Stalin's Hammer: Rome

by John Birmingham

  The line was secure now. The priest tested it and nodded.

  “But their lives were wasted,” said Ivanov with real bitterness. “My mission was a failure.”

  Furedi shook his head and gestured for the Russian to come forward, as he slung a glider over the line.

  “We have poked the bear today,” said the priest. “Bled him well—a cut here, a cut there. Even the largest and most ferocious bear cannot sustain itself while it bleeds constantly. You did not achieve your goals perhaps. But we did well today, and those of us who died can go to our judgment knowing that we died well, for a good cause. For our city, and for God. Now go, Russian. Time is short.”

  Ivanov took a grip on the glider mechanism. He turned to speak to Marius one more time, but the priest gave him a push and out he sailed, away from the church tower and across the wasteland toward the free city.

  13

  South Rome (Allied sector)

  While Plunkett guarded the entrance to the dining room, and Viv scouted the service lane behind Babington’s as an escape route, Harry pushed Sobeskaia up against the wall again, next to a freezer unit. Kitchen staff gave them a wide berth. Harry was covered in blood, but then again the sight of blood was not unusual in a large commercial kitchen. The murderous look in his eyes was a little less commonplace, however.

  “Comrade Sobeskaia,” said Harry, as calmly as he could manage, “I am going to do my very best to get you out of here alive and in one piece, and back to the embassy with the nice Mr. Plunkett over there …” He nodded to where the SIS agent had braced himself against the kitchen doors. “And Mr. Plunkett will then do his very best to make you disappear.”

  The short, rotund man, with a waxy sheen to his skin that seemed almost permanent, nodded gratefully. “Thank you, thank you,” he began again.

  Harry cut him off. “That’s enough of that—just tell me: What the fuck is going on with the tungsten? It has to be something more than penetrator rounds or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be trying to get out and buy yourself a new life in the West.”

  Sobeskaia, who up until that point had looked merely terrified, now began to look both frightened and calculating.

  “It is too much, too big,” he replied. “I need debriefing in a safe place. I have much to tell.”

  Harry dug a thumb into the man’s biceps to emphasize just who was controlling this negotiation.

  “You won’t get a chance to tell anybody anything until you get to a safe house, and I’m not taking you anywhere until I know whether it’s worth it. Quite frankly, comrade, there’s a very good chance I’m going to get my arse shot off tonight. It’s a fine-looking arse too. I spend a lot of time keeping it in trim and my girlfriend will be jolly fucking upset if some filthy Smedlov shoots a big bloody hole in it. So before we go anywhere, before you begin the first day of your new life as a pampered turncoat on some beach in bloody Australia, you’re going to tell me everything you know. Just. In. Case.”

  The businessman grinned, or at least tried to. It was a weak, unconvincing effort. His eyes shifted left and right, and he jumped a little as the fire-exit door suddenly opened.

  “Still looks clear out here, guv,” reported St. Clair.

  “Thanks, Viv.”

  “Don’t thank me, Your bloody Highness. Just make sure they pay my invoice promptly when I send it for this little bit of freelancing. Seven-day terms.”

  “Your check is in the mail.”

  Harry laid his gaze back on the quivering Sobeskaia, allowing the Russian to see the smile in his eyes die when he turned away from his old friend.

  “Is complicated, and much difficulty,” blurted Sobeskaia. “Much I do not know, much I have to tell. This is not place and, really, we must go now. I can tell all, later.”

  “Aggregate it for me, Comrade Huff Po.”

  Sobeskaia stared at him as if the prince had begun to speak a different language, which in a way he had. The argot of uptime. Harry found himself regressing to the future whenever he was stressed.

  “What is the tungsten for?” Harry repeated. “What processes were you applying to it in your secret lair under the volcano or on the seafloor, or wherever the fuck it was you came from?”

