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

by John Birmingham

CHAPTER TWO

  Harry almost reached a hand up to rub at the scar tissue just beneath the clavicle of his left shoulder. For years, whenever he recalled the fight with Otto Skorzeny that same nervous tic got the better of him. This time, he hunched his shoulders uncomfortably.

  “Yes, I remember. It’s not the sort of thing you forget, having a bloody great German flopping around on top of you with half a bayonet stuck in your tit.”

  C paid him the compliment of an appreciative grin. “Hardly.”

  Harry looked from one man to the other. “So this is about Professor Bremmer? I thought he was out of the game. He’s one of those tedious bloody peacemongers now.”

  “I’m sure we’re all peacemongers at heart,” said Sir Anthony in a surprisingly soft voice. “None of us really want to go wasting the national blood and treasure.”

  “Not when it’s my blood and my treasure, no,” Harry agreed with a half-smile, relaxing just a little bit. “So what’s up?”

  C opened the folder and passed across half-a-dozen photographs, some black-and-white, some color, some close-ups and some taken from afar. All of them were studies of the German rocket scientist. He had aged surprisingly well for someone who had suffered so badly at the end of the war. Getting Bremmer and his family away from Skorzeny had only been the start of that particular adventure. Harry had picked up a few more scars along the way.

  “We weren’t much interested in the professor while he restricted himself to keeping company with Bertrand Russell and a lot of musicians in the peace movement,” said C.

  Harry didn’t believe that for a minute, but said nothing.

  “We know the Soviets attempted to contact him a number of times since the end of the war. His theoretical work on ballistic missiles was borne out by the information you brought through the wormhole with you. They, like us I imagine, were very motivated to put him back to work. But he always resisted the blandishments, encouragements, threats, or whatever that were sent his way. A number of times our people tried to speak to him about his responsibility to help defend the system which was defending him and his family, but all they got for their trouble was a rather tiresome lecture.”

  Sir Anthony butted in. “What the Americans call a stump speech, actually. Very popular on some of the more radical campuses. He probably knows it off by heart now.”

  Harry wondered if the politician was one of those dispatched to work his charms on the German scientist.

  “He had family in East Germany, and we know the NKVD threatened them to no avail,” said C.

  “Did they deliver on the threats?” Harry asked.

  “Almost certainly,” Sir Anthony confirmed. “A Soviet promise isn’t worth much, but their threats are the gold standard. From our observations, Professor Bremmer held firm. Such resolve cannot have come easily to him. I understand he had a sister in Bavaria. And two female cousins. They were very close.”

  Passing the photographs back to C, Harry asked the obvious question.

  “So what’s happened?”

  The Secret Service chief spent a moment fishing around inside the file before handing over another set of papers. Harry took them. Flyers for a peace conference in Cairo, hosted by the Nonaligned Movement but organized by the People for Global Disarmament. Harry smiled. PGD was thoroughly penetrated by Lavrentiy Beria’s agents, who were in turn under close observation by Western agents, also planted within the organization.

  “The professor landed in Cairo yesterday to give a keynote speech at the conference. The organizers were most distressed, because he went missing right after checking into the Hilton with his family. He was expected at a press conference and a couple of meetings, but didn’t show. Most unusual for a man of his punctilious nature.”

  Nodding at the memory of what an uptight ass Bremmer could be, Harry waited for C to continue. Another photograph came across the coffee table. A long-lens shot of a man who looked like the German rocket scientist at a café table with another man.

  “This was taken by one of our German colleagues. It’s Bremmer, meeting with a very disagreeable chap called Skarov when he should have been at that press thing. Skarov is Beria’s favorite henchman. His problem solver. He was the fellow who gave us so much grief in Rome, on the other side of the Wall, when you were there. We don’t see him much on our side, and if we did, we would put the double 0 section onto him jolly quick.”

  A quick glance across at the foreign secretary confirmed the pronouncement.

