by Ryder Stacy
FREEDOM’S VICTORY
A century after Russia’s surprise thermonuclear first strike, America struggles to survive as a radioactive wasteland. Locked in a cruel yoke of oppression by its Soviet dictators, the United States has only one chance to regain her past glory: Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior, and his high-tech guerilla army of Freefighters—the brave shock troops of freedom!
America’s worst nightmare becomes reality when the insane KGB Colonel Killov discovers the location of an armory of ancient super proton weapons capable of terrible destructive power. Informed of this ultimate threat to freedom’s future, Ted Rockson and his tough Freefighters power into action. His sleek fusion-fired battlecruisers pushed to the limit, the Doomsday Warrior blasts through Killov’s awesome attacks on land and in the sky to stop his mad scheme before America is annihilated forever!
DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR
DEATH DUEL
Colonel Killov advanced slowly toward the Doomsday Warrior. Fully protected in an impenetrable suit of body armor, the insane dictator raised his weapon and prepared to fire.
Ted Rockson had no time to think and let loose his own blistering barrage of degree-four explosive shells directly at Killov. The impact was so powerful that the surrounding cavern walls of solid granite split.
Yet Killov kept coming, his weapon leveled for a close-quarter hit. “Prepare to die, Rockson. Your fight is over!”
But Rock had other plans.
ZEBRA BOOKS
are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
475 Park Avenue South
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN: 0-8217-3451-2
Copyright © 1991 by Ryder Syvertsen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
First printing: July 1991
Printed in the United States of America
Invisible before birth are all beings,
and after death, invisible again.
They are seen between two unseens.
Bhagavad Gita
book 2, verse 28
Forward
Total nuclear war was the fate of the world in the late twentieth century. After a period of rapid disarmament and the cooling of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, a secret coup in the Kremlin deposed the Soviet peace forces. There was a resurgence of militant communist ideology, and the forces pushing for war, pushing for final, glorious victory against the “decadent” West, grew mighty once more.
As the United States lulled itself into complacency, confident of a peaceful future, ever more absorbed in its own internal problems, the officers’ clique in Russia consolidated its iron grip on the Kremlin and plotted a massive first strike against the free world.
They carried their plan out with total precision, catching everyone by surprise. So many bombs were dropped from Tupelov 119 bombers, so many ICBM Sokev 19 missiles fell on America, that the entire country was left a devastated, radioactive wasteland. In fear of retaliation, the Russians overdid their attack and almost destroyed themselves in the process.
World-encircling clouds of radioactive fallout killed one billion people outside the United States, including forty million in the Soviet Union alone. But gradually a disease- and famine-ridden world succumbed to the domination of a new Soviet world empire, a ruthless communist dictatorship that made Joseph Stalin look like Santa Claus.
The nuclear war forever changed the face of the land of freedom: great craters rose up everywhere like a cancer on the landscape. As far as the eye could see, there were miles of smooth-as-glass melted sand deserts, with green putrescences gushing up from time to time from below, through so-called blowholes. The air was thinner, with less oxygen content, the result of year-long forest fires and the depletion of the upper atmosphere, which had been literally blown away into outer space by the force of the megablasts. The daytime sky was purple, not blue, the sun a burning white torch at noon and a hazed, greenish orb at sunset. The bleached bones of millions of the ordinary sort of creatures—men and animals—were everywhere, turning to powder and blowing around in the megacyclones that wracked the nation.
And strange things grew . . . strange plants, like daisies with teeth, and dogs twice their normal size. Stranger still, the human gene pool was forever altered. Many mutations were not able to survive, though a number of beastly and powerful ones did for a time. Finally a more subtle and useful form of human alteration occurred: the Star-Pattern Mutants. They were strong, agile men and women with some psychic ability, including a nascent form of telepathic power. They were people of physical abnormalities of coloration—redheads and raven-haired people with streaks of white in their hair. All had five-pointed, starlike patterns on their backs. The appearance of these new humanoids was basically good news for the human race, for it was doubtful that humankind would survive the ever-increasing rain of radioactive death. That death oozed down year after year from high in the strontium layer circling Earth since that fateful, deadly attack.
