by Ryder Stacy
“No, no,” she cut in, ignoring his thin-lipped depreciating grin. “Not this time, Rock. I guess you haven’t heard. Trouble! Big trouble.” Rockson stuck his right index finger against a sensor hidden in the apparently solid rock wall in front of them and a wall opened, hewn from the living granite of the mountain the city was built into. They entered a medium-sized suite reserved for visiting dignitaries and returning fighters. The subdued lighting was more natural than in the corridors outside. As the door slid shut, soft, lilting music oozed from hidden speakers.
“Off!” Rockson said, and the music faded out. Another one of Shecter’s little toys. “Tell me while I decontaminate,” Rockson said, walking over to the microwave-shower area. In other suites the other Freefighters would also take procedures to minimize the amount of radiation they carried in their bodies—and into Century City.
Rockson dropped his field clothes into a steel container, to be fully de-radiated later, and stepped into the red circle of the shower. A purplish beam played over his body with a soft hiss as he made shadowboxing motions slowly exposing every part of himself to the decon unit. Outside, over the low humming noise, Shannon was momentarily distracted by his nakedness, then told him the bad news.
“They—the Reds—got Preston—from Westfort. He was one of their top military men. He was doing point on a scouting mission in one of the Dead Zones about two hundred miles from Westfort when apparently the whole sky filled with Blackshirt paratroops. The Freefighters put up a hell of a fight, took out scores of Reds, and most of them got out—all except Preston. Evidently they got his belt off in the fighting and he couldn’t swallow the pill.”
Rockson frowned. There was a beep, the purple rays died down and he stepped from the circle. Now for a real shower. “Well, he won’t talk. I know him and—”
“He might talk, Rock. The Reds have this new machine. It literally cuts right through our cortex programming and gets beyond the babble we can implant. No, this new machine—the Mind Breaker they call it—has two long needles. It’s like a headset—big, ugly thing—it sticks these needles in and . . . Never mind the specifications, the fact is, it might break down anyone’s resistance. Even yours, Rockson.” He saw the way her green eyes followed him toward the shower as the intel expert continued.
“According to our information they plan to use them on recalcitrant labor but have discovered it works wonderfully to get information as well. Believe me, the pain—it heightens pain in addition to probing deep into the brain’s memory circuitry.”
“And,” said Rockson, stepping into the shower stall, “Preston knew everything about Westfort—his home base. Has he ever been here?”
“No, never. Only four people in each Free City are permitted to know the location of other cities. He wasn’t, because of his military activities. Still—to lose Westfort!”
Rockson turned on the shower, first hot for several minutes, to get every bit of grime and radioactive dust from his skin and hair, then ice cold. Right now the Red bastards could be probing Preston’s mind, torturing, searching through layer after layer of false imprinting, going up the pain threshold until . . . Shannon sat, looking depressed outside the stall.
Westfort was a relatively small city with a population of just under four thousand. It was located somewhere in Colorado. Several times Rockson had rendezvoused with Preston and some of his fighting team from Westfort. All hard-fighting, courageous men. They had done joint missions together. Preston’s capture felt like a personal blow to him. He would miss the man. For whatever they did to him, he wasn’t coming out of it alive. What hellish device could make a man as tough as Preston talk? Betray his home?
But there was nothing to do but wait and see. Every twenty-four hours, pigeons arrived from the other Free Cities bearing micro messages on a peg pouch. In that way the cities kept in communication without radio—and without anyone but a privileged few knowing where the other cities were. It was better that way. If the carrier pigeon didn’t arrive that evening, it would mean that Westfort was gone.
Rockson stepped from the shower and said, “Order a full alert, priority two—and let me know when and if the pigeon arrives.”
