by G T Almasi
Dad and Brando both chortle into their plates of heavy German fare.
Falcon blushes. “I’m fine otherwise. I was only in action for a couple of days.”
My partner takes his turn. “I’ve got a lot of abrasions, plus this one big injury.” Brando points at the fresh bandage over his ear. It’s much cleaner than the grubby mess he’s been wearing since we were patched up at Helen Wheels’s place in Dachau.
“Will it scar?” Cleo asks through a puff of smoke.
“Yeah, probably.” Patrick looks at me. “If I wear my hair longer, it’ll hardly show.”
I comm to him, “Don’t worry, pumpkin-head. I’ll still love you.”
Brando tries to hide his smile in his coffee mug.
We’re gathered in the Pratergarten, one of Berlin’s oldest beer gardens. Many of the city’s watering holes were trashed during the battle for the city. Pratergarten survived—kinda. The establishment’s tract of outdoor seating features hundreds of dinged-up yellow picnic tables clustered around dozens of charred chestnut trees. In fact, one of the flora morte is still smoldering, which lends a sort of dining-in-hell ambience to our breakfast.
The Pratergarten owners reopened for business the moment the shelling stopped because Germany’s passion for bombastic liver-pickling is more than a compulsive vice; it’s opera. Even so, the genetically efficient Heinies also use Biergartens for more sober necessities like eating a quick breakfast.
Our breakfast, however, has not been quick. So much has happened since I left the States, it takes hours for me to catch up. My mom bravely told me how only one of those baby girls came through our raid at Aberdeen alive. Even though her Original was the black-haired Talon, the surviving child’s hair is coming in white. Her caretakers call her Snow.
News from Munich continues to be grim. Between the nuke and the firestorm, the city had to be completely evacuated. Water is the biggest problem. The local reservoirs were all contaminated, so every drop consumed near Munich has to be trucked in from elsewhere.
If Germany rebuilds Munich—a big if—the work can’t begin until the local terrain cools down a few zillion curies. This return to habitability may take anywhere from one year to one generation. Science’s only precedent for a nuked metropolis is Pyongyang in 1951. While not a direct hit like Munich’s, the Pyongyang bomb was much larger. Restoring that city took decades, even with Asia’s unlimited labor pool.
Right now, Europe faces a bigger problem, namely the Soviet Union. Moscow is preparing a huge army to pour into the former Reich Provinces of Poland and Hungary. It’s a good thing the KGB hasn’t assembled a clear picture of the situation, because if the Commies had any idea how discombobulated Europe is right now they’d invade immediately, ready or not.
The reeling Europeans have to unfuck themselves mucho pronto. The first step was to find someone dumb enough to take charge. As of last night, that dummy is my old pal Victor Eisenberg, who was unanimously appointed to lead Germany’s interim government. To hear Victor tell it, he was pretty much drafted into the job. I had expected to see a mad rush for the gig after Honecker was no-confidenced into oblivion. Instead, every political careerist dodged the post like a cat avoiding a waterfall. Patrick explained their disinclination in two words.
“The Russians.”
What Brando means is Victor inherited a shit sundae, topped by a turd-cherry mandate to fend off the Soviet horde. This thankless assignment will incur an ass-galaxy of collateral damage. Whoever carries it out will never hold public office again. That’s fine with Victor; he hates politics. He isn’t really a dummy, though. For this specific assignment, he’s as qualified as anyone. Besides, someone has to do it.
Acting Chancellor Eisenberg made his lack of political aspirations immediately apparent. Within minutes of taking office, he nationalized half of Germany’s capital assets. His goal is to force Germany’s reeling industries to collaborate on restoring their battered economy whether it’s profitable or not. Victor’s decision set the world record for Most Disliked First Executive Action.
Victor’s surprising second act won back the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Beer-Head. It also bought him time to reorganize his armed forces. The civil war’s frontless nature sneezed military units across the continent like a gust of rain. And now, suddenly, the troops are all from different countries. Their chains of command, communication protocols, and lines of supply are as tragically twisted as an Irishman’s guts the morning after St. Paddy’s Day. Facing this disorganized mess, Victor decided he had only one way to fend off the Soviet swarm.
