That changed quickly enough as her nervous system finally woke up to a new sensation—the alien presence of sharpened steel inside her.
She cried out and the cry became a scream—of surprise, of outrage, of violation. All thoughts of safeguarding the corridor, Harry, these children, vanished as she half-turned towards the source of this new, exquisite pain, at the same time as she tried to rear away from it. She met the cold visage of the Bremmer girl snarling silently as she tried to drive the blade in deeper. Her face was contorted in a rictus of killing fury, but her eyes were as flat and empty as a blackboard scrubbed clean.
Julia lashed back with her elbow, hitting the girl square on the nose. She felt cartilage crumple under the strike, and the girl’s head snapped back, a few spots of blood spraying out of her nostrils. But she simply bent to her task with even more vigor, her shoulders hunching as she tried to push the knife in further. The pain came for real then, a great blooming rose of black and red fire that burned the entire side of Julia’s body.
She was going to die at the hands of this child killer… No, this killer… child.
As her vision dimmed and grayed out the edges, and as black ink spots spread everywhere else she finally remembered who had brought the gun to this knife fight, and jammed the muzzle of the Makarov up under the jawline of this little psycho.
Even then, a normal person, man or woman, might not have been able to do what was needed. Some dying, fluttering remnant of a deep-seated need to continue the species might have stayed their hand. But Julia Duffy was not normal. Julia Duffy had traveled through time from one seemingly endless, futile and savage war into a world consumed by an even greater and more brutal conflagration. Julia Duffy had not just survived this transition, but flourished within it. Death had come for her many times, and death had failed. She would be damned if she was letting it win today.
“I fucking hate children,” she snarled.
And pulled the trigger.
Fräulein Bremmer’s little brother came at her then, his tiny fingers hooked into claws as his sister slid down the bulkhead, leaving a bright red smear against the off-white paintwork.
She pulled the trigger again and again as darkness welled up around her.
###
Charlotte also broke right, but as she was facing forward, towards the bow of the ship, this put her on the starboard side, in a small closet-like stowage space similar to the one in which they’d stashed the body on the deck below. This one was crowded with stores; cardboard boxes, some of them sagging and split, spilling out tins of food and packets of freeze-dried rations underfoot.
She saw Wales break left, smashing through a flimsy cabin door like a human battering ram. She was peripherally aware of the struggle that immediately broke out across the passageway from her, Harry shooting one man in the cabin and grappling with another. There was nothing she could do to help. The Tommy gun was a crude weapon for the circumstance. She couldn’t just hose down the room even though she had a clear line of sight. She could, however, use it to push forward with fire and movement.
She was certain Bremmer was being held in one of the cabins she could see just up the corridor. The volume of fire coming at them from that direction spoke to some vital asset the Russians wanted to protect. She poked her machine gun out into the passageway, staying well inside cover herself, and squeezed off a couple of short bursts. It dampened the return fire enough to give her some confidence. She removed the drum magazine with some difficulty—it was not a mechanism with which she was familiar—and checked the load. It was heavy, possibly more than three quarters full.
“Good enough,” she said to herself, before taking a few breaths to steady her nerves and committing to what must come next. It would be easy to just give up, to slide to the deck and wait for the end, or even to escape. To cover her own retreat with a few long bursts of automatic fire as she ran aft, heading for the nearest exit to the ship’s promenade deck. There was a lateral corridor bisecting this long passageway not ten or fifteen meters back. She was a strong swimmer and under the cover of night she was confident she could make good an escape by water.
She snapped the heavy drum magazine back into the old machine gun.
She wouldn’t be doing any of that.
She had already died once. The little girl who had gone into prison Camp 5 of the Cabanatuan complex in 1942 was Charlotte-Grace Mulvaney. Her daddy was an officer under General Douglas MacArthur. Her mother was an army wife and homemaker. They were gone. Her mother and father were dead by the time little Charlotte-Grace was captured and imprisoned, and Charlotte-Grace Mulvaney herself had become something else by the time she was liberated by the ghost soldiers. She too was a ghost now, and a soldier, and she would do what was expected of her.
