by Glenn Cooper
“Ardmore!” Bess screamed, running over and half-catching him as he slid onto the road. Her fingers latched onto the short length of bolt protruding from his chest but it was too well seated to pull it out.
Ardmore sputtered and tried to speak but the only thing coming out of his mouth was red froth.
She let out a blood-curdling “No!” and sought out the solitary rider up the road who was loading another bolt into his crossbow and kicking his reluctant horse to a gallop.
Bess shouted at her outriders, “Get him!”
None of her three henchmen had firearms but they had swords and though Trevor was pointing a crossbow at them they charged him full on. Trevor was bouncing in the saddle too heavily to aim another shot carefully. He chose the horse coming at him the fastest and fired at its huge brown mass. The mare pitched forward into an earth-thudding somersault, steamrolling the rider and crushing his pelvis.
Trevor threw the crossbow down and with one hand on the reins he pulled his loaded pistol from his satchel and cocked it. The two other riders were almost on top of him. He pulled the trigger but the powder must have been damp. The gun didn’t fire.
One of the swordsmen slashed at his horse’s neck. The wounded animal whipped around so forcefully that Trevor was thrown clear. He scrambled to his feet, drawing his own sword just in time to parry a series of blows from the closest rider while the other man dismounted to challenge Trevor on foot.
The sword fight played out some fifty feet from the boys. “Who is he?” Glynn asked the others.
“I don’t know but he’s trying to help us,” Angus said.
Bess had been cradling Ardmore’s head in her lap but now she gently lowered it to the ground and reached for his gun.
Angus saw what she was doing and so did the other boys. They all began to scatter but stopped when she didn’t pursue them. Instead she slowly walked toward the clashing swordsmen.
Trevor’s back was turned; he didn’t see Bess coming. Her shooting arm was extended straight and unwavering as if the heavy pistol was weightless.
Glynn was by Angus’s side. “We have to stop her,” Angus said.
They both still had their heavy walking sticks. Glynn caught up with Bess first and swatted her across the back, cracking the stick in two. She didn’t fall, she didn’t cry out. She merely turned to Glynn and calmly fired into his forehead.
Angus screamed, an agonized guttural scream, and he began laying into her with his stick. She shielded her face with one arm and reached into her trousers with the other. That’s when Angus saw she had cocked her own pistol. All he could do was continue to flail at her but she seemed immune to pain. She was too strong.
Angus heard footsteps coming from behind and then, in a blur, he saw all the other boys—Nigel, Danny, Stuart, Kevin, even frail Andrew—swinging their sticks at Bess, preventing her from raising her gun hand. Then Danny delivered a lunging strike to her breastbone and she fumbled the pistol.
Angus picked it up.
The gunshot tore into her jaw, ripping the mandible clean away.
The man who was fighting Trevor on foot momentarily turned toward the blast giving Trevor a split-second edge. A vicious downward thrust cleaved the man’s shoulder. He reeled away and staggered into the woods. The swordsman on horseback saw Bess lying in a pool of blood and decided he was done. He turned toward Devon and soon, all that remained was a trail of dust.
Trevor put his hands on his knees to catch his breath and after several moments, began walking toward the boys.
“Is one of you Angus Slaine?” he called out.
Angus let the smoking pistol fall from his hand. “I am.”
Trevor saw two boys motionless in the road. He counted six of them standing. “There were ten of you,” Trevor said.
Angus began to cry. He managed to say, “Glynn, dead. Harry, dead. Boris, dead. Craig, dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Who are you?” Angus asked.
“My name’s Trevor. Your father sent me to find you. I’m here to bring you home.”
28
They covered the distance from Paris to Cologne in one full day, showing their true colors through Francia, but disguising themselves as a caravan of Russian soldiers when they crossed the border into Germania. They were split between two sturdy, covered wagons, each pulled by a team of excellent horses. Traversing the French territories, Brian and John drove one wagon with Emily, Sergeant O’Malley and Trooper Culpepper riding inside. Simon and Caravaggio drove the other team, with the Russian, Ostrov, under wraps. Inside Germania, Ostrov emerged to drive the lead wagon and talk his way through the Russian checkpoints while Simon and Caravaggio hid inside.
