The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  “Really? Why?”

  “It seems during the ’60s, the good professor made some enemies within the Air Force and NASA. Those letters in his file are a red flag against any presidential recognition. I am sure you understand.”

  “Certainly, although I am amazed. He was a top scientific mind of the last century. But if it’s red flagged it’s red flagged. Thank you for coming over to tell me personally.”

  “No problem, really. I actually wanted to meet you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I followed your college career and, well, let’s just say it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Hiccock.”

  “It’s Bill, please, and the pleasure’s all mine, Dave.”

  “Your two-minute shootouts, well, they were the most exciting thing in college ball. Still, to this day.”

  “Well, thanks, Dave. But you know I had an excellent offensive line. I could have washed my socks, trimmed my nails, and still had time to throw.”

  “Well, I’ll be going. Again, a thrill to meet you.”

  “Have a good day,” Bill said as Dwyer left.

  Twenty minutes later, Bill was sitting at his desk, deep in analysis of how to defend against the next bio-terror plot. As he sat, he absentmindedly spun and caught a football in one hand, something that he first perfected on the sidelines, as a backup quarterback his sophomore year at Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Using his thumb to pivot the ball in his palm, at regular intervals he would swoop his 3x-size hand over the top and catch the ball in a perfect fingertips-on-the-laces grip. Eight out of ten times, he got it without looking. So inured was his muscle memory and acuity at finding the laces that he actually was able to focus his mind on something else, while performing this mindless feat.

  Ray Reynolds, the President’s chief of staff stood in the doorway hypnotically watching Bill perform this one-handed trick. Eventually, he knocked on the jamb. “Got a minute, Bill?”

  Bill caught the ball mid-twirl and placed it back on the wooden stand on the credenza behind his desk.

  Ray sat down in the chair across from him. “Bill, the boss was very pleased with the way you moved things along up in New York.”

  “We got lucky because Kronos didn’t get lucky, so he was home Saturday night to wire the patch up.”

  “All the same, it’s your team. We’ve got bio-med crash units in the two Muslim communities where we found two of the infected men. So far it’s contained, but we are losing people. Almost 3,000 innocent folks are dead because they were first to get infected by the bastards hiding in their neighborhoods. They were already dying long before we got to them.”

  “But those 3,000 could have in turn exposed 90,000. Both communities could have been wiped out,” Bill said.

  “Of course, those 90,000 could have infected millions before this thing burnt out,” Ray said closing the briefing folder on his lap. “Again, you don’t wire up the fast patch thing and we don’t get facial recognition on these animals. Then untold millions would be dead or dying now, Bill.”

  “The cop didn’t make it…” Bill said without moving his head or eyes.

  “Which cop?”

  “At the motel. An NYPD cop found a jar cracked open on the asphalt. As far as we can tell, he didn’t touch it, but he inhaled a full dose. He was quarantined but slipped away yesterday.”

  “I hope those sons of bitches, rot in hell for bringing that shit to America.”

  “Nationally, the Center for Disease Control says we are talking 26,000 additional deaths this flu season. And that’s with 21 of them caught or killed before they could infect anyone.” Bill had just read that report a few minutes earlier.

  “Even so, I’d say we dodged a bullet.”

  Both men uncharacteristically sat in silence, each dwelling on what could have been.

  “Well, I better be getting back to my office.” Ray got up and looked at the game ball behind Bill’s desk and noticed what was written on it in white paint. “Stanford 27, Penn State 3? Bill, I watched you on three consecutive New Year’s Days win all kinds of bowls. What was so special about this mid-season snorer?”

  “That was the best game of my life, Ray.”

  The quizzical look on Ray’s face begged for more clarity.

  “That was the first game that Janice came to. I got in trouble talking to her on the sidelines during the game, but I didn’t care. Right in the middle of the third quarter, I knew she was the one, and that I loved her.”

  “So that solves a mystery that’s bugged me for a while.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How, with all the awards trophies and souvenirs you’ve collected in your football career, the only trace in this office that you even threw a pass was this one game ball. I though scientists were supposed to be cold and unsentimental.”

