girls, hardly in their teens, lay on each side of him. One was a twelve-year-old Negress, the other a little blond-haired thing. Both were as smooth and formless as children. But the Russian president of America liked them that way. The girls shifted uncomfortably away from the fat hairy man who slept between them, praying that he wouldn’t “take them” again. He had hurt them so.
But Zhabnov had other things on his mind: Killov! Colonel Killov was chasing him, even in his dreams. Was there no escape from the skull-faced madman? Deep in sleep the KGB commander followed him, haunting, threatening. Zhabnov was running down a long well-lit hallway—a hospital corridor, and someone was after him. Then Zhabnov was slipping. He looked down. The shiny white floor was red with blood, a sea of blood coming out from under every door. Then the doors opened and dead men, corpses, their faces pale blue, their arms held out stiffly in front of them, came at him. They opened their lipless jaws to bite at him. Then they were all over the “supreme president,” ripping at his flesh. Killov stood behind them, commanding them to kill, to “eat the pig.” Zhabnov screamed again and again. Then he awoke.
The obese Red general sat bolt upright in the master bedroom of the White House. The portrait of Franklin Roosevelt stared down through the darkness from across the wide, oak-paneled suite. The wide feather bed was soaked down the middle with his sour sweat. Zhabnov reached over and pushed one of a row of buttons on a control panel mounted on the bedboard, nearly crushing the little three-breasted Negress beneath him. Within seconds the door opened and a servant rushed in, snapping on the wall light.
“A drink man, make me a drink right away! Triple bourbon with ice—quick, quick!” He shook his hand impatiently, then wiped it across his goateed red-flushed face. His hair was thinning on top, just wisps flattened down over the shiny skull, his big stomach and breast-fat chest hung out in the air, shiny with cold sweat. The servant, an ancient pale-faced Ukrainian who trembled as he walked and spoke with aristocratic accent, quickly and expertly poured the drink from Zhabnov’s long cherry wood bar that popped out of a paneled wall with the flick of a dial. He brought the bourbon over and handed it to the supreme president, not daring to even glance down at the two naked forms surrounding Zhabnov.
“Go! Go!” Zhabnov waved his hand and the servant rushed out, shutting the lights and gently closing the door behind him.
Zhabnov took a deep gulp from the glass. Three ice cubes just as he liked it, floating, clanking together at the top of the artificially frosted crystal. Within seconds he felt the wonderful glow of alcoholic fire sweep through his gullet, and a warm glow rushed over his face. What the hell was he worried about? He could handle everything. Premier Vassily was allied with him now—against Killov. Even the “Grandfather” had realized Killov’s threat, especially after the conspiracy of the doctors, when Killov’s physician agents had tried to poison and kill the premier with injections of cancer cells.
But the premier had survived and given Zhabnov the word. No more would there be a careful balance of power between the three of them—the Communist trinity that ruled the world. Now it was the premier and Zhabnov to the death against Killov.
“He must be stopped,” Vassily had said to Zhabnov over and over on his last call. “The man is mad. He wants to destroy the earth.” Zhabnov had never heard the premier so frightened. But now President Zhabnov had his own band of assassins after the colonel of the dread Blackshirted KGB. Killov would never know when or where they would strike—or how they would kill him. One of them would succeed. Of this Zhabnov was sure. He finished the drink and felt much better. He turned toward the small blond girl and put his thick hand on her soft, lithe thigh.
“Come here,
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