Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (24 page)

The six interceptors were now twenty-three miles away! It was beyond the time for thought, it was time for gambling!

He pointed the jet directly at the blinding white sun above.
The Sun. The Lamp of God.
It showed the way! He pulled the stick even further back, and as he rose sharply upward banked the jet directly at the sun. The pursuing jets, although they didn’t need visual sighting to fire their air-to-air missiles, needed a radar lock on him.

Rock would give their air-to-air missiles a choice of
two
heat sources now. One was the engine of his jump-jet. The other was the greatest heat, light, and radar source in the solar system—the sun.

He was twelve miles up when six yellow blips left the six blips behind him. They had all fired their missiles! Six Stingers with heat-homing devices. He’d be blown to smithereens if any one of them detonated near the aircraft.

But the burning sun misled them. The six Soviet missiles came screaming by Rockson’s jet bent on destruction. They roared up toward the stratosphere. They would expend their fuel long before they were even ten miles further. They’d never reach their hot target 92,000,000 miles away.

Rockson, smiling in relief, banked the jet into a long rolling dive perpendicular to the radar indications of the six jets, which were breaking formation. Rockson couldn’t hope to match the six interceptors in speed or firepower—or even pilot skill. But the trainer jet he was in had one small advantage—it could “biff.” Most short-takeoff-and-landing jets could do it. To “biff” meant that Rockson could slow his airspeed by putting the engine on a
tilt,
as he had positioned it at takeoff. As a result of the engine tilt, the forward speed was reduced to subsonic, and then could rapidly drop to
zero.
A pursuing jet, without the “biff” capability, would zoom past—and present its butt to Rockson’s short-range guns.

“Biff, baby, biff,” Rock yelled, hitting the takeoff-position switch on the engine. He felt the dizzying sensation of coming to a near full stop in midair. The nearest interceptor jet zipped past on his port wing. Its startled pilot, expecting this to be more of a turkey shoot than a dogfight, twisted his head around to near breaking point. His target had vectored at an impossible forty-five-degree angle and dropped behind. He began a long curve and drop to come around. Too late. The machine-gun bullets fired by Rockson’s jump-jet came right up his tailpipe, blowing the Red interceptor and its twenty-million-rubles worth of armaments and engine to hell.

Rockson tilted the engine back and sped away in an accelerating upward curve. Another Red jet got on his tail. Rockson almost sickened himself with a series of barnstorming stunts—rolls, biffs, and dives—that none of the five interceptors left could match. Soon they were scattered among the clouds for a hundred miles. And since they had no visual sighting, and their radar at ranges greater than five miles couldn’t tell an interceptor from a jump-jet like Rockson’s, their eager pilots locked onto the closest targets, let fly air-to-air missiles at one another. Two blips fell from Rock’s screen.

Each pilot, seeing the air-to-airs approaching, bailed out, their ejection seats catapulting them into the sky right over an area Rockson remembered was the domain of the Bright-Face Sioux, a particularly warlike tribe that liked to bake any Russians they found on stakes. So much for them. Three to go!

But they were piloted by men who weren’t so foolish.

Rockson watched the three remaining interceptors on his radar, slid his jump-jet into a swift descent, and dove into a narrow canyon. Hopefully they’d have a tough time picking him up on the radar with all the metallic rocks around.

“Where the fuck is he, Deskenov?” snarled the pilot in the lead interceptor as the three MIGs swept right by the area Rockson’s jet had vanished into.

“He’s down there somewhere among all the damned rocks,” the second jet’s pilot replied. “We’ll soon get a heat trace of him.”

“Fire in bursts, at random, all along the canyon down there—he’s likely to get hit.”

“How will we know if we hit him? We can’t tell Killov we
think
we’ve killed the Doomsday Warrior!”

“Fool, there will be an explosion. Stones don’t explode! We will know if we hit him. Now lay down a field of fire up the canyon to the west. I’ll fly along the east arm and do the same. Volik, you follow me a minute later.”