  “We don’t much go in for what you uptimers call ‘sanctions’. It usually leads to escalating unpleasantness on all sides,” Eden said. “But we would make an exception in Comrade Skarov’s case. Unless, of course, we could squeeze him dry beforehand. That would be even better. But unlikely. He’s a slippery fellow.”

  “And the Germans,” asked Harry, “did they do any better than just getting a look at them?”

  C shook his head. “I’m afraid not. It was simple damned luck that they even picked up the meeting. One of their BND chaps was on holiday‌—‌meant to be climbing the pyramids with his family, but their tour bus was overbooked. He chanced upon Bremmer when he was buying his children a placatory ice-cream. The whole arrangement looked rather dodgy to him, so he took a couple of snaps with the only camera he had available. The children waving back at the camera are his, the BND man’s.”

  Harry glanced down at the photograph again, paying more attention this time. Sure enough, two young girls were waving in front of a Parisian-style café, with all of the seating on the footpath facing outwards. Bremmer and this Skarov character were hunched over a small table, talking closely just off to the left.

  “The BND man was an officer in the Abwehr during the war,” Eden explained. “He had some incidental responsibility for the security around the V2 program and recognized Bremmer as one of his charges from that time. He told his superiors back in Bonn that the atmospherics of the meeting were all wrong. The professor seemed highly stressed and agitated. The Russian, not at all.”

  “Some sort of blackmail attempt then?” Harry ventured.

  “We don’t know,” said C. “But Bremmer went from that café back to the hotel and locked himself in his room, missing all of his appointments and not resurfacing until the evening when he went straight to the bar, where he’s been ever since, apart from an hour’s excursion to deliver a rather lackluster keynote speech.”

  Harry passed back the photographs.

  “So I suppose I’m off to Egypt, then? To gather up Professor Bremmer, I hope? Not Comrade Skarov.”

  C smiled.

  “Skarov’s turn will come. But yes, we would like you to make contact with Bremmer. Sound him out. Make sure he’s not run afoul of some villainy. We have tickets booked already. Two first-class return airfares with BOAC, flying out this evening.”

  “Two?”

  C had the good grace to look a little embarrassed.

  “We are aware that you had intended to spend some time with Miss Duffy this week. After things went pear-shaped in Rome. If she is agreeable, and of course if you are so inclined, we would not be averse to her traveling to Cairo with you.”

  Harry could not help a wry smile at that.

  “It is exactly the sort of trip she would make for her work, such as it is these days,” C continued. “And in a delightful irony, while the Nonaligned Movement is hosting its Cairo love-in, many representatives of its constituent governments have gathered in the city for an arms fair. I know we promised to liberate you from your duties as a cocktail party host, Harry, but a number of British manufacturers will be represented there. A few parties, some resort time, perhaps a camel ride out to see the pyramids with your lady friend, it is just what people expect of Prince Harry.”

  Sir Anthony Eden leaned forward in his chair, with his fingers linked together.

  “We will keep your schedule very light, Harry,” he said. “Because mostly what we want you to do is determine whether or not th
e Russians have indeed brought some pressure to bear on Bremmer.”

  “Because of Sobeskaia’s information?” Harry asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” said C. “Our pet defector has been most forthcoming once spirited away from the eternal city. We really do fear the Russians are developing that orbital system.”

  The hairs on the back of Harry’s neck stood up.

  The MI6 chief continued. “It could be a sophisticated bluff, of course. An attempt to mislead us into diverting resources into an arms race we cannot afford. But the information Sobeskaia has given us so far has checked out with alternative sources. If it’s true, Harry, Stalin is planning to fill the sky above us with his own sword of Damocles. Hundreds of them, in fact. Maybe thousands. And Professor Bremmer is an expert in the sort of orbital payloads the Russians would have to boost into space to pull the whole thing off. If they are having problems ramping up the scale of the project, he is one of the men who could solve them.”

