Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (16 page)

“Ah, there you are, Rockson. I wanted to let you sleep—yet I wanted to be here the moment you awoke. We have much to talk about—and very little time.” He shouted some sharp words to the second elephant, and it kneeled down.

“He’s your war elephant from now on. His name is Kral, in the closest approximation in English,” Rahallah explained. His English was filled with high British overtones as he had learned the language at Oxford in Britain, where the premier had him sent when in his late teens. Rahallah, among other talents, had turned out to be a scholar, and had majored in languages.

“My
elephant?” Rockson echoed dumbly back. He walked hesitantly over to it as the immense half-armored animal turned its head and looked at him, not too overjoyed apparently with what it saw.

“He’s a full battle-class elephant, old and scarred. He carries total body armor—and a Class A laser cannon. He’s tough, all right. Just be nice to him and—”

Rockson jumped up atop the bent leg, and then grabbing the ear as he’d seen the others do, he pulled himself up by swinging onto the broad neck. The beast roared out, its trunk snapping up, and the whole back shook for a second as if it was thinking of throwing him off. A bucking elephant, that’s just what Rock needed right now.

“No! No!” Rahallah shouted over.
“Never
pull the ear of a prime bull elephant! You must grab the hair on the back of the neck near the ear, and pull yourself up.”

Rahallah gave some loud orders to the creature in Egyptian, and it suddenly stood up, whipping its snout around to sniff at Rock, who tried to seat himself comfortably atop its broad neck on a padding of cloth.

“Just sit back on him and sort of nudge him this way or that by moving your leg. Prime bulls think they know it all—and they probably do,” the black man said as he started his beast forward. “They pretty much take care of you. That’s why I gave you this one. There’s no time for you to learn to ride a younger one, they need more training. This one belonged to a general—he knows his job. Just don’t pull his ears.”

“Never again,” Rock said, raising his hand in Boy Scout promise as the elephant did indeed start forward with a loud harrumphing sound. The beast pulled alongside Rahallah’s animal, and they moved slowly down the main central clearance of the vast camp. Rock, evidently, was being shown around.

“These are all fighting men here, elephant divisions, infantry. They’re combat hardened—and ready to do whatever is necessary,” Rahallah said. Rockson could see that there were indeed acres of the troops. Men everywhere were practicing their fighting techniques. Some were doing sword work in long lines facing each other, first one side striking—then the other. Blow, counter-blow, counter-counter-blow. They looked as though they knew what they were doing.

Another group about fifty yards down was working with their long double-edged spears with fluted, almost hooklike ends that looked as if they could just rip apart anything that they touched. They practiced on stacks of thick palm trunks that had been set in the earth in holes. The swords were slamming into them, slashing away and ripping even these foot- and two-foot-thick segments into pieces in just a few blows.

But it was the sight ahead of them as they came over a dune that really caught Rock’s full attention. Two whole cavalries of elephants charging toward one another, their riders’ arms outstretched with long spears, slashing away at the air. There must have been fifty or more elephants on each side, all of them immense bulls in full body armor—steel mesh that came down around their legs and flanks. The elephants’ heads were helmeted as well, each one of their helmets a different grotesque shape. Welded out of solid metal, they formed hoods and death masks. Spike-augmented tusks were poking forward beneath the head armor.

The two groups came unceasingly toward one another as they waved their trunks, and man and animal alike screamed up a storm. Yet as they came to each other’s lines, the ranks somehow passed through, spears just missing opponents by inches.

“They’re just training—war games, I think your colloquial American expression goes. As if war could ever be a game.”

“Jesus,” Rock said as his mouth dropped open in amazement. “Who are those elephant fighters? I mean, where did this whole wild operation come from?”

