by Ryder Stacy
He slowly accelerated as he felt more used to the feel of the big gear pedal, and the wide wheels. Up to 20, then 30. He shifted the wheel back and forth, testing the feel of the truck, how it balanced on turns. A few poundings came from the back.
“You think that’s bad?” Rock yelled out as he turned his head toward the grid between the two parts of the diesel. “Then you better get out now, pals, ’cause I’m going to start speeding up and we ain’t never slowing down again.” With a wild kind of laugh that none of them had ever heard before in the Doomsday Warrior’s voice, he switched the truck into higher gear, gave her a little gas and sped up to 40. It was straight ahead to the dock, then a left. Rock slowed down on the curve, but took it fast enough that the whole back of the diesel spun around, wheels screeching and leaving huge black trails on the street. The fighting men in the back didn’t even pound this time—they were lying in a huge knotted pile on the wooden floor.
Then Rock could see it ahead. The Dreadnaught, standing above the river like some leviathan from days of old. It was impossible that they could even think of attacking it. It was hubris, challenging the gods. For surely the huge 2,000-foot long structure of super-steel was impervious to anything they could hurl at it. Not wanting to hear the voices screaming in his head that it was “impossible, impossible,” Rockson just accelerated the rig even more, leaning forward in his seat as his eyes began scanning quickly back and forth, checking for ambush.
“Get ready, man,” he hissed over to Scheransky above the now pounding roar of the diesel. “Killov will have some forward defensive units.” Rockson moved into tenth gear and the truck shot forward another notch. Now they were hitting 60 and the whole rig actually seemed to settle down as if starting to hit cruising speed. Rockson relaxed just a fraction as he realized that at least he could control the damned thing.
As if on cue, two machine guns opened up from low buildings—one on each side of the four-laner that headed straight for the dock. Slugs tore into the asphalt all around the racing truck tires, a few into the thick rubber. But this was a Red Army transport truck, with super-hardened, steel-encased tires almost impervious to bullets, to anything but a direct explosive charge, in fact. They had been built, after all, to protect them from Freefighters. The irony didn’t escape the Doomsday Warrior as he prayed now that they would hold.
“Hit something, you bastard!” Rock screamed at Scheransky, whose one fault seemed to be his daydreaming tendencies. The man hadn’t even pulled the trigger yet. Scheransky pulled back hard and the Liberator burped out a meal of screaming slugs toward the nearer of the two machine-gun posts. Beginner’s luck or a good eye, Rock didn’t know, but the gunners leaped up into the air, blood streaming from their chests and faces, and tumbled out the window as the truck roared by.
Then they were there—the long ramp that the major had shown on the diagram, just to the side. It had been built to allow fast and easy access for trucks loading or unloading their supplies. And Rockson was going to push that fact to the max. There was but a single barrier in front of the bottom of the long concrete ramp that stretched off nearly two hundred yards ahead, slowly climbing up to the top level. Beyond that, Rock could see the deck of the Dreadnaught. The fighters of Allah, wind flipping their red robes around them, opened up on the diesel. But it was too little, too late. The slugs just pinged off the rig’s super-hard alloy-steel bumpers and hood.
The diesel slammed through the steel barrier, snapping it like a toothpick—and they were on the ramp, moving up at about a five-degree angle. Rockson didn’t let the diesel slow down at all, but shifted instantly to higher gear, feeding it gas, more gas all the time, like blood to a hungry shark. Speed was the whole damned thing. It was the only way they were going to come out of this alive. He hunched forward over the seat as Scheransky looked like he was starting to turn a little pale.
By the time they came to the very top of the ramp and leveled out, they were doing 75. The truck shot forward, gaining even more speed, “Holy Lenin,” Scheransky shouted. There was another hundred yards to the edge of the warehouse. Rock could see there was no wall between him and the boat, just space—but he saw also that they were nearly level with the Dreadnaught. Shivarsky had said they’d be at least ten feet higher—above it. It was too late now, that was for damned sure. For suddenly they were there, right at the edge of the loading building, and the truck launched itself right into the air. Moving at 120 miles an hour. Rockson looked out of the cabin of the twenty-ton truck as the world spun by all around him, and wondered just what the fuck he was doing up there, in the air.
