Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  His eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness of the entry hall. A young man in a charcoal gray pinstripe suit arose from a desk to greet him. He was the only person visible, and the desk the only furniture in the dark, wood-paneled antechamber.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said. “They have been expecting you. If you would like to come with me, I will take you up.”

  “Thanks,” Harry said, following the young man down the hallway towards an ancient elevator. As they moved away from the desk, a second man appeared from a concealed door and took up station guarding the entrance. The concierge opened the double door entrance to the elevator for Harry, first a heavy steel slab that rumbled back on ball bearings, and then a lighter cage of brass struts in a sort of accordion arrangement. It looked positively antique to Harry, but he supposed it might well have been installed just ten or fifteen years ago. He thanked the young man with a nod and rode the elevator up to his appointment.

  The building was air-conditioned, for which he was grateful. Air-conditioning was still quite unusual in London. Most buildings were heated against the winter, of course, but not many were routinely cooled. Not like the London from which he had come. And not like America now, in his experience. Or New York, at any rate.

  He rattled to a stop on the third floor and pulled back the cage of the elevator. The outer door began to roll aside, opened from the outside by another young man in a conservative suit. The pistol in his shoulder holster did nothing for the tailoring as he reached up to the door.

  “Good morning, Colonel.” he said.

  “Hello,” said Harry. “I’m here to meet with C.”

  “Of course.”

  This new escort accompanied him down a short corridor and into the outer office of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. C‌—‌a retired major general, late of the Royal Artillery‌—‌shook hands with Harry at the door to his office, ushering him through to meet another guest, one he had not expected.

  “I’m sure you know the foreign secretary, Your Highness.”

  “Harry will do just fine,” he said. “I’m surplus to royal requirements these days.”

  Sir Anthony Eden, not long knighted by Harry’s young grandmother, smiled and stepped forward to shake his hand. Harry was a little taken aback to find him kitted out in the Edwardian mufti of dark gray morning pants and a heavy black waistcoat and jacket. He must’ve been sweltering something fiendish through the morning. C was dressed less formally, but still sported a heavy blue three-piece number from Savile Row. Harry felt suddenly underdressed in his lightweight Italian jacket and slacks.

  “A pot of tea… Harry?” The spymaster asked, forcing himself to use the familiar form of address.

  “Thanks, C, but I had a coffee on the way here. Tossed most of it away, actually. Too bloody hot, I’m afraid. You’d think the Principalities would play better in this sort of weather.”

  “Oh it’s never too hot for tea,” said Sir Anthony. “Opens up the pores, you know. Lets the skin breathe.”

  C poured tea for himself and the minister, and a long glass of iced water for Harry as the three men exchanged opinions of yesterday’s cricket. Ice cubes clinked in the cut crystal jug as he tipped it forward and a few slices of lemon plopped into the glass of cold water. When Harry had the drink in hand, he had to restrain himself from draining it all in one long pull.

  “Shall we sit?” C asked, indicating a nest of armchairs in the farthest, book-lined corner. The sofas were upholstered in soft, studded leather and so oversized that Harry felt like a child called to his father’s den. He had to push away memories from his old life at that. He had been summoned to the Prince of Wales’s private study for a dressing-down on more occasions than he cared to remember.

  “I haven’t had a chance to thank you yet, not personally anyway, for everything you did for us in Rome,” said Sir Anthony. “It really was a bit of a rum show, those bloody Russians barging in like that. C tells me that you and your man St. Clair were indispensable. Not the sort of thing we can talk about in public, of course. The cover story about the drunken Australians starting a fight is holding well enough. They’re always good for that sort of thing, the Aussies, and Comrade Beria seems disinclined to queer the pitch, probably because he got such a black eye from the whole thing. So well done, Harry. And well done to your man St. Clair, as well.”

  Harry accepted the thanks with good grace, but could not in good conscience allow Sir Anthony to characterize the whole thing as his show.

  “That’s kind of you, Minister, but I have to say that Viv is very much his own man, not mine, and Agent Plunkett deserves the lion’s share of glory for the way he led his own men and women that night. It would’ve been a bit of a cock-up without them.”

  The chief of the SIS inclined his head in recognition of the compliment to his organization. “The appropriate commendations have been made on Agent Plunkett’s service record,” he said. “But it’s kind of you to speak for him.”

  Harry sipped at his iced water, wondering where this was going. Sir Anthony Eden took a delicate drink from his bone china teacup before leaning forward to carefully place it on the small table in front of them.

  “Rome was a difficult and unfortunate situation,” he said. “But it could have been so much worse. Ultimately, we secured the desired outcome. Sobeskaia was successfully removed from the care of Comrade Beria and he has been most forthcoming during his debrief.”

  Harry knew better than to ask after any of the information Sobeskaia might have given up. There was no need for him to know. He couldn’t help his natural curiosity, however, and did wonder whether or not his initial suspicions had played out. When he’d been asked to help with the extraction of the Soviet businessman in Rome, he’d intuited, from the briefing, that Sobeskaia was involved in Stalin’s space program. His heavily militarised space program. The man himself had claimed knowledge of an orbital weapons system. But of course he might have been doing so simply to effect his escape from the Eastern Bloc.

