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

by John Birmingham

  “Be a hell of a lot easier than this bullshit, trying to follow our noses and track the Kraut at the same time,” he grumbled.

  Harry and Fontaine looked at each other, each expecting the other to answer. They had never sorted out the chain of command on this operation. It had all turned to custard too quickly. Harry was more than happy to defer to Viv, but he wasn’t here. Fontaine seemed inclined to defer to Harry, either because Bremmer was his target, or because Harry was his former CO. After a moment when neither of them said anything, Julia spoke up.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake. Spare me the English and their obsession with rank.”

  She leaned toward the driver’s compartment.

  “It’s a great idea Henderson, go for it.”

  A sudden burst of speed threw them all back. Fontaine cursed, nearly dropping his flexipad. Harry had to brace himself as Julia’s shoulder slammed into his.

  “So, I suppose this is what you wanted to talk to me about when we got home?” Jules deadpanned when they had righted themselves. The van motored along a smooth stretch of freeway, undoubtedly laid down by some foreign donor or company seeking favor with the king. The Nile flowed north to the sea half a klick to their east, on the far side of a long stretch of cleared ground. It had probably been surveyed and pegged out, ready for development by whichever interests had funded the road. The river was busy with watercraft‌—‌their lights twinkling in the dark‌—‌but they could not see the motorboat carrying Bremmer. No matter. The drone humming along six hundred meters above them saw everything.

  Harry turned back to Julia, trusting Fontaine and Henderson to watch the surveillance feed from the Kestrel.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling his cheeks start to warm with embarrassment. He knew Julia’s sense of humor, just as he knew how well she understood the position he was in. His new employers were comfortable with her understanding what he did for them in a very general sense, but not in any particular instance. They had assured Harry that he was free to discuss the vague parameters of his new responsibilities whenever he chose to do so with his partner. But, of course, briefing her in on the Russians’ development of an orbital bombardment system was out of the question.

  “I honestly thought this was going to be a milk run,” he said, feeling utterly lame. “I mean, who starts a gunfight in the cocktail bar at the Hilton?”

  Both Fontaine, who had been studiously ignoring the couple for the last few moments, and Julia answered at once.

  “Mossad.”

  “The Israelis.”

  “Same difference,” Julia conceded. “I know you can’t talk about these things, Harry,” she went on. “Believe me, I understand. But it would have been nice to get a heads up about my chances of getting snatched by a couple of goons.”

  “If I had thought that was a possibility, I wouldn’t have brought you,” he said, regretting the words as they left his mouth.

  “Oh, come on, Harry. I’m not a fucking princess. I never will be. I’ve seen as much combat as you have, maybe more. You don’t need to protect me. You can’t protect me. You know that.”

  He shrugged off the truth of it.

  “Yes, I know. It’s just… I don’t know, this is not how I saw this trip playing out. It was a contact operation, that’s all.”

  “He’s right,” Fontaine offered as the van bounced over a rougher stretch of road. “We were briefed to do any elbow work that might need doing, and the guvnor here was supposed to be miles away at the time.”

  “What, shagging me?”

  The question could have been dangerous, but Harry could hear the amusement in her voice, could see by the light of his phone the slight curl of her mouth into a wry grin.

  “Well I’d hope it wouldn’t be completely horrible for you,” he said.

  “No,” she said, more seriously this time, “what’s horrible is not knowing. If this is your future, Harry, it’s mine too, assuming we have a future.”

  She left that last line hanging.

  “Definitely heading to the port,” Henderson announced from the front of the van. He poured on even more speed as Harry checked the drone cover. Bremmer’s boat had reached a part of the Nile beyond the outskirts of development. As it left the busier, more crowded stretch of river, it nearly doubled its speed. Fontaine answered a call on his headset while Harry and Jules scanned ahead on the map.

  The river passed under a major freeway ten kilometers to the north.

