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

  Bugger me, he thought. I wouldn’t mind going back to the simple fucking days when getting in trouble in hotels meant pictures of my hairy red arse all over Instagram.

  Harry tried to squeeze off another two shots, to reinforce the principle that he was more than happy keeping this part of the bar to himself and everyone should just stay the fuck away, but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, answering the question of how many rounds he had left. None.

  “Steady on, guvnor,” a voice straight out of the East End protested. “That’ll be enough of that.”

  The gunfire, all of the gunfire, had stopped. Not because everybody had run out of ammunition, like Harry, but because everybody who needed killing was now dead.

  “Is that you, Harry? It’s Angus. Angus Fontaine. One of Viv’s crew. You right, guv?”

  “Corporal Fontaine?” Harry said, uncertainly.

  He got a snort of laughter in reply.

  “Not for ten years now, sir. Just Angus will do.”

  Harry knew the voice. He hadn’t heard it in over a decade. God, not since that stunt at Biggin Hill when the Germans had sent paratroopers. He heard footsteps crunching across broken glass. A pair of scuffed black loafers and dark slacks appeared around the corner of the bar. He looked up and, sure enough, the man standing over him was Angus Fontaine, late of His Majesty’s Special Air Service.

  “You haven’t aged a day, you bastard,” said Harry as Fontaine, a thin wiry man with close-cropped blond hair turning to silvery gray, helped him up from the floor.

  “Clean habits and quiet living,” Fontaine grinned. “But we don’t have much time for a catch-up, I’m afraid, sir. This job’s turned into a bit of a fucking Serbian clown show. Might be a good time to scarper.”

  Fontaine helped him haul Bremmer up to his feet. The bar had been thoroughly destroyed, and chaos reigned in the grand foyer outside. Harry knew they had to get moving but his reactions felt sluggish. He couldn’t help but gawk at the devastation and the butchery. Eight bodies he counted, including the barman, Farouk’s agent, and the four members of the Israeli hit squad, or snatch team, or whatever they were, plus a couple of hotel guests caught in the crossfire.

  “What the hell was this?”

  “Fuck me for an answer and I still won’t have one for you,” said Fontaine. “And we don’t have time. Really. Six has a couple of boltholes nearby. We need to get moving and sort this out.”

  “Julia. My partner. I came here with her…”

  Fontaine frowned. Bremmer was swaying between them and looked like he might faint. Harry put an arm through his to hold him up.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We didn’t have overwatch responsibility for Ms Duffy. I don’t know where…”

  Harry looked through the windows shattered by the first explosion. Neatly trimmed lawns sloped away from the hotel down towards a couple of large white tents shrouded in an artificial mist pumped out by some sort of ice blower. People were running around down there as well, probably freaked out by the gunshots and the two explosions up here.

  Dammit, he thought. There was no choice but to get Bremmer away. He had obviously been the target of the Israelis. Assuming they were Israelis.

  “These characters,” he said, indicating the corpse of the man whose gun he had taken. “Mossad?”

  Fontaine shrugged. “Or freelancers on Mossad’s tick. Deniability, you know, guv. It’s a beautiful thing. I haven’t seen these arse clowns before today. But we did clock one of their observer teams a day ago, watching Bremmer. The kit, the tactics. London to a brick this was them. First bloke they took out was a Serb. There were three of them. And one of Farouk’s enforcers.”

  “Standing by the bar,” Harry confirmed. “I saw him as soon as we came in. A bloody Serb though? I didn’t pick him.”

  Fontaine stowed his weapon and motioned to his colleagues, a man and a woman, conservatively dressed. Were it not for the uptime machine pistols they were busy putting away‌—‌he under his jacket, her in an oversized handbag‌—‌and their apparent equanimity in the midst of hell and slaughter, they could have easily passed for a holidaying couple, or a pair of business associates in casual attire. They hurried over and took up positions on either side of Bremmer, supporting him by the elbows as they led him away from the mess.

  “Look, I need to get word to Julia before I skive off with you,” Harry insisted. “I don’t want to make a habit of this sort of thing.”

