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

by John Birmingham

  “Mister St. Clair is waiting for you at the hotel, sir,” the older one said to Fontaine in perfect, unaccented English.

  “Oh, bloody typical,” muttered Angus.

  “I don’t understand,” Harry started to say in answer to Bremmer, but he felt his stomach clenching because he understood only too well. “Skarov,” he spat.

  Bremmer flinched as though struck. “You know this man?”

  “Only by reputation. Does Skarov have your children, Professor?”

  He’d meant the question to be gentle, but it came out hard on the adrenaline backwash of the fight at the hotel. Bremmer did not flinch this time. He simply nodded, a quick, jerky movement.

  “Ja,” he said quietly after a moment. “He has had them and my wife for days. We were all supposed to leave Cairo tonight.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Fontaine’s crew secured the lay up point while Harry and Angus ran through a quick and dirty debrief of the professor.

  “I arrived here the day before my family,” Bremmer explained after taking a hit from a hipflask supplied by Henderson. It calmed him down a little.

  “They were to join me after I had performed my main duties. They never arrived.”

  “So who’s the woman and the two kids back at the Hilton?” Harry asked. “She’s a good match for Frau Bremmer.”

  The professor shook his head and took another drink from the flask. Harry eased it out of his fingers. No sense in letting him obliterate himself.

  “Stasi. NKVD. I do not know,” Bremmer said, almost protesting. “I only know they work for Skarov. They are German, so maybe Stasi.” He shrugged, trying to offer them something. All of the fight had run out of him.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” said Harry. “Go on.”

  In fact, it did matter, because if they were East German operators that would be three or four fraternal services in on this operation. Beria’s NKVD, the Serbs and Romanians Fontaine had clocked, and now this strange little crew out of the DDR. The Yanks would call that a full court press.

  Bremmer staggered a little and Fontaine took him by the elbow, before leading him over to a table where neatly folded piles of hotel linen awaited transport across the island. You had to admire MI6’s initiative. This little business gave them access to the bedrooms of the city’s power elite. Bremmer made a self-pitying sound in his throat and leaned his head against the nearest pile, as though intending to use it for a pillow. Fontaine and Harry pulled him upright again, but not before he left a greasy imprint on the white cotton.

  “Professor. You need to work with us. If your family is still in the city we can get them back. But only with your help. Come on. Pull yourself together.”

  Bremmer blinked at Harry as though he were speaking Swahili.

  “What did the Russian say?” Fontaine asked. “What did he want you to do?”

  Harry watched as Bremmer struggled to come back to himself. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, but his shoulders straightened a little.

  “He said they would be safe if I traveled with him.”

  “Where?” Harry asked.

  “I… I’m not sure. He was vague, but he did say we would take ship to begin with. He used that form of words. ‘Take ship’. It sounded odd. Very old-fashioned.”

  Harry forced himself to be patient. The man was obviously traumatized. He was probably suffering from shock before he ever set foot in that bar at the Hilton.

  “Did he tell you to meet him on a ship or a boat?” Harry asked. “Somewhere on the riverfront?”

  Bremmer searched his memory, his eyes losing focus for a moment before drifting back up on the Englishmen.

  “No,” he said, surprising Harry. “He said I was to go with the woman down to one of the new river taxi stands. We would go somewhere from there.”

  The two Englishmen exchanged a look.

  “Once they got out on the Nile,” Harry said, “Skarov could move them anywhere. It sounds like they’d be going upriver though, maybe heading for the coastal road and then to Port Said?”

  “Wouldn’t like to say, guv,” Fontaine replied. “But once they get on that bloody river, we’re buggered. Skarov could cross-deck them anywhere.”

  Harry gave Bremmer the hipflask again and encouraged him to take a hit or two while he drew Fontaine away for a private chat.

  “You think the family are still breathing?”

  Fontaine gave it a moment’s thought before nodding, but not with any certainty.

