Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style (10 page)

They were coming out of their second night, the second dawn as well just starting to come up when the wind seemed to pick up and the sky to the north turned a peculiarly nauseating greenish color. It was as if the whole heavens were about to puke their guts out. Something bad was about to happen. Rockson could feel the hair on his head and arms charge up and stand out, and Snorter stopped in his tracks and reared, whinnying something fierce. Rock calmed the animal down by grabbing hard on the reins and taking control again. But the sky was only getting worse. Far to the north, perhaps twenty miles off, Rockson swore he could see a jet-black cloud, alive and undulating, coming straight toward them. He knew what it was.

“Stop!”
Rock screamed, holding up his right hand as he circled Snorter quickly around, so that he was facing the rest of the team.

“It’s a blow,” Rock said, “a black blow,” suddenly having to talk above the roar of the wind that was picking up rapidly. “I think—think—it might be acid rain.” The men’s eyes opened wide—even the tiredest of them who had been off in some fantasy island of the mind as they rode along. They had all seen acid rainstorms before. Had seen the whimpering piles of smoking fur and hide and flesh that was left behind for those caught in such a downpour. Worse than acid snow, even.

“You know what to do,” Rock screamed out. “Alumatarps. Take ’em out fast—we’ve only got minutes, less maybe, to set up the goddamned things.” But they had trained for before and, all except Scheransky moved in precision with one another. Poles were pulled down from satchels and slammed into the ground with collapsible sledge hammers, until they were embedded as solid as King Arthur’s sword. Then they unpacked the special Shecter-created aluminum alloy tarps—thin as wafer, but impervious to the vile acids that the atomic storms were sometimes capable of spitting out. The silver squares were quickly attacked to the pole frame, and within six minutes they had a 20 x 20 foot, six-foot-high structure completely enclosed—with walls, roof and all.

“Get inside,” Rock yelled out, cupping his hands over his mouth as the black clouds came on them like gangbusters. The men pulled and kicked and cajoled their nervous ’brids inside. But as the wind picked up and goosed their butts with shrieks of pure fury, the animals shot into the enclosure and stomped around, making all sorts of horrible, deafening sounds. Detroit was the last one in—he always took up the rear. And he jerked his head around several times to double-check that no men or ’brids were out there. Then he slammed down the entrance flap, which sealed shut with a special Velcron coating.

Not a moment too soon. For suddenly the dimly lit world all around the tent went pitch black and the cloud swooped down and enveloped them. A waterfall of liquid erupted onto the tent, making the whole thing sway back and forth as if in the throes of a hurricane. The animals went mad and every man had to hold the reins right at chest level and keep pulling the ’brids down harshly. Some of them were cut and bleeding—but if the damned things got free and outside . . . there wouldn’t be any blood to bleed.

Then the thing really ripped into them. It was as if it were alive, a predator determined to claw them out of the makeshift tent. It slammed into the structure, the black, steaming rains pummeling the sides, seeking entrance to the living flesh inside. The winds beat against the walls, which slapped back and forth, creating drumlike sounds, which, with the brays of the animals and the yells of the men for them to shut up and “get that fucking hoof out of my fucking eye,” created quite a cacophonous event.

Outside, Rock heard the sudden terrifying screams of some woods animal that had been caught in the downpour of the stuff. But the screams didn’t last for long—though the terror in them more than made up for the length of torture. Rock prayed he didn’t go that way—melted, dissolved down to the very bone. It made him hug the ground a little closer, pull Snorter down so he was on his front knees and virtually immobilized. Not that the steed was going anywhere. He’d been with Rockson before on these journeys. If there was one thing the animal had learned, it was to trust its master. And not go out in the acid rains.

The storm seemed if anything to increase in fury, beating at them like a fusillade of artillery shells. And here and there, a slight flaw in the tarping allowed a drop or two of the sizzling liquid to burst through and onto someone’s arm, or one of the ’brids’ hides. The screams would rise a decibel or two and then be followed by whimpering. For the acid kept burning—past the flesh, the muscle, right to the bone. Rock prayed that those afflicted could just hold their ground. If a single man or beast rose—and pulled down a wall—a roof—it would be over for all of them. Almost instantaneously. Not quite, though. Not fast enough.

