Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit by Ryder Stacy Read Free Book Online

C.C. when younger than even these two. Still he didn’t want to press them too hard. There was a long way to go.
    He stopped and told the whole team to get out their alumatarps, thick “space blankets” which could be wrapped right around the rider and held together with velcro strips. It offered almost ten times more protection from the elements than even the warmest of foul weather gear. After that the whole unit seemed a lot happier. The alumatarps keeping out the worst of the stinging wet, the rain slid down the silver coccoons.
    The ’brids were drenched but took it all in stride, their ultra-thick hides and huge mops of manes which came down over the sides of necks and faces was strong protection. They even had extra eyelids which could cover the eye as gusts of ice blew into them. In fact, the hybrid horses liked this sort of weather. It made them frisky as they snorted and occasionally stood up on hind legs in a look-at-me kind of dance. The animals were never quite as tameable as horses had been. But they sure as hell were tough as wind-hardened rock.
    Thus encased in silver foil, Rockson pushed the team to the max, riding them a full twelve hours without stopping. They had volunteered—they would pay for it in bumps. And when they stopped that night and set up a mini tent city out of the aluminized tarps, joining them together in tents, the whole crew was bitching aloud. Bitching about how their asses felt like they had just been riding all day in saddles made of broken glass and razor blades.

Seven
    K illov stared hard into the faces of Col. Heinrick and Führer Glock in the Captain’s quarters of the orbit-warship Talon, to which he had been kidnapped two days earlier. The Fourth Reich—Space Nazis—remnants of an organization run by a Nazi madman who had worked with NASA as a top scientist—but on the side had been building his own ship. He had made it into space with five others before Nuke war broke.
    And now his descendants, a hundred years later, lived in five ships and the half-Wheel which they had claimed as their own long ago. Now the space-based Nazis had made their move—to make the Great Wheel whole, to return it to its past dark beauty. And they had brought Killov up to help them put it together again—and make it function.
    He mused, yes, he would help them. Oh indeed. To rearm the greatest weapon in the history of man—and to be in control of it. It was an offer he could not refuse.
    “Yes, I’ve thought over your offer,” Killov said, addressing the two head Nazis. Führer Glock was the great-great-great grandson of the original colony founder, Dr. Glock. And as nasty no doubt as great grandpa. But Killov’s eyes burned a thousand times colder than either of the Nazis, and it was they who turned away first from his gaze, try as they might not to. “And I will help you. You were right in selecting me as the one man on earth who could do the job . . . Not that I can do it myself—but I know where to find the men—through my years as KGB director and gathering intelligence from around the globe—before I was er . . . extricated,” he said bitterly. He wished more than anything that he could get back at Ted Rockson who had been responsible for the extrication. With the Wheel he could take out whole sections of the Rocky Mountains within a hundred-mile radius of where he knew Century Center lay. Take it all out until he was sure he had burned it. His previous weapons were mere toys compared to what the Nazis had!
    “Then what are your needs?” Col. Heinrick asked, leaning forward, as he was responsible for the day to day operations of the Wheel project. The wall-eyed Führer sat back. Killov knew he was not cognizant of exactly what was happening with all this. Just that it would give him greater power. Heinrick was the manager of the show, the brains were in his bald head, not under the Führer’s slicked-to-the-side hairdo.
    “I’ll need to have ten men, scientists, kidnapped