The jets dove, roared level about seventy feet off the rolling terrain, letting loose bursts of cannon fire and an air-to-air missile from time to time. Rockson saw one coming, veered right. He winced as the missile passed him and destroyed a huge chimney of red sand to his port side. A few rounds of cannon fire whizzed past his cockpit and chipped holes into the splendor racing by. But they were shooting blind, Rockson’s jet’s exhaust heat often hidden behind towering pillars of sandstone. He zigzagged between two buttes, almost clipping one.

Rockson saw his chance and he took it. He biffed the jump-jet once more, and he saw the startled expression on the MIG pilot who for the briefest of instants saw his jet when he slid by Rockson. The Doomsday Warrior fired the last of his machine-gun bullets after the Red jet, managing to catch the port wing-flap. It tore off the wing-flap, which bounced down among the canyon rocks. Unable to steer, the Soviet pilot had a good view of a particularly brightly striated mesa, dotted with sagebrush, glowing in the pink winter sunset—before he died.

Rock biffed to a stop and set down his jet on a sandy beachlike area, where the roaring creek in the canyon made a gentle turn. The jump-jet’s wheels grated and grinded over the gritty sand and came to a bumpy halt. Rockson let out a sigh of relief and cut the engine. He hoped that this desperate trick would work. It better. He was a sitting duck now.

The first and third MIG pilots saw the explosion of their air buddy’s plane in the canyon. And their computers fooled them. The Soviet interceptors’ computers found no trace of the exhaust heat of any aircraft below and therefore reported, “Target destroyed.”

The two remaining Soviet pilots sighed in relief. Their comrade had made the supreme sacrifice. His jet had, no doubt, run into the Doomsday Warrior’s jet. They peeled away, climbing high, then took a vector back toward base to report their victory.

Rockson watched them disappear on his radar. His joy was shortlived. He was alive, but the Megon-II missile was still heading for Century City. He had lost precious minutes—perhaps too many! He hit the starter, heard the engine turn and whine up to takeoff power. He tilted the big engine for an almost-totally-vertical takeoff and hit the afterburner switch. He rose quickly out of the canyon on a tower of blue flame, and then he angled off to the south, narrowly missing the lip of the canyon as he gained speed and altitude, back on the chase.

Seven minutes. The whole air battle had only taken seven minutes. But that meant the damned hell-missile was seven minutes closer to destroying all that Rockson lived for.

The computer informed him that the missile he was chasing had diverted west to circumvent flying through a megastorm of winds over 380 kilometers per hour.

“If this jet goes straight through the storm,” Rock said, “can we make up seven minutes of flight time and intercept missile at last point projected?”

The computer said, “Yes. But tolerance of this jet is exceeded by winds in storm ahead.”

“Proceed shortest way to target.”

“Proceeding.”

Twenty-Six

R
ockson saw the flashing lightning. A brewing blue-black thunderhead appeared directly in front of his jet. He knew the storms with the blue-black clouds packed tornados. This could tear the plane apart like a matchstick.

The Doomsday Warrior plunged his jet into the hellish turbulence nevertheless. Immediately the plane began yawing violently from side to side. He trimmed the flaps and the craft steadied. Lightning bolts yards wide crashed by to his right and left. He watched the radar. The missile was there, off to the west. He flew onward, into the sodden clouds that buffeted and rocked the little jet like it was a fly caught up in a giant’s hand. Blue crackling “ball lightning” attached to his little craft, crept up the wing, and flashed itself out.

The lights went out in the jet’s cramped cabin, the instrument panel went dead. The lightning had shorted everything, Rock realized.

As the plane began to nose over he found the auxiliary power switch, clicked it, and some of the panel including the radar lit again. But the altimeter was spinning off his descent. Why? He was encased in silence. The engine had flamed out! He was falling out of control. Altitude 25,000, 20, 15, 10 . . . and a downdraft was making his descent more rapid.
“Restart,”
he yelled. No answer. Computer down too! Where was the fucking restart? He hit every switch he could find. Bursts of de-icing fluid exuded from his wings. Martial music came on. His seat moved back. Finally he heard a whine. He had found the restart. The engine was turning over. Five thousand, four thousand, and still dropping.

Suddenly the jet’s engine roared to life and he pulled the stick violently toward him. At five hundred feet he began to rise again through the drenching rain and wind.