But those useful human mutations occurred in the mid twenty-first century. In the late twentieth century, there was only bad news: death from radiation burns, disease, and worst of all, the Reds. All over defeated America, occupation troops quickly moved to eliminate any opposition forces they could locate. But deep inside the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, in a five-mile-long interstate highway tunnel, a group of a thousand Americans of every description, of every ethnic and racial background, of every level of technical skill and intellectual accomplishment, were sealed in by avalanches. They combined their talents, appraised the situation soberly, and vowed together to become a mighty force of opposition to the Soviet invasion.
For years they lived furtively, like rats, scavenging, attacking Soviet patrols when they could, but mostly staying hidden. And the highway tunnel became Century City, so named because of the Americans’ hundred-year-plan for resurgence. As the world-dominating Soviets grew lax and complacent, the secret American Underground grew and grew. Many underground fortress cities were founded in the Rockies, and the boldness of their attacks against the Russian invaders grew. American technology was soon equal to if not stronger than that of the Soviets. American survivalist soldiers—some of them highly advanced mutants whose genes had been altered by the radiation, carried the fight into the central plains of America and even into the slave cities of New Chicago and New Kansas City.
This story begins 116 years after the thousand nuclear missiles destroyed America the Beautiful. America was not very beautiful now; she was mean and nasty. America the Beautiful had become America the Vengeful.
The leader of the survivalist soldiers who raided from Century City, Colorado, was Ted Rockson, also known and feared as the “Doomsday Warrior.” In a series of daring actions over a ten-year period, he and his cohorts had succeeded in winning back the nation for democracy. The Soviet Union was nearly collapsed and had signed a peace treaty backed up by surveillance satellite observation policed by an international force.
But there was one group of Soviets that had not signed the treaty: Colonel Killov’s KGB renegade force. Rockson was determined to smash the KGB and to kill the maniacal, drug-addicted KGB leader. But Killov seemed to have nine lives. Finally Rockson and his elite team of fighters had Killov cornered in the deserts of Arizona.
Or so they thought.
Prologue
Twelve miles outside the ghost town of Cluster City, Arizona, the final battle of a long campaign raged. One hundred khaki-clad, gas-masked men of the elite Com
mando Unit of the Re-United States of America battled the last holdouts of Colonel Killov’s KGB army. The beseiged Soviets had retreated to their underground bunkers in the Superstition Mountains, having suffered great losses. Their tanks lay in jagged heaps on the sands a mile east, and pieces of their broken artillery were scattered, steaming hot metal, nearby. The Soviets hid like rats now, and the flamethrower battalions of the RSA advanced to burn them out of their ratholes.
Leading the American forces was a man six-foot-two, with mismatched light and dark blue eyes. He wore his black hair to his shoulders, and a white streak ran through his forelocks. He was Ted Rockson. The thin grimace on his tanned, craggy face revealed his pleasure at the turn of events. Rockson knew Killov was in there somewhere, in the warm tunnels under this blasted and seared terrain. Rockson’s RSA commandos had the upper hand, but he knew that advantage can suddenly reverse. In an hour night would fall and the hunters might become the hunted.
Rock shouted to the advance men to stop flaming the bunker entrances—instead, there would be a penetration by the troops. If Killov was taken out, Rock wanted the body identifiable. He would not trust anyone else to kill the man. Killov must die by Rockson’s own hands.
“I know what you’re a-thinking,” McCaughlin came up to Rockson to say, laying a meaty hand on his friend’s hard-muscled shoulder. “But you shouldn’t do it! We’ll take fewer casualties if we just burn ’em where they are and count the bodies later. DNA tests can verify which one is Killov.”
Rockson nodded, “Thanks for the advice, pal, but I say we’re going in!”
