Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (19 page)

Twenty

A
fter leaving the Ice City, Rockson and his men pushed north into the forbidding area the Eskimos called the Devil’s Playground. It was a landscape of twisting canyons and smoking volcanic cones, some hundreds of feet in height. Only the guidance of the Ice City men enabled the party to choose the right path to take through the labyrinth of death. The temperature, by the fifth day out, had dropped to a constant minus forty-five degrees. They still managed to cover more than eighty miles a day, and by the lime they reached a frozen lake, Rockson’s sextant indicated they had crossed the 64th parallel.

When they reached the middle of the twenty-mile-wide lake there was a sudden piercing howl, a sound to chill the bones of the most hardened Fighter—then another.

A chorus of death filled the air. Rock knew the sound—a wolf pack was after them. The howls were carried by the wind, dozens of wolf voices.

“Quickly,” Rock shouted. “Cut right, to the bank of the lake, into those woods. If we’re lucky there will be dry wood there. We’ll build a fire to keep them away.”

The sleds turned as one on the frozen lake and raced in the moonlight toward the shoreline a mile away. Behind them now, dozens of wolves poured out of the night, their gray pelts glistening in the white-fire moonlight, their intended victims well visible to their night eyes. Like the fires of a predatory sun their hot-coal eyes burned. Thoughts of tender raw meat that they would soon savor in their sharp-toothed jaws made them salivate in streams. They needed food to carry to their young. The wolves were gaining on their prey.

Rockson whipped away at his team, flicking the whip tip against their moon-silhouetted ears. They yelped and pulled harder. He hated to treat them roughly—but they didn’t want to be eaten either, he was sure of that. If a shot to their ear tips was what it took to get them moving at top speed, so be it.

Yet the wolves cries grew louder. The Freefighters were losing ground. A glance over Rock’s shoulder showed the ghostly images of fast-approaching death on paws. They were less than fifty yards behind now. He unholstered his shotpistol and set it for wide dispersal. But the weapon was no good for such distance. And there was no way any of the men could get their rifles up and fire accurately at this pace.

Rock could dimly see the glint of other shotpistols being pulled out. A shot was fired—McCaughlin’s. His sled was furthest back, his dogs being the least able to achieve the needed speed. There was a yelp; Rock saw a furry shape tumble to a halt on the whiteness behind. A good shot!

The wolves spread out now, as if they knew to disperse reduced the risk of more than one wolf getting hit at a time. Rockson was dismayed. He’d hoped that they’d stop to eat the wolf who had fallen. Rock expected that some bloody meat, even of their own kind, would be sufficient to stall their attack. But they were intent on human meat, or dog meat, or a smorgasbord of both.

He sighted as best he could and fired at the nearest wolf. The thing howled and fell, rolling end over end. But again it did nothing to stop the advance of the others. They had spread out in a wide arc that was beginning to encircle the sleds like a vise, even as they flew over the ice. These were no ordinary wolves, Rock realized with a start. They had a strategy, a leader, they could communicate. He noticed a certain rhythm, a certain give-and-take in the seemingly random yelps. The damned things were communicating.

“Men—shout, make noise, keep firing. They’re talking wolf lingo to one another. We’ve got to drown out the commands the lead wolves are giving.”

Rock saw what appeared to be one of the leaders, a big brown wolf, catching the moonlight far off to the right. He had to get a good shot at him, but how? As the men continued firing at every opportunity, Rock leapt aboard the sled he had been gliding behind on his skis. His added weight further slowed down the team, but it couldn’t be helped.

He crawled forward over the blankets covering the supplies, felt a long frigid object—his Liberator .9mm rifle. He tore off the blankets and pulled the rifle out, switched on its laser sight, checked the clip. He lay belly down. The sled danced and swerved forward, guided by the panicked dogs. Rock swung the light-sensitive scope around the horizon, found the big brown leader wolf. He lined the thing’s mad eyes in the crosshairs and squeezed off a full clip of .9mm explosive slugs. He got it. He swung the rifle slowly around again. The laser night sight found another, much closer wolf. It was coming toward Rock from only yards away. Its huge fangs opened far apart, ready to slam shut on human meat.

