Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America (21 page)

“Now we kill Reds,” Yuri Goodman said, letting his clarinet fall to his side. He led the jazz men up ancient rusting circular stairs until they reached a half-cracked wooden door. They put their shoulders against it, and after several whacks, the moldy padlock on the other side gave way with a snap and dropped to the stone floor. The dissidents rushed through, their sound weapons ready for anything. They were inside a crude rock cell at the very depths of the prison where the czars had once imprisoned their opposition—to die in the dank, lichen covered walls, consumed by rats, bugs, spiders, and fear. A prisoner, his flesh shrunken away to nothing, his bones poking out, was chained to the wall, naked above the waist. Deep red welts covered his back like stripes. He stirred as he became aware of their presence and then looked again, unsure as to whether or not this was just another hallucination of his feverish mind.

“I’m seeing things again,” he muttered to himself. He had been in the hole for nearly three years now—a farmboy named Potkin whose crime had been to publish some poetry in a local town paper mildly critical of a local Red bureaucrat. Couched deep in metaphors, it had still been deemed suspicious enough by the Red censors to land him the prison where the only literature had been that of starvation and the whip.

“Not hallucinating. No siree, Bob,” Yuri Goodman said. “We the Big Bopper, the Seventh Cavalry and the Chattanooga Choo-Choo all rolled into one.” He walked up to the suffering prisoner and aimed his clarinet at the chains that held him, setting the instrument at its most narrow frequency beam. He blew a high note and the metal links broke in half. The man tried to stand on wobbly feet.

“Thank you—I don’t know who you are but—”

“No time for regrets, stranger,” Yuri said with a smile on his chalk-white face. “We the wild jazz men, the junior birdman of the steppes. Come to free all you crazy jazz lovers here in stone land. Come—we get others.”

The dissidents broke the lock on the cell door with a quick note and walked cautiously up the crumbling stone stairs. Every cell they came to they released an amazed prisoner. All seemed to come to life out of their semiconscious states. The taste of freedom did wonders for a man’s energy. After releasing nearly sixty of the captives, they reached the ground floor of the prison where the prisoners told them they would have to face many guards.

“No problem,” Yuri said to the grimy crowd of released rebels behind him. They burst out onto the vast barred waiting rooms of the prison’s reception area.

The fifty or so prison guards, rifles around their shoulders, stood frozen in their tracks as they took in the crowd of black-robed figures before them, lining up in a straight formation. The prisoners cowered behind them, afraid of what was to come and sure that their liberators would soon meet their doom. The scene was frozen in time for a split second, the coats of arms, the long flowing purple velvet curtains, the antique weapons still hanging on the mortared wall as they had centuries before.

Then the tableau unfroze as the guards reached for their Kalashnikovs. The dissidents raised their instruments to their lips and played a single terrifying chord, encompassing nearly every wavelength in the sound spectrum. The notes shot out across the cold stone floor, dropping the guards where they stood. The Reds slapped their hands over their ears, quivering in stunned agony.

“Now we groove, hot babies,” Yuri said, turning to the shocked but heartened prisoners. The men grabbed up the fallen rifles of the guards and, with the dissidents in the lead, began making their way through the rows of cells.

Floor by floor they freed every man in the building. It disgusted Yuri and the jazz men to find the prisoners in such a terrible state. They lay in their own feces, skinny, nearly blind, their teeth falling out from malnutrition. Some had not seen light for years and rubbed their painful eyes as they were gently coaxed from their cells. At every floor, guards came at them, ready to kill this absurd band of rebels. And at every floor the result was the same: a quick ultrasonic symphony followed by the instantaneous collapse of the audience. Shaking and drooling, their teeth clamped tightly shut; their brains scrambled beyond repair, the dead and dying guards littered the stairways and floors of the building.

It took nearly forty-five minutes, but with the freed prisoners’ help, they finally reached the top cells of the castle and pulled every man from his confinement. The vast assemblage of prisoners gathered on the lower floor and waited for the dissidents to return. They were happy but confused, unsure of what to do next and where to go. Many clutched Russian weapons: pistols, rifles, grenades in their pale bony arms. They were weak but ready to die. At least they would go down fighting. They had sampled first hand the forces of Russian justice and knew there was no salvation—except by firepower.

