Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (2 page)

THE RUSSIANS:
The United Socialist States of America is run by the red-faced, heavy-drinking General Zhabnov, headquartered in the White House, Washington, D.C., now called New Lenin. A bureaucrat, careful but not cunning, and a libertine, Zhabnov spends his days eating and his nights in bed with young American girls rounded up by the KGB. Zhabnov has been appointed supreme president of the United States for a ten-year period, largely because he is the nephew of the Russian premier, Vassily. General Zhabnov rules America as his personal fiefdom. The only rules he must obey are (1) no uprisings and (2) seventy-five percent of the crops grown by the enslaved American workers must be sent to Russia. General Zhabnov believes that the situation in the United States is stable, that there are no American resistance forces to speak of other than a few scattered groups that raid convoys from time to time. He sees his stay here as a happy interlude away from the power struggles back in the Kremlin.
Colonel Killov is the head of the KGB in the United States headquartered in Denver, Colorado. He is a ruthlessly ambitious man whose goal it is to someday be premier of the world. Thin, almost skeletal, with a long face, sunken cheekbones and thin lips that spit words, Killov’s operatives are everywhere in the country: in the fortresses, in the Russian officer ranks, and lately he has even managed to infiltrate an American-born agent into the highest levels of the resistance. Colonel Killov believes General Zhabnov to be a fool. Killov knows that the American forces are growing stronger daily and forming a nationwide alliance to fight together. The calm days of the last century are about to end.
From Moscow, Premier Vassily rules the world. Never has one man ruled so much territory. From the bottom of Africa to Siberia, from Paraguay to Canada, Russian armies are everywhere. A constant flow of supplies and medical goods are needed to keep the vast occupying armies alive. Russia herself did not do badly in the war. Only twenty-four American missiles reached the Soviet Union and ten of these were pushed off course or exploded by ground-to-air missiles. The rest of the United States strike was knocked out of the skies by Russian killer satellites that shot down beams of pure energy and picked them off like clay pigeons.
Vassily is besieged on all sides by problems. His great empire is threatening to break up. Everywhere there are rebel attacks on Russian troops. In Europe, in Africa, in India, especially in America. The forces of the resistance troops were growing larger and more sophisticated in their operations. Vassily is a highly intelligent, well-read man. He has devoured history books on other great leaders and the problems they faced. “Great men have problems that no one but another great man could understand,” he lectures his underlings. Advisers tell him to send in more forces and quickly crush the insurgents. But Vassily believes that to be a tremendous waste of manpower. If it goes on like this he may use neutron bombs again. Not a big strike, but perhaps in a single night, yes, in one hour, they could target the fifty main trouble spots in the world. Order must be maintained. For Vassily knew his history. One thing that had been true since the dawn of time: wherever there had been a great empire there had come a time when it began to crumble.

One

I
t was a storm like no other. Like no other before the Nuke War anyway. It roared across the sky like a lion, shrieking out peals of thunder, ripping the earth with its claws of lightning. Fifty million volt spears of electricity cracked down out of the sky, lighting up the desolate terrain with blinding sheets of white. Immense purple and black thunderheads filled the heavens. Clouds piled atop clouds, huge, hanging in the air like mountains of the purest darkness. The storm, which extended for nearly two hundred miles in every direction, roared across eastern Colorado, smashing away at the Rocky Mountains with an almost malevolent fury. The storm shot down bolts like artillery shells, ripping at the jagged peaks of majesty. Avalanches of rocks and boulders as big as trucks pounded down the sides of the mountains by the thousands of tons. The lightning blasted away again and again as if seeking total annihilation.

It was a megastorm, one of the biggest of the postwar blows with winds up to one hundred and fifty mph, and tornado funnels setting down; swirling winds of absolute blackness into which whole trees and screaming mountain animals were sucked; touch down for seconds, minutes, then disappear back up into the writhing clouds, dark as a sea of death, taking their earthly booty with them into the blackness. The storm took as much life as it gave back with its torrents of rain—rain that would make the earth live again. Rain that would heal the radioactive scars and sores that oozed pus red and brown in wastelands across America.

