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

  Gracie waited impatiently to eat, standing with the ladies from Hut 23, including Mrs Ritherdown. They didn’t say much, the grown-ups. Now that all the excitement was over, they seemed even quieter than usual, although there wasn’t much point in talking. It was hard to hear over the noise of the strange wingless planes that came and went from Camp 5 with a terrible thudding roar. Gracie tried to ignore the rumbling in her tummy as she watched a lady soldier come stomping out of one of the aircraft. Right out of its belly! The lady soldier was dressed just like the giants guarding Colonel Tanaka and his men, but she had a red cross on her uniform. She was a nurse then and she looked even fiercer than Mrs Ritherdown.

  The angry lady stormed right up to their little gathering, ignoring the Japanese at first. She looked at Gracie, noticing her among all of the grown-ups.

  “Come here, darlin’,” she said, and even though she looked so fierce and scary her voice was soft. “I’m Doctor François. What’s your name?”

  The doctor‌—‌a lady doctor, there really was no end to the surprises with the ghost people‌—‌kneeled down and gave her a little hug. In a quiet voice, Gracie said that her proper name was Charlotte-Grace, which was what her mommy always called her, but Doctor François may not have heard.

  Dr François introduced herself to the grown-up ladies then, and she gave them a little talk about how everything was better, and they would all be going home, and how the men who had done the terrible things to them would be punished. Sanctioned, she called it. They would be sanctioned.

  Gracie held on to Dr François’s leg while she spoke, as she had once held onto her mother’s leg during the loudest summer storms back in Kansas. Dr François was wearing army pants. The pockets were full of mysterious objects and she wore a pistol at one hip and a very large knife at the other. It did not look like something a doctor would use. Charlotte-Grace held on, nonetheless, because it made her feel better.

  She held on extra tight when Dr François ordered some of the Marines‌—‌she called them Marines, so that’s what they were even though they didn’t look like any Marines Charlotte-Grace had ever seen‌—‌to bring over the Japanese prisoners. There were lots of prisoners, but she meant Colonel Tanaka and his officers. Charlotte-Grace could see that Colonel Tanaka was very scared. There was no color in his face and he was shaking. It made her feel good to see him like that. She had seen a lot of people look very scared since she had arrived in the Philippines. Many of them had been scared of Colonel Tanaka.

  Not all of his officers were scared, however. Two of them swaggered over as though they still ran the camp. She did not know their names, but she recognized one of them from the time they had cut off the Australian soldiers’ heads. He had been cheering the loudest. Mrs Ritherdown leaned forward and spat at him, which was far and away the most surprising thing Charlotte-Grace had seen since the ghost soldiers first arrived.

  “What’s your name, asshole?” Dr François asked.

  She was talking to Colonel Tanaka, and the casual way in which she addressed him with a swear word caused Charlotte-Grace to look up suddenly. She could see muscles bunching in Dr François’s face. It seemed she was very angry. Her whole body felt like it was made out of steel cables.

  Colonel Tanaka pretended not to understand, which was a mistake, because everybody knew he could speak English. Charlotte-Grace wanted to see what would happen next, but Dr François gently pushed her face into her leg and held one hand over her ear. She took out her pistol and fired it. The noise was such a surprise that Gracie jumped. One of the ladies screamed and some even started to cry.

  Charlotte-Grace recovered from her shock and uncurled herself from Dr François’s leg. She walked over to look at the body of one of the officers. Nobody stopped her. She kicked the twitching man, to make sure he wasn’t getting back up again. Nobody stopped her doing that either.

  She heard Dr François saying, in a very calm voice, “I asked you what your name is, you rapist motherfucker.”

  She was very rude. Not at all like Mommy. But Charlotte-Grace decided that was okay. This last year she had seen much worse things than people using swear words.

  Colonel Tanaka didn’t think it was okay though. He started to babble in Japanese which must have annoyed Dr François because she shot another two of his men. A third man tried to run away, and she shot him too. In the back.

  Charlotte-Grace looked at Dr François the way she had once looked at the stained-glass windows in the church at home. She did not understand her feelings, and could not sort them out from each other. Nonetheless, she knew watching Dr François kill one man after another, as calmly as Charlotte-Grace had learned to flick insects off herself, that she was seeing something very powerful. Something hinted at in those stained-glass windows.

  When Dr François walked over and held out her hand, Charlotte-Grace took it. The camp commandant had fallen to his knees and he was begging the Marines to do something. Charlotte-Grace did not imagine for a second that the ghost people would lift a pinkie to help him. One of the Marines even said, “You’ll want to keep clear, ladies. Give the doc some room.”

  As they moved away from Tanaka, Charlotte-Grace saw her chance. She squirmed free of Dr François’s grip and ran forward to slap the trembling Japanese officer in the face. Some of the women shouted encouragement. She slapped him again, this time for her mommy, and he did nothing about it. It was as though the world had been turned on its head. She could have stood there slapping him all day, one slap for every person he had hurt, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Honey, stand aside.”

  It was Dr François, speaking softly. Charlotte-Grace came back to herself and did as she was told. She was a good girl like that.

