Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (21 page)

Rockson set up each two-man team: Farrell and Dalmok, McCaughlin and Zebok, Chen and Ngaicook, Detroit and Tinglim. He and Scheransky were the fifth team. If any other team didn’t make it, either one of them could rush to finish their job. They started walking in the pipe. Each had a Liberator, enough ammo for a few minutes of fire-fight. Their shotpistols were nearly empty. Ten cold and tired men against hundreds of fanatical KGB Commandos. Not good odds. But Rockson had faced odds nearly as bad in the past and survived.

Scheransky was a little weak-kneed at the idea of the unfair odds, and had to be encouraged along the interior of the pipe.

It took an hour and a half of claustrophobic trekking down the pipeline before the antimatter meter pinged once.

“We are there,” Scheransky whispered.

“This is it,” Rockson said. “Finally. What time is it?”

“Eleven
A.M.
, hereabouts,” said Chen, checking his all-weather chronometer.

“Give it another hour,” suggested Tinglim. “By then the storm should be at its maximum.” Rockson nodded.

They sat there, as tense as they had ever been in their lives. At noon, on Rock’s order, Chen started cutting through. It didn’t take long before a rolling mess of tundra mixed with snow came tumbling in, nearly half burying them. But the flow quickly stopped. They could see the glow of a searchlight. They were through. The howling winds had covered their cutting noise.

A fierce storm—ice and snow, frigid wind—was blasting across the frozen land, making for a near white-out condition. The searchlight that lit the camp merely reflected off the milky swirling snow. Rockson whispered, “Leave the searchlight alone unless we’re detected. Once the shooting starts, knock it out.” They listened for a while. Not a KGBer stirred in the camp, but the men working on the runway several hundred feet away were making their own noise banging down the hard tundra.

Rockson and the others clawed up into the frozen camp, into the numbing cold of the “Black Day.” Each man knew exactly what he was supposed to do.

Rock and Scheransky made the first run from the hole, right after the beam of the searchlight swept past. They made a dash for the closest bunker. They hit the snow ten feet from the bunker door and watched the four other teams make their own runs to the other bunkers. In seconds they were all in place. Rock flicked his flashlight for the others to proceed. Their flashlights flicked back.

Rock rose, pushing Scheransky forward. They ran right up to the bunker door. A light was coming through a crack in the metal doorway. They heard laughing.

“Here goes nothing,” Rock whispered. He tried the door; it wasn’t locked. Rock kicked open the door and threw the stun pineapple in, pushed Scheransky down and to the side in the snow.

Whumppp!

The two attackers entered the smoking interior, stepping over four bodies. Scheransky froze. Rock shook him. “Scheransky—over there, isn’t that the missile? Get to it, man!” The major snapped out of it, rushed forward with his red deactivator box and got to work. Rockson stripped off his parka and put on the least-messy Red uniform coat.

Rockson opened the door of the bunker a foot and emptied his Liberator at a squad of Reds caught in their own searchlight’s beam. He saw other running shapes out there in the strobelike flashes of gunfire—two of them were carrying something that looked like a mortar. “Hurry!” Rock screamed at Scheransky. “Hurry!”

“I
am
hurrying!” Scheransky screamed back.

Rockson snatched up a Kalishnikov rifle and continued firing in full auto, slashing the air, waving the gun like a wand in front of him, conjuring death. He succeeded in a few lucky shots, heard the crunches as the KGBers fell in front of him, lifeless eyes staring accusingly at him, blood trickling from noses and mouths onto the mauled snow.

Scheransky was dripping cold sweat as he carefully placed the Phillips screwdriver into the first screw-head and loosened it. He knew he’d do it right, but Detroit, Chen, McCaughlin, and Farrell were doing the same thing with very little instruction in the other bunkers. If any one of them made a mistake, they’d
all
be vaporized instantly, along with two hundred and fifty square miles of Arctic wasteland. The major loosened the second screw. Then, with a solid grip on both screws, he pulled them out simultaneously. He removed the cover exposing the wiring, took the red box, and jammed it into place.

“Done!” he yelled triumphantly.

“Let’s go!” Rock screamed back.

