Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time Read online

  STALIN’S HAMMER

  CAIRO

  A NOVEL OF THE AXIS OF TIME

  by

  JOHN BIRMINGHAM

  Published by John Birmingham

  PO Box 437

  Bulimba, Queensland 4171

  Australia

  First Edition published 2016

  Visit John Birmingham’s official website at

  cheeseburgergothic.com

  for the latest news, book details, and other information

  Copyright © John Birmingham, 2016

  Cover design by William Heavy

  Ebook formatting by Guido Henkel

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  STALIN’S HAMMER

  Years have passed since Admiral Kolhammer’s 21st-century battlefleet was dragged into a wormhole and thrown across oceans of time, emerging with disastrous consequences and shattering the history of the Second World War.

  Hitler and the Nazis have fallen, Kolhammer sits in the White House as Vice President, but Stalin rules half of Europe and Asia. The great Soviet engines of state power turn and burn to set history right. Not just the war, but all future time.

  TOP SECRET ABSOLUTE

  Office of Strategic Services Operational Evaluation Program (OSSOEP)

  After Action Report [Operation Tangent]

  FILE SEQUENCE: STALIN’S HAMMER

  STATION: ROME

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  EXTRACTION OF TARGET SOBESKAIA (VALENTIN) FROM SOVIET SECTOR (ROME) BY SPECIAL OPERATOR (IVANOV) WAS ABANDONED DUE TO HOSTILE ACTION BY NKVD.

  CONFIRM INVOLVEMENT OF TARGET SKAROV. KILL ORDER REMAINS CURRENT.

  OSS STATION CHIEF (ROME) INITIATED CONTACT WITH SUBJECT WINDSOR (HARRY, COL. HRH) MAY 6. 1955. PRESENT WAS STATION HEAD (ROME) MI6 (CARSTAIRS, TALBOT).

  SUBJECT WINDSOR WAS BRIEFED ON OPERATION TANGENT (FILE SEQUENCE STALIN’S HAMMER). VOLUNTEERED ASSISTANCE IN EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION OF SOBESKAIA, VALENTIN.

  SUBJECT WINDSOR WITH SIS PERSONNEL AND CONTRACTORS SECURED EXTRACTION WITH PREJUDICE OF TARGET SOBESKAIA FROM LOCATION 2. (SEE ANNEX 8)

  SOBESKAIA TRANSFERRED TO A SECURE LOCATION UNDER FIVE-EYES ARRANGEMENTS. INTERROGATION ON-GOING. SEE ANNEXE 9 FOR TAKE TO DATE.

  OP TANGENT UPGRADED TO PRIORITY ULTRA. RESOURCING CLEARED AT NATIONAL COMMAND LEVEL.

  OSS RECOMMENDS IMMEDIATE DEFCON REVIEW.

  SUMMARY ENDS.

  PROLOGUE

  Magdeburg. 1944.

  Prince Harry drove his fist into the Nazi’s face. Otto Skorzeny’s head snapped back and his coal scuttle helmet flew off, clattering across the flagstones of the basement floor. The German grunted and staggered backwards, but Harry cursed as he felt his knuckles break. He had caught the leading edge of the helmet with the desperate, poorly aimed blow. The skin split on his fingers and fresh blood flowed from the wound. He ignored the pain of this new injury as best he could, but before he could follow up on any brief advantage over the SS man, Skorzeny shook off the terrible blow like an old bull shooing a fly.

  He was a huge man, with the advantage over Harry in both size and weight despite the privations of the last months of the war. Harry could see him tracking the frightened family with his peripheral vision, and he moved to keep himself between them. Skorzeny appeared to suppress a snarl that wanted to run wild on his face. He remained in a fighting stance, knees bent, leaning forward, his weight evenly distributed and his fists held up in front of him in the style of an old-fashioned bare-knuckle brawler. But he did not move towards them again.

  “We don’t need to do this, Colonel,” said Harry. “You can just quietly fuck off and disappear. You know that. We’re done here and nobody will come looking for you. Didn’t happen last time, won’t happen now.”