She would fight to the end.
She whipped the machine gun out into the corridor again, clearing a space to move with a series of short, randomly timed bursts of automatic fire. When she judged she had a good chance to move forward, she leapt from her cover, leaving the uptime prince and his partner behind. Harry was still struggling with one of the men he had surprised in the other stateroom. Viv had spoken highly of his former commanding officer. Her old boss had enjoyed complete confidence in his old boss, and she would trust that confidence now.
Duffy, too, she would have to leave behind. She had made it to cover across the passageway and could secure their rear while Charlotte moved forward. Duffy had been there on the day the ghost soldiers had come to Camp 5. She had written stories about it, and Charlotte still had the clippings of those stories pasted into a scrapbook in her apartment back in London. She had not told the woman they shared that small connection. It had not been relevant to the job. Maybe if they survived this day she would have a chance to discuss it.
Most likely, however, they would not. All the more reason then, that the mission must succeed.
She charged forward, passing two doors that remained closed, shooting the lock off the third when the Russians recovered from the surprise of her assault, and started to coordinate their defense, concentrating their fire on her. She ran through the stateroom door, which splintered with a crash as she hit it. There were people in the room, men, and she fired two short bursts at them, attempting to clear the room with the last of her ammunition. She cut down one man, but missed the second who came at her with a cargo hook. He was a sailor, not one of the NKVD agents. It did not make him a poor fighter, just an untrained one. He came at her with animal ferocity, screaming obscenities, raising the wicked-looking hook just above his shoulder, but not so high that it might catch overhead.
Charlotte had no space to move outside the line of his attack, so she stepped inside it and swung the butt of her empty machine gun in a short, savage jab. The heavy wooden butt of the Thompson smashed into his mouth, shredding his lips and shattering half of his teeth. With a deft flick, she deflected the cruel steel tip of the cargo hook, pirouetting inside the man’s fighting arc, such as it was, to place herself behind him, where she kicked out the back of his knee and caved in his skull with the empty weapon.
The machine gun hit the deck at the same time as the dead body. She already had Frau Bremmer’s handgun out as she advanced on the stateroom door again, intent on resuming her forward progress. A figure appeared, framed by the open doorway, and she fired without hesitation.
It could have been Duffy or Wales, but that was not likely. The man had appeared from the left. He had been forward, where the Russians were hunkered down. Charlotte put three bullets into his center mass before he could squeeze off a single round. He dropped to the deck-plating with a thud—a thickset man in a blood-spattered gray suit.
She fired out into the passageway, emptying the magazine of her pistol, giving her just enough time to grab the dead man’s weapon, a sort of miniaturized Kalashnikov. The main body of the weapon felt like crudely stamped sheet metal, but she did not doubt that it would be a hardy, reliable fi
rearm. Even now, more than a decade after the Transition, the Sovs did not go in for wasteful techno fetishism. Their shit was simple and cheap and it worked.
Firing and moving forward again, she cleared another two cabins before having to take cover in a third. The Russian submachine gun in her hands snarled with a deep, intimidating roar, and the magazine was loaded with penetrators and tracer rounds. She was close enough to her quarry to hear the cries of distress and fear occasioned by her latest assault, but her attack faltered when she ran out of ammunition for the Kalashnikov.
Holed up in a small cabin, which looked as though it housed one of the ship’s officers, she was pinned down by the ferocious defense layered around that last stateroom.
Bremmer had to be in there.
###
Harry broke left, firing off the last of the Metal Storm ammo. He got a sight picture of the passageway ahead of them a split second before he hit the dark, thin wood of a stateroom door. There was a sort of crossroads formed by a meeting of two passageways fifty meters or so ahead of him, just beyond the next hatchway leading down to the lower deck. He estimated there to be seven or eight shooters up there, some of them Skarov’s men, some dressed in the mismatched coveralls, dungarees and work shirts of the Bulgakov’s crew. Merchant marine or not, they were no fucking slackers with a gun.
