Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (15 page)

Two guards stood on each side of a road that ran into the tent compound. Next to them were the same plastic devices that the elephants had in their trunks. Only these gleaming death-ray shooters were mounted on tripods, set up like machine guns.

The handlers of the elephant caravan waved and uttered some words. The guards laughed and stood up on their toes, trying to peer into the center elephant’s basket to see the prisoners. They waved the men through, the lead elephant stepping inside just as the already blazing sun broke free of its nightly hiding place and lit up the whole scene with eye-searing light and heat. When it got hot, it got hot fast out here!

The inhabitants of the hidden tent-city wore the same garb as the elephant men, the same steel and gold tricornered helmets, and had geometric patterns that looked like hieroglyphs covering their short robes. Some wore armor on their chests and backs. Suddenly Rock realized what it was he was looking at: an army. This wasn’t a civilian village but a troop camp. Somebody had gathered together a lot of men. And, as he passed a long, flat sand-covered tent-dwelling hundreds of feet long, he saw elephants in roped-off stalls inside. Man, they had enough mounts to carry a good deal of the mini-army to war!

They came to a higher, double-pyramid-shaped tent with connecting tunnel between the two halves, each half about twenty feet high. This tent structure was surrounded by men dug into trenches with all kinds of weaponry poking out. They were protecting somebody who carried mucho weight around here.

The elephants came to a stop right in front of the place, and Rock’s elephant again kneeled down. The driver turned and started yelling at them in that sharp, almost clicking language. It was like no other Rock had ever heard, even with his years of study of language patterns in Century City’s linguistics class—a must for a world in which on every mountain they spoke a different language. But this one sounded crazy, hardly related to modern tongues. Like it had evolved before modern language patterns had started to develop.

The Freefighters dragged Sheransky off the beast, and suddenly Rock saw the sand-coated tent material part like curtains in one of the pyramid shapes. A tall black man, very strong, stood there in a metal breastplate oufit. Rockson’s face lit up with optimism for the first time in twenty-four hours. It was Rahallah.

“Rockson,” Rahallah said as he came forward with a concerned look on his ebony face, seeing that one of them was hurt. “I’m afraid there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. These men weren’t supposed to attack you, but to bring you back here. Their squad leader, the only one who knew the exact situation, was bitten by a rad-wasp along the way and died within hours. I hope my—my men didn’t do that to your Freefighter.” Rahallah spoke anxiously as he kneeled down and looked closely at Sheransky.

“No, it happened when we had to eject from our jet and landed in the ocean. We were attacked by something that should only be in horror movies.”

“He’s hurt badly,” the black man said, his full-lipped face and wide brown eyes looking in full concentration at Sheransky’s face as he pressed his thumb against the man’s neck artery. “He’s in trouble. Lost too much blood. Bring him quickly into our headquarters.”

A tall mocha-complexioned man came up. “Rockson, this is Tutankhamen, the head of the whole army you see here,” Rahallah said as he rose. “He’s a good man—and on the right side. The side we’re all on, pledged to stop Killov no matter what the cost.”

“Any man that’s an enemy of the colonel is a friend of mine,” Rock said, holding out his hand. He took notice of the man next to Rahallah for the first time. He was about fifty, with closely trimmed silver beard and hair, very firm square jaw, and the same burning eyes as Rahallah. He reminded Rockson instantly of drawings he’d seen in books of the pharaohs of primordial Egypt.

The man smiled and held out both hands, covering Rockson’s, an act of warm acceptance. “Honored that you have come all this way to help us,” Tutankhamen said. “You and your fellow Freefighters are welcome to all that is ours. Among my people, we share everything. You are of my people now.”

“You speak English,” Rockson said with some pleasure. It would sure make it a hell of a lot easier to communicate with him than the clicking, all-consonants dialect that the elephant drivers spoke.

“English is the language of the gods,” Tutankhamen replied, bowing toward the east. “The high priests of my people and I, those of us who must communicate with the gods, may speak in their language.” Just how laser-carrying, elephant-riding Egyptian pharaohs spoke English with a decidedly Oxford accent was something Rockson would ponder much later.

