Stalin's Hammer: Rome

by John Birmingham

  All this Ivanov had secondhand from his guide. They never met with Franco’s brother, who was away somewhere else in the north, on “the pontiff’s business.” The former Spetsnaz officer had no doubt that whatever the holier Furedi sibling was up to, it was almost certainly as dangerous as their mission this evening.

  The less spiritually inclined Furedi had already fitted his own NVGs and was playing with the setting, switching between LLAMP mode and infrared.

  “Low light is best,” Ivanov said quietly, “especially when we get down below street level. Less drain on the battery too.”

  “Sì, okay,” Furedi answered.

  Ivanov appreciated the man’s ability to take an order, or at least a suggestion. He had known many soldiers to bristle when he pointed out the obvious to them. But the mafia man was in his mid to late forties and seemed content to take as much instruction from Ivanov as he could get. It was not surprising really. The Russian’s equipment was high-spec and valuable. Furedi would not be allowed to keep the goggles once the mission was over—assuming they survived. But Ivanov knew from his long experience of working with insurgents that giving them access to this kind of equipment simply brought forward the day when they would acquire it for themselves. On that day, a man like Franco Furedi, a man with operational experience of its use, would find himself much valued by his overlords.

  “It is time,” said the Italian. A few quiet strides took him over to the window where Ivanov had stood vigil. After a final check of the street outside, he returned, collected the small backpack on the stone floor between them, and led the way into the vestry.

  Where the main body of the church had been empty but clean, if very dusty, the small room to the left of the altar space where the priests had once prepared for mass was strewn with rubble. Even using the goggles, picking a path through the shattered flagstones and granite was hazardous. You couldn’t trust your depth perception; it would always be just a notch off.

  Both men carefully climbed over the debris to the far corner, to a small hole in the floor, just wide enough for Ivanov to squeeze through. Franco went down first. He was thin and agile enough to lower himself through the opening and drop into the darkness wearing his little backpack. They already knew that Ivanov, about twice his size through the shoulders and chest, would have a tight squeeze. The Russian dropped his satchel down before carefully lowering himself after it. He had been much larger, years ago, back when he still lived in the gym, pumping iron by day and vodka by night. Years on the move had made him considerably leaner, yet he was still an impressive-sized man. That, he suspected, would be a problem in the Roman underground.

  He felt Franco’s hands grip his boots and guide them to a piece of unbroken ground. Or rather, unbroken roofline. An hour before, they had come up into the vestry by climbing onto the roof of an ancient temple, on top of which the church had been built, perhaps a thousand years ago. An archaeologist could doubtless spend his entire career studying this small, buried neighborhood, but for the special forces operator it was of interest primarily because of the hidden access it provided to their target.

  Once he had regained his footing, Ivanov followed Franco across the temple of some long-dead god, or gods, crouching at one point to duck beneath the rough red bricks of the vaulted ceiling that had buried this part of the old city. A few feet ahead of him, Franco swung over a low line of carved stones with the assurance of a man who had done the same thing many times before.

  A couple of cigarette butts, some discarded chocolate-bar wrappers, and an empty fifth of Johnnie Walker, all scattered around the cold ashes of an old campfire in a small cleared area in front of the temple, spoke of previous visits. Ivanov wondered what business his mafia guide must have had with the Church that he should have been entrusted with such useful information.

  There was virtually no ambient light down here, not even a few stray photons leaking down from the vestry.

  “I am turning on my LEDs,” he warned Franco.

  “Si,” Furedi replied.

  The mafia soldier turned away from him lest he be temporarily blinded. Ivanov thumbed the switch on his night-vision goggles, powering up a small cluster of light-emitting diodes. Instantly their surroundings sprang into bright relief. Ivanov squeezed his own eyes shut as the optical processors struggled for a second to adapt. After a moment, the gloomy subterranean scene was rendered in opalescent clarity.

