Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (22 page)

The sapper teams came out of the woods on each side of the wide valley in waves, one minute apart. They rode at full speed among the panic-stricken troops as Nazi officers screamed out angry orders trying to get their units back in battle formation.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The Germans were the attackers—the freefighters the victims. The galloping hybrids covered the field of battle, as shells from the artillery rocked the earth to the north and south of them. They heaved their charges under tanks, armored vehicles, machine-gun emplacements, squads of Nazis brave or stupid enough to try and stop them. Everywhere they rode they left a trail of twisted burning scrap and corpses spouting pulsing fountains of blood. From time to time one of the ’brids or its rider would get hit, plummeting in a cloud of dust to the ground. But for every freefighter shot down the Germans lost twenty men, and tons of equipment.

Abrams rode into the thick of an infantry battalion, on his own now as the further the cavalry units got into battle, the more separated they became. A huge smile covered his red-bearded face as he blasted away at full speed, sending Nazis flying like bowling pins. Only these pins spat red and they screamed as they fell to the blood-soaked ground. He felt like an avenging angel, the souls of those Jews who had died in the Nazi butcher camps a century-and-a-half before singing out in joyful vengeance in his head. Yes, this is for you—for all of you, Abrams thought as his steed leaped clear over a mobile field cannon and the sergeant dropped his last sapper charge right on top of it. The blast hit his ’brid before it reached the ground, sending them flying as the .122mm howitzer exploded into smoking pieces around them. Abrams was knocked unconscious for a few seconds and came to, to find himself pinned under the ’brid. It was dead—a piece of still-steaming howitzer muzzle lodged deep in its neck, blood pumping out in great gushes every few seconds.

“Damn,” he muttered, trying to extricate himself. But a riveting pain shot through his left leg. It was broken. He could see Nazi troops running at him from all sides, their bayoneted Kalashnikovs held forward. “So be it,” Abrams whispered under his breath. “On this day, Jacob Abrams found his peace.” He raised the pump shotgun and fired at the closest Nazi’s smirking face just yards away. The load blasted through the man’s chest, making a fist-sized hole. The smile vanished as the corpse fell like a stone. Abrams pumped the gun, ejecting the smoking spent shell and instantly fired again. The .12-gauge shot spread out in an X-shape, catching two more Nazis in the gut. Their stomachs blasted out, revealing pink sucking innards, as the two crumbled to the bloody dust. But there were too many. Shots were slamming into the body of his dead hybrid, rocking the corpse above him with violent jerks, sending bolts of pain down his broken leg. Suddenly a shot tore into his shoulder, knocking him flat on his back. Abrams sighted two more of the Nazi killers and sent them greetings—pump shotgun style. He had reached down to his cartridge belt to reload when he saw a shadow just below him on the slippery ground. He looked up into the face of a leering German who thrust his bayonet into Abram’s belly. The knife went clear through, all eighteen inches of it, burying itself in the ground. The Nazi pulled the blade out, screaming, “Die, American bastard.”

“You
die, Nazi pig,” Abrams managed to cough back as he whipped his .45 from its holster. He pumped off three shots point-blank into the German’s guts. The man’s eyes opened wide in horrified surprise and then he sank forward and died.

Abrams felt his mind growing dim as the blood pumped through the wide slit in his abdomen. “I’m ready,” he croaked as he slid back onto his back, his arms and legs no longer responding to his commands. “Take this Jew into never-never land.” His eyes closed as the voices of his ancestors cried ghostly tears in the deafening air around him.

On the northern ridge, Rockson could see the battle being played out like some vast choreographed dance of death—the shells falling among the advancing Panzer divisions, hundreds of them, which had managed to regroup amidst the flaming carnage. They swept toward the bottom of the mountain on which he stood, raising their .152mm cannons and beginning to rain their own murderous hail of shells back up toward the freefighters. On the valley floor below, the hybrid attack teams were creating trails of death, leaving bodies and wreckage behind their galloping hoofs. But they were only human, flesh and blood creatures. Round after round poured down on them from the German troops who were slowly reorganizing themselves. One, then another of the brave freefighters fell beneath the fusillade.

