Doomsday Warrior 01 (10 page)

“Great,” Rockson said, turning and walking down the main aisle toward the podium, around which the expectant Council members were already seated in rows of cushioned, low-slung seats. That was much too long, Rockson thought. That was exactly the rub all the time. They were fighting a giant. Even the loss of whole expeditionary forces scarcely made the Red leadership blink. What were ten, or even twenty thousand troops a year to them? They probably expected that in their troop-strength projections. No, somehow the Freefighters’ attack had to be a hundred times more violent and destructive. They had to be hurt!

Rockson walked up the four wood steps to the podium and took a seat to the right of the speaker of the chamber, Willis, who shook his hand warmly and then turned to the Council members and addressed them, officially opening the meeting. He expressed the heartfelt thanks of the Council that Rockson had again been so successful in his mission. But the speaker’s smile immediately dropped away as he began the session.

“Let’s get to the most serious matter immediately—the capture of Preston. This situation endangers not only Westfort but our own Century City as well.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Seven

T
he eighty-story, circular monolith sat in the center of Denver, a statue of death. Black as night, sheathed in impenetrable, shimmering glass, it reached up to the sky, the highest structure in the KGB fortress of Vostok, the center of KGB operations in America. The monolith, called just “The Center” by its personnel and “The Death House” by the Americans, had been built to terrify, to frighten, to intimidate. And it did. Erected nearly sixty years earlier by Commander Jargov, the fourth of the KGB leaders in the occupied United States, it had been constructed of the finest materials, hardened steel and specially made, triple-polorized, brownish blue-tinted glass to withstand the sun and dust of the Colorado climate. “I want this building to last as long as the empire,” Jargov had ordered. And it would be standing well after that.

Still as mysterious and conspicuous as the day it was built, the monolith, some two hundred feet in diameter, was the base of all KGB operations in the U.S.A. Over nine thousand men and women worked here daily, pulling up to work early each morning in their Pushka three-wheel cars or on motorcycle. The monolith was set in the center of the KGB fortress, separate from the military base or its housing. The KGB demanded its own space. It did not want to mix. The meaning of the KGB was fear—to watch over the Soviet military as well as the American workers. Fraternization meant familiarization and friendship. This could not be. Not the Blackshirts. Their black uniforms and red death’s-head medallions designated that they were out of the ordinary. An image must be created of immortality, of superhuman strength and violence. And that was how it must be. For fear worked only when it was believed.

Within the walls of the Center, myriad functions were carried out. From information fed in from military operations, informers, spydrones and the KGB’s own network of intelligence operatives, a comprehensive picture was drawn of the rebel activity and the trouble spots around the country. The intelligence units occupied twenty-five floors, filled with maps—floor-to-ceiling, contoured maps of the entire country, flashing with different colored lights to designate the trouble spots. Green lights for environmental dangers—from earthquakes to radioactive mists—red lights for rebel attacks, orange lights for possible Free American hidden cities, and blue lights for all other KGB centers in the U.S.A. Messengers constantly ran from floor to floor as their superiors yelled out orders. The sheer enormity of spying on such a vast country as the United States was a constant struggle. There were always problems, always emergencies—breakdowns of equipment, rebellions, sabotage of the factories and the Russian fortresses by the underground. The army were fools, barely capable of going out and capturing a few rebels, let alone understanding the whole picture, the emerging pattern. That work was for the KGB.

On the next fifteen floors were the counterespionage “services”—ruling bureaucracy that sent out the Death Squads to liquidate all those thought to be troublemakers. There were no laws they had to obey—they were the law, the judge, the jury and the executioner. They had free rein over the country like some barbarian war lords of the past.

From the forty-first to the sixty-fourth floor were the communications networks, linking all KGB centers in the country with Mother Russia and their comrades in arms around the world. From Timbuktu to London, from Paris to Tokyo, the KGB ruled supreme. Radio, laser systems and giant radar dishes on the roof, slowly turning their fifty-foot cones to follow their linking satellite ten thousand miles up. Information was sent and received from virtually every corner of the world. The wires literally buzzed with energy as the global Soviet Empire talked to itself.