  “You know what, I don’t really give a fuck what your goddamn name is,” Dr François said then. Charlotte-Grace had never heard a lady swear so much before. It didn’t matter.

  Nor did she care when Dr François shot Colonel Tanaka three times, spinning him into the ground where he lay for a little while before she shot him a fourth time, in the head.

  Dr François put her gun back in its holster and picked up Charlotte-Grace as though she weighed almost nothing. They walked past a couple of the Marines on the way towards the strange aircraft in which the even stranger doctor had arrived.

  “Come on, precious,” she said. “Let’s get you a hot bath and some chocolate.”

  Charlotte-Grace nodded, completely satisfied with the way the morning had turned out. “I like chocolate,” she said.

  When Dr François replied, her voice was thick and she was crying as she hugged Charlotte-Grace tightly to her chest.

  “Of course you do, darlin’. Everyone loves chocolate.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  A half-second after Charlotte heard the opening shots of the ambush, a man appeared without warning, blocking the path she had chosen. He was a head taller than her, and twice as wide, standing at the end of a long, narrow corridor between two shipping containers. Backlit by the lights of the port, he was a featureless silhouette, holding a gun.

  It was the cries from her team nearby and the accompanying shots of an ambush that saved her. The noise warned her they had been compromised. Betrayed. As soon as she saw the man in front of her, she drew and fired her weapon before he could raise an older and much cruder pistol.

  Charlotte was armed with a Metal Storm VLE pistol. The caseless ceramic ammunition fired electronically at an adjustable rate. She had chosen a three-round preset at the maximum rate of fire: 6000 rounds per minute. Charlotte squeezed the trigger twice, lightly, and the handgun snarled, a low and guttural noise, dampened by the suppressor built into the unusually long barrel. The report was lost in the sounds of battle erupting behind her, but there was no question of whether she’d hit the man. The first three rounds punctured his unprotected belly, blowing his innards out. The second burst took him high in the chest. Charlotte moved forward quickly, gun up. She
desperately wanted to spin around and return to Viv and the team, but she knew the gunfire she had just heard had not come from them. They had walked into a trap. There was a good chance they were gone and responsibility for the mission had fallen to her.

  Heart racing, mouth dry, she overrode an almost physical need to return to the people she knew and trusted. People who needed her. Three years of training and two in the field pushed her forward. If her team survived they would make contact. Either way, her escape was mission critical. She doubted she could extract Professor Bremmer from the Russian ship but that did not absolve her of responsibility for him. Quite the opposite. It was now imperative she reach the asset and deny it to the enemy.

  Charlotte stepped over the dead man, an Arab. She quickly checked him, but saw no identifying details. He wore a dark civilian suit, not the blue uniform of a customs inspector. No lanyard or armband signified he was an official of any sort. His weapon was contemporary‌—‌a massive old cavalry pistol of unknown vintage, possibly a relic of Britain’s colonial occupation of Egypt. Another armed figure appeared at the end of the narrow corridor and she put him down too, without identifying herself or demanding he drop his weapon. The VLE loaded out with a strip of fifteen rounds of caseless. She had two three-round bursts left. Working by feel, never taking her eyes off the path ahead, she reprogrammed the selector for single shots.

  The men she had killed would be perimeter security, looking for squirters who’d escaped the ambush. If their controllers were any good there would be a second perimeter, and beyond them, overwatch. Charlotte emerged from the darkened passage between the containers‌—‌an uptime design of contemporary manufacture‌—‌and broke right, away from her original objective‌—‌the Russian ship, Mikhail Bulgakov.

  Port Said lay in front of her, a massive complex sprawling across hundreds of square miles. Much of it was modern, a vast concrete labyrinth laid down by western contractors and paid for by the aid programs of their governments. The Bulgakov was tied up to a wharf in an older quarter, which had survived from the colonial era. Many of the buildings hereabouts were smaller, and made of sandstone and hardwood. The cranes along the foreshore were smaller too, and manually operated, not like the giant robot derricks lining the port’s eastern shore. Even as the night flashed and crackled with gunfire the cranes continued to lift pallets of boxes and nets full of heavy hessian sacks through the air, carefully lowering them into the hold of the cargo ship. The operators most likely could not hear the gunfire over the noise of the huge, working port, and their attention, like hers, was focused on their task. She also doubted their Russian paymasters would allow them to be distracted by a little gunplay.

  Dressed in black coveralls, Charlotte flowed from one shadowed haunt to the next, always seeking the shortest route between cover, never moving until she was certain she would not be observed; or as certain as she could be.

  The gunfire had stopped after just a few seconds, but that was not a good sign. It meant the ambush had been successful. She heard a single shot after the brief storm of automatic weapons fire. Then nothing. Charlotte was a couple of hundred meters from the ambush point, a half-demolished stone building, a tiny structure without even a roof or all four walls to enclose it. They had laid up there, waiting for al Nouri’s contact in the Customs Office to report back to them after inspecting the Soviet ship. The building offered a good line of sight to the Mikhail Bulgakov and decent cover from observation. Unless somebody knew you would be there, in which case it was a deathtrap.