They arrived at Cologne in the morning. With the limestone castle looming overhead, perched on a jutting chalk promontory, they found a small glade in the woods on the west side of the Rhine. There, they set up a protected camp, the SAS soldiers doing picket duty with their last remaining AK rifle. Ostrov unhitched a horse and with the other AK-47 slung over his shoulder, he bade the rest of them farewell, vowing to return as quickly as possible with Paul Loomis in tow.
“You really don’t like the bloke,” Brian told John as they watched him disappear.
“It shows, does it?” John said. “There’s something about the guy. He says all the right things but he’s too glib for my liking. I hate having to trust a stranger.”
“You and me both,” Brian said. “Shame to see us lose half our lovely rifles.”
“By the time we get back Kyle will have cast plenty of new ones.”
“He’s a good ’un, that brother of yours,” Brian said. “How come you never mentioned him to me?”
“He is a good guy, I should have. I guess he and I had our differences but that’s behind us. He’s covered himself in glory this trip, that’s for damn sure. I am so fucking proud of him.”
All nights in Paris were dark but this night was particularly black. If there was a moon orbiting the planet, forever cloaked by dense clouds, then it must have been the thinnest of crescents tonight. The royal forge was beastly hot but there was something almost cheerful in the way its glow spilled out the doors, pushing back the blackness. Inside, Kyle and the forge master, the fat-bellied, bellicose Jean, had been working over twenty-four hours straight without so much as a break for a proper meal. The workers had a small baking oven off in a corner and one man knew how to make bread. So it was freshly baked loaves that had sustained them all.
As Kyle quenched part of a trigger assembly in cold water, Jean looked over his shoulder and grunted his approval. The cast piece was uniformly black in color. When it was cool enough to handle Jean took it and inspected it more closely.
“Good iron,” Jean said.
“Yeah, doesn’t suck,” Kyle said.
“What means suck?”
“You know, something that’s bad. Like Hell. Hell sucks.”
“Ha, oui, Hell, she sucks.”
Kyle reached for a half-eaten baguette. “Why are you here, Jean?”
“Me? In Hell?”
“Yeah.”
“I kill my brother.”
“Really?”
“Oui, c’est vrai.”
“Was he an asshole?”
“What means asshole?”
“Someone who sucks.”
“Yes, asshole.”
“There were times I probably wanted to kill my brother,” Kyle said. “Fortunately I never acted on it.”
Jean shrugged. He hadn’t seemed to understand any of it.
“Speaking of assholes, I think that guy’s an asshole.”
Kyle was looking across the forge at Pavel Antonov, the mute Russian whom Ostrov had left behind.
“Ostrov asked us to put him to work,” Simon had told Kyle before they left for Cologne. “He says he knows a thing or two about making lead balls for shot.”
So they had given him a job casting lead bullets alongside a bench full of Frenchmen. But the Russian stuck to himself a
nd creeped everyone out with his hard stares, fixed frown, and thick facial scar.
“Oui, asshole,” Jean agreed.
As the night wore on, Kyle found himself dozing at his bench, each time waking with a start, unsure of how long he’d been out.
This last time he figured he had been napping for at least several minutes because the warm iron piece he’d been filing was now cold.
He blinked a few times and saw that Jean too was napping, fully stretched out on some straw in the corner. In fact, half the forge workers also seemed to have petered out. He noticed that Pavel Antonov was by the main door. The Russian turned to look at something and their eyes met for a moment before he was gone. Kyle couldn’t be sure but his expression seemed to have changed.
Was there a hint of a smile?
Something about that moment made Kyle get up to see what Antonov had been looking at.
He saw it too late.
A length of cord was on fire; a thin trail of ash led from the bread oven and snaked over the floorboards toward a large barrel standing upright in a corner.
A barrel of black powder used for bullet-making.
The brightly burning cord was only a foot away from the barrel when Kyle launched himself across the room, shouting for everyone to get out. Jean woke and swore at the disturbance.