“It’s a typically bizarre story, as are most in the post-nuke world,” Rahallah answered as they moved on to see yet more training facilities on both sides of them. “Somehow, remnants of the Egyptian army survived a few nuke strikes during the Great War a century ago. A bunch of them, nearly five hundred, survived intact. Because these men were in the midst of their own desert-war maneuvers, they found the cities destroyed when they went and looked—but some areas around the pyramids were untouched. So there they developed a culture, out in the desert, where the sand at least was less radioactive than the rest of their nation. They had been out testing very rudimentary weapons using lasers as mere sighting devices, nothing like these weapons of ours! But it was a start. Slowly, they adapted to what was around them, began dressing in the styles of the ancient pharaohs they found in the vast burial chambers unearthed by quakes, adopting their ways. The only culture that survived the war—as amazing as it is—was the truly ancient culture of the pharaohs. They just bypassed all that man had wrought for about five millennia—and started over.”

“But these weapons—and the elephants!”

“The weapons were developed by a group of scientists who had been along to study the laser-sighting weapons—several Americans, the rest Egyptian. They—and their children—continued to develop the lasers and enhance them. They learned to attach them to some elephants they had captured and trained. Out here in the shadows of the tombs of the pharaohs, they continued to develop their entire Egyptian culture. These are the Northern Egyptians—now inhabiting the banks of the whole northern part of the Nile. Killov has captured the Southern Egyptians—the followers of the Sun God, Amun. That is how he is spreading his dark words of destruction—as the Angel of Amun, as His Son, descended from heaven. An angel of death pretending to be one of life! And they believe him, or at any rate, they are too terrified to disobey. Already, he has taken two countries—the Sudan and Chad, and a good portion of Egypt! Libya may be his by fiat if the tribal leaders who are meeting today decide to surrender.”

“But how can he convert people so fast? I mean he doesn’t exactly have the pleasantest of ruling philosophies.”

“That’s exactly it,” Rahallah said from atop his rocking elephant. “His weapons are far more terrible and planet-threatening than even these laser weapons. Somehow Killov has acquired—through the priests of Amun who now comprise his top leadership and military staff—some kind of device that can levitate things—huge rocks, whole small mountains. He can raise them and smash them down on man and beast alike. He has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands already! He cares nothing for human life. Nothing—crushing whole villages like ants. That’s exactly how he rules, Rockson—through sheer unbridled terrorization of the populace.”

“Sounds like the Killov I know and love to hate,” Rockson said bitterly as his elephant let out a long gooselike honking sound. He wondered if he had done something wrong again.

“Killov hasn’t been able to find us out here in the middle of the desert so far. But that’s not for lack of trying. He’s had his units out all over the place, on search-and-destroy—the Southern Army uses camels and horses for that. He threw a few planes at us, but we managed to shoot them right out of the sky, as they were old props. So, for the moment, he’s confined to the ground. That’s our one bit of good fortune. He has to track us to find us. My general Tutankhamen has moved the camp five times in the last month. It’s all extremely mobile. But it’s only a matter of time. I know you have waged large-scale battle operations. I remember reading the reports that came in on the premier’s desk for many years of one Rockson victory after another against some Red Army convoy or battle group.

“In spite of myself, I must confess I always felt a certain admiration for you even though you were always the ‘enemy.’ Against vastly overwhelming manpower and firepower you seemed to manage to come out on top. And when we fought alongside one another for peace in Washington, I was
honored.”

“I’m
honored,” Rock replied, “but I must admit to being a little—make that
very
—apprehensive now.” Rock looked over at the black man. “I’ve never fought in a desert terrain like this—and I’ve never fought atop war elephants that could give King Kong pause to think.”

“Yes, King Kong,” Rahallah mused as if off in his own thoughts for a moment. “Excellent movie, excellent. Not the re-make, of course! Nonetheless, you have carried out large-scale combat maneuvers involving tens of thousands of men at a time in your career, if I’m correct.”

“Yes, I think it’s been known to happen,” Rockson said, a dozen memories of a dozen battles rushing through his head.

“Well then, you’re ahead of the rest of us. I know it will involve strategy, not just head-on collision with the Killov forces. We know—because several elephant battalions, nearly a hundred Class A elephants, have died, with five hundred men. This army looks large—but it’s perhaps three thousand men, no more, and barely a thousand war bulls. But if you see Killov crush an entire village with one of his damned levitating mountains,” Rahallah said, his voice suddenly growing cold and filled with rage, “you know we must act immediately.

