Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (24 page)

When it rose up, there was just red and splintered bone where the beasts and men had been. All along the field of his glasses the enemy was coming down the valley from both sides—on camel, on foot, even a contingent on some sort of levitated raft! But it was the ones in the very forefront, the first ranks of the moving camels, the riders holding the red anti-grav sticks, that Rock was interested in.

He focused the glasses for a second, and thought he spotted Killov as a peaked hood fell from a gaunt, pale face. He swore he saw the Skull staring back up at him and pointing a Qu’ul!

At that very instant a huge boulder came down just yards from some of the other bait-riders, this group more fortunately situated.

The Amun priests tried again. They quickly sent more boulders slamming down onto the lure-force. Others saw that there was something going on up on the slopes of each side of the dam. Huge rock slabs came flying through the sky, shooting up toward the ranks of war bulls on each side of the dam that were filling every bit of stone or cement walkway that could be found.

Rock waited as planned, though it was agonizingly hard to. They had to sucker the Killov forces into the valley, get them in trouble as much as possible. Get them close to the dam, so there would be no way out, no way they’d miss the brunt of the crashing sea of water.

But suddenly, waiting wasn’t possible any longer. Boulders began coming down on both sides of the river, slamming into the elephants on Rock’s flank and on the far side as well. It was as if thunder was going off in their very midst. Suddenly, ahead of time, Tutankhamen’s forces were shooting up at the dam. The elephants all raised their trunks and fired out the laser rays’ blue and red, snapping with electric energy.

Rockson gave his beast the kick signal for aiming and firing, and it raised its long trunk as well. The laser apparatus came whirring out of the snout, and began glowing and blinking a deep violet color. The elephants behind Kral followed suit, as the whole slope of war bulls with riders all over their backs raised their trunks and the laser weapons emerged.

The whole contingent of laser-equipped pachyderms shot, and a thousand beams of the most aching blue the world had ever seen came instantaneously out of them. Unlike bullets, the laser wave didn’t take time. It just was there. Between the Tutankhamen forces on both sides of the Nile, there were literally thousands of the crackling rays playing over the surface of the dam. It all didn’t seem to be doing a damn thing, though. They had to concentrate the beams more accurately, Rock suddenly realized, bring all the power to an exact focus.

“Fire exactly where I’m firing,” Rock screamed out over one of the Egyptian handspeakers. The word was passed down the line and within seconds, more and more of the blue beams were snapping into the same spot—just about dead center on the dam, the spot where Rockson figured the greatest weight of water would be pressing in from the other side. The spot in a dam that Rocky Mountain beavers always fortified!

Across the Nile, Tutankhamen saw what Rock had in mind, and commanded his forces to do the same. Killov’s forces were right down the river, just five hundred yards off, closing in on the sacrifice-force tearing along just in front of them.

The concrete in the dead center of the dam began to glow—first orange, then white. It takes a lot of heat to make concrete melt, but the combined strength of 3,000 beams of laser energy was like a controlled thermonuclear explosion.

Suddenly the circle of heat was a good twenty feet wide and almost blue like the laser beams themselves. There was a roar, even louder than the slamming rocks of the Amun Army rising and falling all around them now and creating mega-death through their ranks. All the men looked up as the spot that had been glowing erupted out of the face of the dam like a lava explosion, red hot and melting.

A burst of water came shooting out behind the spewing concrete pieces, under incredible pressure as it rushed through the circular twenty-foot hole. And even as the elephants were commanded to shut off their lasers, their riders gazed up to see the Nile’s immense water pressure eating at the edges of the rapidly expanding hole.

It was like a domino effect—but very fast. The circle of exploding concrete spread, moving out on all sides as the water bit away at the ninety-foot-thick cement dam at the rate of about five-hundred feet a second. And the more water that roared out in a waterfall dwarfing Niagara itself, the bigger the hole became. Suddenly the whole center of the Aswan went with a roar that took out over a billion tons of concrete in an instant, sending it flying through the air, straight down at the advancing Killovian forces and the heroic, doomed remnant of the bait-squad.

But the concrete shrapnel was the least of their worries. For right behind it was a wall of water as high as an eighty-story building as half the liquid contents of the multi-trillion-gallon reservoir that the dam had contained came out in the space of seconds.

The wave roared out into the air like a thing alive, a twisting maelstrom of liquid which just seemed to expand out in every direction as it flew. Rock could see right away that it was going to take out some of the main force’s elephants too. Those who were on the lower rock ledges or concrete walkways across river below five hundred feet elevation might be in trouble.

Five hundred yards down the river, the army of Killov saw the great wall of blue water right overhead and realized they’d been trapped. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do beyond point with their power-sticks around in the air. It’s hard to push back water. Liquids are tricky. And they only had about two seconds to learn how. For suddenly, the tidal wave which had flown out a good two thousand feet from the face of the high dam came down in one immense wall a half mile on a side. It crashed with the loudest sound Rock had ever heard, making his eardrums vibrate like rubber bands. Heroes and villains, everyone and everything in the flood’s path instantly disappeared beneath the crushing waters.

On both sides of the Nile, spreading back a mile, camels, riders, and thousands of infantry died as the water crashed down. And it was far bigger slaughter than any of the mountains the Skull-man had raised up to kill. They all just vanished beneath the churning foam and twisting blackness. Their anti-grav sticks were sucked down, and boulders everywhere dropped from the sky as they regained their full weight, bounding down the slopes into the churning madness.

The waters took all of it down. Took them all as Moses had commanded the Red Sea to take the pharaoh’s chariots. Of such things are legends born.

Twenty-Seven

T
he raging water released by the dam continued to churn debris downriver like clothes in a washing machine. The currents put in play by the super-tonnage of water rushed from bank to bank with bubbles and whitewater everywhere. Dead camels, troops of Killov’s army, a high priest here and there, white robe billowing out in the water—all floated by, bobbing up and down, spinning around in the mud-black river. A river of the doomed.

Already vultures roamed high in the sky in great arcing circles, slowly swooping lower down as the vanquished began rolling up onto the shores of the Nile, snagging among the weeds, dragging onto stumps that jutted out. Crocodiles, vultures, ants, bugs, and beetles of every size and description began feeding on them. Taking what was now theirs.

In the midst of it all, a small figure floated half submerged alongside a dead bloated camel. His gaunt face was hidden in the black waters that swirled around the slowly turning beast whose white stomach was distorted and had risen up like dough in the oven. The submerged figure’s eyes darted back and forth, continuously raking the waters for crocodiles. In one hand he held a length of broken sword by the dull end of the blade. The other hand clutched the soaked, thick hairy hide of the bloated animal’s side, pressing close against the camel so he couldn’t be seen. Colonel Killov kicked slowly to keep from going under as he floated along, dead center in the river, only occasionally allowing his mouth to reach the surface and suck in air.

As he floated, he cursed silently. He had been so close. He had had both sides of the power spectrum in his grasp. His armies were poised to sweep all of Africa. And then . . . Total and complete annihilation!

He would devote the rest of his life to taking out Rockson. Nothing else mattered now. Nothing.

And suddenly, from the pits of the darkest depression the skull-faced KGB butcher had ever known, he was released. He felt risen up into a kind of mad elation. An elation of revenge. And he began planning how he would kill him. Would he strangle him? Pour acid on him? Oh, the many ways that Ted Rockson could die! And in a bizarre way, Killov almost felt sort of happy as he fended off crocs and lashed out at vultures that swung too low. As his dead camel slowly spun down the endless black Nile, he realized that he had a reason to live.

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