Gun Metal Heart

by Dana Haynes

  John said, “Why? Please. Professor. I need to know why.”

  Professor Antic sat ramrod straight, his body hardly seeming to weigh anything on the antique chair.

  “Muslim holy wars around the globe. The utter failure of the euro. The first President Bush leads Europe into a land war in the Middle East, then the second President Bush does it again! Europe learns nothing. American arrogance, European weakness. What do these things have in common, Mr. Broom?”

  John waited.

  “The fall of the Soviet Union.”

  He couldn’t help himself: John actually snorted a little laugh. The blood on his arms and hands was turning stiff but remained tacky.

  The old man shook his large head. “Oh, we are not stupid, Mr. Broom. We know that the Soviet model was corrupt and an economic joke. But the concept! The idea! A strong East, to counterbalance the blustering West. A European superpower to curb the American cowboys. It would have saved the last quarter century from so much bloodshed.”

  “The Illyrian Party?”

  “The Illyrian League, Mr. Broom. My counterparts throughout the former Soviet Union are taking up the banner. Romania and Hungary. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In Poland and Ukraine.” The old man allowed himself to preen a bit. He patted one spindly leg, the way a man might applaud while holding a wineglass.

  “The fuse is lit. As with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in 1914. So today. We fan the flames of European independence and liberty.”

  John wiped his left hand on his pant leg—the new suit was ruined anyway—then gingerly drew his stolen phone out of his pocket. He activated it, creating a perfect bloody thumbprint on the screen. He nudged his chin toward the man with the flattop haircut and badly swollen knee. The guy was sweating and in a great deal of pain but was trying to be stoic.

  “That schmuck? He’s American military. You lured him here?”

  Antic chuckled. “Like shooting a barrel of monkeys.”

  “Shooting fish in a barrel,” John sighed. “Fun as a barrel of monkeys.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing. Give me your hand.”

  John wiped blood off his. Then raised it.

  Antic studied the younger man’s hand warily.

  “I’m serious. I see you’re the grandmaster here. Give me your hand.”

  Antic’s distaste was obvious.

  “Is it because you want to avoid blood on your hands?” John laughed. “’Cause, I gotta say: That ship’s sailed. C’mon.”

  “I admire you as a student of politics, Mr. Broom. I do.”

  “But…?”

  The old man shrugged apologetically. “You’re just a Jew.”

  John shrugged. “I’ll buy that.”

  But he didn’t lower his hand. And after a beat, Antic took it. A simple, weightless, gripless up and down. Antic performed it the way one might shake a hound’s paw: he’s a lower species. He doesn’t understand.

  John nestled back against the wall. He closed his eyes.

  “Boy. Hell of a day.”

  To Antic, it looked like the young American was just giving up. The old man felt vindicated. He felt young.

  “You’re an anti-Semite.”

  Antic shrugged as if to say, Isn’t everyone?

  “The Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo?”

  “They will rise with us now, when we need them. Later, like children, they will need to be put in their place.”

  “You’re a neofascist?”

  “Let us not mince euphemisms, Mr. Broom. I was a Nazi.”

  John held up the stolen cell phone and waggled it a bit. The old man glanced at it.

  “You should see this,” John said.

  The old man took the phone from John, peering myopically at the screen. His breathing grew thin.

  “What … what is this…?”

  “Bunch of really smart twenty-something interns in Washington.” John leaned his head back against the wall and watched the doctor work on Diego. “They’re crazy-good with the Internet. They created a bunch of hashtags and markers telling young people to watch your broadcast. They pushed it out on every social media platform. Then they located your original feed from here. And they’re rebroadcasting it throughout Europe.”

  The professor’s face fell. His rheumy eyes flashed from John’s phone to the video camera and audio boom.

  Which lay on the floor. Facing them.

  “You’re still live, Professor. You and the discredited CIA agent you just shook hands with. Smile for your fans.”