  Fontaine had the decency to look uncomfortable, but it was obvious he had his marching orders.

  “No time for a meet-up, guvnor, unless we bump into her in the foyer. Maybe give her a call? She carrying a phone? Local net’s not too bad here on the island. But call her on the hop, eh? I’ve got a motor running out the front and nobody in reserve. The Israelis will be here soon, what’s left of them, and the bloody Smedlovs I don’t doubt…”

  “Wait. What? There are Russians here too?”

  Fontaine was already moving towards the door, not waiting for Harry any longer. “This fucking city is rotten with them,” he said. “Serbs and Romanians too. Gawd, I hate those fuckers. And the Sovs are all over the bloody peace conference, of course. But they’re not the ones I’m worried about. We made a couple of NKVD wallies on the manor about an hour ago. Maybe the Israelis did as well. Something made them go off. Come on, we have to go. Now.”

  Harry wiped the gun he was still carrying, trying to get his prints off it, before he tossed it back at the body of its original owner. It was of no use to him. He had no ammunition for it and it wouldn’t be done for a Prince of the Realm, even one surplus to requirements such as he, to be found carrying a murder weapon. And that’s what it was. Looking back on it now, he didn’t think there had been any immediate danger to him from the Mossad agent. But there had been a danger to Bremmer, and Bremmer was his mission. He hadn’t killed the Israeli to save his own life. He killed him to save the mission.

  A quick glance back over his shoulders, through the ruined windows towards the tents on the lawn outside, did nothing to calm his fears. He could not see Jules out there. He had no idea where she was, or how long it would take him to find her if he started looking now. Probably, he decided, it would be better for her if she was nowhere near him at the moment. After all, some cheeky bastards had been trying to shoot him only a few minutes ago.

  He took out his phone, half expecting to find it had caught a bullet. It was off, but intact. He’d power up and text her. That was more likely to get through than a call. The limited cell system on the island‌—‌an expensive luxury for the city’s elite and visiting foreigners‌—‌would be melting down around about now.

  I’m ok, he typed. Going dark for a few hours. Keep your head down. Viv will send someone.

  His personal affairs taken care of, he put on a burst of speed and caught up with Fontaine. Fire alarms blared across the lobby, people shouted, staff ran back and forth, seemingly without purpose. The front doors had been propped open to allow people to escape.

  “You need to get word to Viv,” Harry said. “He needs to find someone to get hold of Julia Duffy and get her to a safe house. He needs to do it right now, or I will do it myself and this job will be even deeper in the custard than it already is.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m on it, guvnor,” Fontaine assured him. “She’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A taxi awaited them. A London taxi. Harry did a cartoonish double take when he saw it in all of its blocky, black glory.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Fontaine snorted. “Take it up with Farouk if you ever make it to dinner and drinks at the palace, guv. He’s got a stiffy for them. Literally. Got his end away in one on a visit to the Old Dart. Imported a dozen to keep the memories warm. Now there’s hundreds of these things crawling the city. Not taxis, mind you. All private fleets. All the fucking local try-hards trying to get on the good side of the grand Pooh Bah. Imitation is the sincerest
form of kissing arse, after all.”

  Harry had more trouble processing the sight of this displaced icon than he did the idea that he’d been in a fight for his life just a few moments ago.

  “Don’t worry about it, guv,” Fontaine assured him. “The local Johnny Hoppers are never going to pull one of these things over. Could be a prince. Could be the defense minister. Could be the defense minister’s mistress gobbling his knob in the back. Never gonna happen.”

  They hurried down the front stairs, stepping around hotel guests and conference goers who had either collapsed there, or been laid out waiting for ambulances to arrive. It seemed hardly less chaotic out here than it had been inside. Possibly more so. Dozens of vehicles all but blocked the giant circular driveway. No sign of Jules. No hope of finding her quickly. A fire engine, its lights flashing and siren howling, muscled its way into the traffic jam. Stretcher bearers yelled at each other in Arabic. He could see police cars pulling in through the main gates.

  Oh man, he was going to be in so much trouble with Jules.

