Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (24 page)

The freefighters tumbled in, McCaughlin bleeding badly from the thigh, Detroit holding his hand over one shoulder that leaked red down onto his khaki jacket. Chen was the last one in, heaving two more exploding star-knives out the door at a few Germans who had decided to be heroes. They went somewhere—in a spray of blood and veins, but not to a medal-presenting ceremony.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” the Chinese martial arts master yelled out. “Rona—you know how to fly this thing?”

“Sure.” The statuesque redhead grinned. “Driven ’em a thousand times.” She ran back to the control pit and desperately tried to remember watching Rockson fly one of the damned things. She clicked the ignition on and the blades above sputtered to life, quickly reaching flying speed. She pushed the joystick forward and the chopper, lurching wildly, soared almost straight up into the air as bullets followed it from below. “See—there we go. It’s easy,” she yelled back to the green-faced crew. She eased the stick forward and the German helicopter, for use by Nazi officers only, charged forward at a peculiar angle toward the back of the mountain. Below and behind her, Rona could see the command tents burning like bonfires in the noonday sun. “Not bad for a morning’s work,” she said to Detroit who painfully seated himself beside her at the controls.

“You actually know how to fly this damned thing? ’Cause I do,” the ebony-faced freefighter said, tying a tourniquet around his upper arm.

“We’re flying, ain’t we?” Rona replied with a sardonic grin.

“Like an eagle,” Detroit said. “Like a fucking eagle.”

Far below them, Ubenführer Von Reisling stood alongside the burning tents as troops frantically tried to extinguish the flames. But he knew it was too late. There was nothing to save in there but charred bones. His body was coated with a thin sheen of his own blood. But he was alive. His radar-patched eye had seen the first of the satchels as it flew down onto the command tent roof. He knew there was no time to warn the others—besides
he
was what mattered. He had torn out of the back of the tent at a full run, knocking over officers as they stared after him with puzzled expressions. But they had found out—in a most hideous way—why their commander was fleeing. And by then it was too late.

Von Reisling looked up at the helicopter quickly disappearing over the mountain edge with hate in his eyes. He had underestimated these freefighters. They were more than guerrillas—they were tacticians.

Within his hate was twisted respect as well. They had struck quickly and forcefully, as the Führer himself had conducted his military campaigns. And they had dealt a powerful blow against his army. But
he
was alive. And that was all that mattered. They had won a battle—but the war, that was a different matter.

He walked slowly and painfully over to the edge of the plateau, shaking off field doctors attempting to treat his wounds. The commander of all the German forces looked down on his Panzer divisions as they spread out, boxing in the freefighters on the plains below—as he had commanded just minutes before. Soon they would all be cut off. And then, then they would die.

Sixteen

F
rom his perch on the forward ledge of the northern peak overlooking the valley floor, Rockson could see the freefighters fighting valiantly as hordes of the hybrid-riding sappers continued to sweep in from all sides. They threw their explosive charges into the advancing German ranks, and under the endless stream of Panzer tanks. But bravery is an emotion and overwhelming numbers of men and equipment a reality. The freefighters had been preparing for this day, for an all-out battle with the enemy for years. But not yet—it was too soon. The Americans were not ready. And it would spell their doom.

He looked through the field glasses with a sinking heart as he took in the full picture of the war—the huge tanks forming a square around the valley floor in which every single damned freefighter would soon be trapped. The sappers were taking Nazis out by the dozen but new ones kept streaming out from the center, taking the place of every death machine that was destroyed. He could see the ranks of Nazi troops goose-stepping forward, alongside the metal monsters, firing from the waist. He could see his own brothers and sisters of freedom falling like flies everywhere. Sacrificing their lives to take out as many as they could.

But it was not enough. The most valiant heart can be pierced by a bullet, the most fearless eyes ripped from their sockets by mortars, grenades. “Shit,” the Doomsday Warrior screamed out in rage, slamming his hand down in a fist on the rock beneath him. Tears welled up in his eyes for one of the few times in his life. The freefighters had killed twenty, thirty, forty thousand troops. Who the hell knew. And tanks beyond number. But the Germans kept pouring through the far mountain pass in an endless deathly procession.