Twenty-Five
Rockson didn’t know who looked more terrified—him, or the Arab commandos who stood on the deck at which the immense steel meteor was flying like something from outer space. It all happened fast. He swore they weren’t going to make it, thought the truck was maintaining a straight trajectory as if it were still on the road. But then they did come down—and damned if they didn’t hit solid metal. The huge diesel screeched and wriggled and shimmied all over the place as Rockson applied the brakes, pumping them hard over and over again and down-shifted fast as Scheransky had shown him. There was nearly a hundred yards to the far side of the immense deck—but it took just about every foot of that distance for Rockson to bring the monster to a full stop. Along the way he thought he saw about a dozen Arabs disappear beneath the wheels, though it was hard to tell. The windshield was covered in red, dripping sheets of it that splattered in through the bullet holes in the thick shatterproof glass.
Then they jumped into hell. Rock and Scheransky exited their doors, firing on the run, as Rock’s men, dizzy and ready to puke up their dinners from the ride, came scrambling out of the back doors that had burst open. The Arab commandos around the deck came rushing from all directions, leaving their posts by the side where they had been firing at Red Army forces along the river bank.
Detroit, Chen, McCaughlin, and the dozen Red commandos came out shooting at everything that moved. And the three freefighters rode horses. They galloped into the fray on their ’brids! The Red commandos surged forward, spreading out in all directions in a circle, firing as they moved. The horsemen-of-the-apocalypse leaped over startled lines of gunmen, decimating them from behind.
Rockson, with pistol in his right hand and sawed-off Liberator .9 mm autorifle that could spray out clips of 40 rounds in 2.3 seconds in his left, waded into the thick of the red robes. They were fast, had obviously trained. But not fast enough. Rock could see, as he blasted everything in his path, that they were not battle-hard men. They had been in play-training, probably, but they hadn’t done the real thing. And that made all the difference in the world, for it was all counted in fractions of a second.
A sword-wielding figure rushed toward him like some sort of avenging Samurai, and Rockson ducked to the side, letting the man miss him by inches. He let loose with a single pull on the Liberator, and ten slugs poured out into the man’s stomach.
Two from the left came charging at once, their Kalashnikovs burping death. Rock leaped to the deck as the slugs buzzed past him, and heard their sharp whistles go right by his eye. A pair of Chen’s shuriken’s whirling like saw blades in a lumber yard, spun into the throats of the two Arabs. Their necks seemed to disappear as the exploding charges built into the plastic mold of the star blades went off. Two heads flew up into the air, spinning fast like bowling balls rolling down an alley of non-existence. Rockson glanced around hard at his savior and caught the mounted Chinese-American’s eye as he rode down-deck. Then he had other things to contend with.
Detroit and McCaughlin dismounted their wounded ’brids. As the bazooka men, they were, in effect, fast-moving artillery. They manned their heavy bazooka. With the others behind them they quickly let off a screaming shell. The resulting simultaneous explosions took out a good ten to twelve more of the fighters of Allah. Before the smoke had cleared the men moved forward, the troops behind them securing the area with gunfire and hand-to-hand. They let off
another round each, sending up great sprays of flesh and steel as they caught a machine-gun post and a concentration of red-robed fighters coming at them with their swords high. Cloth turned to tatters, flesh to soup.
It was almost tragic in a way, the Freefighters and their Russian compatriots could see as they cut their way through the ranks. For the Arab fighters, though gallant and coming in clearly ready to die, were in fact dying. Too easily. They seemed to want to join their Allah, screaming out his name as they took whole loads of automatic weapons fire in their chests and faces. They were fighting some sort of religious, romantic battle, with charging fervor, and swords clanging in the air. But there were no more wars like that. There never would be again. It was survival or death. The attacking forces cut the Arabs to shreds. They didn’t care how the bastards died—just as long as they died.
Not that the attackers didn’t take losses. A number of the over-laden Elite Guard commandos were cut down in their tracks.