  The other two operators bundled the professor into the back of the cab. They looked a good deal younger than Angus Fontaine, too young to be uptimers. The driver, however, was another familiar face.

  “Allo, Your ‘ighness,” grinned the Yorkshireman. “Long time no see. What you been up to then?”

  “Capers and fucking hijinks, Mister Henderson. And you? No, don’t bother. You’re working for bloody St. Clair too. Everybody seems to be working for that jammy bastard these days. Even me, I suspect.”

  “Wo gehen wir … I mean, where are we going?” said Bremmer, surprising Harry by speaking for the first time in a few minutes. He continued in a wheedling voice, “I cannot leave the hotel.”

  “You’re not checking out,” said Harry. “But it might be a good idea to get away from the place where everybody seems to be so very bloody keen on putting you into a bag or a box.”

  “But my wife,” he protested. “And my children,” he added, but it seemed like an afterthought and Harry would be damned if the man did not look guilty. Still, he had a point. If whoever was after Bremmer couldn’t get hold of him, they would go for his family. Just like the Smedlovs had shortly after the war.

  The last door slammed as Fontaine climbed into the front passenger seat, and Henderson hit the accelerator. Hit it way too hard, by Harry’s reckoning, given the snarl of haphazardly parked cars and vans and emergency vehicles surrounding them. But the Yorkshireman‌—‌whom he well remembered speeding in a jeep across the tarmac at Biggin Hill, swerving around shell craters and crashed German gliders, throwing hand grenades at the invading Fallschirmjäger‌—‌employed similar driving tactics here. He accelerated towards obstructions, relying on abuse and long blasts of his horn this time, instead of throwing bombs around, but he enjoyed a similar level of success. That is to say, he crashed into quite a few obstacles, and one or two people, but made a lot more headway than Harry would have imagined possible. It took only a minute or two before they had cleared the worst of the traffic jam and were motoring away from the Cairo Hilton in a London cab carrying a German rocket scientist, a once-upon-a-time royal heir, and four freelancing mercenaries.

  “Sorry, Jules,” Harry muttered to himself, checking that his text had sent. It was still trying to get off his phone.

  “I really must insist…” Bremmer started up.

  “Insist on what?” Harry snapped. “Going back to the bar and getting your fucking head blown off for another bowl of peanuts?”

  “But my wife und meine kinder!”

  “Maybe she can explain to my girlfriend what the hell just happened,” said Harry. “Because I have no idea. Would you care to enlighten us, Professor?”

  The taxi bounced over the gutter as Henderson reefed the wheel around to the left and accelerated into late afternoon traffic, which seemed to have slowed down as drivers tried to catch a glimpse of what was happening a few hundred yards away. Fontaine was already speaking into a throat mic, holding a finger against his ear, presumably talking to somebody off station about the sticky mess they’d just left back in the lounge. Harry controlled the urge to lean forward and ask him to do something about Julia, or about Bremmer’s wife. Fontaine had been a three-year veteran of the regiment when they came through the wormhole back in ‘42. He’d survived the Transition campaigns in the Pacific and later in Europe and didn’t look like he’d been sitting around eating pies for the last ten years. He knew his job.

  Sure enough, Harry heard the former corporal issuing instructions to get another team out to the hotel to pick up Julia and to secure Bremmer’s family.

  “That’s right. The wife and the two kids. We need to lock them down five minutes ago,” he said. There was a little more back and forth as the team leader attended to the aftermath of the gunfight, including, Harry thought, a few references to who would need paying off and just how bloody quickly that needed to happen.

  The professor, however, couldn’t follow the conversation, or didn’t know to, and he appeared to grow ever more agitated the further away from the hotel they drove. He started shifting in his seat, craning around and even looking as though he might make a lunge for the door handles and jump out. The woman who was sitting on his right placed a reassuring hand on top of his, stroking and patting him, whispering some soothing rubbish about how it would be all right and he needed to calm down and let them do their jobs. It worked, after a fashion. Bremmer remained agitated, but he stopped twisting around like a ferret in a sack, and he showed no comprehension of how close the woman had come to putting a compression wristlock on him.

