Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (15 page)

The voice on the line asked him a question. “No, don’t execute him. We’ve lost too many workers lately. Put him back on the airport detail.”

“Jah, mein general,”
the voice replied, clicking the phone down.

Standing just on the other side of the doorway, overhearing the conversation, was the man who was clean for the first time in years, rested, well-fed. Ralph 66 was going to be replaced. No, no, he screamed silently. He had just had a taste of the good life. He would rather die than be returned. He lifted a glass ash tray from a small table in the hall and cracked it against the table edge, breaking it into three razor-sharp fragments. He slipped one of the glass blades into his uniform pocket.

General Reisling picked up the ringing phone next to his tiger-skin bed.

“This is Premier Vassily,” the quavering voice at the other end said.

“Yes, sir,” Von Reisling said, tightening his voice.

“Good you are there, Reisling.” Vassily left out the Von, a treasured family name aborted by the Red master. The general reddened but tried not to let it affect his voice.

“I’m checking to make sure that all necessary preparations are proceeding according to schedule. There can be no slip-ups.”

“German efficiency has put us
ahead
of schedule,” Von Reisling said proudly. “The planes all landed with but a single malfunction. The men are in their barracks, armed and ready. I am meeting with my officers tonight to give them final instructions. Morale is high, sir, very high.”

“Excellent,” Vassily said, his white lips smiling at the other end, nearly twelve thousand miles away. “You know what the capture or death of this Ted Rockson means to me. When you have successfully completed this mission—there will be a position of power waiting for you here in the Kremlin. You understand me?”

“Fully, sir,” Von Reisling said, reaching over and lighting a cigarette at the end of his ivory holder. “We will capture this Rockson, of that you can rest assured. A quarter million German soldiers will make sure of that. There is no way that he will escape.” The general snickered at the thought.

From the servants’ area, a door was being slowly opened. Ralph 66 stepped through, moving just an inch at a time so as not to alert the general whose back was facing him. Reisling was alone and on the phone. Good, his death would come easily. He moved toward the general. None would ever be so close to this all-powerful overlord, Ralph 66 thought. I will die for sure, but I must take this chance. Perhaps American slaves will say my name tomorrow with awe. Perhaps my name will be banned from even being uttered—like Ted Rockson’s. I must be careful . . .

The general lifted his Tokarev Service Revolver from its holster, turned and placed a single bullet through the advancing servant’s forehead, dead center between the man’s eyes. The body was dead before it hit the plushly carpeted floor.

“What was that noise?” the premier asked.

“A difficult servant has been replaced, Grandfather,” the general said, reholstering the gun. He smirked—the eye patch was in fact a sophisticated radar device with a 360-degree field of scan. Von Reisling had had too many enemies over the years, too many assassins trying to take his life, to have not learned a few tricks or two. And this measly mongrel slave thought
he
could kill the leader of the German army. Fool—he had seen the man coming from the moment he stepped through the door.

The lifeless eyes of Ralph 66 scanned the thick purple curtains that ringed the general’s living quarters. The good life.

Gunter’s 201st Wolfpack commando detachment were the first to advance to the invasion site, some thirty miles from the comforts of the sprawling base of Dzersch. The 201st’s orders were to scout the terrain and send back intelligence reports for the rest of the 250-thousand-man army of this unknown and treacherous land in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. And if the freefighters were waiting, they would be the first to engage in combat. Gunter was ready, proud to hold the banner of the bravest, the best of the German army.

The men lined up at the open door of their K-121 Airlifter, their parakites strapped to their bodies, as the icy air rushed in, blasting them with a frigid introduction to the American Rockies.

Gunter, who always led his men into battle in the front ranks, rather than the rear as many officers preferred, was the first to hit the silk, leaping from the wide bay door. His parakite snapped open and he caught one of the high currents, heading into a slow curving glide. But he didn’t like what he saw below: swirling clouds, snapping around the atmosphere like serpent’s teeth, ready to strike out with all of nature’s omnipotent fury. Fierce winds whipped his parakite, stretched out to its full eight-foot wing span, the nylon foils catching the full force of the blasting wind, buffeting it back and forth like a leaf in a hurricane.

