Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration Page 11

  The freefighters walked back to their Roadmaster and examined it. The thing was gone. It had served them well, but now after more than a hundred years of service it had met its maker. The front tire had been completely ripped from its axle by the force of the explosion; the engine seemed to have numerous holes in it. It leaked oil like dark blood onto the yellow ground.

  “We’re switching horses,” Rock said to Archer, who was trying to extricate the last of his few belongings still stowed inside and the remaining steaks. They took their supplies and the winnings from the poker game and carried the load over to the truck. They kicked the still-smoking timbers from its back and then hauled out the dead men from their seats. The thing smelled like a charnel house, but when Rock flipped the ignition switch, the engine roared into life. Roofless, doorless, peppered with little holes from the roadster’s .55—the damned thing still ran.

  “It goes,” the Doomsday Warrior said with a sardonic grin as Archer jumped up through the opposite door onto the seat beside him. They shot forward into the unknown, leaving a graveyard of smoking steel behind them.

  Ten

  Hundreds of planes filled the skies—huge K-121 Airlifter four-engine jet troop carriers that had set out six hours earlier from Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart. They soared down from out of the clouds over the Red fortress city of Dzersch in southern Colorado, setting down one by one. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops, tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery were ensconced in their steel bodies. The German invasion force was arriving in America. The second time in history that foreign troops had set foot on American soil. One landed every minute on the two-mile-long desert runway, unpaved hand-pounded dirt at the outskirts of the newly built invasion camp.

  Exhausted American slave workers looked up with fear in their narrow eyes as the giant transports dropped from the brown skies, their jet engines roaring out a symphony of impending doom. The ragged, beaten and sullen men—there were no women, they had been sent to breeding farms in Russia—had been up for days and nights, smoothing down the hard-packed runway with shovels and hand-pulled rollers. The wretched half-men had never seen such a concentration of power, as everywhere now in the pre-fabricated alumisynth Quonset huts that they had also assembled over the last month, officers and troops were stowing their gear—preparing for the slaughter of Century City. Trucks and armored vehicles roared by everywhere—Red army flags on their front fenders but swastikas on their doors—all converging at the Soviet Army Command Center, a five-story building in the center of the concentric circles of huts that spread out around it for nearly a mile. High cheekboned officers emerged from the vehicles and rushed into the headquarters, thick satchels of orders and maps under their arms. At the side of the ominous windowless building a wooden platform stood, still splattered with blood from the night before. The scaffold of death—for recalcitrant American workers who were brought there and slowly, over hours, strangled and tortured to death while their screams rang through the hovels at the northern end of the camp that served as the slave barracks.

  Ralph 66, one of the unfortunate American “no men” who had been shipped here months ago along with nearly twenty thousand other slave laborers from Red Fortress Cities around the country, was barely able to walk. He had been up for eighty hours without sleep. But those who fell did not rise again without being pierced by a Red soldier’s bayonet. So the bearded, pale worker staggered along for yet another day of backbreaking toil.

  “I am less than nothing,” he mumbled to himself as he stumbled out to the landing field along with a hundred other bent slaves who gasped for air with each faltering step. Nothing—no mind, no food, no sleep. Since they had taken his one possession—a cracked glass with a decal of President Kennedy on it—he had nothing at all. He mustn’t think of it, just step, step—his life was to step, step . . .

  There was so much noise now from the jets that it hurt his ears. The huge skylifters stacked like angels of doom in the pulsating green radioactive sky above Colorado dropped down like steel hawks, their tails of fire passing just over his head.

  “Vat haf ve here?” a Nazi officer asked him, noticing that Ralph 66 had been looking up instead of down at the ground as was the law for all slaves. “Do you zee something interesting?” the German asked, his thin lips grinning like stretched steel.

  “Nothing, nothing, I’m sorry,” Ralph 66 muttered, bowing his head low and trying to move on. The Nazi major slapped Ralph 66 on the side of the face with his swagger stick.

  “You like troop planes, do you?”

  “No, no, I only want to work, only work.”

