Doomsday Warrior 01 (25 page)

Rockson cut on the twin-booster jets in the tail of the MS-20 and it roared forward, quickly picking up to six hundred kilometers an hour, far faster than any of the regular choppers that might pursue them. He took a final look over his shoulder at the still-unfolding carnage. A ball of flame three hundred feet high burned with the intensity of a death star. The explosions continued one after another, spreading to other parts of the fort. They had really hurt the bastards this time. Half the fort would be gone by the time this thing blew itself out.

It had been a break finding the jet copter on the pad when they blasted their way back to the roof. The power of the machine was incredible. Rock was barely capable of handling the HP of the craft, and had to keep his hands gripped to the controls as it bucked beneath him. The ground sped by below as if he were flying a jet and Rock took the chopper up fast and high at a steep angle that made the men gulp and swallow uncomfortably in the back.

The roar was deafening but it would have been worse had the KGB commander, Polikarpov, not had it doubly insulated so as not to give him headaches. They quickly left the Stalinville fort and headed out toward the canyons and wild country where they could lose themselves if anyone tried to follow. Rock checked the scanning radar and saw something coming in fast on the screen. From behind. By their speed: jets.

“Detroit! Hit the rear gunner position,” Rock yelled out to the black Freefighter, still rubbing his shoulder from the spill of a minute before. Detroit strapped himself into the gunner’s chair and turned the switch on under the guns. Three rows of dials lit up—air-to-ground, air-to-air, machine gun. Detroit pushed air-to-air, and looked into the eye-level screen built into the wall of the copter. Two blips appeared, closing range at two hundred feet per second. Detroit pressed the number two on a keyboard and then Fire button. Two laser-guided missiles shot out from underneath the chopper and headed straight back to greet the two pursuing hot-eye missiles. They met in a collision of flame two hundred yards behind the MS-20.

“Good shooting, man,” Pasqual said, slapping Detroit on the back.

“I wish I could feel prouder, but to be honest with you the Reds built these missile gizmos simple. If they didn’t, the Russian crews would be blowing themselves up all over the place. I know how simple they are—I read the fucking manual.”

Up front, Rockson listened to the radio scream with various versions of what had happened at the fort. He decided to add his own.

“Red-One to emergency control. Commander Polikarpov’s helicopter is in the lead of the chase to capture the enemy. Do not interfere with the commander’s flight path.” He switched off. That ought to gum things up a little more. The Reds would be trying to figure this whole thing out for months. Several other voices cut in on the frequency, denying that the commander was flying the helicopter, demanding that the valley defenses shoot it down. And they could. If they dared take the chance of making a mistake that would cost them. The big anti-aircraft guns mounted in the hills around the fort didn’t go off as they flew directly overhead.

Detroit’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Two Mig Skydog jet fighters coming up on us and boy are they hot-dogging it. They might intercept us before we hit the mountains.” Once in the thick mountains, which they knew inside out, the jets couldn’t match the copter’s maneuverability, but out here . . .

Rockson called back, “Detroit, can you get them?”

“Negative. I’ve only got laser-guided mothers here. They got some kind of electronic countermeasure—it’s showing on my defensive systems screen.”

Rock glanced at the beeping distance of the nearest mountain on the screen—thirteen miles to go to rugged terrain, nineteen to the pass where he might be able to elude the jets. Too far. “Do the best you can, Detroit,” Rock said quietly.

“Aye, aye, Captain.” The men’s faces were set in deep grimaces as they overheard the conversation. To have come so far.

In a few moments the jets flew alongside! The radio crackled. “Your excellency, because of the confusion, we are escorting your ship on its mission.”

“Acknowledged,” mumbled Rockson into the radio. So they had a police escort from the big guy’s own men—how fitting an end to the most destructive day the Russians had known in a century. The jets stayed until they reached the high canyons and the going became impossible. They peeled off, their afterburners trailing hellfire up and away over the mountains.

Rockson made a series of hair-raising turns down a narrow gorge, as they entered the first of two hundred miles of jagged mountain range. Detroit crawled up into the co-pilot seat and sat down next to Rock giving him an ear-to-ear grin.

“How on earth did you decide not to fire on those Skydogs? You saved our lives, Green. They would have changed their plans to escort us if you’d fired.”