“Right!” Shannon was out the door. When Rockson said something he was obeyed. As first commander he was the highest-ranking military—as opposed to civilian—officer in the city. Donning a new set of indoor clothing—tan, loose-fitting shirt and pants—Rockson went immediately to the computer room. Saying a brief hello to the operator at one side working on cataloguing orders for the Liberator automatic rifle, which were shipped out to other hidden cities by the thousands, Rock sat in front of the main terminal and pushed the “activate” switch. He punched in the code for sequential screening of each and every section of the vast Century City complex. He was looking for something—a way to tell if the city had been breached. Perhaps the Westfort incident was not just a chance occurrence but part of a big Red crackdown on the underground. Rockson had worked out a program without even Dr. Shecter knowing, a way of mapping human activity in the city. It was based on radiation count. Spies, either Russian or traitorous Americans from one of the fortress enclaves, were invariably less radioactive than Free Americans. It was a very small difference he had noted when studying equations on the buildup of radiation levels after the return of Attack Teams. What it boiled down to was his own particular program—which he now accessed with his code word “Possum”—to search each level for lower-rad humans, and to flash a red dot wherever these personnel existed on the plans now flashing one at a time on the green-tinted screen.
“A-1”—that was main Hydroponics, thirteen hundred meters of underground vault lit by growth lights wherein most of the city of fifty thousand’s vegetables were produced, without any soil. It had 1,265 personnel on three levels, and “Possum” gave no indication of anything amiss. Next he hit “A-2,” the Central Library—a good place to slip unnoticed into the group. The four-level library was filled with 1,237 people. 1,476,391 discs were on file, and 209 people owed library fines for overdue discs. But no red dot.
Century City, the fabulous creation of a hundred years of guts and ingenuity, had a less than auspicious beginning. It was September 11, 1989, the last day of the old era. It was rush hour. The five mile long, eight-lane tunnel of Interstate 70, coursing out of Denver and reaching into Utah, was filled with rapidly moving vehicles of every type—vans, panel trucks, huge double tractor trailers, small imports, rusty, old Chevys. Eager commuters going back to another night of TV, roast chicken or pot roast, extra helpings, in their own little home. The American Dream.
Then it happened. The strike! Out of the skies they came, hundreds of flaming needles ripping the heavens with their screaming descents all over the United States and Canada. Each needle splitting up into five, six, as many as ten glowing warheads heading down to their own special target. Some went off in the oceans or devastated the wrong areas. But seven hundred of the missiles went off. Hitting Aspen and Cheyenne, Las Vegas and Omaha. Hitting Detroit and Tacoma, Texarkana and Little Rock. Everywhere the same—a retina-burning flash, a towering mushroom-shaped cloud. Millions were incinerated, tens of millions, in the first few minutes. Millions more staggered around, their eyes burnt, their skin charred and peeling, in a shock beyond shock. A world of megadeath.
The lucky ones died straight off. Another fifty million men and women and babies lingered on painfully over the months. Their hair and teeth slowly fell out, their flesh wasted away until it looked like something gangrenous and rotted. And then, mercifully, death. Then the cancers, the malformed babies, the plagues of virulent, mutated diseases that took one man by the throat and let the next live. Then came the bandit gangs—murderous packs of marauders, armed to the teeth, who roamed the country raping and burning out of bloodlustful nihilism.
The hardest hit cities were the ones with the large black populations. The survivors concluded that this had been a deliberate racial policy by the Soviets—to get rid of the minorities of the
country—to make occupation easier. They knew well how blacks had fought their way up the ladder from slavery in America. They knew that blacks would not accept a new master—ever. So they “sanitized” the largely black cities of Detroit, New York, Newark, Chicago, with multiple hits. So much for freeing the oppressed peoples of the world.
