Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum Read online

  He breathed out hard and began looking through the dog-eared flight manual which was sitting on the instrument console. He started fiddling with the various buttons and dials without actually pressing them in. Slowly it started coming back to him. But it looked like it was going to be more difficult than he had remembered, as some modifications had clearly been made to this MIG.

  Suddenly there was a flash of bright light at the far end of the runway, followed by an explosion.

  “Shit,” Rock spat out. Chen and Archer had been discovered, or were creating a diversion too early. Whatever! Things were speeding up and they weren’t anywhere near ready to take off.

  “What the hell’s happening down there?” Rock screamed down at Sheransky as he saw troops running out of their barracks about a mile down the tarmac, heading toward the source of the explosion.

  “Almost done, Rock,” the Freefighter shouted back up again. “Dude says we’re about three quarters full of fuel—another five minutes.”

  “Move it man, move,” Rock screamed out again. “We may have to leave without a full tank if—” But he hadn’t even gotten the words out when he saw a whole squad of Reds rushing down the asphalt toward the jets.

  “Get in, man, forget it—we’ve got enough for the moment—we can refuel somehow, somewhere else—” Rock climbed half out of the cockpit, leaning over the side to see what the hell was taking so long. And even as he looked down he saw that as Sheransky climbed up the ladder propped against the side of the X7, the tech had grabbed a huge wrench and was just a mini-second away from bringing it down on the Freefighter’s skull.

  “Ah, shit,” Rock groaned, ripping out his shotpistol. He knew it was a matter of fractions of a second until Sheransky either lived or died. But his own mutant reflexes were slightly faster than the tech’s, even starting with a handicap. Rockson’s shotpistol rang out just as the mechanic began his descent toward the back of Sheransky’s neck. The Russian Freefighter was still blissfully unaware of what was transpiring. He looked up to see Rock’s huge-muzzled .12-gauge pellet-firing handgun aimed at what he thought was his head. He turned white as a ghost, wondering if somehow the Doomsday Warrior thought that he had betrayed them.

  The gun went off with an explosion that made his ears do handstands. But the mechanic just inches behind him had worse problems. His whole face disappeared into a grimy red mush that splattered out into the air as he fell backwards down onto the cement.

  “In, in,” Rock screamed out angrily as Sheransky froze for a few seconds on the ladder, even as the other guards began opening up with their weapons. The Russian Freefighter got the message that this wasn’t the best place to be as a slug whistled past his ear and pinged off the ladder. He made it to the top of the cockpit, and Rock’s strong arms reached out and grabbed hold of his sleeve, pulling him in so he slammed down onto the floor.

  “Buckle in,” Rock said pointing to the co-pilot’s seat alongside his. There were two low-slung seats behind them for flight navigator and bombardier. Just enough room for Chen and Archer if they ever got to them. Which problem Rockson wasn’t even worrying about right now as he bit his lip hard and threw the SYSTEMS ON switch. He was sure you were supposed to wait five minutes or so to actually fire up the plane after it was gassed up. Or so it said in the manual. So he waited ten seconds—and that was hard. But the jet, though it grumbled, the whole thing shaking wildly, fired up hard, a blast of red flame shooting out the back, along with some bolts and nuts.

  He turned the half wheel sharply to the right and threw on some power. The MIG spun around, wheels screeching like some psychotic drag-racer’s car on a back road. The funnel of exhaust flame poured right into the faces of several overzealous Reds, and they went up in flames, their hair, clothes, faces all burning brightly in the night. More shots rang out as Rock headed the jet out of the parking area and onto the runway. He heard a few more pings around the metal outer structure of the jet, but figured if it didn’t blow up, he wasn’t doing so bad.

  Sheransky strapped himself in as he kept ducking down, hearing shots whistle by overhead since the cockpit’s bulletproof dome was still in the open position. Rock had a few more passengers to pick up.