“My home,” the pharaoh king said dramatically, his arms high on each side as if he were acting out the part of Moses, “is your home. My food, women, hunting dogs . . . You shall consider them as yours, to do with as you want to. And now, while Rahallah attends to you and your men, I shall see to my troops. It is hard keeping so many warriors caged up like this. You, Rockson, are a great general, I’ve been told. You would understand. But we’ve waited. Waited for your advice on how to take on the dark one’s forces. Waited for your help. There can be—no mistakes.”

He turned and walked off with half a dozen heavily armed guards walking on all sides of him, hands on the curved razor-sharp swords which sat in jeweled sheaths at their sides.

“This whole thing is like Ali Baba and the forty thieves,” Rockson exclaimed to Rahallah as they started inside the twin tents. The black man of royal African descent had been kidnapped by Russians when just a child, Rock knew, and brought to Russia, where through the strange twists of fate he had become first Premier Vassily’s servant, and then, over the years, his most trusted confidant. Rahallah now wielded immense power. In his own way, nearly as much as the premier himself. Which many in the Kremlin didn’t like, to say the least! There had been numerous attempts on his life, from explosions to poisons and everything in between. But none had succeeded. The black man was as strong both mentally and physically as Rockson himself. In all the world, Rockson knew that this man alone equalled him on
any
level of combat. He prayed they’d never have to fight against one another.

“Here, we must work on this wounded man immediately,” Rahallah exclaimed. “I’ll take him into my private medical chambers through the connecting tunnel. Why don’t you and your men go into this room over here. There’s food, bathing, sleep.”

“They’ll go,” Rock said, motioning for Archer and Chen to take ten. Both obliged, walking in, Archer yawning loudly and scratching himself like a flea-bitten bear as his nose began wriggling around his face, smelling food ahead.

“But I’ll come with you,” Rock added. “I’d like to keep an eye on just what’s going to be done to him. You don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Rahallah replied as he carried the 175-pound Sheransky along like a large rag doll. The man had muscles like anacondas stretching beneath the steel meshed robe.

Rockson asked, “Who is your doctor?”

“I’m the man who’s going to treat him. I’m a doctor, Rockson, in both Western medicine, and with my own tribal brand. I’ve developed them in a symbiotic way over the years, mixed them together. I promise you—it will help him.”

“He’s in your hands, pal. Do your thing.” They walked into the second tent, and Rock’s eyes opened wide when he saw what the inside of the tent was made of: elephant hide, stretched out on joined-together tusks of the whitest ivory. Evidently, these warriors had learned to use every part of the beast. It was perhaps the only way they could survive the hardships and barrenness of such a desert as surrounded them!

Rock was a little taken aback when the unconscious Sheransky was placed atop a long slab of wood, obviously a makeshift operating table, and Rahallah stripped down to leopard-skinned loincloth. The African ripped out two rattles, gourds with beans inside, which he proceeded to shake violently as he jumped up and down and raced around the prone body of Sheransky like a wild man. Rockson tried not to react. Maybe there was something in it all that he couldn’t fathom. The man was clearly not a charlatan.

Rahallah, his broad ebony face covered with sweat as he moved around, took out some powder from a skin bag and threw it over Sheransky’s head and chest. The powder was colored brown, black, and bright red, like blood. He nearly covered the stripped-to-the-waist patient with a thin layer of the powder, as if he was trying to bury him in sand at the beach. And then Rahallah began to howl at the top of his lungs:

“Oh, Lion God, please come and hear me. Save this wounded man. Give him the power of your beating, unstoppable heart. I, Rahallah, son of the Plains Lion, son of the Father of my tribe, beseech you. Let me hear your roar, Lion God. The roar that frightens even death.”

Rock stepped back, startled as Rahallah’s whole face suddenly tightened up into a snarling demonic appearance. Rahallah let out a roar that nearly gave his observer a heart attack. Then another higher-pitched roar as the black man reared back and then forward, screeching right over Sheransky’s motionless body. He did a complete go-round of the table, roaring like a lion with its ass on fire, and then stopped in his tracks.

“That’s the first part of the procedure,” he said, turning toward Rockson with just the hint of a smile. “Now the second part.” He quickly stepped back into his Egyptian fighting armor and sandals, and then walked back over with a small mobile table with one of the beam weapons atop it, and bandages and salves all over the thing on shelves.

