Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (25 page)

Twenty-One

T
he porters took the Freefighter/Aussie force they had helped to escape back to the railroad junction where the Silver Bullet sat between two rusting freight trains, undetected. The team got out and stood in front of the bullet-shaped engine, looking at the black warriors who had saved their lives, barely able to find the words.

“We owe our lives to you,” Rock said at last, knowing that any words would sound trite, meaningless—compared to what the porters had gone through, had risked, to save them. “I know what this rescue has done for you—it’s blown your cover.”

“Forget it, Rockson,” Rufus said, standing inches taller than he had when acting out his “nigger” role as servant on the train. “Man’s gotta make decisions about his life—and we all decided that there wasn’t many more important things than saving the President of the United States—and Ted Rockson. If the Reds had killed both of you—well, there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of hope left in this land. And hope—that’s what a man needs, even more than food or water.”

“But your jobs,” Detroit piped up, suddenly feeling a ton of guilt—as if it had been his words of censure back on the Bullet that had forced the porters to carry out such a daring and dangerous mission. “What the hell will you all do now? I mean—working these trains is your life.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll be losing our jobs,” Rufus said with a smile. “We all look the same to these Russians—just another nigger in the woodpile. Once the heat blows over, they’ll be running these trains again—and they’ll be needing our services. They don’t feel important unless they got people waiting on them hand and foot. No, we’ll be riding the rails again, I know it. Meanwhile, I got lots of reading to catch up on before the next battle begins. I got all of Dostoesvsky to read—and believe me, that guy wrote by the pound.”

The Freefighters and Aussies thanked their jailbreakers and boarded the train, which Reston had all fired up and ready to go. The Silver Bullet pulled out, the chromed chimney sending up a cloud of smoke as the warriors of freedom waved goodbye to the black men standing motionless by the tracks. The luxury train quickly reached top cruising speed and shot out of D.C. like a steel snake with its ass on fire. Behind them the Freefighters could see the battle for Washington between the Red Army and Killov’s forces continuing as artillery barrages shook the city. But with the dreaded KGB commander dead—or so they believed—surely the Blackshirt army would crumble.

The President was put in a sleeping car attended by Kim, who kept putting cold compresses on his head, unsure of how to even begin treating the damage that had been done to his brain. The two Mindbreaking experts that Rock had brought along examined Langford but came out shaking their heads, telling Rockson that they couldn’t do a thing. Perhaps, back in Century City, surgeons could attempt to fix the torn brain tissue—but they didn’t hold out much hope.

“Perhaps the worst thing,” Ashton told Rockson with a drawn look on his face, “is that he’ll live. The functions of the brain that govern breathing, involuntary reflexes, and the like are all working. The man could survive twenty, even thirty years. But whether or not he’ll ever be able to think even one thought again—is now in God’s hands.” Rockson wanted more than anything to be with Kim, to comfort her in her time of pain. But he was responsible for
all
the fighters—and they still had to get out of this thing alive.

“You find anything on this train worth using?” he asked one of the Aussies who had stayed behind. “Anything big-league?”

“Better believe it, Yank,” Croft, Boyd’s second-in-command, answered. “Back there near the end—last two cars—we thought they was just storage or something since all the doors were locked. But we pried ’em open and whadda you think—the bloody thing’s are filled with anti-aircraft batteries and even some mini ground-to-air missiles. Ain’t quite sure how to operate ’em, but—”

“Chen, Detroit,” Rock yelled out to the middle of the dining car where the men were eating a hastily prepared breakfast of eggs and bacon that McCaughlin had whipped up. “Check out the heavy-duty stuff this guy found in the back. We may be needing it.”

“Will do, Rock,” Detroit said, slopping down a last bite of food. The two of them headed back to the mobile artillery, to get it ready just in case. The Silver Bullet shot out past the suburbs of the Capital, little boxes of houses—homes to the upper echelons of the Red hierarchy and their families; past the five-megaton crater about twenty miles from the city, its ugly rim tall and jagged, a monument from the past, in all its dark glory. They sped past the huge concrete buildings that housed the factories where slave workers were paid only with bowls of gruel and died by the hour. Past it all—and toward the west, which for all its cratered and poisoned terrain was home to Rock and the Freefighters.

