by Ryder Stacy
The Doomsday Warrior walked across the open space between the tower and dome, well lit by spotlights that aimed down from the edge of the immense semi-globe, spaced twenty feet apart. He walked up a wide ramp, probably a main loading area, and knocked on the closed steel doors a good foot thick. A camera far above him swiveled toward Rock, and a tinny voice boomed out from a speaker on the wall.
“Orders?”
“Sergeant Vashnikov,” Rock said, having looked at the dead guard’s ID papers. “A delivery of radioactive tubes for the atomic generators.” There was silence for a few seconds. Then a confused voice shot back.
“We have no shipment of R-piping due today.”
“Look comrade,” Rock continued in his best mumbled Russian. “This guy’s got a whole trailer load of the things parked just around the building. These aren’t cans of paint.”
“The duty commander is not here right now,” the voice said nervously from the speakers. “I—I’ll let you in. I’ll call the unloading teams.”
“Thanks,” Rock said, coughing so the camera couldn’t look too closely at his face. The huge steel doors whirred silently apart and Rockson stepped through. A portly captain sat at a control booth up a set of concrete steps. He waved to Rockson to come into the office and the Doomsday Warrior, his hand firmly on the butt of the dead sergeant, headed up into the office.
“Sorry pal,” Rock said as he rushed toward the soldier. He smashed the surprised military bureaucrat on the side of the skull, knocking him cold. Rock turned and looked back into the vast warehouse beneath the dome, filled with row after row of supplies piled high on endless metal shelves. He could see movement far off in the dim flickering lights of the storage terminal. They’d have to move fast. He rushed back to the now fully opened warehouse doors. Rock motioned for the men to come forward. They dashed at full speed across the lighted sector just in front of the dome. They had almost made it when shots rang out from the next tower, to the left of the one Rock had left a cooling corpse in.
“Shit,” he muttered as two of the fighters fell. The rest made it in. The Doomsday Warrior pushed the Close button, and the two immense steel doors rolled back until they were fully shut. Outside, rifle butts banged against the metal creating loud, drumlike thuds.
“We don’t have much time,” Rock said, turning to the assembled men. He held up the map that the dissidents had given him of the plans of the structure’s support beams, found in a rotting library years before. “If we can just destroy three of the six main foundation beams,” Rock said, going over the plans once again, “the place should come tumbling down.” Should was the word that bothered him, but he didn’t mention his fears. “We’ll split into four teams of four men each. I’ve shown you how to place the explosives and set them. Any questions?”
“Nyet,” the men said in unison. They quickly split up and went their separate ways, having gone through the battle plans nearly twenty times. The Doomsday Warrior’s target was the computer complex itself—that way, if they failed to bring down the dome, at least the machinery inside, all of the advanced technology, would be blown to kingdom come. But they also had the farthest route to traverse. He was glad that he had Archer along and two stout-looking fellows carrying rapid fire Lavnikhov-18 subs. Each man carried a small crate of the dynamite over his shoulder, strapped around the back so as to give them movement and mobility. Archer carried two, one over each broad shoulder, and looked as if he could handle a few more.
They made their way through the endless storage terminal, moving just a few feet inside the main causeway, hidden behind rows of unpacked ten-foot-high crates of parts. Suddenly there was a flash of motion and guards were upon them—three Reds wearing the crossed electrical bolts on their sleeves, signifying the Elite Air Force Special Commandos. The men leaped in front of them, blocking their path. Rock and Archer fell to the floor instantly as the bullets of the three Russian subs spat out a storm of metal death. But the two freed men didn’t move quick enough. Their bodies were cut nearly in half, and they crumbled to the floor, dripping red bile through dissected body cavities. Rock fired three quick bursts from his own stolen submachine gun from a prone position on the cold concrete floor. The three Reds looked surprised for a moment, and then ghastly expressions crossed their pale faces. They fired wildly from arms that were no longer receiving signals from their dying brains and fell to the sawdust-strewn floor, dead as fallen trees.