Rockson turned his attention to this more immediate problem. The devil in gray fur leapt, was suddenly upon him, knocking the wind from him, raking his body with its huge claws, biting. Having no other weapon at hand, he swung the Liberator’s stock, used it to slam the drooling jaws from his jugular. The teeth imbedded instead in his right shoulder. Pain shot through him, then numbness. He had no more use of that arm. He slammed the rifle butt again and again into the teeth, but it was an exercise in futility, and the awful realization that the next time the oversized incisors bit into him it might be the end welled up in his soul.

But a solid blow stunned the wolf. Rockson pulled the thing to the side and, dangling precariously half off the speeding sled, threw the creature from him. Half his parka tore from his body, caught in the locked jaws of the monster. The wolf fell away. He was alone again on the sled. But more red eyes were just feet behind; he could hear their labored breathing.

A rifle shot rang out, then another—a whole burst—and the wolves immediately behind his sled tumbled like bloody snowballs. He saw McCaughlin’s sled zoom past him. McCaughlin flashed the thumbs-up.

Rockson, who somehow still had his short steel skis locked on, crawled back to the end of his sled and took his old position, hanging on for dear life as he made contact with the rapidly passing ice beneath him. He was nearly jerked off his feet, but held the handle with a steel grip in his good left hand. Somehow he managed not to fall. The full weight of his body gone now, the dogs increased speed. Any second, he half expected one of the huskies’ hearts to burst.

Tinglim pulled alongside him, yelling something, whipping his dogs like mad. “We’ve been separated,” he yelled. “Someone’s missing!”

Indeed, there were only five sleds now. The wolves suddenly were nowhere to be seen.

A howling chorus of wolves’ voices, a cry of victory—Rock knew that’s what it was—went out now. The chorus of hell-voices spoke of their triumph. They had a human and six dogs somewhere back there on the bloodstained ice, and they were already tearing their prey apart in their bloody jaws. The wolves had won—this round.

At the roaring fire that night, Rockson sat with his head buried in his hands. Pedersen, good old Pedersen—gone. He had liked the man. It wasn’t the way to die, ripped apart by wolves. But then there were few ways to go that were particularly pleasant.

And the death of Pedersen wasn’t the only thing troubling the Doomsday Warrior. There was the constant image of Archer. The big lug lay near death—or already dead—back in Ice City. And Rock himself had lost use of his right arm. Farrell, acting the medic again, had made it a sling. The throbbing pain reassured Rock that the arm still was alive, still connected despite the huge teeth wounds. Tinglim rubbed some bear salve in the wounds and the pain diminished. Tinglim told him, as the fire roared its red threat into the icy sky, “There is little danger of infection, wolves are very clean creatures. They don’t eat decayed meat, only fresh, warm flesh. And the salve I put on your wounds will knit them closed very very soon. You will see!”

More misfortune—and totally unexpected—found them before dawn. One of the best sled dogs slept too close to the fire. As a big stem cracked and popped in the fire, a hot coal burst out and caught in the dog’s pelt. The dog rose yelping and leapt into the woods. It didn’t yelp for long. Before anyone could go after it, its sounds were cut off by the snapping jaws of things huge and mean. They couldn’t sleep after that, as exhausted as they were.

Dawn came, its fingers of amber light like the hand of a cadaver reaching up for a chance of rebirth. But there was none. Just the barrenness of the dead forest they had camped in: Twisted, gnarled tree trunks and fallen branches, and around it a white barren wasteland stretching seemingly forever.

Rockson felt weary of spirit, not just of body, as he scanned the way ahead. It was so very cold—the belt thermometer said minus thirty. Could Killov still be alive out there? Or was his body sprawled under a dozen wolves, just foul meat. Somehow the bastard always survived. Only last month he’d had Killov in his sights and was about to dispatch the dark one to hell when the fiend pressed a button and rocketed away in an escape module that had snapped shut around his chair.

No, he lives, Rockson thought, I know it. He expects us to give up, to not follow him through this hellish frozen wasteland. But I will follow him to the gate of hell and beyond if I have to, to finish him off. I will stand over his dead body and pump slug after slug into it, make sure he stays dead. Pedersen and many other good men had been lost in the attempt to stop Killov. Their deaths must not be in vain. With Killov dead, the whole world could have a few decent nights’ sleep, Russians and Americans alike.

