Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (20 page)

The dogs pulled like they never had before, nearly bursting their strong canine hearts as the sleds began the climb up a foothill. The mighty masses of volcanic rock beneath the skids of the fleeing sleds shook as if there was an earthquake. Rockson glided on behind the sled, holding the vibrating handles for dear life.

The first of the snow waves struck the far side of the slope the men were on, but was unabated by the rise of terrain. First came the lighter powdery snow. Then came the rocks and ice boulders each the size of a house, smashing into and colliding with one another in one liquid wave. The huge tumbling things plummeted toward the puny creatures who were attempting to elude it.

The two sleds furthest back were enveloped by a fog of white powder that preceded the huge avalanche.

Rock put his sleds on a diagonal course—up the slope to the left. The sled strained, nearly turning over in its course. If they could reach even another hundred feet up the gently rolling hill, there was the slim chance the roaring avalanche would just pass them by, heading down the valley.

Looking back to make sure his men saw his move, Rock saw the awesome thousand-foot-high wall of snow moving forward. It looked like a whole planet was rolling at them. Rockson was enveloped in the white powder mist.

The avalanche was now a living thing, an evil entity determined to snuff out the intruders in its cold domain. The wall of ice and snow hollowed itself into one huge breakerlike wave.

Rockson searched for some cover. The roiling white powdery mist parted at that moment.
There!
To his left, barely visible between two boulders, was a blue darkness in the side of the snowslope. It looked like an ice cave. If they could only reach it . . .

Rather than screaming back to the men behind him, for his voice would be lost, the best thing Rockson could do was head there himself. He turned the team, nearly whipping the ears off the lead dogs to push them to the top speed possible. The Doomsday Warrior’s sled sped past the misshapen ice boulder, plunged into the blue-black darkness of the cave.

He could see nothing, but the echoing yips of his dogs and the icy ground grating under the sled told him they were still moving forward at great velocity. He pulled the flashlight out of his sealskin parka, lit it, and saw the precipice ahead—a fall into a nearly bottomless steaming abyss. He yanked back hard, nearly beheading the dogs who tumbled in a heap, bringing the sled to an abrupt stop. Suddenly he heard shouts, more dog yelps behind him. One after the other, the sleds had followed him into the ice cave.

They all heard the tremendous concussion of the snowmass hitting the mouth of the cave, the snowmass stopped short, though sealing them inside. Rock got off the sled and ran back to see who the hell had made it and who was buried forever beneath a million tons of ice.

Chen, Robinson, Detroit, McCaughlin, Tinglim, Scheransky, and himself were in. The Eskimo guides too had made it—miraculous.

They sat down, exhausted, in the lights of several flashlights, too exhausted to speak. After several minutes of stunned silence, Rockson rallied them to begin digging out. They whittled away at the snowmass with their shovels, depositing the snow in the steaming pit. “We don’t know,” confided Rockson, “how deep we’re buried. I’ve noticed that the temperature is rising. The volcanic steam will make this cave our watery tomb. We must dig as hard and fast as we can.”

After hours of exhausting digging, using the same method of cutting out blocks of ice that they had used to build the emergency igloo, they had accomplished little. The men were starting to breathe with difficulty. The air was filled with hot steam and, Rock suspected, sulphur gases from the abyss at the far end of the cave. It was choking them. The walls of the ice cave were melting, drips became rivulets of running water.

Soaked, they continued to frantically dig, passing the ice blocks to be dumped in the abyss.

Rockson wondered how long they could go on. The desperate team was near their last breaths—when suddenly there was a
whoosh
and a blast of frigid air.

They had reached the outside world!

They made sure their dogs and sleds were okay and then set off again. Rockson and the others were silent. The sun, which had been edging over the horizon, sank. The northern lights came on like a neon sign sending blue-green curtains across the starlit sky.

Rockson realized it hadn’t been sheer luck that he had found the ice cave that had saved them. It had been timing. If he hadn’t been at that precise place on the slope at the exact moment when the ice cave was visible through the white mists, they would have all perished. Could the Ice Shaman’s delaying tactics have arranged it all? He would never know for sure.