He hired someone else to do it.
Europe’s eastern border will be secured by a private security company. Sounds like rent-a-cops, but Victor assured everyone these will be conventional ground forces: armor, artillery, aircraft, the works. It’ll be the largest use of mercenaries since Alexander the Great. Exactly how these mercenaries will operate has not been shared with lowly field operatives like us. We only know where this wildness will happen, because we’re going there, too.
ExOps has expanded its House in Warsaw to serve as our foreign headquarters for a new section designated to operate in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It’s now our biggest office outside Washington, D.C. Officially it’s the ExOps Residence in Warsaw, but Falcon already shortened the name to the Polish-sounding “Rezdi.”
Patrick, Raj, Falcon, and I will choo-choo it to Poland in a few days. Once in place, we’ll form a Hit Man’s Sampler of various Level classes: Interceptor, Vindicator, and Malefactor. Other Levels will join us soon. My parents will return to ExOps headquarters in D.C. with Cyrus, Frank Bell, and—of course—Director Kennedy.
Speaking of whom, Bobby “Rogue Mode” Kennedy has catapulted himself to superstardom in the clandestine community. Not even Wild Bill Donovan—the wacko godfather of American secret services—ever went rogue. Kennedy took his whole fucking agency off the reservation and got away with it! If Bobby keeps this up, he could get elected president, no matter what Papa Joe Kennedy wants.
I bum a cigarette off Cleo and relax against Patrick’s shoulder. When our waiter walks by, I order myself a short beer. Patrick gives me a disapproving look.
“What?” I comm. “It’s gotta be eleven o’clock somewhere.”
—DARE: WARSAW HQ—
4 OCT 1981
STATUS REPORT
From: ExOps Residence in Warsaw
To: Francis Bell, Front Desk, Russian Section, ExOps
Sir,
Preparations on the Residence are complete. Please dispatch agents to our office as soon as possible. We already have Job Numbers for them. Please find attached the list of equipment and weapons we’ll need moving forward.
Sincerely,
—Gibson N. M. Williams
Local Desk, ExOps Residence in Warsaw
Extreme Operations Division
56
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 5:45 P.M. CEST
EXOPS RESIDENCE, 26 KANONIA, WARSAW, POLAND
The sausage and potato fairies bring us another platter of leaden Eastern European grub. Raj, his right arm in a sling and a cane by his chair, awkwardly shovels food onto his plate with his left hand.
“Scarlet,” he says around a mouthful of bratwurst, “I still don’t understand how you knew which hallway to jump into.”
“It was behind the only windows lighting up with gunfire.” He means a dramatic entrance I made as we mopped up the Reichstag last Thursday. “It’s a good thing I was there, Raj. That slippery-looking guy with the bayonet woulda knifed you.”
“Scarlet, my ballistic armor is rated to withstand—”
“Not if he stabbed you in the neck!”
The deep-voiced Vindicator lowers his eyes to his plate of food. “Okay, yes,” he grumbles. “If he’d landed a lucky cut I might have needed your help. So, thanks for co
vering me. You—”
I proceed to noisily regale our other dinnermates with the amazing tale of Scarlet Saves Raj From Certain Death.
Then I remember something.
“Hey,” I blurt. “I saved your butt!”
“Yes.” Raj sighs. “I was just about to say, Scarlet. If you let me—”
I interrupt him again. “You have to tell me your name!”
“What?”
“You said if I saved your life you’d tell me your real name.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do! I was laid up after my Job Number in Baghdad. You came to see me in the hospital. You were feeling all Santa-Raj and you said if I ever—”
Raj closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, okay. I remember now.”
I lean forward and stare at the big man. I expect something cripplingly dorky like “Ervin” or circle-of-hell cutesy like “Buddy.” Once I backfill Brando in on what’s unfolding in front of him, my partner won’t believe I finally wangled this information from Mr. Reticent.