“He is worse than any man,” the African prince went on. “The way he kills is not for power, nor wealth, the way other men kill. They at least can be controlled, bought off, so the human race can survive. No,
he
kills for pleasure, just to see it, to experience the pain and the agony of others!”

Suddenly Rock’s gut was filled with the most chilling sensation, as though he were going to puke out some of last night’s massive dinner, which was still digesting in his overfilled stomach. These men, the whole stinking country, all of Africa was counting on him, and he didn’t even know how to make the damned elephant he was riding go to the left or the right!

Seventeen

R
ock inspected the rest of the camp as Rahallah led him on out through the concentric circles of sand-covered elephant-hide tents. There were four sprawling circles of them, encompassing the entire fighting force of General Tutankhamen’s warriors. Rahallah wanted him to see everything so any decisions Rockson made regarding their ultimate strategy would be made with complete knowledge of just what there was to work with. It was clear that the African didn’t want to take the responsibility for the large-scale operation solely on his own shoulders. Not many men would. Not that Rockson looked forward to being responsible for the life and death of thousands of men, not to mention the whole continent of Africa. But the difference, perhaps, between Rockson and other men was exactly in the fact that he was willing to shoulder the decision-making, and to take the risk of total failure.

They toured the encampment for nearly two hours, going up and down every dirt passageway between the tents and covered trenches. Some “roads” were so narrow that the huge elephants could barely fit through even single file. Rockson was quickly getting an immense respect for the multi-ton beasts. They weren’t just huge—but smart—and quite graceful, all things considered. Nimble enough to get through passageways between sand dwellings with hardly more than inches on each side—doing it without sending any walls crashing in. He’d like to see one of them in a china shop. Rock’s beast, Kral, seemed to settle down once it got used to him being up top. And once it saw that he was basically going to let it do the steering. It’s like that in any marriage, too—compromises have to be made. And the Doomsday Warrior wasn’t about to argue with something that outweighed him by twenty to one.

Rock filed away everything he saw in his brain. He still hadn’t the foggiest idea of just what he was going to do against the Skull, but at least the information was being fed inside, where he could feel it all whirring and clicking into the right slots. He just prayed they had enough time to work something out. If Killov attacked immediately, was able to break up this force into smaller groups, send them on the run in all directions without leadership, it might well be all over before it had begun.

He banished such thoughts from his mind. Yet within his heart he felt a certain fear, a feeling that he hardly dared acknowledge. A fear that Killov was not human, that the Skull truly
was
in league with darker forces.

The man should be dead by now. By all rights he
was
dead. Killov had been killed more times than a nine-lived cat—and still came back. Somehow each time he was more powerful and threatening than ever.

This time Rock would make sure the bastard was terminated. He would stand over him and see his flesh and bones placed deep under the dirt. And then would wait a few hours just to make sure the KGB colonel didn’t crawl out again. Seldom did Rockson feel such an animosity, such a loathing for any living thing. But Killov was not of the living, as far as he was concerned. Rather, he represented the dead, dark forces of the universe. Surely the man had been born from under a rotting log along with the scuttling bugs and larvae. It didn’t seem possible that he could have sprung from a human womb, from a human mother.

At last Rahallah told him that that was it. There was nothing else to see as they reached the very outermost sand tent a good half mile from the center of the circles of bivouacs where they had started. He led Rock back down one of the wider paths to the center of the camp, and stopped right in front of his own double-tent headquarers. Rahallah tapped his elephant on the side of the head, and it kneeled down on its front legs. He jumped down onto one of the great tusks, and then to the ground.

Before Rock could say a word, his own war bull was down too, and Rock imitated the black man. Not quite as successfully, as he nearly tripped, getting his foot lodged somehow between tusk and trunk. He reached up, grabbing instinctively for the huge ear hanging down like a round theater curtain. And even as he made contact with it, grabbing hard, he suddenly remembered it was a no-no.