Doomsday Warrior 08 - American Glory (25 page)

“This is it, General,” Rock said as the “10” and then the “11” flashed on the indicator board. “When we hit ‘12’—move as fast as you’ve ever moved in your life. This—this Killov is no ordinary man.”

“No—?” Panchali asked with a curious expression. “How interesting. I’m growing bored with killing ordinary men—it’s like shooting carp in a pond. Perhaps we will have a worthy challenge.” Rockson threw a skeptical look at Panchali but didn’t have time to debate the man’s character as “12” lit up and the doors flew open.

It wasn’t that Panchali was slow, but that Rockson was just a millimeter faster. He saw the five men standing yards from the doors, their rifles aimed dead forward, and reacted with the speed of a striking piranha. As he dove forward, Rock kicked Panchali’s leg out from under him, bringing the man down like a stone to the corridor floor. The KGB assassins opened up like a firing squad, sure they had the men in their graves. But the slugs only found closing elevator doors and ricocheted off, careening backwards. Rockson’s .12 gauge equalizer was in his hands at the moment the Reds fired. By the time they realized they’d missed, his finger had moved three times. Five bodies flew backward as if hit by the fist of God himself, leaving five bright red trails on the floor all the way to the back wall, fifteen feet behind them.

“That’s the second time, Freefighter,” Panchali said, jumping to his feet, “that you’ve saved my life. I am growing too indebted to you.”

“Forget it, man,” Rock said as they headed down the hall on their toes. “Just your coming to this country, where every goddamned thing seems to want to kill a man or at least take a bite out of him, is payment a thousand times over.”

As they went down the hall they kicked open doors, ready to incinerate whatever was inside. But all the rooms were empty. They came to the last and main door at the end of the corridor and again, facing each other just inches apart, shoulder-slammed into it, smashing the rectangle from its hinges. Both men stumbled into the room, their weapons high.

“Ah, welcome, gentlemen,” said a cold voice dripping with lies and deceit in every word. “I’ve been expecting you. Although I didn’t realize I was going to have two guests.” Both fighters focused on the man who sat in the misty dimness at the far end of the room behind a long wooden desk, both hands clasped together on the heavily waxed top. Could it b
e—him?
Killov?

“Thanks for the greeting,” Rockson said, his shotpistol pointed at the calm man’s chest, as he and the Sikh walked forward.

The gaunt man’s face moved out of the shadows. Rockson would know it anywhere. The evil skull features, the reddish scar he had himself placed on that face-of-death.
“Killov!”
Rockson snarled. “You are our prisoner, you will stand trial for war crimes—or die right here, right now. However you want it,
bastard.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Killov said, his eyes wide, the pupils dilated big as quarters. “You really should be taught some manners. Pity you won’t get the chance to learn.” Still his long pale hands were plainly in sight. Rockson didn’t get his making threats.

“You must finally be cracking, slime, from all those drugs you pile into that skeleton of a body,” Rockson sneered. “I think you’re the one who’s finished—not us.”

“Perhaps there are factors you don’t know about,” the KGB commander said with the icy smoothness of a razor cutting flesh.

“Like what?” Rockson asked, his eyes darting suddenly around the room, searching for hidden attackers.

“Like this!” Killov screamed, all the rage he had been suppressing over the imminent loss of Minsk exploding from him. The Blackshirt leader pushed his knee up hard under the desk and thus pressed a button. Whether he was intending to reach Killov with his sword, or to shield Rockson from what was coming, the Doomsday Warrior couldn’t tell—but suddenly Panchali was jumping in front of him. There was as roar from the whole front side of Killov’s desk as the wooden panels flew off and a mounted rack of ten arrayed shotguns fired simultaneously at waist level. The wall of shots hit the Sikh general dead on, ripping into every part of his torso. Rockson, standing three feet behind him, was shielded from the majority of the blasts though he felt stabbing pellet fragments rip into his right shoulder and leg. Panchali was thrown straight backward as if running in reverse and slammed into Rockson, dropping them both down. Before he even made contact with the floor, Rock had his pistol up and pulled the trigger over and over again until the chamber was empty.

But before a single one of his shells could take root in the mad KGBer’s flesh, Killov had already pushed another button. A peeled-open steel globe shot up from the floor and snapped closed around his entire chair, shielding the madman inside in an impenetrable cocoon. Rock’s shots bounced harmlessly off the thick outer alloy-layering. Suddenly the room was filled with a deep vibration and a rocket system ignited on the underside of the diving-bell shaped device.

