Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance Page 4

  The colonel smiled. “I’m so glad you brought that up,” he said sarcastically. “Fortunately, the missile control complex in Moscow was destroyed by the late Ted Rockson.” The others gasped at the news that the Doomsday Warrior was dead.

  “I-I didn’t . . .” Mishkin stuttered, “mean to . . .”

  “Mean to imply that I don’t know what I’m doing?” Killov asked, his voice turning hard. “On the contrary, every bit of this takeover strategy has been worked out to the most minute detail. But I am glad you raised the subject.” Killov clasped his withered hands together on the round mahogany table and surveyed the KGB officer corps. “Would you do me a favor, Mishkin?” he asked, his voice as low and hollow as the sound of a crypt door closing.

  “Of course, Excellency, your merest request is my—”

  “Please go over and get that treaty for me, would you? It’s sitting at the edge of my desk in a round jar. I want to show you what I think of that sacred document.”

  Mishkin’s eyes nearly rolled up in terror. He knew something was up, but he dared not refuse a direct request from his leader.

  “Of—of c-c-c-ourse, sir,” the portly KGB officer whispered through suddenly dry lips. He rose slowly from his chair as the others stared at him through shuttered eyes, uncaring, as if they were watching a fly crawl across the wall. Mishkin reached the table, picked up the treaty in its museum-like glass container and turned, slightly relieved that the thing hadn’t exploded in his hands. The colonel had a reputation for eliminating those around him who displeased him—in a hurry. Mishkin’s face slowly relaxed as he saw Killov smiling at him, holding his hands up to receive the document. The sweating officer took one step back toward the conference table and screamed—a scream so sharp and terrifying that the gathered KGB brass jerked back in their chairs. Smoke poured out through Mishkin’s eyes and ears as his hands and legs jerked wildly like a marionette in the hands of an epileptic puppeteer. Bolts of the purest white electricity coursed through him, describing an arc from floor to ceiling, traveling through every cell in his flesh and cooking them. Killov had had hidden metal plates beneath the rug and above the plasterboard ceiling installed to protect himself against assassins. Plates with cables attached to them, capable of sending out surges of over 500,000 watts of power for up to a minute—siphoning it off from the KGB city’s power supply.

  The white rainbow of death crackled and spat out electric fuzz as it burned Mishkin’s brain and blood, dancing wildly from side to side as if it enjoyed the chance to kill. The smoke in his ears and eyes emerging from his mouth like a dragon’s breath changed within seconds to fire so that the whole head was spouting tongues of yellow flame like some horrible nightmare vision. Then the fingers, too, sprouted flames and began to spin around in front of the burning man like propellers of melting flesh. But the thing that had been Mishkin was already dead. The electric streams held the blackened husk for a few more seconds and then suddenly cut off. The charcoal mess, no longer shaped like a person, fell to the floor where it lay in a smoldering pile, glowing and dimming like burning embers in an oven.

  Killov snapped his fingers at one of the servants standing near the table. “Clean it up.” Then the colonel turned back to the table where the assembled officers sat, stiff as ramrods, looking straight ahead at rigid attention.

  “One less spy and one less fool,” the colonel said with a satisfied look. “And let that be a lesson to all of you. I have my eye on you, always. I know what you think, where you eat, who you fuck. I know all your perversions and your weaknesses. If you carry out my orders and give me your unswerving loyalty, the world shall be yours. I shall rule the whole planet, and each of you shall rule continents, billions of people. You will be like no kings or emperors who have ever lived. Your power shall be like a fist, able to crush even the smallest pockets of resistance. And my power shall be absolute. Absolute.” His eyes lost focus on the scene before him as he saw the course decreed by his vision. Absolute control of every bit of life on the plant—human, animal, plant. He would be like a god. He would be God. Many had tried—Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. But none had succeeded. He would be the first human God. And when he was—then he would carry out his ultimate plan. The secret that none of the others knew—not one. To destroy the planet. For a God’s power could only be demonstrated in its ultimate greatness by death itself. The mass murder to end all murders, Killov’s goal was nothing less than to take the entire planet—every living thing, every blade of grass, every microbe and virus—with him into hell.

