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

by John Birmingham

  Two pistol shots sailed harmlessly over her head.

  A lucky break, at last.

  The driver was out of the car now and firing wildly in her direction. For the moment she was protected by the bulk of the old-time automobile but that wouldn’t last long. She’d fallen clear of the second man she had just killed, which meant she could run for it, or at least she could have if she wasn’t wearing these stupid high heels.

  Another shot, this time kicking up a clod of earth beside her.

  Jules rolled towards the corpse, frantically patting it down, looking for another weapon, for a gun. But the man was huge, lying face down, and his deadweight would not budge. The other body was a few feet away, folded up awkwardly against the front wheel, the head a grotesque fright mask bathed in blood. A dark stain was spreading out from the man’s crotch and one of the pants legs had ripped slightly when it rode up, revealing an ankle holster.

  A small pistol of some sort, maybe a .32 PPK, stood out against the impossibly white hairless leg. She lunged for the weapon, too late.

  “Nyet!”

  A harsh voice, Russian she now knew, barked at her again.

  “Nyet!”

  And to emphasize the command, a fourth pistol shot cracked out, sparking off the metalwork of the car. Julia stopped. Turned around slowly, raising her hands. There was so much blood on them. It was already drying out in the harsh afternoon sunlight, turning sticky. The driver held his gun on her, motioning for her to stand up and move away from the bodies.

  “Bystro,” he snapped, but shakily. “Bystro!”

  Quickly.

  NKVD, she thought, stupidly. Had to be. The third man’s sallow complexion looked slightly green as he contemplated the two corpses she had made of his comrades. He said something to her but her Russian was not that good, not good at all really. She held her bloodied hands up in front of her and slowly began to climb to her feet, squinting into the sun. The adrenaline rush was gone. She felt sick and dizzy, and the light of the lowering sun seemed to be pouring directly in through her eyeballs, burning her retinas.

  For the first time in what felt like hours, but could only have been less than a minute, Julia Duffy was suddenly aware of more than her immediate surroundings, of the killing zone in which she was trapped. She heard a plane droning overhead, a propeller-driven aircraft. She heard screams, and shouts in four or five different languages. English, French, maybe German, and of course Arabic.

  The driver snarled something at her again and extended his gun hand as if to draw a bead on her. He wasn’t motioning with the weapon to move her along. He was aiming at her.

  His chest exploded a fraction of a second before she heard two‌—‌no, three‌—‌more gunshots, showering her with a fresh spray of hot blood. His gun went off and she jumped, but the bullet thudded uselessly into the torso of the agent she had stabbed in the eye. The last of her attackers toppled like a redwood crashing down in the forest. His forehead hit the concrete gutter with a sickening crack.

  She tried to climb to her feet and get away. To get to Harry. But her legs wouldn’t work. She wasn’t paralyzed. It just seemed as though she had forgotten to tell them how to move. And then they did start moving, but only to tremble, in the same way her hands were trembling. A series of deep body quakes took hold of her. Her vision swam and she dry-retched onto the grass.

  More shouts reached her, mostly in Arabic now, telling her to stay down, not to move. She laughed. Just a snort, a giggle at first, but quickly becoming an ungovernable, hysterical reaction, unseemly braying guffaws that shook her even more forcefully than the tremors of the body shock had a few seconds earlier. Boots came pounding up, and she realized some idiot was blowing a whistle.

  Yeah, she thought, that’ll help.

  And then she was surrounded, an odd, eclectic mix of hotel staff. Two porters, a gardener, and a man dressed in something that looked like an army uniform. He was carrying a gun which he kept moving as he aimed first at the driver, whom he had presumably shot, and then at the two men Duffy had killed. He didn’t point the weapon at her, and for that she was grateful. He looked more than likely to pull the trigger again from sheer excitability.

  She heard more voices, with English accents now, and one American‌—‌no, Canadian‌—‌speaker.

  “Is she okay? Is she all right?”

  “Oh my God, the blood, look at the blood.”

