Doomsday Warrior 19 - America’s Final Defense (2 page)

“Well?” Rock asked as Green saluted. “Can they get out of there?”

Detroit was in charge of the seismic resonancer unit, which probed the earth with radio waves to outline the extent of the Red bunkers. If anyone could answer that question, he could.

“Not a chance,” he smiled, his white teeth shining like day-glo in the purple twilight. “We got it checked out, Rock! My seismo teams checked all the surrounding rocky areas. There’s no tunnel leading out of there. We’re sure of that. He’s finally trapped. At last we can kill the bastard and have the body to prove it.”

“I sure hope so,” Rock replied cynically. “I won’t believe we have done away with Killov until I drag his body out of there myself, though.”

“What do you plan to do—gas him to death?”

“Might as well tell you all my plans at once,” said Rock, looking over Green’s shoulder. He could see that Chen, Archer, and Scheransky were walking up the hill together now, talking animatedly. Chen looked like a child next to the bearlike mountain man striding beside him. Rock waved to them, and to the seven-footer coming up behind them: Scot McCaughlin, wild haired and long bearded, like Neptune. Rock invited them all into the command tent. There charts of the area were already set up. He picked up a pointer and hammered it on one map.

“This is our position; these are the holes the rats are dug into; and these,” he folded down an overlay, “are the rat tunnels.”

“They look like bookworm tunnels, crooked and spiraling,” Rockson went on. “None is deeper than a hundred yards. There might be explosives down there. The Ruskies might try to blow us up along with them, on Killov’s order to commit suicide. But I know Killov—he’d be here or here,” Rock pointed to the deepest tunnels. “He’s
not
going to kill himself. Only if he can get me at the same time would he do that. He likes his evil, sick life too much to die. He’s tortured millions, but he still wants to live on to cause
more
pain—and of course, to enjoy his drug highs.”

“So what’s the plan?” Chen asked, getting right to the point. “Do we dig in from the hills with earth melters?”

“No,” Rock said, scratching his chin. “I think we infiltrate through
these
shafts.” He pointed to a series of steep airshafts. “We’ll use only stun grenades if we’re spotted! I want as many of the KGBers we can get alive—for interrogation. We go in with sleep gas. We isolate the different groups of Reds, gas ’em, then interrogate. Find out which tunnel is Killov’s. I want to go into that tunnel alone.”

“But you said—” Archer began, looking perturbed.

“Yeah, I know. I said that Killov wants me as much as I want him, that he would kill us both. I’ll take that chance.”

Operation Kill Rat commenced at daybreak. A few KGBers had to be picked off during the night as they’d tried to slip out of their nests under cover of darkness, but there was no real breakout. Rockson was satisfied that the majority were still in there. Ground scans from the seismo team’s detectors showed that about 115 men were still alive. Movement and dioxide readings at the exit holes confirmed that. Rockson positioned his men, keeping his team as a unit.

As dawn turned to day, the commandos went in, ten to a hole. There were ten holes in all. The operation went smoothly at first; drowsy and dazed Soviets were dragged bodily from each of nine tunnels. The tenth had a series of metal snap-shut doors, blast baffles, and hidden booby-traps. Nothing was accomplished there. Even before the captives were questioned, Rockson knew that Killov was in the tenth rathole.

Rock’s team approached the tenth tunnel at noon, after sappers blew apart three sets of foot-thick steel barriers. After the smoke cleared, a scan was done. Rockson anxiously looked on as Detroit’s scan team quickly concluded that there was only one man in the last hole. “That would be Killov,” Rockson said, gritting his teeth. “Come on; let’s get him now.”

His team of ten approached the rathole. They hunkered down, looking for any movement. “It doesn’t have to be
him,”
Scheransky whispered. “It could be anyone down there. The best instruments can’t identify individuals.”

“But I can smell the bastard, psychically,” Rock stated, shaking with certainty. “I walked about for a long time on the hill over there, and every time I glanced at this particular bunker entrance, the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up! This is the tunnel where Killov is hiding. Come on.
Slowly.”

Stepping over charred metal, they cautiously descended the steep ramp.

“Looks like an old mining tunnel,” Chen whispered. “Silver or uranium, probably. There’s no radiation, according to my gauges— Just an ancient, half-crumbling mineshaft. What’s that noise?”

“Relax,” Green said. “Vermin.”