  “So that takes care of the agreement I signed with Vassily and Zhabnov,” Killov said, his eyes again focusing on the officers. “Now it’s total civil war, gentlemen. There can be, there will be, only one victor!”

  The colonel pushed a button. The lights dimmed, the window became opaque, and projected upon it there appeared a map of the country, showing Zhabnov’s extensive but incomplete re-creation of the American interstate highway and rail networks. The restored Amtrak and Conrail lines, now fitted with tungsten steel rails for the bullet trains, were silver threads on the map. Zhabnov had done him a favor by making these feasible roads of attack. Killov pressed another button. The computer filled in yellow-dotted lines for the three-stage attack Killov planned on Washington itself.

  “One whole division of Death Squad paratroopers will be assigned to Washington. Yakov, you will lead them. I will command the Washington attack personally-coordinating from a mobile command center on the outskirts of the capital.”

  Over the next two hours, Killov’s Night of Blood took shape in the minds of the officers. It was a maniacal, all-out assault with no reserves whatsoever held back. If even a few fortresses failed to fall, it would be disaster. But they could say nothing. Their years at West Point hadn’t prepared them for making objections. And the sight and putrid stench of Mishkin’s electrocuted body had burned an image of terror into their minds that would never fade.

  “I have planned a blitzkrieg into the midwest. Specifically, we will hit Interstate 80, which runs through Iowa. Cut it—and you will keep all convoys from reinforcing Lawrence, Kansas. I want that place utterly destroyed. No memory is to remain of the Summit. There is only one leader in the world, there was never a summit! It will be removed from the history books. Skolonski, you will command the combined Air and Army attacks—including the Elite Air Cavalry—against the Niagara Falls military command. From Quebec to Toronto and down into Steamville, New York—border of the radioactive waste area—Zhabnov has built the most massive fortifications. He would have had this impregnable fortress area completed by next year—a retreat of ultimate safety. But I move now, before it is completed.

  “The Air Cavalry is essential to this battle. How many Suslov-19 choppers with ATG rockets do you have available?” he asked Rorskin, head of the Air Force.

  “Two hundred—three if we include the experimentals.”

  “Everything—I want all the choppers—except my five Deathhead Command Choppers—to be launched on the Buffalo Strategic Area—marked there in red.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And I—I will have the honor of leading the attack upon the White House itself, simultaneous with our swift strikes on the Buffalo strategic area. You will drop all of our paratroopers—including the Elite German division—upon Washington. Right on the White House. Then I will come and take my rightful seat there in the Oval Office. I want Zhabnov alive—I have special plans for ‘the Pig.’ ” Killov smiled. “I will let one of his captive young ladies decide what tortures best fits him. But I have plans for his execution. In the end, he will be put on a spit with an apple in his mouth, smeared with honey, and roasted on the White House lawn. He will be fed to the survivors of his general staff—who will then suffer the same fate!”

  When the officers had all finally departed, Killov staggered to his long, serpentine black-and-gold-streaked marbled desk and slumped down in his chair. He was exhausted—and more jittery than ever. So much was at stake—everythin
g was at stake. It had to work. He reached in his drawer and took out a vial of tiny red pills, popping three of them between his cracked lips. There—that was better. Within seconds he felt the energy of the Phenyl-Vitatons rip into his body as though a diesel engine were running him. He knew he was consuming every bit of his own flesh by pushing himself like this. But within days it would all be over, and then . . .

  He opened two steel doors on the right-hand side of the long desk and took out . . . his dolls. They were plastic, each a foot-and-a-half high, and amazingly lifelike. The faces and physiques of the men Killov hated and had to destroy. Premier Vassily, with his age-spotted face, bent over as if about to fall; Zhabnov, with his jowls and ruddy complexion, his ugly little goatee and huge elephantine stomach. The KGB colonel placed them on top of the desk, side by side. Then Rockson—Rockson’s weathered face, Rockson’s granite muscles showing through the doll’s khaki uniform. Killov assembled them all—all his enemies—and looked at them, addressing them with a sardonic grin.

