Doomsday Warrior 13 - American Paradise (14 page)

He put his hands onto the control levers and activated the little laser guns mounted on the ceiling above the figurines. Killov manipulated the levers until the twin mini-guns pointed upon the first statue—Rockson. The targeting laser lit up a red spot on the lifelike doll’s khaki-clad chest. “Now, you obstinate bastard—
die, mutant die!”
Killov squeezed both triggers.

The mini-lasers fired, and light streaked down and ignited the Rockson doll. As the doll flared, then melted and burned, Killov turned the lasers toward Vassily in his wheelchair. The trigger squeezed, the premier and Rahallah burst into flames, too, from the heat of the intense light ray. The realistic metal wheelchair melted, the blanket-shawl smoked and ignited, the plastic faces hung and stretched, then their “flesh” fell off their heavier plastic skulls. The smoke and smell in the room was awful—the smell of burning poly-vinyl—but the colonel didn’t care. Killov’s drug-crazed senses reeled in pleasure. “Now one more,” he said, turning the rays on Zhabnov, with like results.

As the dolls puddled and burned, Killov laughed like the madman he was. He
liked
the smell of burning plastic—or skin. He liked destruction, even if it was just symbolic.

The room’s phone started beeping. Killov let it beep. He sat and inhaled the plastic smoke until he started choking; only then did he turn on the vent blowers.

The phone was still beeping, and he picked up and spat angrily, “What the hell is it?”

“Sir!” Deminsky’s hysterical voice cried out over a whooshing wind, “the weapon is nearly operational. Please,
please
send the elevator. Don’t abandon us, sir! We’ll go back to work as soon as the storm breaks! We—we’ve lost seven men—blown off the—”

Killov snapped, “You
finish!
I’ll not have Nakashima send the elevator until the work is done. As for the seven men, there are lots of technical people on this island—we can get replacements easily enough. They should have been proud to die for my cause. Keep the rest working!”

Nineteen

T
he team had been going over the attack plan for hours.

“There has to be a reconnaissance of the tower before we attack,” Rockson concluded. His men, who were clustered around him in the cave, all volunteered.

“I’ll do it,” Detroit said.

“No me,” Scheransky said. “I speak perfect Russian and—”

“Nix! I’ll go,” Chen insisted. “I have the skill. I can get in and out—”

“I’m going,” Rock stated, “with some bugs to plant. But I’ll have to wait until the storm is over. Leilani—how about our two ships. Can they ride out the storm?”

Leilani said, “Don’t worry. The Polynesians on board will take them into the lee of the island. We have weathered such storms as these, even on the open sea.”

“I’m glad you think so. I’m very relieved, then, as soon as it lets up a little, I’ll get going.”

At dusk, as the rain died to a mere shower and the wind to a normal-scale gale, Rockson walked out of Chimura’s house, dressed as an aged intinerant poet. He wore a whispy white beard and carried a gnarled staff. “One of the best makeup jobs I ever had, thanks to you, Reiko.”

She walked him to the gate saying, “But must hide size! There are no aged poets so big.” Reiko worried. “Please keep
bent.”

Rock stooped over.

“The stoop is convincing.” Chimura’s wife smiled. “Keep the paper parasol up—and direct it at the KGB sandbag installations.”

Rockson hobbled past his first KGB checkpoint ten minutes later. He was unbothered, except with jibes that he didn’t have to pretend not to understand.

The Japanese population was re-emerging into the streets.
They
didn’t make fun of his passing. The people loved their vagrant poets in New Tokyo. Rock was assisted across the intersections and greeted with bows everywhere. He didn’t know much Japanese, but he had memorized several of the great Basho’s seventeenth-century
haikus,
which he shouted out, as if half-batty, at odd moments while he hobbled along:

“With each puff of wind

the butterfly is alighting

differently.”

He alternated that poem with:

“By the light of new moon,

the land is inundated

with buckwheat!”

Finally, he had managed to get to a spot right across from the tower. He made mental notes of all he saw but wanted more; he wanted
in.
But how could he get past the sandbags and elite guards? If he ever was scared in his life, this should be the time, despite the shotpistol hidden in his robe. The place was crawling with sullen-looking Reds eager to use their weapons.

Almost forgetting to stoop, Rock started across the still-wet pavement, between slow-moving trucks painted with crude KGB symbols. He was stepping onto the curb in front of the first checkpoint when he heard a click. Out of nowhere, a KGBer had appeared, and Rock now felt the cold steel of a Tokarev pistol barrel on his left temple.

“Old man,” the soldier said, “recite a poem to amuse me—or die!” He used English—everyone’s second language worldwide since the twentieth century.

Rock giggled and nodded. He hoped the few raindrops still dropping weren’t smearing his face-job. This time Rock spat out a verse of the poet Shiki:

“Oh red carnations,

whiteness of butterflies,

who gave them souls?”

When the pistol was removed, Rockson, leaning heavily on his gnarled poet’s staff, limped on across the plaza of cut slate.

He was under the grid-work of the Tokyo Tower now, just fifty feet from the ornate gold-leafed double doors of the marble-walled core building, and he didn’t have a single idea on what to do now. Except wing it. A truck crawled across the plaza, and at the same time Rock saw a pair of dirty-coveralled workers roll a dumpster out of a service door, spill its contents into a wide pit and roll the thing back toward the entrance. He walked toward them, shouting out poetry, jesturing with his staff. They stopped in their tracks. He was counting on the workers being Japanese, not Reds. Trusting his life on that fact. The truck cut him and the workers off from the view of the guards at the tower’s west leg for a second.