  The two men, dressed in the gray coveralls of municipal sanitation workers, stood in front of the collapsed remains of whatever building had once been a neighbor to the buried sepulcher beneath the old Roman Catholic church. The rubble provided a convenient series of stepping-stones up to the roof. Ivanov’s natural caution and years of experience demanded that he now survey the area for any change while they’d been topside. But the interred street remained as it had been from an hour earlier, as it had been for a millennium or more. Where once the citizens and slaves of Rome would have looked up into a hot blue Mediterranean sky, he now saw soil and roots and the scalloped brickwork of a vaulted ceiling that here and there gave way to flat slabs of granite and marble.

  Franco’s people had done some work toward clearing the street in front of the temple of rock falls and shattered masonry, exposing the original paving stones in the process. But they had done so in order to provide themselves with a more convenient lay-up point rather than out of any interest in ancient history. A few steps away, the cobblestones and pavers were lost again under centuries of soil buildup. It was one of the stranger places that Major Pavel Ivanov had been to; preserved well enough that were he given to flights of imagination, he could very easily have closed his eyes and filled this entombed district with hundreds of long-dead Romans, with priests and acolytes chanting in the temple, with snorting oxen dragging carts laden down with produce from surrounding farmlands as the Republican-era client mobs of the optimates and populares swarmed around them, and legionaries stomped by, marching past in triumph—the only time soldiers were permitted in the city in full regalia.

  Ivanov sometimes surprised himself that he could remember so much from his academy days in a future lost to eternity. What were the Communists thinking—that they could just sweep away the crush of so much history and culture? Probably. Stalin had shown himself to be more than willing to eliminate whole peoples if they proved inconvenient. The Romans were not the Chechens or the Cossacks, however, and the spear point of six NATO divisions was poised just a few miles away in Frascati.

  No, the great game would be played out here by different rules. There would be blood and terror, but it would be shed quietly in the shadows by men like him. Ten years’ worth of screams and terror were painted onto the backs of his eyelids now. It made him feel uncomfortably warm, sick to his stomach, and a little dizzy.

  “We go now,” said Franco. “I lead.”

  “Of course,” said Ivanov. Yes, this was his mission and ultimately he would make all the important decisions, but one of the first such decisions was to place his trust in this man who was, in the end, nothing more than the indentured assassin of a small, somewhat pathetic criminal oligarchy. A clan of thieves and killers that just happened to be the most important rival power to the Soviets and their local collaborators in this part of the Eternal City.

  Franco added the power of his own headset’s LED cluster to Ivanov’s, lighting up the bizarre surroundings as brilliantly as Piazza Navona on a festival night. The two men walked at a brisk pace through the empty, subterranean streetscape, slowing to climb and occasionally crawl over piles of rubble and earth that were otherwise impassable.

  Ivanov was soon sweating with the exertion and found himself impressed again with Furedi’s quiet, obdurate ability to press forward at a steady pace without complaint. He had put the man’s age at just under fifty, perhaps, although it was sometimes difficult with Italians because of the privations they had suffered through the war. Many of them, particularly in the larger cities, looked older and more worn-out than would oth
erwise have been the case. Franco was gray-haired and hollow of cheek, with a mournful expression on his face most times. But he looked like a man whose hair had been silver from a young age and who had probably come into the world glaring at it with an evil eye. There was no questioning his fitness for this particular task, or his commitment. He had already put one body in the river while sneaking Ivanov into the Soviet sector. Furedi moved through the caverns and crawlways beneath Communist-controlled Rome with a surety and confidence that spoke of real familiarity.

  “Down,” he said, pointing at a drainage pipe that disappeared under the collapse of what looked to have been another ancient temple, this one considerably larger than before.

  The aperture was just big enough for Franco to be able to crouch deeply and shuffle into it without crawling. For Ivanov, the way through was not so easy, and he soon found himself on his hands and knees. He could hear water running in the distance, and after crawling for a few minutes, the dry, dusty bricks beneath his hands grew moist and slimy. The stench of sewage was much stronger now.