It was hard to keep the damned thing homed in on the radar signal that had been dropped the day before by parachute, marking their drop site. The rest of the Wolfpack were hanging onto their parakites for dear life. They filled the skies around him, over two hundred of Germany’s toughest fighters—men he had known since they had marched together in the Hitler Youth. Men who would die for the purity of the Aryan Race. In their hearts burned the flame of the Reich. He skillfully steered his parakite through the increasingly stronger blasts of hail and snow until at last he saw the outlines of a three hundred-foot wide outcropping on the mid-slope of a towering ice-capped mountain. That would be Pike’s Peak, 14,100 feet above sea level. His lungs burned trying to breathe in the thin air as he dropped like a hunting hawk in ever lower circles, edging toward the plateau.

But the landing site was coming up too fast, a blurred vision of trees and rock. He veered up at the last second, pulling the tail control of the kite, and managed to stop the parakite almost in midair just inches above the ground. He touched down with his feet, holding the kite around him at waist-level, and stepped out of the support bars. He had made it. Gunter quickly turned to see the rest of his Wolfpack soaring this way and that, like a flock of birds gone mad. They were all having trouble in the stiff winds and the now-blinding snow blowing horizontally. He saw a man high above smash into the edge of the mountain and fall from his parakite, quickly dropping thousands of feet to the rocky floor below. But the rest of the squad somehow made it, slamming into the plateau in crash dives, jumping from them, even landing upside down. Within five minutes all but three of the pack were on the outcropping and gathering around their leader who shouted out instructions. They broke into their preordained groups and began heading up the mountain, Gunter, taking the lead, and his right-hand man, Helmut, bringing up the rear. Heavy snowflakes blanketed them, cutting their visual range to less than three yards.

It was the kind of storm that didn’t even exist before the nuke war. The all-out atomic holocaust had set the earth wobbling on its axis, reversing the magnetic poles and beginning a “nuclear winter” which lasted for years over much of the Northern hemisphere. Nearly eighty percent of the earth’s population was dead in three years. Then a miraculous cleansing action began to take place—the cosmic rays, the unfiltered solar rays, began to change the radioactive molecules, reducing their half-lives—the time it took for the deadly rads to become half as virulent. Slowly, ever so slowly, the forces of nature began to reassert themselves. But there would never be an earth that the people of the 1980s would recognize as home. Now it was a world where non-mutant men, except in the lowest elevations, were forced to don oxygen masks when walking or exerting the slightest effort. It was a world with a flashing aurora-filled purple sky at night and green strontium clouds floating like omnipresent symbols of death high in the daytime sky. And the mega-storms—with their winds of hundreds of miles per hour, hurling rocks the size of baseballs through the air, twisters spawned by the hundreds, ripping up all that stood in their path, rains of putrescent skin-dissolving acids, and spiral-shaped black snowflakes of super-hard ice that could tear and rip an unprotected person to shreds.

Or a storm like the one Gunter and his Wolfpack were trying to fight their way through now, crawling along bent over as if they were savage no-men instead of proud soldiers of the master race. Nature humbles even the mightiest, turning them, when it wishes, into mere ants, blown like so much dust in the wind. Gunter was covered head to toe, as were all the Wolfpack in form-fitting plastisynth armored suits with an oxygen mask and radiation filtration system shaped somewhat like the astronaut helmets of old. He had just the slightest opening between his gloves and the snow-resistant suit when one of the black spiral snowflakes whipped into his wrist at 150 mph. Blood poured out, soaking the bottom of the glove. He could hear the agonized groans and screams of his men who had not secured their face shield properly. They had all been warned and briefed over and over about the necessity for complete cover—but men will be men, and their laziness in America 2089
A.D.
meant death. A sudden gust of super-wind, over 200 mph, tore off the unsecured helmets, ripping them from nearly a dozen of the Wolfpack’s heads. The razor-sharp spikes of black flakes slammed into their faces like knives, cutting, slicing through cheeks, eyeballs and throats. Men threw their hands over their faces, as blood and flesh poured out like mush and was caught by the screaming winds, sending out sprays of red that quickly dissipated in the blizzard.