  “I don’t think they’ll try to head out into open water,” Harry said. “More likely they’ll transfer to road transport again… here.”

  He pointed at the screen where the bright yellow ribbon of the highway crossed the straggling blue line of the Nile.

  “You’re forgetting something,” said Julia. “These are our maps. That freeway might not even be there.”

  “That was Viv,” said Fontaine, cutting in over the top of them. “He says that al Nouri bloke reckons the Smedlovs will get off at a little river port place a couple of miles short of the coast road. Says there’s a ferry there we can catch across and he’ll leave one of his men behind to make sure it stays open for us. He’s gonna follow them with Viv and the others.”

  “Wouldn’t it be quicker for us to just head up to the freeway?” Harry asked. It was quite close on the map.

  “No, guv, the freeway is there but not the bridge across the river. They’re still building it.”

  Harry favored Julia with an apologetic half-smile.

  “Well, if we don’t have a future in this game, you surely do,” he conceded. “Maybe C should have sent you here instead of me.”

  “Oh, we’ve got a future, Harry. As long as you can always admit that you’re wrong.”

  “And you’re always right?”

  Julia smiled.

  “That goes without saying.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “They are on that ship, the Russian bulk carrier.”

  Mister al Nouri pointed down the dock at the imposing silhouette of a giant container ship tied up about half a mile away. Julia’s eyesight was not what it used to be, and her night vision was even worse. The outline of the vessel was a blur, but a blur that gave the impression of great mass and power. The upper decks were stacked three stories high with steel containers, a design which would have revolutionized global trade decades from now. Like so many things, both good and bad, they had arrived early in this world.

  “Soviet flagged,” Harry said, not needing to explain any further. The vessel would become the sovereign territory of the USSR shortly after it put out to sea.

  The port complex was huge and still growing, an aid project for the country funded by the US, Canada and Great Britain. It stretched over hundreds of square kilometers, modern concrete, steel and glass construction wrapping around the weathered sandstone blocks of 19th-century warehouses, customs offices and trade facilities. Naturally, Mister al Nouri seemed to know everyone in a position of authority, or to know of their cousin, or brother, or some other distant relative. They had gained access to the inner port through the good offices of one of Cairo’s seemingly endless number of well-placed al Nouris, a security supervisor‌—‌“Please, call me sir. I am no mere guard”‌—‌via a quiet entrance well out of sight of the Russian ship, the Mikhail Bulgakov.

  “And you saw them board the ship, cousin?” Julia’s Mister al Nouri asked his cousin, al Nouri. Her Arabic, like her eyesight, was not what it once had been, but she could follow the men’s conversation.

  “The German. His woman and the children. With two guards.” The second al Nouri‌—‌she could not help thinking of him as the minor al Nouri‌—‌checked his watch. “That was thirty-five minutes ago.”

  “And do we know where they are on board?”

  “Not yet. But I scheduled an unscheduled customs inspection when you first called me. My sister’s husband’s cousin from his mother’s clan is the inspector. He will report back what he find
s.”

  “How long?”

  A headshake, a shrug.

  “It will be as it is, cousin. Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah.”

  Julia could feel Harry’s need to know what was happening. It was coming off him like waves of heat from a radiator, but he was not so foolish as to ask her for a translation. Neither al Nouri knew she had quite good Arabic‌—‌much better than Harry’s basic bazaar chops.

  “So what’s happening?” Viv asked in a low murmur when the two men stopped speaking.

  “My cousin confirms Bremmer and the woman boarded with both children. Half an hour ago.”

  Julia nodded, as if in acknowledgment of the new information, but in reality to signal to Harry that this was what al Nouri’s cousin had just told him.

  “The ship is subject to a customs inspection. These are random but frequent enough that it should not raise suspicions.”

  Again, Julia nodded.

  “The Smedlovs aren’t going to let them see Bremmer and his family,” Harry said quietly. “Not his real family.”

  al Nouri smiled.

