Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style (24 page)

It was rough going at first as the waters were dark, murky—and filled with bodies or pieces of them. The frogmen commandos had to keep pushing parts of human anatomy away from them as they swam along about ten feet below the surface of the waters. Even the fish and fresh water sharks hadn’t been able to eat all that had been delivered to them. In fact there weren’t even that many fish in evidence, as so many of them had gorged themselves sick and now had gone off to get the fish equivalent of aqua seltzer and take the phone off the hook for a few days.

Rahallah had done much scuba diving off the Kenyan coast. Thus, though certainly not an expert—as were the other men—he could easily keep up with them. His physique had amazed even the other commandos, who themselves were all in excellent shape. The black man—at nearly six-foot-six, 250 pounds of black muscle that looked like it had been carved out of obsidian—was clearly a match for any of them—perhaps all. The fact that he was undertaking such a dangerous mission had immediately been knowledge throughout the remaining Elite Guard—and it had solidified their loyalty to the Grandfather and to Rahallah. When a man is willing to lead right into the fires, then and only then will other men charge in behind him.

They swam for what seemed like miles, the body parts if anything getting thicker as they neared the ship. The bones that had been stripped clean had already sunk to the bottom where they lay in the sand, a whole field of them like some sort of elephant graveyard. It stunned even the hardened commandos to see how much death Killov had caused. And they knew many of those whose remains floated around them or glowed up like ivory from the shifting mud below—many were their friends. Had been. And perhaps even worse, they couldn’t even say good-bye as the corpses had no heads. Even in death they had been humiliated—deprived of their identities.

Suddenly the immense warship was ahead of them; there was no mistaking it, it was as if a mountain had risen out of the river, a volcanic eruption that had sent up a towering mountain of steel that shadowed out the entire Potomac around them. They had just made contact with it, the two lead frogmen attaching magnetic anchors from their suits to the sides of the
Dreadnaught
to keep from floating away, when they heard firing far above the waterline. The attack had begun. They knew their ground forces on each side of the ship had opened up to create a distraction—pull the attention of the Arab fighters away from any noise down below.

The commando unit went to work like the well-synchronized team they were, as Rahallah treaded water several yards away, watching it all in fascination. A mobile oxyacetylene torch was pulled out of a watertight pack and sparked instantly to life. A long tongue of burning white flame stuck out about three feet as Captain Vilarik, who was commanding the unit, looked through his mask and saw the seam of the underwater door. There was no way in hell they could go through the hull itself—but there were just a few bolts and hinges that held this particular door in place. He lowered the tip of the flame to the tiny crack before him and winced slightly as the sparks roared up in front of him, shooting out into the water, lighting up the darkness with a weird fluorescent glow.

Rock and his men loaded themselves up with every bit of firepower they could muster. Their own Liberators—but bazookas as well, and a whole duffel bag of shells—manned by Scheransky and McCaughlin. Rock and Chen stuck with their own weapons—shotgun-pistol and star-knives—things they were used to, so they could move fast once they were inside, if they ever got inside. Not one of them thought it wasn’t a totally ridiculous, insane, impossible plan. But they agreed to it without a second thought. They knew the stakes.

They let the frogmen start out ahead of them, while they loaded up the back of the big diesel parked out on the White House lawn. Then it was time. Rock and Scheransky took the driver’s cabin while the rest of the Rock team—along with a dozen volunteer Elite Guards decked out like walking fighting machines, with bullets and grenades, rifles, pistols and knives—jumped in the back. Once all loaded in, the steel doors were slammed shut and locked behind them. It was dark inside, just the light streaming through a few dozen bullet holes from when it had first burst its way into D.C.

Scheransky had wanted to drive again. But this was Rock’s trip. It was too important—the lives of too many people resting on his shoulders for the Doomsday Warrior to let anyone but himself handle the wheel. The Russian defector, looking somewhat dejected about the demotion, glared out the righthand window, cradling a modified Liberator submachine gun with circular magazine holding a hundred slugs—and five more in a satchel around his shoulder. If he couldn’t drive, he could still kill.