  Forty-Eight

  Daria studied the floating hummingbirds framed in the harsh oval light as if they were lead performers, dead center onstage in their designated follow spots. They hummed. When they didn’t move, they didn’t look much like hummingbirds. More like badminton birdies with four horizontal plastic wings and miniature helicopter rotors at the end of each wing. Their downdrafts sent up billows of dust and paper debris.

  Outside the hawks swooped past the aging missile holes.

  Daria held one of her incendiary meth bottles in both hands, one hand wrapped around the cap. She stood on the remnants of a filing cabinet, on its side, straddling it like it was a surfboard. She could see the curled remnants of tile flooring beneath it, but also holes that plunged all the way down to the third and second levels as well.

  “Those,” Viorica’s voice echoed, “are Mercutio. I think they like you.”

  “And the hawks?” When Daria spoke, both hummingbirds snapped in her direction but held themselves motionless in the middle of the white beams from the ground-floor floods.

  “Hotspur. Made illegally by a company called American Citadel. A company that, collectively, is peeing its pants right now.”

  The Mercutio drones did not sight up on Viorica when she spoke. Daria cursed silently. Flying fucking Monkeys.

  “We need to get them out of here.”

  “How come, Punkin?”

  “Because–”

  A shot rang out from outside. A .22 bullet raced into the confining, confusing space, through the centermost of three missile holes. Subsonic, the bullet made a zipping sound before it embedded itself in a downed ceiling support column, inches from Daria’s right shoulder. She twisted back, hissing in pain. The bullet missed but blood bloomed from the talons of wooden shrapnel driven into her shoulder.

  In the shock of impact, she’d jostled the lid of the water bottle. Daria felt it begin to expand.

  She threw it clumsily, left-handed, without room to wind up and really heave. The bottle lobbed about five feet in a high arc.

  Daria ducked.

  Viorica spied the bottle and rolled up and over a pile of debris.

  The fireball erupted.

  Wood and copper and ceramic shrapnel rained down from the ceiling. Already twisted debris twisted more. Mounds of detritus crumbled, falling through the missile holes to the floor below. A cyclone of dust and asbestos and bits of paper and plastic swirled around the floor.

  Both spotter drones crashed into the wall and fell to the floor.

  Viorica had scrambled over debris and almost tumbled into a great hole in the floor. It was almost six feet in diameter, the rim cluttered with felled bits of building and office equipment. It was almost round.

  Viorica teetered precariously on the edge of the round abyss, grabbing onto a truncated length of water pipe, her left foot dangling for a moment. Her Glock bounced off an old coat rack and glittered as it fell to the floor below.

  The dust was suffocating. Both women hacked coughs.

  Daria rose and clambered unartfully over an mound of insulation, moving clockwise from Viorica’s presumed position, finding a new hiding place. She couldn’t know that Viorica had dropped her weapon. Daria’s right arm throbbed as long slivers gouged against the hardworking muscles. Blood from the cuts around her left eye again obscured her vision. She found a depression behind a remnant of a chalkboard that now served as a pretty good duck blind.


  She hunkered down, the backpack dragging in her wake. Volatile meth bombs had seemed like a good idea down on the first floor. Now they felt like a ticking time bomb strapped to her back.

  She rubbed blood away from her left eye and let her finger just brush the handle of the cutthroat blade in her boot.

  She glanced at the chalkboard. Miraculously, it still held writing, even after all these years. It looked like the ghost of a Venn diagram with Cyrillic scribbling around it.

  Only ten feet away, Viorica swung one of her red canvas sneakers up and snagged a jagged bit of copper pipe around the edge of the abyss. The pipe held. She levered herself back up and put her other shoe on the last viable floor support she could see.

  “You … wanna not … do that again,” she gasped, flexing her left arm. In stopping her fall, she’d jolted her rotator cuff.

  Daria was surprised by the proximity of the blonde’s voice. They were almost atop each other. She said. “Can you call them off?”

  “Can I what?”

  “The doctor’s bag.” Daria levered herself to her knees. “Dr. Incantada’s bag. Call off the drones.”

  Viorica laughed. “Why should I?”