Gunter looked around him in horror. They hadn’t even encountered the enemy and already they were losing men every few yards, bodies falling to the black-covered ground, twitching as the ebbing heat of their dying bodies melted little ready-made graves for them. Nature was more than happy to oblige. “Your masks,” he screamed out over the throat mike in his helmet, capable of sending out a signal up to a half mile. “Make sure your masks are properly sealed.” They were barely gaining ground now, the men clutching arms in long lines to avoid being blown away, right off the plateau to the rocks below. Surely the gods—Freya and Thor—must do something to stop this storm, Gunter thought. Or they would all perish. The undefeatable powers of the super race reduced to pitiful midgets against the raw forces of the American hinterlands. Was this their fate? To die here without ever sighting a single rebel?

He pressed the telecommunications button on the side of his mask and radioed a report back to the launching camp at Dzersch. “What are the weather reports? We are being destroyed out here.”

“Clearing expected in two hours,” came the succinct reply. They would have to hold out. As they made their way up the treacherous slope, Gunter bumped into an ancient, nearly faded road marker—still standing long after the road that it demarcated had disappeared beneath trees and bushes. He scraped the black ice from it: MURCHISON PASS, elevation 13,200 feet. He stumbled on, trying to keep the lead, trying to make an example for his men. They must not stop, not for a second, or they would be buried under a shroud of the black death. He placed one foot after another, moving somehow through sheer will power.

He tried to think of other things, force his mind from the storm. He remembered back to his home, to Germany. The beautiful motherland with its history of conquering armies, of imperial wars, of uniforms and whipping flags and great Nazi banners awesome in their splendor and history. And he remembered the breeding farms—the factories for the creation of the master race. Gunter had never known his true mother. The woman he had come to call “mother” was in fact assigned to rear him after he had been created from carefully selected sperm and egg cells with the required Ayran genes—strength, intelligence, fearlessness and obedience—all the things that would ensure that another perfect Nazi soldier had been produced. Embryos were grown in long tanks of fluids; pink fluid, he seemed to remember. There was the haziest image of him staring up at curious doctors who manned the birth tanks, of being manipulated by machines, sent down chutes, sanitized when dirty, lifted by mechanical hands that fed and exercised his young body. He remembered the tapes, played over and over, twenty-four hours a day, that told him Hitler was the father of the German people, of all the test-tube babies—his glorious creator.

Later, he had been placed with a flesh-and-blood mother and father who had been just as cold and uncaring and mechanically systematic in his feeding and caring as the coldest steel. Only sometimes—sometimes at night, as a child, he would awaken from nightmares, the vision of a void so deep and black that he would tremble violently and cry. His foster father would hear the cries and come in enraged, screaming, “What is this crying? The master race of children do not cry, do not fear.” And with that he would tear off his thick black leather belt and beat Gunter into silence. Only once had this human father touched him, held him, caressed his head. Once, but never again.

No! Not to think of that, Gunter thought, suddenly coming back to the here and now—the black storm which continued with unassailing fury as if it wished to wipe every man of his Wolfpack off the face of the earth. The cold—it is the cold and being pinned down by this fierce storm, that and the thin bastard air of America, that is making me hallucinate. Be strong, do not allow emotions to enter. They are weakness itself. Cowards. The race—think only of the master race. His allegiances to the Führer, to the fatherland. If Hitler could see him now. He pulled back the tears that had been welling in his eyes, back and down into the darkest pits of his soul. Emotions are for weaklings, tears for women. His father had been right to beat him when he cried. This was the way of strength. His father had failed when he had succumbed to a child’s snivelings and held him.

The storm winds at last died down, gone as suddenly as they had come. The rad-snows faltered and stopped. Gunter took stock of their losses—the fools who had allowed their face masks to come off were all dead, lying strewn around the slope waiting only to be consumed by the scavengers that would soon emerge from their dank holes and hiding places beneath rocks and logs.