James Axler - Deathlands 001 - Pilgrimage to Hell

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There were, of course, survivors.

The world was not destroyed—just a way of life. The global population was cut

down to perhaps one-fifth of what it had been. The ecosystems were utterly

disrupted. The climate was transformed.

In what had once been North America, the survivors struggled to prevail in a new

age of plague, radiation sickness, barbarism and madness. There were days of

seemingly endless night, eerily lit by fires in the sky. Pyrotoxin smogs blanketed

the earth. Fetid strontium swamps created new and terrible life forms. Two-

hundred-mile-an-hour winds hurtled across the landscape, and when by some

freak chance a storm cloud swept in from the sea, it was acid rain that fell— pure

acid that stripped a man to the bones in sixty seconds of shrieking agony.

In spite of this, life returned.

In isolated pockets, survivors fought back against terrible odds. And won.

Sort of.

DEATHLANDS

Pilgrimage to Hell

By JACK ADRIAN

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • PARIS • AMSTERDAM •

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STOCKHOLM • HAMBURG

ATHENS • MILAN • TOKYO • SYDNEY

Prologue

First edition June 1986 ISBN 0-373-62501-

this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other

means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying

and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden

without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill

Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the

author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or

names. They are riot even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown

to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

The Gold Eagle trademark, consisting of the words, GOLD EAGLE and the

portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of the word

WORLDWIDE in which the letter "O" is represented by a depiction of a globe,

are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

Printed in Canada

Prologue

THE WORLD BLEW OUT in 2001.

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To be precise, at noon on January 20, 2001.

There was an irony that only a very few people fully appreciated. That is, about

0.0001 percent of those who survived.

Back about thirty years or so a science fiction writer called Arthur C. Clarke had

gotten together with a movie director called Stanley Kubrick and made a film

called 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film, the beginning of a series of such films,

had a message. For many who had seen it and read the story in the last quarter of

the twentieth century, the year 2001 had become a symbol of optimism and hope

for the future of mankind. Calmer times were only just around the corner. Peace

and prosperity were assured.

The world blew out in 2001.

So much for fantasy.

THE FULL DREADFUL REALITY began at noon on that crisp and clear

January day with a one-megaton blast in Washington, D.C., power base of the

United States of America and political center of the Western world.

The bomb was not triggered above the city, nor was it the result of a preemptive

strike by a passel of missiles hurtling in through the air defense screens and

hitting the deck.

It erupted without warning in the bowels of the Soviet embassy, in a basement

section that was a restricted area even to the ambassador, V. A. Vorishin, who,

like just about everyone else within a five-mile radius, was vaporized.

Mr. Vorishin was not actually in the embassy at the time. He, along with a

multitude of other foreign dignitaries and a vast assemblage of national and civic

leaders, journalists, members of the judiciary, show biz personalities and

thousands who were just along for the spectacle, was on Capitol Hill, attending

the inauguration of the forty-third President of the United States, a man in his

sixties, a man who had first come to fame back in the early 1980s as a dark-horse

contender for the Democratic leadership, strongly favored at the time by young

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voters called "yuppies."

Within the blast area itself a number of things happened inside a very short time.

The flash, which grew in brightness to one thousand times the sun's radiance in

two seconds, ignited all flammable materials. The blast hurtled outward,

pulverizing anything and everything that stood in its way. Tall buildings were

uprooted like trees, falling apart as they descended to the earth, the shattered

pieces of masonry, stone, steel girders and glass sent whirling in a deadly vortex.

A tremendous ball of fire, expanding rapidly and angrily, roared like dragon's

breath up into the troposphere and beyond, fed by the thousands of smaller

conflagrations that had started almost instantaneously.

Incredibly, a few, a very few, of those in the city survived the initial blast, but

they were soon put out of their misery. Within a few minutes two other, smaller,

bombs exploded: one, to the northwest of the city in Bethesda, beneath a chic art

gallery owned by a man whose father had "defected" to the West from Bulgaria

twenty years earlier; the other, to the south, in the basement storage area of a large

drugstore situated in Indian Head, across the river.