“Simple,” Detroit said. “Their ceremonial lights were on. Their pinkish wing-tip lights are only on when saluting a high-ranking officer. You couldn’t see them from your position.”

“But how the hell do you know something like that?” Rock asked, incredulous.

“I read the fucking manuals.” Detroit grinned back. His eye caught a motion on the radar screen blinking above Rock’s head. “Company!” he said. He watched the object weave and twist in pursuit of the constantly shifting copper. “It ain’t no damn jet, not down in these alleyways. Must be some kind of heat-seeking missile. Gonna be hard to shake this one, Rock.”

Rockson placed the helicopter in a steep dive, then made a nearly impossible sharp right around a branching canyon’s jutting boulders. But the cruise missile stayed with them easily. But it wasn’t gaining either and from the depth of color on the radar monitor it was one of the smaller class.

“I’ll try to outrun her in open territory,” Rockson yelled going for broke toward a barren plateau. The cruise stayed about three hundred yards behind them, just matching speed. Soon they were up over the flatlands and the copter shuddered violently as Rockson pushed it to its limits. As if the speed—678 mph—wasn’t enough to do them in, a storm—purple and brown, one of the electrical monster thunderstorms—was looming like the edge of the Earth itself right over the advancing plains.

They were moving just under the sound barrier when suddenly the storm was on them. They were buffeted about like a cork in an ocean squall and Rock nearly lost control as the chopper went into a downward spiral. He pulled back on the controls and gave her even more speed and the black death machine leveled out and they tore forward through the ever-thickening clouds. Lightning crackled all around, shooting by in jagged pitchforks of blinding white. A screaming sound started to come from the overheated engines and a sickening wobbling from the overhead rotor. If this kept up they’d be splattered from here to Century City. Rockson’s knuckles were white on the controls.

“That cruise missile still trailing us?” Rock asked, keeping his eyes glued to the rapidly advancing terrain just a few hundred feet below.

“Radar says it’s there,” Detroit said almost apologetically. “But it’s dropped back a little to five hundred yards.”

Rockson eased up just a bit on the throttle and the terrible din cut in volume. He glanced at the steaming right engine, then quickly back at the temperature gauges. They were cooling already, slowly, but cooling. Maybe the cruise missile would be having its problems too. Perhaps the hurricane winds and the hail would tear its stubby, little fucking wings off.

Rock’s ground radar was picking up more canyons ahead. They would reach them in three minutes. He didn’t want to tell the crew that the worst was yet to come. Suddenly he recognized the contours of the computer profile. “Hey, men, it’s Carson Canyon ahead. I know that place. It’s a piece of cake—and I think I can dump our friend there, too.”

The blades seemed to suddenly shake as the storm again hit them with renewed anger. The engines started spilling oil that spattered back along the body of the chopper.

“You’ve got to go faster, Rock, it’s gaining again. Slowly, but coming up,” Detroit said hoarsely.

“How’re the guns?”

“Haven’t you heard them? McCaughlin’s been firing for the last few minutes. Nothing.”

“Let me know when she gets within a hundred yards.”

“150, 140, 130, 140, 150—hey, what’s happening?”

Rockson let out a sigh of relief, and eased up on the throttle.

“180, 200—hey, Cap’, she’s going down, she’s falling.”

The cheering was loud throughout the chopper and even the normally restrained Rockson joined in as loud as the others.

“How the hell did
you
know what was going to happen?” Detroit asked, puzzled.

Rockson explained that the little bugger was only a short range. “It just ran out of gas before we ran out.”

The rest of the journey home was uneventful other than several dozen heart-wrenching turns in a half-shot helicopter down narrow, dark canyons. At last they were climbing toward Century City. Radio silence was maintained, but Rock knew that gun units down on the ground were keeping a wary eye on the descending helicopter. He landed the bird near the camouflaged hangar in which were stored two other helicopters, much smaller ones, and a prop plane. The bird had scarcely touched down when fifty men, their rifles trained on the chopper, approached in a closing circle.

Detroit jumped out first, then McCaughlin and the others. The Century City Defense Crew embraced the returning Attack Force and stared with wonder at the super chopper.