  “You shall all soon be gone, my little friends. How sad. We shall converse no longer. But the world will be such a nicer place with you dead.” He reached forward and took the Rockson doll by the head, lifting it into the air. “The Ultimate American,” Killov laughed, spitting out the words, “has already passed into the dark world—haven’t you?” Killov put the eighteen-inch Rockson replica onto a stone circle near the center of the desk and took out a small torch from his “Supply” drawer. He clicked the side of the oxy-hydrogen torch, and a pencil-thin, whitish-blue flame shot out straight as an arrow. The KGB Commander thrust the torch toward the face of the Rockson doll, setting the flame just fractions of an inch from it. Within seconds the eyes began dripping, twisting around, then the mouth and ears. The features all sank and blended into a pudding of eyeballs and lips. Killov lowered the flame slightly and the shoulders slowly collapsed, the big arms dripping toward the stone beneath like the long limbs of a gorilla. A narrow smile sliced Killov’s drugged face.

  “Yes, die, Rockson. Sink down into the slime, into nothing.” He played the flame over the figure, the legs giving way, the whole thing falling over backward. The plastic soup caught fire and Killov sat back, his hands clasped beneath his chin, his black eyes reflecting the flames that rose from the hideously distorted image of his deadliest enemy. With Rockson gone—the world was his.

  Four

  Over plains and mountains of both incredible beauty and stark ugliness, making their rounds of the smaller Free cities in the Montana wilderness, traveled President Langford and his daughter, Kim. They rode on ’brids—the strong, radiation-resistant strain of American horses that had arisen wild from the roaming mustangs and short, stout work ponies of the Navajos. A pair of these reddish spotted beauties now carried the future of America on their backs.

  The two traveled alone, clad in buckskin and leather. They carried no metal at all, so none of the Red spy drones that might fly overhead would register them on their magnamometers. They were safer as two plain “mountain people” in leather hats. The Soviets didn’t pay much attention to a lone traveler or two. After all, they depended upon the grubby American mountain men to bring in chunks of nuke-dislodged turquoise and garnets to decorate the throats of the elite of Moscow’s fairer sex. The Americans also provided the furs the Soviets used in making luxurious hats and coats. The traders lived, ultimately, to serve the Soviet Empire.

  Langford took the lead, and the two mounts maintained their rhythmic gait along the grasslands of northern Montana. His jaw was firm, his head held high, and he looked straight ahead at the mountains that rose in the distance like a vision from a beautiful dream—snow-capped and crystal clear like jewels on the brown flesh of the earth. He often had that faraway look that great men tend to get on their faces—their minds too involved in working out the problems, the liberation of whole countries. For in his heart, Charles Langford, recently elected President of the Re-United States at a Constitutional Convention, believed that it was all on his shoulders—the freeing of his people, the removal of the occupying forces. And what a task it was. It seemed laughable for him even to think about such things. Here he was rambling along on an old flea-bitten mega-mule, armed with a wooden pistol and a knife, carrying enough food to last him about thirty-six hours, and he was daydreaming about conquering the Soviets and winning back the entire United Socialist States of America. And, yet, in his heart he knew he could do it. If he could just get the military councils of every rebel city to send two of their top officers to join his Allied Military Command Forces, headquartered in a thick forest belt in Minnesota. . . . There was so much to do. So much . . .

  Kim’s thoughts were not of her country, but of the man she loved—Ted Rockson. It had been months since she had seen him. And as time went on, the days became harder and harder. It was sometimes difficult to hold his face in her mind. Yet her love, the desire to be with him, to hold him, love him as a woman should was overwhelming, like a flood of desire threatening to explode at any moment. She knew he was alive. She could dimly sense his presence with her barely developed telepathic powers, brought to life by the Glowers after she and her father had been saved from the very jaws of death by the hideous but compassionate race. If he had been killed, she would know it—would feel the sudden void. And yet he seemed to live so heedless of death, giving everything he had for his country, his Century City, and his fellow Freefighters. He was just like her father—devoted, obsessed with the fight to free America. And so was she, of course. Yet some days, days like today with the sun like a bonfire in the sky, burning down on the low grasslands of the endless plains, jack rabbits darting from bush to bush . . . some days she wished she and Rockson could have just been man and wife, could have lived as they did in the old days—with babies and a house, a two-car garage, and PTA meetings. They were all the things she had read about in the old America—the pre-Nuke America—a place she would never know. She felt an aching in her breasts and in her loins—an aching to feel his hands, his lips upon her. “Oh, Rockson—come to me,” she telepathed through the shimmering heat waves that rose from the flatlands around them. “Come to me, I miss you,” she communicated with all her might, not even knowing if she was sending her thoughts any distance at all. Her eyes filled with tears, which she quickly fought back, as her father slowed his ’brid some ten yards ahead.