The effect of these two secondary bombs can only be described as monstrous. The

initial shock wave, already losing momentum, was renewed, strengthened,

fortified. A firestorm developed. Hurricane-force winds hurled the superheated

fire-mass around until the very air itself seemed to ignite. The Potomac River was

sucked up into the fiery sky in a vast, roiling waterspout that evaporated even as it

rose. Dust and ash and pulverized debris cut off the sunlight, as though someone

had thrown a switch. Immense damage was sustained in Baltimore, Hagerstown,

Fredericksburg, Annapolis. The city of Washington, along with its inner and

outlying suburbs, was wiped off the face of the earth, leaving only a crater large

enough to house a few Shea Stadiums and a lot of seared rubble.

IT IS NOW, OF COURSE, CLEAR that this was merely the climax to the first

chapter in the grim saga of the end of Western civilization. For the catastrophe

was not the result of a sudden mistake on someone's part, an ill-understood order

or a chance accident. There had to be a prologue.

Some might argue that the prologue began to unfold when Karl Marx first met

Friedrich Engels and began to postulate an alternative political creed to that which

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held sway in the early nineteenth century. Others might push the jumping-off

point further back in time: to the French Revolution, say, or the teachings of

Rousseau and Babeuf. Or perhaps the insurrectionary sermons preached by the

fiery hedge priest John Ball prior to the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381 were

indirectly to blame. Or even…

But this is academic. Although the roots of the virtual destruction of a global way

of life must necessarily lie deep in the past, the actual concrete and significant

causes clearly took place within a generation of the moment of disaster.

The history of the last fifty years of the twentieth century is one of general gloom

shot with stabs of light. Perhaps one could say the same about the history of the

world since man first shuffled out of the caves and began to hunt and gather and

till the land. But so much happened during the twentieth century, and so much of

it happened so fast, that a good analogy might be of a car on a long downward

slope whose driver suddenly discovers that the fluid is running out of his brakes.

No matter that the slope is a gentle one; once momentum has been achieved, a

certain point reached then passed, there is no stopping the downward rush that

very soon becomes headlong, irreversible, terminal.

The United States, deliberately isolationist in between the First and Second World

Wars and yet historically jealous of Great Britain's high global profile during and

before that period, was swift to change its foreign policy and seize the

guardianship of the Western world from the 1950s onward.

During this time atomic power became more than just a science fiction cliche;

West and East glared at each other during the Cold War; tensions eased as detente

became a political priority; pacts were signed, treaties ratified; an arms race

began, got out of hand; black-gold blackmail became a hideous reality when the

Arab oil states became greedy for power; money markets throughout the world

rocked and teetered; enormous economic depression arrived, stayed for more than

a decade.

In the 1960s and 1970s America got its fingers burned in Southeast Asia, fighting

a war that, despite what later apologists maintained, could never have been won.

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, the same old story was rerun in Latin America,

for the same old reasons. This time, however, the stakes were higher and the face

cards more evenly distributed. For a time the world tottered on the brink of a

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Third and probably final World War. In the end, both superpowers, Russia and

America, backed off. For the moment, mutual face-saving became the order of the

day.

In 1988 President Reagan was succeeded by his vice president. The crisis in Latin

America had slowly grown during Reagan's two terms of office, but it was his

successor who, early in 1992, had to face the Soviet leader Mr. Gorbachev across

a table in Geneva so that both could pull back from the brink with as much grace

as could be mustered.

One might have expected that a grateful U.S. electorate, later that year, would

have returned the Republican leader for a second presidential term with a

thumping majority. But the electorate is notoriously fickle. In 1992 the

Republicans were skinned by the Democrats, led by an aging Democratic figure, a

long-time politician from a family of political stars, a man with a terrible driving

record in his native Massachusetts.

The American public had had it up to its collective back teeth with the GOP. Over

the previous twelve years there had been too many close calls, too many near

disasters. It was time to turn to a symbol of the past, time to revert to a New

Frontier style of politics.

But the presidency of this East Coast aristocrat—whose political acumen, never

particularly strong in the first place, had been frayed and shredded by years of self-

indulgence and self-pity—was an unmitigated disaster. After four years of inept

rule, verging at times on the catastrophic, the electorate demanded the return of

the devil they knew, and in 1996 the previous President, in any case still regarded

by the mandarins of his own party as a sound, even muscular, choice, took the

country by a landslide and became, for only the second time in American history,

an ousted President who returned to the White House in triumph.