When the powder keg went off it blew out the ceiling and the walls. The fireball that lit up the skies of Paris was as bright as the midday sun that none of the Hellers had seen since last they walked the Earth.
Joseph Stalin sat in Barbarossa’s old throne chair in waiting to receive his visitor. The reception hall was gloomy and archaic, reflecting the old king’s love of hunting. The walls were studded with centuries of trophies—boars, deer, stags, and bears. Stalin had ordered the windows to be opened to air out the stuffiness and allow thousands of flies to escape but the direction of the wind was unfavorable. The pungent smells from the rotting room in the castle cellar wafted into the hall so the windows were closed and the flies were buzzing.
“Nikita,” Stalin said gruffly, “bring me something to swat them,” and the young secretary scrambled off to find some suitable implement.
General Kutuzov, Stalin’s field marshal, had just eaten a rich stew and brown gravy soiled his tunic. He noticed the streak and began rubbing at his belly with a moistened finger. Stalin saw his attempt and made a disparaging comment. The secret policeman, Vladimir Bushenkov, sat motionless, staring at the closed doors at the end of the hall with his one good eye.
The doors opened and Ostrov entered accompanied by armed guards, one of whom carried something wrapped in a cloth. At the sight of Ostrov, Stalin’s face compressed into a fearsome frown.
“So, the traitor returns. What do you have to say for yourself Valery Aleks?�ndrovich?
Ostrov stopped a dozen feet away from the throne chair and lowered his head.
Then he slowly raised it and smiled broadly. “I say it is good to be back among my comrades.”
Stalin rose and approached the man with open arms and enveloped him in a slapping hug, followed by a kiss to each cheek.
“So, has our gambit worked?” Stalin asked, swatting a fly that settled on his leg with the leather strap Nikita had produced.
“It worked brilliantly, my tsar. Garibaldi and his stooges believed everything. They accepted Comrade Antonov and me as the defectors we claimed to be. Garibaldi is like an eager child who wishes to be loved. I showed affection for his ideas and the rest was easy. He readily accepted us into his inner circle.”
Bushenkov said, “We want your complete report.”
“And that you shall get, comrade,” Ostrov said. “I know much of their military capabilities and the state of their alliances. But permit me to begin with the most startling news. John Camp and Emily Loughty have returned.”
He told the astonished men that they and the Earther adults and children had succeeded in making their way back to their homes. But the situation on Earth had deteriorated. The portals between the worlds had multiplied and remained wide open. There were four locations in Brittania where Hellers were pouring into Earth. Camp and Loughty had been obliged to re-enter Hell to find the one man they believed had the knowledge to close down the connections.
“They want Paul Loomis,” Ostrov said.
“Pasha,” Stalin said quietly. “They want my dear Pasha.”
“I was sent to bring him to them,” Ostrov said, reaching into his jacket. “I carry this letter from the woman.”
Stalin unfolded it and read it then handed it to Kutuzov, forgetting he could not read English. Bushenkov took it next and scanned it with his eye.
“You are to bring him to them in Paris?” Bushenkov asked.
“Not Paris,” Ostrov said. “Cologne. They are here, not two miles away.”
“Camp and Loughty here?” Stalin said, clapping his hands in celebration.
“Not just them. Two of Garibaldi’s top men too, men you met when they came to Marksburg as emissaries, the Englishman Wright and the painter, Caravaggio. Also two modern English soldiers who came over to protect Camp and Loughty. And finally, the Englishman Brian Kilmeade.”
“The bastard who conjured up the Iberian fleet out of the mist,” Stalin said. “So he returned too.”
“He never left,” Ostrov said. “He elected to stay as Queen Mécia’s consort.”
“A true madman,” Stalin said stamping his feet in merriment. “Staying in Hell to lie with a corpse. This is too much. All of them, within our grasp. You have done well, Valery Aleks?�ndrovich.
“There is more, my tsar.” Ostrov asked for the cloth-wrapped object and offered it to Stalin.
“What is this?” Stalin said, reacting to the weight of the package. As he unbundled it his eyes opened wide and his mouth parted. He ran his fingers back and forth over it as if he didn’t trust his own eyes.
