by Ryder Stacy
And who knows—perhaps it was these very screams that attracted a small fishing boat from Korea, which had made its way all the way to the mid-Pacific, for Killov’s iceberg vehicle had traveled nearly a thousand miles south. Whatever it was, something attracted the attention of the half-drunken captain of the fishing boat, and he headed toward a lump floating at three o’clock. And sure enough, as they approached, something began flailing around. And when they pulled it aboard, it was a waterlogged, weasel-like fellow, his eyes as wild as a crazed saint’s. And he kissed the men who saved him, and then fell on his knees, screaming “Thank you, Revenge, God of revenge. It is you I serve now.”
When the man had been calmed down, the captain was able to talk to him, with the help of his second-in-command, in broken Russian. That, plus Killov’s own fractured understanding of the Korean language—he had had to study many in Officer’s Training School, long, long years before in the quiet hallways of Leningrad Military Academy—enabled them to communicate. The extraction of one of Killov’s five gold Russian sovereigns that he had in the emergency pack made the captain quite cooperative, as this trip had been a disaster, fishing-wise, from beginning to end. He had caught almost no fish other than mutations, monstrous eel-like, over-toothed specimens that Killov shuddered even now to think about. Though the captain kept them—flopping around below. Lost two men, one his own brother-in-law. His sister would kill him when he returned to the small fishing village of Tenachi on Korea’s northernmost coast. But the gold suddenly made the whole venture much more pleasant, the vast gold store that Killov had them eager to set sail for.
Thus it was no big undertaking for Killov to quickly be running the boat and its crew. He had them take him toward Asia instead of heading back to America. He needed time—and money—and most of all men and weapons. Vassily’s forces were triumphant worldwide—after the Premier’s battle with the KGB in which Killov had been vanquished. All of Killov’s bases had been destroyed, dismantled. So he would go to his cache of diamonds and that glistening ace-in-the-hole of his, gold.
“To Macau Island,” Killov had commanded, handing out gold to the crew and promising more. Thus the boat flew west all the way through the Pacific again—past the Russian coastal defenses, which paid no attention to the fishing boat. There were thousand of such vessels. Not too many ever attacked the immense gun batteries that stood along the entire coast. Killov had the fishing boat land in an isolated bay and row-boated himself to Macau Island. When he returned, they knew he was loaded—and the entire crew closed in on him.
But the colonel was prepared for even that. He had, after all, been the head of the KGB in America. He was an expert in the doublecross, the backstab. He always knew what the others were thinking, because he was thinking it first. As the six-man crew closed in on him with sad grins, as if they were grieved that they were going to have to do this—cut him and throw him to the fishes—Killov struck first. An automatic pistol ripped out from beneath his jacket and he fired a spray of .9mm slugs across them at chest level, then back again—then once more the other way for good measure. Fifty slugs were fired within three and a half seconds. Then there was nothing moving, not even a mouse.
But once again Killov had saved his own butt—only to be in a worse situation. The fishing boat was out—he couldn’t sail it alone. So he didn’t waste time worrying about it, but got dressed in two down coats, rifles and pistols hanging all over him, and a huge supply of drugs—ups and morphine, which he had stashed along with the fortune in gold—and staggered along. Through the steppes of Asia. One plodding step after another. Just too damned mean to give up or freeze. Always carrying Rockson’s or Vassily’s or Zhabnov’s face before him like a dark beacon of hate in the night, to lead him on.
And thus it went. Somehow he made it through Indochina, Burma, hiding during the day, moving at night. He didn’t exactly go fast. But he went, never stopping, never faltering. The dreams of madmen are powerful motors, indeed. He made his way through India, into Afghanistan, where he traveled with mountain bandits for nearly a thousand miles, coming all the way to the Iranian peninsula. Here a camel caravan heading across Iran and into Africa allowed him to tag on. Buying two camels and hiring a swarthy-looking but capable bodyguard, whose scarred face kept most trouble away, Killov rode with the caravan through remote desert landscapes for what seemed like an eternity. Only the pills, the constant popping of the different kinds of ups, and the drinking of hot fruit juices, kept him alive. But his body was used to it all by now. Everything inside had already shriveled up into knots. A raisin would have filled his stomach.