  “Only the ones who never meet Janice, Ray.”

  “Touche, my friend.” And with that he was off.

  Bill picked up the phone. He scribbled something on a pad as he dialed home. “Janice, let’s stay in tonight. I don’t know. Just hang a little… maybe get to bed early. Yes and get to sleep late… you got it!”

  Bill smiled to himself as he hung up the phone. He checked his calendar and called out to the outer office. “Cheryl, can I have the summary for my eleven o’clock?”

  Cheryl came in with the summary and said, “I have a Mr. Remo on the phone?”

  “Remo? From where?”

  “He says he’s an old friend.”

  Bill’s mind whirled. “Peter Remo? Yeah, I’d say so. Okay, put him through.”

  Cheryl went outside and a few seconds later Bill picked up. “Peter, how the hell are you, man?”

  “Hey, Bill; thanks for taking my call.”

  “Don’t be silly. How ya been, buddy?”

  “I’ve been okay, but something’s come up and I need to sit down with you.”

  “This doesn’t sound too good.”

  “I wish it were good, but Bill, I’m scared, and I need help.”

  “You got it. Where and when?”

  “Not in your office. Can you meet me in twenty minutes, at the Lincoln Memorial?”

  “Little dramatic, Pete, ain’t it?”

  “Bill, please.”

  “Okay, twenty minutes.”

  Bill hung up the phone and called to Cheryl. She wasn’t fond of the “scream intercom,” and her expression showed it.

  “Cancel the rest of my morning and my two o’clock.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s nothing cabinet level and you can cover the eleven and two o’clock for me if you want.”

  “Oh, okay. Where will you be?”

  “On my cell.”

  “No, where? The Secret Service is going to want to know.”

  “The Lincoln Memorial.”

  “Why?”

  “Dramatic interlude.”

  Cheryl shrugged. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  — BOOK II -

  The Box

  CHAPTER ONE

  History Repeats

  It was the best knockwurst in the neighborhood. In fact, his little stand was a six-sided, umbrella faceted jewel in the gastronomic crown of Hungary. Claude’s traditional preparation in his humble kitchen in Kivorst held the secret. He stewed the meat in three kinds of sauerkraut from earlier the previous afternoon. Each of the krauts brought out the individual flavor of the beef, pork, and veal that was knockwurst. He also added a dash of molasses, apple vinegar, and wine to the pot to compliment each. As was happening more and more, a businessman from the area was proudly buying lunch for a visiting client. He was spouting praise for Claude claiming, as many others had, that the knockwurst was just like his mother’s. The anticipation on the faces of those who knew what awaited them, with many actually rubbing their hands together like children expecting a treat, made Claude proud. And he had little to be proud of since the war.

  There was a time when he owned one
of the best restaurants in Budapest. It involved thirty-three years of toiling everyday, getting up before the chickens, and going to sleep after the cows, but he loved it. Those were truly the good old days. His whole family worked in the restaurant, which kept them close and caring for each other. It provided a good life for all, obviously there was always enough to eat, and his sister, Mary, even met a doctor. It wasn’t too bad a life.

  Then the Nazis came, the dream ended, the nightmare began. Now, he was the only one left. His wife, mother, father, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, all shipped off to the camps, never to be seen or heard from again. He had a different fate because of his cooking skills. The Germans found Claude, emaciated and near death, when hunger forced him to leave his hiding spot in the root cellar of the restaurant. The Nazis had taken over the place to be an officer’s mess. He didn’t get as far as the front door when they caught him. A sniveling coward of a Nazi captain, left behind to secure the phone system of Budapest, ordered him carried off to the street to be shot. However, when the captain overheard Claude protesting that this was his restaurant, he ordered his men to halt.

  “Can you cook?” the captain asked.

  “Yes… I was… the… chef,” Claude said, coughing.

  The Nazi turned his head as he ordered, “Take him to my house, clean him up, and see if he can boil water.”

