Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style Read Online Free Page A

camera, he knew, transmitting images of the mountainous terrain back to a central video headquarters. There the data was sent on to a Central Western Territory Information Center, where computers matched and compared random drone sightings from ten states. It was actually a crude arrangement. But it had helped the Reds track down many a careless Freefighting band.
    This one passed overhead without slowing or zeroing in on them for a closer look. But past experience told him to wait a minute or two before heading out. And as usual, his intuition was 100 percent. For hardly had the buzz of the pilotless drone vanished than a second sound quickly filled the afternoon sky. A gargantuan bomber, ancient from the looks of it, with long, hanging wings instead of the swept-back configuration of the supersonic Van Allen Belt dartjets that the Reds used now. Apparently this one was on a sort of hunting mission itself: As Rock and Rona peered out from the darkness of the granite overhang they saw leaflets begin falling from the jet’s bomb-bay doors, which had suddenly flown open. Just a few at first, then a hurricane, then a blizzard of whirling and spinning pieces of paper about a foot square came sailing down, filling the entire sky above them as if with snowflakes.
    The plane deposited its load over the entire mountainside—and then flew past as Russian troops inside the metal bird continued to shovel out the leaflets by the thousands. Litterbugs on a grand scale.
    “Bastards,” Rock muttered as the plane disappeared over a far ridge still shitting out its load of propaganda. He walked out figuring there were no more aircraft, and caught one of the falling announcements in his outstretched hand. He read,
AMERICAN FREEFIGHTERS:
    IT IS TIME FOR PEACE. WE HAVE ALL HAD ENOUGH OF THIS FIGHTING, THIS WAR. PRESIDENT ZHABNOV AND PREMIER VASSILY HIMSELF, WHO IS FLYING OVER FROM RUSSIA, WANT TO MEET WITH THE LEADERS OF THE FREEFIGHTING FORCES, PARTICULARLY TED ROCKSON, WHO WE KNOW IS AUTHORIZED TO NEGOTIATE TERMS FOR ALL REBEL FORCES.
    THIS IS NOT A TRICK, BUT A REAL OFFER. A NEW CHANCE FOR WORLD PEACE. AS OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN WE IMPLORE YOU TO MEET US AT WASHINGTON, D.C. ON JULY 28, 2095 A.D. THERE YOU WILL BE FETED AS BEFITS YOUR STATION. AND A NEW DAY MAY BEGIN. A DAY WHEN RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN WILL WORK HAND-IN-HAND AND TURN THE AMERICAN-SOVIET SOCIALIST STATES INTO A PARADISE ON EARTH.”
    It was signed PRESIDENT ZHABNOV, LEADER OF THE UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF AMERICA, and PREMIER VASSILY, PREMIER OF ALL THE RUSSIAS.
    “What kind of manure are they shoveling this time?” Rona asked, stepping up alongside him as she caught one of the paper snowflakes herself.
    “The usual,” Rock said with disgust, squeezing the paper into a ball in his clenched fist. He started to throw it angrily to the ground and then saw all the others lying there, ten thousand pieces of garbage. So he held it—and put it in his pocket for later disposal. As if the land needed any more debris. Assholes. When—not if—but when the Freefighters at last took back control of America, he would personally march every son of a bitch who had littered something under these spacious skies and make him pick it up with his hands and take it back to the Motherland, throw it in the Volga, the Tolga or the Holga—but not in the goddamned Rocky Mountains! There wasn’t a hell of a lot that Rockson was attached to—but these mountains, these granite peaks reaching impossibly high into the sky, daring the very clouds to stop them, these ridges with eagles soaring around their breadths, slopes covered with a green-firred flesh that almost blinded the eye with its beauty when the rays of the noonday sun or the midnight moon swept down over it all . . . These lands he would fight to protect to the last cell of his body.
    “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,” Rock said, feeling for a mad moment like stopping and picking up all the waste that now blanketed the area