At last, after nearly a year and a half, he had reached Dhul Qarnain—the one man Killov knew he could count on to help him in his mad plan. Of course Killov phrased it all the right way—kill the Americans; cut the throat of the Russian pig—plus promised to return Palestine to Qarnain’s control. Then he would do what he wanted with it. And it had worked. Killov was, after all, a master manipulator. Few could resist his bribes or threats. And since most men are basically greedy, few even tried.
“Well? Well?” A voice penetrated the fog of memory.
“What?” Killov asked, startled.
“I said, is something wrong with that gun? You’ve been holding it for a minute now.” Qarnain looked puzzled.
“Oh, no,” the colonel said, regaining his bearings. “It is absolutely perfect. Perfect!” Killov checked off the box marked PISTOLS on the long chart in his hands.
They walked on to the end of the underdeck world, past long racks of rockets.
They suddenly heard coughing and rustling sounds coming from behind the rocket cases.
Qarnain put his finger to his lips, and walked past the colonel around to the back of the rack hidden from view by boxes of spare parts. He reached out and pulled a tarp over from several crates.
Two of his men were sleeping on the floor, with the remains of some food lying on a plate between them.
“What is this?” Qarnain screamed. “What? What?” His face grew red with embarrassment in front of the colonel.
The two sleeping men opened their eyes and, seeing their master, turned deathly pale. They jumped to their feet.
“We were just, I mean . . .”
“Silence, you filthy dogs! You have blasphemed the name of Allah by your actions. There is only one prescribed punishment for blasphemers. So it is written.”
“No! No!” They both screamed, as four guards rushed over and grabbed them.
“They shall be executed immediately,” Qarnain said to the guards. “Gather the entire crew on the deck.”
Killov smiled inwardly. These Arabs were a bunch of flea-ridden camel worshippers, but at least they ruled properly. He couldn’t help but admire the quickness and efficiency of Dhul Qarnain’s judgements. Mercy is foolish in the quest for supremacy. It leads to failure as surely as ineffiency.
“Bring them before me!” Dhul Qarnain ordered. His eyes were cold and fixed. He stood on the open deck in the center of the tanker. The Servants of Death stood before him, in two lines of 100 men each, their loose black uniforms rippling in the strong wind, snapping and wrapping around their legs. They stood quietly, at attention. All of them faced Dhul Qarnain, but none looked at him. Their eyes were focused at his feet. One could only look at the Messenger of God when he spoke.
Dhul Qarnain gazed up at the skies. Clouds, gray as a dead man, covered the heavens, blocking any view of blue. They moved slowly, like lions, through the dark jungle of the upper atmosphere, as if slowly stalking their prey.
“Hear me, Allah!” Qarnain opened his arms wide and looked straight up, his head bent back. “I am about to send you two souls. It is your judgement whether they live in Paradise or in Hell. I no longer have any use for them.”
The two men were shoved before him, a guard on each side of them. They were forced to their knees. They had been stripped of their weapons and their robes. Instead, they wore the grey shroud of the soon-to-be-dead.
They groveled befor
e Qarnain. He put a boot against their shoulders and pushed first one and then the other onto their stomachs. Their watery eyes peered up, pleading for mercy.
“You know why you are before me,” he said.
“Please, please, Blessed One, spare us. We meant no harm. What we took were but morsels of food. Nothing that would endanger our sacred mission,” the man called Akbar said. The other, shorter man, with a small black beard pointing down from his chin, lay silently gazing at Qarnain’s feet. He knew there was no point in begging, and so he grabbed at the pride that loved deep in his body. He was determined to go out as a flame of Allah should, burning till the last moment.
Qarnain looked at the man who had spoken. “Your very begging for your worthless life only shows your cowardice and unworthiness to be part of the Holy Army.”
“But if I am to die now, Blessed One, I shall never be able to prove my courage. All I ask is a chance to complete our mission. Then, should I fall in battle, I would be happy as the blood spurted out from my severed heart. I would raise my eyes to the heavens and die smiling.”
