by Ryder Stacy
They rode through the gray day into increasingly arid terrain. Even though it was clouded up, they had to bring out the Shecter blankets again and drape themselves from the hot rays of the sun. They pulled their legs up onto their mounts and just sort of tranced out as the animals made their tired way one grinding step at a time through the prairie land. Far off to the north Rock saw several jagged atomic-crater walls on the horizon, looking like still-festering sores on the face of the Earth. When they at last saw another range of mountains in the distance, everyone’s demeanor took a turn for the better. Even the hybrids poured on the gas, wanting to reach the green-treed shade and some water, to get away from the sour smell of the dry red dirt beneath their hooves.
Thus they reached the Blackface Mountains—so named because of the almost shimmering black coating over their surfaces, the result of nearby bomb blasts. They were marked on Rock’s map as “safe.”
It was sundown, but he pushed them a little, making the strike force head up into the foothills. According to the map, the Red air force base of Mesdinsk was just over the rise. It was built on a long flat plateau nearly two miles long and a thousand feet or so wide. The ’brids didn’t like the idea of not stopping to graze on the slopes, green as they were—not after tramping through the wasteland dirt which made their hooves burn as if acid had been poured on them, which made their legs tremble beneath their powerful bodies as if they might give way. But somehow they walked on. Slowly, reluctantly, they stomped one angry leg down and then another.
They reached the summit, a good seven hundred feet up at a forty-five degree angle. Rockson had them all slow down before they got to the very top. The silhouette of a man on ’brid could be seen for miles there. Not that the Reds would be expecting anyone to be coming in from this direction. Most of the fortress cities and outpost bases weren’t even that well guarded anyway. They were a lazy bunch, these bastards, Rock mused. After a century of occupation, the Russian troops had grown bored, fat, tired, like any entrenched bureaucracy. They had experienced few attacks on their main bases, as the Freefighters preferred to concentrate on convoys or on an occasional strike against a particularly important city. Some of the out-of-the-way bases, like the airport below them, almost coexisted with the small bands of Freefighters who often lived within miles of them. Just leave us alone—we’ll leave you alone. For the moment anyway. Only the moment was now up.
The men dismounted from their steeds, tethering them to some stunted blue-barked trees just below the rise, and slid up on elbows and knees until they were looking down over the air force base. It was a long runway, designed to take intercontinental transport jets when necessary. But only a single runway ran along one side of the low barracks houses.
Rock took out his night-binocs and scanned the area. It was a typical Russian setup. They had designed the structure of these bases a century before, and that was that. No change in one hundred years. Which made it that much easier for anyone who had any designs on messing with them.
Eight MIGs were parked along a wide concrete corridor at one end of the two-mile-long runway, along with two of the MIG X7 four-seaters that Rock had prayed would be there. He let out a deep breath. So far so good. Two immense StratoBursters sat like steel whales side by side, so fuel supplies had clearly been delivered recently.
At the other end of the runway, set back about a hundred yards, were rows of two-story barracks, sealed off from the outside world like Howard Hughes’s bedroom, so that not an American germ nor a particle of American radioactive debris could enter. About midway along the runway the control tower, a desultory globe-topped structure, rose up about sixty feet, high enough so controllers could direct air traffic, what there was of it, along the tarmac. It wasn’t even lit up. They had clearly closed down for the night. Not a hell of a lot of call for air control after dark out here in the high-rad sticks of mutilated America!
Even for a Red base, the place looked pretty run-down. Rock knew the system. Only those bases, army command centers, etc., with high-ranking, well-connected officers got much of anything. There probably wasn’t anybody above the rank of captain out here. So they had to deal with the crappiest equipment, food, and barracks.
Rockson almost felt sorry for the poor bastards who were holed up inside those little tin sardine cans, scared to even come out most of the time. Stuck there for years—often five, six, even as much as ten years—before they were allowed to return home. If they were still alive. They were hardly listed in the Moscow Who’s Who out here. And if the whole damned base disappeared in some mega-storm or was sucked down in an earthquake, those back in the Kremlin weren’t going to do a hell of a lot of mourning.
