests that ran up and down the Potomac.

  It was rough going at first as the waters were dark, murky—and filled with bodies or pieces of them. The frogmen commandos had to keep pushing parts of human anatomy away from them as they swam along about ten feet below the surface of the waters. Even the fish and fresh water sharks hadn’t been able to eat all that had been delivered to them. In fact there weren’t even that many fish in evidence, as so many of them had gorged themselves sick and now had gone off to get the fish equivalent of aqua seltzer and take the phone off the hook for a few days.

  Rahallah had done much scuba diving off the Kenyan coast. Thus, though certainly not an expert—as were the other men—he could easily keep up with them. His physique had amazed even the other commandos, who themselves were all in excellent shape. The black man—at nearly six-foot-six, 250 pounds of black muscle that looked like it had been carved out of obsidian—was clearly a match for any of them—perhaps all. The fact that he was undertaking such a dangerous mission had immediately been knowledge throughout the remaining Elite Guard—and it had solidified their loyalty to the Grandfather and to Rahallah. When a man is willing to lead right into the fires, then and only then will other men charge in behind him.

  They swam for what seemed like miles, the body parts if anything getting thicker as they neared the ship. The bones that had been stripped clean had already sunk to the bottom where they lay in the sand, a whole field of them like some sort of elephant graveyard. It stunned even the hardened commandos to see how much death Killov had caused. And they knew many of those whose remains floated around them or glowed up like ivory from the shifting mud below—many were their friends. Had been. And perhaps even worse, they couldn’t even say good-bye as the corpses had no heads. Even in death they had been humiliated—deprived of their identities.

  Suddenly the immense warship was ahead of them; there was no mistaking it, it was as if a mountain had risen out of the river, a volcanic eruption that had sent up a towering mountain of steel that shadowed out the entire Potomac around them. They had just made contact with it, the two lead frogmen attaching magnetic anchors from their suits to the sides of the Dreadnaught to keep from floating away, when they heard firing far above the waterline. The attack had begun. They knew their ground forces on each side of the ship had opened up to create a distraction—pull the attention of the Arab fighters away from any noise down below.

  The commando unit went to work like the well-synchronized team they were, as Rahallah treaded water several yards away, watching it all in fascination. A mobile oxyacetylene torch was pulled out of a watertight pack and sparked instantly to life. A long tongue of burning white flame stuck out about three feet as Captain Vilarik, who was commanding the unit, looked through his mask and saw the seam of the underwater door. There was no way in hell they could go through the hull itself—but there were just a few bolts and hinges that held this particular door in place. He lowered the tip of the flame to the tiny crack before him and winced slightly as the sparks roared up in front of him, shooting out into the water, lighting up the darkness with a weird fluorescent glow.

  Rock and his men loaded themselves up with every bit of firepower they could muster. Their own Liberators—but bazookas as well, and a whole duffel bag of shells—manned by Scheransky and McCaughlin. Rock and Chen stuck with their own weapons—shotgun-pistol and star-knives—things they were used to, so they could move fast once they were inside, if they ever got inside. Not one of them thought it wasn’t a totally ridiculous, insane, impossible plan. But they agreed to it without a second thought. They knew the stakes.


  They let the frogmen start out ahead of them, while they loaded up the back of the big diesel parked out on the White House lawn. Then it was time. Rock and Scheransky took the driver’s cabin while the rest of the Rock team—along with a dozen volunteer Elite Guards decked out like walking fighting machines, with bullets and grenades, rifles, pistols and knives—jumped in the back. Once all loaded in, the steel doors were slammed shut and locked behind them. It was dark inside, just the light streaming through a few dozen bullet holes from when it had first burst its way into D.C.

  Scheransky had wanted to drive again. But this was Rock’s trip. It was too important—the lives of too many people resting on his shoulders for the Doomsday Warrior to let anyone but himself handle the wheel. The Russian defector, looking somewhat dejected about the demotion, glared out the righthand window, cradling a modified Liberator submachine gun with circular magazine holding a hundred slugs—and five more in a satchel around his shoulder. If he couldn’t drive, he could still kill.

  Rock started up the big rig slowly, letting her move along at a crawl as he made his way across the White House lawn, leaving deep grooves in the grass. Zhabnov would no doubt be quite perturbed about that, Rockson thought with a smirk. If the fat boy was even still alive. The guards opened the electrified front gate and Rockson turned the diesel onto Lenin Avenue, the main thoroughfare that ran through the center of D.C. The streets were deserted—most of D.C.’s populace had heard Killov’s demands, broadcast on every frequency, his ship having the power to override all local transmissions. They hid inside their hovels and mansions, wondering if the end was truly near.

 

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