With a sweaty grip he returned the jet to course. And the storm raged on, buffeting winds tearing at the jet. Where was he? The computer light blinked on. “Computer, project our position.”

He was still somewhere over Oregon. There on the radar screen was Mount Hood. And the blip that was the missile. Twenty-one miles away! A sudden windshear threatened to smash the jet down, more lightning streaked across the sky, one jagged arm of white death touched the port wing and tore off several heat-tiles. Rockson fought with the stick; the plane was like a leaf in an autumn squall, rocking, plummeting, and then—amazingly—the storm ended as quickly as it had begun. Rockson hit the afterburners, which should only have been used for takeoff. It increased his speed, but it wouldn’t last. It was gobbling up his last fuel too. The computer said,
“Pilot warning A.”

At a speed that was heating the wingtips white hot, he tore across the now-flat sagebrush-dotted prairie, sending up a sandstorm of dust in his wake, shattering the ears of a thousand gophers and chittabugs, creating avalanches from the echoing concussion of his passage in the nearby hills. A race against the total destruction of free man, a race to save the world from the clutches of the drug-crazed Colonel Killov. One man, with one air-to-air missile, one desperate man with but one last chance to save humanity.

“Emergency abort,”
warned the computer.
“Speed too great for structural integrity of plane. Automatically slowing airspeed.”

“Override, override,”
Rockson screamed.
“Manual speed control.”

“Negative,”
said the droll tones of the computer.
“Slowing to mach two.”

Rock’s heart sank. What could he do against the computer?
Right! Pull the plug!

He took out his knife and pried the panel off the computer console; as it fell to the floor he cut the red wires inside the panel. The computer started saying something, then stopped. Forever. The plane started to gyrate wildly. Rockson took the stick and increased altitude. He leveled off at 6500 feet, keeping his eyes peeled ahead and the stick tightly in both hands. Still possible to catch it—with all the acceleration power into the engines. The plane’s wingtips glowed white; heat began seeping into the cockpit. The plane was about to disintegrate. He looked at the radar screen. Range dropped to twenty and one-half miles.
Almost there.

Suddenly he saw the missile visually. It was passing over some jagged peak—elevation fourteen thousand feet—a mountain! Maybe there was a chance he could live after all! The Megon missile’s image on the screen started blinking.
IN RANGE OF TARGET
printed itself out on the radar screen. Rock hit the firing switch for the last air-to-air missile and watched it shoot forward in a blaze of smoke. Immediately he eased down on the airspeed. He twisted the stick, and a second later dropped the jet behind the giant granite face of a high peak. There was a too-brilliant-to-watch flash beyond the summit. The air-to-air had destroyed the Megon.

Rockson was still alive. The immense peaks had shielded him from the full force of the antimatter explosion.

Rock landed in a steep canyon, this time smashing the plane’s wheels to a torn, useless junkheap under the jet. The plane settled in at a crazy angle in the sand and gravel, having gouged out a long skid mark. The nose bent over. There was smoke. He hit the cockpit release, and the canopy shot away a hundred yards and floated off in some rapids.

Rockson jumped out of the steaming jet and ran for what looked like an indentation in the canyon wall to his left—shelter of some sort. It was fifty feet—and he dove headfirst into the little cave. The concussion of the antimatter explosion, some twenty miles northwest, rolled down the canyon walls loosening boulders, nearly bursting his eardrums.

He pressed to the floor of the shallow cave until the rolling thunder of rocks and falling boulders subsided. Minutes later, Rock crawled out of the cave and looked around. The jet was in no danger of flying again. It was so twisted up that Rock surmised a boulder had rolled over it and continued on. It looked like a fly squashed by a flyswatter. But it had served its purpose.

He started walking down the canyon. Walking toward Century City. It was hundreds of miles south. But he had some daylight left. And tonight would be clear. The stars above would guide him. He was alive. And Century City survived. But what of his men in the far north? Would they make it back? They were resourceful and brave men. They’d make it back—
somehow.

He coughed up some blood, and with a silent prayer, he began putting one foot in front of the other. So weary, so far to go . . . so very far.

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