  “That is good.” The steel-gray eyes bore into him. “Hmmm, let me see your profile.” He pressed the end of the leather-bound stick against the stubbly face. “I see upon looking at your upraised face that you are of partly Aryan stock. I have a different chore for you, mongrel. Come with me.”

  “Please I only want to—”

  “Shut up, cur. You don’t realize how lucky you are today. You will serve to replace a dead boot lackey in my commandant’s quarters. You will be fed, shaved, bathed, clothed.” The Nazi officer smirked. “Now do you wish to go to work?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Ralph 66 replied without raising his head.

  He was taken to the servants’ quarters in tents behind the general’s building. Other American slaves took off his filthy clothes sending them to the garbage dump. He was cleaned, scrubbed for the first time in his miserable life, salved over his festering sores, dried and then clothed in a magnificent dark green Nazi servant’s tunic. He felt like a new man—he was now a boot servant, a high post indeed for a no man. In just a few hours he had to accomplish the task of learning the deferential way to approach the general and help him on and off with his boots. He practiced on the other servant’s feet until he was sore. His muscular though wasted arms gave him the strength to put on the boots—with pressure—all the time lining it up and pushing or pulling. No twisting, for the general had a sore leg. The last boot lackey had been executed for twisting the general’s ankle.

  “Do not make the same error,” the head servant told him again and again.

  He was taught well and felt fully competent by the the time the evening boot removal was to take place. Still, it was with some trepidation that he approached such a powerful German. And with hate. The Reds must be weak, he thought. Why do they need the Nazis to fight for them? Had the legendary Rockson killed President Zhabnov and the rest of the Red rulers in America? He came to the two guards at the door of the general’s quarters who looked at his ID papers and allowed him to pass through. Inside, he hesitated just outside the commandant’s office suite, listening to a phone conversation through the half opened door. They spoke almost always in Russian, these high Germans, as a sort of acknowledgment, a courtesy. And Ralph 66 knew Russian well. Those who didn’t follow hasty Red orders were dead men. There were no excuses.

  The Command barracks were a giant, heated affair, three stories high with immense double swastikas on the outer walls, sitting on the southern edge of the vast encampment. In the main first-floor room, the commander of the American theater of operation sat on thick furs, drinking hot tea from a steaming samovar. Herr Ubenführer Marshal Von Reisling, a tall squarish man with a patch crossing his left eye where he had been stabbed by an enemy years before. Moist pinkish lips sipped almost daintily from the china cup as the impeccably dressed general with purple resplendent uniform, gold swastikas on each lapel, sat back, resting for the first time in days. There had been so much to do, so many preparations as the largest invasion force since the first days after the nuke war a hundred years before entered America. But all had gone well. The transports had all landed. The camp had been ready to receive them, having been hastily assembled in just a month. Nearly ten thousand of the original thirty thousand-man American slave force had died in the process of building the Nazi city of Dzersch—but no matter, there were many more where they came from.

  The general was prepa
ring to meet with Gunter Klaus and Helmut Heinz, the commanders of Wolfpack 201, the winner of the German all-army games the year before. For the presentation of the Lead flag, for the 201st would spearhead the invasion, he would wear his full uniform with gold brocaid, and his knee-high black boots. His new servant knocked nervously at the door and came in bowing effusively.

  “Yes, yes,” Von Reisling said with distaste, “put them on.” Ralph 66, sweating from every pore of his terrified body, carefully slid them up the wide calves an inch at a time.

  Outside the commandant’s barracks, Gunter and Helmut stood at rigid attention, waiting, at the honor guard’s command, to enter the forbidding quarters. Gunter was the regimental leader of the 201st, a tall angular-faced man with perfect Aryan features. His icy blue eyes seemed to ooze death of which they had seen much. Beside him stood Helmut, shorter, plumper, but just as tough. He had worked his way up in the Nazi ranks and had fought his way at every inch. Brown-eyed, his features were much coarser, almost swarthy. It had been rumored by several under his command that his hooked nose betrayed Jewish blood in his heritage. But none dared breathe a word of such thoughts—for it would be their last. The two men stood like frozen statues, just feet outside the general’s quarters. Only their slightly breathing chests betrayed the fact that they were alive. They visualized the beaming yet stern face of Von Reisling as he would present the glorious flag to them. They did not shiver in their thin parade uniforms though the midnight temperature hovered at five degrees.