  The look on the German’s face told Harry he didn’t think it a very good bargain. Skorzeny shifted his weight a little to the left, moving closer to one of two pillars that supported the dark oaken planks of the low roof. The cellar in which they faced off was not large, but it was big enough that Harry could not be sure of blocking the German if he suddenly accelerated and tried to sidestep him.

  The room was illuminated, poorly, by three candles guttering in the darkness, throwing unsteady shadows up the sweating walls. Above them the ruins of a four-story apartment block in Magdeburg’s Gründerzeit district jumped to the impact of nearby bomb blasts and rocket fall. Dust and grit drifted down on both men. Harry adjusted again to counter Skorzeny.

  “It is you who does not need to do this, Your Highness,” said the German. “You should just slip away from here, rejoin your unit before the Communists arrive. They have been dropping all over the city looking for Professor Bremmer and his colleagues. You don’t imagine they will show you any deference if you get in the way, do you?”

  Harry remained in his own fighting crouch, unwilling to be talked out of the confrontation.

  “What? Like you, you mean?”

  Skorzeny actually smiled at that, an exhausted grin that cracked the layer of gray dust on his face. “I have my orders directly from the Führer,” he explained.

  “Which one?” Harry asked. “You’ve been through a couple now.”

  The German’s face knotted in anger.

  Okay, thought Harry, poor choice. You just couldn’t credit the inability of some people to see reason. The few real Nazis he’d met face-to-face, and mostly killed, had seemed quite reasonable enough, even while they were trying to shoot holes in him. It was just business after all, nothing personal. And then if you were a smartass like Harry, you stuck your finger into an open wound and gouged. The nuking of Berlin which, incidentally, turned their second Führer, Heinrich Himmler, into superheated plasma, was one of those issues that tended to set your average Nazi right off. After all, hugely destructive super weapons were supposed to be a Nazi thing. And Führer jokes of any kind? Best not go there.

  Skorzeny came at him with a savage growl, drawing a bayonet from the scabbard at his hip as Harry reached quickly for his own dagger, a Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife. Both men had expended the last of their ammunition seeing off separate squads of Red Army commandos. The Soviets were supposed to halt their advance at the line of the Oder River. And they had for the most part, because the Wehrmacht held them there, using thousands of tons of chemical weapons to create an impenetrable barrier. But Magdeburg was infested with Communists. Spetsnaz and NKVD troopers, too. Not just Red Army peasants.

  Fighting continued in a chaotic fashion throughout Germany and southern Europe, despite the collapse of the regime in Berlin. Or rather, despite its reduction to radioactive ash. In Magdeburg, deep in the unsettled, unclaimed battlespace behind the Oder, special forces from all three sides raked at each other in darkness and in secret. Cowering in the shadows behind Harry was one of the reasons. The warrior prince sunk down onto his haunches, giving Skorzeny the impression he was rooted to
the ground, digging in to receive the German’s assault. But he shifted his balance to the balls of his feet, away from his heels, and tensed up his core, imagining a tightly compressed, coiled spring at the center of his hara.

  Part of his attention still floated in the darkness behind him, alert to the possibility that Bremmer and his family might panic and try to run for it. They would almost certainly die if they did. Hundreds of Soviet troops swarmed over the ruins of the city above, contending with SS Werewolf squads and Allied special forces. Rangers, Special Air Service, Polish GROM, a right bloody dog’s breakfast it was up there.

  Skorzeny attacked and Harry deflected the bayonet thrust with the blade of his own shorter fighting knife. Sparks leapt from the weapons as edged metal screeched. Harry pivoted on his leading leg, whipping his hip to one side and allowing Skorzeny to blunder through the space where he had been standing half a heartbeat ago. Before the snarling giant could charge across the room to reach the professor and his family, Harry put his shoulder into a deflection, shunting Skorzeny into one of the thick wooden poles supporting the roof. The German grunted with the impact, a low guttural sound, but used the rebound to come at Harry again with a slashing backhand.