On the top fifteen floors were the administration offices of top KGB officers. Here the rooms were huge and plush, with Persian rugs and flowing copper waterfalls. The elite of the elite—their death’s-heads cast in solid gold—the most feared men in America ruled from here: Killov, Turgenov, Dashkov, Mukstadt.

Below the ground floor, the original designers of the monolith had built an additional ten stories, pushing a good 150 feet below the ground. Here, it was thought, just in case of counterattack, the structure could be used as a fallout shelter, and thus was built with twenty-foot-thick concrete reinforced walls, airlocks, self-contained oxygen supply and provisions for years. But the KGB had quickly found a much better use for these subterranean floors—a use more fitting to their work: torture chambers. The floors beneath the Center were equipped with over five hundred cells, in case large-scale interrogations became necessary. The most advanced—and primitive—torture devices known to man were here, a regular testing laboratory of the implements of pain. From bamboo shoots inserted under finger nails, still effective on many American fortress workers, to sophisticated electrode devices, which when attached to the genitals were capable of producing an exquisite pain.

The torture squad consisted of nearly a hundred men, the most sadistic of the KGB crews, who had been chosen just for their qualities of mercilessness and cruelty. Down below they had their own world. There were no rules, no one to answer to. God help the man or woman or child who set foot through those basement doors. Most were never seen again. The few that were released were mindless vegetables, their bodies ripped, scarred, their brains reduced to functions of stumbling and excreting. Most could hardly talk, or if they could, wouldn’t. They sat on stoops, and in glass- and brick-strewn lots in the run-down American sectors of the fortresses and moaned softly, unable to communicate their private hell.

Fortunately for them, most did perish within the walls. If death could be termed fortunate, it was here that such a designation would occur. For the KGB of 2089 were experts in every kind of pain that the human body could experience. They studied the ways of pain, the uses of pressure points and blades and electricity and ice and beatings and stretchings and glass inserted in the rectum and broken. But why go on, only those who give torture or feel it would want to know every detail. When death came it was a blessing.

Still, there was one thing that grated on the torture squads. The Free Americans. Somehow, their own scientists and psychologists had come up with a psychological conditioning that could overcome pain. They felt the torture, but blocks came on in their minds that permitted no access to the secret information that the KGB wanted most desperately—the locations of the American Free Cities. The Americans would scream and then spout nursery rhymes, the name of their girlfriend, or their favorite food. Even in death they had the last laugh on their KGB tormentors, who thus far had been totally incapable of breaking through these mind armors.

Until now, that is. The number-one priority of the KGB scientists for the last twenty years had been to develop some method, some device capable of smashing through these blocks, and now, at last, success was within reach. The Mind Breaker, invented by Dr. Nikolai Chernov, would make the difference. The device used laser beams to actually penetrate the brain tissue and short out the brain block, by slicing certain vital brain connections, producing a pain undreamt of heretofore. As Chernov had said when presenting the first of the devices to Killov, “The demons of hell itself would be happy to have such a machine. The pain produced by them is virtually infinite. We’ve only used them at the lowest power and the results are . . . extraordinary.”

Killov immediately ordered extensive testing of the Mind Breaker. If it was true, the shape of America could be changed forever. The Free Cities would be found one by one and destroyed. The last strongholds of resistance to the Soviet Empire would be crushed and Russia could settle into a thousand years of tranquility. Of course, Killov’s future would be assured as well. With the destruction of the rebels he would be next in line for the premiership. Every prisoner brought in from now on was to be hooked up to the Mind Breaker. He wanted every detail of the machine. How it worked, what its limits were, if any. But most of all, he wanted the locations of the Free Cities. Blood would flow.