This base’s very isolation—and the habits the air force officers had gotten into of closing the doors, pulling down the blinds, and waiting for the years to pass—was going to be very helpful to Rock and his team. He noted the two guard towers at each end of the place. These appeared to be manned. There were dim lights on inside the amber-tinted windows on the thirty-foot-high sentry boxes. They’d have to get those.
After he’d checked the place for a good five minutes, up and down, back and forth with his glass, trying to peer into every nook and cranny, he pulled back away from the rise as the others followed suit.
Archer was looking at him with huge brown eyes as he grunted out pitifully, “FOOOOOODD? EEEEAAATT NOOOOWWW?” The near-mute, just because of his immense bulk, was more like a grizzly than a man. He had to deposit uncountable pounds of chow into the large mouth each day in order not to starve. But tonight the oversized Freefighter was going to have to make do with an energy pill.
“So now ve rest up and attack in the morning?” Sheransky asked hopefully, as he stretched tiredly, looking forward to a good night’s sleep, to be rested up for their assault.
“No,” Rock said, as his mind already was planning feverishly the best way to carry out the attack. “We’re going in tonight. In fact, relieve your bladders, boys, ’cause we’re moving right now. You might not get a chance to piss again all the way to Africa.”
Eight
“A diversion. Somehow we’ve got to create something to divert the Reds’ attention from our hijacking of the X7,” Rock said as the men crouched down around him in the darkness, popping down a few super-energy and vitamin pills, a creation of the Bio boys back in C.C. The pills didn’t substitute for food, they didn’t even take away the stomach’s growling hunger, but they gave enough fuel in an emergency situation to keep a man going a good twelve hours without any energy loss. Sheransky popped his down in a depressed manner. Archer swallowed a whole handful of the things and eyed the feedbag around the ’brids heads with envy. Chen had his own concoction—super-hard crackers of Miso and God knew what Oriental energy concoction that he chewed on slowly instead of taking the bio pills. He sat in a crouch, almost invisible in the night air in his ninja suit, which cloaked him in a curtain of black against the other blackness.
“Some kind of dramatic happening down there,” Rock whispered. “Even with those bastards watching their videos of rowing contests on the Volga and their sitcoms about masturbating tractors from Mother Russia, someone’s very possibly going to see something. We gotta wheel one of those X7 babies around, maybe even fuel her up—plus I’m going to need a few minutes at the controls to familiarize myself with how to fly the damn thing. It’s been a while.”
The last few words didn’t exactly make them all feel any better. Sheransky gulped hard and downed another energy chunk. But they didn’t say a word. It was a given from the start that when on a mission with Rockson, life could be terminated at any second. Still, they prayed he at least had some vague ideas about the functioning of the super-jet.
“All right then, this is the plan,” Rockson said as he finished gulping down a few of the bio pills himself with a big slurp of water. “Sheransky, you’ll come with me. If there’s anyone around the jet parking lot, maybe we can fake our way in. You’re a real Russian, and therefore have a much be
tter accent than mine. That might get us in without firing. Archer, Chen, you two will go to the far end of the runway and wait for trouble. If you hear nothing, just wait. We’ll come pick you up at that end. If you do hear or see trouble up where we are, set that far sentry post on fire. That’ll draw them all to that end. Once you’ve got their attention, circle back along the perimeter of the field—to the midway point—and we’ll taxi there in the X7—and we’re on our vacation cruise.”
It all sounded simple enough. None of them had any illusions that it was going to even come close to being that way!
Rockson went over the plan again so everyone understood just what they were supposed to do. They synchronized combat watches. Chen and Archer would begin their penetration of the field at exactly 11:00, just as Rock with Sheransky, made his move to hijack one of the jets. They unloaded their gear from the ’brids’ backs, took off the saddles and reins from the beasts, and sent them on their way back down the slope in the direction they had just come from. All of Century City’s ’brids were trained to make their way home once their riders left them or were killed. Only about a third actually ever made it home from distances like this. But that was better than none. And those that did were considered the toughest of a tough breed. Good breeding stock. Maybe the ones that didn’t make it back survived out in the wild, who knew?