He gave his order for the Rock Team, his elite band of five super-survival fighters, to rendezvous with him at the top of the boulder field overlooking the KGB bunkers. McCaughlin left to spread this news as Rockson climbed to the vantage point.
First to report was the bull-necked, ebony-faced second-in-command Detroit Green. Green had run all the way up the boulder-strewn hill. The crisscrossed bandoliers of grenades on his chest, Rock noticed, were largely empty. Green had been busy hurling death at the enemy. Rockson knew the man had single-handedly taken out two dozen of the estimated force of four hundred Reds that had made up the original band of KGBers. The images of those dead men danced in Green’s eyes.
“Well?” Rock asked as Green saluted. “Can they get out of there?”
Detroit was in charge of the seismic resonancer unit, which probed the earth with radio waves to outline the extent of the Red bunkers. If anyone could answer that question, he could.
“Not a chance,” he smiled, his white teeth shining like day-glo in the purple twilight. “We got it checked out, Rock! My seismo teams checked all the surrounding rocky areas. There’s no tunnel leading out of there. We’re sure of that. He’s finally trapped. At last we can kill the bastard and have the body to prove it.”
“I sure hope so,” Rock replied cynically. “I won’t believe we have done away with Killov until I drag his body out of there myself, though.”
“What do you plan to do—gas him to death?”
“Might as well tell you all my plans at once,” said Rock, looking over Green’s shoulder. He could see that Chen, Archer, and Scheransky were walking up the hill together now, talking animatedly. Chen looked like a child next to the bearlike mountain man striding beside him. Rock waved to them, and to the seven-footer coming up behind them: Scot McCaughlin, wild haired and long bearded, like Neptune. Rock invited them all into the command tent. There charts of the area were already set up. He picked up a pointer and hammered it on one map.
“This is our position; these are the holes the rats are dug into; and these,” he folded down an overlay, “are the rat tunnels.”
“They look like bookworm tunnels, crooked and spiraling,” Rockson went on. “None is deeper than a hundred yards. There might be explosives down there. The Ruskies might try to blow us up along with them, on Killov’s order to commit suicide. But I know Killov—he’d be here or here,” Rock pointed to the deepest tunnels. “He’s not going to kill himself. Only if he can get me at the same time would he do that. He likes his evil, sick life too much to die. He’s tortured millions, but he still wants to live on to cause more pain—and of course, to enjoy his drug highs.”
“So what’s the plan?” Chen asked, getting right to the point. “Do we dig in from the hills with earth melters?”
“No,” Rock said, scratching his chin. “I think we infiltrate through these shafts.” He pointed to a series of steep airshafts. “We’ll use only stun grenades if we’re spotted! I want as many of the KGBers we can get alive—for interrogation. We go in with sleep gas. We isolate the different groups of Reds, gas ’em, then interrogate. Find out which tunnel is Killov’s. I want to go into that tunnel alone.”
“But you said—” Archer began, looking perturbed.
“Yeah, I know. I said that Killov wants me as much as I want him, that he would kill us both. I’ll take that chance.”
Operation Kill Rat commenced at daybreak. A few KGBers had to be picked off during the night as they’d tried to slip out of their nests under cover of darkness, but there was no real breakout. Rockson was satisfied that the majority were still in there. Ground scans from the seismo team’s detectors showed that about 115 men were still alive. Movement and dioxide readings at the exit holes confirmed that. Rockson positioned his men, keeping his team as a unit.
As dawn turned to day, the commandos went in, ten to a hole. There were ten holes in all. The operation went smoothly at first; drowsy and dazed Soviets were dragged bodily from each of nine tunnels. The tenth had a series of metal snap-shut doors, blast baffles, and hidden booby-traps. Nothing was accomplished there. Even before the captives were questioned, Rockson knew that Killov was in the tenth rathole.
