He would need the cooperation of MI6 or the Office of Strategic Services to access that signal, but he did not imagine such cooperation would be difficult to obtain. More than ever now, they would want the man found.
When he was finished with Harry, Ivanov sought out the women. The reporter, Duffy, and the surviving mercenary. But the hireling soldier was gone and the reporter was deeply sedated. The doctors were unsure she would live.
“Who brought her here?” Ivanov asked the physician in charge of her care.
“An American. He did not leave his name.”
###
Julia dreamed, and for a while her dreams were nightmarish. She was back in the Ardennes. Standing with a dozen or so captured American soldiers, looking down into the mass grave where they would soon lie. She had been shot. She was in the earth, choking on soil made wet with blood.
A hand reached down and pulled her out.
It was Harry.
No, it was Dan. Her beautiful Dan. Always there for her, no matter how much she disappointed him.
“He was a great guy,” she told Karen Halabi. She was still dreaming. She was in a hospital bed and dreaming. She had been pulled out of the mass grave in the Ardennes. She was talking to Captain Halabi on board the Trident.
“It didn’t work out between Dan and me,” she said.
“I heard.”
“Yeah, it was my fault.”
“Now, Jules, don’t—”
“No, it was. He was a great guy and I totally fucked it up with him. Jesus. What a fucking mess I made.”
And in her dream, Karen told her it would be okay, and it was, because Dan was standing there at the foot of her bed telling her it would be okay. That she would be better and he would return and everything would be fine.
He looked older. Not old, as such. But his hair had a few streaks of gray in it, and he looked thicker through the upper body. He hadn’t run to fat. He had just thickened up with age, as men do.
He told her everything would be all right. Then he left.
Julia was three days under sedation before they finally dialed back her dosage.
When she clawed her way back to the world of real things, Harry was sitting at the foot of her bed, in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, smiling at her. His face was swollen and bruised and she assumed her own would be too.
“You’re back,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
“Me too,” she said, smiling weakly.
They spoke of nothing for a few minutes, just of how happy they were to see each other. How lucky they were to have survived. She eventually asked what had happened to Charlotte.
Harry said that she had moved on.
“Hardly a bloody scratch on her. She checked in on you, and she left. Things to do. People to kill.”
He remembered something, pulling a piece of paper from the pocket of his dressing-gown. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article. She wondered how many photocopiers there could be in Cairo.
“I wrote this,” she said, a little confused. It was a report on the liberation of a series of prison camps in the Philippines. There was a picture of a woman in full combat gear carrying a small child. She recognized the woman. Dr Margie François. At least half of the story was devoted to the efforts of Dr François to save the women of the camp, who were in a terrible state after months of captivity.
Julia had written about them being used as sex slaves by the Japanese, but the Times had cut that part of her story. She had not written about the good doctor’s summary execution of the camp commandant and half-a-dozen of his men.
Sanction Four.
There was a neat, handwritten note in the white space of the photograph.
I always meant to thank you for this. So thanks.—Charlotte F.
Her wits still dulled by the drugs and her trauma, Julia looked to Harry for an explanation.
“She told me she was an orphan,” he said. “Her parents were killed before she ended up in that camp. Dr François adopted her.”
“And Viv… How did she end up with him?”
“She joined the Marines,” Harry explained. “She’d always wanted to, you know, after the camp. But for whatever reason, it didn’t take. She liked the work, but not the job, if that makes sense. So she ended up working with Viv. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took her on as a favor. He never said anything about it to me, but that was the sort of thing he would do for one of us.”
He meant “for an uptimer”.
For one of the lost.
She was tiring. Everything catching up with her again. Before she fell back into sleep, however, she needed to know just one more thing.
“How did we escape? Why are we even alive? Was it her?”
Harry furrowed his brow.
He did not so much look troubled as… dissatisfied.
Shaking his head, as if he didn’t quite believe his own explanation, he said, “Another freelance team hit the Russians. Americans, she told me. Charlotte, I mean. I don’t recall much of it. They came over the side of the ship. I think I got kicked in the head. I have little bits and pieces of memory, little jigsaw pieces really, of being carried off the ship, and driven to a hospital. This one, I suppose,” he said, looking around them. “Charlotte told me they were running backup on Viv’s operation. That’s what they told her.”
He shook his head.
“But Viv would have told me that, and he didn’t. She thought it was bullshit too.”
He shrugged, unable to explain the mystery.