Chen took a piece of shrapnel in the right shoulder, McCaughlin in the leg. But they kept moving, not slackening for an instant, keeping an eye out for one another as the battle raged. Their mounts shot down, they worked their way across the very top of the long super-aircraft carrier, with its planes folded like sleeping hawks at the far end. Fought their way toward the bridge—and control of the entire ship.
The resistance increased as they grew near—obviously Killov had concentrated his forces around here. Rockson scanned the bulletproof windows of the ultra-modern bridge a good sixty feet above them, trying to spot the madman—but the view was covered by the smoke that was now rising from the many explosions around the deck, and the secondaries as well as a few of the jets parked close by went up in great roaring bonfires. Rock and his team were stopped in their tracks as the Arab forces seemed to gather themselves and make a stand. They fired from behind stairwells and steel cabins, from portholes beneath the bridge that housed the ship’s communications center. Time was ticking away—where was Killov?
Slugs of every size pinged all around them as if they were in a swarm of locusts—but Rock motioned for the bazooka men to just open up and not stop. And they did. Both men fired all seven of their remaining shells into every opening they could see. They were fourteen thunderous roars—then horrible screams, as mutilated figures jumped up and ran around minus arms, legs . . . The Freefighters rushed in through the thick smoke, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of resistance after that.
Rock ran toward the stairs leading to the tower and took out two men who came at him, cutting them in two with a burst from the Liberator—snipping their chest cavities open for disection class. Then he was up the stairs three at a time, jumping over the bloody piles that the bazooka explosions had left behind. There wasn’t even anyone trying to stop him the rest of the way up, and Rockson blasted open the door, burst into the bridge, spinning around and searching for trouble.
There was someone here—an Arab, tall and broad, wearing a red robe that flowed all around him like a fountain of blood.
“I am Dhul Qarnain—and you may not come into this sacred chamber.” The man had a wild, proud face, like something out of Ali Baba. The fellow clearly was the leader of the whole bunch. And as the man pulled out his glistening scimitar, he pointed to a similar weapon on the countertop. What the hell? The Doomsday Warrior leveled his .12 gauge shotgun-pistol as the Arab took a sudden step forward. “Here, I have a second sword for you, Rockson. You must fight with a man’s weapon, as I do—do not defile—”
“Sorry, my friend,” Rockson said with just the hint of a smile. “I’m not into swordfights.” He pulled the trigger of the sawed-off .12 gauge shotgun-pistol right in the face of the robed attacker. The whole center of Qarnain’s head disappeared, though the body kept coming forward for another second or two. The nose, eyes, chin, teeth—every damned thing just suddenly wasn’t there. Where it was, who could say. Dhul Qarnain’s arms stayed up, holding the long, curved sword poised in the air. Then the whole dripping thing collapsed into a bloody mess on the floor and Qarnain got the “romantic” demise he had so long sought.
Twenty-Six
While Rockson and his team were fighting it out above deck, Rahallah and his men came in from below the waterline. The acetylene torch cut through the three main connecting pieces within ten minutes and they pulled the door free and were inside the ship—in an inverted cone-shaped chamber that kept the outside water at a constant height, so the ship’s frogmen could go in and out. They came up cautiously, but there wasn’t a soul in the steel-walled room. The Arab commandos had more important things to do than go swimming down here.
Stripping off their water gear, the fighting force, with Rahallah in the lead, charged forward, fast, ready to take out any bastard that got in their way. They had one objective and one objective only: to rescue the Premier—secondarily, Zhabnov. The African prince moved like a cheetah down the steel corridors and up the iron ladders of the Dreadnaught. He carried a short spear, the front end of his Masai hunting spear, the one he had killed a lion with at the age of thirteen—the ritual passage to manhood in his tribe. It was about three feet long, two feet of which was razor sharp, with slightly curved point. With his leopard loincloth and the African weapon in hand, with his legs pumping, muscles rippling like an Olympic runner, Rahallah appeared like some primitive African god—and both inspired and terrified the Elite Guards who came swarming behind him down the halls, their submachine guns and autopistols at the ready.
They met some resistance, but not much—two Arabs attacking them on the first two levels. Rahallah took them out easily by himself, thrusting his spear hand downward so that their intestines oozed out over the handle and his hand.