  “All’s well that ends well, then?” Harry said, the rising inflection of his voice turning his statement into a question.

  The other two men exchanged a glance.

  “Unfortunately,” said C, “we are a long way from the end of this. I’m afraid, Harry, that your initial impression has turned out to be spot-on. Having had the opportunity to speak with Comrade Sobeskaia at length we find ourselves convinced of his claims.”

  Harry frowned. “Well, I don’t know that he made any claims as such. He had some interesting information, data points we would’ve called them uptime. But he didn’t give me the impression of really understanding them. Just of knowing that they were important somehow.”

  Sir Anthony crossed his legs and leaned back. “Indeed,” he said. “Very important. Since Rome, Harry, we’ve gone through the Fleetnet archives, and spoken to a lot of your technical people from the Kolhammer taskforce. And having examined Sobeskaia’s evidence, I’m afraid we are convinced there is a real possibility that Moscow intends to develop and deploy an orbital bombardment system. A very simple and crude system, to be sure, but one that would have significant advantages, tactically and strategically, over our nuclear weapons.”

  “I see,” said Harry. But he didn’t, not really. “How is this something I can help with? I used to fly helicopters. And then I went into the regiment. We did a bit of nuke hunting, but nothing much came of it really.”

  Sir Anthony Eden and the head of MI6 appeared to share another moment, with C eventually deferring to the minister.

  “I know you were not expecting me to be here this morning, Harry,” said Eden, “and as far as anybody is concerned I’m really not here. My official diaries and staff will attest to my presence at a private briefing in the Ministry of Defence this morning. The PM thought it important, however, that the responsible minister meet with you in person.”

  A frown started to crease Harry’s brow, but he covered it with a lo
ng draw on his ice water, taking the opportunity to quickly think through what this might mean. Eden should have been prime minister by now, with Churchill retired to the countryside. But the old bulldog had hung on a little longer than he had in Harry’s time, thanks to some advanced 21st-century medical therapies and some old-fashioned common sense. To everyone’s surprise he had given up the grog and looked ten years younger for it. Sir Anthony was still widely expected to succeed him, but nobody knew when that might be. So in a sense, Harry was not just talking to the responsible minister, but most likely to the future prime minister.

  Harry finished his drink and shrugged in a most uptime fashion. “Okay,” he said.

  The foreign secretary ceded any further explanation to C with a brief nod.

  “We have a most unusual and delicate proposal to put to you,” he said, carefully choosing his words. “You receive an income from the civil list, of course, and always will. That is only proper. But it has not gone unnoticed that you have… lacked for a certain… purpose, I suppose. Not so much since the amendments to the Act of Succession, but really since the end of the war.”

  C regarded him with an expression that spoke to a personal understanding of how a man who had found himself in the blood and chaos of war might lose himself in more peaceful times.

  “Do you enjoy the demands made on your person by such official duties as you are required to perform?”

  Harry could not help the half-smile that crept onto his face. He shook his head. “No. I didn’t enjoy them when I was young many years from now, and I haven’t changed my opinion back here. They’re not just boring, they’re… I don’t know…”

  “Beneath you?” Sir Anthony asked.

  “No, not at all,” Harry protested.

  “But they are,” said C. “They are very much beneath you. You are a better man than the fatuous uses to which you have been put. Party host. Doorman. Celebrity toastmaster. You have more to offer than that.”

  Not knowing exactly what to say, Harry chose to say nothing. Sir Anthony coughed softly, breaking the discomfort of the moment.

  “We were wondering, Your Highness…”

  “Harry, please. Or Colonel if you like. It’s all the same to me.”

  The foreign secretary dismissed his mistake with a wave of the hand.

  “Excuse me, Harry. We were wondering if you would consider taking on a permanent role with Section 6?”

  “What, me? A spy?” It was all he could do to contain the bark of laughter that rose up within him. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not exactly anonymous or low-profile. Your Agent Plunkett would have a better shot at pulling off an undercover op than me.”

  Both men nodded, but neither seemed convinced by the point he had made. Plunkett’s anonymity had disappeared with the arrival of the uptime Fleet. He was a dead ringer for his nephew, the cricketer David Gower, a man whose image and exploits were extensively recorded in the data stores of the fleet’s British and Australian vessels. Plunkett’s problem was emblematic of the disruption caused by Manning Pope’s failed wormhole experiment. The arrival of a large battlefleet from the twenty-first century into the early days of the Second World War had been an immediate shock to settled course of history. But the information that arrived with it had been even more disruptive.

  C took a sip of his tea, finishing it and putting the cup to one side.