Rockson grabbed the explosives crate from one of the dead freed men and quickly saluted them both. Two more unknown soldiers in the eternal war for freedom. He threw the crate over his shoulder, wrapping the homemade harness they had rigged up around his chest. Each weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and the two of them over his back made Rock feel as if he were dragging an elephant, but there was no choice. They needed every bit of “boom-boom” they could handle. He nodded to Archer and they ran like the wind down the center of the terminal. This was no time for subtlety. Rock twisted his head this way and that, one arm cradled around the sub, as they ran searching for more Reds. Far off in the distance he could hear the quick cracks of pistols and then the steady drone of automatic weapons. The others were meeting resistance, too. Just let them get the three beams, Rock prayed silently.
The dissidents, meanwhile, were trekking miles through the decaying underground railroad system with their death-dealing instruments. They pulled flat wooden railroad carriages about twelve feet long, loaded down with dynamite-filled crates, on long ropes that they had tied around their waists. They strained like a team of work horses, singing as they pulled. Two of them in the lead playing out a tune on their trombones at the non-lethal end of the sound spectrum, while the rest sang out in unison.
“A tisket, a tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it.”
There were nearly fifty of them, each armed with their own particular musical weapon. Clarinets, trumpets, flutes, tubas hung over their shoulders on colorful straps. Their flowing black robes covered their pasty white bodies. Their thick curly white hair stood up fluffy with sweat beneath their hoods. The dissidents’ huge black eyes, used to years of darkness, could see perfectly in the shadows of the tunnel system. They carefully kicked fallen bricks and dead molding rats out of their way as they pulled the two small-wheeled platforms along the rusted tracks.
At last they reached the intersection of five tracks—just above them they knew was the Moscow Prison. The “Hole of No Return” it was called by those unfortunate enough to have been sent there. The prison was notorious for, among other things, its roving packs of man-eating rats that the authorities did little to control, feeling it was fitting punishment for those who were sentenced to the three-hundred-year-old prison. The prisoners would just have to make friends with the toothy vermin. The dissidents stopped the cars just beneath what would be the central hall of the massive confinement and torture center thirty feet above them. They turned the fuses and set the timers on the nearly two tons of dynamite that would bring down the walls of terror forever—for one hour ahead—twelve noon. How many of them would still be alive no man could say. Just as the last timer was being placed, they heard a noise down the track and stopped dead in their places. Every man held his breath.
Suddenly from out of the winding subway tunnel came a wave of black furry bodies—rats—thousands of them. The dissidents swung their instruments around and pulled them to their lips. They formed a straight line so that their own wouldn’t be hit by the sounds and set their instrument levels—to kill. They blew out wild notes, a cacophony of jazz melodies from eons before. The wave of rats stopped dead in their tracks, the first few hundred of the fanged creatures falling onto their backs and kicking their feet in frenzied agony. But the dark, nearly two-foot-long meat eaters right behind them rushed forward, scampering over the twitching bodies. Again the dissidents blew their hot licks. The frequencies lashed out like invisible whips at the army of fu
r before them. Another twenty square feet of rats flew onto their sides, squirming, wriggling in death agonies. Now the rats slowed. Something was wrong. Their front ranks, the most aggressive of the rat pack, the highest of the rat-pecking order, were dead. A few hundred more made a half-hearted charge as the rest waited back in the darkness, watching. Again, the clarinets, the flutes, and trumpets blasted and again a battalion of rats flopped over on their sides, clawing at the air on the dark roadbed. The fanged army had had enough. They retreated, screaming out high-pitched squeaks of rage and confusion at not having their food.
“Now we kill Reds,” Yuri Goodman said, letting his clarinet fall to his side. He led the jazz men up ancient rusting circular stairs until they reached a half-cracked wooden door. They put their shoulders against it, and after several whacks, the moldy padlock on the other side gave way with a snap and dropped to the stone floor. The dissidents rushed through, their sound weapons ready for anything. They were inside a crude rock cell at the very depths of the prison where the czars had once imprisoned their opposition—to die in the dank, lichen covered walls, consumed by rats, bugs, spiders, and fear. A prisoner, his flesh shrunken away to nothing, his bones poking out, was chained to the wall, naked above the waist. Deep red welts covered his back like stripes. He stirred as he became aware of their presence and then looked again, unsure as to whether or not this was just another hallucination of his feverish mind.