But this had little effect on the global situation, and toward the end of this man's

second term, in the spring of 1999, there occurred an event that was to have a

shattering effect on the course of world history. Or what was left of it.

In a spectacular and bloody coup the Soviet leader N. Ryzhkov was gunned down,

in the corridors of the Kremlin itself, by hardline Stalinist revisionists. Most of

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Ryzhkov's key associates, inherited from his predecessor, Gorbachev, who had

died in a plane crash in the Urals in 1993; were shot, and for six months the USSR

was racked by a civil war far more atrocious in the short term and far more

damaging in the long term than that out of which Soviet Russia had agonizingly

emerged back in the early 1920s. The upper echelons of the Soviet army, in

particular, were decimated.

The coup had been masterminded by KGB chief V. N. Pritisch who, it was

rumored, had already disposed of the previous head of the KGB, V. Chebrikov,

five years earlier. Chebrikov, a close ally of both Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, had

died of a brain tumor and been given a full and impressive state funeral; however,

some said a lethal injection, administered by Pritisch himself, had helped

Chebrikov on his way.

Pritisch was a hard-liner who detested the West, favored the bleaker aspects of

Stalinism and was determined to revert to the original Marxist-Leninist line of

total world revolution leading to total world domination. On the other hand he

was as much of a pragmatist as any serious politician, and although it might be

supposed that the bombs that destroyed Washington were detonated at his

instigation, this was by no means the case. Pritisch needed time to plan, a ten-year

breathing space, after the short but savage mayhem he had inflicted on his own

country, in which to develop his global strategies. The bombs that destroyed

Washington gave him nothing.

They were the work, in fact, of a secret and even more extreme junta of

disaffected senior internal security officers who, for five years or more before the

Pritisch coup, had been plotting not simply for revolution but for outright war.

This group, headed by two shadowy figures in the Soviet hierarchy, B.

Sokolovsky and N. D. Yudenich, were fanatical purists who believed that over the

past generation there had been too much humiliation and marking time, too little

action. They called themselves vsesozhzhenie, or "terrible fire."

Their grievances, real or imagined, were many. The fat-cat corruption of the

Brezhnev era had, they felt, never been entirely eradicated, even under the brisk,

no-nonsense rule of Gorbachev. The gradual erosion of influence over the lesser

partners of the Warsaw Pact and Russia's European satellites during the 1970s and

1980s worried them. The growth of consumerism, the importation of decadent,

Western-style petit bourgeois values into western Russia appalled them.

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But if the domestic scene was one at which they looked with sour eyes, the

international scene, and Soviet foreign policy in general, seemed to these

philosophers of the "terrible fire" one of gross mismanagement, a succession of

blunders and embarrassments.

The disastrous intervention in Lebanon during the mid to late 1980s had led a

number of Middle Eastern allies to back away from Soviet influence right into the

welcoming arms of the United States. The tactical retreat from Afghanistan in the

late 1980s had been, for them, a humbling experience. And the return of Soviet

forces in even greater numbers only three years later had merely resulted in an

even more debilitating and long-drawn-out war of attrition with the rebels that

still smoldered into the late 1990s.

The bloody holocaust that had swept South Africa in 1988-9, when President

Botha, after three years of vacillation, finally offered the black population limited

as opposed to universal suffrage: far too little, far too late, had been a shambles

politically as well as literally, for the victorious, Marxist-oriented African

National Congress had turned its back on its Soviet mentors and accepted aid

from the increasingly capitalistic China.

The back-down over Latin America had been, the vsesozhzhenie thought, nothing

short of an act of cowardice. And the assassination of Fidel Castro in 1993,

probably engineered by rogue members of the American CIA, had not been dealt

with at all with the firmness—the sternness, even—that was, the plotters felt,

required. The subsequent uprising had been put down by the Cuban army with no

help from the Soviet Union, who were still uneasy, so soon after the Latin

American crisis, about cruising into dangerous waters. The fact that the U.S., for

the same reason, had not poked its oar in when for a couple of weeks Cuba had

been theirs for the taking, proved that the Americans were just as stupid as those

who sat around the mahogany conference tables in the Kremlin.