Using all his strength, Rockson pulled the dead weight of Panchali out of the way of the flames emerging from the desk as the heat swept by them both like the fire of a furnace. The white ignition flame changed to the blast of a full-sized escape-rocket taking off and the globe shot backward, smashing right through the twelfth-floor wall and out into the air.

Rockson ran forward and coughing from the hot smoke, peered through the twisted opening, pieces of wall still tumbling to the street below, and saw the escape device shooting through the night like a meteor until it disappeared far over the vast woods to the north of them. Rock let his gaze fall to the streets below where Freefighters and Sikhs were streaming past the Command Building. The KGB was in full retreat now, many of them driving vehicles at full speed trying to get out the back entrance of the fort. But there would be no escape for them. Only their master had made it out.

Rock walked back to Panchali and knelt down beside him. The man was still alive, his eyes open and weakly alert. But the Doomsday Warrior had been around too many wounded, too many dying not to know that the Sikh didn’t have a chance. He was bleeding in over thirty places, thick streams of red that pulsed, and emptied out his life onto the floor around him. Rock reached down and put one arm under the man’s head, lifting him slightly so he could breathe easier.

“Thank you, Freefighter,” Panchali said as he looked up at Rockson with a smug smile. “See—I repaid you. Now we are even.”

“No—now I am once again in your debt,” Rock said softly. “And I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to repay you,” he whispered so low it could hardly be heard.

“Don’t whimper like a raw recruit,” Panchali barked out, coughing up blood. “I know I’m dying. It is obvious. But Rockson,” he said, looking the Doomsday Warrior square in the eye, with incredible power in his gaze even as he lay mortally wounded, “do not mourn for me. My life has been a miraculous adventure—and my greatest wish in life—to die in the midst of glorious foreign battle—has been granted. Can you see me growing old and fat, sitting at a desk? No! I go now on the river of my own blood across the Styx into the land of fallen warriors.” He held his hand out and squeezed it tightly around Rockson’s. “I shall see you there someday—friend.” His hand tightened and then relaxed and Rockson knew—it was over.

Nineteen

A
ll across the length and breadth of America the results were the same. The KGB vermin were driven out and sent skulking back to their lairs. Some of the forts didn’t fall at first—but the big ones did, the ones that mattered. And with their top command centers gone, the rest of the Blackshirts saw the writing on the wall and left with little more than the literal shirts on their backs. The loss of life was staggering, with 25,000 Freefighters killed, over 50,000 wounded. The Royal Sikh Army took 43% casualties. But the earth had been saved once again from total and complete darkness—for now, anyway.

“Where will you go now?” Rockson asked Sikh Ragdar as the two men rode around Fort Minsk, supervising the withdrawal.

“Back to where we landed. Our transports are scheduled to pick us up in one week. Then home to Asia where there is much work still to be done.”

“I’m sorry about Panchali,” Rock said. “He was a great general.”

“No, Freefighter,” Ragdar said with a loud laugh. “You gave him his greatest desire on this earth—to die with a sword in his hand, the bravest of friends at his side. You don’t know how many times he told me—‘Ragdar, if I grow old and feeble-minded—please send a band of noisy assassins to kill me so that I may go out fighting.’ He begged me, Rockson, I swear to you. You gave him the greatest gift, perhaps, that he has ever received.” Rockson digested this strange information and then spoke again, almost in a whisper.

“I—I wish you were not to end our all-too-temporary alliance, to return to the other side. Fighting for those we are pledged to destroy. You are a brave man—and I sense, a good man. It is hard for me to understand.”

“Ah, General Rockson,” Ragdar said with a sigh. “I don’t understand it all either. I have spent my whole life in battle with my hand gripped around a sword and a gun. I have never questioned it. I have just been the best fighter, the best general I could be.” He looked up at the sky, now sunny and clear as a pre-war afternoon, as if the answer to it all lay hidden up there, unreachable. “Perhaps I have been wrong to not question. I don’t know. It is too late now. Now that Panchali is gone, soon I am sure I will be gone too. Our fates have always been intertwined, like snakes together. And when we are dust—perhaps the Royal Army will be no more. Perhaps the rebels we fight will win. Maybe they should. And with our deaths there will only be warriors like yourselves, rebels, Freefighters. The Russian Empire will be in the long run, no match for you.”

The Doomsday Warrior reached out as he saw his team waiting by the fortress’s front gate to depart, and shook Ragdar’s hand with a long firm grip. Then, with a deep sadness in his eyes, he turned and rode away.

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