“I’m seeing things again,” he muttered to himself. He had been in the hole for nearly three years now—a farmboy named Potkin whose crime had been to publish some poetry in a local town paper mildly critical of a local Red bureaucrat. Couched deep in metaphors, it had still been deemed suspicious enough by the Red censors to land him the prison where the only literature had been that of starvation and the whip.
“Not hallucinating. No siree, Bob,” Yuri Goodman said. “We the Big Bopper, the Seventh Cavalry and the Chattanooga Choo-Choo all rolled into one.” He walked up to the suffering prisoner and aimed his clarinet at the chains that held him, setting the instrument at its most narrow frequency beam. He blew a high note and the metal links broke in half. The man tried to stand on wobbly feet.
“Thank you—I don’t know who you are but—”
“No time for regrets, stranger,” Yuri said with a smile on his chalk-white face. “We the wild jazz men, the junior birdman of the steppes. Come to free all you crazy jazz lovers here in stone land. Come—we get others.”
The dissidents broke the lock on the cell door with a quick note and walked cautiously up the crumbling stone stairs. Every cell they came to they released an amazed prisoner. All seemed to come to life out of their semiconscious states. The taste of freedom did wonders for a man’s energy. After releasing nearly sixty of the captives, they reached the ground floor of the prison where the prisoners told them they would have to face many guards.
“No problem,” Yuri said to the grimy crowd of released rebels behind him. They burst out onto the vast barred waiting rooms of the prison’s reception area.
The fifty or so prison guards, rifles around their shoulders, stood frozen in their tracks as they took in the crowd of black-robed figures before them, lining up in a straight formation. The prisoners cowered behind them, afraid of what was to come and sure that their liberators would soon meet their doom. The scene was frozen in time for a split second, the coats of arms, the long flowing purple velvet curtains, the antique weapons still hanging on the mortared wall as they had centuries before.
Then the tableau unfroze as the guards reached for their Kalashnikovs. The dissidents raised their instruments to their lips and played a single terrifying chord, encompassing nearly every wavelength in the sound spectrum. The notes shot out across the cold stone floor, dropping the guards where they stood. The Reds slapped their hands over their ears, quivering in stunned agony.
“Now we groove, hot babies,” Yuri said, turning to the shocked but heartened prisoners. The men grabbed up the fallen rifles of the guards and, with the dissidents in the lead, began making their way through the rows of cells.
Floor by floor they freed every man in the building. It disgusted Yuri and the jazz men to find the prisoners in such a terrible state. They lay in their own feces, skinny, nearly blind, their teeth falling out from malnutrition. Some had not seen light for years and rubbed their painful eyes as they were gently coaxed from their cells. At every floor, guards came at them, ready to kill this absurd band of rebels. And at every floor the result was the same: a quick ultrasonic symphony followed by the instantaneous collapse of the audience. Shaking and drooling, their teeth clamped tightly shut; their brains scrambled beyond repair, the dead and dying guards littered the stairways and floors of the building.
It took nearly forty-five minutes, but with the freed prisoners’ help, they finally reached the top cells of the castle and pulled every man from his confinement. The vast assemblage of prisoners gathered on the lower floor and waited for the dissidents to return. They were happy but confused, unsure of what to do next and where to go. Many clutched Russian weapons: pistols, rifles, grenades in their pale bony arms. They were weak but ready to die. At least they would go down fighting. They had sampled first hand the forces of Russian justice and knew there was no salvation—except by firepower.
“We split this scene,” Yuri said, addressing the throngs of half-naked, grime-coated prisoners in the main holding area. “We bust out of here now. You go home. Remember it was jazz what saved you.” The prisoners raised their arms in a salute of gratitude.