On and on they plunged into the near-endless darkness of the forbidding northlands. After a brief rest stop, they spent the next twelve hours speeding across an enormous flat expanse. It grew colder by the hour. It was down to almost minus forty degrees and was still dropping by the time they joined together three tents and crawled into the shelter. They huddled close to the seal-oil heater that was their life-giver. But they were short of precious fuel and it had to be used sparingly.

Chen and McCaughlin had frostbitten feet. Rockson was deeply worried about them, but nothing could be done except to try to keep the flesh as warm as possible and move the injured tissue as much as possible to keep the blood circulating. Tinglim brought one dog—a precious lead dog that was whining a lot—into the cramped quarters. The big brownish husky had scarred feet. Rockson had a look. The pads of the dog’s feet were badly torn.

Rock greased its feet with fat cut from wolf meat. Tinglim lashed soft sealskin on the pads of the dog.

Rockson had never even thought of such a thing, dog boots. He was sure the dog would rip the makeshift shoes off, but the big gentle husky hunkered down and put its head on Rock’s lap. “They won’t accept shoes until they are actually bleeding,” Tinglim said. “Then they see the light. Necessity is the mother of acceptance.”

Rockson nodded. Perhaps, with Tinglim’s resourcefulness, they would yet win out against the northern hell.

They slept for six hours then moved on.

Twenty-Two

R
ockson took a sextant reading on the low sun. They were five miles from the Arctic Circle. Scheransky set up the antimeter tracker. He excitedly reported to a numbed-cold Rockson that the readings indicated the five missiles were less than six miles away. Killov hadn’t moved since their last reading.

Rockson looked north through the snow flurries at the rolling hills of tundra ahead of them. Killov. At last.

Rockson wondered if Killov was making camp for a few hours or had set up what would be his launch base. He suspected the latter. The mad colonel didn’t have to go any further. He was at the right latitude now, the Arctic Circle, to threaten Moscow, Colorado, the whole damned world!

The date was December 22, the date of the winter solstice. At this extreme altitude, the sun wouldn’t come up again for three months. Rock and his attack force would have the first
Black Day,
total darkness on their side, when they attacked.
Today,
at noon!

They set off on skis, moving quickly over the rolling terrain. The weather was good and they could steer by the faint light of the stars.

A few miles on, Rock’s calculations were proven correct. They had effected the overland shortcut and intersected the Alaskan Highway. They saw it when they crested a tundra hillock—snow-covered, a long smooth roadway stretching back toward the southwest.

Detroit excitedly pointed. “Look, there are tire tracks from large vehicles in the snow.”

The Freefighters skied down to the roadway, and Rock inspected the big tracks more closely.

“I’d say these were made less than a day or two ago.”

Rock scanned the horizon on the north with his electron binoculars.
There!
At the side of the road some miles up—a row of structures. Killov’s base, alongside the highway. “Let’s get up the hill again, under better cover behind those rocks,” the commander ordered, “and take a look from there.”

A scan of the base with the high-power light-amplification lenses showed that the KGB force were busy as bees, constructing quonset-type buildings, guard towers, and the like. There were lots of troops down there, possibly a hundred. “The trailer with the large radio antenna jutting from it must be Killov’s headquarters,” Rock said. “It’s right in the middle of the base.” The three-hundred-meter-wide base was surrounded by double razor-wire coils ten feet high. There were electric wires running to the coils.

Rock wondered for a while what the KGBers were doing in their heavy Arctic work overalls out beyond the camp. Rock focused in on the workers. They were smoothing out the bumpy ground, making it flat. Were they completing a rough airstrip? Rock wondered. It looked like it.

“We have no time to lose,” Rock said. “God knows, he’s expecting planes—they’d be very unwelcome company for us. Once Killov has completely fortified and brought in additional troops by air, we may not be able to stop him.”

Further scanning showed the trucks—ten of them—that had carried the troops, and five large balloon-tired vehicles, presumably the ones that had carried the missiles. But these missile trucks no longer carried anything. Rock scanned the camp again. Those corrugated-metal quonset huts, they were really missile bunkers. Five of them, each fifty feet long by twenty wide. Scheransky said, “See the hinges at one side of the roof of each of the huts? They open up like a cigar box. The missile pops up on its launcher arm, and is fired. Those are the standard field bunkers for the missiles. The launch crew, four men to each missile, stay inside the building—until launch, of course, which requires a four-minute countdown.”