  “Probably. They’re the pressure point, aren’t they? As long as Skarov has them, and Bremmer knows they’re alive, he’ll do as he’s told. If the Smedlovs necked them, he’s got no reason to cooperate. No reason to keep his mouth shut either. Could end up being very messy for old Beria. So yeah, guv, I reckon there’s a good chance they’re alive.”

  “I agree,” said Harry. “They’ll either be locked up in the hold of some bloody awful tramp steamer, or as near to the docks as Skarov can get them. If I had to place a bet, and I suppose I do, I’d lay money on them being on the water already. A ship is a more easily contained environment, less easily surveilled than a safe house.”

  Fontaine nodded reluctant agreement.

  “Still doesn’t get us to them, does it but? And old mate here,” he jerked a thumb back at Bremmer, “doesn’t look like he’ll be the model of cooperation if he doesn’t get them back.”

  Harry appraised the German scientist coolly.

  In a very real sense his work here was done. They had Bremmer and the Smedlovs didn’t. They could put him in a bag for rendition right now and be done with it. Fontaine was right. He wouldn’t be very cooperative, but how cooperative did he need to be? They didn’t need him to build them an orbital bombardment system. They only needed to confirm that the Russians were trying to, and they pretty much had that confirmation now. The smart play was to tag him and bag him and let Viv handle the transfer.

  But…

  Harry sighed.

  “I suppose we’d best go rescue his wife and little ones then?”

  “Viv’s not gonna like that, guvnor,” Fontaine said without much enthusiasm. He took Harry by the arm and led him away from the German. “Now we’ve got Bremmer,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “he’ll be well satisfied just pissing off back to London.”

  “But Skarov has his family.”

  “Not the guvnor’s family he doesn’t.”

  Harry smiled.

  “You misunderstand me. The family isn’t important. Skarov is. If Six can lay hands on that villain they’ll squeeze him for everything he knows about the rocket program. And he’ll know plenty. He’s not just Beria’s Lord High Executioner. He’s the NKVD fixer-in-chief. Angus, London will want him, or they’ll want to know why we don’t have him when we get home. Believe me. Skarov is special to them.”

  Angus regarded him skeptically, but Harry saw the moment he gave in.

  “You’ll be wanting that spare shooter after all, I reckon,” he sighed.

  “I imagine I will,” Harry agreed, checking the load for the Glock-analog Fontaine had given him earlier. This felt like the sort of stunt where it simply wasn’t possible to have too many guns to hand. “And some tracking hardware too, if you can spare it.”

  Fontaine grinned then.

  “Got some uptime gear, actually, guv. Some micropellets and a couple of nanodrones to chase after them. Mint condition too. Still in the wrapper.”

  “That sounds lovely,” Harry said, both surprised and pleased. “Viv been keeping that in the bottom drawer, has he?”

  “Not the boss, no, guv. We got this packet from Six, with their blessings to use it as we saw fit.”

  Harry mulled that over. In the thirteen years since Admiral Kolhammer’s Multinational Force had been thrown out of the 21st century and back here by a wormhole experiment gone wrong, most of the ships, their fittings and contents had been stripped down and reverse-engineered. Researchers h
ad emptied PX stores on giant floating cities like the USS Hillary Clinton, gathering up thousands of cell phones, tablets and laptops, but also coffee makers, sous vide machines and toys. Anything with a microprocessor that could be broken down and reused in the fight against Hitler and Imperial Japan had been. It was a surprise these days to come across an example of uptime technology in pristine condition. It was possible the kit Fontaine had offered up might even have come from regimental stores originally assigned to the Multinational Force for use on deployment to the Indonesian Caliphate.

  “We’ll have to move quickly,” Harry said. “NKVD will be tearing the Hilton up, trying to find the professor.”

  They both looked at Bremmer, who was sipping at Henderson’s flask and staring into the middle distance. Lost.

  “If we can get him back on the hotel grounds in the next fifteen, twenty minutes,” said Fontaine, “we can probably get away with it. It’s bloody chaos back there and local emergency services won’t be any help in calming things down. What are you thinking?”