At the third level they met real resistance—a machine-gun post of six. But Rahallah ducked into a doorway and let the Elite Guards use some of the shitload of weaponry they carried. They opened up with automatic fire that absolutely blasted the corridor ahead. A mini-rocket launcher one of them had brought in a watertight pack was aimed from shoulder level and fired.
A blast shook the hall, and when they moved forward through the smoke the red-robed fighters were all dead. All but one, who seemed untouched. He lay in the corner covering his head and face with his arms and hands, whimpering. “Don’t kill me—please, please don’t kill me.”
“Where’s Vassily?” Rahallah said angrily, going over to the Arab, the hood having fallen from his face to reveal a mere teen, sunken-cheeked, a coward along for the ride.
“I can’t tell—they—”
“Where’s the Grandfather?” Rahallah asked again, placing one of his huge fingers behind the man’s ear at the pressure point. The Arab’s whole body arched up and he screamed breathlessly. “Fifty level, Room 5209. Don’t kill me. I told you, I told you.”
“Sorry,” the black prince said, reaching down with the other hand. “I’m not feeling generous today.” He grabbed hold of each side of the Arab’s head and pushed, before anyone could stop him. There was a loud snap and then the light went out in those eyes. Whatever light had been there to begin with. Rahallah let the lifeless body fall to the floor. “The Lion wills it.”
They tore up to level five and encountered more resistance in front of the room. But it, too, was blasted away, and within minutes Rahallah was at the door. He threw it open, not daring to believe that the Premier might still be alive, though he prayed with all that was in him to his African gods. As his eyes took in the small room and its occupants, his face lit up.
For the Grandfather was alive—the leader had not been killed by the madman Killov. Rahallah rushed over to the Premier, who was lying on his side on the floor of the small room. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed. Rahallah reached his palm down and felt the man’s heart. It was fast, but not erratic. The African had seen it much worse. Maybe there was hope—real hope. He slipped a blue heart pill between the Premier’s half-opened lips.
“Swallow, Excellency,” Rahallah exhorted him. “We’ve got t
o get out of here. Fast. Try to wake up. Please.” He lifted the Premier slightly and held him up as Vassily’s eyes slowly opened.
“Faithful one—you’ve come,” he said with the trace of a smile flickering across his lips. “I knew—I knew.”
“Shh, Excellency,” Rahallah said, holding the Premier in his arms as he stood up. He noticed Zhabnov for the first time, trembling on the other side of the floor, in the darkest corner he could find. And there against the wall, chained to it, a snarling, very angry Archer. How they had managed to get that overstuffed mountain man alive was beyond Rahallah’s ken, but he signaled to the commandos who came into the room behind him to free the giant. One of them walked over and set a tiny charge, hardly larger than a postage stamp, against the base of the chain—and it popped apart with a puff of smoke. Archer was free. He rubbed his hands, looked at his rescuer and growled slightly, as he wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on, and then looked over at Rahallah.
“Cool out big fellow—we’re friends,” the African grinned at the man, remembering what Rockson had once said about him—that he picked up emotional states from people more than their words. That he could understand what someone was saying through their tones, their body gestures. He seemed to trust Rahallah and relaxed, his growls subsiding.
“We’ve got to go,” Rahallah snapped out to Zhabnov as he walked back out toward the corridor still carrying the Premier. They had to get the hell out there before the whole place erupted into a firestorm. For far above he could hear heavy explosions going off, the ship seeming to rock from time to time as if it were feeling some of the blows that were leveled against it. He ran with the Premier in his arms as the other Elite Guards formed a phalanx around them, taking out any fool stupid enough to get in the way, or pop his head up suddenly out of somewhere. Zhabnov ran along, his fat body jiggling wildly beneath his uniform, now tattered and ripped, coated with blood. It was the one he had worn that the Peace Conference, just a few hours earlier—it seemed like an eternity. Archer took the rear, snarling at this and that shadow but kept up, as he hated being stuck in the bowels of the steel monster, and was in fact starting to feel quite claustrophobic.