“Good luck, boys,” Rockson whispered into the darkness as the hybrids picked up speed, realizing they were on their own again and headed off fast into the hills beyond. Rock muttered an inaudible prayer that the Diety would take care of them. Then the men were off over the top of the rise, splitting up into two groups. Chen and Archer headed down the slope to the left, Rock and Sheransky to the right. Archer, for all his attempts, had just never quite gotten the crouch-and-run down right. He was just too big. It was like a bear trying to limbo. Funny and sad.
Rock had to go slower than he normally would as Sheransky, though he was in fairly good shape and had been working out like a maniac in the C.C. gym for months, wasn’t near the physical conditioning of the other men on the team—let alone Rockson himself. Rock would have been a super-athlete in the twentieth century, with offers for endorsements for every soft drink, car, and charge card known to man, so he had to hold back a little. Rock kept a sharp eye on the field as they descended toward it, making sure no one spotted them. It took about five minutes to get down the steep loose-graveled slope, and then they ran outside a fence, around the base, through gullies, and over mole holes the size of the tunnel Alice fell into Wonderland in. The Reds clearly weren’t busting their humps to keep the perimeter in shipshape condition.
They were rounding the far end of the fence with the jets in sight sitting parked like metal behemoths of the night. Rock was just starting to think they were going to get inside without too much trouble when a jeep came out of nowhere, its searchlight suddenly snapping on and swinging around onto them.
“Shit,” Rock hissed, “down, down.” He knew Sheransky wasn’t as combat hardened and that his reflexes were slower. And true to form, the Russian defector seemed confused for a moment, and suddenly took off to the right for some bushes, stumbling around like a jackrabbit with one leg. The two Reds in the jeep saw only the running Sheransky and somehow missed Rock, who had ducked down fast, a situation Rockson took instant advantage of. As the jeep veered wildly around toward the stumbling Sheransky, Rockson came tearing out of the darkness with his long knife blade in hand. He leaped with everything he possessed in his steel legs, and managed to get up onto the back of the jeep even as it continued its pursuit.
The guy who was sitting on back of the jeep, handling the light machine gun that was mounted there, didn’t even see Rock. But he felt the cold steel, which sliced once deep across his neck. And he felt the blood shooting out of him in a waterfall. But only for a second. Then he was hurtling off the jeep into permanent darkness. The driver heard something at the last instant and reached for his service revolver. Rock jumped all the way to the front of the jeep with a leap, and slammed the knife down hard into the Red’s upper back. The blade penetrated muscle, bone, and the heart, slicing it in two like a badly butchered Sunday roast. Spurting blood from his mouth, the Russian didn’t even have a chance to scream as Rockson kicked him from the driver’s seat, taking over the wheel and bringing the vehicle to a stop.
Quickly he turned off the floodlights, leaving only the jeep’s amber-colored low lights on in front.
“Psst, Sheransky,” Rockson whispered into the darkness around the jeep. He heard rustling sounds and spoke up again sharply, just in case the Freefighter didn’t realize that Rock had taken control of the jeep. Suddenly Sheransky came bolting out of the shadows, his silenced mini-Liberator submachine gun cradled in his hands like he was out for bear.
“All right, you Red bas—” the defector began. But he barely got two steps before he saw Rock and the gun lowered in his hands. “Oh, Rock, sorry, I thought—”
“Get in,” the Doomsday Warrior snapped. “We don’t have time to play around out here.”
“Sure, Rock, sure.” The blond Russian cursed himself silently. He was lucky Rock even took him on missions, he thought. Why the hell was he so slow sometimes? Rockson wheeled the jeep back around in the direction it had come from, and when he spotted the two dead guards lying about fifty feet apart, he stopped. He and Sheransky got out and donned their clothes, blood-splattered and torn as they were.