  He could hear renewed reports of discord and struggle over by the swing doors to the dining area. He stole a quick glance over his shoulder and spied Plunkett fighting with an Asian-looking man who was about one-and-a-half times his size. The SIS agent was giving nothing away, though, matching his attacker blow for blow. The cocktail party beyond the doors seemed to have descended into chaos.

  “Let’s start with something you can answer, then,” said Harry. “What the hell are you doing here? You were supposed to make contact with our people in North Rome, at your hotel. What happened with that?”

  “I was betrayed. She was going to betray me, anyway,” replied the Russian, looking genuinely bereft.

  “This is your girlfriend, your mistress? The one who made contact with us initially?”

  Sobeskaia nodded. “Anna. I loved her. We were going to escape together. But Beria got to her, turned her against me.” His voice took on an unpleasant, wheedling edge. The fingernails-on-blackboard tone of a weak man whose failures were always someone else’s fault.

  “So you used her as a decoy. Sent her to a meeting you were supposed to make, and what, you scarpered off over here?”

  “It was not like that,” he protested. “She loved me, she did. But Beria forced her into betraying me. If I had gone with her to that meeting at the Grimaldi, I would have been captured, along with whoever you sent.”

  Ivanov, thought Harry. That would explain the fireworks on the dark side of the Wall tonight. The onetime Spetznaz officer had either walked into a trap or seen it and sprung it early. Harry shook his head. There were times when operating down-time was not just frustrating, but life-threatening. Little or no satellite cover, scant overwatch, if any at all, and the most primitive of extraction procedures. A gun, some directions, and a pat on the back for good luck.

  “What were you going to tell our man?” Harry asked. “We had the tungsten shavings already. You must have had more to say. And you’re not leaving until I get it, now.”

  Plunkett appeared at his elbow, bruised and bleeding from a cut to his scalp, his shirt and jacket torn. But he was upright and moving. The man he had been fighting was not. Harry took a quick sight picture of the chaos and madness now spreading into the kitchen. Plunkett’s NKVD opponent was lying on the tiles, his head neatly split by a meat cleaver.

  “Things have gone a bit wobbly, I’m afraid,” he said. “Best we get a move on.”

  “St. Clair is keeping an eye on the service lane,” said Harry. “It’s clear for now. We can get out through there if you can organize some cover for us. It looked like there was half a regiment of Beria’s finest loitering around out the front. Be sure to have some of your lads covering the rear as well. Or they will very soon.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” replied Plunkett, absenting himself again.

  “You heard the man, Sobeskaia. We’ll see what we can do—and we’ll do what we can. But not until I know it’s worth it. Or that you are worth it. What is Beria doing with all the tungsten? If it’s being run through the Functional Projects Bureau, it won’t be something simple like armor-piercing rounds.”

  The defector seemed to weigh his options and find them wanting. He took a deep breath, which came out in a loose ragged rush.

  “It is big,” he said. “Everything is so big with this. The production schedules, they are not possible for us. But Beria, he will not listen. Three of my best foremen have gone to the gulag now because they have failed to deliver on schedule.”

  Harry resisted the urge to cock an eyebrow at that. Sobeskaia almost certainly selected the names of those foremen himself, to avoid a spell at the gulag himself. Cheap shitty toasters and blame-shifting were the two areas where Soviet production methods led the world.

  “Keep talking,” h
e said, as St. Clair stuck his head back in the kitchen.

  “Got some movement out here, governor.”

  “You going to be all right, Viv?”

  The commando-turned-businessman smiled and extracted a Metalstorm P50 personal weapon from the voluminous interior of his dinner jacket.

  “Wish I’d thought of that,” said Harry.

  The P50 was an uptime model composed of exotic composites and ceramics. Only a few dozen of them came through the Transition, as best he knew. St. Clair had almost certainly stolen his. It would not have registered on the primitive metal detectors employed by embassy security to pick up junk like Makarov pistols.

  “Carry on then,” said Harry, shifting his attention back to Sobeskaia. “You were telling me about the production schedules. What else is so big about this project?”