  At last they were escorted in by the goose-stepping honor guards and proceeded down the red carpet in the front hall to the general, who sat on a green silk chair mounted atop a marbled platform with foot-high gold swastikas surrounding it. The general rose, and as the two men stood at rigid attention, he walked around them.

  “So you are Gunter,” Von Reisling asked with a stone face.

  “Javohl, mein general.” Von Reisling placed the Order-of-Hitler medal on his chest.

  “Your 201st Wolfpack will be the spearhead of the operation. Congratulations—you are no longer lieutenant but a major.”

  “Thank you, mein ubenführer,” Gunter said, clicking his heels together with a sharp crack.

  “And you, Helmut,” he said, placing a medal on his already decorated chest, “will be promoted to major as well, effective immediately. You will be second-in-command of the Wolfpack. Sieg heil,” he barked, holding his arm up in stiff arm salute.

  “Sieg heil,” both men yelled, raising their arms to the ceiling.

  “You are dismissed,” Von Reisling said. “And may the brave blood of the undefeatable German soldier flow through your veins.”

  When they left, Von Reisling sat back on his military throne and yawned. Such displays were necessary for morale but he had much to do. The Grandfather himself was to call him from Moscow exactly at midnight. He called in the boot lackey again to remove the tight-fitting knee-highs which were beginning to pinch his throbbing leg. The lackey seemed to tremble as he removed Von Reisling’s boots, slightly twisting the right leg. The general winced in pain.

  “Get out, fool,” the commandant screamed, kicking Ralph 66 in the face, knocking him backwards. The boot servant ran from the room, tears in his eyes. Von Reisling got on the phone immediately. “Stein, this is Reisling. This new servant you sent me today—he is inadequate. Please, get me a new one and one with the intelligence to put on a pair of boots.”

  The voice on the line asked him a question. “No, don’t execute him. We’ve lost too many workers lately. Put him back on the airport detail.”

  “Jah, mein general,” the voice replied, clicking the phone down.

  Standing just on the other side of the doorway, overhearing the conversation, was the man who was clean for the first time in years, rested, well-fed. Ralph 66 was going to be replaced. No, no, he screamed silently. He had just had a taste of the good life. He would rather die than be returned. He lifted a glass ash tray from a small table in the hall and cracked it against the table edge, breaking it into three razor-sharp fragments. He slipped one of the glass blades into his uniform pocket.

  General Reisling picked up the ringing phone next to his tiger-skin bed.

  “This is Premier Vassily,” the quavering voice at the other end said.

  “Yes, sir,” Von Reisling said, tightening his voice.

  “Good you are there, Reisling.” Vassily left out the Von, a treasured family name aborted by the Red master. The general reddened but tried not to let it affect his voice.

  “I’m checking to make sure that all necessary preparations are proceeding according to schedule. There can be no slip-ups.”

  “German efficiency has put us ahead of schedule,” Von Reisling said proudly. “The planes all landed with but a single malfunction. The men are in their barracks, armed and ready. I am meeting with my officers tonight to give them final instructions. Morale is high, sir, very high.”

  “Excellent,” Vassily said, his white lips smiling at the other end, nearly twelve thousand miles away. “You know what the capture or death of this Ted Rockson means to me. When you have successfully completed this mission—there will be a position of power waiting for you here in the Kremlin. You understand me?”

  “Fully, sir,” Von Reisling said, reaching over and lighting a cigarette at the end of his ivory holder. “We will capture this Rockson, of that you can rest assured. A quarter million German soldiers will make sure of that. There is no way that he will escape.” The general snickered at the thought.