Rock started up the big rig slowly, letting her move along at a crawl as he made his way across the White House lawn, leaving deep grooves in the grass. Zhabnov would no doubt be quite perturbed about that, Rockson thought with a smirk. If the fat boy was even still alive. The guards opened the electrified front gate and Rockson turned the diesel onto Lenin Avenue, the main thoroughfare that ran through the center of D.C. The streets were deserted—most of D.C.’s populace had heard Killov’s demands, broadcast on every frequency, his ship having the power to override all local transmissions. They hid inside their hovels and mansions, wondering if the end was truly near.

He slowly accelerated as he felt more used to the feel of the big gear pedal, and the wide wheels. Up to 20, then 30. He shifted the wheel back and forth, testing the feel of the truck, how it balanced on turns. A few poundings came from the back.

“You think that’s bad?” Rock yelled out as he turned his head toward the grid between the two parts of the diesel. “Then you better get out now, pals, ’cause I’m going to start speeding up and we ain’t never slowing down again.” With a wild kind of laugh that none of them had ever heard before in the Doomsday Warrior’s voice, he switched the truck into higher gear, gave her a little gas and sped up to 40. It was straight ahead to the dock, then a left. Rock slowed down on the curve, but took it fast enough that the whole back of the diesel spun around, wheels screeching and leaving huge black trails on the street. The fighting men in the back didn’t even pound this time—they were lying in a huge knotted pile on the wooden floor.

Then Rock could see it ahead. The
Dreadnaught,
standing above the river like some leviathan from days of old. It was impossible that they could even think of attacking it. It was hubris, challenging the gods. For surely the huge 2,000-foot long structure of super-steel was impervious to anything they could hurl at it. Not wanting to hear the voices screaming in his head that it was “impossible, impossible,” Rockson just accelerated the rig even more, leaning forward in his seat as his eyes began scanning quickly back and forth, checking for ambush.

“Get ready, man,” he hissed over to Scheransky above the now pounding roar of the diesel. “Killov will have some forward defensive units.” Rockson moved into tenth gear and the truck shot forward another notch. Now they were hitting 60 and the whole rig actually seemed to settle down as if starting to hit cruising speed. Rockson relaxed just a fraction as he realized that at least he could control the damned thing.

As if on cue, two machine guns opened up from low buildings—one on each side of the four-laner that headed straight for the dock. Slugs tore into the asphalt all around the racing truck tires, a few into the thick rubber. But this was a Red Army transport truck, with super-hardened, steel-encased tires almost impervious to bullets, to anything but a direct explosive charge, in fact. They had been built, after all, to protect them from Freefighters. The irony didn’t escape the Doomsday Warrior as he prayed now that they would hold.

“Hit something, you bastard!” Rock screamed at Scheransky, whose one fault seemed to be his daydreaming tendencies. The man hadn’t even pulled the trigger yet. Scheransky pulled back hard and the Liberator burped out a meal of screaming slugs toward the nearer of the two machine-gun posts. Beginner’s luck or a good eye, Rock didn’t know, but the gunners leaped up into the air, blood streaming from their chests and faces, and tumbled out the window as the truck roared by.

Then they were there—the long ramp that the major had shown on the diagram, just to the side. It had been built to allow fast and easy access for trucks loading or unloading their supplies. And Rockson was going to push that fact to the max. There was but a single barrier in front of the bottom of the long concrete ramp that stretched off nearly two hundred yards ahead, slowly climbing up to the top level. Beyond that, Rock could see the deck of the
Dreadnaught.
The fighters of Allah, wind flipping their red robes around them, opened up on the diesel. But it was too little, too late. The slugs just pinged off the rig’s super-hard alloy-steel bumpers and hood.

The diesel slammed through the steel barrier, snapping it like a toothpick—and they were on the ramp, moving up at about a five-degree angle. Rockson didn’t let the diesel slow down at all, but shifted instantly to higher gear, feeding it gas, more gas all the time, like blood to a hungry shark. Speed was the whole damned thing. It was the only way they were going to come out of this alive. He hunched forward over the seat as Scheransky looked like he was starting to turn a little pale.