  “The poor woman, look at her, oh my God, look at her.”

  She felt strong hands grip her, gently this time, not at all like the NKVD man. They lifted her carefully to her feet, fanned at her.

  “Give her some room. She needs to breathe.”

  “Madam. Madam.” An Egyptian voice this time, but speaking in English. A cultured voice. “Madam, are you well? Who are these men? You are with the prince, yes? The Prince Harry.”

  She blinked, trying to shake the confusion and the shock out of her head. “Harry,” she croaked. “Yes. I need Harry. Can we find him?”

  An Egyptian man, well-dressed in a dark blue suit, was at her arm, supporting her weight. He was handsome in an old movie reel sort of way, and as cool and collected as if he had just stepped out of a cocktail lounge. Not at all bothered by the commotion or the heat of the day. His suit must have been very hot, and yet he was not sweating, and unlike the uniformed man waving the gun around, he seemed unlikely to make things worse.

  “I’m Julia Duffy,” she said in a faltering voice. “I’m here with Prince Harry, yes. I need to find Harry, I need… Can we find him?”

  She could hear the jagged edge of her frayed nerves turning to anger. At the Russians, but also at herself. There was no excuse for her falling apart like this. She had more combat experience than most of the veterans she’d met. Not just in this world but in the one she had come from. This wasn’t even her first attempted kidnapping. It was her third for fuck’s sake, and she hadn’t been a trembling hot mess after the previous two.

  “I am Mister al Nouri,” said the man in the suit. “I help Mister Hilton with security at the hotel.”

  He broke off talking to her to bark instructions at the uniformed man and to demand that the crowd stand back and give her some space.

  “Move along. Move along all of you,” he said. “Mister al Nouri is in charge here, al Nouri will be taking care of this. Go back about your businesses.”

  More instructions followed, this time in Arabic, including some sharp words to the idiot who was still waving his revolver about. He soon packed the firearm away and muttered his apologies.

  “Please,” said Julia. “Don’t be harsh with him. He saved my life. I should thank him.”

  Mister al Nouri smiled. He positively beamed, reminding her of the salesman she had graced with her credit card earlier that day when she bought the unbelievably expensive, and now totally ruined, silk tank top.

  “Oh him,” al Nouri said. “He did nothing. He is my cousin’s idiot nephew. A danger to himself and everyone about.” The hotel’s security man, if that’s what he was, clapped his hands together and barked a few more orders in Arabic at the uniformed guard. The man put his hands together in an attitude of prayer, bowed his head repeatedly and muttered some sort of agreement before hurrying away, hauling a few of the more reluctant sightseers along with him.

  “But if not him…” said Julia.

  Mister al Nouri beamed at her again, “I shot him, Miss Duffy, al Nouri, your servant. But we shall make nothing of it. I am forever shooting guests who get out of hand. That was a joke. To lighten the atmosphere which has been tarnished this afternoon by all of the bloodshed. Perhaps you would like to come with me back to the hotel. You are not a guest, I believe, but I’m sure Mister Hilton would insist on our extending to you every courtesy. That is not a joke. Mister Hilton takes these things very seriously indeed.”

  Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she found she was able to follow Mister al Nouri away from the carnage and back towards the
hotel. She could hear sirens somewhere in the distance, but then, when she thought about it, she could always hear sirens somewhere in Cairo. More uniformed men were running towards the scene as she and al Nouri departed. They wore side-arms but had not drawn them, instead brandishing long dark canes. They used them to point the last of the tourists and conference goers away from the corpses and the now empty car. The engine was still running, she realized, when one of them leaned in to turn it off.

  “Harry,” she said without explanation. “I need to talk to Harry.”

  Mister al Nouri put his hand lightly in the small of her back, not pushing her exactly, but providing just enough gentle pressure to keep her moving away.

  “Ouch,” she said. “I’m cut.”

  Mister al Nouri tut-tutted as he took his hand away and quickly examined her ruined shirt and the wound beneath.

