Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  “The Stalinists sometimes use dogs to track us,” she explained as she blew out the candle and flew up the rope with no more difficulty than she’d had ascending the stairs. “But we have trained our own dogs. They will fall on the handlers and their beasts before they even pick up your scent.”

  Eva did not relight the candle and Ivanov wasted no time in hauling himself up after her. He was about to fit the goggles again when she reached out and touched his arm, stopping him. It was a curiously adult gesture.

  “You will not need them,” she said. “And it is better that you do not have them on if the helicopters come with searchlights.”

  Ivanov did not need that explained to him, but he did need to know where she had come from, and why. “I am in debt to you for your assistance, young lady,” he began. “But how is it you came to offer your assistance? It has been many hours since I separated from Franco, and I did not tell him I was returning to the hotel.”

  Eva was crouched in the attic space, her small face illuminated by a shaft of moonlight pouring in through a hole in the roof. Where she had seemed strangely grown-up just a few seconds ago, she now rolled her eyes like a young girl beset by the stupidity of the adult world.

  “You are our responsibility, Russian. We have been watching you since you set foot here. We lost you once or twice, but as soon as you returned this way, we picked you up again. Uncle Franco and Father Marius warned me you might come back to the Albergo and that it would be my job to guide you away from whatever foolishness and trouble you caused. So come now, Russian, we must go.”

  For just a moment he was struck dumb and immobile. Ivanov had the unpleasant sensation of perceiving a much greater truth, of snatching a glimpse for a mere second of how he fitted into the machinations of others as a flimsy, disposable cog. And then he heard dogs barking and fighting and the crackle of gunfire nearby, and he put it all aside to follow the girl, who was already on the move.

  The wide attic space was cramped, forcing him to move along beneath the centerline of the pitched roof while crouched over. His eyes had readjusted to the darkness, which was split here and there by shafts of silvery light piercing through gaps and holes in the terra-cotta tiles above them. Much of the space here was taken up with boxes and sacks of supplies. He could smell garlic, as always, but even more strongly, the ubiquitous dried fruit, preserved meat, and cheeses. Two rifles, German Mausers from the previous decade’s war, were propped up in one corner, visible in a shaft of moonlight.

  Wood creaked on wood as Eva pushed against a solid wooden shutter in the roof. Ivanov came up behind her and lent his strength to the task. The skylight squealed open, making him cringe, but the streets were already alive with confusion and noise. He could hear hundreds of men down there now, and dozens of vehicles. The dogfighting was over, seemingly coming to an end with the crack of a single pistol shot. He followed Eva out onto the roofline, feeling terribly exposed as he emerged into the bright starlit night.

  To the south, the lights of Free Rome twinkled and shimmered like a vast illuminated sea lapping all the way out to the horizon. The dome of St. Peter’s, lit from below by spotlights, stood out in glorious relief. Even the guard towers of the Roman Wall twinkled as if wrapped in fairy lights.

  “Follow me,” said the young girl. “Do not stray. A giant oaf like you will fall straight through.”

  He did as he was told, carefully stepping not just in line with her, but as far as possible in her footsteps. The ancient tiles shifted and once or twice even cracked beneath his weight, but he could feel the solid, reassuring strength of a supporting beam directly beneath them. Eva flew across the roof like a cat.

  They moved in tandem, as though tethered together by an invisible line. After reaching the end of the tiled roof, Eva vaulted up onto the neighboring building-a gymnast’s leap of at least her own height. For one crazed, disassociated moment, Ivanov imagined her in another life, in another world, where Stalin and Beria were already dead, as they should have been, and cousin Carlo’s little girl capered and played in the streets below. Perhaps she was a gymnast there, perhaps just a carefree child. But here, on the rooftops of Occupied Rome, she was a fugitive and his guide. She was almost certainly a killer as well, he reminded himself.

  The special forces operative heaved himself up onto the next rooftop, taking considerably more care and time to execute the move than his diminutive pathfinder had. She was already running ahead of him.

  This building was topped by a flat roof garden. Simple wooden furniture, trestle tables and benches, were scattered about between huge pots containing groups of herbs and simple vegetables like string beans and cucumbers. There was less of an imperative to track along in her footsteps here, but he did so anyway. They moved quickly, covering the length of the building in half a minute.

  He was wondering how they were going to cross the gap he could see gleaming up ahead, when Eva accelerated toward it … launching herself into the air like a triple jumper, or perhaps a parkour adept. She sailed across the void between the closely spaced apartment blocks, landing softly on the far side. Ivanov did not give himself a chance to hesitate or overthink the jump. His longer strides ate up the distance in a heartbeat. He shortened his last step by a few inches, flexed his knees, and pistoned out into space. The gap was small, less than four feet across, but he felt his balls crawling up into his body as he sailed through clean air. Far below him, the hard, black cobblestones seemed to wait for him to miscalculate and fall.

