Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  And still the Stasi woman was not done.

  Her hands reached for Charlotte’s face, her fingers broken claws raking for soft tissue.

  It was a poor move. The desperate choice of a beaten foe. As the counterfeit Bremmer’s arms straightened, Charlotte smashed her hands on the woman’s elbows, violently snapping them.

  Bremmer’s last scream died in her throat, cut off by Charlotte’s jaguar paw strike into her jugular notch.

  Her head spinning, her throat dry, she almost collapsed beside the corpse she had just made. Even though she had almost no time on her side, she still took a few moments to steady herself. Kneeling in seiza, Charlotte-Grace François drew in and released a deep, slow breath. Five times she did this. Finding her center. Letting go of the world. For it was almost certain she would take her leave of this world very soon, and it was important to her that she did so properly. To honor the spirits, living and dead, to whom she owed her existence.

  For Charlotte, there was no irony in her having borrowed so much from the Bushido, the warrior code of Japan’s old samurai and of her modern day soldiers‌—‌the monsters who had killed her parents and stolen her childhood. She had taken from them exactly what she needed to survive.

  Rice from the prison camp store.

  Medicine for Nurse Ritherdown.

  Bushido for a world at war.

  When she was ready, she collected her knife, the length of chain, and Bremmer’s knife and gun. She moved forward again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Julia spat out the tip of Oleg’s finger. The man pulled his hand away quickly, grunting and snarling, but not crying out like a normal man would have. The runnels of dark blood pulsed out of the ragged stump dripped to the floor. His expression was murderous, but controlled. He looked to Skarov, not Julia.

  The Russian seemed amused, but when he spoke his voice was cold.

  “I will talk to Professor Bremmer about this missile shield he is to build for you. If you are lying, we will come back and Oleg will take all of the fingers on Miss Duffy’s right hand. If you are telling the truth, just this finger…”

  He held up his middle finger, as though flipping the bird. It was the same as the digit Julia had just spat out onto the filthy deck. Her cheeks were smeared with Oleg’s blood. Her eyes were filled with dull fire.

  “Get a bandage and some pliers,” Skarov ordered his men. “Clean yourself up,” he told Oleg. “You were foolish to let the woman do that. I will take her finger as punishment for the insult done to me, not to you. Idiot.”

  His henchman looked sickly at that, much worse than he had when Julia had bitten off the top of his finger. He muttered something that sounded like an apology, and shuffled towards the door with his chin on his chest, and his wounded hand closed in a fist. It looked as though he was squeezing blood from himself.

  “So that went well,” Harry said, as the hatch clanged shut behind them.

  “I was improvising,” said Julia. Her voice was thin.

  “Well, you may have just improvised yourself into a handicapped parking sticker. What the hell were you thinking, Duff? This ugly Russian fuck does not look the type to make empty threats.”

  She spat. Twice. Getting the last of Oleg out of her mouth.

  “He has to release my wrists to cut off my finger. That’s our only chance, when my hands get free. I’m going to stick my thumb in his eye, and you’re going to kick out his legs. I take his eye, then the pliers or whatever they use to cut my ties and I stick it in Skarov’s neck. Sound like a plan?”

  “It sounds like you’re still improvising.”

  “That’s because I am.”

  The Russians were not long in returning, maybe ten minutes or so. Skarov was not with them. Oleg led the way into the cabin, his face looking flushed, a fresh bandage wrapped around his finger. Harry thought he could smell some sort of crude liquor on the man’s breath, but could not identify it.

  He took a blade from his pocket and leaned forward to hack away at Julia’s restraints. His partner stayed by the door, just outside, mostly watching Harry, but flicking his eyes onto Duffy every now and then. He seemed agitated. They both did.

  Julia’s game plan played out remarkably quickly, and remarkably poorly. As soon as the knife cut through her plastic ties she shrieked out a fierce kiai and raked at Oleg’s face with her claws. Harry lashed out with his foot, aiming a sidekick into the Russian’s knee. But Oleg was no amateur. He had positioned himself just outside the effective range of Harry’s kick, and he batted away Julia’s attack on his face with ease. He turned a lazy defensive fend into a vicious back-fist for good measure, snapping a short but powerful blow into her face.