  “We need to know why he was talking to the NKVD man,” added Sir Anthony.

  “I see,” said Harry. “I’ll pack my sunscreen then.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Julia Duffy could not help but be a little bit entranced every time she flew first class, which was, to be fair, every time she flew. Most people, she knew, when they could afford to fly at all were packed into unpressurized, uncomfortable tin cans that had started out as military transports, like the venerable Douglas C-47. She’d done more than enough time in Dakotas to feel she could trash-talk them now.

  Harry had “blagged” them a couple of first-class tickets, as he put it, on one of the two BOAC sleeper jets doing a daily turn of the Continent, the Med and the Mideast. It was quaint, she thought, how they called them sleepers, like railcars that rolled on through the night. The jet, an analog of the original Boeing 707, was much roomier and more comfortable than any of the uptime commercial airliners she remembered flying in, although it did reek of cigarette smoke. The funk of burning tobacco was so bad that she’d been unable to get to sleep, unlike Harry, who dozed next to her in 1A.

  There were only four seats in first class, and all except hers were fully reclined at the moment. They looked very much like the individual “pod” designs that had been so popular back up in the 21st, although these did not come with in-flight LTE, a screen farm or VR, and rather than high-end molded plastic their rigid fittings were carved from some sort of blond wood. They were comfortable enough, and she appreciated the effort that had gone into attempting to re-create a small slice of the future for those with the money to sample it, but Julia wished they had gone that one last step and banned smoking in the cabin. Congress had already done so in the US, and she knew that legislation was working its way through the committee system of Parliament in the UK, but as always the situation on the Continent was a shambles. Thankfully nobody in first class had actually lit up. She really wanted to stretch her legs with a walk up and down the length of the plane, but she dreaded pushing through the curtain separating first from business and economy, where the thick blue fog of carcinogenic smoke was oppressively dense.

  Instead she paced about the relatively roomy first class cabin. A small bar stood at the back of the cabin, tricked out in genuine 1950s chic, rather than the ironic retro chic she had grown up with. Leaving Harry to snore softly under his blanket, she tiptoed past the other two passengers, both minor Arab royalty, to fix herself a drink. A flight attendant put her head through the curtains to see if there was anything she could do, but Julia shook her head. She wanted to make her own drink.

  The world was dark outside, with only a few points of light picking out the position of a ship here and there as they jetted over the southern reaches of the Mediterranean. Their flight had left the stopover in Rome a shade after midnight and they’d been in the air with the seatbelt sign turned off for over an hour. It would be a few more hours before they nosed over into the descent which would put them on the tarmac at Cairo in the morning. The flight could have been quicker had they overflown Greece, but there had been incidents with the Communists buzzing commercial flights in their airspace for months, forcing the 707 analog to push out to the edge of its range to make the flight in one hop.

  Julia mixed herself a gin and tonic as quietly as she could behind the bar. She carefully placed ice cubes into the drink and added a slice of lemon before opening a packet of nuts. She checked the back of the small pack but frowned at the lack of nutritional information. When would these people catch up? Her Fitbit had died a couple of years ago, not long after the Bluetooth link to her Samsung had fallen over. It was a hell of a thing keeping track of her calorie intake and burn without digital help. And packets of fucking peanuts that couldn’t even tell you how much fat and salt they contained didn’t make it any easier. She shook her head, ate the nuts, and resolved to put in an extra half hour at the hotel gym tomorrow. Assuming the hotel had a gym.

  “Oh give it a fucking rest, would you,” she scolded herself quietly.

  She needed to get a grip. This was a good thing they were doing, spending some time together, even if it meant fitting in with Harry’s other commitments. She smiled at the explosion of unruly red hair poking out from under his blanket as she swirled the drink. She knew there was something up with his ‘work’. The long interrogation she had endured on his behalf just a week ago reminded her a lot of the positive vetting process she had undergone when she first embedded with the Marines back up when. The security people had introduced themselves as trade ministry officials but she didn’t believe that for a moment. Harry had been fronting for the trade ministry for a couple of years now and she had never had to go through anything like that before.