Yuri turned toward the thick wooden doors of the prison, and the jazz men again aimed the instruments at the only remaining obstacle to freedom. They blew. Blew hard—and the wood splintered and crumbled like so much kindling. The prisoners with the dissidents in the lead, stormed through the twelve by fifteen-foot jagged hole in the doors. Outside more troops were lining up at the other side of a wide, rushing moat. The dissidents tore across the drawbridge that was the only access to the prison, wailing away on their musical death dealers. Many of the Reds fell, but some were able to fire before the sound waves reached them. Seven of the dissidents were hit and a dozen or so of the freed prisoners behind them. But the rebels rushed forward and soon were upon the Russian troops. The jazz men moved forward as the prisoners made mincemeat of the remaining soldiers, ripping them to pieces with their hands and feet, with knives and butts of rifles. They left a bloody, butchering yard behind with not a soldier left alive.
In the distance was Moscow, its skyline brightly lit with a million twinkling lights. To the left and right, dark unlit roads that led quickly off into the suburbs and then the countryside of central Russia. The prisoners split up into smaller bands, each heading his own way—back to some wretched hamlet, some pig farm. They might be caught again, but they had already been destined to die. At least they were being given a second chance—a rare occurrence in the Red Empire. And they would be careful this time. It would take many Russians to capture any one of these hardened, bitter men.
The dissidents pulled back about half a mile to some low-lying hills dotted with only a few abandoned buildings. They settled down in the dirt as choppers and armored vehicles came screaming in from every direction.
“Good, man,” Yuri Goodman said to the closest jazz man, Vantrov, the saxophonist. “They all going to get in on the sound.” He pulled out a small pocket watch with a Mickey Mouse face in its center. “Mickey says—right nooooowww—”
A roar filled the night sky in front of them. Nearly two tons of dynamite went off at once, ripping the guts from the bottom of the three-century-old castle of one hundred thousand deaths. The walls blew out on every side at the bottom like a volcanic explosion. Then a ball of flame shot out from the square stone windows and the roof, tongues of fire hundreds of feet long, lapping out into the cool air. Five choppers that had been hovering overhead were engulfed in the tidal wave of fire. They dropped down onto the burning roof, exploding in five quick blips of smoke
, hardly visible against the rising hundred-foot sheets of yellow that reached up toward the very clouds. Thousands of bricks and chunks of rock showered down into the gathering fresh troops and vehicles below, smashing them into bony goo, covering half-tracks and transports with blankets of red-hot rubble. Screams could be heard everywhere as the wounded tried to struggle free of the conflagration. Secondary explosions began going off throughout the prison as flames made contact with stores of ammunition and artillery shells. Suddenly the entire castle seemed to shake as if in the grasp of a giant. Then a deep sound boomed out as if the very earth was moving. In slow motion the entire castle, nearly five hundred feet high and a thousand feet on a side gave way. The structure collapsed from the bottom first, the walls giving in, squashed, unable to hold the weight above them. Then like a falling house of cards, the bricks and thick mortared squares exploded out in all directions. Within seconds the Moscow prison disappeared from the skyline, falling into a vast mound of burning rubble. Flames and bursts of ammo continued to shoot out from the wreckage, burning in the night like a torch of doom for the Russian Empire.
“Hey man, this gig is over. We got our own tunes to play,” Yuri said.
“Good show,” Nikov, the tubaist whispered softly, his immense instrument balanced on one shoulder. “Best damn music I ever heard. Coltrane would be proud.”
Nineteen
Rockson peered through the frosted glass square window in the center of a steel door. He could make out shapes moving around inside. He and Archer had made their way up ramps, halls, and stairwells—more than he could count—but according to the dissidents’ maps they should be at a side entrance to the main control center. Far behind him he could hear the firefights erupting. He hoped that the freed men would not be wiped out. Death had to mean something—then a man could give up his life with satisfaction in his soul. There wasn’t time for games, and Rockson knew he couldn’t bluff his way into this room—not with the fighting going on. The technicians and guards inside would know about it by now. They would have to go the more primitive route. Rock took out five sticks of dynamite and bound them together with some tape. He placed the deadly package at the base of the two inch-thick door and set a timer for thirty seconds. He and Archer tore ass around a bend and waited. Thirty seconds later an explosion rocked the halls, shaking the floor and sending out billows of acrid smoke. They rushed back down the corridor and through the curtain of gray. They were inside the Main Control Complex of the dome.