Beneath this onslaught of wind and rain and fusillades of lightning singeing the very air with their electric heat, beneath the atomic roar of thunder shaking the mountains around them, six American freefighters slipped and slid along a steep mountain trail as they made their way toward their destiny. The destiny of not just their lives but of all Americans. They were going into battle with the Russians and the outcome could well change the course of human history.

Ted Rockson, his chiseled stone face wet with the cold thick drops of rain from the storm, reached around the edge of the mountain trail for a firm handhold. His eyes, one aquamarine blue, the other violet, seemed to almost glow with power. The power of “the Rockson,” the man the American slaves called the “ultimate American.” The man the Russians had designated as the “most dangerous rebel in America—wanted dead or alive.” Rockson found the hold and pulled his feet in close against the narrow ledge of a cliff. The backpack and weapons on his back pulled backwards, trying to pluck him from the ten inch-wide path, two thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine feet up the sheer rock face of one of the eastern Rocky mountains. Rockson looked down for a moment but could see only an impenetrable cloudy blackness as the storm swirled and whipped around him, snapping the loose sleeves of his jacket. He made it around the outcropping and came to a momentary plateau about fifty feet in diameter. Rock stood back and waited while the rest of the Rock team worked around the edge. Detroit Green, Rockson’s righthand man, came next, his short bull-like body pressing close against the lichen-covered rock. His black face shone like polished ebony as a crack of lightning blasted into a peak about a thousand feet away. Trickles of rain splattered down his cheeks.

“Damn, this ain’t a good night,” Detroit said as he joined Rockson on the outcropping. He adjusted his twin bandoliers of hand grenades, making sure that none had loosened or become wet during the ascent. Rock peered anxiously back at the trail he had just been on. The going had been unusually rough—even for freefighters. None of them had ever made this particular crossing of the Rockies and the last two days had been treacherous. Rock didn’t want to lose a single one of his men. They had all been through too much together. McCaughlin came next. The huge Scotsman was the size of a barn door but tough as a grizzly in a fight of which he had had many. Next, Chen, the martial arts instructor of Century City, in his black ninja suit that covered him from head to toe in a warm but supple midnight black material. He came easily around the outcrop, his thin face smiling with that ever present self-mocking grin that sat beneath his pencil-thin mustache. Around the Chinese American’s waist were his only weapons besides his hands—five-pointed exploding star-knives. With these he was an expert, able to nail a man between the eyes from eighty feet. And the explosives, plastic fitted around the razor-sharp weapons, were powerful enough to take out the side of an armored vehicle.

Next came Lang, the kid, the youngest of the group, but as tough as they came. Nearly six and a half feet tall, Lang reminded Rock of himself when he was in his early twenties—arrogant, smart-assed, and tough as nails. The kid even resembled Rock physically—same stone-muscled physique, same chiseled features as if the skin had been worn away by winds and forces beyond imagination to a pure state of impenetrable muscle. He didn’t, however, share Rock’s white streak of hair running down the center of his scalp nor the different colored eyes. Bringing up the rear came Archer, who despite his seven foot stature and three hundred and twenty pounds, moved with the agility of a cat. His crossbow hung down across his back as the mute mountain man reached around the corner of the cliff and found a hold with his immense hand. Rock breathed a sigh of relief as the last freefighter came onto the outcropping. For his own life he never worried but for his men . . .

“I don’t like it Rock,” Detroit said, as the six Americans stood in center of the raging storm. At his words a chorus of bolts took off from directly above them and roared down to shattering fiery rendezvous with tall pines and iron rich peaks. “It’s a megablow,” the black cannonball of a man continued. “Could take us all right the hell off this earth.” Detroit looked up at the writhing fists of clouds pounding and punching away at one another. The stocky freefighter was afraid of few things—the megastorm was one of them. He had been in one of the super storms that periodically swept across America and had barely escaped with his life as winds grew to two hundred and fifty mph and tore everything—trees, vegetation, animals screaming out shrill death cries—away. He had made it to a small cave and watched in horrified fascination as the world outside was leveled to a splintered, flooded wasteland.