  And of course there was the business in Rome a few weeks ago. The fiasco at the embassy party. He’d been right in the thick of that and had the bruises and bandages to show for it afterwards. She knew not to press him on the matter, and her days as a working reporter were long behind her anyway. She didn’t so much want a quiet life nowadays, as a more predictable one. Some surprises were fine. This trip, for instance. The chance to spend a little more time with him. That was a good surprise. But Harry had also said he needed to speak to her about his work, about some changes that were coming which they would have to deal with. That sounded like the sort of surprise she could possibly do without.

  The alcohol and ice in her glass climbed slowly up one side of the tumbler, reaching for the rim, as the plane banked towards the south. She gathered her drink off the napkin before it could spill or slide off the bar. Stooping down a little, she peered out of the nearest window, but found only inky blackness on the other side. They would overfly Crete in an hour or so and it would be lit up like an oil refinery because of all the NATO activity there. But for now the world beyond their thin metal tube appeared to be entirely empty.

  She thought about crawling into her own sky-bed, putting on some headphones and catching up with a little television. BOAC had licensed a pretty fair selection of uptime media and had some video-on-demand of a couple of TV shows she’d always meant to watch but had never got around to. Better Call Saul, the last series of House of Cards and the Machinima pilot for Dies the Fire. It was amazing the things you missed if you didn’t make a real effort to keep up. She’d watched The Wire three times from start to finish, for example, but had never managed to even download the other series by that guy. She wasn’t even sure she could remember them now. Something about the Iraq war, and something about New Orleans before the second hurricane.

  But in the end Julia finished her drink and decided to try to sleep. Harry had warned her he’d have to take himself off to do “a few little jobs” in Cairo and they weren’t the sort of jobs he could talk about. Something for the government, he said with an apologetic smile. He promised they would talk more about it when they got back to London. They might even be able to hop over the pond and spend a couple of weeks in New York, he said. It was that sort of work, apparently. Things got busy
when they got busy, and between times he was largely free to do as he pleased. But right now, everything was rushed.

  It didn’t sound all that different to what he’d been doing for the past couple of years, but since Rome she had noticed a definite improvement in his mood. He seemed to leap from bed each day, ready for action. And he’d been leaping back into bed for a piece of that action with much greater frequency and enthusiasm. Julia, who figured he’d come to some arrangement with the military to do a bit of freelance spooking here and there, was more than happy to go along. It wasn’t like he’d be disappearing on undercover assignments after all. He was hardly anonymous. And given her work for Kolhammer in the Room, she could hardly complain about secrets.

  Harry mumbled and rolled over as she pulled his blanket up and snuggled in next to him. Her noise-canceling headphones had stopped canceling anything a couple of years earlier so she wadded up some gel-form earplugs to block out the whine of the engines. She did have some work she could have gone on with. A couple of pages of bedtime reading about the post-Transition Middle East, provided by her chief of staff back at the Times in New York. They were more than happy to take a couple of thousand words of color for her usual fee plus expenses, which would help when the IRS came after her at the end of financial year. But she just couldn’t be fucked right now. She already knew pretty much everything she needed to know. Israel had birthed itself again after an even bloodier gestation and delivery than back in her own time. The British had “gifted” Egypt its independence, rather than suffering the inevitable humiliation of a revolution. The Shah of Iran was still busy murdering anybody who even looked sideways at the possibility of tipping his family from power, and had grown very close to the regime in Turkey, from which he was furiously studying the path of secular development. The Shah, however, was less inclined than his new besties in Ankara to experiment with dangerous ideas such as universal suffrage and a robust, independent parliament.

  She sighed, and the sigh became a yawn as her eyelids grew heavy.