A Skinord attack helicopter swooped down suddenly from out of the sky like a black hawk zeroing in on a kill. The KGB chopper with the red skull on the side was one of the KGB’s fleet of one hundred similar, highly armed helicopters used for reconnaissance, counterinsurgency and whatever. It dropped to within a foot of the Center’s landing pad, located several hundred feet to the rear of the towering, black structure. The pilot pulled back on the rotor speed and the chopper dropped softly onto the rubber-padded landing zone. It was immediately surrounded by machine-gun-toting guards who waited impatiently for the side door to open. With a click and a slight whoosh of air from the pressure difference, the steel door slid back and a battered man, face dripping with blood, was thrown out by the two KGB men inside. He landed roughly on the ground, wrenching his shoulder, for his hands had been cuffed behind his back. He was instantly lifted at the elbows by the waiting guards and shuffled off toward the Center.

Lt. Col. Bill Preston, one of the highest ranking officers of Westfort, located some five hundred miles to the east of Denver, had been captured, It was one of the Reds’ biggest catches in years. He had been traveling by hybrid with a force of twenty men, investigating the possibility of a recently uncovered machine factory still containing parts in collapsed rooms. They had traveled, as did all Freefighters in this part of the country, only at night to avoid the Russian unmanned spydrones which buzzed constantly overhead, video cameras relaying information to control centers set up in every Russian fort. But the KGB had set a trap on one of the forest trails that they suspected was being used by the underground. Preston and his men had just come into a small clearing when they were attacked from every side by the black-garbed, submachine-gun-firing KGB commando squad. The Americans, of course, fought back with everything. There could be no capture by the Russians. That meant only one thing. Death was far preferable. Though hopelessly outnumbered, they pulled knives when their pistols clicked empty and flung themselves on their attackers, stabbing guts and slashing eyes. Though the force of the KGB numbered over a hundred men, the fight went on for almost ten minutes. When it was over, thirty-five KGB commandos lay sprawled in pools of blood. Every Freefighter had been slaughtered except for Preston and an unconscious Freefighter, thought dead, who later escaped. Seeing he was about to be captured, Preston turned his pistol on himself, but the damn thing jammed. He reached for the cyanide capsule in his utility belt and lifted his hand to swallow. An alert officer leaped at him, knocking his hand away with the stock of his submachine gun.

“Now we have one,” the Red said with a smile, looking down at the fallen Freefighter who stared back up scornfully.

“You have one, but you won’t get squat from me, comrade. I’ll die before I’ll spill a thing.” He smirked at the futility of the KGB attempts to make Freefighters talk. Many Americans had already died. And many more would before this war was over. He was ready to die himself. Life had been good to him all things considered. He regretted that his wife and children would be alone now. But they were tough. They would fight on.

A helicopter had been called in within minutes of his capture and Preston, handcuffed, had been thrown on board with four guards. Within minutes the chopper was flying, Priority One to Denver. All other air vehicles gave way as the shiny black chopper flitted through the air, a messenger of doom. The crescent moon flickered fingerlike shadows on the craft as it soared along, just below the cloud line.

Once landed, Preston was immediately pushed toward the back entrance to the Center. Death’s-head guards, stiffly at attention, saluted and stepped aside as the door creaked open. The captured Freefighter was hustled inside as the inner airlock door rolled quickly closed behind them. He was led to one of ten gleaming chrome elevators and down. Down into the Earth. Preston had never been in the monolith. But he had heard of it. A courageous man, a man who had faced death square in the eye many times, Bill Preston nevertheless felt a knot in his gut as the elevator descended. He tried to imagine what awaited him. He knew that it would be far worse than anything his mind could picture.

The elevator snapped open and again he was pushed out. They led him down a long corridor filled with countless numbered doors. He could hear blood-curdling wails of pain echoing down the hallway. Even steel couldn’t stop the sound of a man screaming for his life. At the end of the corridor they came to yet another large steel door. The guards saluted the officer at Preston’s right and buzzed the door open. Preston was pulled into a fairly small room equipped with futuristic equipment, blinking computer lights, diodes, dials, video cameras and a large, gridded screen. All the guards exited quickly except two who stood by him, hands at ease behind them.