“You stole food from your brothers. A man such as you cannot be trusted. You were given enough of everything for your comfort, and the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon a warrior—to serve with me, the Last Prophet. No. You must die now. Go with glory. Perhaps Allah will look upon you with favor if your final moments are brave.”
Qarnain looked at the guards around the two thieves and moved his head ever so slightly. The guards grabbed each of the condemned men around the elbows. They dragged them about ten feet away and pushed them to their knees so that each man had his head thrust forward.
A large man stepped from out of the ranks of the Holy Army that stood before Qarnain. He was a giant of a man. Almost seven feet tall, with a bald head smooth as glass, and deep black eyes like bottomless pits. He had a long mustache that covered the whole lower part of his face and ran from ear to ear, so that it almost looked like he had a set of black horns.
He walked up alongside the first man, the coward, who was whimpering and crying, his tears splashing onto the metal deck. The executioner pulled his sword from its ivory scabbard with one smooth motion and raised it high in the air, so that the cold rays of the sun bounced off it, making it sparkle with a deadly glare.
He glanced over at the Chosen One, who only stared back. He had passed judgement—now it was the sword that must carry out the sentence.
“No, no,” the plump man screamed from his knees. “No, I wish to live longer. I am not done with this life!”
The executioner looked for an instant at the angry sun through the tangle of mist and clouds that formed the afternoon sky and swung the sword down. It slid through the man’s neck like a knife through soft butter. The head fell to the deck with a loud plop! like an overripe fruit. The poor man’s lips were still twitching as blood gushed from the mouth and nose of the severed head. Blood splattered out from the fallen body as if shot from a hose, drenching the deck around it with dark, warm puddles. The head came to a stop about two feet from Qarnain and looked straight up. Qarnain swore to himself that the eyes blinked a few times and then slowly glassed over as the life left the cells and the pupils began turning into stone from whence they had come.
The executioner turned to the next man, who kneeled, his hands flat on the ground. He was praying as fast as he could, as if just one more word might be the one that would send him through the narrow gates of heaven. He dared not look up at the giant who would take his life, but kept his eyes closed, tight, listening only to his own words and his heart, which beat like a jungle drum deep inside his chest.
The executioner was already drenched with blood. His white robe was stained in the middle. A big circle of red about a foot wide stared out from the center of the stomach like the cruel red eye of God. The four-foot-long curved sword hung again in the air like a snake of death, dripping blood from the tips of its fangs. The terrible blade waited in the air like a lightning bolt, silent, poised, ready to strike. It created a deafening silence on the ship as every man stared in hypnotic fascination, waiting for its descent.
The executioner let his heart slow and his muscles relax, and when he felt the moment was right he swung again, quickly, but this time not quite so deftly. The sword slipped slightly to one side as it cut into the condemned man’s shoulder and stuck like a meat cleaver in a pig. He screamed a scream that could be heard by the man in the ship’s bridge, a thousand feet away. The executioner had missed. The man’s left arm fell to the bloody deck, cleanly separated at the shoulder. Blood gushed out from the opened flesh like a fountain. It pulsed out from the gaping wound in great surges every two seconds. The condemned man still kneeled, supporting himself now on his one remaining arm. Some of the commandos turned pale and seemed about to lose their last meal. They had all seen executions before, but never so slowly and cruelly to one of their own comrades.
Quickly, the executioner raised the sword of death again and brought it down on the man’s neck. He caught the flesh as the man fell tumbling to the ground, his one arm no longer able to hold the weight of his mutilated body.
This time the cut was clean. It went through the neck just below the base of the skull, and the grimacing head hit the deck before the body could collapse. The head rolled over several times like a lopsided bowling ball and came to a rest only inches from the first victim’s. The two of them seemed to be joined in a meditation on death, their eyes both focused on infinity, staring up at the unknown that lies above all men.
Dhul Qarnain stared in disgust at the sloppy execution. Pieces of flesh lay strewn around the deck as if they had been slaughtering lambs.
“Clean it up!” was all he said. He walked away, his head high, white robe trailing at his feet.