The skies were filled with their own roaring air battle. The Rapid Strike Force had taken out half of the eighty Red transport choppers and the rest had finally fled at top speed, hightailing it back over the southern ridges to safety. Now it was a battle between the Nazi attack copters and C.C.’s own fleet. The freefighter pilots were amazingly proficient considering how little training they’d had. But then they were fighting for their country, their city, the very core of their souls—and they didn’t hold back an inch. They swirled and dove, always two at a time, one blasting its way through the German helios which were filling the skies by the minute, the other riding shotgun twenty yards behind. The attack formations had been taken right out of the century-old manual from America’s first attack fleet and the freefighting pilots followed it to the letter. After all, those guys way back when had had years to work it all out. And it was proving highly successful. The Nazi pilots had been well-trained—but in the unimaginative strategies of the Russian manuals. The Reds were used to strafing rebels, shooting at ground targets; they had never faced a foe such as these speedy devils who didn’t seem to give a damn about their own lives. Seventy-five of the jet-powered Stulag-5 Nazi squadron now blanketed the sky above the valley, trying to find, to shoot down these mosquitos that buzzed around them. But their own immense armaments and super high speed capability only added to their problems. At speeds of over three hundred mph it took them precious seconds to turn, to climb, to evade the American steel bugs that seemed to appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly. And with so many of their own in the sky, they were unable to fire their heat-seeking missiles for fear of taking out a Nazi craft. Hysterically they tried to figure out some way of dealing with these pest, these gnats, who were shooting them down like clay pigeons.

Rock swept his computer-enhanced field glasses over the battle scene, barely able to keep up with the action that was unfolding throughout the flat valley. The tempo was speeding up as the Germans at last seemed to get a grip on themselves, their officers taking control, shooting fleeing troops if they had to. Slowly, ever so slowly, they managed to get themselves into their battle formations, the big lines of Panzer tanks taking the lead, grinding toward the northern mountains, two rows of one hundred tanks each—every two hundred feet. The Doomsday Warrior could see their hastily implemented defense strategy unfold as columns of tanks that had been the last to arrive by transport chopper moved from the center of the plain out to the sides, straight lines of steel death, their cannons pumping out shell after shell toward the woods and the concentrations of American hybrid squads. They were going to try and create a box—a square of tanks around the entire valley, protect themselves on every flank, and at the same time box in the freefighters down there fighting for their lives.

Damn, he hadn’t expected them to be able to respond so quickly to the surprise party the freefighters had laid out. Perhaps he had underestimated the strategic mind of the Germans—after all, they had once been the most brilliant of military nations, with their blitzkrieg, their mechanization of warfare, their Rommels, their ruthlessness and speed. But it was all too late now. There would be no time-outs, no chance to rethink things. And it was all up to him, to Ted Rockson to somehow make the difference. He felt a strange emotion surge through his soul—something he had never felt before. It was fear. Not for himself—but for all those men and women down there on the plain below who had trusted him and the general staff. Who had gone into battle with smiles on their nervous faces, and hope in their hearts. He couldn’t let them down. Couldn’t stand up here on the safety of the mountain top and watch them all die. Suddenly he wished he had never become the top military officer of Century City—that he was out there with Chen and Detroit and Rona, who were right now, he knew, fighting with fury, deep inside the German lines. It was too fucking complicated being a general, too much responsibility.

He pulled back from the outcropping and slid down behind it, closing his eyes tight. He concentrated as he never had before and sent out frantic telepathic messages to the mutants who were working with the different forces.
“You are being cut off from all sides. Form a single force and head east before tanks form complete trap. East, hook up and head east.”
He dimly heard mental messages being flashed back, signaling they had heard him. He waited a few seconds, breathed out and sent out mental commands to the four mutants spaced wide apart on the northern peaks who were armed with the deadly black-beam weapons.

“Black beam squads—fire at tank column moving from center of valley to east. Trying to cut off our forces. Stop them, concentrate all fire power on column heading east.”
He opened his eyes, gasping from the strenuous mental effort. He had done what he could. Now it was in the hands of God. The freefighters would find out on this bloody day whether or not he favored America or was in fact “dead,” as the manifestos of Marx and Engels and Trotsky and Lenin had all so loudly proclaimed. Rockson turned his eyes skyward as the maelstrom of sound and flame and blood screamed out from the valley behind him. He searched through the clouds, trying to penetrate the very cosmos, searching, searching for a saving sign.