What they lacked in accuracy and fire control they more than made up for in volume. The old Russian standby. Quantity with a quality all of its own.
He didn’t think they’d had time to set their ambush. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity to ponder the question if they had. He’d be dead. Most likely Skarov or one of his offsiders, maybe even an officer of the ship, had thrown together a fire team and headed straight for Bremmer, racing the enemy they knew was also moving to take him.
And then his shoulder hit the door, and he was through the obstacle with a rending explosion of splinters and the crashing thunder of impact and there was no time to contemplate the how’s and why’s because two men were trying to kill him. He shot the first with the Grach while he was still on the move, pulling the trigger three times, and hitting the man twice before his mate slammed into Harry from the side, driving most of the air from him, cracking a rib, and sending his gun flying out of his hand as they both encountered the unyielding barrier of a thick metal bulkhead at high speed.
Harry managed to take the blow on his side, turning his shoulder towards the wall just before they hit. He was still crushed between the bulk of the man and the mass of the ship, but at least he did not crack his skull open. He was winded and off balance, but he had his wits and his fists. The Russian, a sailor in drab canvas cargo pants and a filthy striped T-shirt, pounded at him with his own fists, a brawler, not a combat adept. Harry locked one hand behind the man’s head, accepting the blows in exchange for the time they gave him. His other hand he drove up into the man’s bristled chin and he pulled the Russian’s head sharply around to the side, feeling the spine shatter somewhere above the shoulder blades. All of the fight ran out of the man. All of the life. The body dropped to the deck, thumping down on a thin Persian carpet.
The uproar from the fight outside the cabin grew worse. Harry heard the rabid bark of a Thompson submachine gun, fired in the short bursts of somebody trained to work with automatic weapons. Charlotte. She was pressing the attack, intent on getting to Bremmer, but not to save him.
The only thing she would be saving was a last bullet to put into the German scientist so that she could deny him to Skarov and Stalin. And if she ran out of bullets, Ernst Bremmer would probably die with her hands around his throat.
In another time and another place there might be a fuck that Harry could give about that, but right now what he cared about was living through the next few moments and making sure Julia did too. Everything else was negotiable. Bremmer was a long way from Moscow. Even if they didn’t stop him leaving Cairo, Harry knew the chances of him working on Stalin’s orbital bombardment system were close to zero.
He picked up his gun and checked the magazine. Five bullets left in the fifteen-round mag.
He timed his run to sync with Charlotte’s cover fire. When next she poured fire down on the Russians sheltering at the intersection of the two passageways, he dived out into the corridor and ran back towards Duffy. He found her bleeding out on the floor of the cabin where she had sheltered.
Harry was battle hardened. He had fought in Afghanistan and again in Syria back up in the 21st. With the rest of Kolhammer’s Multinational Force he had emerged into the middle of the Pacific War, fought his way home, and then across western Europe to put down the Third Reich. He had seen his fill of horrors and then some. The slaughterhouse scene he stumbled on now was all the more distressing for its discreet, unexpected nature. Julia was down, propped against an internal bulkhead, her hand clamped on the deep wound in her back. Blood was pooling beneath her legs from that, but there was more blood painting the walls and the floor, painting everything in the room. And two bodies, tiny little corpses she had made of…
In a moment of conscious doublethink he edited out of this horror story the idea that she had murdered Bremmer’s children. She hadn’t. His lover had been set upon by a pair of underage psychopaths, recruited and trained as deceivers and killers by experts in the field. All these thoughts shot through him in a fraction of a second, like an arrow passing through gossamer.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered as he knelt down beside her.
“Harry,” she croaked, coughing up a thick, dark dollop of blood with it.