  Not knowing what had become of her colleagues, but expecting the worst, she withdrew as far as she dared into the container park. The long, corrugated steel boxes were stacked three and four high, but they were not laid out in a strict grid pattern, instead they created a diabolical maze in which it would be very easy to get lost. She did not question the foolishness of this arrangement, she merely adapted to it, skirting the open area of the docks, edging further and further to the east, attempting to maneuver around the second perimeter and below the radar of any hostile actors tasked with overwatch.

  At one point, she was forced to scale a container stack, two-high, to avoid a search team she first noted as a murmur of voices‌—‌Russian and Arabic‌—‌bouncing around and off the steel walls that enclosed her. She monkeyed her way up the tower, making footholds and hand grabs of the containers’ hinges and corrugations. The searchers entered the short passage below her just as she swung her trailing boot heel over the edge, and was forced to lie completely still in a cramped, uncomfortable position. All it would take would be a rustle of clothing, or the clank of her pistol on the steel beneath her hands and feet to alert them.

  At least they don’t have dogs, she thought.

  But how long would it be before they called some in?

  Her Russian was excellent. Her Arabic passable. Listening to her pursuers below, she quickly realized they were not speaking Arabic. One of the men was swearing in Turkish, or what she thought might be Turkish. She was familiar but not conversant with the language.

  The pieces clicked together in her mind.

  Back at the hotel, al Nouri, the security chief, had a Turkish lieutenant. His second-in-charge. She dared not risk peeking out over the edge of the container to check out “the Turk” as Viv had quickly taken to calling him. But, as he was the only Turk they had encountered all day, a coincidence seemed unlikely.

  One of the Russians spoke slowly and loudly, the way people did to foreigners.

  “She must be here somewhere,” he said. “She was very close. She will not be far away.”

  The Turk spoke in English. As slowly as the Russian, but not nearly as loud.

  “The port is huge and al Nouri still has allies everywhere. If she can find one, she will get away.”

  He sounded as if he accepted the inevitability of her escape.

  The Russian did not. He replied with one word.

  “Unacceptable.”

  They both spoke in their own language then, issuing instructions to subordinates, she was sure. From the Russian, she heard an order to spread out, and two distinct replies.

  “Da.”

  “Da.”

  The Turk spoke in his own tongue, but from the tone she assumed he was merely repeating the orders of his Russian master. When their footsteps and voices had faded, she allowed herself to relax, just slightly. Three frustrating years of officer training and deployment with the US Marine Corps had provided Charlotte with a thorough grounding in mission planning. It was one of the reasons Viv had taken her on. She knew how close she was to the ship, and had already mapped out a number of alternate paths to get there.

  She could not just walk up a gangway, and climbing a hawser was out of the question. She had no equipment to effect entry from the waterline. She needed a way onto the ship that wouldn’t be seen and couldn’t be traced. Once aboard she did not intend to stow away, so finding a long-term hiding spot was not an issue. Short term, however, she would need concealment. The lifeboats weren’t an option. There would be no way to replace the canvas covers securely and the first sweep which found a cover out of place would find her. The forward anchor locker was a bust, unless she wanted to die screaming when they hauled in the big chain. The Bulgakov was an older freighter, with a continuous shelter deck aft. There was a very good chance deck winch spares were stored under tarpaulins back there. They would not be monitored and could make for a decent lay-up point. Getting there, however, was still a live issue. As best she could tell there was only one way onto that ship that wasn’t being closely guarded.

  The cargo lifts.

  Charlotte called up a mental map of the port and her approximate location within it. It would have been nice to plug into full spectrum drone coverage via a pair of AT combat goggles, but Viv had been controlling their drones, and he was almost certainly down. She had taken her goggles off when the link died. The port was lit well enough that she did not need the night vision function. S
o she was left with her own eyes and her memory of the tactical area.

  Moving towards the cargo cranes by walking atop the shipping containers would get her most of the way there, and if she crouched low and stuck to the center of the containers she probably would not be seen from ground level. But she would be silhouetted against the lights of the port for anybody on her elevation. The crane operators, for instance, or any crew on the upper decks of the Bulgakov. Still, she was safer hidden from the ground teams up here than she would be trying to ghost her way through the maze at ground level.

  Staying low on her belly, she began to inch forward, a creeping advance on her elbows and knees made all that much slower by the need for silence. The steel corrugations of the containers bit into her limbs, and after a while her stomach muscles ached from the pressure on her core. She made progress, though. Three times, then four, she was forced to stop while searchers passed by below. At one point she was certain a crane operator was looking directly at her, and she tensed waiting for the shouts and even the gunshots to start. But after a moment she saw the distant glow of a cigarette in his darkened cabin, and the old crane rumbled around to pick up another pallet of old-fashioned wooden tea chests. He had not seen her.

  Probably just stopped to jerk off, she thought to herself. She needed the reassurance.

  While Charlotte made inching progress towards the edge of the container farm, she could sense the search moving away from her as the Russians widened the cordon. They were only being sensible. They needed to lay hands on her and every minute that passed without her being found was another minute she could get further away. She did not lower her guard or take greater chances speeding her advance, though. The same caution that demanded they seek her further afield would also demand they redouble their security around the contested asset. Professor Bremmer.