  From the servants’ area, a door was being slowly opened. Ralph 66 stepped through, moving just an inch at a time so as not to alert the general whose back was facing him. Reisling was alone and on the phone. Good, his death would come easily. He moved toward the general. None would ever be so close to this all-powerful overlord, Ralph 66 thought. I will die for sure, but I must take this chance. Perhaps American slaves will say my name tomorrow with awe. Perhaps my name will be banned from even being uttered—like Ted Rockson’s. I must be careful . . .

  The general lifted his Tokarev Service Revolver from its holster, turned and placed a single bullet through the advancing servant’s forehead, dead center between the man’s eyes. The body was dead before it hit the plushly carpeted floor.

  “What was that noise?” the premier asked.

  “A difficult servant has been replaced, Grandfather,” the general said, reholstering the gun. He smirked—the eye patch was in fact a sophisticated radar device with a 360-degree field of scan. Von Reisling had had too many enemies over the years, too many assassins trying to take his life, to have not learned a few tricks or two. And this measly mongrel slave thought he could kill the leader of the German army. Fool—he had seen the man coming from the moment he stepped through the door.

  The lifeless eyes of Ralph 66 scanned the thick purple curtains that ringed the general’s living quarters. The good life.

  Gunter’s 201st Wolfpack commando detachment were the first to advance to the invasion site, some thirty miles from the comforts of the sprawling base of Dzersch. The 201st’s orders were to scout the terrain and send back intelligence reports for the rest of the 250-thousand-man army of this unknown and treacherous land in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. And if the freefighters were waiting, they would be the first to engage in combat. Gunter was ready, proud to hold the banner of the bravest, the best of the German army.

  The men lined up at the open door of their K-121 Airlifter, their parakites strapped to their bodies, as the icy air rushed in, blasting them with a frigid introduction to the American Rockies.

  Gunter, who always led his men into battle in the front ranks, rather than the rear as many officers preferred, was the first to hit the silk, leaping from the wide bay door. His parakite snapped open and he caught one of the high currents, heading into a slow curving glide. But he didn’t like what he saw below: swirling clouds, snapping around the atmosphere like serpent’s teeth, ready to strike out with all of nature�
�s omnipotent fury. Fierce winds whipped his parakite, stretched out to its full eight-foot wing span, the nylon foils catching the full force of the blasting wind, buffeting it back and forth like a leaf in a hurricane.

  It was hard to keep the damned thing homed in on the radar signal that had been dropped the day before by parachute, marking their drop site. The rest of the Wolfpack were hanging onto their parakites for dear life. They filled the skies around him, over two hundred of Germany’s toughest fighters—men he had known since they had marched together in the Hitler Youth. Men who would die for the purity of the Aryan Race. In their hearts burned the flame of the Reich. He skillfully steered his parakite through the increasingly stronger blasts of hail and snow until at last he saw the outlines of a three hundred-foot wide outcropping on the mid-slope of a towering ice-capped mountain. That would be Pike’s Peak, 14,100 feet above sea level. His lungs burned trying to breathe in the thin air as he dropped like a hunting hawk in ever lower circles, edging toward the plateau.

  But the landing site was coming up too fast, a blurred vision of trees and rock. He veered up at the last second, pulling the tail control of the kite, and managed to stop the parakite almost in midair just inches above the ground. He touched down with his feet, holding the kite around him at waist-level, and stepped out of the support bars. He had made it. Gunter quickly turned to see the rest of his Wolfpack soaring this way and that, like a flock of birds gone mad. They were all having trouble in the stiff winds and the now-blinding snow blowing horizontally. He saw a man high above smash into the edge of the mountain and fall from his parakite, quickly dropping thousands of feet to the rocky floor below. But the rest of the squad somehow made it, slamming into the plateau in crash dives, jumping from them, even landing upside down. Within five minutes all but three of the pack were on the outcropping and gathering around their leader who shouted out instructions. They broke into their preordained groups and began heading up the mountain, Gunter, taking the lead, and his right-hand man, Helmut, bringing up the rear. Heavy snowflakes blanketed them, cutting their visual range to less than three yards.