  They swore at each other in Russian, but all the points went to Oleg. He stood up with ease, wiping away the fresh blood on his face with the back of his injured hand. His mirthless smile promised sweet vengeance. He held his knife, handle out for his colleague to take. Harry wasn’t sure whether he was to be released or whether Julia would be taken somewhere. He shuffled around to see what the other man was doing.

  He was dying.

  An object protruded from his throat, and attached to it, a hand, and to that black-clad arm, driving everything in deep and hard was a woman.

  Charlotte!

  Charlotte killing the anonymous NKVD man with a blade, and shooting the other‌—‌Oleg‌—‌with her spare hand.

  He recognized the blocky, futuristic outline of a silenced Metal Storm VLE pistol, a split second after it coughed out a single round of caseless ceramic ammunition. The shot took Oleg just above the bridge of his nose, disintegrating the upper half of the man’s skull in a shower of gore.

  “Where’s Bremmer?” she asked. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “He’s close, but I don’t know where,” Harry said, after a second or two to recover. “Fuck,” he added.

  “Cut him free,” Charlotte said, ripping her knife out of the man she had just killed and tossing it onto the cot for Julia to pick up.

  Duffy worked quickly to cut him loose, before searching Oleg’s corpse while Charlotte dragged the other man into the cabin. She passed Harry the Metal Storm handgun, but qualified her generosity. “It only has two rounds left. Use it wisely.”

  The heft and feel of the uptime weapon in his hand was both reassuring and frustrating. Only two rounds. Harry quickly patted down Oleg for weapons: a 443 Grach analogue pistol in a shoulder holster and two clips of ammunition in his poorly made, ill-fitting and now blood-drenched suit jacket. The Grach, an uptime design of the Russian Federation, loaded out with a seventeen shot mag. This locally produced variant carried fifteen. He took a Makarov from the body of the other, nameless Russian corpse, and gave it to Julia.

  “Seriously,” Charlotte said, her voice clipped and angry. “Hurry up with the scavenger hunt. They know I’m on board. They’re looking for me. And now they’ll be looking for you too. We have to find Bremmer and finish the job.”

  Harry paused.

  “You mean we have to rescue him, right? Not put a bullet into him.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” muttered Julia. “Not this again.”

  “You can try to save him if you want,” Charlotte said in a more reasonable tone. “But if that doesn’t work out, I have my orders. He doesn’t go back to Moscow.”

  Harry was tempted to argue with her, but the last time he’d debated Bremmer’s fate, back on the docks, everybody had been captured or killed.

  “Just play it as it lies, Harry,” Julia said. “Let’s go. This cruise sucks.”

  Charlotte checked the companionway before they left the cabin. Harry could hear raised voices echoing around the vessel. Russian and Arabic, but mostly Russian.

  “I’m pretty sure Bremmer is one deck up from here,” Charlotte said as she led them forward. “And I’m kind of hoping most of the Sovs are down on the lower deck looking for me. That’s the last place anyone laid eyes on me and I killed
them all. They will need to secure that area.”

  Harry and Jules exchanged a look. Neither of them had had much to do with this young woman back in Cairo. She was simply one of Viv’s operators. Quiet, unobtrusive, and young. Young enough to have been a child during the war. Harry and Julia knew each other well enough to exchange an entire conversation with that one, wordless glance. Who was this woman? Where had she acquired and honed her skills and why was she working with St. Clair?

  “Anybody we meet, we kill. Strip their weapons and keep going,” she said as they moved forward in a two-up one-back formation: Harry and Charlotte leading the way, Julia bringing up the rear, covering their tracks. They could move only as quickly as Duffy could walk backwards‌—‌but they still covered the ground at a reasonable pace and they could not be surprised by a flanking move.