Rock’s team approached the tenth tunnel at noon, after sappers blew apart three sets of foot-thick steel barriers. After the smoke cleared, a scan was done. Rockson anxiously looked on as Detroit’s scan team quickly concluded that there was only one man in the last hole. “That would be Killov,” Rockson said, gritting his teeth. “Come on; let’s get him now.”
His team of ten approached the rathole. They hunkered down, looking for any movement. “It doesn’t have to be him,” Scheransky whispered. “It could be anyone down there. The best instruments can’t identify individuals.”
“But I can smell the bastard, psychically,” Rock stated, shaking with certainty. “I walked about for a long time on the hill over there, and every time I glanced at this particular bunker entrance, the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up! This is the tunnel where Killov is hiding. Come on. Slowly.”
Stepping over charred metal, they cautiously descended the steep ramp.
“Looks like an old mining tunnel,” Chen whispered. “Silver or uranium, probably. There’s no radiation, according to my gauges— Just an ancient, half-crumbling mineshaft. What’s that noise?”
“Relax,” Green said. “Vermin.”
Killov was going to die in less than palatial surroundings, Rock thought, as rats scurried underfoot and waterbugs ran every which way. They went on, and the tunnel leveled off. Archer said, “Me hit head—tunnel too small! I go back?” It was a plea.
“No,” Rock insisted. “I know you hate small places, pal, but just bend lower. And for god’s sake, don’t bump hard into any of those support beams. This tunnel could collapse!”
They moved forward, casting their lights around, but saw nothing but old beams. “Stop,” Chen suddenly whispered. They froze.
Rockson looked to where Chen pointed, and nodded. It was a booby trap, clever as hell—a little dead rat, but one that glistened dully. It was metal. A boot descending on that bomb, and boom! Chen easily disarmed it with his magna-pry device, and whistled.
“Look at this,” Chen said as he opened the “rat.” He held up a near-invisible glass-and-wire device. “Frag bomb. Sophisticated. I’ll bet the glass pieces are poisoned.”
They went on down the tunnel. It was
dryer now. Ahead, it seemed there was some dim light. “Ruskies. We should use the sleep gas,” Chen suggested.
Rockson motioned Green to come to the front. “Let it spray,” Rock said. Detroit stepped forward in the dim light of Rock’s pencil-beam laser flashlight, and detached the nozzle and hose from his belt. From the tank on Detroit Green’s back the nozzle delivered a fine spray of gray gas with barely a hiss. They watched as the blue-white gas spread down the tunnel. Ahead there was an excited word or two, then the sound of collapsing bodies.
Rock and his men double-timed around the bend and found three sleeping gas-masked black-shirt commandos, still holding their Kalashnikovs.
“Ordinary gas masks don’t work against this gas,” Detroit smiled. “It’s one of the new concoctions from Schecter’s lab.”
The rock team had all taken antidote tablets before beginning the operation, so they were unaffected. The Reds would be out for hours. The rock team stepped over them; they were after bigger game.
Down, down . . . steeper now. And Rock actually heard music. Wagner’s Ring Cycle! Was Killov playing music as waited for death? Rock motioned his men to follow him single file.
Blam! Blam!
All hell broke loose. The music had worked well, distracting Rockson from the menace above them. Suddenly a trapdoor opened and the tunnel was rapidly filling with a sticky black sand. In the quickly rising sand, the Doomsday Warrior struggled to move, along with his companions. The sand was made of a heavy, clinging substance—it was not ordinary silica, but something more sinister. They were all immediately stuck solid, up to their necks, but no further. With dismay, Rock realized no one had managed to keep a weapon above the weighty prison of sand.
There was a laugh. The music stopped. The light ahead was blocked by a slowly approaching figure. The gaunt form of the wild-eyed Russian madman was limned in the light from afar. He came forward, stopped, and looked down at each head projecting out of the dead-weight sand. Killov. Archer tried to bite Killov’s left boot, but got a kick for that. The enraged mountain man cursed him and promised him vengeance. Killov laughed again.