With a final surge of its poisonous lungs slamming at the tarp tent as it tried to lift it up into the very heavens, the storm suddenly was gone. It lightened outside within seconds, but as the men started forward Rock screamed out for them to stop.

“Let the droplets dry on the ground—or they’ll burn you as much as if you’d been in the deluge.” They stopped in their tracks and waited, slapping their ’brids in the nose when the creatures bit at them from time to time, demanding to know just what the hell was going on. At last Rock gave the all-clear sign and they stumbled out.

The last of the droplets of pure acidity were melting away, their steam rising up into the atmosphere where they would coalesce once more into the droplets of acid, then the clouds and the rains . . . Falling forever. Off to the west, the ten-mile-wide cloud system was wreaking more havoc—burning, melting every damned thing that got in its way. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, foxes . . . men.

They broke down the tarp as soon as they made sure every last bit of moisture had evaporated—which the stuff seemed to do almost instantly, being quite unstable once released as moisture into the air. Within five minutes they were loaded up again and on their way. It wasn’t a pretty picture, what had happened to the creatures that had been caught in the storm’s path. Piles of bones lay in steaming stews of pinks and browns. Guts bubbled like soup cooked too long on the fire, heads sat in the midst of puddles of their own oozing flesh. The acid was merciless and thorough. It left nothing alive where it touched, where it left its wet kiss of death.

Ten

D
hul Qarnain stood on the bow of the immense black oil tanker, staring into the mist-shrouded afternoon sky. His eyes were half closed to ward off the sea spray and cold driving wind that bit fiercely into his desert-toughened flesh.

From his vantage point he could see the entire ship behind him and the surrounding ocean on all sides for a distance of a mile or two. The fog along the ocean’s surface was heavy. As was his heart. He had spoken to Allah for hours at prayer this morning and had heard nothing in return. Was the Great One angry at him? Was there evil in his own heart? He searched himself as he had done a thousand times before, looking for evil, reaching inward to touch his soul, his being.

No! There was nothing impure inside of him, inside of Dhul Qarnain. He felt clean as white desert sand. He lived only for his Master—and to carry out His plans and desires. But he longed for a word from time to time. A sign from Allah that he was on the right track. Yet there had been silence for weeks now, months.

No matter. There was a time for peace and a time for suffering. He had undergone many moments of loneliness and pain in his forty-three years of life and had survived and would continue to survive. At least until this mission was complete. Then he would gladly die. For he would have returned his homeland to his people, a task no other man had been able to accomplish in Palestine’s long, tortured history.

Many times he had seen himself, dressed in his flowing red robes, ascend into the sky, up, up to his God. In the vision, he was bleeding from an arrow or a spear, or a bullet. And his robe was burning bright red with the blood of his life. But it only made the ascension more glorious. To fight His enemies and die for Him. To be taken into the arms of the angels in Paradise.

His visions often lasted hours. Alone in his tent in the middle of the black desert night, Qarnain experienced ecstatic seizures that threw him around the sandy floor of his tent like a rag doll, his body trembling violently, drool flowing from his wide open mouth. He would wake hours later from his fiery dream, burning with the blood of Allah in his veins, tears flowing from his eyes. And he would thank the Lord for showing His humble servant the path.

And now the time was near. The Blessed War was soon to be fought, and he, Dhul Qarnain, was its general—the chosen warrior who would send His holy troops into battle. The Red rulers of the Arab world had grown soft and fat and rotten with their forbidden—to the Arabs, anyway—liquor and women. They had been seduced by the “dead” materialism of the West. They had given in to the Great Satan. He knew the time of judgment was near. He could feel it in his blood and bones, as one feels the approaching storm deep in the nostrils, hears the earthquake in the center of the heart minutes before the ground begins to move and shake like a whirling dervish. He would lead his men to battle—under Colonel Killov—and in return he would be given back the sacred land of Palestine, for him and his people. This the colonel had promised. And though the man was supremely evil and twisted, Qarnain knew he would keep his word. He and Killov had connections extending far back.