  Julia trusted them to call out any obstacles or pitfalls; literal pitfalls in the case of open hatches leading down to the deck below.

  It was a harrowing, anxious passage, with Harry forever expecting shouts and gunfire to catch up with them. The wounds on his wrists had clotted over and cracked open and bled and partly dried out again. As they approached a ladder from A-Deck they halted as a set of boots climbed down. Just one. Harry raised the silenced Metal Storm pistol, preparing to fire off the last shots, but Charlotte stayed his hand. She glided forward the few steps between them and the crewman‌—‌he was dressed in dirty coveralls, not a suit like Skarov’s NKVD men. He was armed, however. A Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine, like something from an old gangster movie.

  A knife appeared in Charlotte’s hand. The blade was matte black and fashioned in an uptime design. It may well have come from an armory on one of the ships of the Multinational Force. She used it with swift and terrible prowess, killing the man quietly before he could raise the alarm, before he knew he was dead.

  Julia took the tommy gun while Harry helped Charlotte drag the body out of the passageway into a small rummage space.

  It had no hatch but there was a rust-stained canvas tarpaulin under which they could hide him. It would serve for the moment. As soon as they had stowed the dead man, Charlotte led the way forward again.

  Julia caught Harry’s eye.

  “She won’t date you, you know.”

  He grinned, but not for long.

  They pushed on. Harry and Julia covered Charlotte while she reconnoitered the upper deck, climbing the same ladder her latest victim had just come down. She took a small scope from one of the many pockets in her black combat coveralls and maneuvered it through the hatch. Harry recognized the scope as a piece of 21st-century kit, a compact multifunction lens on a flexible fiber-optic cable. Charlotte fed the vision through to a small handheld unit that looked even more familiar. Then he realized why. It was a late model iPod, one of the last made. A couple hundred of them had come through in the PX on the Clinton and the Kandahar. He was pretty sure every one of them had disappeared into the maw of the Zone’s R&D program. They were precious. The fact that a junior member of a freelance team on a deniable mission had access to one spoke to Viv’s operation being plugged in at a much higher level than Harry had imagined.

  “All clear,” Charlotte said quietly, reaching back and holding out her hand for the submachine gun. Julia passed it up to her without protest. Charlotte would need to secure their foothold of the next deck. Half their age, seemingly unburdened by fatigue or injury, she seemed to float up the ladder. Julia followed her, while Harry covered their departure from the lower deck. He thought he heard voices approaching from somewhere aft, but it was hard to say.

  The next deck up looked very similar to the passageway from which they had just emerged. A narrow corridor lined with cabins, some of them with closed hatches, others guarded only by curtains on rails, or simply open to any traffic passing by. Charlotte signaled that they were to advance silently. They moved in the same formation, Harry and Charlotte to the fore, with Julia covering their rear.

  Harry counted nine cabins before the next junction, where a passageway crossing port to starboard met the corridor they were headed down.

  The shooting started before they reached the first cabin door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Maria O’Brien found him in one of the private rooms off the main gaming floor, thirty or forty grand down in a hand of poker he was playing with a couple of exiled White Russian dukes, some Korean factory guy, and the inevitable Arabs. There were always Arabs. O’Brien waited for him to fold‌—‌he’d been bluffing with a lousy pair of threes‌—‌before inclining her head to indicate he should follow her.

  Slim Jim thanked the other players for their time and tossed a thousand-dollar chip at the croupier. The brunette he had peeled away from that Texan blowhard got a room key and a promise of all the Slim Jim she could handle just as soon as he was done with work. The bodyguard who had been nursing, but not drinking, a soda water by the small bar fell in a few steps behind him as he followed his lawyer out of the private room.

  “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” O’Brien said as he caught up with her. “I heard about Sam Horton.”

  “Who?” he asked, as innocent as a newborn.

  “The oilman in the stupid hat. The one you humiliated at the craps table about an hour ago. The one who carries a silver six-shooter with him everywhere he goes. You stole his hooker too, I see. And yet I’m almost certain I asked you not to start any fights.”