Raj takes a long breath and says, “My mother is very socially active. She’s participated in more civil rights marches than we’ve had hot meals. When I was born she wanted to make sure I never forgot what to fight for. So…my real name is Malcolm Martin Luther DuBois Johnson.”
I nearly see stars as I quickly rewind my Day Loop to make sure I heard him right. That’s too incredible to be true, but Raj has zero humor on a good day, and his expression is completely serious. I rewind again and listen to his name once more. His recorded voice is the last thing I hear for at least five minutes because I just about die laughing.
I finish celebrating ol’ Raj DuBois’s real name, and our conversation returns to its more typical gloomy tenor. We speak of death, in particular how Markus Wolf’s grisly demise did not immediately end his rebellion. His remaining forces still occupied strong defensive positions, with plenty of ammo to spray around. They held out for eighteen hours before receiving word their Subglorious Leader had gone and gotten his face shot off.
While Raj, Tiger, and I prowled the Reichstag’s halls to finish off Wolf’s bodyguards, King, Jade, and Patrick herded the surviving members of the German parliament into the cavernous Volkshalle. The hall had become Victor Eisenberg’s command center as he oversaw the final stage of his liberation of Berlin.
Before Operation SCORPIO, I never equated “liberate” with “destroy,” but that’s exactly what’s happened. Long swathes of Europe have been bombed, burned, or flattened by artillery.
Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, London, Madrid, Manchester, Milan, Munich of course, Rome, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Warsaw have all suffered damage above- and belowground. Some of these cities got really clobbered and lost a lot of people, not to mention basic services like water and electricity. Others places—although banged up—retained their infrastructure and are relatively livable. One of these fortunate cities is Warsaw.
Now that we’re at the Rezdi, our first general order is to help stem the anticipated flood tide of Cossack crazies. Briefs from CIA make it sound like the USSR will invade Europe any minute. ExOps’s demonstrated expertise in creating huge messes seems to have the brain trust at Langley thinking we’re the perfect people to throw in front of the Soviet bulldozer.
Running this all-clown circus is the Warsaw Desk—my new boss, Gibson N. M. Williams. He’s a middle-aged misfit genius who ditched the dusty, hallowed halls of academia for the boogie-woogie world of espionage. The dude has around a dozen advanced degrees, so Falcon nicknamed him The Brain. The man himself prefers to be called Gib.
When we arrived earlier today, Gib greeted us with room assignments, comm-codes, and a special treat for Yours Truly: a shrink to treat my shit-raft of stress-induced psychological disorders. The psychiatrist’s name is Dr. Irena Rasinski. Her job is to keep my head on straight and decide if I’m fit for service. Dr. Herodotus has always been a bit of a pushover for me. Not this woman. We had our first meeting this afternoon, and she laid down the law.
“Do not bullshit me, Alix. I will not have you in the field unless I know it is what you can do. If I even think you are bullshitting me, you can nevermind being a Level.”
Her accent made “bullshitting” sound like “booshing,” but I got the point. We began work on a mental toolkit to help me manage my panic attacks, hallucinations, nightmares, tremors, hysterical blindness, fainting spells, and all the other fucked-up garbage that comes with post-traumatic stress.
Additionally, Dr. H is following through on his threat to detox me. No Enhances for a month. I’m snoozing so much I may get all my sleep in one go and then be able to stay awake forever.
Meanwhile, back in D.C., our jackframe jockeys trace and repair the trail of mayhem caused by Jakob Fredericks. The son-of-a-bitch continued rewriting CORE until the Red Army Faction abducted him. Untangling it will take a ton of time because every single data point has to be independently verified.
Some of the cyber-detective work will be aided by the records seized from the Strategic Services Council, Fredericks’s D.C. think tank. The FBI raid on the SSC resulted in the arrests of the entire staff, who either knew what their boss was doing, or didn’t. But they’re toast either way, since those brainies are paid to be the smartest zipperheads in the Beltway’s steaming pile of intellectual giants.