Century City began as a tomb for the people trapped in the five-mile tunnel when the war began. Avalanches from the surrounding mountains, exploding from nearby hits, covered both ends of the tunnel, sealing it off with nearly a hundred feet of dirt and rock—but it also protected those inside. Realizing the horror that had occurred, those inside used the situation to their advantage. They immediately elected leaders and formed into work groups, stripping their cars to make engines for electricity and rigging up an air purification system through the vent holes in the hillside. Somehow they survived and, soon, even began doing well. Names such as Ostrader, Taggart, Meister and Bonne. Men who took charge and made the tunnel dwellers constantly strive for more. They quelled the panic, made the best of the situation, and kept the democratic tradition alive. They realized the Russians were moving en masse into the nearby, unscathed Denver by the number of giant airlifters coming by each day. For anyone to leave and go his own way would mean death. They voted and it was nearly unanimous. They would gather their strength. There were engineers, scientists, mathematicians, plumbers, teachers, auto mechanics—all had been trapped on Interstate 70. They would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as their ancestors would have done. And there would come a time when they would hit back—hard—against the bastards who were busy enslaving whatever they hadn’t already destroyed of America. The child rapers and the mass murderers would pay back with blood—it would be done if it took a century. Hence the name Century City.
They gradually expanded their small society in the tunnel, hewing out more space under the large mountain that stood above them. First, just extra storage rooms, but over the years elaborate complexes of tunnels and multilevels had been built, containing a now-bustling, industrious city. And they had changed too, or their children had. Certain minor mutations began popping up more and more frequently in babies born after the blast. Signs like white-star patterns on the children’s backs or different color eyes, such as Rockson’s violet and blue combination. Streaks of white on the head, lack of body hair below the face. But it also became apparent that children with these traits were stronger, more radiation-resistant, better able to survive in the hard new world. These were the children of Free America who would inherit the land, who would retake the U.S.A. from her Red rulers.
Ted Rockson continued to look at the screen, his eyes tied like a hawk searching for rats, as detail after detail of the vast complex came on the viewer. Schools, nurseries, exercise rooms, gardens, research and weapons labs—everything linked by ramps, stairways and elevators, so as to keep the movements of the city’s inhabitants free and quick. And it all worked. The best part was the Russians had no idea how big it was and how deadly.
Diagrams of the main power generating chambers flashed on the screen, five seconds per schematic. This was Rockson’s favorite area in Century City for it was the future. No longer would man’s quest for power sources despoil the environment. For here were ecologically sound energies. In the history of Earth, all industry and power production left traces behind, junk fouling the environment. Here the wastes from industrial production—gas, solid and liquid—were re-used. Some for power; some harnessed to react with carefully developed, chemical-eating bacteria and become inert. The byproducts were mixed with dirt and shipped off to hot zones where they were used to create a thin topsoil for the radioactive desert. This soil would block off the radiation beneath to some degree. Simple experiments had shown that many simple grasses and plants could grow in this environment. The dead zones could someday be green again.
Rockson liked to think of a future green America. Greener than it had ever been, for all Free Americans now understood how precious and delicate the environment that had been nearly destroyed was. We will no longer pollute, we will restore, was the credo of most hidden cities. Over the thirty years that Century City’s Industrial Waste Removal Program had been in operation, nearly a million tons of synthetic soil had been produced and stored in giant natural caverns and fissures below the mountain, many created from earthquakes during the war. These tons of soil could be pumped up to the surface when the time came, and shipped to dead zones all over the country—on trains, if trains would ever again roll.
Rockson had been sitting in front of the computer terminal screen for almost an hour and had nearly completed checking every one of the 115 sections of the city complex when the intercom rang. It was Shannon. The Council would meet in G-3 at eleven City Time. Rockson flicked off the console. General knowledge of his little surveillance system would render it useless. It was his ace in the hole.
Rockson nodded to Pierce and Evers, the Council guards, as he entered. Pierce, a broad-boned viking of a man with amber eyes and a nearly platinum beard, asked, “How’d you do, Rock? Kill all those bastards yet?”
“Didn’t help them any,” Rockson deadpanned. “Maybe ten tanks, a dozen half-tracks, and 150—make that 200—Russians.”