  “I didn’t,” he said honestly. “There was no fight. He just left. And she’s not a hooker. She’s a college grad. From Emily Dickinson.”

  “I rest my case. You know Horton once shot a man, right?”

  “Pfft. Who hasn’t?”

  “You, for one.”

  “So what’s the problem? It’s not like I shot him.”

  Her sigh was almost a growl.

  “I don’t get paid enough for this shit,” she said, but mostly to herself.

  “True enough!” Slim Jim shot back, enjoying himself. “Remind me tomorrow to double your pay.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Neither am I.”

  They left the casino behind, transited the foyer of the hotel, which was still heaving with drinkers and fusion-jazz fans, and took a flight of stairs up to the first floor where O’Brien led him into a business lounge. He was disturbed to find sandwiches and coffee. That was never a good sign.

  “Is this going to take long? I was kinda hoping to get back to Emily Dickinson. Can’t you just give me a bullet-point rundown of what’s going on with Kolhammer?”

  The bodyguard closed the door, leaving them alone as he took up station outside.

  “There is something big going down,” said O’Brien, before hurrying on to add, “and please, no dick jokes. It’s something involving the Soviets.”

  A tingle ran up Slim Jim’s spine, scattering out as it approached his shoulders.

  “Like a war?”

  O’Brien shook her head, but she was frowning darkly.

  “No. Or at least not yet. But things are happening, quickly, and none of them look good.”

  Davidson wished he had taken a piss on the way up here. He was feeling the strain of a couple of beers and bourbons he’d had down at the poker table.

  He found the idea of coffee both tempting and daunting. He needed to sharpen up, but he really didn’t want anything else to drink. Instead, he settled on grabbing a couple of ham sandwiches.

  “Okay,” he said. “Gimme what you got. And how Halabi’s involved. And what it means for us.”

  “You remember those satellites we put up for Boeing about six months ago?” O’Brien asked.

  He did, but only because she had insisted on briefing him about them before he went to dinner with Halabi.

  “They were spy satellites or something?”

  “Experimental platforms. Proof of concept for a couple of technologies the temps had finally
managed to build for themselves after cribbing from us. From the archive,” she added.

  “Right. So Boeing proves this out before General Dynamics or Hughes Aerospace can, and they sign a deal with the US Air Force or CIA or whatever to fill the skies over Russia and China with them. So what?”

  O’Brien remained standing by the main conference table, dressed in a dark overcoat, beaded with rain. She was holding a briefcase, which she finally put on the floor.

  “Apparently the joint chiefs want them now. Like, right now. Kolhammer is putting the word on Halabi to turn over operational control of the experimental birds to the National Reconnaissance Office. Immediately.”

  “Because?”

  “Because NRO lost their own satellites.”

  “Lost them?”

  “It’s a side effect,” explained O’Brien. “It’s what happens when somebody shoots them out of the sky.”

  That fell between them like a lead weight.

  “Holy shit,” said Slim Jim. “The Russians shot down our satellites? Well, not ours, you know, mine. I mean…”

  “I know what you mean, and yes. Or at least, maybe. The tracking stations lost half a dozen birds a couple of hours ago. It doesn’t look like the Bluetooth connection dropped out or anything.”

  Slim Jim nodded. He understood the uptime joke. Normally he took a lot of pride in that sort of thing. It was stupid, but he liked to think he knew these people as well as they knew themselves.

  Part of him still thought of the uptimers as “these people”. Even O’Brien.

  “There’s something going on in the Mideast, or the Mediterranean,” she went on. “Some shit going down inside Russia too. Deep inside. National Command Authority has lost cover in both areas.”

  Slim Jim suddenly felt tired. The fun he’d had baiting Horton, the fun he was looking forward to with Horton’s girlfriend, was drained of its charge. He felt older than his years, and he conceded the loss by pulling a chair out and sitting down at the table. There was no avoiding it. Maria had done exactly what he had asked her to do. She had brought him information they could use.