Kutuzov didn’t know what it was but Bushenkov did. He got up to bend over Stalin’s lap to see for himself.
“An AK-47,” Stalin said in a hushed, reverential tone. “I remember as if it were yesterday bestowing the Order of the Red Star on young Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov for inventing this beautiful weapon. But who has made this? We have not seen a weapon so advanced in Hell. I have been demanding something to propel us beyond the primitive state of blackpowder guns but no one could answer my prayers.”
“John Camp and his brother, Kyle Camp, a gunmaker, brought it with them from Earth.”
“Impossible,” Bushenkov said. “Do you think we are fools? Metals do not come through.”
“But rubber does,” Ostrov said. “Rubber molds. A hundred of them for each part of the weapon, the magazine, and the bullets.”
“Genius,” Stalin murmured.
“They went to a forge in Brittania, cast the parts, and assembled the weapons. They made them for the English soldiers to defend the portals in Hell and prevent Hellers from crossing. This was to be a temporary solution while they sought Pasha.”
“Can we get these molds?” Bushenkov asked.
Ostrov shook his head. “We will have to disassemble this weapon and have our iron workers in Russia or Germania make their own casts. The bigger problem is making the explosives for the primer caps on the bullets. These I could not obtain.”
“We will find chemists in Russia,” Stalin said. “This problem will be solved.”
Ostrov was about to say something when Bushenkov cut him off. “Tell me,” he asked, “did you steal this rifle from under their noses? And what of Garibaldi? Is he not interested in producing his own arsenal of AK-47s?”
“Steal it? No! It was much sweeter than that. They handed it to me and wished me luck. I told them I would pretend to have doubts about my defection and tell you I stole the rifle as a display of my true loyalty to the tsar. All this would be a ruse to get the letter to Pasha and spirit him away for a meeting with the Loughty woman.”
“You see how clever our Valery Aleks?�ndrovich is?” Stalin said. �
�You will be rewarded for your heroism, my son.
“There is more to tell,” Ostrov said. “John Camp’s brother gave Garibaldi a complete set of molds and has set to work at the royal forge of Paris to manufacture large numbers of rifles and ammunition. Loughty knew the recipe for the primer chemicals.”
Stalin’s mood darkened in an instant. He pushed himself off the throne still holding the rifle. “Then we are finished,” he spat. “An army with these weapons will be victorious.”
“Yes, I agree,” Ostrov said. “And that is why we will be victorious.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Kutuzov said. “I am confused.”
“I left Pavel Antonov behind to assist John Camp’s brother. Pavel is very clever with gunpowder, you know. By now Kyle Camp is dead, the forge and all the workers are destroyed, the molds and gun parts and chemicals are destroyed. We have one of the two AK-47s in Europa. The other is not two miles away.”
Stalin told Nikita to bring wine. He wearily sat back on the throne with the rifle propped against his knee.
“You know,” he said, “I am too old for all these ups and downs and ups. Is this the end of the fun-fair ride, Valery Aleks?�ndrovich? Do you intend to wrench out my guts with more ups and downs?
“I am sorry, my tsar,” Ostrov said. “Perhaps I have too much of a flair for the dramatic. Yes, that is everything.”
Stalin took a cup of wine and told Nikita to pour some for the others, Ostrov first. “So, all we need to do is seize Emily Loughty and have her make these primer chemicals for us,” Stalin said. “Then, when we have hundreds, maybe thousands of these rifles and wagonloads of ammunition, we will need to construct the largest rotting room in Hell to receive the broken bodies of Giuseppe Garibaldi and all his filthy allies. Nikita, bring Pasha to me.”
Loomis’ room was at the opposite end of the castle. By the time Nikita brought him to the hall the men had finished one bottle of wine and started another.
“Ah, Pasha, come, come,” Stalin said, his speech happily sloppy.
Paul, Pasha—the man hardly cared what he was called anymore. His face was a permanent, heavily lined mask of sorrow. All his puckish good looks that Emily still clung to when she thought about their years together as his junior—they had long-ago faded away during his years in Hell. On his best days he looked old and wilted; on his worst days he was catatonic, refusing to rise from his bed or eat.