  He guided the throbbing jet down the white-lined runway, the MIG jerking from side to side as Rockson tried to get the hang of it. Not that he had more than seconds. For even as they approached the far end he could see that Chen and Archer were in trouble. The Reds had set up mortars and heavy machine guns all around the two men. He could see them halfway up a small hill just the other side of the base fence. They hadn’t even reached the fence! The Russians were opening up on the two of them like they were facing an army.

  But Rock had his own equalizer now. And even as the jet moved to within a hundred yards of the air force troops, he opened up with a fusillade of its explosive machine-gun slugs. The bullets ripped through flesh and metal, fence and dirt, leaving bloody pools all along the side of the field. Two of the mortars and one machine gun stopped firing as they joined in the rain of smoking steel. Rock stood up, poking his head through the cockpit opening, and waved his hand up and down hard, signaling for the two trapped Freefighters to lie down flat where they were. They got the message, and stopped firing and flattened themselves out, though Archer’s barrel butt poked up some from behind a boulder.

  Rock sighted up through the computerized firing grid on the console, and then slammed his hand down on the firing button of the jet’s air-to-air missile system. The jet shook like it was having a little fit, and then a missile shot out from under one of the wings. At just a few hundred feet the explosion was quite loud, and the jet shook violently from the shock waves. But when the smoke cleared Rock saw that he had indeed made an instant access route through the airfield fence.

  Archer and Chen came barreling out of the smoke and onto the runway as more of the Reds opened up again. The two men darted this way and that, Chen throwing out shuriken after shuriken from beneath his sleeves. The whirling five-pointed blades spun with a terrifying whistling sound through the air, ripping into whatever he had aimed them at—man or machine. They exploded with nearly the force of a grenade. And more of Lenin’s men got to meet their Maker a little quicker than they had been expecting to.

  Even as they rushed forward, Rockson again ripped the controls around, and the jet screeched around too, doing a 180 in about forty feet. He pulled the thruster back so the jet flame in the back went low but didn’t die out, so the two Freefighters wouldn’t be cooked to overdone before they even had a chance to get aboard. Then he heard cursing and scrambling, and even as he turned his head around, the two of them were somehow clambering up on board.

  “Behind me,” Rockson screamed out as they both tumbled inside, Archer almost landing on his lap and sprawling out onto the steel floor. He didn’t wait to see if they were all tucked in nice and cozy, but pulled the thruster back to nearly half. The whole jet shook again, and they could smell the acrid odor of burning fuel as the exhaust flame lengthened to seventy feet spitting out behind them. They were pressed back into their seats by acceleration.

  Just as Rock saw a Russian aim a bazooka-type weapon from only about sixty yards dead ahead, he pulled the wheel towards his chest. The computer read-out indicated that they had enough thrust to get airborne. The canopy shut, the jet shot forward like a Brahma bull coming out of the rodeo gate, and slowly rose up. And they didn’t even hear the piercing scream of the bazooka man as he melted like silly putty beneath the searing heat of the blast.

  Why couldn’t Rock get her higher?

  The jet tore down along the runway at an altitude of ten feet as Russians came out from everywhere trying to strike down the intruder. More shots rang out—tracers, clouds of smoke as larger weapons went off. They were definitely ready to sacrifice the jet to get the suckers inside who had stolen it. Ahead Rock could see three armored vehicles tearing ass straight toward the slowly rising MIG from the far end of the tarmac, firing away with heavy machine guns.
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br />   “Hold onto your fucking hairpieces,” Rock bellowed out above the roar of the overtaxed engine. He had just found the takeoff thrusters. “We’re going up.” He wasn’t sure himself if he meant going up in the air or exploding—but he flicked the switches and pulled back hard on the control just as they reached the first of the advancing armored vehicles. The MIG took off straight up. Its right wheel slammed into the men who were shooting from the lead armored vehicle, sending them flying. The tail flames of the MIG ripped over the rest of the attacking vehicles, sending them all into flames as the three vehicles skidded wildly end over end, erupting in more fire as their gas tanks went up.