He tried sending out his telepathic commands again, although in his heart of hearts he knew it was too late.
“Retreat, retreat now. Further confrontation on the valley floor is useless. Head east—rejoin freefighter forces at fallback position 2.”
He sent the message out again and again, until his brain throbbed in pain from the effort. Here and there he got back dim mental signals that they would comply—or try to.

“Give them covering fire,” Rock yelled over to one of the gunnery posts just twenty yards away. “And pass the word along. Hit those tanks coming to the left—that column of Panzers.” The word was sent along the artillery line by flag and the big guns opened up with everything they had, trying to buy a little more escape time for their trapped comrades.

But there was more to worry about—the German advance ranks were reaching the bottom of the northern mountain and scaling it. Long lines of black-booted troops came charging up the slope. And behind them, the rock-climbing tanks—their huge steel legs whipping end over end, pulling them up over the big boulders that dotted the side of the mountain. Every man, woman and teenager in their defensive positions along the slope fired down with everything they had—machine guns, mortars, Liberators, .45s. They sent down a stream of death, ripping into the forward Nazi flesh like a shooting gallery. But the Nazi charge was relentless. It was like a nightmare in which whatever one does has no effect on the enemy, on the monster that just keeps coming, reaching forward with hands of death.

There was nowhere really to go, Rock knew. The fallback positions would just slow them down—but even then the freefighting forces would be scattered, what little firepower they had broken down into laughable units that the Germans would run right over. And once they reached the top of the northern ridge, the one advantage the Americans had—firing down from a height—would be gone. When the enemy reached the heights, it would all be over. Death—complete, total—for all of them. Deep in his brain he could hear the desperate messages of the mutant telepaths each with their own frantic plea.
“We are being overun. We can’t hold, Rockson. Rockson, what can we do?”

“Jesus,” the Doomsday Warrior muttered through teeth locked tight as a crypt. For a moment he wished he was dead. It would be better than seeing the slaughter of his people. Perhaps a stray bullet would rip into him, a mortar shell would—

Suddenly he saw three huge glowing shapes at the far end of the valley. Strange, floating craft, burning with a blinding blue electricity. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and broke into a lip-splitting smile. The Glowers—riding into the back ranks of the Nazis on their immense sand ships. The plains below were filled end-to-end with German troops, like a million ants coming forward but the Glowers ripped into them like death itself on a rampage.

The ships sped through the ranks, sending men flying in all directions. The electric force that surrounded each of them individually had been extended through mental power to protect the ships themselves, each with a ball of blue lightning twisting around it like the aurora borealis. The Glowers stood on the bows, their hands just inches apart, like stars in full nova, sending their bursts of death into the universe.

Suddenly he felt the voice of the strange race fill his mind like a rainbow of hope.
“We have come, Rockson. We have come as we promised. Only those with evil in their hearts need fear us. The pure shall not be harmed.”
The Germans began firing with everything they had at these bizarre new entrants into the battle, but their bullets and shells harmlessly ricocheted off the blue force field that protected the sand ships. The glowing craft sailed back and forth on the valley floor, their energy sails billowing out high above them, collecting energy from the sun and the stars. Oblivious to the intensity of the fire power being leveled on them, the Glowers on board the craft began sending out their mental waves. They joined their thoughts together and created . . . illusion. The waves of illusion flowed into the brains of the Nazis who fought like tigers all around them. The telepathic commands reached deep into the unconscious of the soldiers bringing up their deepest fears, their dark personal hells, the nightmares that they had pushed down into the sewers of their unconscious. Whatever they feared most, they suddenly saw before them—rats, rabid dogs, bottomless pits that they plummeted endlessly down, mutated horned demons chewing their flesh into bloody pieces. Every Nazi soldier in the valley entered a living hell.