“We split this scene,” Yuri said, addressing the throngs of half-naked, grime-coated prisoners in the main holding area. “We bust out of here now. You go home. Remember it was jazz what saved you.” The prisoners raised their arms in a salute of gratitude.

Yuri turned toward the thick wooden doors of the prison, and the jazz men again aimed the instruments at the only remaining obstacle to freedom. They blew. Blew hard—and the wood splintered and crumbled like so much kindling. The prisoners with the dissidents in the lead, stormed through the twelve by fifteen-foot jagged hole in the doors. Outside more troops were lining up at the other side of a wide, rushing moat. The dissidents tore across the drawbridge that was the only access to the prison, wailing away on their musical death dealers. Many of the Reds fell, but some were able to fire before the sound waves reached them. Seven of the dissidents were hit and a dozen or so of the freed prisoners behind them. But the rebels rushed forward and soon were upon the Russian troops. The jazz men moved forward as the prisoners made mincemeat of the remaining soldiers, ripping them to pieces with their hands and feet, with knives and butts of rifles. They left a bloody, butchering yard behind with not a soldier left alive.

In the distance was Moscow, its skyline brightly lit with a million twinkling lights. To the left and right, dark unlit roads that led quickly off into the suburbs and then the countryside of central Russia. The prisoners split up into smaller bands, each heading his own way—back to some wretched hamlet, some pig farm. They might be caught again, but they had already been destined to die. At least they were being given a second chance—a rare occurrence in the Red Empire. And they would be careful this time. It would take many Russians to capture any one of these hardened, bitter men.

The dissidents pulled back about half a mile to some low-lying hills dotted with only a few abandoned buildings. They settled down in the dirt as choppers and armored vehicles came screaming in from every direction.

“Good, man,” Yuri Goodman said to the closest jazz man, Vantrov, the saxophonist. “They all going to get in on the sound.” He pulled out a small pocket watch with a Mickey Mouse face in its center. “Mickey says—right nooooowww—”

A roar filled the night sky in front of them. Nearly two tons of dynamite went off at once, ripping the guts from the bottom of the three-century-old castle of one hundred thousand deaths. The walls blew out on every side at the bottom like a volcanic explosion. Then a ball of flame shot out from the square stone windows and the roof, tongues of fire hundreds of feet long, lapping out into the cool air. Five choppers that had been hovering overhead were engulfed in the tidal wave of fire. They dropped down onto the burning roof, exploding in five quick blips of smoke, hardly visible against the rising hundred-foot sheets of yellow that reached up toward the very clouds. Thousands of bricks and chunks of rock showered down into the gathering fresh troops and vehicles below, smashing them into bony goo, covering half-tracks and transports with blankets of red-hot rubble. Screams could be heard everywhere as the wounded tried to struggle free of the conflagration. Secondary explosions began going off throughout the prison as flames made contact with stores of ammunition and artillery shells. Suddenly the entire castle seemed to shake as if in the grasp of a giant. Then a deep sound boomed out as if the very earth was moving. In slow motion the entire castle, nearly five hundred feet high and a thousand feet on a side gave way. The structure collapsed from the bottom first, the walls giving in, squashed, unable to hold the weight above them. Then like a falling house of cards, the bricks and thick mortared squares exploded out in all directions. Within seconds the Moscow prison disappeared from the skyline, falling into a vast mound of burning rubble. Flames and bursts of ammo continued to shoot out from the wreckage, burning in the night like a torch of doom for the Russian Empire.

“Hey man, this gig is over. We got our own tunes to play,” Yuri said.

“Good show,” Nikov, the tubaist whispered softly, his immense instrument balanced on one shoulder. “Best damn music I ever heard. Coltrane would be proud.”