  Somewhat to Rockson’s disbelief the jet hit 2000 mph, the afterburners clicking in automatically to give him extra vertical boost.

  They climbed up, rapidly losing sight of the bodies and then the rooftops of the air base. Up over the smoke-filled air of the battle scene below they rose like a skyrocket on the Fourth of July. Sheransky let out a little cheer, and even Archer grunted up something congratulatory. A thin smile raced back and forth across Rockson’s face. He was as amazed as the rest of them that they had pulled it off.

  Nine

  “Rock, Rock!” Sheransky screamed out as Rockson took the MIG X7 up in a steep climb, turning sharply so they all slid over at nearly a ninety-degree angle. Archer, who hadn’t had time to strap his huge bulk in, was thrown from atop the seat and sent slamming into the steel frame of the canopy a few feet off. “They’re sending up jets after us,” the Russian Freefighter bellowed in his heavily accented English as he stared out the window nearly straight down at the miniscule moonlit runway below.

  “Oh, are they?” Rock replied. He quickly banked the jet back around again so they all felt like they were going to fall out the other side. Archer, bellowing out slobbering curses, slammed all the way across the plane behind the second pair of seats, where Chen had managed to get himself belted in, and bashed himself into the other wall. Only his steel hide kept him from getting seriously hurt, but he was getting bruised up pretty good. His bearded face raked across the protruding ribs along the inside of the jet.

  “Get strapped in, Archer. No heroics!”

  Rockson leveled the plane out again, and they could see that he had turned completely around so they were heading back toward the runway from about ten miles off. Rock could see the thrusters of three jets on the far end of the tarmac already firing up, red tongues of flame in the grayness below. He knew he probably wasn’t good enough to take them all out in dogfights. That took a high degree of accuracy from a speeding jet moving at 2,500 miles an hour. But then he had something different in mind.

  “Now, if I can just remember how this sucker works,” Rock muttered as he slammed his hand down on a few buttons on the computer console. The screen in front of him suddenly filled with a video image of the runway, and they could see the planes below and the men running around by infrared detection. Rockson came in at about a hundred feet high and slammed the red FIRE button, then climbed sharply again, turning to the right. A rocket detached itself from beneath the MIG’s right wing and soared down, leaving a white plume behind it.

  They all heard the concussion as the jet hadn’t quite cleared the area, and felt it shake wildly for a second. Below, a thundering explosion ripped the middle of the runway just as the first of the Russian jets, throwing on its burners, reached the now-smoking crater. It slammed into the hole without having gained any altitude, and like any vehicle that hits a pothole six feet wide and three deep—it dipped right into it with a grinding scream of wheels and metal. A nano-second later the craft erupted into its own little volcano of debris as yet another jet, unable to slow its takeoff, ripped into the flaming jet-cremation-chamber pit right in the middle of the runway. Only the third one was able to throw on its reverse thrusters, turn sharply to the side, and avoid exploding, running right off the blacktop and through a fence.

  The Freefighters cheered lustily as they saw that Rock was as good a gunner as a pilot. There was no way the Reds could send up anything after them. Not off of that smoking pit! Maybe in a day or two, after they’d filled the crevice in and smoothed it over with bulldozers. But Rock’s team would be in Africa by then.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sheransky muttered as he tried to calm his slamming heart. “You showed them a shit or two, heh?” he said, not quite getting the colloquialism right as he smiled broadly and slapped Rock on the shoulder hard. Which motion wrenched Rockson’s hand from the controls for an instant and the jet swooped sharply to the right, dropping about a hundred feet in a second.

  “Uh, pal,” Rock said without taking his eyes from the console and the cockpit window, as he straightened the plane up and started regaining altitude. “Hitting the pilot is a big no-no. Nyetski, nyetski, yes?

  “Sorry, Rock, got carried away,” the exuberant Russian defector said, his face growing beet red. Archer—who had at last gotten himself strapped in, barely, as the belt was hardly made for a sixty-inch chest—laughed broadly. It was his kind of humor.