The gradual spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into Turkmen and

Uzbekistan had slowly but surely, like a relentlessly insidious maggot, reached up

into the southern parts of Kazakhstan: extremely sensitive territory. On the other

side of the Golodnaya Steppe lay some of the most secret military establishments

in the whole of the USSR.

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All in all, the past thirty years seemed to them to have been a time of confusion

and disorientation, a time of feeble men and feeble policies. In spite of the

massive strides forward in agriculture, historically the weak link in Soviet

domestic affairs, the huge leaps in industrial manufacturing and, more important,

technological development in outer space, there seemed to those of the

vsesozhzhenie to have been a loss of direction. A loss of faith in the old Marxist-

Leninist ideologies. A loss of purity.

Purity, it was argued, could only be regained in the heart of the fire. Fire cleansed.

The world must be set alight.

And not in ten years' time. Or twenty. Or a hundred.

Now.

IN THE U.S. THERE WAS UNEASE at the Pritisch coup, alarm at the

subsequent show trials that dragged on through the spring of 2000, and then a

ground swell of pure panic as it was realized that the face of Soviet Russia had

undergone a complete and utter transformation, an almost total reversion to the

stony, obdurate, uncompromising mask of Stalinism.

The strong feeling in the country was this: the Republicans, in general, were

politically right of center; the Democrats, in general, were politically left. Better,

therefore, to go for the party that might—just might—find some common ground

with the new rulers of Russia than the party whose inveterate and historic

belligerence might—just might—upset the Soviets into doing something drastic

and irreversible.

The American electorate could well have gotten it right. There could have been

some kind of cobbled-together short-term accommodation with Pritisch, although

Pritisch himself viewed matters in the longer term and had made up his mind that

within a decade the entire world scene must be transformed.

But this, too, is academic. The vsesozhzhenie—who also called themselves the

obzhigateli, or "igniters"—had other ideas. More to the point, they had contacts in

what remained of the armed forces. Owing to the Byzantine and intensely

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secretive nature of the Russian power structure, much could be done with those

who hated Pritisch as much as they hated the West.

And much was done in the final quarter of the year 2000. Plans were devised.

Preparations made. Secret orders given and carried out. A state of readiness was

achieved.

All culminated in the long-range remote-controlled detonation, by a small group

of spetsnaz—special forces—of the three Washington bombs.

THE PLAN of the obzhigateli was, briefly, as follows: once Washington was out,

the three main U.S. space stations were the primary targets. These would be

destroyed by particle beam weapons from a variety of killer satellites directed by

the two central Soviet space stations. A minute at most.

The U.S. and the NATO countries would then have to rely on the rather more

antiquated sky- and ground-based early warning systems still in operation as

backup to the extremely sophisticated SDI "loop." First priority, then, was the

huge 767 Fortress flying in a figure-of-eight pattern above the American Midwest,

the DEW Line "golf balls" stretched across the Arctic landscape from Alaska

through Canada and across to Greenland, and the new NORAD bunkers situated

beneath the dusty terrain of New Mexico—the old NORAD complex, deep within

Cheyenne Mountain in the Rockies, had been taken more than a decade

previously by a curious and obscurely funded government controlled "energy"

department, which also ramrodded a number of other locations to be found—or, it

was profoundly to be hoped, not to be found—in the continental U.S. and

elsewhere. Once these and four key communications facilities in Europe and

Turkey had been taken out—the Deluge.

Although "terrible fire" was made up of ideological purists who planned for

Armageddon, even they did not wish for total destruction. There were to be

degrees of conflagration. Although certain places, mainly in North America,

Europe, the Middle East and China, were to be made practically uninhabitable for

generations, other locales—in America and Europe—were not to receive a full-

scale "dirty" missiling. There had to be something to inherit when the obzhigateli

emerged from their bunkers.

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摘要：

d8Therewere,ofcourse,survivors.Theworldwasnotdestroyed—justawayoflife.Theglobalpopulationwascutdowntoperhapsone-fifthofwhatithadbeen.Theecosystemswereutterlydisrupted.Theclimatewastransformed.InwhathadoncebeenNorthAmerica,thesurvivorsstruggledtoprevailinanewageofplague,radiationsickness,barbarism...

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James Axler - Deathlands 001 - Pilgrimage to Hell

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