By the time they came to the very top of the ramp and leveled out, they were doing 75. The truck shot forward, gaining even more speed,
“Holy Lenin,”
Scheransky shouted. There was another hundred yards to the edge of the warehouse. Rock could see there was no wall between him and the boat, just space—but he saw also that they were nearly level with the
Dreadnaught.
Shivarsky had said they’d be at least ten feet higher—above it. It was too late now, that was for damned sure. For suddenly they were there, right at the edge of the loading building, and the truck launched itself right into the air. Moving at 120 miles an hour. Rockson looked out of the cabin of the twenty-ton truck as the world spun by all around him, and wondered just what the fuck he was doing up there, in the air.

Twenty-Five

R
ockson didn’t know who looked more terrified—him, or the Arab commandos who stood on the deck at which the immense steel meteor was flying like something from outer space. It all happened fast. He swore they weren’t going to make it, thought the truck was maintaining a straight trajectory as if it were still on the road. But then they did come down—and damned if they didn’t hit solid metal. The huge diesel screeched and wriggled and shimmied all over the place as Rockson applied the brakes, pumping them hard over and over again and down-shifted fast as Scheransky had shown him. There was nearly a hundred yards to the far side of the immense deck—but it took just about every foot of that distance for Rockson to bring the monster to a full stop. Along the way he thought he saw about a dozen Arabs disappear beneath the wheels, though it was hard to tell. The windshield was covered in red, dripping sheets of it that splattered in through the bullet holes in the thick shatterproof glass.

Then they jumped into hell. Rock and Scheransky exited their doors, firing on the run, as Rock’s men, dizzy and ready to puke up their dinners from the ride, came scrambling out of the back doors that had burst open. The Arab commandos around the deck came rushing from all directions, leaving their posts by the side where they had been firing at Red Army forces along the river bank.

Detroit, Chen, McCaughlin, and the dozen Red commandos came out shooting at everything that moved. And the three freefighters
rode horses.
They galloped into the fray on their ’brids! The Red commandos surged forward, spreading out in all directions in a circle, firing as they moved. The horsemen-of-the-apocalypse leaped over startled lines of gunmen, decimating them from behind.

Rockson, with pistol in his right hand and sawed-off Liberator .9 mm autorifle that could spray out clips of 40 rounds in 2.3 seconds in his left, waded into the thick of the red robes. They were fast, had obviously trained. But not fast enough. Rock could see, as he blasted everything in his path, that they were not battle-hard men. They had been in play-training, probably, but they hadn’t done the real thing. And that made all the difference in the world, for it was all counted in fractions of a second.

A sword-wielding figure rushed toward him like some sort of avenging Samurai, and Rockson ducked to the side, letting the man miss him by inches. He let loose with a single pull on the Liberator, and ten slugs poured out into the man’s stomach.

Two from the left came charging at once, their Kalashnikovs burping death. Rock leaped to the deck as the slugs buzzed past him, and heard their sharp whistles go right by his eye. A pair of Chen’s shuriken’s whirling like saw blades in a lumber yard, spun into the throats of the two Arabs. Their necks seemed to disappear as the exploding charges built into the plastic mold of the star blades went off. Two heads flew up into the air, spinning fast like bowling balls rolling down an alley of non-existence. Rockson glanced around hard at his savior and caught the mounted Chinese-American’s eye as he rode down-deck. Then he had other things to contend with.

Detroit and McCaughlin dismounted their wounded ’brids. As the bazooka men, they were, in effect, fast-moving artillery. They manned their heavy bazooka. With the others behind them they quickly let off a screaming shell. The resulting simultaneous explosions took out a good ten to twelve more of the fighters of Allah. Before the smoke had cleared the men moved forward, the troops behind them securing the area with gunfire and hand-to-hand. They let off another round each, sending up great sprays of flesh and steel as they caught a machine-gun post and a concentration of red-robed fighters coming at them with their swords high. Cloth turned to tatters, flesh to soup.

It was almost tragic in a way, the Freefighters and their Russian compatriots could see as they cut their way through the ranks. For the Arab fighters, though gallant and coming in clearly ready to die, were in fact dying. Too easily. They seemed to want to join their Allah, screaming out his name as they took whole loads of automatic weapons fire in their chests and faces. They were fighting some sort of religious, romantic battle, with charging fervor, and swords clanging in the air. But there were no more wars like that. There never would be again. It was survival or death. The attacking forces cut the Arabs to shreds. They didn’t care how the bastards died—just as long as they died.