Killov was going to die in less than palatial surroundings, Rock thought, as rats scurried underfoot and waterbugs ran every which way. They went on, and the tunnel leveled off. Archer said, “Me hit head—tunnel too small! I go back?” It was a plea.

“No,” Rock insisted. “I know you hate small places, pal, but just bend lower. And for god’s sake, don’t bump hard into any of those support beams. This tunnel could collapse!”

They moved forward, casting their lights around, but saw nothing but old beams.
“Stop,”
Chen suddenly whispered. They froze.

Rockson looked to where Chen pointed, and nodded. It was a booby trap, clever as hell—a little dead rat, but one that glistened dully. It was metal. A boot descending on that bomb, and
boom!
Chen easily disarmed it with his magna-pry device, and whistled.

“Look at this,” Chen said as he opened the “rat.” He held up a near-invisible glass-and-wire device. “Frag bomb. Sophisticated. I’ll bet the glass pieces are poisoned.”

They went on down the tunnel. It was dryer now. Ahead, it seemed there was some dim light. “Ruskies. We should use the sleep gas,” Chen suggested.

Rockson motioned Green to come to the front. “Let it spray,” Rock said. Detroit stepped forward in the dim light of Rock’s pencil-beam laser flashlight, and detached the nozzle and hose from his belt. From the tank on Detroit Green’s back the nozzle delivered a fine spray of gray gas with barely a hiss. They watched as the blue-white gas spread down the tunnel. Ahead there was an excited word or two, then the sound of collapsing bodies.

Rock and his men double-timed around the bend and found three sleeping gas-masked black-shirt commandos, still holding their Kalashnikovs.

“Ordinary gas masks don’t work against
this
gas,” Detroit smiled. “It’s one of the new concoctions from Schecter’s lab.”

The rock team had all taken antidote tablets before beginning the operation, so they were unaffected. The Reds would be out for hours. The rock team stepped over them; they were after bigger game.

Down, down . . . steeper now. And Rock actually heard
music. Wagner’s Ring Cycle!
Was Killov playing music as waited for death? Rock motioned his men to follow him single file.

Blam! Blam!

All hell broke loose. The music had worked well, distracting Rockson from the menace above them. Suddenly a trapdoor opened and the tunnel was rapidly filling with a sticky black sand. In the quickly rising sand, the Doomsday Warrior struggled to move, along with his companions. The sand was made of a heavy, clinging substance—it was not ordinary silica, but something more sinister. They were all immediately stuck solid, up to their necks, but no further. With dismay, Rock realized no one had managed to keep a weapon above the weighty prison of sand.

There was a laugh. The music stopped. The light ahead was blocked by a slowly approaching figure. The gaunt form of the wild-eyed Russian madman was limned in the light from afar. He came forward, stopped, and looked down at each head projecting out of the dead-weight sand.
Killov.
Archer tried to bite Killov’s left boot, but got a kick for that. The enraged mountain man cursed him and promised him vengeance. Killov laughed again.

Then he found Rockson. He bent down as Rockson struggled, pinned like a bug. “Like my special sandbox for American heroes?” Killov snickered, and took a steely grip on Rock’s long black-and-white locks and pulled hard, tilting the American’s head back.

“Look at me
when I talk to you! You’re not so big now, are you, Rockson?” The black, beady eyes flashed in triumph. “That’s a new type of quick-setting material called silica-40 that you’re trapped in. Do you feel like a fool, Rockson? Admit it.”

Rock didn’t reply. Killov stood up, then Rock felt the hard edge of a steel-tipped boot—Killov’s boot—against his chin. Numb and bleeding, Rock twisted and struggled. The sucking sands gave a bit. Killov was surprised. He reached for his sidearm, but fumbled.

Rock had summoned a power he didn’t even know he possessed, a mutant strength born of desperation and anger, and he had somehow overcome the tons of weighty sand. Rockson crawled out of his living grave as Killov backed off, muttering, “Can’t . . . be!” He lifted his pistol and fired. But Killov’s sidearm was jammed by Rock’s throw of sand—accurate and lucky!

Now the fight began tooth and nail—over the half-buried alive bodies of the brave men Rock had brought to this hell. Rock vowed they would not die because of his mistakes. And
he
wouldn’t die!