“Quick,” he whispered to the workers, “I am sent by Chimura-san and the council. I must get into the building. Let me get in the dumpster.”

They bowed at the mention of the council. Rock slipped in the dumpster. They kept walking the dumpster—with Rockson in it—back to the service door.

Rock peeked through a hole in the filthy metal cannister. The guards, distracted by checking the I.D. of the truck driver, who they had halted, didn’t notice Rock had disappeared. Luck!

Once inside the tower building, he climbed from the dumpster and asked, “Which way to the lobby?”

The pair of stoic workers pointed left toward a door and bowed again.

“Thanks and sayonara,” Rock muttered, wiping his grimy kimono off. He must look a mess.

Just as Rock had hoped, once he was in the lobby, people
assumed
it was okay for him to be there.

Maintaining his crazed-poet persona, Rock limped around, slipping the ten listening devices he had in his robe under tables, in the floral displays and inside the sand ashtray next to the elevators.

He heard a snippet of conversation of two strolling majors: “The colonel will be not pleased that the work crew was blown off the tower. Still, the final switches were put in place.”

“Are you serious? Killov will live with a few deaths—as long as the weapon is operational. There’s more than enough power to operate the crystal laser now. Tomorrow we rule the world.” The officers, using a key, got in a silver elevator, and the door closed.

Rock, muttering koans and haikus, headed toward the silver-doored elevator with the death’s head and swords symbol. That would be Killov’s private elevator—why not go for the kill now? He was on a roll and should capitalize on it.

As uniformed men passed him in both directions, he pressed his lock pick in the keyhole and twisted. The elevator descended, the door opened and he stepped in. That raised a few eyebrows.

“What the hell is an aged, filthy Japanese doing in Killov’s lift?” a startled young lieutenant asked his companion.

“Not our business,” the other replied. They walked on, eager not to question the holder of one of Killov’s elevator keys.

Rockson’s heart pounded as the elevator closed and accelerated smoothly upward. His ears popped at 21, and again at 55. The elevator stopped, and the door opened on 71.
Killov’s Lair!

Nakashima was busy dusting off the dials in Killov’s personal control room. Killov had gone to personally inspect the pagoda disaster site, still uneasy about the “freak” natural occurence there, leaving Nakashima in charge.

Nakashima lovingly worked. He’d scrape and bow, even caress his death-master’s
boots!
He had learned
so much
about negative energy, about death and darkness from Killov already. And there was so much
more
to learn from the skull.

WHAT? The elevator door was opening. Was his great master back already? Nakashima sensed not and dove to hide in the clothes’ wardrobe.

Through the half-shut louver doors, the chauffeur saw a tan muscular man standing over six feet tall and dressed incongruously in tatters of a kimono robe. The man was
very
strange. He had a mane of grey hair and heavy white eyebrows. But it was makeup. He wasn’t old at all. Nor was he Japanese! The intruder’s mismatched light and dark-blue eyes scanned the room. Nakashima watched as he went directly toward the control panel. The intruder looked around and raised the heavy wooden staff he carried. He raised it over his head, intending, Nakashima realized, to smash it down on Killov’s precious instruments.

“Banzai!” the chauffeur shouted, snapping his knife from its belt scabbard and throwing aside the louver doors. He lept for the strangely costumed, would-be destroyer. Nakashima was fast, and he hit the man at his waist, toppling him. But the man deflected his knife-blow to the side. He had not reckoned on the intruder’s speed, agility—and strength.

The intruder rolled, and as Nakashima drove his knife down at the man’s neck, a mighty hand stayed his effort. Had he but known he was attacking the Doomsday Warrior, the chauffeur would not have been so hasty.

Rockson spun to his feet and hit the defender with a head butt. But it was Nakashima’s chance now to show his battle skills, and the hefty Japanese took the butt and twisted to the side, smashing his locked fists onto the back of Rockson’s neck.

The Doomsday Warrior, seeing stars, nevertheless recovered and snapped into a crouch. He picked up his fallen oak staff and swung at Nakashima’s knees. But the man jumped, and the blow swished through empty air.

Who
the hell was this ferocious Japanese opponent, Rock wondered. But there was no time to speculate!

Nakashima again lunged with the big knife, and it was Rock’s turn to be
gone!

They faced off in a crouch, the Doomsday Warrior holding the club, the Japanese with the knife. Rockson didn’t want to draw this out; any second now someone else could join the party.

Nakashima backed off toward a display case that held an ancient ball-and-chain mauler—a relic of the samurai knights. “I, Nakashima, diciple of Master Killov, will destroy you,” the Japanese servant yelled.

The glass case was shattered by his elbow, and quick as a flash, he picked up the chain weapon. Swinging it mightily in his left hand, he rushed to attack the intruder once more.

Rockson again rolled to the side and snapped back into a crouch. He grabbed his shotpistol but thought better of it!
No.
A sound like that given off by the pistol would rouse the whole damned tower.
He had to defeat this swarthy killman silently.

Nakashima, his chain-and-iron-ball samurai weapon swinging with a
whoosh,
came at Rock again, intending to deliver the heavy spiked ball into his skull, then jab the knife into his gut for good measure.

Rockson lifted the oak staff suddenly, snagging the chain, and then, before Nakashima could let go of the chain end, Rock pulled the staff with all his might. The Japanese fell forward, and Rockson smashed the barrel of the shotpistol on his left temple.