Speaking of which, after ExOps’s string of spectacular successes in Berlin, the Executive Intelligence Chairman reinstated our agency and retroactively approved Bobby’s impromptu company-wide field trip. Admitting that ExOps wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the German Civil War would have raised too many embarrassing questions, for example, “Why did you give a building full of hyper-juiced lunatics to an overentitled hothead like Bobby Freaking Kennedy?”
I asked Brando how much of this would ever be public knowledge. He held his hand up then pressed his thumb and forefinger into a goose egg.
“None?”
“Ten percent, maybe. And that’d be so heavily sanitized we wouldn’t recognize it.” He shrugged. “So, yeah. None.”
One episode that certainly won’t appear in the official reports is the drag race between RFK’s telephone truck and Victor’s armored command vehicle. Both Kennedy and Eisenberg wanted to be the first one to the Volkshalle. Whether their motivation was political or just testosterone, I don’t know.
Or care. I lit into both of them. Victor was first. I approached him in the Volkshalle, under the damaged Great Dome.
“Victor!” I called.
He turned and smiled. “Scarlet, my friend!”
I kicked General Eisenberg in the groin and screamed him a piece of my mind.
Victor’s staff officers didn’t appreciate my nut-buster greeting at all. The ensuing brawl attracted some onlookers from the American Expedition.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” they chanted.
The American officers cheered every time I flattened one of Victor’s men. After Victor caught his breath enough to call off his guys, I asked the American soldiers if they’d seen a telephone truck full of shotgun-toting desperadoes. A lieutenant told me RFK and my parents were parked in the vast plaza out in front of the Volkshalle.
“Mom,” I commed. “You’re in the Great Square?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Where are you?”
“On my way to you. I’ll be there in half a minute.”
I found them in a van labeled BERLIN TELEFON. Director Kennedy was sending orders to all his operatives and didn’t notice me as I approached the back of his truck. He must have felt the vehicle shift on its suspension when I climbed in, because he turned to see who it was.
“Scarlet! Hey, great work—”
My boot bashed into his baby-maker and Bobby K went down like a slide trombone. I leaned over him to yell the same thing I’d told Victor.
>
“Old man, you risk my mother’s life again—” I tilted his head so he could see me. “—and I’ll kick you till you’re dead!”
My parents looked on in horror, but when my father heard what I said he broke out laughing. Mom shifted her eyes to me then immediately forgot about the groaning scion of American society.
“Alixandra!” She tossed her comm-set off her head and pulled me to her like I was a big teddy bear. Next Dad hugged me, which gave Mom a better look at me.
She burst into tears. “My God, angel, what happened to you?” The more of me Cleo saw, the more upset she became. “There are bandages all over you! Half your hair is burned off! One of your eyebrows is missing!”
I hadn’t noticed the eyebrow.
Cleo was still going. “…your skin looks terrible! You’re much too thin. Are you limping? What happened to—”
“Mom!” I grabbed both her hands. “Enough! I’m all right, okay?” I wrapped my arms around her and we buried our faces in each other’s hair. My dad embraced both of us, pressing his head against ours.
Bobby rolled onto his back. “Very, ah…very touching,” he wheezed. “Now one of you help me up.”
That was almost a week ago. By now, Director Kennedy has returned to D.C. with everybody from Med-Tech, Admin, Info, and the Front Desks. My parents went with him, but not before we had a few days together in the smoldering wreckage of the twentieth century’s greatest superpower. A very Nico family sort of vacation.
Even stranger than the setting was how our little holiday included Falcon. This was fine for me, a little weird for Dad, and very difficult for Cleo.
Since F-Bird and I completely missed each other’s childhoods I’m not sure he’ll ever feel like a sibling, but one way or another I can see him as part of our lives.
My father is taking the phlegmatic, been-through-hell-and-back route. My daughter springs me from eight years of captivity? Great! My mortal enemy has left behind a clone of me? Sure! My clone works in the same office as me? All right, whatever you say! Dad is happy just to be here.