  Daria rose to her haunches. Blood oozed from the long splinters in her shoulder. “You should call them off because there was only one explosion from Parliament. The hawks with the rockets stopped hunting. And if they can’t get me with bullets…”

  She waited.

  In the swirl of dust and gloom, Viorica whispered.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Outside, another Hotspur glided past the three round openings, casting a rolling shadow from the ground floor floodlights.

  Would the shadow, the threat of the rocket-hawks, distract Viorica? One way to find out.

  Daria vaulted over the chalkboard, scrambling like mad. She spotted the blonde only a few feet away, standing on the precipice of a whacking great hole, almost two meters wide. The pebbled leather doctor’s bag sat atop an overturned water heater.

  Daria landed on the far side of the round hole, reached for hanging wires, and swung out over the emptiness. Her fist connected with Viorica’s mouth.

  The blonde spun as well as she could, one foot on a floor support, one leg outstretched, and the sole of her stolen sneaker on the jagged end of a copper pipe. Blood spurted from a split lip.

  Daria swung on the overhead wires, drawing closer, fist flying.

  Viorica ducked, threw a sharp elbow into the glistening blood seeping from Daria’s bare right shoulder. Daria grunted. Hanging by one arm, she swung back to the far side of the six-foot hole.

  Viorica grabbed another section of the overhead wires—they hung like a giant letter W—and swung toward the middle of the hole. She gambled that the wires would hold both their weight. She made a blade of the large, middle knuckles of her right hand, fingers tightly together, fingertips curled in toward her palm, and drove the knuckles into her enemy’s side.

  Daria felt a rib crack.

  They swung over the precipice, both finding new footholds. If they had been at twelve and six o’clock before, now they were at three and nine.

  They dangled, each from one arm, and eyed each other, looking for weakness. Both gasped.

  Viorica swung out, kicking, going for Daria’s gut. She missed, but by inches. Daria floated across the void, too, her elbow slamming into Viorica’s ribs. They spun, hanging by one fist each, and scrabbled again for new footholds.

  They stood, panting, feet finding precious little purchase, on separate sides of the vaguely round missile hole in the floor. They’d both gone halfway around the ominous hole.

  They eyed each other on the far side of the gap.

  Viorica wiped blood from her lip with the back of her free hand. “Suppose it ends here.”

  “Suppose so.” Daria struggled not to inhale too deeply, her newly broken rib screaming at her. She let go of the overhead wires, half turning, both hands scrambling for purchase amid the overturned desks and chairs and trash bins.

  Viorica took a gamble: she relinquished her overhead handhold, which provided reach and maneuverability. And she averted her eyes from the enemy. In a fight, doing that begs for defeat. But she reckoned the payoff was worth it. She hiked up her skirt and yanked at the Velcro holding together a black Lycra garter. Tucked into the band was an Italian switchblade stiletto with a hammered-steel blade and oxblood-red handle.

  She grinned at Daria. “Round Two?”

  Daria looked up from across the abyss.

  And grinned, too. Her wolfish smile exposed her canines. She showed her left hand. It held the last of her meth-bombs. She shook the plastic bottle vigorously.

  “You can’t kill me with a bomb, Punkin. Not this close. You’ll kill us both.”

  “Might,” Daria shifted her weight. She revealed Gabriella Incantada’s leather bag. It was open, in her other hand.

  “Don’t!” Viorica shouted.

  Daria felt the plastic water bottle expand a bit. She stuffed it in the doctor’s bag, snapped the bag shut, and hurled it back across the abyss.

  In midair, the bag stretched comically, as round as a beach ball, and fire glowed from beneath the handle and the double straps. Streamers of fire began to emerge from seams. Viorica tried to spike it out of the air, but some of the meth clipped her forearms, fire spreading. She screamed.

  Outside the Chinese embassy, in the warm, still air of Belgrade, the drones were robbed of their brains.

  The Mercutio drones hovered in midair, awaiting instructions. They could stay like that for another ninety minutes, give or take. Then they would simply fall to earth.