“I can’t say that I care much. This city is full of spies and operators and penny-a-dozen villains. Maybe it was just another crew after Bremmer. God knows there are plenty of them around. Could have been more Israelis. I’m lucky they didn’t slot me.” He sighed. “We’ll probably never know. And in the end, does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” she conceded, before falling silent. “I’m tired,” she said after a while, and she closed her eyes.
But it did matter.
Because Julia was certain the man who had saved them, who had saved her, had died in a plane crash nearly fifteen years ago. And his name was Dan Black.
EPILOGUE
“No kill six,” said Maria O’Brien. “Breaking contact.”
Damn it, thought Kolhammer. But in reply, he spoke without urgency.
“Acknowledged,” he said, and cut the link to the Quiet Room’s senior operator as his car pulled onto the tarmac a short distance from the plane that would take him across the Channel to England, and then on to Scotland.
The Room—as its few, highly cleared and privileged occupants referred to it—was largely empty these days. It had played its role most energetically in the years after the Transition, and most significantly in that strange, unsettled time after the Special Administration Zone had reverted to contemporary jurisdiction. Its small number of well-placed operatives had worked tirelessly and secretly in those early years to secure the interests of the ten thousand plus uptimers who had arrived through Pope’s wormhole.
And by using Davidson’s secretly weaponized satellites Kolhammer may have just opened the Room, built under his direction, to the world. But what choice did he have? He did not relish the inquisition which would now come into how a small, closed 21st century cabal had actively plotted to rework the culture of mid-20th century America into something resembling their own, preferred time. And how they had all but taken over the world’s largest corporation in doing so.
But an asset you can never use because you fear revealing it, is not an asset. It’s a failure waiting to happen.
He put aside what he could not change and directed his thoughts to the next few hours. The small civilian aerodrome had been used by the Allies during the war to stage long-range bombing raids into Germany. It was normally quiet these days, but tonight it was alive with the activity of a hundred or more US military and government personnel. They hastened to ready his flig
ht out of France, which had become a battleground again, a mere decade after it had last been fought over.
He was not taking Air Force Two. The converted passenger jet had filed flight plans from Paris to New York and would take off after them, escorted by F5 Freedom Fighters and a refueler. As far as anybody knew, and especially as far as the Red Army Air Force knew, Vice President Philip Kolhammer was on that flight.
He wondered whether it would be targeted, and he felt a nauseating guilt for the men and women who were risking their lives in a rudimentary diversion. The car came to a halt and Kolhammer climbed out of the rear cabin, still surrounded by his Secret Service detail. They hurried across the wet concrete tarmac to his waiting flight, a small business jet. It would also be escorted by USAF fighters, but a hell of a lot more discreetly.
It was an unseasonably chilly night, with low cloud cover, and the ground glistening with puddles from the earlier showers. He hurried up the stairs in through the forward door, where an air force lieutenant, a young woman, saluted him smartly. He returned the salute.
They were not long delayed in preflight. After strapping in, he had only to wait for clearance from the tower before they taxied out to the runway. The engines spooled up from a low whine to a powerful roar and a few minutes later they were airborne and turning north for the British Isles. He had no advisors with him. He preferred to travel light and the American presidency had not yet evolved into its full Imperial state. A lousy Veep could still get around with a surprisingly small entourage.
Kolhammer had a small nest of four seats to himself. His security detail and the flight crew were strapped in behind him. Three thick manila folders, all of them stamped TOP SECRET awaited his perusal. Initial reports from US and Allied intelligence agencies on the surprise Soviet attack.
Not that it had been much of a surprise to him. He had been expecting something like this for years. And warning against it.
When he could not goad the Administration into action—not even from the vice president’s office—he had taken action himself, telling O’Brien that Davidson Aerospace was going into the arms trade. But quietly.
So quietly that Slim Jim Davidson himself did not exactly know, or entirely understand what his own company was doing. It was not a coincidence that the Dual Use Orbital Platforms Program at Davidson Aerospace was a small team, staffed overwhelmingly with specialists who had come through the wormhole.
People would question him for what he had done. Hell, they’d probably impeach him.
But he’d had his reasons.
Before turning to the intelligence reports that awaited him, Kolhammer took out a flexipad and started to list those reasons in an email to President Eisenhower.
STALIN’S HAMMER HAS FALLEN.
THE AXIS OF TIME WILL RETURN
IN WORLD WAR 3.1
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, this book was a collaborative effort. Thanks to my Beta readers, to my editor Deonie Fiford for cleaning up the original manuscript, and Alicia Burke for proofing the final.
The cover art is by William Heavy and formatting by Guido Henkel.
And thanks to you, for taking the time to read. I do appreciate it.
Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time Page 15