Rock and Scheransky scrambled out of a side window. When the beam of the searchlight had passed, they ran like jack rabbits out into the drifting snow, back toward their rendezvous with the others—the pipe hole. Seconds after they dove into the cover of the broken-open pipe, the beam of the searchlight passed again, followed by fierce submachine-gun fire. From their vantage point, they could see mortar shells kicking up snow near the bunkers. The fools would get them all killed! Seconds stretched to hours, minutes stretched to eternity, as they waited for the other Freefighters. Detroit came in next, diving in with Tinglim, closely followed by Chen and Ngaicook. A bear of a man came running through the night. It was McCaughlin. Alone. As they pulled his great hulk into the pipe hole, he gasped, “They got Zebok—Farrell and Dalmok too. I saw them lying in the snow outside the fifth bunker.”

“Did they defuse the missile?” asked Rock.

“I don’t know,” McCaughlin answered.

“Scheransky, you come with me,” Rock ordered. “The rest of you, cover us; and for God’s sake, get that searchlight and that mortar crew.”

Colonel Killov had been watching the video he had made of the torture of the wandering Eskimo boy they had captured. Suddenly there was shooting, explosions. He ran to the window. The sweeping searchlight silhouetted running figures. He saw bursts of flame from many rifles. Tracer bullets crisscrossed the darkness. There were attackers—many attackers out there. It would take a force of hundreds of commandos to break the camp’s perimeter defenses.

As Killov watched wide-eyed, the huge floodlight went out—hit no doubt by enemy bullets. The firing continued, even more wildly. He ran to the P.A.

Killov’s voice, cold and thin, but very loud, came over the loudspeaker.
“Fools!
Stop shooting at everything that moves. Turn on the vehicles’ headlights.
See
what you are doing. Beware of damaging the missiles.”

Rockson and Scheransky took advantage of the cease-fire order to rush for cover behind some crates.

Following Killov’s orders, the KGBers began turning on their headlights. The Freefighters knew what to do. They started shooting them out immediately from their positions as Rock fired from behind his crates. In a matter of moments the lights had been shot out again. Rock and Scheransky had to get the last bunker. They could see it strobed in the light of sporadic submachine-gun fire—fifty yards away.

Killov pressed the intercom buttons to contact all the missile bunkers. Only one bunker answered—the fifth. “We are under attack!” a hoarse voice screamed in reply to the buzzer.

“Fire the missile, you fool, fire the missile!” Killov yelled. “Do it immediately, it’s already target-programmed.”

“But—but we are in here
with
the missile. We will be killed by the launch flame!”

“Fire the missile on a sixty-second countdown. That should be enough time for you to make a run for it.”

“Missile will be fired,” the terrified voice replied.

Killov quickly got on the shortwave accessing the channel for Kamchatka Island. The radioman at the Siberian base answered his call immediately. Killov’s special channel was monitored twenty-four hours a day. The colonel screamed, “This is Killov, get me General Sirkovnak!”

There was a slight pause, then Sirkovnak’s gruff voice came in on the shortwave. “Killov! You are alive? Where are you?”

“I am in the Yukon. Zero in on my broadcast. I have constructed a short runway. Send a rescue jet right away,” Killov commanded. “A fast short-takeoff-and-landing plane. My base is under attack.”

Sirkovnak’s strained voice replied, “I cannot. Vassily has given orders that you are a traitor and that anyone helping you will be executed.”

Killov played his last card: “If the rescue plane is not here in twenty minutes, I will inform Vassily that you were part of my ‘Doctors’ Plot’ to kill him. As a matter of fact, you are the last conspirator yet alive. Send two planes: one to land and pick me up, one to fly escort. Do you understand what I say, you fool? Unless that plane picks me up—”

“They will be sent, Excellency! Two of my fastest jets. Twenty minutes at the most.”

Wham.
A projectile of some sort hit the trailer. Killov fell over on his side, pieces of the trailer’s metal walls imbedded in his skin. But he was alive. All he could hear was a ringing in his ears. He staggered to his closet, put on a parka, ran out through the hole that had appeared in the side of the trailer. He ran for his life as tracer bullets lit up the air behind him.

Then he heard a rumble, saw the missile rising on its column of flame. The bunker crew had obeyed his order. He threw up his arms and laughed. Death, megadeath, for Century City.

