Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America by Ryder Stacy Read Free Book Online

big eyes and untainted innocent mouths. Yes that would be nice . . .
    Zhabnov walked over to the laced windows and peered down into the snow covered rosebushes of the White House garden. The weathered bronze statue of a very heroic looking Premier Drubkin was ordering the launching of the First Strike that had decimated America. His hand was held up, frozen forever in time, giving the command to fire, the hand caked in glistening icicles as the temperature slowly dropped. It was now minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The premier’s war had not affected the weather in a kindly way, but at least the capital of the Soviet Union wasn’t radioactive, having been spared any close hits by high-rad nukes, so it was able to continue as the seat of power for the entire world.
    Zhabnov wondered for the thousandth time what it was like to hear on the radio that you had only a few more minutes to live. Were the Americans resigned? Scared? Were they told? History tapes said the air raid sirens had gone off and broadcasts were made over radio and television about what was happening. But the history tapes were unreliable, having been rewritten a dozen times according to party ideologues, new lines of propaganda since the war. There was no denying that the Drubkin plan to destroy America while Russia escaped unscathed had gone at least partly awry. About twenty submarine-launched ballistic missiles and several cruise missiles had gotten through the killer satellite defensive network of the motherland. Because their trajectories were so low, the anti-missile systems had not detected them. Minsk, Odessa, Leningrad, Volgograd . . . all destroyed.
    But we had won the war, and that was what mattered, Zhabnov thought, clearing his head of any doubts. Besides, if the intelligence analysis was correct, the history tapes said that the U.S.A. had been about to regain technical superiority and launch their own strike. Then the premier had done the right thing. Otherwise Americans would be sitting in Moscow today. Wouldn’t they? Having power struggles and telling their Red slaves where to live and work. No, what is inevitable is inevitable.
    It was inevitable as well that Zhabnov should rule the world once the Grandfather was gone. He would make a much better premier than that Killov, who was without question a madman and growing more psychotic by the moment. But Zhabnov had no illusions about the looming battle between the two of them. Killov was terribly powerful and clever. More clever than Zhabnov, even the president knew that. But Zhabnov now had a secret weapon that Killov had no idea of—the mindbreaker, a device that his own scientists had invented just months before. At first, the globe which covered a prisoner’s entire head and slowly lowered laser probes into the brain cavity, burning away memory, causing pain more intense than could be borne by the strongest man, was used primarily for torture and trying to extract information from captured freefighters. And it had worked well, forcing several prisoners to reveal their hidden cities location, able to break through the hypnotic blocks that the freefighter’s psychologists and hypnotists had been able to implant in them. But now his researchers had discovered another aspect of the machine: it could be used to change men’s minds, rearrange them, alter the memory patterns and even the loyalties of anyone. Of course, many prisoners’ brains were irreparably destroyed by the device, but then Zhabnov had more than enough workers to play with. They were, after all, his subjects, his toys, his to do with what he wished.
    Thus came Plan Lincoln into being—without question, Zhabnov’s peak of intellectual inventiveness. They would take American Workers from a number of Red fortress cities and brainwash them, change their very brain patterns so that they thought they were Russian troops. Then they could be armed and sent out against their fellow citizens—the freefighters hidden in the