  A half-step backward carried the Englishman out of range, and another step avoided the return swing. But Harry had lost track of the distance to the wall behind him. He might have to move around and seek out a better position. He might be about to crash into the wall. Only one thing for it then. It was Harry’s turn to push off and launch himself at his enemy. Skorzeny didn’t hesitate, changing his grip on the bayonet to effect a vicious stabbing motion aimed at Harry’s neck. A piercing kiai did nothing to interrupt the flow of the attack. The SS officer was too practised in close combat for that. But the war shout focused Harry’s energy and carried him inside the arc of Skorzeny’s returning arm. The tip of the blade opened up the sleeve of his battledress uniform and scored a white hot line of pain across his upper arm.

  But he had avoided the worst of the attack and now found himself favorably positioned to use Skorzeny’s momentum to drive him back towards the thick wooden pole again. Harry hooked one booted foot around his opponent’s lower leg and shoved. It was an ugly, ungainly maneuver, not at all like the smooth flow of the judo throw on which it was based, but it worked. Skorzeny tumbled over and fell awkwardly. His bayonet caught in the large, deep gap between two flagstones and the tempered steel shattered as he toppled over.

  Harry leapt at the opportunity, intending to drive a kick into the man’s temple, before finishing him with the blade. Stunned and bleeding, Otto Skorzeny was still no easy kill. He scissored his legs and caught Harry by surprise, whipping his feet out from underneath him. Harry went down in a tangle, losing his fighting knife and most of the breath in his body. Jangles of electric shock ran up one arm as he crashed down awkwardly on an elbow. The German was on him with the speed of a starving rat and Harry cried out involuntarily as pain and shock exploded in his left shoulder.

  The hilt of Skorzeny’s broken bayonet protruded from Harry’s chest, just a few inches north of his heart. Roaring, he clamped his spasming arm over the German’s wrist, locking it in rather than pushing him away. Skorzeny tried to rear back, attempting to pull the jagged steel fang out of Harry’s shoulder for another blow. Harry stiffened the fingers of his good arm into a spear hand and drove it into one of Skorzeny’s eyes. It was not a clean shot, and it did not have his full weight behind it, but he still felt the tips of at least two filthy, bloodied fingers rip open the thin membrane of the lower eyelid and gouge deeply into the socket.

  The German’s unholy scream spoke to the damage Harry had done and Skorzeny could not help but throw his hands protectively up to his face. Harry’s strong right hand closed around the grip of the ruined bayonet. He wrenched out the shortened, broken blade and drove the iron pommel into Skorzeny’s temple with a chopping backhand. The protective mantle of bone, so much thinner at that point on the skull, shattered and collapsed inwards with a wet, cracking sound. Harry felt a jolt run through the giant body, and then all of the tension drained out of it as Skorzeny vomited and toppled towards him. Harry braced and bridged to his right, throwing Skorzeny off to that side. Black roses bloomed in his vision when he pushed himself up and threw his good arm around the German’s throat, catching him before he dropped completely.

  Skorzeny was unconscious and breathing erratically. Harry’s forearm bit into his Adam’s apple and he pressed his upper body weight against the back of the man’s head. The autonomic nervous system cut in and Skorzeny thrashed against the strangle. The pain from Harry’s stab wound was fiery and dizzying but he held on.

  The life ran out of the SS man and Harry let the body drop to the floor where it landed with a dull thud.

  A child was screaming. A young girl he hadn’t even noticed before. As he panted for breath, he caught Professor Bremmer staring at him with an expression somewhere between horror and blessed relief.

  CHAPTER ONE

  London. 1955.

  Prince Harry emerged from the Underground at Piccadilly Circus and stretched his legs on the short walk to Section 6, a block and a half down Coventry Street, and a minute or two against the traffic on Oxendon. A heatwave was due that summer for the first test cricket series against the Principalities of the Subcontinent, and it seemed to Harry that the weather would not disappoint. More than a decade after the Transition you could never quite be certain of how things might turn out on a particular day. The butterfly effect and all that, he supposed. But the slow, measured breathing in and out of the planet, the turning of the seasons, the deep rhythms of the global climate seemed largely unaffected. London had originally sweltered through weeks of unusually hot, dry weather in the summer of 1955. It looked as though nothing would change in this newer, altered version of the city’s history.