The opponents grappled and rolled about. Killov was amazingly strong, though he should have been a pushover. Perhaps, Rockson thought as they struggled, the KGB madman was charged up with some sort of stimulant. Indeed, Killov’s eyes were bloodshot, red, like a world afire. His breath was like acid against Rockson’s face. “You die,” the KGB head snarled, and his long metal-replacement fingernails raked Rock’s shoulder. They felt like icepicks.

“Not yet!” Rock smashed a fist into the man’s yellow teeth. Rotted-out stumps fell out; the thin and cracked mashed lips uttered a groan. Killov pulled away and again tried his jammed weapon. This time it worked.

After the loud report of the pistol came flaming pain. Rock had been hit in the shoulder. Then the Luger misfired again. Desperately, Rock dived at Killov’s legs and tried to topple the man. He succeeded, but not before another solid hit of an explosive bullet hit his chest, inches from Rock’s heart.

Killov had mortally wounded him. Rock knew that. He’d pass out in another second. But not before Rockson killed the man. He
had to
save his men, even if he died.

Rockson smashed Killov with his good fist, sending the man’s head to the side with a snap. As his entrapped men cheered, Rock smashed in the rib cage of the bastard with the butt of his gun. It had fallen to the side when Rock had hit Killov’s jaw.

The madman lay twitching now. Red blood gushed out of Killov’s lips and he sagged, wide-eyed. Rockson felt a lack of breath, a searing pain. He couldn’t stay conscious. Before he passed out, he jabbed at the KGBer’s face one last time and a piece of flesh tore away.

Rock, in his last moment of consciousness, saw that it was not Killov. His opponent was someone else, a man wearing a mask.

He had been fighting an impostor!

Rockson passed out just as Archer repeated his commander’s feat and smashed out of the silica trap. He couldn’t awaken Rockson, so Archer broke the others out of the sand trap.

Chen examined Rockson, and said, “It’s real bad. We’ve got to get him to a hospital. Quick!”

Detroit had one end of the stretcher upon which Rockson lay, and McCaughlin the other. Chen ran ahead of them, frantically waving the medivac helicopter in for a landing.

“This is Rockson,” Chen explained as he ducked under the heliblades. “Get him to Century City. I’ve given him five units of whole blood, but he’s bad. The chest wound is the worst. Get Schecter on the horn as you fly Rockson in
—nobody else,
understand?”

The heli pilot nodded and shouted “Okay” as the stretcher was attached alongside the heli’s fuselage.

“Me go in heli,”
Archer shouted, pushing Chen aside.

“No!” Chen exclaimed, pushing back the tear-faced mountain man. “The heli will fly faster with just Rock aboard. Get back, Archer, and watch the blades!”

The heli took off at a steep angle, its jet engine flaring out a burst as it went into overdrive.

Scheransky came running and joined the four other men watching the heli leave. Then the Russian defector sagged down on the ground. He looked at them all, and said, “How bad is he?”

“He’s dying,” Chen lamented. “Unless our prayers are answered, Rockson will die before he gets to the emergency room at Century City Hospital.”

Up in the air, two medics were pumping drugs and sealing wounds on Rockson. “Jeez,” the bearded one exclaimed, “get the fibrillator. He’s stopped breathing. He’s in cardiac arrest. God, Rockson, hear me! We
need
you! Hold on! Hold on!”

One

O
n another continent, seven thousand five hundred miles to the south, in Peru’s fabled Inca fortress called Machu Pichu, Killov, the real Killov, stood at the very top of the rebuilt Temple of the Sun. He admired again, as he did every morning, his “new” capitol. Machu Pichu had been born again as Killov City. And he was the new Montezuma—or whoever the hell the Inca god-king had been. He turned to face a stone-hewn platform. It was always a thrill to look at and touch such a wonderful object. This dark obsidian stone bed was the very altar at which the noble Incas had decapitated and disemboweled over more than a thousand willing sacrifices a day. The stone pallet was worn from the running of so much blood.

The Incas had offered sacrifices to appease the gods, but all that sacrifice had, Killov knew, failed to stop the Spanish conquistadors from sacking the Inca Kingdom. The Incas had taken last refuge in this city, as Killov had. The great stone temples and residences on the Andean Peak were half wreathed in mists in this warm dawn-time. One could only get a glimpse of the hacked-down jungle that had grown up to cover it over. Now it was clearing, and crews of Killov’s men continued their job with earth movers and weed burners. They had cleaned up most of Machu Pichu in a mere twelve months.