  “So I see. But it is not deep. If you need the doctor, I, al Nouri, shall see to it. But perhaps a sticking bandage will do. As for your prince, I have my men looking for him already. I really hope you will allow us to‌—”

  She never found out what it was Mister al Nouri wanted her to allow. Before he could finish speaking half-a-dozen windows on the ground floor of the hotel, overlooking the last putting green of the nine-hole golf course, exploded outwards.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The stun grenade went off on the far side of the room, shattering windows and setting fire to the drapery and a few pieces of furniture. Harry was shielded from the worst of the effects by the heavy table which the staff had been setting with hors d’oeuvres and stemware for the cocktail hour. Nonetheless his ears were ringing and he blinked rapidly. It was hard to make out anything more than the most indistinct shapes. He had moved without thinking when the flash bang exploded, throwing himself at Bremmer, the pair of them tumbling awkwardly to the floor. Harry grunted when he landed on top of the German, whose oversized beer stein fell between them, winding him as effectively as a punch in the bread basket.

  “Oof!”

  As Harry grunted, Bremmer swore. The prince heard three muffled thuds, like a cricket ball hitting a batsman’s pads, the sound of suppressed pistol fire, unless someone had decided to bowl a few overs here in the drinks lounge. Squeezing his eyes shut, he hissed at the professor to keep his head down. The screaming started, cries of shock and pain, but mixed in with them were the sounds of curt orders barked in German.

  No, not German, he realized. Yiddish, but spoken with a heavy German accent. More replies in the same language, but with slightly different accents, southern European perhaps.

  Thud. Thud.

  “Qlʼár dʼárʻm.”

  Clear south. A woman’s voice.

  Thud.

  Thud. Thud.

  “Qlʼár myyarʻww.”

  Clear west, he thought. Rather than keeping his head down, Professor Bremmer had decided it would be more appropriate to curse up a storm and try to wriggle free from beneath the man who was trying to protect him. Harry hissed into his ear again, telling him to lie still, as though unconscious. He couldn’t be certain that Bremmer heard a word of it. His own ears were still ringing. Harry let himself go limp and closed his eyes, playing dead.

  Two more shots rang out, unsilenced this time, the big booming roar of a real hand cannon, a forty-five or something like that. He heard a strangled shriek just before something heavy crashed to the floor and a fusillade of soft metallic coughing sounds replied. Glass shattered and tinkled and another man dropped noisily to the polished concrete floor, cursing in something that sounded Slavic, but not Russian.

  “Stay down. Everybody stay down and do not move. There is no need for anyone else to be hurt. Stay down and do not move.”

  The voice was hard and masculine, almost without accent. Bremmer had stopped moving underneath him, he was entirely rigid now, as though frozen with fear. Fair enough, thought Harry. I wouldn’t want to be doing my laundry tomorrow. The ringing in his ears had dialed back to a loud hum, but not so loud that he didn’t hear the crunch of boots on broken glass approaching. The footfall sounded heavy, like a man’s. He tried to relax, to prepare himself. He could hear alarms shrieking and ringing all over the hotel. Panicked cries, shouts of horror and distress. But the ruined cocktail lounge appeared to be unnaturally still, even quiet.

  “Get up, Your Highness,” said the male voice, the one without a discernible origin. Or maybe it was that there were a number of trace accents at the edge of the words. The clipped consonants of German. The soft, guttural tones of Yiddish at the back of the throat. An American burr. Perhaps the nasal harshness of New Jersey.

  It hardly fucking mattered, did it?

  Harry lay still, not rigid like Bremmer, just waiting. A pretense-weak position they called it in training. A posture of defeat or resignation, of inferiority. There was no sense in trying to stare down this crew. They had all the guns and the initiative. In fact, there was very little pretense about his weakness. He could hardly have been in a worse position.

  “If you would just roll off the good professor, Your Highness, we will be on our way. You are no concern of ours.”