  He crunched down on the other side, rolling forward and coming up on the balls of his feet next to the little girl. She nodded as though he were a child who had passed a simple test.

  They had landed on another flat roof, this one covered in washing lines from which sheets and blankets had been left to dry overnight. The bedclothes swayed in the soft breeze. Below, on the streets, the Red Army and NKVD paramilitary forces were kicking in doors, rousing the locals from their beds. A shot cracked out somewhere, followed by screams. First of terror, then of anger.

  “Come, Russian, we must move quickly.”

  Eva took off again, threading her way through the flapping laundry.

  “Wait,” said Ivanov. “Look …”

  He pointed to the south, where two gunships were hammering toward them. He could tell from their size and the deep percussive thrumming of the rotors that they were big monsters. Augmented-tech Mi-24s, at least one-and-a-half times the size of their uptime progenitors-partly because the Communists had not yet mastered postindustrial miniaturization, and partly because in Joseph Stalin’s psychology, quantity had a quality all its own. These flying behemoths seemed to claw through the air, as though they might lose their grip on flight at any moment, so loaded down were they with armament and armor. As Eva turned to face the threat, crouching, just like a cat on a ledge, columns of bright white light speared down from each of the choppers, searching and playing out over the city below with a strange, contrary beauty.

  “They are heading right for us,” said Eva. She did not panic, but he could hear the promise of it in her voice.

  The gunships were reviled wherever they flew. As Ivanov and his new Roman guide watched, the nearer one opened up on some unknown target, pouring down a bright yellow ribbon of tracer fire; a neon stream of destruction fired into the heart of one of the oldest, most densely populated cities in Europe. Two seconds, the burst lasted, delivering one thousand rounds of alternating tracer, armor-piercing, and high-explosive munitions. Smoke and flames rose from the impact point. The crash and rumble of collapsing masonry reached the two of them a second later.

  Eva made as if to take off again and continue the headlong flight, as though they could simply outrun the airborne menace. Ivanov shot out one hand, grabbed the girl by the scruff of her neck, and yanked her back-ripping a blanket from the nearest washing line and driving her down. The leading helicopter was just seconds away. All four of its searchlights swept over the roofline of the church, three blocks away.


  “Be still, be quiet,” he commanded, on top of her now, with the damp blanket covering them both. “And pray they do not have infrared sensors.”

  Of that at least he was reasonably sure. Had the gunships been fitted with FLIR or LLAMPS vision, the pilots would not have been using old-fashioned spotlights. But you never knew. Perhaps they were just poorly trained.

  The girl squirmed once underneath him, complaining that he was crushing her. But she lay silent and still as the miniguns roared again and the cold white light crept along their rooftop.

  Ivanov waited to die, hoping only that the shield of his body might afford Eva a false sense of security. Because in truth, if the gunners opened up on them, they would be shredded instantly.

  He clutched the blanket tightly around them, grinding his teeth together, as the Mi-24 seemed to hover directly overhead. The downblast of the rotor wash tried to rip the cover away from them, and he could feel the little girl giving in to her fears as violent tremors ran through her tiny frame. They endured a hell of sound and fury and supernova radiance … and then it was gone. The flying beasts moved on and left them in darkness and relative quiet.

  He waited a full minute before throwing back the blanket. His ears hummed, and he blinked dust from his eyes even though he had shut them tightly against the violent rotor wash and the glare of the searchlight.

  “Come, Roman,” he said gently to the girl. “We must hurry.”

  She stood up slowly and shakily. Ivanov watched, impressed and somewhat saddened to see her gather up whatever fears had run wild, squeeze them all into a bitter little ball, and swallow it down.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “We must hurry.”

  She led off again and he followed her to the far corner of the building, where it all but kissed the corner of a neighboring apartment block. Eva stepped across the gap carefully, but her limbs were still shaking and she nearly lost her footing.

  “Careful, little one,” warned Ivanov, as he steadied her with a firm hand. “You are still in charge here. I need you to get us out of this.”

  The next building was possessed of a peaked roof, covered in terra-cotta tiles again, forcing him to attend to exactly where Eva was putting her feet. It was a difficult, anxious task, with the need to keep an eye out in case the helicopters swung back. For now, the Hinds seemed to be concentrating their search pattern around the part of the city where he had killed Borodin.

  The Italian girl and her Russian charge ghosted across the roofline, crouched over, careful not to expose their silhouettes any more than was necessary. Ivanov could see a major gap coming up and wondered whether he would be expected to make such a giant leap. But Eva pulled up before they reached the edge, turned to him, and pointed to an old wooden ladder.