Evers, the shorter, swarthy one with a shotgun pistol, similar to Rock’s, in a quick-draw holster on his thigh, said in a raspy voice, “I have the last batch you disposed of in the memory on my calc.” He extracted a flat, tiny adding machine and punched in the new numbers. “Let’s see, at the present rate of elimination it would take—” he pressed the tiny total button—“fifty-one years to kill every Red in America.”
“Great,” Rockson said, turning and walking down the main aisle toward the podium, around which the expectant Council members were already seated in rows of cushioned, low-slung seats. That was much too long, Rockson thought. That was exactly the rub all the time. They were fighting a giant. Even the loss of whole expeditionary forces scarcely made the Red leadership blink. What were ten, or even twenty thousand troops a year to them? They probably expected that in their troop-strength projections. No, somehow the Freefighters’ attack had to be a hundred times more violent and destructive. They had to be hurt!
Rockson walked up the four wood steps to the podium and took a seat to the right of the speaker of the chamber, Willis, who shook his hand warmly and then turned to the Council members and addressed them, officially opening the meeting. He expressed the heartfelt thanks of the Council that Rockson had again been so successful in his mission. But the speaker’s smile immediately dropped away as he began the session.
“Let’s get to the most serious matter immediately—the capture of Preston. This situation endangers not only Westfort but our own Century City as well.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Seven
The eighty-story, circular monolith sat in the center of Denver, a statue of death. Black as night, sheathed in impenetrable, shimmering glass, it reached up to the sky, the highest structure in the KGB fortress of Vostok, the center of KGB operations in America. The monolith, called just “The Center” by its personnel and “The Death House” by the Americans, had been built to terrify, to frighten, to intimidate. And it did. Erected nearly sixty years earlier by Commander Jargov, the fourth of the KGB leaders in the occupied United States, it had been constructed of the finest materials, hardened steel and specially made, triple-polorized, brownish blue-tinted glass to withstand the sun and dust of the Colorado climate. “I want this building to last as long as the empire,” Jargov had ordered. And it would be standing well after that.
Still as mysterious and conspicuous as the day it was built, the monolith, some two hundred feet in diameter, was the base of all KGB operations in the U.S.A. Over nine thousand men and women worked here daily, pulling up to work early each morning in their Pushka three-wheel cars or on motorcycle. The monolith was set in the center of the KGB fortress, separate from the military base or its housing. The KGB demanded its own sp
ace. It did not want to mix. The meaning of the KGB was fear—to watch over the Soviet military as well as the American workers. Fraternization meant familiarization and friendship. This could not be. Not the Blackshirts. Their black uniforms and red death’s-head medallions designated that they were out of the ordinary. An image must be created of immortality, of superhuman strength and violence. And that was how it must be. For fear worked only when it was believed.
Within the walls of the Center, myriad functions were carried out. From information fed in from military operations, informers, spydrones and the KGB’s own network of intelligence operatives, a comprehensive picture was drawn of the rebel activity and the trouble spots around the country. The intelligence units occupied twenty-five floors, filled with maps—floor-to-ceiling, contoured maps of the entire country, flashing with different colored lights to designate the trouble spots. Green lights for environmental dangers—from earthquakes to radioactive mists—red lights for rebel attacks, orange lights for possible Free American hidden cities, and blue lights for all other KGB centers in the U.S.A. Messengers constantly ran from floor to floor as their superiors yelled out orders. The sheer enormity of spying on such a vast country as the United States was a constant struggle. There were always problems, always emergencies—breakdowns of equipment, rebellions, sabotage of the factories and the Russian fortresses by the underground. The army were fools, barely capable of going out and capturing a few rebels, let alone understanding the whole picture, the emerging pattern. That work was for the KGB.
On the next fifteen floors were the counterespionage “services”—ruling bureaucracy that sent out the Death Squads to liquidate all those thought to be troublemakers. There were no laws they had to obey—they were the law, the judge, the jury and the executioner. They had free rein over the country like some barbarian war lords of the past.