Fifteen

T
he Rock team had set out in the dead of night, far before the battle erupted into hellfire. Chen led them through the thick woods on the eastern edge of Forrester Valley, with Detroit, McCaughlin, Archer and Rona close behind him. They moved quickly on narrow shortened skis through the snow-covered fields and hills, wearing white camouflage body suits and loaded down with weapons and plastique. Chen carried the exploding star-knives with which he was an expert—five-pointed razor-sharp blades of steel, tipped with explosive charges, a Japanese short sword at his waist and other deadly surprises. Detroit wore twin bandoliers of grenades across his chest and carried a snub-nosed uzi, which he had found on one of C.C.’s supply expeditions—and had grown quite fond of. Rona was armed with a sawed-off Liberator set on full auto and equipped with Teflon-coated bullets, capable of penetrating steel. Archer, taking up the rear—and having some difficulty on the short skis—carried his ever-present steel crossbow around his shoulders and a quiver full of arrows, tipped with everything from exploding charges to gas pellets, and an eighteen-inch twin-bladed hunting knife he had picked up while browsing through the Century City weapons supply. McCaughlin, moving surprisingly well for a man of his size, was equipped with a .357 magnum and magazine firing .12 gauge.

A light snow was falling as they headed through the still-dark woods, but thanks to Dr. Shecter’s going-away present, infrared ski goggles, they were able to see clear as day as they made their way along a narrow path, trampled down by migrating mountain elk. They hit a good pace, moving quickly as they adapted to the yardlong skis with which they had had only two days’ practice, shooting down slopes and sliding along flat terrain with the crosscountry strokes they had been taught by C.C.’s top ski instructor. Miles to the west they could hear the assembling German army, tanks coughing to life, officers screaming, the vast fleet of transport choppers landing their loads of death. Each carried their own personal thoughts burning like hot embers in their brains. Their mission might make the difference between life and death for Century City—to destroy the central command headquarters of the Nazi army, miles off on the peaks of the southern mountain. They knew their fellows would soon face the battle of their lives out there on the valley floor—but if the Rock team could take out enough of the German officer staff, maybe even Von Reisling himself, it might make all the difference. When the queen bee dies, the colony is lost. And Chen and his team were the wasps equipped with enough poison to do the trick. If, if, if.

They took a circuitous route, heading miles around the valley to avoid encounters with the commando teams that had been scouring the surrounding forests and mountains for days, searching—unsuccessfully—for the famed freefighting city. But as luck would have it, they had gone but halfway to their attack point when out of nowhere a German ski patrol was upon them.

Chen, twenty feet ahead of the others, saw them first, twenty white-suited figures, swooping down from a steep hill to their right.

“Attack,” he screamed out, turning his head for a split second to warn the others. Without breaking stride he reached for two of his star-knives, set four in a pocket, on a wide utility belt around his waist. The Nazi squad came right at them, eerily silent in the snow-covered woods, with just the faint crack of skis breaking the white surface and the mocking hoot of an early-rising owl whispering through the trees. Then it got noisy.

Chen spun the two five-pointed death stars with a flick of each hand as he skidded to a stop, digging his skis into the three-inch-deep snow. The blades whistled through the air, catching the two lead attackers square in the chest. The whirling blades exploded the second they made contact with flesh and sent out a hail of blood in all directions that mottled the picture-postcard-perfect woods scene with a red stew of steaming flesh. The Nazis began firing from their Turgenev-7 subs, cradled under one arm as they shot forward toward their hated enemy.

But every member of the Rock squad had been through combat before—and lots of it. They went into their defensive alignment in a split second, stopping dead in their tracks and diving to the cold ground. They had barely stopped moving when their weapons were in their hands—speaking a language the Nazis could understand: death. Chen ducked behind a wide black-barked pine tree and began flinging out his birds of death every few seconds; Rona and Detroit opened up with a storm of automatic fire, sweeping across the front ranks of the screaming Nazi attackers. McCaughlin drew his .357 magnum silencer-equipped revolver, as big as a small cannon and, taking careful aim, fired off round after round, each shot catching German flesh.