Doomsday Warrior 01 (20 page)

“Thanks, Rock,” Saunders said, his body and half his face covered in a thick, green down parka. “Tell your men to take all their equipment over there to Sturges by the tent we’ve erected. He’s handling materials.” The rest of the team hustled over as quickly as their freezing legs and cramped muscles would carry them, praying that somehow there was hot coffee inside the dimly lit storage tent.

“Looks like you’ve actually got things slightly under control,” Rock said, glancing around at the frantically working crews. Then he got the bad news.

“Rock, I wanted to give you thirty seconds to catch your breath,” Saunders said grimly, “but something terrible has happened. One of the crews, climbing over to the lower glacial peak about a mile over that way to check for more wreckage, was captured by a Blackshirt patrol just an hour ago. Fiden was watching with binoculars and saw it happen. Two choppers just popped out of the sky and surrounded the men. They didn’t have a chance without weapons and were taken. The Reds didn’t see us—and had no reason to think there was anyone else. Poor bastards. Armstrong, Smith, Gilhooley, Fitz and Scranton. They’ll all be tortured to death for sure.”

Rockson didn’t let on that the situation was far worse than that. With the new Mind Breakers, the five captured Freefighters might,
would
, talk. Century City would be just a smoldering memory like Westfort within twenty-four hours.

“Keep working,” Rock said. “Don’t let the men slack off or get depressed because of the capture. You’ve got your job to do, I’ve got mine.”

The situation was critical. They couldn’t use flags to contact Century City, as they often did on routine missions up the mountain. With the moon totally hidden behind ever bigger clouds and the beginning of more snow, the flags would be totally invisible, even to ground watchers with binocs. To wait until dawn could mean disaster. Rock had to get the message to Century City—and there had to be a rapid hit on the Stalinville KGB prison, where the men would have been taken, before the Mind Breakers made them spill their city’s location. Rock was the inevitable choice to lead such a team. He would have to somehow get back down the mountain fast, deliver the message of doom and assemble the Attack Force. But how the hell could he do it? It would take twice as long to get down as it had to get up. And it was ten times as dangerous on the descent, especially in the dark, when handholds and footholds were always below one in the shadows, instead of upslope at eye level.

There had to be a way, had to. He glanced around the plateau on which the crews worked feverishly. If only he had a parakite or— Wait a minute! The Russian airlifter ramjet’s wreckage—the Reds had huge paragliders built into the wing sections of their large craft, so the planes could glide down to earth in case of trouble. This time the thing hadn’t worked. Rock went to the main piece of wreckage. There! Red pieces of fabric in the snow, about fifty feet to the side of the hulking engine. A paraglider—slightly damaged but nothing unmendable. Could it be adapted for him?

Rock quickly got several of the repair crew to help him mend the tears in the fabric with an instantly bonding glue that was used in the solar panel installation. Within minutes the contraption was as good as new. Looking much like a hang glider of the days of old, Rock had the men quickly weld a bar across the underside of the kite-shaped nylon wing. He had the men help him carry it to the edge of the peak and strapped himself in, tying his legs to the steel struts beneath. It was as good as it could get.

“All right,” Rock said, holding on to the sides of the paraglider, with a wingspan of ten feet. “Give me a push and pray for me, boys.” The men around Rock looked at each other and then back at their top fighter. The paraglider dwarfed the man under it.

“You sure, Rock?” Saunders asked. “I mean, this—”

“If the Reds get the wrong info out of our captured men, we’ll all be dead by tomorrow morning. There’s nothing to lose, everything to gain. So push me off, boys.”

With two men holding each wing and two behind, they maneuvered the paraglider to the very edge of the four thousand foot drop, straight down—and pushed.

Rock was falling. The glider wasn’t catching the air, but just dropping like a stone. He had to change the angle of descent. He kicked his legs hard and managed to flip the nose of the nylon glider up. Suddenly the wings filled with freezing air and the craft began gliding. Wobbly at first, Rock quickly figured out how to shift his weight from side to side or kick his legs to make the strange man-sized kite respond. He could see almost immediately that he couldn’t make a direct descent, the angle of the trajectory would make the wings lose their currents of air. No, he’d have to circle around, slowly dropping down. The thin, icy air burned his lungs with cold.