  “It is what we don’t see that tells us what is there.”

  “I see,” Harry said uncertainly.

  “I don’t,” said Fontaine.

  They had gathered in the shadows of an older structure, possibly dating back to the port’s origins in the 1850s. It was a small stone cottage, two rooms, with views down the quay. The views were immeasurably improved by the lack of any rear wall. It had been demolished and the cabin’s interior gutted in preparation for some imminent renovation. Shovels and sledgehammers leaned against the remaining internal walls and a cement mixer stood in the center of the hollow structure. They could keep the Mikhail Bulgakov under observation through the large windows in the facade of the cottage, their silhouettes lost against the darkness of a container farm which loomed over the tiny dwelling.

  A walkie-talkie crackled.

  Cousin al Nouri walked a few feet away to answer it.

  “They are coming off,” he said when he returned.

  “Bremmer?” Harry asked.

  “No. The inspectors. My sister’s husband’s cousin will call us when he is clear.”

  Julia squeezed Harry’s upper arm. His bicep was hard with tension. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air, almost all of it from the Egyptians, who puffed away constantly. Among the uptimers only Henderson joined them. She caught herself thinking of St. Clair’s youngest operators as uptimers even though they were temps. The man she knew only as Peter and the woman called Charlotte, or more often Charlie by her colleagues, were young enough to have been in primary school during the war. Young enough, perhaps, to not even have memories of the Transition. They had adapted to uptime culture with apparent ease. Even enthusiasm. Charlie, in particular, seemed to revel in the collegiate atmosphere where she was judged on her skills and performance, rather than her gender. Julia wondered how they would fare if their roles were reversed and they found themselves tossed through a wormhole into the 21st.

  She suspected they’d love it.

  God knows she wanted to get back up there.

  Never happen though. Einstein had made that clear to Kolhammer back in…

  Grit and gravel crunched underfoot as a shadow appeared around the corner and everyone turned towards it, some with their guns raised.

  The customs inspector threw his hands up and began babbling in Arabic, too fast for Julia to follow.

  al Nouri, her al Nouri as she thought of him now, gently pushed down the barrel of the pistol one of his goons had snapped up‌—‌the man who had stood watch over them at the hotel while al Nouri returned Bremmer to the Stasi, or the NKVD or whoever was down in that room. She could not eavesdrop on the hushed al Nouri exchange without being too obvious about it. The men had moved a little aways from the knot of armed men and women clustered in the lee of the half-demolished cottage. She caught a few words, a phrase here and there, but nothing which gave any shape or meaning to the customs man’s story.

  After a minute, al Nouri thanked him, exchanging air kisses with his relative and pushing a handful of folded currency into his grasp. “For your men,” he insisted. “For their families.”

  More elaborate rituals of thanks and disengagement followed before Mister al Nouri could return to the main group. Everyone moved in tighter.

  “Gamal believes they are in a cabin on the second deck,” said al Nouri. “It is just forward of the main galley.”

  “Did he see them?” Harry asked.

  “No, that is why he thinks they are there. The Slavs did not try to interfere with his inspection until he reached that section and then they offered him a bribe to overlook two cabins. A very large bribe for rather small cabins. They claimed to have women and liquor in there. They showed him one cabin. There was a woman. She matched the description of the woman in Bremmer’s room. She was in her underwear, drinking. She offered herself to my sister’s husband’s cousin but his virtue is not to be impeached and so he took the bribe.”

  “A credit to his office,” said Harry without a hint of snark.

  “So he didn’t look in the second cabin?” Viv asked.

  “No.” al Nouri shook his head. “If he had, I doubt he would ever have stepped off the vessel.”

  “Probably not,” Harry agreed. “So what now? This doesn’t sound like it calls for a cavalry charge.”

  “Pete, Charlie?”

  Viv motioned his younger operators deeper into the circle. They had been standing on the outside of the huddle, keeping watch.

  “Guv?” said the woman.