  The drainage pipe narrowed and soon Franco was also on his hands and knees, while Ivanov stretched out onto his stomach, inching forward, pushing with his toes and elbows. The effluent on the crumbling brick walls of the old Roman drainage pipe was a blessing, reducing any friction he would have to fight against. He couldn’t help but think of himself as a giant Russian turd being squeezed through the bowels of the city.

  “Why you laugh? Is funny, this?” his guide asked as he pulled himself over the lip at the narrowest part of the pipe, eeling down into a much larger drain.

  “Toilet humor,” Ivanov deadpanned.

  Franco nodded as if he understood exactly what the Russian meant. “We are nearly there,” he said, jutting his chin up at the curve of bricks above them as Ivanov prised himself out into the wider space.

  A foul, contaminated stream of brown sludge ran a foot deep down the slight descent to the northeast. Huge black rats skittered and splashed away from them, and the walls seethed with worms and cockroaches and all manner of unidentifiable insect life. Franco turned off the LED cluster on his goggles. The artificial illumination provided by Ivanov’s headset was more than enough to light the way to their next objective, partly because a few shafts of weak, late-afternoon sunlight reached down from street level through a grate farther along. Ivanov turned off his LEDs too. The comparatively bright, green underground world became a darker, muted place again, but the night-vision goggles quickly adapted.

  Ivanov could hear street noises close overhead, a truck rumbling through, and the crunch of hobnail boots stomping along a street in unison. A patrol of the People’s Polizia, no doubt. The authorities put extra men on the street about an hour before the traditional start of passeggiatto. A public-order measure, according to the mayor’s office, but in reality a bullying tactic. Increasingly the patrols had taken to arresting strollers for minor, summary offenses. Offenses that carried harsh punishments behind the Wall—in addition to the random beatings that often accompanied arrest.

  The OSS operative took a moment to call up a mental map of the street above them. Albergo Grimaldi, the hotel where his contact, Anna, was staying, was less than two minutes’ walk from the church where they had just established an observation point. And it wasn’t the best observation point. A difficult angle in the turn of the street gave them only an impeded view of the Albergo’s top two floors, but it was the best they could do. Approaching the hotel from below, unfortunately, entailed a much longer and more arduous journey. one that had just deposited them, reeking of filth, another minute’s walk from their objective.

  “Come,” said Franco, taking a knife from his boot. “His woman will be waiting for us in the laundry block at the rear of the building.”

  Ivanov followed him, careful not to splash through the sewage. As they moved quietly along the drain toward the grate, he took up his own weapon—a silenced contemporary-era MP5. A bit on the heavy side because of the lack of composites, but the OSS Field Operations shop had produced a credibly effective copy. He was happy to have it.

  Franco whistled through the grate. Ivanov heard the rumbling of steel-shod wheels and, a moment later, a fishmonger parked his cart overhead and reached down to lift the grate for them. The smell of brine and fish gone too long without ice drifted down on them. With a quiet word of thanks, Furedi and Ivanov climbed up and squeezed through into the street.

  It was deserted, save for their nameless helper, who nodded briefly, holding the bill of an old fisherman’s cap, before taking himself off down the narrow, cobblestoned conduit. Moving swiftly, they reached the rear of the laundry. Franco, with his knife palmed for immediate use, opened the door and led the Russian past a group of women working through steaming piles of white sheets. As they moved, the women grunted and wrinkled their noses in disgust yet said nothing. It was as though the men were not there. An older woman, bent over and swaddled in black rags, hobbled after them with a bucket and mop. She set to cleaning the sewage they tracked behind them.

  Franco looked around, concern on his face.

  “What is it?” Ivanov asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  A woman screamed and the first shots barked out at exactly the same moment. The washerwomen screamed too, all of them scattering for cover and squawking like startled birds. Ivanov snapped out the stock of his weapon and pulled the bolt back.

  The doors to the laundry block crashed open to reveal two NKVD operatives in cheap Russian suits. Their eyes scanned the room, quickly falling on the two men, rank with excrement and filth, standing in the middle of a mountain of white linen.