The moon suddenly came out, peeking from behind an opening in the clouds and Rock took a quick look at the bright panorama below him. There, he could see Century City’s Mount Carson, towering to the right, and all the woods and valleys spreading off in every direction. God, it was beautiful. He felt his mind getting tired. The air. It was too thin, he’d have to dive quickly.

He came to about a thousand feet down, nearly careening into a rock ledge. He must have blacked out for a second. He shifted his weight with a wild lurch and the paraglider banked to the right, only feet from a projecting cliff. But now he was heading in the wrong direction. Where the hell was everything? He dropped lower and lower, in wide concentric circles, until he saw Vulture’s Peak, which was just above one of the city’s entrances. He maneuvered in that direction, making fine adjustments with his legs and shoulders, zeroing in. At last he was only fifty feet above the ground, having narrowly missed several trees along the ridge. How in blazes do you stop this thing? he suddenly wondered. He tried several maneuvers to slow it down, and finally settled for what he hoped was the right approach—pulling up at the last instant. The snowbanked slope on the southern side of Vulture’s Peak was suddenly upon him. He slid his legs from the tubing and kicked down suddenly, pulling the nose of the paraglider straight up. He landed like a drunken pigeon, crashing into an eight foot drift of cushioning snow.

“I’m alive,” Rock said, standing up, half disbelieving he had pulled it off. But the Survivor had beaten the odds once again. He walked quickly toward the hidden entrance to the city on shaky legs, frozen, red-eyed, his lungs rasping from the descent. But he had saved time, valuable time that the rescue mission would need.

Sixteen

R
ockson stormed into the Council chamber, beside himself with rage at the taking of the prisoners. It could turn into a disaster. The fifty-man Council was in session, debating emergency procedures to deal with the present solar power crisis. The large chamber was lit by flickering light bulbs strung up haphazardly around the walls, powered by a groaning old gasoline generator that had been dug up from supplies.

All eyes turned toward the sweaty, clothes-torn Rock, his eyes blazing with a mad fire as he made his way to the podium of the oval-shaped chamber.

“Members of the Council,” he began immediately without waiting to be recognized. “I have just returned from the salvage operations on Ice Mountain and I have terrible news to report. Five of our men, including Armstrong, were captured by Blackshirts and flown to Stalinville. We all know what awaits them there, the poor bastards. We must immediately mount a rescue operation—an attack. It’s not just their lives I’m thinking of,” Rock continued, scanning the Council members as he spoke, “but with this new Mind Breaker machine the Reds have, these men will talk. We already know they made Preston talk and we saw what the result of that was.”

A chorus of loud voices met his words. From “Yes, let’s get the bastards” to “No, we must wait.” Immediately the Council members began arguing among themselves. Composed of twenty-nine men and twenty-one women, the Council members were fiercely democratic, debating all issues with a vigor and loudness that sometimes appeared to degenerate into a free-for-all. But it worked!

“There isn’t time for bullshit,” Rock said, his nostrils flaring. “Every minute could mean the difference between life and death for every man, woman and child in Century City.”

“Now, just a minute, Rock,” an elderly man, Councilman Rostas, spoke out. “This is a democratic council. All decisions must be approved by a vote. No man—even you—can just come in here and dictate what we
must
do!”

“Well then, goddamn it, debate and vote,” Rockson shouted back. “But let’s get on with it!” He stepped down from the podium and, glaring at the Council, threw himself down in one of the front rows of circular seats that ringed the central, raised platform of the chamber.