They were about a hundred miles out of Washington when Rock got an urgent call over the train’s intercom from Reston.

“Problems,” the gritty oldtimer yelled over the roar of the engine. “Now, I don’t even know quite how to use the damned thing, but the radar scope up here is showing something coming after us. A whole bunch of somethings—and Rock, they’re moving fast.”

“Just keep her going,” Rock said. “Give it everything you got—we’ll do what we can at this end.”

“Sure, Rock, and—” he paused, looking down at the twenty blue dots on the console monitor that were gaining by the second, “it’s been nice working with you.”

“It ain’t over yet, pal—not by a long shot.” He clicked off and got Chen and Detroit on the wireless transmitter that hooked all the cars of the Bullet together. “You figure out those doohickeys back there?”

“No sweat, Rock,” Chen answered. “We’ve used all this stuff before in one form or another. The main thing is figuring how the hell to get the roofs of the cars to rise up—they’re built on some kind of hydraulic system—so we can shoot the damned things out.”

“Well, figure it out fast,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “Cause we’ve got company coming.” Rock turned to the entire force, still gobbling down everything in sight. “Chow’s over, boys,” Rock said. “The Red’s are on our trail and closing fast.”

“What do you want us blokes to do?” Boyd asked, his men quaffing down the last remaining cans of Russian beer with their sausages.

“We’re going to have to make a stand of it. We’ll be sitting ducks if we just let them blow us apart. Get every bit of heavy stuff you have,” he said, addressing the attentive fighters. “Mortars, machine guns—whatever—and get ’em up on the roofs.” The men jumped up from their tables and got to work, passing the equipment out the back doors and up on top of three of the cars near the center of the train. Within minutes they were ready, sitting high, waiting for the enemy to show.

They didn’t have long to wait. Out of the east came first a loud drone and then a whole squadron of heavily armed Red choppers, bearing down on the train like hawks trailing a wounded rabbit. Suddenly they were upon the Silver Bullet, dropping out of the sky, releasing a barrage of rockets and machine-gun fire. The slugs dug into the sides of the grading as the rockets burst all around the Freefighters. They returned the greetings, opening up with everything they had, trying to sight up the jet-powered craft. But shooting a stationary target is one thing—trying to knock down a fleet of twisting, turning helicopters moving at up to 300 mph is a different story entirely. The Americans and their Australian compatriots fought valiantly, firing right up into the blurs that filled the air above them, as streams of death poured down.

One of the car roofs took a direct hit from a rocket, sending Ashton and Douglas and three of the Aussies flying off in a geyser of flame. They fell from the speeding train, hitting the grading and rolling end over end, bloody corpses, dead before they came to a stop. But there wasn’t time to mourn—not now. Rockson climbed down the steel ladder at the end of the third car and got on the intercom to Detroit and Chen, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Get it going back there—our firepower ain’t doing shit to these bastards.”

“We got it, man—just figured the fucking thing out,” Detroit yelled back over the constant explosions that were just barely missing the Silver Bullet and drawing closer by the second. “Just hold on a few more seconds, hold on.”

“We can’t hold on,” Rock yelled angrily, slamming the receiver back down and heading up to rejoin his men. If they were going to die, he would be with them, fighting down to the last breath in his body. Ten cars behind him, the hydraulic rods groaned as the roof of the attack car slowly opened up, parting in the middle and filling the floor where Detroit and Chen were standing with beams of light from the pasty cotton swab of a sun that slowly rose on the horizon. Each man stood in front of a battery of blinking lights and radar screens that beeped out screaming warnings of attack. Both Freefighters had spent hours perusing captured Russian weapons manuals—and what had seemed like a waste of precious time, was now about to pay off in spades. They lined up the nearest craft until the blue dots on their computerized attack systems were dead center of a series of concentric circles. The screen lit up with “Target Tracked—Fire At Will.” Both men pushed the bright red ignition buttons just below the radar grids, and the car shook with a violent roar as two Annihilator missiles flew up from their tubes straight into the air. The laser-guided missiles rose about two hundred feet and then turned on a dime, their afterburners clicking on, emitting a ten-foot tongue of flame from their tails. They shot forward at nearly 1,000 mph, right for the fleet of weaving death craft. The three-foot long Annihilators tore into the two helicopters that the Freefighters had sighted—guided by their computer systems—and sent them on a sudden detour to hell. They exploded out a rain of steaming hot metal and parts of human bodies that fell to the tracks just behind the Silver Bullet, coating the tracks red.