  “Big in all ways. These things they want—tungsten rods—they are huge, like telephone pole. But the machining is precise. Tolerances too great for my equipment and workers. I do not choose my workers, you understand. They are sent to me, many of them.”

  “Oh, I understand the concept of slave factories, Mr. Sobeskaia, don’t worry about that. Just tell me about the rods.” A queasy tension had taken a grip on Harry’s stomach, though. It grew worse as the boyar spoke.

  “I do not know what for Beria needs these giant rods,” he said. “I am only part of the production process. At Prozpekt Elektric, we provide the machined rods to specification, or else. It is bad enough when I have to provide hundreds. But now they want thousands—tens of thousands.”

  Harry’s balls tried to crawl up inside his body and his stomach did a slow flip forward. “The machining of the tungsten rods, what did that involve?” he asked. “What did you have to do to them?”

  Sobeskaia tried to wave him away. “It is a complicated thing.”

  “Pretend I am a simple man. One who could do you a great deal of harm. Like Stalin, for instance. Pretend you are explaining to Comrade Stalin what you have to do in his very special, secret factory. Explain to the maximum psychopath why you, Comrade Sobeskaia, need more of his money and his slaves to give him what he wants.”

  The defector appeared to be more than a little perturbed by the idea of having to explain himself to Joseph Stalin. He looked as though even imagining the encounter could be fatal.

  “The rods,” he started to explain, slowly and carefully, “are 6.1 meters long, 30 centimeters in diameter, and solid except for a pair of centimeter-wide shafts running from base of the rod to small chamber 1 meter from nose cone.”

  “Nose cone?” Harry said, growing ever more alarmed.

  “Of a sort. It is really more of the tapering effect. But this is not all. I am also to place four channels at the base of the model. Each one to be at a point same distance from each other …” He seemed to struggle for words now.

  “Equidistant,” prompted Harry. “Equidistant from each other. Like the stabilizing fins on a missile.”

  “Yes,” said Sobeskaia, staring at him and nodding slowly. “Just like a missile.”

  “Okay, I think I’ve heard enough. You’ve earned your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  He reached up to his ear, unconsciously looking for a press-to-talk headset. Damn it …

  He was not plugged into the matrix here. He could not call down air support, or extraction, or backup. Not without physically searching out the people he needed to talk to. He thought he had gotten over that habit after so many years in the past. Apparently not.

  “Wait here. No. Come with me.”

  He took Sobeskaia by the arm and gave him a push, a little more gently this time, toward Plunkett, who was talking into an old-fashioned phone attached to the wall on the far side of the kitchen. Restaurant staff were still running about, jabbering at each other, all panicking at the mess in the dining room. Plunkett saw him coming and hung up.

  “We’ll have a car here in four minutes,” he promised. “I can take care of our guest after that, if you wish. Or would you like to ride along?”

  A wave of exhaustion rolled over Harry. “What I would like to do is track down my girlfriend, who is fast losing patience with me, have myself a hot bath and a cold drink, and fall into bed with her.”

  Sobeskaia looked alarmed at the thought.

  “But I can see our new best friend here won’t be having that,” Harry continued, “so I guess we’ll just crack on, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Plunkett.

  Three of his people pushed through the swing doors, as if summoned at that moment. Two men, one woman, all looking severely disheveled. They took up station around Sobeskaia, unshipped their weapons—no inconvenient restrictions for them, Harry noted—and at a gesture from Plunkett, they all moved toward the exit.

  “How did the party go?” said Harry as they left the confusion and carnage behind. “I’m afraid I have to leave early.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” replied Plunkett. “You probably didn’t miss much, though. We had the most awful gate-crashers.”

  Stalin’s Hammer: Rome is over.

  Prince Harry will return in Stalin’s Hammer: Cairo.

  About the Author

  JOHN BIRMINGHAM is the author of After America, Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice, and other novels, as well as Leviathan, which won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other magazines. He lives on top of a hill with his wife, daughter, son, and three cats and a dog. The dog is scared of the cats.