Cpl. Wolfgang Schmidt was just at the bottom of the rebels’ mountain, training his submachine gun on a pocket of freefighters ahead when he felt something strange. His body quivered with chills as he heard a sound—a sound he hadn’t heard for years. A sound he had hoped he would never hear again.
He was six years old. He was in the German Alpines near Düsseldorf. A shape, a furry body coming at him. A wolf. It was the woods’ wolf with its foot-long fangs bared, coming at him with eyes like burning embers. He fired at the thing again and again, too terrified to wonder how such a thing could be on this field of battle. He clicked his Turgenev sub on full auto and swung it around him. The bullets streamed out and into the chests and skulls of his fellow troops. He mowed down nearly a dozen of them before another tortured soul’s nightmare, firing back, ended his brutal life.
He fell to the bloody ground, two slugs through the back of his skull, his brain tissue slowly leaking out, unable to receive the hallucinations of the Glowers anymore.

Lieutenant Von Dressier was just at the peak of the mountain commanding one of the rock-climbing tanks. He sighted up a group of freefighters firing at his death machine without effect. He went to push the button that would fire the big .122mm cannon of his vehicle.
Suddenly he couldn’t believe his eyes. Instead of a button he was holding a snake, wriggling, with its fanged jaws arched wide and snapping at him. The snake seemed to leap from the control panel and wrap around his neck, the forked slimy tongue licking in and out in front of his horrified eyes. He ripped his combat knife from its sheath and began stabbing into the thing, trying to break its deadly grip on his throat. But the blade passed through the illusion and into his neck. He stabbed himself three times, the blade running deep into the jugular, sending out a torrent of blood before he grew too weak to continue. His body began jerking wildly as if he was a marionette at the end of a madman’s string, trying to remain upright. The snake was gone. But, but . . . He fell to the steel floor of the tank in terrified confusion as his heart pumped out precious pints of blood through the gaping wounds. Slowly his eyes closed, but the look of sheer horror stayed, even after death.
The mountain-climbing tank, without anyone guiding it, came up against a twenty-foot wall of stone and tried to scale it. The stilt-legs ripped deep holes in the granite as the tank careened over onto its side and tumbled down the mountain onto German troops below, squashing them beneath its three-ton iron body.

Everywhere around the battlefield each Nazi found his own doom, his own monster. Demons created by the mind and amplified by the Glowers’ telepathic commands. They turned on one another, screaming, “Jew! Traitor!” They saw what they thought were their enemies and fought back desperately to destroy them—shooting, knifing, strangling one another in total and complete madness.

The tide of war was changing. The Nazi troops decimated themselves as the freefighters on the valley floor dove for cover, letting the enemy destroy itself. Their minds were not affected by the Glowers’ nightmarish waves. Those who fought for freedom were spared; those who fought for evil were consumed.

Far across the valley, Von Reisling and what remained of his general staff watched with growing horror as they saw their troops being laid to waste—by each other. They had no idea what was happening but could see the Glowers’ craft soaring just inches above the ground back and forth across the valley, relentless and overwhelming in their destruction. What had seemed a certain victory only minutes before was rapidly turning into the biggest rout in military history. Von Reisling knew that if something wasn’t done, all the Nazi forces would be destroyed. It couldn’t be. He had spent years, training, building up the roughest fighting force in the world and now—they must retreat. He could not lose the entire army. There would be time for another battle, another assault on the freefighters—without the wretched glowing mutations that cruised below to protect them.

“Withdraw, withdraw,” Von Reisling screamed over his radio to the field commanders on the plain below. “Set up covering fire, but withdraw now.” He peered down through his field glasses and within seconds could see that the orders had been received as the units whose minds had not yet been touched by the Glowers’ nightmares began pulling backwards.

Rockson stared down, his grim expression changing to one of exultation as he saw the massacre on the floor below. The power of the Glowers was beyond belief. He wasn’t sure what the hell they were doing—but obviously some sort of mental signal was being sent out across the battlefield. Something that he couldn’t receive—something he was glad he couldn’t. The Nazi ranks pulled back, slowly at first and then on the run, leaving tons of equipment behind them as they hightailed it back to the southern slopes at the other end of Forrester Valley.