  Bremmer shifted underneath him again, quickly this time as if trying to get away. It was all Harry could do to maintain the charade of being unconscious, or dazed, or crippled with injury. He felt the hardened toe of a boot nudge him in the leg. He didn’t move. He prepared himself for what he assumed was coming next, and when the boot kicked him on the side of his knee he managed to remain still, just as a man who had been knocked out, or even killed, would.

  The Israeli agent‌—‌he had to assume they were Israelis, almost certainly Mossad‌—‌carefully leaned down and took Harry’s lifeless body by the collar of his jacket. Harry allowed himself to be pulled up and off Bremmer. His eyes were slitted open now. He knew which hand the Israeli was holding the gun in. Although his vision was blurry, it was not so bad that he couldn’t make out the weapon. When the man was at his most awkward point of balance, Harry came back to life, both of his own hands whipping out and closing around the wrist of the agent in a C-grip, his thumbs shifted and pressed firmly into the back of the gun hand.

  Harry wrenched his own body out of the line of fire at the same time as he folded the man’s hand back on itself, a simple wristlock. Kote Gaeshi. He did not intend for the weapon to go off. He did not press his own finger in on the trigger as he had been taught. But the gun did go off. One silenced shot that punched into the agent’s stomach. A cry of pain, which sounded to Harry’s damaged hearing as though it was coming from far away, and he was suddenly dropping back towards the floor again as all of the strength ran out of the wounded man’s body. There was nothing for it but to continue the rolling movement he had started to get himself out of the original line of fire. The agent’s head crashed into a bar stool, knocking it over with a great clatter.

  Voices yelled out orders and threats and‌—‌from the woman he had heard before‌—‌a torrent of violent abuse. Two shots, both fired with a suppressor, slammed into the brushed metal facing of the bar. He didn’t know whether they were warning shots or whether they had been meant to kill him, but he was well past giving a shit about such nuances. Harry stripped the gun out of the hand of the dying man, wrenching it back against his trigger finger so hard that he heard the bones snap.

  “Get back and keep down,” he shouted at Bremmer as he dived for whatever cover the end of the bar might provide. Enough, for now. A fusillade of silenced gunfire erupted, like the tapping of a high speed typist. Three or four guns at least.

  And then the automatic gunfire started. Not silenced, not suppressed at all, a ripping burst from something that sounded like an Uzi.

  “I give up, I give up,” Bremmer yelled in German.

  “Oh no you fucking don’t,” Harry corrected him with a quick and not entirely playful tap on the head from the butt of the handgun he had taken. The blow was enough to drive the German back to the relative safety of the
floor where he huddled against the base of the bar. Harry wondered how many rounds he had left in the pistol‌—‌an unusual model he hadn’t seen before. Probably some sort of augmented technology from Mossad’s workshop in Tel Aviv. He didn’t dare check the mag lest he suddenly find himself staring down the barrel of a submachine gun with his own weapon in pieces.

  A second automatic weapon started up, also concentrated on his corner of the room. He already knew how this was going to work out. Two of them would use suppressing fire to keep him pinned while the third one flanked him. He would know they had flanked him when he felt the bullets tear into his body. The man he had killed‌—‌sort of‌—‌had stopped moving and moaning. He had bled out. Bremmer mewled like a terrified child just behind him. Harry contemplated trying to drag him out through the windows shattered by the flash bang. They would only need to toss another one over here and he would be righteously fucked. They could walk up and double tap him at their leisure.

  A second flash bang went off.

  Harry squeezed his eyes shut, swore loudly, and pointed the gun in the general direction from which he expected to be attacked. In the mayhem and the savage, caterwauling chaos of murder, he could hear the same voices he had picked out before, but this time raised in anger and fear. The submachine guns clattered, something answered back, something with an even harsher, denser roar, a much higher rate of fire. Harry pulled the trigger on his own weapon a couple of times, sending two rounds into the space from where he expected them to approach. Not much point really. It wouldn’t be long now, and if he was going to get his arse shot off he was more than willing to give a little bit back in return.