  The Hotspur drones still swooped. But now, blind and deaf. They smashed mindlessly into the Chinese embassy.

  Daria leaped feetfirst into the hole in the floor. She could not see how far down it went.

  Above her, the pyrophoric missiles housed inside the hawks detonated. A firestorm engulfed the fourth floor.

  Forty-Nine

  Chaos held the reins, dragging the Belgrade first responders and Serbian military and intelligence forces along for the ride.

  The madness up and down Avenue Kralja Milana left civilian, municipal, and federal officials stumbling over each other. The main north-south thoroughfare became a parking lot, smoke roiling from the damaged Parliament building on the left; the upper floors of the long-abandoned Chinese embassy pancaking in on themselves to the right; and the city’s political elite fleeing the U.S. ambassador’s residence back on the left.

  It didn’t help that a large contingent of the nation’s infamous and greatly hated White Scorpion gang had shown up at the Parliament building. They had been tipped off in advance that something would be happening. Some street fighting broke out with police. Skorpjo was there to stir up trouble. As if trouble needed any help.

  Amid the police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and military vehicles parked randomly up and down the avenue, the biggest and baddest beast was a camouflaged Vystrel two-axel tank that roared up from the south, roof hatch open, a soldier in the black fatigues and black beret of Special Forces riding beside the roof-mounted, rotating weapons platform.

  The Vystrel—a BPM-97 armored personnel carrier designed by the Russians—is a thundering leviathan: ten tons of armored hull, 240 horses, and large enough for a crew of twelve. This particular vehicle included a turret fitted with a 30 mm cannon and automatic grenade launchers. Every other responder with a lick of sense got out of its way that night.

  The war wagon ground its way up Kralja Milana and stopped first in front of the U.S. embassy. The soldier who rode up above half emerged through the open roof hatch and deftly hopped down. The smoked, bulletproof glass of the armored personnel carrier obscured the remainder of the crew.

  The soldier didn’t walk, he stalked: shoulders straight and a little forward, chest out, arms straight, and never far from his low-slung belt holster. He was pale and blond. He wore a major’s insignia. His hair was spiked with sweat and his athletic f
orm was bulked up by a ballistic vest and a web belt. He exchanged IDs with police and U.S. Marines at the ambassador’s resident.

  Under armed guard, he took a handcuffed John Broom to the tank. Two U.S. Marines with a stretcher brought out a bandaged and unconscious Diego.

  Captives in hand, the battle tank roared up the street to the gutted Chinese embassy.

  Smoke curled out from the hulking ruin. Everything above the third floor was either crumbling or in flames. Most of the devastation was internal, so it wouldn’t be until the light of morning that officials realized the damage there was far greater than that of the Parliament building.

  The Vystrel chewed up tarmac, coming to a halt before the former embassy. A Belgrade police officer wisely rolled his cruiser back to let the military vehicle through. The driver whacked the partially open main gate of the security fence, then rumbled through.

  Once on the grounds the side doors of the tank sprang open and two more soldiers, one a woman, joined the lead soldier with the major’s stripes. The woman had roughly chopped black hair and moved as if she’d been born in combat armor. A dark-skinned man, as small and as compact as a bullet, dashed to the gate, machine gun in both hands, to keep out the police and fire trucks. The Special Forces soldiers’ cheeks were blackened by angry slashes of charcoal, à la American football.

  The taller man and the woman began a methodical search of the grounds, working quickly and concisely. They spoke little. They were disciplined and, more importantly, had worked together often enough to interpret each other’s movements and silence. They moved like Army ants: all purpose, no distractions.

  They found a dead man behind a tireless Russian truck with a four-foot slash across his face and chest. He had bled out. They found another man in a silver van with burned-out electronics. The inside stank, a nasty funk of melted plastic. He’d died of a leg wound.

  They approached the rapidly disintegrating Chinese embassy. The soldiers could see that the building was nearing imminent collapse.

  They reached a wide, vertical gap in the wall, acrid smoke billowing from within.

  A form stepped out.