It was a pathetic disguise, Rock had no illusions about that, but he hoped that if they were seen it would be from a distance, in the darkness. It would have to do.
He started the jeep up again and headed it around the back end of the runway. As they came around the corner of the cyclone fence, he saw a gate about a hundred feet ahead and a single guard sitting back on a chair reading some well-thumbed Russian magazine under a flashlight. Probably porno.
“Sheransky, get your submachine gun ready—just in case. But I’m going to try to bullshit our way through. Tilt your head and mutter something dumb in Russian if the bastard looks up. If he looks up a second time, take his head off.”
“Will do, Rock,” Sheransky said, brightening a little after his fiasco of several minutes earlier. He cradled the submachine gun as Rockson came out of the darkness fast, cornering around through the opened gate. The guard glanced up quick, but fortunately for the two Freefighters, he had just reached the centerfold of his magazine. A centerfold containing an immense Russian woman with equally immense breasts. He stared down hard as the vehicle tore through, and Rock breathed out a sigh of relief. If they had been stopped before they even got inside, the firefight might have been too intense to get hold of the X7. Now at least they had a chance at it.
Rock tore right toward the aircraft-parking area. Most of the jets were completely unready for flight, the smaller ones chained down to protect them from the fierce winds that sometime swept across the land like a hurricane. Others had their wheels with blocks all around them. But two of the jets, one a MIG X7, stood side by side facing the long runway. Rock prayed the X7 was functional.
As they drew closer, he saw a grease-covered tech fiddling around with the wheels of the MIG. God was on their side tonight, maybe. Rock brought the jeep to a screeching stop, and was out and heading straight toward the man before he had a chance to realize what was going on.
The Russian tech began to rise from where he had been lying on his back looking up at the front wheel housing of the jet. He reached for his service revolver as he realized something was wrong, realized that the two men coming straight at him were not Piskov and Masilowski, the two night guards.
“Don’t even think of it, comradeski,” Rock snapped with a commanding tone as he aimed his shotpistol right at the tech’s nose from about a foot away. The guy could get a good look at how big the barrel was, how it would take his head off with a single shot. Sheransky added a few choice threats in Russian as he also leveled his silenced submachine gun. The tech got the message, and let his hand fal
l away from the pistol as he rose up to full height with hands above his head. Rock reached down and took the revolver, slipping it into his belt. The mechanic was covered in grease and dirt, and looked more like a chimney sweep of Olde England than a technician who handled the most advanced aircraft in the world. But then Rockson was sure he and Sheransky were equally debonair in their blood-soaked Russian uniforms.
“Tell the dude that I want this X7 fueled up to the gills and everything ready to go—in ten minutes tops,” Rock said to Sheransky, not wanting to waste the time with his poor Russian pronunciation. Sheransky snarled at the tech, spitting out a mouthful of Russian commands. The tech gulped hard several times and nodded his head vigorously in the affirmative.
“Says sure he’ll do it,” Sheransky said, turning to Rockson but keeping his submachine gun trained right on the man’s heart. “But I’ll keep a close eye on him. I don’t trust how easily the bastard went along with it.”
“What did you tell him?” Rockson asked as he glanced around a full three hundred and sixty degrees to see if anyone else was nearby. No one was. “You spoke too fast for me.”
“Just said that we were bandit cannibals from the mountains.” Sheransky smirked. “And that if he fucked with us, we’d cut out his heart for our dinner, and cut off his balls and send them back to Russia so his wife would see what she was never going to get again. The second part of the statement I think got to him.” Rock winced at the thought, and jumped up onto the wing of the sleek jet, making his way along the inner edge up into the cockpit. Its long bubble dome was opened back. He sat down in the pilot’s seat and looked at the controls with a groan. He had flown one of the jets about two years earlier, using a manual and praying real hard. Somehow he had pulled it off, but it sure as hell looked a lot more complicated tonight than it had then. He wondered if they’d changed the damned control panels.