  “Rock,” Chen blurted out as he tore his face away from the side window. “Before we all start breaking out the champagne, I hope I’m reading that gas gauge wrong. Does it say empty?”

  Rockson hit the gauge with his fist. It went to full. “Aw, it was just stuck,” he said. “No sweat!”

  Ten

  Near the town of Jabal Al Uwaynat, right at the common borders of Egypt, Libya, and the Sudan, was located what had been termed many centuries before “The Bloody Triangle.” There, countless men had died in ceaseless disputes and wars, and now four thousand more men gathered along the three hills that surrounded the field of rocks that were arranged in a bizarre swirling pattern—a pattern laid down by slaves thousands of years earlier, and long since disturbed by wind and storm. Their original outlines of lions, dragons, gods, and demons were hardly recognizable.

  In the center of the rock garden a large winged stone sculpture crumbled at its outer edges, mutilated but for its wings and long serpent’s tail. On its back, in a hollow twenty feet in diameter that had been carved out for ritual sacrifice, a fire burned, red flames rising up to the sky twenty, thirty feet. Men around its edges poured fuel on it and worked immense bellows so that the fire roared up at the dawn sky as if challenging the sun out of its cave of darkness.

  The men on the surrounding hilltops were clad in myriad colorful and garish costumes: long, flowing robes of purples, oranges, greens, and golds. They wore beads and silver and jeweled necklaces. The men had proud, fierce faces of brown, black, cocoa, in which one could see the effects of their warrior genes. They whirled and jumped up and down, holding their spears and short swords, their ancient rifles, their shields made of elephant, zebra, and crocodile hide so thick and difficult for any blade to penetrate.

  They lived to be fighters; they and their people had indeed fought for many centuries. And from the way each slightly differently garbed or beaded group glanced from hill to hill, it was obvious they were not used to being with each other. Each of these sturdy desert tribes was bunched together, separated from the other tribes.

  The Libyan, Egyptian, and Sudanese desert fighters who had been gathered here were ancient enemies. Their fathers and father’s fathers had murdered one another. Yet now they stood gathered together within spear’s throw or rifle shot of one another. The tribes watched as the flames rising from a large pit on the back of the sacred sun serpent statue rose ever higher, beckoning the sun to rise as the stars quickly faded in the early moments of dawn.

  Suddenly there were gasps and cheers from the assembled thousands as they saw a cloud of dust coming in toward them from the gray desert, beyond the half-crumbled gargoyle. It was Him—the Great One—the Man-God Kil-Lov who had descended from the heavens to earth to carry out the prophecy. The Ka Amun. The Man-God who would carry out the prophecies of total rule, of conquering the world, of uniting all the tribes under the rule of his thousand-year reign.

  As the dust cloud dr
ew closer, they could see the priests of Amun walking in their long white robes covered with arcane symbols. They carried large religious symbols, carved from wood or chiseled from stone, aloft on poles. Some were heavy enough to take six, even eight men to hold them up.

  On each side of the line of sun priests, drummers pounded out smashing beats on immense gazelle-hide drums which were carried along on straps around their shoulders. And behind them, other men blew on long brass instruments, sending out a cacophonous trumpeting of heart-stopping tones. The sheer spectacle of it all made the superstitious desert nomad warriors’ bones tremble. If there had been any skeptics among the gathered about the power of the Amun cult, they were rapidly vanishing.

  And suddenly they saw Him, in the center of the line of priests—the Man-God himself, the one who had descended from the skies on fire-feet and landed on the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The angel sent from the Sun God himself, a piece of the god, burning with Amun’s unquenchable flame. Colonel Killov was carried atop a golden throne. He was dressed in the finest of Egyptian priestly garb—with long white robe adorned with precious jewels at every seam. A large triangular-shaped golden hat sat atop his head, and golden paint had been dabbed in hieroglyphs on his emaciated face and along his boney arms.

  Ka Amun smiled as he saw the waiting army of fighters bowing down to him, screaming out their peculiar high-pitched wail of obedience.