In the attack car, Chen and Detroit quickly sighted up another two—and then another. The tide of battle turned quickly as the chopper fleet dove like maddened birds, twisting and diving in every direction, trying to outrun the slivers of steel that mercilessly tracked them down. But the Reds had built their air defense systems well—after all, they had to protect the Russian brass that rode the Silver Bullet—and every missile that was fired found what it was seeking.

Atop the speeding cars, the Freefighters let out a collective roar as chopper after chopper exploded and fell to the tracks behind them. Maybe they would live after all. At last there was but one of the jet craft left, and it came swooping down on the train, just twenty feet above the ground, trying to avoid the missiles and firing every weapon it had at once. Chen pushed the firing button sending the final missile up through the roof and toward the attacker. The flame-spitting tube shot right into the spinning rotor of the chopper, decapitating the blades from the craft. The helicopter veered wildly like a drunken man trying to find his bearings and then plummeted down, out of control. It crashed into the tracks just ahead of the engine, exploding in black oily smoke. Reston, at the controls, saw it fall—and as his eyes widened in horror, saw the tracks lifted right up off the ground and thrown to the side. He slammed on the brakes, locking the wheels tight as the Silver Bullet came to a screeching stop just inches from the demolished rails. They weren’t going any further—this particular luxury tour was over.

The Freefighters scrambled down from their perches and quickly unloaded the ’brids and camels, bringing the hysterical animals down a wooden ramp. They loaded up their own equipment, tied President Langford, his eyes as dead as midnight shadows, atop one of the hybrids so he wouldn’t fall off, and headed off, leaving a trail of burning helicopter hulks for miles behind them. Within minutes, the predators that lived in the woods bordering the tracks came hesitantly out of the treeline, sniffing the air. It was thick, pungent with the scent of fresh blood—lots of it. They would all eat well today.

The Freefighter/Aussie force rode hellbent for leather through the thick woods ahead, wanting to get as far as possible from the wreckage before the Russians sent yet another armada to destroy them. Though on this day of destruction for the Russian Empire, Rockson somehow thought they might have had enough. They rode for hours, not daring to stop until they were twenty miles away from the rails, changing their trail a dozen times, losing themselves in the thick forests of what had been Maryland. But at last it was clear that, at least for the moment, they were safe. Rockson held his hand up and the Freefighters dismounted to let the ’brids rest for a few minutes. But the Aussies stayed atop their snorting beasts.

“Well, it looks like we’re going to be heading off now, Yanks,” Boyd said, nestled between his camel’s two bulbous humps. “We done what we came here for—helped you blokes out of a bloody bit of trouble, I dare say.”

“That you did,” Rock said, extending a hand up to shake with the Aussie leader. “But I thought you’d be coming back with us to Century City. We could use men like you. Whatever I said when we first met—I take it all back now. You ‘blokes’ are the equal of any man here.”

“We appreciate your words, Yank,” Boyd said, reaching behind him and lifting a Foster’s—which he popped the top from, taking a deep, satisfying swig. “But we’re almost out of brew, you know. No—we’ll be heading off. Give our services to ’ooever needs ’em—and who knows—maybe in our travels we’ll even find a whole buried warehouse of ale—a brewery, just waiting to feed its buried treasure to dry, thirsty lips.” The Aussies made their farewells, and headed off to the north, quickly vanishing among the trees until only the sounds of their snarling camels could be heard echoing through the dawn.

The Doomsday Warrior stood there for a moment, thinking of all the carnage of the past week. Then he sighed and turned to Kim, who had come up alongside him, and held her close to him.
This
round was won. But the fight would go on and on. Until the enemy was vanquished.

Until America was free once more.