Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum

FREEDOM’S GAMBLE

For nearly a century, a wasted and savaged America has struggled to rise from the radioactive ashes of a Russian thermonuclear sneak attack. And one man has led the desperate fight to free a once-great nation from the enslaving clutches of the brutal Red Army invaders. He is Ted Rockson—the Doomsday Warrior!

Killov, the insane leader of the KGB, is alive and planning the final annihilation of America. To achieve his terrifying goal, the Soviet death-monger enlists the aid of an overwhelming horde of Libyan cultists, determined to destroy the U.S. . . . or die!

America’s last hope lies with the Doomsday Warrior, as Rockson and a handful of FreeFighters race to the heart of the Dark Continent for an explosive African showdown. But even with the help of an entire force of Bombassa warriors, Rockson’s taking an incredible gamble by facing the lion in its own den. For a jungle defeat for the forces of freedom could set the entire nuclear-blasted world on fire!

DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR

“I’M GOING TO WATCH YOU DIE,
ROCKSON!” KILLOV EXCLAIMED.

The Doomsday Warrior looked up at the six-foot-thick slab that hung in the air micrometers from his nose.

“You’ll be crushed, Rockson, but very, very slowly,” Killov continued. “You’ll feel every bone in your body snap and the very cells of your flesh explode.”

Rock could feel the slab sinking slowly toward him. He turned his head sideways and pulled in his chest. It already hurt as the slab squashed his ear against the side of his skull. And then his skull began compressing as the death slab dropped another twentieth of an inch.

Killov was right. Rockson could see that already. Dying was going to hurt a lot.

ZEBRA BOOKS

are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

475 Park Avenue South

New York, N.Y. 10016

ISBN: 0-8217-2587-4

Copyright © 1989 by Ryder Stacy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

First printing: February 1989

Printed in the United States of America

One

I
t was many thousands of years old, its birth lost in the dim mists of pre-history. Its face was crumbling. Dust cascaded down its granite nose, and sand swirled within its hollow deep-set eyes, which stared out only with blackness. Its long back, flanks, and legs were filled with ten thousand cracks—fissures which threatened to rip open and expose its baked innards at any moment. And yet within this decomposing physique there was a great strength, an unbreakable spirit that emanated energy. In the midst of its inevitable decomposition a ghostly voice screamed out, “I shall live forever, far beyond the lives of the men who built me, or the tens of millions who have come to see, worship, marvel over me through the centuries!”

It was called the Sphinx.

It sat in the sand, stretched like a cat, its long lion claws digging into the sand ahead of it like it was slinking, preparing for movement, perhaps ready to pounce, to leap on any who dared stare at it. It was as mysterious as the day it was chiseled, a monument to rival anything that future generations might offer the gods. A testament to the abilities of the ancient craftsmen of the Nile, and the power of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. A colossal being sculpted out of solid rock, over 189 feet long, the massive sculpture guarded the Duqur Valley, protecting it from other gods, other men. With its human head, lion’s body, and hawk’s wings, it took the best of all three and combined them into one. There was something powerful in its combined characteristics, something to challenge all the other gods: the Bull God, the Cat God, even the Sun God—Amun.

In its immovable immensity and its sheer power, its magic of stone carved into myth and eternal riddle, the Sphinx seemed to toy with mankind. For the ancient myths said that the Sphinx asked a riddle of all who dared approach it.

“What walks on four feet in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?” It killed all who failed to answer the riddle, ripping them to shreds with its stone claws, its great boulder teeth. The answer was man. Man crawls as a baby in the morning of his life, walks on two feet at noon as an adult, and must use a cane in his twilight years. But none had answered the riddle. And their bones, along with the bones of the pharaoh who had built it, had been long turned to powder—the bones of all who had labored on it as well!

Yet still the great man-beast sat, asking the riddle with hollow eyes and voiceless mouth, broken mouth dug out by aeons of windswept sand which ripped into it every second of the day. It asked through a mouth which gaped wide now, dark like a cave between the smashed lips. It asked—who dares come before me and gaze directly into my eyes? Who? What man faces the impenetrable gaze of the Sphinx and thinks he will live?

In the 247th day of its 3,789th year the Sphinx moved. Just the slightest ripple of motion at first, as if it were quivering, sending shivers along its back like a lion trying to warm itself on a cold desert night. Then it was still again as the star-studded sky looked down with its trillion eyes as if in awe of the mythical beast.