  “I think we put a tracker on Bremmer and let him get on that boat, or river taxi or whatever they have planned. We load him with some clunky piece of contemporary locator tech, in case Skarov’s people go looking for it, which they will. But we back up with a couple of pellets and stalk them with the drones.”

  “Bit of a risk, innit, guvnor? Giving him back to them?”

  “All life is risk, Mister Fontaine,” said Harry. “Speaking of which…” He hauled his phone out and jiggled it in front of Fontaine, “do you have a secure net here? Because if I don’t get online and check my messages I run the very real risk of castration.”

  “Got a hardened uplink you could plug into, guv. Connects to the Ministry of Defence sat covering North Africa. I’m sure they’d be cool with you catching up on your sexts.”

  “I wish,” Harry snorted, but he wasted no time following the young woman through into a quiet room, deeper inside the warehouse, while Fontaine and Henderson prepped Ernst Bremmer for his return to the arms of his “family” and the NKVD. Bremmer put up no resistance at all to the plan, which didn’t surprise Harry. The man wanted his wife and children back.

  “Here you go, sir,” the young female operator said, ushering Harry into the station’s comms room, a modest space with a few laptops and satellite radio base units. “It’s a hard point connection. USB-C or Lightning?”

  Harry took out his phone and handed it to her.

  “USB-C.”

  The woman showed no interest in the handset, simply taking the device and jacking it into a laptop with practiced efficiency. Harry estimated she would have been less than ten years old when the uptimers arrived. Whatever path she’d walked since then, she was obviously familiar with real uptime technology, not just the augmented consumer gear you saw on the streets.

  “You’ll have to unlock it, sir,” she said.

  “Harry, please,” he said, using the phone’s DNA reader, then grimacing as the screen filled with eighteen unread messages from Jules and one from an Arab fellow he didn’t know. A Mister al Nouri.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Club Lounge on the twenty-fifth floor was empty, save for Julia, al Nouri and two of his men, who stood outside the room, guarding the entrance. The design language of the space had accents from every postwar era, if you knew what to look for. Hand-carved Norwegian hardwood armchairs in a groovy 1950s pre-minimalist style. A sunken lounge pit from the 1970s. Oversized naked lightbulbs she recognized from the hipster bars of her youth. But it was all held in check by the same aesthetic restraint as the rest of Conrad Hilton’s signature hotels. Julia found it a comforting space, which was good, because she was a thousand fucking miles from comfortable and relaxed at that moment. She stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the grounds, forecourt and main entrance of the resort, assured by Mister al Nouri that the mirrored glass‌—‌“the very latest in armored glass”‌—‌would put her at no risk.

  She had showered and changed into a clean outfit‌—‌long cargo pants and a dark linen shirt‌—‌courtesy of al Nouri and one of the hotel’s in-house boutiques. Her flesh wound had been cleaned and neatly sutured by the hotel doctor, her various scrapes and bruises tended to with care, but she still looked and felt like shit.

  Far below, the chaotic tangle of ambulances, Cairo’s three competing fire services, innumerable competing security services, and injured and panicking guests made a seething maelstrom on the acres of well-watered greensward. Stretchers lay in neat lines on one tennis court, bodies piled atop each other blocking part of the driveway. Sirens, Arabic shouts amplified by bullhorns and, she was sure, the occasional crack of a pistol shot reached her in this lofty eyrie behind the thick, green-tinted shield of glass. What hell must it be down there, in amongst that? Where Harry must be. She forced down her fears.

  “Prince Harry, my men tell me he survived the Jewish attack,” Mister al Nouri assured her. He had assured her three times now, and yet he had no idea where Harry was at this moment, only that he had been seen outside the hotel in the company of men identified as possible English agents. Or maybe American. Or French. It was difficult, you understand.

  Julia understood only too well. Harry had been going to some sort of meet-up in the cocktail lounge and she was cursing herself for having let him go without knowing any of the most basic details.