  “You’d better take this, guv,” said Fontaine, who had finished talking into his headset. He passed over a pistol. Augmented technology.

  “What’s this? A Glock?” Harry asked.

  Fontaine nodded. “Not an original, sorry, guv,” he said. “But a pretty good copy. Seventeen in the mag. Nine mil with a mix of armor-piercing and hollow-point. Coupla spare mags for you too.”

  “Thanks,” Harry said. “Don’t suppose you’d have one of those ceramic shooters going spare?” He didn’t bother to hide the envy in his tone. Fontaine was sliding another strip of caseless ammunition into his own four-barreled Metalstorm handgun as he answered.

  “Sorry, guvnor. The shop is getting really good at turning out some right tasty analogs of the original caseless ammo. Ceramic and everything. But it’s still all bespoke work. Nothing mass-produced. So I’m afraid it’s the old-time shooter for you. On the upside, nine mil ammo rains down like manna from heaven these days. You won’t go hungry.”

  There were no poor districts on the island, but there were areas given over to those businesses which serviced the needs and desires of the elite. Henderson appeared to be taking them into one such district as he swung off the main drive and into a maze of streets fronted by small warehouses and shops that appeared more focused on wholesale trade than the up-market retail outlets around the hotel where Harry and Julia were staying. Thinking of Jules, Harry found himself nearly as anxious as Bremmer must have been about his own wife and kids. He checked his phone again. The text appeared to have been sent. There was nothing for it, and she would understand that. She had been a combat embed long enough to know the rules. She was also, he told himself, more than capable of looking after herself.

  He turned his attention back to their German passenger.

  “So, Professor. Been dabbling in a little bit of history writing, eh? And giving the odd talk at the occasional peace conference? I can totally see why lots of tooled-up Israelis and Serbs would want to put a bag on you for that. Or to ventilate you if you didn’t want to go into the bag.”

  Bremmer stared at Harry as if he was mad. He started to shift in his seat again looking back over his shoulder.

  “My wife,” he muttered. “And the children.”

  “My friends here will do their best to see that they’re looked after. But you’re going to have to h
elp us out. What the fuck is going on, Ernst?”

  Henderson threw the cab around another corner and into an even narrower rats’ nest of old, unpaved streets. There was no footpath. The biscuit-brown mud-brick walls rose straight up from the dusty road surface, and the few shopkeepers and pedestrians here were forced to press themselves up against the buildings as the taxi rumbled past. Harry didn’t play the Skarov card. Although mention of Beria’s lord high executioner would undoubtedly bring a reaction, he wanted to see what Bremmer would give up unprompted.

  The professor examined his hands as he nervously rubbed them together. The two operatives flanking him showed no interest in his answer, instead scanning the street ahead of them, and occasionally behind, for any sign of trouble. They were good, Harry thought. Viv had trained them well. You couldn’t help but wonder about the woman. It was an unusual line of work for a female temp. She looked too young to be a Special Operations Executive veteran from the war. She would have been in high school back then, possibly not even in a senior grade.

  “They are not my children,” Bremmer said, confessing so softly that at first Harry wasn’t sure he’d heard the man correctly. “Or my wife.”

  “What?” Harry said, thinking he must have misunderstood.

  “Yeah, what the fuck!” Fontaine added, before hurriedly speaking into the throat mic again, putting a hold on the order to grab the woman and children.

  Bremmer repeated himself as they pulled off the street into a warehouse. A steel roller door slammed down behind them and Harry shrugged off the madly inappropriate question of whether roller doors were indigenous to the 1950s, or an introduced technology from the future.

  “The woman and children at the hotel. They are not mine,” Bremmer said as Henderson brought them to a halt in an industrial laundry. They were parked next to a van in the livery of the AAA Linen and Laundry Services. The business name was written in both English and Arabic, but the English lettering was more prominent. Giant washing machines and dryers, all of them of very modern design, lined the walls. The two women tending the laundry looked as though they hailed from the Subcontinent. They wore saris and spoke Hindi. They did not seem at all upset or even bemused by Fontaine’s crew spilling out of the London cab, all of them covered in blood and dirt.