Suddenly it was vibrating wildly, every part of it shaking and jerking around as if it were going into the throes of a fit. The Sphinx, which had survived the grinding millennia, taking all that nature and man had to offer, began cracking. The face was first to go, as it crumbled apart like sand in a tidal surge. What was left of the nose cracked and slid down the face. One deep-set eye suddenly was five times larger as a whole section of the skull above it cracked with a loud snap and rushed to the desert sands below.

Suddenly all the countless tons of stone were slowly rising right up out of the desert floor, wobbling and gyrating around like a kite out of control. The immense beast rose up twenty, thirty, then fifty feet into the air. It began spinning around wildly, the long paws dipping up, then back again, like a plane which had lost its tail rudders and didn’t quite know where it would head next. Then the huge stone wings which were folded back on its sides began ripping free with great cracking sounds, as if they were trying to unfurl to help it in its mad airborne fling.

As it spun around, the centrifugal force of the motion began hurling whole sections of the Great Sphinx away. The twenty-foot-long claws tore free of their boulder wrists and fell, slamming into the desert. Part of the back ripped free and exploded into pieces which showered the sand below for many yards.

The men who were standing nearby looked terrified. The gaunt black-clad man who was causing the flying Sphinx’s bodily injuries screamed out curses in a violent rage. “It sucks! This is useless! What the hell’s wrong with this stinking device!” Colonel Killov, commander of what was left of the Earth’s KGB forces, screamed out. The red-robed high priest of Amun stood frozen in terror at his right. “You said this powerstick could levitate anything,” Killov complained. “But this damn Sphinx is just dashing itself to pieces.”

“P-Perhaps Your Godship is not quite using the Qu’ul stick c-correctly,” the priest, Aka-ta-Kal, offered. His white, jewel-fringed robe was now coated with ancient stone dust and sand from the Sphinx’s tumbling. Aka-ta-Kal shouted his words above the din, staring with fear-swollen eyes, knowing how enraged the emaciated, drug-crazed Killov could get. The high priest had discovered this Kil-Lov who was also called Ka Amun, the son of the Great Amun. Kil-Lov had fallen from the sky, his shoes flaming and smoking—as was prophesied in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. So Head Priest Aka-ta-Kal, and all the followers of the Amun Sun God cult who lived along the upper Nile, had come to serve the Ka Amun. For the Man-God had dropped to Earth to deliver his divine message straight to their worthless ears. That’s why the high priest had led the Man-God to the ancient storehouse beneath the Pyramid where he had found the Qu’ul stick.

“What the hell do you mean?” Killov screamed out, shaking his hand-held levitation device. The Qu’ul was a crudely finished red crystal in a rough cylinder shape about a foot long and three inches wide. It gave off a glow as if alive inside, as if a million burning fireflies had been trapped within its crystalline surface. As Killov angrily shook the weapon—which shot out an almost invisible purple-hued beam—it lost its contact with the side of the great stone monument. The Sphinx instantly came flying straight down, a good two-hundred-foot drop. As the dozen or so Egyptian priests of the high orders of the Amun cult stood in a trembling circle around Kil-Lov the Ka Amun, they gasped collectively in abject horror as they saw the Great Sphinx smash into the side of one of the pyramids that stood below it.

There was a tremendous roar as if a burst of thunder had gone off right in front of them, and they were all showered with a blinding cloud of dust. The Sphinx had smashed into innumerable pieces against the pyramid. Every part of it had exploded out in all directions, from boulder-sized pieces to grains of sand. What had lasted aeons had been taken out of existence in an instant.

The Sphinx was dead. It was but sand for a sandbox—if there had been such things in the year 2096
A.D.

“Ah, this stupid thing is broken,” Killov raged, throwing the levitation stick, the Qu’ul, to the sand.

The priests gasped again and closed their eyes reflexively for a few seconds. The dropped levitation device easily could have fallen pointing at them. But it had turned off abruptly as it left Killov’s grip. For the Amun Stick needed the touch of a human being, the warmth of his circulating blood to bring it to life. And as cold as Killov’s skin was, there was enough warmth to power the Qu’ul.

Gingerly Aka-ta-Kal reached down and picked the device up again, letting his own pounding heart settle. The Great Sphinx had been destroyed, just like that. It was terrible, a blasphemy. And yet—and yet—if this was what the Man-God, the Ka Amun Sky Being Kil-Lov, who had dropped from the clouds with flaming feet, wanted, such must be.