“We’ve got to move on, Detroit,” Rockson said softly. “The Reds aren’t going to wait.” He scanned the horizon ahead, trying to penetrate the ocean of a storm and see beyond, see the Russian convoy which he knew lay ahead. “We’ll get wet but we’re not going to die,” Rockson said, looking at the gathered fighters around him, “unless you look up the sky too long and drown. So keep your mouths closed and your feet on the ground and we should be at attack point within several hours.” The men glanced nervously ahead, down the side of the mountain where the trail seemed to meander wildly from cliff to cliff. But they all knew Ted Rockson and trusted him with their lives. They would have walked into the fires of hell itself with this man, with Ted Rockson. Perhaps that’s just where they were going.

The ground grew blacker as they headed down the steep slope, a sign of a nearby A-blast, in the war of a century ago. Rock took a look at his wrist-geiger, an invention of Dr. Shecter, the head scientist of Century City and surely one of the ten most intelligent men alive in the world today. The man’s output of technological innovations and advanced weaponry was prodigious. The needle of the geiger was heading from the blue, safe zone, into the green, radiation-present zone of the watch-sized detecter. But it wasn’t even near the beginning of the red—hot zone, totally within acceptable limits for the freefighters. Their genes, as had the genetic structures of all freefighters living out in the more high rad parts of the United States, had mutated so that they were now nearly a hundred times more resistant than their pre-war ancestors had been to the poisonous ravages of radiation.

But though he was safe from the invisible death, the ground they walked on was not. Rock looked around at the black, unproductive, sterile land as they came to the outer edge of a crater nearly a thousand yards wide. He felt a charge of hatred bolt up and down his spine. Hatred for the Reds—the murderers who had done this to America, land of the free, home of the brave, country of the dead. Eighty percent of the U.S. population had died within the first two weeks of the strike, dying either of the bomb blast or of the far more painful and terrifying radiation damage which made the hair fall out like burnt wheat and the teeth fall like rotten black fruit from the bleeding gums of the wounded. The Reds were easily able to fly in their troops and take over the U.S. from citizens in no shape to fight back. For nearly a century the Slavic invaders had occupied America, living off the produce, keeping her surviving population in the chains of slave labor.

But times were changing. Able to mount only small-scale attacks over the decades, the American free-fighting forces were at last growing in numbers and strength. The seventy-five Free Cities had only recently organized into the Confederation of United States and plans were under way for a Re-Constitutional Convention at which delegates would be sent from every hidden city to elect a president and congress and prepare plans for an all-out military assault on the Reds. Not that the Americans weren’t totally out-gunned by vastly superior Russian armaments, tanks, deathchoppers, and jets, even neutron bombs which the Reds had been using with more and more frequency. Out-gunned until now. But just months before, Rockson and a small expeditionary force had headed out into uncharted regions of the Far West, “land of the red fog” as the freefighters called it. The expedition had made contact with a strange race of mutated Americans called The Technicians, named after their ancestors, missile technicians who had survived the nuclear exchange in their super-fortified concrete bunkers deep under the western soil. The Technicians had lived there for a century, their eyes growing larger, with almost iridescent pupils as fiery as a cat’s, heads as big as pumpkins atop diminutive children’s bodies with spindly legs and arms. The Technicians had continued to use their knowledge doing the one thing they knew best—making weapons. Why they produced these weapons they had no idea. For whom? For what purpose? They had been totally shut off from all communication with the rest of the United States for a century and didn’t even think anyone was alive out there as the terrain around their bunkers was black as soot, miles of lifeless slag.

Until Rockson showed up. Upon hearing the entire story of what had happened to America after Russia’s first strike, The Technicians had gladly given Rockson five of the particle beam disintegrators they had built. Weapons of such enormous power that a single shot of pure black energy from one of the strangely shaped plastic rifles could bore holes through a mountain. Rock and his men had returned to Century City, their hidden city fortress in the middle of the Colorado Rockies, and proudly presented their black beam weapons to Dr. Shecter, who as Century City’s head scientist, immediately took the weapons under his command as too valuable to be used in “just any battle” with the Reds. He had made a careful, controlled scientific testing of the range and power of the particle beam rifles. Results? An unknown energy source with the power of a controlled atomic explosion. As hard as Shecter tried, he was unable to duplicate the weapons. Duplicate, hell, he couldn’t even open one up, as The Technicians had made them in a plastic mold, out of an unknown alloy that was impervious even to diamond drills.