Nineteen

R
ockson peered through the frosted glass square window in the center of a steel door. He could make out shapes moving around inside. He and Archer had made their way up ramps, halls, and stairwells—more than he could count—but according to the dissidents’ maps they should be at a side entrance to the main control center. Far behind him he could hear the firefights erupting. He hoped that the freed men would not be wiped out. Death had to mean something—then a man could give up his life with satisfaction in his soul. There wasn’t time for games, and Rockson knew he couldn’t bluff his way into this room—not with the fighting going on. The technicians and guards inside would know about it by now. They would have to go the more primitive route. Rock took out five sticks of dynamite and bound them together with some tape. He placed the deadly package at the base of the two inch-thick door and set a timer for thirty seconds. He and Archer tore ass around a bend and waited. Thirty seconds later an explosion rocked the halls, shaking the floor and sending out billows of acrid smoke. They rushed back down the corridor and through the curtain of gray. They were inside the Main Control Complex of the dome.

The freefighters found themselves at the edge of a vast, curving room. The ceiling must have risen nearly three hundred feet above the floor, curving like the sky itself. Everywhere computers were clicking, machines beeping out information. Clear sheets of plastic almost forty foot square had maps of the earth printed on them, and the orbital paths of the satellites that circled the earth were clearly demarcated by flashing dots of light tracking their every movement. Radar screens, glistening stainless steel telecommunications equipment, video screens filled with images of earth transmitted back from space all filled the floor and walls of the complex. The internal area was surely the largest man-made structure Rock had ever seen. He whistled through his teeth at the sheer spectacle of the most advanced technology on earth. Even Archer seemed impressed, his mouth dropping open, his eyes scanning the high-tech gadgetry of the complex.

Nearly five hundred technicians clad in white smocks and wearing masks to keep their own human germs and dust away from the array of equipment turned and looked at the wild-eyed freefighters, weapons in hand. There was total silence for a moment as the two groups of men, enemies beyond comprehension, took each other in. Then all hell broke loose. A squad of guards armed with subs came rushing down from a walkway that surrounded the inside of the dome, about fifteen feet above the antiseptically white linoleum floor. Their bullets dug into the tiles where Rock and Archer were standing. But somehow the two Americans had disappeared—Rock diving to the right, Archer to the left. Acrid smoke still rising from the blasted door gave the freefighters a bit of camouflage, at least for a few moments. But Rock knew the odds weren’t too good—their few weapons against an advancing squad of Elite Commandos. He’d have to even things up a bit. The Doomsday Warrior reached into one of the crates of explosives around his back and pulled out six sticks. Each had six-inch fuses. Rock lit one with a lighter the dissidents had given him and heaved it through the air at the charging guards. They didn’t even see it, coming through the smoke and dust. A roar filled the vast domed futuristic complex, and six Red elite soldiers went flying through the air. Rock didn’t wait for the smoke and the falling flesh, like red snow, to settle but lit two more and threw them forward. Another set of explosions ripped the control center, shattering computer screens, knocking down two of the flashing sky-maps from a wall. Another ten troops bit the dust, flying off in all directions as if tossed by a tornado.

Archer, some twenty feet away from Rock, saw a lone marksman high above them on a second platform that circled the wide floor nearly a hundred feet up. The man was drawing a bead on Rockson. He swung his crossbow around and sighted up in a second, used to quick shots from his years of stalking and hunting game and predators, when a single second was often the time difference between living or dying. The sliver of steel-tipped hunting arrow tore through the smoky air like a living thing searching for a home—a home of flesh. It caught the would-be sniper in the right shoulder, spinning him around like a top, until he hurtled from the high walkway and plummeted down onto the white floor, splattering it bright red.

The two freefighters rose to their feet, Archer with his crossbow ready for all takers, Rock holding several sticks of dynamite, the lit flame of the lighter in the other hand, only inches from the fuse.

“Anyone want to try?” he asked the shocked tech squad who sat motionless in their seats, not wanting to believe the carnage that was occurring around them. They were not fighters but technicians, scientists, so clean and unsullied in their white lab coats. One of the techs, with a distinctive red star on each lapel, stood up from his desk and yelled across the floor to the intruders.

“You have no right to come in and cause such damage. This is an important military instal—”