Qarnain himself would die—he knew it. He would succeed in his war but his physical body would be destroyed. He would at last join his Master—fly up to the heavens filled with dark-haired angels. He longed for the day. Longed for the moment of his martyrdom, when Allah would see just how deep, deep as blood, his love ran.

Had not the bountiful Allah provided him with everything he needed for the war? Had he not needed money, and had it not been poured on him from his benefactor, the colonel? He had needed an army, and lo, men came, ready to die for him and he had assembled a multitude of strong and ready fighters. He had needed arms to fight the infidels—and his men had hijacked Red helicopters, machine guns, even small ground-to-air missiles, from Red supply ships and convoys.

And had not Dhul Qarnain needed an ultimate weapon, a weapon so strong, so terrible that no nation could stand up to it? A weapon as powerful as the fist of Allah Himself, able to annihilate the armies of the infidel. And the KGB colonel had known just where to procure such weapons from the very clutches of the Russian serpent—a nuclear battle wagon that could turn the world into a pit of fire.

Now the years of preparation were completed and arms filled the inside of the tanker to overflowing. Allah had been supremely generous indeed. Praise be to Allah.

Qarnain was suddenly startled from his reveries by the sharp sound of boot heels clicking together behind him. He turned. It was Colonel Killov. The man looked like Death itself. Hardly more than skull atop a wasting body, a skeletal frame whose flesh was hardly thicker than paper and translucent throughout.

“And how are you today, Qarnain?” Killov asked, saluting quickly, his arm snapping to attention, half in a Russian salute, half a Nazi stiff arm—although that could just as easily have been from the colonel’s arthritis. His body had been wracked for years now, by abuses of so many kinds that he had been shrunken down to his bare essentials—muscle and bone and hide. Like a sewer rat that grows lean and mean, with its slicked-back black hair, its teeth showing dimly in the dark. Thus was Killov himself a survivor who had been forged into compressed but murderous gristle and grime. The colonel smiled thinly, his parted lips revealing yellow teeth, some rotted nearly all the way through. A nasty odor that blew out from between the thin lips made Qarnain turn his head for a moment.

“So, Qarnain, our rendezvous is drawing close,” Killov said, standing with his hands behind him, staring ahead into the Atlantic ocean as they headed toward the country he had been chased from. “We must make a final inspection of the armaments, be assured that the technical support teams are all proceeding smoothly in their preparation operations. Do not forget the trouble we had with the main hydraulics. Timing is crucial to this whole operation. There will be no second chances.”

“Yes, yes, Colonel, we shall inspect,” Qarnain said. “But do not for a moment doubt the success of this final Jihad. Allah is with us—and Allah is great. We can only win.”

“I do not, of course, question your Allah,” Killov smirked quickly. “I know that Allah is as you say—great. But I, too, have a few tricks up my sleeves.” He licked his dry, cracked lips and popped a few blue pills into his mouth, drinking them down with several sips of a red liquid from a flask. The man was always popping pills, Qarnain had observed. He hardly seemed to eat a bite of real food. It was as if the act of eating, of digesting, disgusted him.

Sometimes the Arab fighter felt afraid of this man. He knew Killov had no belief in Allah at all—or anything else, for that matter. He just wanted to kill the Premier, seize control of the Red brass—and world power. But that was fine with Qarnain. The Arab would use Killov until it was no longer necessary. But then would come a time . . .

The colonel looked as if he had died a hundred years ago and been preserved with some fluid that slightly tanned his stretched, leathery skin. His hands were long and thin and seemed hardly more than cold bones. The other men, the crew, the commandos, referred to him as “Skeleton Hands” and “He who is dead”—behind his back, of course. When he walked on the deck or through the ship, they always conveniently turned their eyes away, not daring to meet those black pits of fire head on.

The two men walked toward the hold as Arab guards armed with long scimitars, as well as Kalasnikov automatics, bowed deeply, as their leader, the Last Prophet, passed. They walked until they came to a long flight of metal stairs leading down into the guts of the giant tanker. Qarnain led Killov through a honeycomb of metal tunnels painted stark white, until they reached a thick metal door; four men armed with machine guns stood in front of it. The black-robed guards opened the door, pushing it slowly like the ritual door to a secret mosque. They all bowed low as Qarnain and Killov stepped through.