“These lasers are not just for destruction,” Rahallah said as he picked a bronze-looking laser tube up and switched it on. A beam of light—blue and hard to look at, so pulsing was its perfect blueness—came out a foot and stopped. It actually burned the air as it heated molecules of oxygen in infinitesimal pops from the super-heat. “The lasers can be used for healing, Rockson. The heat of the sun is contained within this little beam. You saw what the beam could do.”

Rockson looked on anxiously as Rahallah lowered the beam-weapon toward the Russian Freefighter’s wounded arm and shoulder. He trusted the African, but . . . Sheransky’s face would be smoking ash if he made the slightest error in judgment. Rock tensed up, but he didn’t say a word or move a muscle as he was afraid he might distract the “doctor.” He just prayed real hard that Rahallah knew what the hell he was doing.

Rahallah lowered the blue laser toward the flesh, and with an incredibly deft touch, sliced it along the outside of the bandages, cutting them open like a razor, without touching the flesh below. He pried along the cut and looked in at the wound. “You’ve cleaned it well. That’s good. I’ll just use some of this—and—” He reached down and sprinkled liquid from a jar on the mobile table throughout the eight-inch wound, which Rock could see extended right down into the bone. He winced. He had never liked to actually see what was inside a man’s flesh. Although he sure as hell had seen it enough times.

Once the wound was thoroughly cleaned, Rahallah brought the laser tip down to the wound and inside it. There was a puff of smoke, which rose up out of the wound, as he pulled the laser quickly across it. Then he stopped, looked down, and started over again.

He was sealing up one layer of muscle at a time. Rock had witnessed a kind of laser surgery once back at C.C., but nothing like this. Rahallah was sewing the different layers closed with burning stitches with the expertise of a Hong Kong tailor. It took him only five minutes. And the wound was sealed with a burnt white line about a half-inch thick that ran the full length of the arm—closed with its own flesh as a bandage.

“Amazing,” Rockson said as Rahallah at last stood back, let the laser die, and let out a sigh of relief that it was over.

“I think—he’ll survive. That scar won’t look too great—but—I haven’t had any plastic surgery courses lately.”

“He’s not looking to win any beauty contests,” Rockson said. He suddenly felt terribly tired, as if he needed to sleep now that all the tension was over.

He’d been out in the sun too long, on the elephant too long. In the jet too long.

Rahallah had to grab him as he fell. “Quickly, put this brave man in bed,” Rahallah snapped. A dozen servants rushed to obey.

Sixteen

R
ock awoke the next morning refreshed, finding himself on a long plush couch with a stiff animal-smelling blanket thrown over him. He remembered he had awakened once and eaten like a pig—and then passed out again! He got up, and was pleased to find that there was fresh water in a small bowl to wash with and to clean out his stinking breath. He’d forgotten his toothbrush, but his finger would do.

“You are look-ink for toot-brush?” a voice said hesitantly. Rockson turned to see an absolutely gorgeous raven-haired woman with high cheekbones and voluptuous rouged lips. She was beautiful, and wore only a flimsy pink robe with the same odd hieroglyphic symbols all over it. She held out a small toothbrush and a towel, and smiled coyly. Rockson couldn’t help but grin.

“If it’s going to be this much fun waking up every morning here, in wherever the hell I am, I’m going to stay here forever.” She giggled and raised her hand to her mouth, making her firm melon breasts, just barely hidden inside the gown, shake alluringly. Rock held his temptation in check. The man who had just come all the way from America to help guide the entire Neo-Egyptian army against Killov couldn’t just jump back into bed at the slightest provocation, could he?

He just took the toothbrush, not her. Rockson brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face and neck. Then he got dressed, blushing a little under the watchful and appreciative gaze of the young woman.

“I’m Neferte,” she offered.

“And I’m Rockson, Ted Rockson. Rock, my friends call me.”

“Rock,” she said, rolling the word over her tongue in a most provocative manner.

“Oh Lord,” Rockson mumbled under his breath, and headed outside. The first thing he wanted to do was find out just what the hell was going on. He and Rahallah really hadn’t had a chance to discuss the situation and all its ramifications. He saw two elephants waiting as he came through the flap. Rahallah was sitting atop one, the other was empty. Rock gulped.