  “You think you can get Bremmer and his family off without Mr Cock-up putting his head in?”

  Charlie smiled. She handed her submachine gun to Fontaine and produced a knife from somewhere. Julia had no idea from where. The dull black blade simply materialized in her grip and performed a series of impossible twirls before disappearing again.

  “Extraction, right?”

  “If possible.”

  Julia caught something in Viv’s tone.

  “What do you mean, if possible?’

  Viv lifted his shoulders.

  “If it’s possible to get them out, we’ll get them out.”

  “And if not?”

  When he didn’t answer immediately, Harry spoke up.

  “You have a kill order?”

  Viv wasn’t smiling.

  “I couldn’t possibly comment, guv.”

  Harry felt his mouth go dry as his heart dropped into his guts.

  “The trackers. The pellets. They’re not just emitters are they? They’ve got a kill switch. They’ll blow his fucking head off. That’s why you agreed to let him go. So you could take out Bremmer and Skarov if you had to.”

  Viv shrugged.

  “We all got a mission, guv. “

  It had been so long since Julia had been an embed, that her initial reaction was… well, it was human.

  She felt disgust.

  She could see from the queasy look on Harry’s face that he was feeling the same, and she loved him for it. This Bremmer, he was not Harry’s friend. She was not that naïve. But they had some connection beyond the merely functional. Harry’s mood had lifted as soon as she’d agreed to travel to Cairo with him and she wasn’t fool enough to imagine it was merely the prospect of getting away for some hotel sex and holiday shopping. He’d stood taller and walked with a little more purpose when she’d said yes, she would come. Whatever the Brits had sent him to do with Bremmer, it had been good for him.

  Now, that ennui that had been slowly draining him for so long, like a surgical shunt in his soul, was back. There was no mistaking it in his face. Even al Nouri and his men sensed the change in atmosphere.

  “I came here to get him, Viv. Not to kill him.”

  “I know, Harry. But I came to do a job too. Could be the same job as you. But it might not be. You know how it goes.”

&
nbsp; He turned to the woman, Charlie.

  “You right, luv? Time to get a move on, eh?”

  She nodded and moved away from the tight huddle of conspirators.

  Not so much co-conspirators now though, Julia thought.

  “I will show her the best approach,” said al Nouri, keeping his tone neutral.

  “No, you won’t.”

  For just half a second, Julia was certain that had been Harry. It was exactly the sort of thing she would expect him to say, but the accent was wrong, and Harry was standing next to her, not behind her, from where the voice had come.

  Mister al Nouri looked confused for a moment, and then shocked and then his brains blew out through the back of his skull and he was falling to the ground and men and women were shouting and Julia was one of them and the darkness was suddenly criss-crossed with the eerie red lines of laser designators.

  Another shot, the soft-loud cough of a weapon equipped with a suppressor, she thought, and Viv spun around, grunting and dropping as heavily as al Nouri had. Julia cried out as Harry flew into her, his familiar body mass suddenly heavier and harder than she’d ever known it, driving her down, out of the spider web of targeting lasers. More coughs, and one bark from an unsilenced weapon.

  A scream.

  She took a hit to the head and thought she’d been shot, but the pain was too dull for that, and her thoughts still too orderly. She’d smashed her skull on the hard ground, that was all. Harry covered her with his body, but not for long. She felt the kick that crashed into his ribs and thought she might have heard his ribs break even as he cried out loudly. She winced at his pain then, and again when somebody hauled him off her.

  It was Mister al Nouri’s second. The Turk.

  She realized that she did not even know his name.

  “Get up,” he said, holding a gun on her. A semi-automatic pistol, nine millimeter by the look of it. With a fat black suppressor.

  “Mister… al Nouri,” she coughed, tasting the sweet copper of her own blood.

  “I am not al Nouri,” he said. “That dog is dead. You will join him, whore, if you do not do as you are told. You and your prince.”