Tinglim put down his binoculars, and smiled broadly. “I might have good news. Remember the oil shortages of the twentieth century? How a great pipeline was built by you Americans through Alaska and through part of the Yukon to carry oil from the north southward?”

“Yes. What’s that got to do with attacking Killov?”

“Rockson, when you again scan with your binoculars, don’t fail to notice the slight bump in the terrain. It cuts diagonally through the compound, difficult to see at first. That bump, if I am not mistaken, is the covered-up pipe of your ancestors, Rockson—empty, I hope.” Tinglim fairly beamed.

Rock took another look. When he crawled back down he said, “If it is the old pipeline, it used to be mostly above ground, as I recall from the history books. So someplace back to the south it must still break the surface. There’s no way of telling, though. And a lot of it could have collapsed. But we’ll give it a try. I think I remember reading it was big enough to walk through. Chen, we still have the cutting torches, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Chen assured the Doomsday Warrior. Chen was in charge of the remaining stores. “No food left, no heating oil, but thank God, we managed to hold onto the torches.”

“Then we’ll use the pipeline as a highway right into the camp. It’s probably very close to the surface there—hence the bump. Killov has no reason to believe he was pursued. We have the element of surprise. They think they are protected well by their razor-wire electric barriers.”

“There is a storm brewing in the east. It will bring a good blow and lots of snow for cover in a few hours,” Tinglim added.

“Detroit,” the Doomsday Warrior ordered, “I want you to equip five of us with stun grenades. We don’t want a big explosion near those missiles. And you, Scheransky, you know that Killov is here this far north because he wants to be in range of Moscow. We have to defuse those missiles. There can’t be any mistakes. Or boom, there goes Borsht-town. Do you understand? Not to mention my own city, which is still in range.”

“My wife is in Moscow—my children go to school there. There will be no mistakes, Rockson, I promise you that,” said the trek-hardened major.

They made good time despite a gathering snowstorm. Soon they reached the gigantic rusty pipe, jutting out of the tundra. It was perhaps eight feet in diameter. It looked solid enough.

“It’s true, there it is,” Rock said, half in disbelief.

“The northern gods have provided our salvation,” Tinglim said. “And they have provided us a storm to hide the noise when we cut out of the pipe in Killov’s camp.”

“Let’s get to work, men,” Rock ordered.

They broke out torches and set about cutting a man-sized hole in the pipe. Rock winced when the big piece fell out. He half expected crude oil to ooze out, but the pipe was empty, if somewhat crudded up and smelly inside. It had been, after all, a hundred years or more since it had functioned. The twentieth century steel alloy had held up pretty well. He played the light down the seemingly endless interior. It looked like it hadn’t collapsed anywhere. McCaughlin hefted the antimatter meter in on his huge shoulders. They needed the heavy piece of equipment to tell them when they were closest to the missiles. It was set to ping at the highest concentration of anitmatter radiation.

When they were all safely in the shelter of the eight-foot-wide oil pipe, the men huddled around Scheransky who opened the diagram of the deadly missile. Rockson played his flashlight beam onto the diagram.

Rock said, “There won’t be time for Scheransky to defuse all five missiles. The major will instruct us
all
on how to do it.” The major nodded. He looked shaky and pale, Rock thought.

For a precious half-hour, Scheransky explained. Detroit, McCaughlin, Chen, Farrell, and Rockson caught on, but the three Eskimo guides stared in bewilderment. The instructions brought a blank expression to Tinglim’s face too. He couldn’t fathom it either. Rock decided then and there that there would be five 2-man teams. “One man protects, while the other works on the missile. We use stun grenades to knock out the bunker crews. The grenades won’t cause enough shock to blow the missiles up.

“Now, the major has shown you how to open the missiles’ wiring sections—each missile is identical—and install the red boxes, the ‘antimatter drains’ as Scheransky calls them . . .”