  “Lay it across to the next building. It will reach.”

  It did, but the journey across was nerve-racking. The experience took him back to his earliest days of special forces training, when instructors had forced a young Pavel Ivanov and his fellow superheroes-in-waiting to perform any number of gravity-defying feats of life-threatening stupidity. He forced himself to forget the memories of one young friend who had fallen and snapped his spine like a twig. Best just to look ahead, keep the eyes level, breathe.

  He stepped off the ladder just behind Eva, pulled it in toward them, and laid it down carefully in the gutter. The building beneath them overlooked a small square, into which now drove an army truck and a BMP tank-an unwelcome sight that immediately had the rooftop pair crouch-scuffling around to the reverse slope. The helicopters were far enough off that they could hear the crash of the truck’s tailgate as a platoon of soldiers alighted, the crunch of their boots on the cobblestones, the shouts of officers and NCOs.

  Eva and Ivanov stayed low and hidden on the lee side of the roofline before dropping down onto a building next door, leaping across a small gap to the one beyond it, and repeating the trick with another ladder after that. It took well over an hour but eventually the girl delivered them to a church overlooking a section of no-man’s-land between the Allied and Soviet sectors. Work on the Roman Wall was incomplete here. A minefield and rows of razor wire still separated the different worlds, and here on the northern side of the divide, an armored personnel carrier idled away next to an incomplete guard tower. The soaring concrete battlements that bisected the ancient settlement elsewhere had not yet been raised here. Ivanov could see that the Communists had made inroads with earthmoving equipment, but they were still many months from completing one of the last links in the giant prison wall.

  He leaned back against the steeply pitched roof of the old church, looking back to where they had come. Half of North Rome seemed to be blacked out. Fires burned here and there, and four gunships snarled and swooped and occasionally spat out long tongues of fire.

  “I did all this?” Ivanov asked quietly.

  A few steps ahead of him, Eva paused before edging her way around the bell tower at the front of the church. “No, Russian, you did not do this,” she replied. “Stalin did.”

  Having delivered her rebuke, she pushed on, leaving Ivanov to ponder where this girl had been and what she had done in her brief life to see so deeply into things. Eva Furedi-if that was her name-looked like she was only eleven or twelve years old, but it was possible, he supposed, that she’d had a few more years on the planet than that. She grew up in the postwar years, when food was scarce, even more so than now. Perhaps the urchin was a young woman. Or perhaps life in the slave city had simply squeezed all the youth from her at a very early age.

  He carefully followed Eva around the tower installation, just as the troop carrier grunted and rumbled before suddenly lurching forward and driving off. He cursed softly and wondered aloud what was happening, and was surprised to be answered by a familiar voice.

  “A pig can always be led to the smell of a tasty treat somewhere else.”

  Marius … Ivanov cursed again, louder this time.

  “Please, please,” said the priest, from his comfortable repose against the small twin to the tower around which the Russian had just edged. “The young lady does not need to hear such language.”

  Ivanov was about to point out that the young lady was one of the more ruthless females he had met since encountering the black widows of Chechnya, far off in the future. But he held his tongue. Eva was staring at Marius with rapt attention. The Russian had seen that sort of devotion before. And it would’ve been oafish to speak ill of her. Ivanov owed her his life, in all probability.

  “So, where to now?” he asked instead.

  “Into the light,” said Marius, waving one hand toward the glitter and sparkle of Free Rome.

  He reached down beside him and lifted up an old bolt-action rifle. Ivanov recognized the cumbersome attachment at the end of its muzzle: the priest intended to shoot a line over the Wall. Heavy black climber’s rope ran down from the sabot into a small window of the belfry behind him.

  Furedi braced himself and casually fired the weapon. Hundreds of meters of light, high-strength nylon twine snaked out across the gap between the divided city.

  “It will take a moment for my brethren in the holy city to make fast the line.” Even as he spoke, though, the rope went taut.

  “The girl should go first,” said Ivanov.

  “The girl will stay here, Russian. With me. We have the Lord’s work to do.”

  Ivanov started to protest, to insist that it would be too difficult and dangerous for her to remain undetected, with Skarov and Beria raking at the city for any sign of him. He turned toward Eva to ask if she wanted to escape with him, but the girl was already gone. She had disappeared inside the belfry through another window.

  “Bastards,” Ivanov spat. “You would use a little girl — ”

  “Like you just did?” Marius said, not unkindly. “You would not have escaped the city without her help, my friend. Without all of our help. Good men and women died for you today. They died for Rome and for their God too, lest you feel you cannot bear the
burden of their sacrifice alone. Eva Corleone has her part to play in God’s design, as do we all. She will play her part here, with me. You have another path to walk.”

  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.”