The guards took out the ship’s hoses and began shooting water onto the deck. They pushed the bodies and the heads, which were now strangers to their own flesh, and the severed arm slowly across the deck. First one end of the bodies, then the other—the spray moved the corpses across the steel deck, the arms and legs flailing around from the force of the water as if engaged in a mad death dance. At last the two corpses reached the side of the boat, and with a few final bursts, the used-up human cargo flew over the edge into the black gnashing waves below, which swallowed the flesh in great bites of ravenous watery teeth.
The ranks of Allah’s Army slowly dispersed and returned to their quarters below deck. Their heads were down; their eyes could meet only the cold metal of the ship. No man spoke.
The executioner was the last to leave. He stood by the side of the tanker, looking at the spot where the bodies had disappeared into the waves. He stared for many minutes, long after the bobbing bits of flesh had disappeared from view.
Eleven
The Rock team made good time over the next few days. Maybe the acid rain shower had just been to get it over with—and that would be the worst part of the journey. But Rockson doubted it. That was never how it worked out. Things always took a turn for the worse. They hit the plains down out of the Rockies and headed almost due east. The skies were odd, churning with a deep purplish glow far in their depths. Strontium clouds. There was still much radiation of all kinds circling the earth, up in the Van Allen Belt and higher. From time to time it coagulated, or some of it did, and descended down to the cloud line. And these long bands, almost ringlike sometimes in their general formation, circled the earth like lighthouse beacons to man’s stupidity. A sign to the rest of the universe not to even set foot here! HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE PLANET MANNED BY ASSHOLES—STAY OUT!
Not that Rockson had to worry too much about that kind of stuff. He was a mutant. The new direction in which man was evolving. He could, among other things, take nearly a hundred times as much rads as Homo sapiens. And survive. Not that he wanted to test it to its limits. But he had been through some pretty hot places, to say the least. And he was still here. Though his long-term chances for survival—or reproducing little mutant brats into this world, s
hould, God help him, such a blessed event ever occur—were not great. None of the other crew were full mutants, they were human—but with some mutant characteristics. They all to a man seemed highly resistant to radiation. McCaughlin, Detroit, Chen, Archer—they’d all been out there through the worst of it with him. Shecter believed that a lot of men not actually showing mutant patterns had inherited various internal protective capacities.
“After all, these are third, fourth generation now,” the chief science officer had said to him over coffee and doughnuts one afternoon. “They wouldn’t even exist unless they had some sort of adaptive gene patterns. The world is too damned hostile for most of us older ones.” For Shecter, though a genius, perhaps one of the great minds of all time, was also doomed in a way. Century City was virtually his prison—as was the case for almost all those over seventy. For they couldn’t take the high rads of even the nearby mountains. Century City itself was protected by a number of filtering methods. The air inside, the water, everything was as clear and pure as it could be made. So, except for brief trips, Shecter had spent almost his entire later life confined to the subterranean city. An Einstein trapped inside a few hundred thousand square feet of space.
The team rode along in single file, about thirty to forty feet apart. At the very end, like a caboose about to go out of control and fly right off the tracks, McCaughlin tried constantly to keep up, kicking at his mount with thunderous thighs, as he led his two pack ’brids behind him, leaning around in the saddle to keep yanking and coaxing them along. But it was a losing battle, as he would slowly drift far behind the rest. So every ten or twenty miles Rockson would stop—let him catch up. It was good to rest the mounts frequently anyway. He had discovered they could go far longer distances that way.
Thus, within five days, by pushing it, they came to Topeka, just near the border with Missouri in the northmost part of the state. Or what was left of Topeka. It was nothing more, really, than two immense H-bomb craters. The warheads had taken everything out, landing just ten miles apart on each side of the once-bustling city. Just why the Russians had wanted to take out Topeka a century earlier, Rockson wasn’t sure. But they sure as hell had succeeded. There just wasn’t a trace of civilization left. Not a brick. What rubble had remained after the roaring, twin ten-megaton blasts, was just chunks of things, and powder. And over a hundred years that had eroded down to even finer dust and had blown with the wind.