  Claude became the captain’s personal cook. It was barely survival, but again where there was food there was life. Claude stayed alive by feeding the fat Nazi officer like he was the Archduke. While the Hungarian people starved under Nazi occupation, “the Pig” always had fine butchered meats and fresh vegetables for Claude to prepare every day. Many times Claude thought of adding a dash of lye to the soup or iodine to the sauce, but that would only kill Hans, the lowly private who served as the pig’s credenza, tasting everything before the swine ate.

  During one of the final days of the war, when the battles outside the city were looming closer and closer, Claude and all the servants and workers who had evaded death by becoming slaves to these “Aryan Supermen” were rounded up and hastily put up against a wall to be killed. Claude heard the bolt action from the rifles of the SS troops as they aimed their weapons. A once proud people were about to be robbed of the only thing they had left, their lives.

  Claude flinched as the shooting started. He waited a seeming eternity for what would surely be the searing pain of hot bullets puncturing his body, but it never came. He crouched low covering his head. From somewhere deep inside him he drummed up the courage to look behind him. All the SS men were sprawled over the ground, steam vapor emanating from the bullet holes in their crisp, black uniforms as the heat of their blood hit the cold winter’s air. Beyond them were the mud-stained, olive drab uniforms of American soldiers, their guns smoldering as a few of them continued firing sporadic bursts and single shots at SS men still alive or trying to escape. At that moment, Claude started to believe in God once again, a belief he had abandoned in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the Nazis brought with them into Hungary.

  At war’s end, he set up the street cart and reasoned that if he just made enough money to survive the winters, then he was living the life of a king. Accordingly, he only prepared so much meat every day and, when it was gone, he was off. He’d go home, simmer tomorrow’s pot, then read, walk, or watch the children play.

  So it was, that on this fine autumn day, the two businessmen were dabbing sauerkraut juice from their smiling mouths when he heard it. Although his mind didn’t recognize it at first, his body reacted. He slammed down the lids on his cart, dropped the serving fork, and started running, as fast as his old legs could carry him.

  “Claude! Where are you going? My friend wants more of your fine knockwurst! What is that noise?”

  Like a low hanging fog, rolling in from around the corner, a rumbling growl swept over the cobblestones. Then came a metallic clanking sound, then the barrel and finally the tracks of a Soviet TU-24 attack tank. Hundreds of Soviet infantry troops swarmed behind the tank. The two businessmen, who were only thirteen when the Germans left Budapest, started running as well.

  It was the beginning of the Communist siege of Hungary in 1956.

  ?§?

  “Tony, enough with the clanging, it’s no use. You’re just waking everybody up.”

  “That cheap, tightwad, son-of-a-bitch of a landlord, I’ll clang him with a wrench!” Clank, clank, clank was the sound Tony’s crescent wrench made as he rapped the radiator in his fifth floor walk-up tenement apartment. “Send up more steam fer Christ sakes, ya bastard!” Tony, the burly truck driver, yelled at the pipes as if the landlord was nestled warm in his apartment on the first floor, with his ear frying on a steam pipe listening in delight to the freezing cold agony of his tenants on this bone-chilling winter night.

  “I’m going to check on Peter,” Anna Remo said as she went into the other room and found her little two-year-old son curled up and shivering in his brown snowsuit and mittens. She plucked the child from the crib and felt under the blanket for his bottle. It had been warm milk when she put him to bed, but it was now partially frozen. She brought the little boy into their bed and held him close to her body for warmth under the covers.

  Tony came back to bed swearing he was going to kill that wop of a landlord. Although he was Italian, Tony Remo selectively used the term whenever anybody, whose name ended in a vowel, acted like a criminal. As he lay there, a faint whistle started and grew progressively more sibilant. It was the air valve on the steam radiator; the whistling would stop when the unit was hot. It took twenty minutes but the warm silence commenced. Tony had won tonight’s war with the pipes. Maybe the old wop was listening. For Tony and his family, that was life in the Northeast Bronx in 1956.