“This is Commander Polikarpov’s personal helicopter,” Rock said to the waiting guards. “Make sure she’s treated with the royalty she deserves. And a wax job.”

Twenty-One

T
he men they had rescued—Bill Fitz, Pete Scranton and Gilhooley—told of their horrifying experiences as guinea pigs for the scientists who were doing the experimental work with the Mind Breaker. Armstrong had been the first subject of the advanced model, MB II. Since the prisoners were all going to be put to death anyway, after the experiments, the scientist in charge, Letvok, explained the function of the Mind Breaker Model II—how it would probe deeper than the cortex with its laser needles uncovering and activating primitive fear mechanisms in the medulla, bringing nightmares into the awakened state, making the mind of the prisoner experience as real the unconscious fears that he had buried under layers of repression all his life.

Gilhooley described in a shaking voice how the expressions on Armstrong’s face had contorted and changed. How he kept yelling out, “The rats! Take the rats away, Mother! The rats are in my bed!” And then the Reds would turn down the machine and his eyes would refocus and they would ask him questions, questions that had to be answered if his mother was to keep the rats away. Armstrong had refused—even at point of being left permanently in that hell of primeval rats that only his imagination could call forth. Armstrong. The man Rockson had dispatched with a shot to the temple. Brave till the end.

Next it had been Scranton, Pete Scranton. They—the scientists—were sure that the Model II Mind Breaker would work in the direction of pleasure as well. It was Letvok’s brainchild—a Mind Breaker that alternated patterns of pleasure and pain deep within the brain. The machine played its game in Scranton’s brain and every ten or fifteen seconds the expressions on his face changed from anguished grimaces to unparalleled ecstasy. Then they began asking him questions.

“Where is Century City?”

Scranton grunted out, “Mary had a l-little—”

Letvok had turned the dial to full capacity on the pleasure scale. Scranton smiled broadly. Apparently, from his rapid eye movements, he was seeing something. Something that wasn’t there. His restrained hands tried to reach up to touch it.

“What do you see?” the Russian scientist asked.

“Violet, violet women, soft—they . . . call . . . so . . . beautiful, so beautiful. I understand everything—all—everything—the world is love. Yes, that’s it—ecstasy is at the heart of every movement, every—”

Letvok suddenly spun the Mind Breaker’s control to full pain. Instantly the laser needles altered course, tapping the depths of ancestral terror. Scranton had groaned a deep spasmodic groan of a man being immersed in the fires of hell.

“My balls,” he screamed. “Make the demons stop. Don’t let them. Not—
yaaaaa!”
He had screamed for five minutes without cease until Letvok had turned the dial back to neutral.

“I want to hear you tell me the location of Century City. I will reward you.” Letvok had turned the dial up slightly toward pleasure. Scranton stirred, smiling though he had defecated in his pants and urine ran down his leg, forming a yellow puddle on the floor.

“See your violet women?” Letvok asked.

“Faintly, faintly—bring them closer, please bring them closer.”

“I will as soon as you tell me where Century City is.”

Scranton had smiled. “Century City is in heaven.”

“Bah,” Letvok had yelled, spinning the dial to the pain side and leaving Scranton as he screamed incessantly about demons eating his testicles. The others were led away. They could hear the screams for the next ten minutes. Then it stopped. Scranton had been dragged into their cell and thrown on the floor.

They had slapped him in the face and kept saying his name until he finally came round.

“Porter,” Rockson said softly, “see that Scranton gets the best—give him my rehabilitation suite for as long as he wants. He may act confused or withdrawn for a while. But see that he’s not disturbed until he wants to be. I have something I have to do.”

Rockson exited the debriefing room and walked down the corridor. He pressed his palm against a wall sensor and the detention-room door slid open. Inside, the captured Letvok sat on a wood chair. He turned and smiled. “Ah, Mr. Rockson—come to talk to me?” He had little fear for it was known that Americans didn’t torture.

Rockson icily eyed the man up and down. The cigarette dropped from the fingers of the Russian scientist. Fear widened his eyes as Rock rolled up his sleeves to reveal thick, rippling muscles. Rockson approached the Mind Breaker scientist with balled fists. Letvok began whimpering like a baby.