“Lie still,” he ordered, frantically casting about the room for something to stem the bleeding, aware the whole time that he could not afford to lose focus on the battle outside by tending to Julia in here. There was no first-aid kit, no clean bindings to be had. In the end he settled on stripping the bedsheets from the upper bunk, because it looked slightly cleaner, tearing it into strips, and packing the wound with them. He hardened his heart and tried to unsee the ruin she had made of the children. They’d obviously had a decent crack at making dead meat of her.
“You hang on,” he said. “I’m getting you out of this. We’re going home.”
“You really wouldn’t want to be after a second date,” she said weakly, coughing up some more blood. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped against him.
He cursed, once, savagely.
There was only one thing for it. Only one way off the ship.
He took her pistol and checked the load. It was the Makarov. Smaller than his.
Two shots.
Seven all up.
He would have to make do.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
O’Brien shook Slim Jim awake on the couch. He’d fallen asleep in the goddamned business lounge. That cocktail waitress hadn’t worked out after all and the oilman’s hooker was gone. Slim Jim couldn’t be fucked dragging himself all the way back to that snooty restaurant where he’d had dinner with Halabi. He supposed he could have sent a car for the girl, but by the time they were finished with the Russian and the beaner he was too tired and, to be honest, too fucking drunk to be bothered chasing pussy. Besides, he was the world’s richest man. The pussy should be chasing him. And so, while O’Brien fussed around doing all those things she did for him, he’d stretched out on the big blue three-seater lounge with an iPad meaning to watch a video of the Yankees–Red Sox game he’d saved to his personal cloud. But he’d fallen asleep in the third innings.
“Wake up. Time to move. We have to get you to the jet.”
He blinked the crust from his eyes, his head spinning with a hangover.
“I thought we gave the Russian the jet?”
“You’ve got a few to spare,” said O’Brien. “But you don’t have any time. Come on, move, now.”
He had no idea what was happening. She was a bossy bitch, for sure, but not usually like this. There was something more than urgency in her voice. It wasn’t panic, but you could mistake it for tha
t. Her grip on his bicep as she pulled him up was almost painful.
“Hey,” he protested.
“You want to be gently woken with a hummer and a hot chocolate, or do you want to live? Get the fuck up right now if it’s box number two.”
He did climb groggily to his feet then, taking in the security team which was waiting for him. Four anonymous heavyweights in expensive tailored suits. They all wore sunglasses. Inside. At night. It was weird. But then Slim Jim started to gather his wits and he realized they were all wearing slimline HUDs, stripped-down versions of the old WarPig combat goggles which had been standard issue to the special operators who came through the Transition.
“What’s going on?” he asked, sounding and feeling stupid. Getting a little of his own panic on.
“You know how we bullshitted that Russian guy about the Third World War starting tomorrow?” O’Brien said as she handed him his shoes and jacket. Slim Jim felt his heart beginning to beat a little faster, worsening his headache.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, well it’s tomorrow today and it wasn’t bullshit. The Sovs have hit the Fifth Army, and they’re jumping out of southern France and northern Italy, landing airborne forces at all the major transport nodes.”
He was awake now. Drunk, tired, but terrified. It was amazing how quickly you could throw the switch from groggy and drunk to balls-out terrified.
“Did they fucking nuke us or something?”
“Or something,” O’Brien said, unhelpfully.
He was in his shoes by then, not bothering to do up the laces. He tried to get into his jacket, but kept fumbling with the arms, eventually throwing it away in frustration and heading for the door, assuming everybody would follow. They did.
“If they had nuked us, we wouldn’t be here,” O’Brien explained, her voice sounding steadier than before, but just as urgent.
They hit the mezzanine level above the grand foyer of the Dupleix, moving quickly. The revelers had all disappeared. The band was gone. The joint wasn’t deserted, however. There were a couple of dozen people pissing about downstairs, running around like headless chickens. That’s what his ma used to say. He could see now just how apt a phrase it was. These people were panicking. They would hurry one way, remember something, possibly forget something, stop, and head off in another completely random direction. He expected them to start bouncing off each other like ping-pong balls.
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