Twenty-Three

R
ock watched the deadly missile roar aloft with a despair he had never felt before in his life.
There goes the whole ballgame,
he thought.
I’ve lost.
He desperately directed his .9mm Liberator rifle fire up at the ascending thing, but it climbed too fast. It headed away. In a matter of seconds, the swift cruise missile was out of range—and he realized it was heading
south,
toward the U.S., not toward the Soviet Union.

His men were still engaged in a deadly fire-fight with overwhelming KGB forces. But for what purpose now?

“Withdraw,” he yelled. “Withdraw. There’s no reason to stick around now, get to the pipe—get the hell out of here.” He was about to do the same when he saw a figure running out of the trailer—Killov. He pulled up his electron binoculars and leapt behind a dune of bloodstained snow, adjusted them—
yes!
A lone black-clad figure, running.
Killov.
The bastard was getting away, heading toward the runway. Killov must have a plane coming in.

Rock abandoned his effort to leave the hellish killing field. He had to catch Killov. Had to wring his scrawny neck. At least that would be something. It was two hundred yards to the airstrip. Stumbling over dead KGBers, he zigzagged, avoiding a trail of bullets, tear-assing after the shadowy figure. Rock was determined not to lose the man. He dove headfirst over several snowy moguls and in quick time made it to the tarmac runway; he’d cut off Killov. Rockson pulled his shotpistol up to the ready and waited, concealed by a pile of construction supplies at the edge of the snow-blown tarmac.

A shape, a huge
shape,
silhouetted against the raging fires back in the camp, confronted him. It wasn’t human, that was certain. Its half-torn-away uniform revealed glistening chrome and steel parts. It was seven feet tall if an inch. And it stepped out in front of Rockson and blocked his way. The thing, in a frightening metallic voice, uttered three words, “You die here.”

“Not today,” Rock said emphatically. He didn’t know who—or rather
what—
the man-machine was, but he had no time to play “animal, vegetable, or mineral.” He opened up with his shotpistol, firing directly into his opposer’s chest. Bullets ricocheted off metal. Nothing else. The man-machine just stood there.

Its gleaming chrome steel chest was undamaged, though stripped of cloth by the
X
pattern of shot pellets. The thing should have been blasted to bits, but it stood.

“I said, you die here, Rockson,” said the slit mouth.

Rock asked, “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

“You killed me, Rockson, yet I live . . .”

“Don’t speak in riddles, pal, who are you?”

“Gunter used to be my name. You killed me in the battle of Forrester Valley. You blew me apart with a huge projectile. But I was re-created, Rockson, and now I am a superior being. They call me Chrome, because of all my shiny metal. I am invincible. You die here.”

“Gunter! The Nazi!”

“Yes, Rockson. A miracle of KGB science, is it not? I am a cyborg. Part human, mostly robot. Enough talk, now you die.”

Rockson had no time to think about it, the horror was coming at him again.

Rockson caught a glimpse of Killov, silhouetted briefly in the fire from the camp. Damned! The man had reached the opposite side of the runway—and he was crouching there now, gleefully watching the standoff between Rockson and Chrome. Rock heard Killov shout triumphantly, “My rescue jet will soon be here, but I have a ringside seat while I wait to watch your death, Rockson. Please don’t kill him too fast, Chrome, amuse me until I must go.”

“I will amuse,” said Chrome’s booming voice. “Watch.”

Rock fired again, spraying the giant gleaming metal thing with the rest of his cartridges, hitting every part of the thing’s body. Nothing. It smiled. “Time to die, Rockson.”

Rock threw the gun down and dove toward something he saw jammed into the tundra a few feet away—a substitute weapon, of a sort. He grabbed the handle of the thing. It was a pneumo-pick—a pick of the type you used to dig up concrete, powered by a small fuel cell in the handle. When used, the tip of the pick glowed with white heat. The tool was designed to vibrate and burn its way deep into the ground. Surely it could do some damage to this junkheap confronting him.

Rock hefted the big pick in his hand. Chrome just stood there, waiting. Rock wondered if Chrome might be slow.
Maybe.
In that case, he could just run around the metal man—no use fighting if he could just dodge the damned monster. He had to get Killov.

Chrome moved toward the Doomsday Warrior through the swirling blur of snow that continued to pile up around them. Rockson hefted the pneumo-pick. He braced it against his forearm, knowing that to do any real damage to his enemy he would have to strike quick, hard, and often.