Councilman Rostas, as the eldest member of the Council, was given the protocol of speaking first. He rose slowly and walked with a stately dignity that he had cultivated over the years to the redwood podium, coughed several times to get some quiet and addressed the chamber.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Council, we have all heard Mr. Rockson’s request for an attack on Stalinville. Now without belittling The Ultimate American,” he said, with the slightest trace of a sneer, “I do believe that his demand is impulsive, reckless and dangerous.” The Council members exploded into a series of bellowing shouting matches for and against the line of the councilman. “Now, you all know my position. I have long believed that an accommodation can be worked out with the Russians. After all, our Free Cities are functioning quite smoothly even in the midst of their occupation. They can’t get us and we can’t get them. I’m sure that were we to try to deal with them rationally, they would be only too willing to settle things. We could both share this land. It’s big enough. They’re wasting billions of rubles every year fighting us. I believe, therefore, that to attack Stalinville now would be the height of foolishness and would precipitate a violent counterattack, not just against us but perhaps the Free Cities all over America.”

Rock could scarcely believe his ears. His face turned red and it took all his self-control to stop from screaming at the “soft-liner” Council member. As was the rule of the Council, the next speaker presented an opposing point of view. George Sheckle, a man Rockson knew and trusted, walked quickly to the podium, dressed in his ever-present tweed sports jacket, threads hanging from the sleeves, arms swinging loosely around his tall, thin body. Sheckle stood almost six foot, ten inches and was easily the tallest man in Century City, but at a weight of just under 165 pounds, he was like a walking scarecrow, all bone and tendon.

He looked around at the Council members slowly, waiting for a modicum of silence, and then began. “You have all listened to Mr. Rostas, who we all respect and who often has presented valuable ideas to this chamber. But tonight, I believe he is making a grave mistake. Number one, those men are ours. They’re about to be tortured beyond anything any of us here can even imagine. Secondly, if they do talk, and from what I’ve heard of this new Mind Breaker machine they will, all of Century City could be lost—smoking ruins like Westfort. We would be cast back out in the wastelands, those of us who even managed to survive, savages again, like our ancestors after the war, But thirdly, and most importantly, I must take serious disagreement with the idea of accommodating the Russians. There is no accommodation possible with murderers. Good Lord, man,” the lanky Sheckle said, staring at Rostas in his seat, some forty feet away, “they’ve already destroyed most of our country, enslaved all the Americans around the Red forts, and just bombed Westfort, our closest neighbor with more atomic weapons. Something they vowed in those leaflets of theirs they’d never use again.”

He looked down at the floor, his eyes bright and burning with belief. “No, I don’t trust the Russian barbarians. I never have and I never will. We must respond with an attack. Now, I may not agree with Rock’s impulse to send out a team tonight. I think it must be a well-organized force of perhaps two hundred men. We could make a plan over the next twenty-four hours and get a well-equipped Attack Force together—with a much greater chance of success.” He smiled sincerely at the Council members and left the podium.

The debate raged on for almost two hours with nearly every speaker getting his or her views in. The arguing grew increasingly raucous with members booing each other and yelling out insults. The Council chamber had rarely witnessed such explosions of feeling. But then they were debating the very future of their city, their lives.

As the highest-ranking military officer of Century City, Rockson was given the opportunity to speak last before the vote was taken. He rose from his seat, where he had been taking it all in and stepped to the platform, behind the podium. He looked down at the floor for a moment, gathering his thoughts, knowing that this could well be the most important speech he would ever make, and began.

“You are the democratically elected representatives of the citizens of Century City and I must respect each and every one of you. For the tradition of democracy and debate is the one feature of our society that enables us to be a million times stronger than the Soviets could ever be. But I can scarcely believe the things I’m hearing here tonight. Are those of you who are opposed to saving our men’s lives, those who want to deal with the Reds on a rational basis,” he spat the words out, “so naive as to think that they would really live up to their word? Or even want to try? Their aim is
total and complete
destruction of all Free Americans. We are antithetical to their very nature—their very essence of being, which is master and slave. They want one thing: a nation of slaves, of mindless vegetables, of backs to carry their loads and feed their society. As a soldier, a fighter who has spent his entire life battling against the Red murderers, I have seen what they are really like. I have seen them wipe out whole villages, have watched them as they lined up women and children and shot them point-blank in the face. I’ve seen them rape and bayonet and take American lives as if they were so many ants to be stepped on.”