  Just going to meet an old friend from the war, he’d said.

  And then the hotel blows up.

  And, let’s not forget, a couple of generic KGB thugs tried to put a bag on her. Or NKVD, she corrected herself. They were NKVD here. She hadn’t forgotten them, but that incident‌—‌relatively small and personal, until al Nouri’s intervention‌—‌had been overtaken by the violent chaos of the… the what? The “attack” on the bar?

  She turned away from the window. Mister al Nouri was speaking into a radio handset. Augmented tech by the look of it, compact enough to be copied from an eighties or nineties design. He acknowledged her with a raise of his eyebrows, brought his conversation to an end, and stashed the handset in his suit pocket‌—‌on the opposite side to his shoulder holster. He was carrying quite a bit of tactical equipment on him, but the suit was very well cut and did not bulge in a manner that would give him away to a casual observer.

  “Your phone, Miss Duffy, do you have any reception yet? Any word from Prince Harry?”

  Julia shook her head, but took her cell out and checked the screen again. No bars, not even an SOS indicator. The primitive local net had fallen hard.

  “I’ve tried sending him a dozen messages,” she said, “hoping one might squeeze through. But nothing. I can’t get through to him and he can’t get through to me.”

  She spoke in a rush, and the anxiety came back on her breathlessness. The Egyptian sensed her mounting distress and walked towards her patting the air in front of him with his open hands.

  “His Highness will be fine,” said al Nouri. “My men had him under observation when he was meeting with Herr Professor Bremmer, and afterwards when they left the hotel. Both men were fine. His Highness did have some bloodstains about him, but my men tell me this was the blood of the Jewish dogs he shot down. And possibly some Romanians. Or Serbs. It is confusing, yes? Your fiancé put down many dogs today. I will owe him a drink, as the English say. Even though al Nouri does not drink. I will have tea. Prince Harry will have whatever pleases him.” Mister al Nouri’s face contorted in anger and he spat on the floor of the club lounge. It was not just a gesture either. Julia shuddered and stepped away from the giant throat oyster the man hawked up before cursing, “Jewish dogs!”

  “You keep saying that,” said Julia, getting her feelings under control. “Do you mind?” She said, nodding toward a table where dozens of bottles of top-shelf booze stood waiting for a cocktail hour which had come and gone. “I could use a drink.”

  “But of course, but of course,” said al Nouri. “These are for our s
pecial guests and, even though you were not able to stay with us in the hotel, Miss Duffy, I would like you to think of yourself as our special guest. Mr Hilton himself would stand for nothing less. Please, please, do fix yourself a drink. I cannot touch the filthy poison myself, of course, alcohol being the elixir of Satan and the ruination of all virtue. But I could call up the barman, and he could make you a vodka martini. I understand that even though they are as acid to your immortal soul, they are quite nice here in the lounge.”

  Julia smiled and headed to the bar, intending to pour herself a double bourbon.

  “Acid on the rocks is just about my speed at the moment,” she muttered. She found a bucket of ice cubes which had not completely melted away. “The Jewish guys you keep talking about,” she said as she dropped a couple of rocks into a tumbler and chased them with a healthy measure of some small batch rye, “do you know where they’re from? Were they Mossad? Because I don’t see Mossad being that incompetent. Not where I came from, and not here.”

  Mister al Nouri frowned as he peered down on the chaotic scenes below. He looked like a man contemplating a dog turd on his front lawn.

  “Perhaps not,” he conceded. “But they were definitely Jews. The one His Highness shot has the marking.” al Nouri pulled up one cuff of his suit jacket and tapped two fingers on the inside of his forearm. “From the Nazis, yes?”

  Julia frowned, took a hit of the bourbon and grimaced as it burned down her throat. “A camp tattoo, you mean?”

  “That is the one, yes,” nodded al Nouri. “The brand the Germans put on them in the camps. His was what you call the barcode, so he must have been put into the camp later in the war, when such things came into use, after the Emergence.”