  Ivanov snapped his MP5 up to his shoulder and squeezed off a burst that caught the man to the left in the chest, dropping him in a bloody mess onto a basket of pillowcases. The other operative, a taller, shaven-headed man, dived to the floor, protected by a knot of screaming women blocking Ivanov’s line of sight. The laundry workers stampeded for the door as he and Franco knocked them out of the way, searching for a clear shot.

  A pistol roared and bullets ricocheted off the tile near Ivanov’s ankles. The security man unloaded his clip from down low, near a table at the back of the room. Franco circled around a mound of linen, now stained with blood spray, and fell upon him as the hammer of the hapless Russian’s weapon fell on an empty chamber. The mafioso stabbed his knife deep into the man’s throat and ripped it out through the trachea.

  Taking his cue, Ivanov ran over to the door leading to the hotel and attempted to peer inside—only to have to pull back when the doorframe splintered from a fusillade of incoming rounds. Changing mags, he quickly emptied three thirty-round clips into the hallway, chasing them with a pair of grenades. The entire room shook when they detonated.

  Franco ran up to grab him. Ivanov brushed him off.

  “GO!”

  03

  South Rome (Allied sector)

  At first, the owner of Osteria del Gallo insisted on clearing the best table in the house for them, but Harry refused to displace the family already sitting there. Aldo, the owner, then tried to convince the prince and his companion to take his private dining room in the restaurant’s converted cellar, a space more suited to hosting two dozen people. Harry’s security detail thought that a spiffing idea, but he and Julia elected instead to sit at a small table in a secluded corner of the establishment. He also discreetly arranged to cover the bill of the poor locals who’d almost been kicked out onto the street on his behalf, partway through their insalata caprese.

  The del Gallo was a new place, a few blocks south of his apartment on Via Giustiniani. It was hugely popular with the Anglophone diplomatic crowd and those locals who could afford the top-tier prices. Harry recognized the MI6 station chief at a nearby table, sharing bruschetta and a bottle of soave with his opposite number from the OSS. Their protection details were even more obvious than his. At least the first layer of protection was apparent: the bodyguards sipping water at the table next t
o the spy chiefs’ and four more prowling the streets outside. There would be other, unseen lines of defense surrounding them. The great game was played hard and fast here under the shadow of the Roman Wall.

  “So, did you just come to Rome to enjoy your new status as an action-movie hero, or are you actually doing any work here?” Julia asked as she tore small pieces from a ciabatta loaf to dip them into the bowl of olive oil and balsamic. “At the trade talks maybe—earning a little ambassadorial scratch on the side?”

  “I suppose that depends on whether my girlfriend is asking,” Harry replied. “Or whether Julia Duffy, ace reporter, wants to know.”

  She popped a piece of crusty bread into her mouth and sucked the oil from her fingers. “Girlfriend now, is it? Last week the Times referred to me as your ‘longtime on-and-off companion.’ I think that was some subeditor’s idea of drollery.”

  “How so?”

  She cocked an eyebrow before quoting from the article: “ ‘She offered her honor, he honored her offer, and all night long it was on her and off her.’ ”

  “Cheeky fuckers,” he snorted. “New York or London?”

  “New York Times, of course. Your Times can hardly bring itself to admit we’re even dating.” She paused long enough for it to become significant. “We are dating, aren’t we?”

  Harry leaned forward. “I thought we were fuck buddies,” he said quietly, with a brief, mock-malicious grin. “That’s how you described us to that Walter Winchell toad.”

  Julia shrugged as she tore another small piece of bread from her roll. “He’s a tool. But I knew he couldn’t print it or repeat it on the air. I just wanted to see his piggy little eyes spinning round. And you didn’t answer my question, Your Highness. Business or pleasure? I do have a stake in your answer, so don’t make me put my reporter’s hat on. They still wear them here, you know—real hats with a press ticket in the band, and everything.”