Scheransky took another antimatter meter reading. It indicated that Killov was about four days’ hard traveling ahead of them. The Russian major’s once plump, but now gaunt face was blistered and cracked from the cold. He had lost all his excess weight, too. He was trembling constantly, ever since Pedersen was lost. “Please, let us go back. This is insane. I can’t go on,” Scheransky pleaded.

“We go on, buddy,” Rock said. “Sorry.”

Scheransky threw a fit. “You Americans—you—you—are mad. Crazy. You—you are a suicidal race.”

“Maybe,” Rock said. “Maybe we are suicidal or maybe we just value freedom more than our lives.”

To get on as quickly as possible, Rock decided to cut the loads of the remaining sleds. He began to go through the supplies they carried. What could be dispensed with? There was only one answer: the heavy stoves—four out of five would have to go. Rockson hated to do it, but there was no choice. They moved too dangerously slow.

Food was now a problem too. Pedersen’s sled, the one that was lost, had had most of their food supplies on it. So, while the rest of the party remained camped, the three Ice City Eskimos, Ngaicook, Dalmok, and Zebok, strode off through the dead forest with their harpoons and rifles.

It was Zebok who found the first trace of the caribou family a few miles beyond the camp. The Eskimos followed the meandering trail of the three animals—past clump after clump of lichens that had been nibbled to the quick.

The men spread out when Ngaicook’s sensitive nose picked up the smell of the caribou.

Each of the Eskimos moved silently, surely, through the snow, careful to stay downwind from the quick creatures. If the caribou caught their scent before they were within range, they would be gone in an instant.

They came at the caribou buck and the two does in a small lichen-filled clearing. They had already decided to kill only the smallest of the three graceful creatures. It would be sufficient for the food requirement, and Eskimos did not kill for sport. They crept quietly to within a hundred feet of the group.

Suddenly the big buck looked up in alarm and began running. Ngaicook opened fire, and an instant later so did the others. The smallest doe fell immediately, dead before she hit the ground. After whispering their apologies in the dead animal’s ear, which was the Eskimo custom, they quickly cut all the meat from the animal and headed back toward Rockson and the others.

Jubilant voices shouted out praise for the good hunters. McCaughlin prepared a man-sized caribou steak dinner for all of the men. The rest of the meat was loaded, a bit to each sled, and after the dogs were fed the gristle and fattier parts—and the bones—they were on their way much fortified.

Twenty-One

A
fter three more days of arduous travel, the cold and weary attack team came directly below the enormous volcanic mountain called Mount Draco. It was a mountain that hadn’t existed before the earth upheavals that had occurred in the atomic war four generations ago. Its towering twin 21,000-foot summits were loaded with glacial ice.

Rockson had the men stream out their sleds in a long single file as they passed to the west of the sometimes-lost-in-the-clouds peaks. He wanted the group to make as little noise as possible, for there was the danger of an avalanche.

The sleds were nearly beyond the pass and out in the flat snow of the plain again when the lead dog of Tinglim’s sled stepped on a sharp rock. He let out a yelp that set the other dogs to barking as if in sympathy.

There was a sharp
crack
far above. The giant mass of glacial ice somewhere in the cloud-covered slope above pulled free and started down.

The Doomsday Warrior thought it had sounded like an explosion.

With a sickening feeling in his stomach, Rockson screamed,
“Mush
—mush, you huskies,” and snapped the whip. His sled instantly lurched forward. The cracking above had given way to a rising rumble. It vibrated their sleds. A wall of ice began moving down the slopes above. The sleds behind Rock were losing ground, but he could still hear their panicked yelping dogs. The rumbling, like a thousand freight trains, was overtaking them. Rockson tensed his body as he expected to feel the crushing weight of a million tons of white death smash onto him and his team any second. He snapped the whip again and again as the dogs howled and panted, the rumbling sounds echoing and building louder and louder. It was a race against white death—a race that seemed futile.

The massive cloud of snow dust behind them blotted out the pale Arctic sun; the way grew so dark that he could barely see a thing. The massive death wave towered over them as if their sleds were some tiny insects about to be smashed to bits by the enormous white hammer of a giant.