  “We’re not expecting any Ian Fleming style shenanigans from you. Lord knows we have enough trouble with the man himself. But, as it happens, there are occasions when it would be useful to have someone of your stature in play. As you would know, Harry, an awful lot of intelligence gathering has nothing to do with cloak and dagger work. A good deal of intelligence is collected quite openly in public. This is a role in which we propose to call on your services, if you agree to come on board. You move quite naturally through rarefied circles where a more anonymous agent might struggle to gain acceptance. And of course, as you proved time and again during the war, and most recently in Rome, you are not without skills when it comes to dealing with the rougher elements of our trade. We would like you to consider this offer seriously.”

  Harry crossed and uncrossed his legs, then got to his feet and walked over to the large Georgian windows that looked down on the street below. It seemed even busier down there now, with the business day underway. The roads were choked with delivery vans, taxis and a large number of private cars, many of which were incongruously modern in their design, or at least in their lines. More echoes from the future.

  “I wouldn’t say no to a chance to make myself useful,” he said, turning back to the others. “Most days I find myself wishing I was back in Afghanistan or Africa. Back up when, of course. But reserve military status doesn’t see me in uniform for more than a couple of weeks a year.”

  His unconscious pacing around the room had brought him back to the small cluster of armchairs. Eden and C looked up at him expectantly.

  “Before I sign on, however, I’d have to do a bit of due diligence. You’d have to be more specific about exactly what it was you wanted me to do. And I am in a relationship, as you may well know, with a foreign national.”

  “Miss Duffy, yes, we know,” said Sir Anthony. “A journalist.”

  Harry smiled.

  “Journalism is more of an indulgence for her these days, she’s independently wealthy. The commissions she takes on allow her to travel and to meet interesting people at a tax loss. And, like me, she’s prone to boredom.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “And frustration,” he added.

  Sir Anthony shook his head and shrugged at the same time. C seemed similarly disinclined to see any problem.

  “Miss Duffy is a known quantity,” said the spy chief. “Your very own Admiral Kolhammer vouched for her before we had you in for this chat.”

  Harry wanted to point out that he no more “owned” the American vice president than he did Sergeant St. Clair, but he allowed their point. More interestingly, he wondered whether they understood why Kolhammer would vouch for Julia Duffy. Had they simply taken his word because of his position? Even after the shock of Philby, Burgess and Maclean, he found the establishment here was still prone to accepting the word of the right sort of chap simply because he was the right sort of chap. Instead of opening up a discussion about the Quiet Room, however, he asked the more obvious question.

  “You’ve already had her vetted?”

  “Positively vetted,” said C. “Including a three-hour interview with our counterintelligence people. She didn’t tell you?”

  “Of course not,” said Harry. He knew how to answer that one.

  “Spiffing,” said C. “That’s exactly the sort of disingenuous sophistry of which I approve. No, Harry,” he continued, picking at a piece of lint on his dark blue suit. “We are assured Miss Duffy can be trusted to play the game. As you point out, she is independently wealthy and so not subject to financial inducement. She is no crusader. And, like you, she has proven herself in the past to be possessed of a level head when the claret starts to flow.”

  Harry frowned at the odd phrasing until he realized C was referring to Duffy’s background as a combat embed and her lack of squeamishness at bloodshed. Like him, Julia had her own very special set of skills. They were a little rusty, perhaps, from lack of use, but they were there, just beneath the surface.

  “Indeed,” said Sir Anthony, “although we would not be retaining Miss Duffy in any way, and we would of course require you to be as discreet as possible with her. There is no reason for her, really, to have anything other than the vaguest idea of what you might be doing for us, or even whether you are working for us at any particular moment. And there are any number of occasions we can imagine when her presence might provide you with protective camouflage.”

  “Even though you would not be retaining her,” Harry said in a level tone.

  C showed him his open, honest palms.

  “Well after all, Your High… Sorry, Ha
rry, she is a foreign national. And although it is to her credit that an administration official as senior as Vice President Kolhammer would attest to her character,” he paused and smiled ever so faintly, “it does rather lead one to wonder why a former military man, and a serving politician, might go out of his way to vouch for a member of the press whose published work has not always been to his favor.”

  Silence ballooned in the room. Harry kept his face neutral. He knew something of Julia’s work for Kolhammer in the Quiet Room, but he had no idea whether these two did. C’s comment could have been an implied confidence, or merely a fishing expedition. As the momentary lull threatened to become uncomfortable, the once-upon-a-time heir to the throne finally spoke.

  “Well, Julia did cover a lot of combat with Kolhammer’s people. Both before and after the Transition. That sort of thing builds trust, even when a degree of tension is unavoidable in a professional relationship.”

  “Quite,” said C, as if that closed the matter. “Are we agreed then, Harry? Would you like to come aboard?”

  “As I said, I would like some idea of exactly what that would involve.”

  Sir Anthony nodded at C who stood and walked over to his desk, pulling a manila folder, fat with paper and bound up with barrister’s green tape, from a drawer. Returning to the small lounge area, he took his seat again with the file on his knee.

  “Do you recall a German chap, a scientist you rescued along with his family from Magdeburg at the end of the war?”