  So much else has changed, however, he thought as he stepped briskly around three bundles of papers, just delivered to a newsstand at the corner of the Trocadero. The heavy bundles of newsprint, tied up with string, came sailing off the back of an old army surplus lorry that slowed as it rumbled past, but didn’t stop. On the front page of The Times a restrained headline announced the latest national accounts, with unemployment falling below one percent. Thumping down next to it, The Daily Express trumpeted the launch of HMS Ark Royal three months ahead of schedule. The new flagship of the Royal Navy shared a superficial similarity to its namesake in the original timeline, but beneath the steel plates of the flight deck it was a modern wonder of augmented technologies.

  Harry had been invited to the ceremony but had to beg off because of his meeting this morning.

  He found the unemployment figure in the Times a little implausible, given the number of people who seemed to be idling about on the street, delaying his progress. Many of them were lost inside chunky plastic headphones, most of which he supposed were plugged into transistor radios. Miniaturization and mass scale production had not yet delivered a Walkman analog to the 1950s‌—‌not long now though, he thought‌—‌but transistor radios had proved enormously popular, just as they had the first time around. Despite the clear skies, the city air was unpleasant, thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of fried food. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

  Hurrying past competing posters for Capture Von Braun! and a commemorative premiere of Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre, he felt sweat begin to trickle down his back. Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece had of course been performed many times after the war, particularly by the smaller, more determinedly outré theater troupes who took their outsider status so very seriously. But had Manning Pope’s wormhole experiment not up-ended the history of the world by accidentally tossing a 21st-century battle fleet back in time to kick Der Führer’s ass, Godot would have turned up, or not, at the Arts Theatre this summer. Hence a commemorative premiere was deemed appropriate.

  Harry stopped at a café bar, a small sliver of chrome and glass wedged into the Trocad
ero between a McDonald’s‌—‌Try Our New Fish Finger Burger!‌—‌and an electrical store piled high with television sets‌—‌Colour! Credit Available! Best Terms!‌—‌and heavy-looking “portable” tape decks, all of them pounding out a big band version of the Beatles “Love Me Do”. He bought a coffee, white, one sugar, and scanned the sports news while he waited for the barista to finish the pour. Frank Tyson had cleaned up the Principalities for the MCC in an early tour match, before Peter May had buried them with a double century. Harry wondered if there might be an omen in there, not just for the tour but for the future of the fractious, unstable little monarchies, fiefdoms, theocracies and good old-fashioned dictatorships that made up the loose patchwork of nations that once would have become India and Pakistan. The latter, he thought, was no great loss. Not even to cricket. But India… He shook his head. That was a tragedy.

  “Here you go, guv,” the serving girl said as she passed across his cardboard cup of takeaway coffee. He smiled as their eyes met, and she gasped, finally realizing who he was. The once-upon-a-time heir to the crown, another crown in another world, thanked her and moved off. Harry had found he could enjoy an increasingly workable street-level anonymity in the last couple of years, ever since the Act of Succession had cut him out of any chance of succeeding his grandmother. Celebrity culture wasn’t nearly as carnivorous and toxic here as it had been back up when, and his retreat from public life since the end of the war had only hastened the dwindling interest. Indeed, he thought to himself, it was possible that girl back there had gone wide-eyed because she recognized him from the publicity for Capture Von Braun!, rather than from any news item about the Royal Family. He also decided the coffee had been a bad idea on such a warm morning.

  He binned the hot drink about halfway through, as he turned the corner into Oxendon. The slightly bohemian crowds around the Trocadero, with its collection of cafés and little galleries, gave way to somber suited businessmen and civil servants. A few nodded to him, or tipped their bowler hats as they passed by, but more simply carried on right past him, oblivious to their close encounter with the blood royal. Harry pulled at the front of his shirt a few times, trying to ventilate some of the warm air lying close to his skin. He turned into the foyer of an old Georgian-era walk-up a minute or so past the old Prince of Wales Theatre.