  They came suddenly to the top of a ridge and looked down over a deep valley strewn with pink and white flowers. Kim sighed. She wished she could make a wreath for Rock’s head and put it on his white streaked hair, gaze into her lover’s mismatched mutant aquamarine and violet eyes once more. Perhaps soon—when her travels with her father took her farther south—perhaps in the snows of winter, she and Rockson would meet and keep each other warm . . .

  Her father peered through a pair of plastic electronic binoculars, scanning the valley from his position on the auburn ’brid. He focused on a thin wisp of smoke nearly a thousand feet off. Only the Sovs had mechanical means of transport in these parts. She watched as her father attached the sound detector module to the binoculars and continued to scan. Suddenly he put the binocs down, turned to her in his saddle, and said, “We’d better get out of—”

  He never got to finish the sentence. Out of the nearby cluster of trees came a group of Red troops, armed with Kalashnikovs they trained on the President and his daughter. The two didn’t even have a chance to reach for their weapons. They were dragged off their mounts and rushed back to an armored personnel carrier parked behind some trees. A well-sprung trap, President Langford thought bitterly. No place in America was safe from the Red death grip.

  Kim and her father were tied up tightly with nylon rope, elbows bound together behind their backs. She prayed that the officer in charge wouldn’t realize who they were. If he did, they would be sent to a Mindbreaking center. Their precious secrets, the locations of the American free cities, would be worked loose from their dissolving minds.

  Lieutenant Primorski, who ha
d stalked the two for miles, walked over to Langford, took his chin in his hands and yelled, spitting right into the President’s face, “I know who you are—who could mistake that Mount Rushmore jaw, those piercing blue eyes? It seems I have hooked myself a really big fish indeed. Yes,” the officer said, the veins in his nose ruptured, his cheeks bloated and discolored from too many vodka-soaked nights, “this could be very good for me, very good indeed.” He walked slowly around the two prisoners, a broad smile crossing his face. He knew there was an astronomically large reward for the capture of either Rockson or the so-called “President” of the country. Hundreds of thousands of rubles. Lenin, what a big mansion that would buy back in the Motherland! He would be promoted, become a wealthy, powerful man. He slapped the President on the back suddenly, feeling great warmth for the unfortunate fellow—after all, Langford was about to make him a very rich man.

  “Here, Mr. President, have a drop of vodka with me. It will be your last, I can assure you. And as for what lies ahead—well, I’m sure you can imagine. Please have some.”

  Langford laughed. “Me? President Langford? You have delusions of grandeur. The President travels with a whole convoy, not just one woman. We’re just simple mountain people.”

  Primorski’s beefy face suddenly darkened with fear, the way a bright day is darkened when a thick cloud passes over the sun. His wealth, his women, all his visions of excess threatened to vanish as quickly as they had formed. He slammed the cap back on his silver and turquoise flask and said angrily to the prisoners, “Well, we shall soon find out. No one has ever withstood the laser probes of the Mindbreaker. I’m sure you’ve both heard of that little device, even out here in the wastelands.” He snarled sarcastically, “I’ve heard some of you simple mountain people aren’t so simple at all. That you hide weapons, explosives, even artillery in your filthy animal lairs.” He looked toward their motionless ’brids, reins held by a Red trooper, and scanned them quickly with his bloodshot eyes. No, it couldn’t be, he decided instantly. There was no way these two could be transporting anything bigger than a few pistols on the ribsticking mules.