  Suddenly, it was the horror of 1939 all over again. Hungarians were being arrested and others were being beaten into submission. Like then, many congregated secretly in the basements and tunnels trying to find a way out. Tonight seven men — seven scientists, who escaped the Nazis by luck, were huddled in the basement of a church awaiting their savior. He was a freedom fighter during the last war and had made a name for himself. He was fearless, striking the enemy silently and then disappearing. Now that the heel of the Soviet boot was on top of them, Hungarians only whispered the legends about him.

  The group of men had only the warm clothes on their backs and one small suitcase each. The Monsignor who ran the church was a member of the newly formed Underground Railroad that sprung up as the Russians took more and more prisoners. Not just laborers, but also the intelligentsia. Those people whose fertile minds alone posed a threat to the great irrationalism of the Soviet State. The aim of the apparatchik was a “re-education” campaign to convert these Hungarian national treasures into right-thinking communists. The last lesson, if all else failed, was a bullet to the brain.

  “Where is he?” Dr. Brodenchy asked.

  “He cannot very well take the tram, Doctor,” the Monsignor said. “He must make his way through alleys and back roads. They know his face.”

  Brodenchy’s hand was shaking. Not in anticipation of the dangers that lay ahead, but in concern for his father and sisters who he would be leaving behind. Surely, the Russians would treat his father, an Imam, with the respect due a member of the clergy. Still, the worry mounted, but he could not get past the army, back to his hometown. He was caught here when the Russians came. They will be all right. They will be all right.

  There were two knocks, then three, then one at the storm cellar door to the church’s basement — the pre-arranged signal for Kasiko Halman, the one who would shepherd them from the red menace. The men were surprised when they saw him. He was smaller and dirtier than his legend and the Kalashnikov machine gun that was slung around his torso, was held there by a frayed rope.

  “How many?” Kasiko asked curtly.

  “Seven.”

  He spun and turned to the Priest. “You said six.”

  “Err, it’s my fault,”
Dr. Brodenchy said, stepping forward. “My brother was caught staying with us when the tanks came…. I promised our father.”

  Kasiko walked up to Dr. Brodenchy, his cold stare frosting the doctor’s graying temples.

  It was as if Kasiko peered into his soul, “You. You are Muslim?”

  “Yes.” He tried not to flinch, doing the best an academician could in the face of this hired killer.

  Kasiko continued his stare. Suddenly the doctor realized there was a new calculus at work here. He could almost hear Kasiko deciding if risking his life for a Muslim was worth it. The fear of being left behind welled up inside the older brother. His mouth went dry and swallowing was hard. He stuttered and mumbled, “My broth…brother was away in school but suddenly he came….”

  “Fine.” Kasiko’s contemplative mood seemed to switch off like an electric light. “All of you give me all your money!”

  “What? Why?” a tall member of the group asked.

  “You can stay,” was Kasiko’s icy response that stabbed at the stunned scientist, who instantly became very compliant.

  In single file, they exited the cellar of the church. A small relief to the Brodenchy brothers, who wouldn’t want to be caught dead in a crusader’s church. Under cover of a moonless night, they made their way through dangerous countryside that had been friendly and serene only a week before. To a man, they wore the same kind of sensible shoe, an Oxford style appropriate for the halls of science and academia but ill suited for the terrain they now traversed.

  They had only walked twenty minutes from the church when a small Soviet patrol crossed their path. Kasiko didn’t hesitate or delay. He opened fire and killed all three Soviets before they knew what hit them. The seven gentle scientists were horrified as he then took out a knife and stabbed each one in the heart without wasting precious ammunition.

  Kasiko felt their looks. He went over to one of the Cossacks and pulled a radio from his dead hands. “With this he would have had half the Russian Army here looking to skin you alive. It’s my job to keep you safe and get you out of here. That is the only thing you should judge of me. I am going. If you are behind me, then you will be free. If not, it’s your life.”