Hammer of Angels: A Novel of Shadowstorm

by G T Almasi

  “Darwin, grab that jerkoff’s rifle and whatever ammo he has left.” Brando leans me against the water tank and bends down to retrieve my dead adversary’s weapon.

  “How’s Rah-Rah?”

  Brando slips his arm back around me. “He’ll have a nasty bruise, but he’s okay. The bullet struck him at an angle, and his SoftArmor wasn’t pierced.”

  “How about Victor?” I take the rifle from my partner.

  “He’s defending the safe house’s front door until we’re ready to go.”

  I drape the rifle’s strap across my body and wrap my right arm around Brando’s waist. “What’s the plan?”

  “Raj is coming to us, and then we’ll go down the stairs of this building.”

  “Lemme guess. Then we’ll swipe a ride and drive off into the sunset.”

  “Steal a vehicle, yes, then we pick up Victor. It’s a little early for the sunset part. Grey has some kind of distraction planned to help us get away.”

  “Well, button my shirt first. I don’t need Raj to see what color bra I wear.”

  23

  Same morning, 7:28 A.M. GMT

  36 Talbot Road, Notting Hill, London, Province of Great Britain, GG

  Raj leans out from the doorway, looks up and down the street, then leans back into the front hallway of our temporary hideout. He says, “The Staatszeiger truck is up the road. I only see one soldier. He must be the driver.” Our big man sets his stolen MP-50 into his cavernous mitts, checks the safety, and glances at me and Brando.

  The two of us are covered in blood, all of it mine. My partner’s hands, arms, and face have red smears all over them, and I’m simply drenched from the waist down. My bandages aren’t adhering very well since I’m still walking around. My sneakers leave sticky red footprints everywhere.

  Brando holds his arm around me to help me stay upright. I shouldn’t be standing, of course, but we have to get the fuck away from here. All three of us know the only thing that will kill me faster than moving is not moving. This fact is being clearly reinforced by the gunshots roaring through the neighborhood.

  Raj comms on the team channel. “Victor, you there?”

  Victor’s voice crackles through the firefight. “Affirmative. Go ahead.”

  “Our exit is imminent,” Raj answers. “Break off contact now and come to us through the back garden.”

  “Understood. On my way.”

  Raj’s face is tense. He looks at my midsection and my legs. “Scarlet, maybe you’d better ride up front with us.”

  I say, “Forget it. I can’t drive like this, and one of us has to ride in back in case the Krauts chase us.”

  Raj turns in the direction Victor will come from, then back to me. I cut him off. “No way, Raj. Victor is good, but he’s not enhanced.”

  My fellow Level turns back to face the door. “You’re right. Let’s do this, then.” He brandishes his gun and charges into the street. Brando and I lumber out of the doorway after him.

  Rah-Rah isn’t as fast as me, but he’s no slouch, either. The big man rushes the half block and body-slams the driver right out of his boots. The Staatsjerk hits the street like a load of turnips. Raj then runs around the transport to make sure he hasn’t missed anybody. He emerges from behind the vehicle while Brando loads me onto the truck’s rear gate. Victor emerges from the garden and runs across the street.

  “Victor,” Raj says, “you ride shotgun.”

  “I ride what?” Victor asks.

  Despite the pain I’m in, I laugh to myself. I guess Germans don’t have that expression.

  Brando pitches in. “He means you ride up front with us.”

  I thump onto the deck and drag myself into the cargo area. A pair of benches face each other across a middle aisle. I slouch between the two benches and lean against the back of the cab, facing the rear. I load a clip into the sniper’s rifle and examine the sights. Good enough.

  Brando, Victor, and Raj climb in front. The diesel engine bursts into life with a loud rattle, followed by a rumbling roar. Raj steps on the gas, and we escape from the O.K. Corral.

  My partner comms, “Scarlet, you all right back there?”

  “Fine,” I comm back, “but I’m hungry. Ask Raj to stop if he sees a McDonald’s.”

  He laughs. “Only if it has a drive-through.”

  I wince as the wheels bounce through a pothole.

  Brando again. “Scarlet, you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I heard you yell. It sounded like it hurt.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d yelled anything. “Don’t worry about it.” I switch to Raj, “Hey, Mario Andretti, can you avoid those big bumps?”

  “Sorry, Shortcake. Will do.”

  After a few minutes we make it to an expressway out of town. Ahh, smooth, smooth highway. The tires’ fluid rolling helps my muscles relax a bit. Cars drift past and swush into the background. My head droops forward, like when I used to nap in math class. I don’t want to dose any Madrenaline because it’ll make me bleed out faster.

  I wish I had some coffee or another one of Grey’s cigarettes. I’m daydreaming about cappuccino and Marlboros when I hear from up front, “Do you think they saw us?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Raj comms to me, “Get ready back there, Scarlet. We’ve got company.”

  A military motorcycle with a sidecar bounces over the median strip and pulls into the fast lane behind us. It follows us for a mile or so, maintaining a distance of about sixty yards. The trooper in the sidecar holds a radio microphone up to his mouth to call in reinforcements.

  Well, that won’t do at all.

  I pick up my rifle and look through the sight. The vehicle’s movement jiggles the crosshairs all over the place. I bend my legs up in front of me and prop the rifle on my knees and sight again. Better. The truck’s motion means my aim is too unsteady to go for a head shot, but I can certainly give these heinies something to think about.

  My first shot smashes the bike’s headlight. My second one hits the driver in his left arm and pushes his left hand off the handlebars. I miss with my third shot as the injured driver swerves the bike into the breakdown lane and stops.

  “Guys, they’ve stopped.”

  “Nice work, Scarlet,” Raj comms.

  I tug out my rifle’s magazine, stuff in a new one, and settle in for the ride. After five minutes or so, my eyes get sleepy and my breath becomes steady and regular. Mmm, mocha latté …

  I’m jolted back to reality by Raj’s comm. “Scarlet, there’s a roadblock up ahead. You’d better hang on to something.” The truck’s engine howls as Raj accelerates. I drape the rifle’s strap around my shoulders and grab the benches. Victor’s submachine gun thunders from up front.

  Shouts from outside, then we hit. The impact is terrific, a shattering clong! that jolts me off the floor. My head smacks the wall, and my vision goes all white static for a second.

  A flurry of gunfire and German curses from behind tells me we’ve bashed our way through. Several cars and a couple of motorcycles detach themselves from the mess and race after us.

  I blink the dizziness out of my eyes and prop the sniper’s rifle on my knees. I methodically fire rounds at the pursuit vehicles’ drivers. Victor tries to engage them too—his automatic bursts shower the cars in sparks—but his awkward firing position makes it tough for him to do more than suppress them. I kill two troopers and wound another three before I have to stop and reload. The two motorcyclists see their opportunity and roar forward.

  The first rider pulls up to the rear gate, chucks something inside, and veers away. I don’t have to look to know it’s a grenade, but it’s all the way at the deck’s far end. I sit forward and cry out in pain as I roll off my butt and onto my knees. I grip my rifle in one hand while my other hand crab crawls toward the hissing potato masher. I stretch out with my rifle’s barrel and poke the grenade out the back of the truck. It bounces three feet off the pavement. I flop down and tuck my face in
to the crook of my elbow.

  Boom! Something hot hits me in my shoulder, and my right arm goes numb. The first motorcycle veers off to the side of the road. The driver’s face grimaces, and his body leans awkwardly to one side.

  The second motorcycle maniac closes in behind us with a grenade ready to throw.

  “Raj! Hit the brakes!” I comm.

  “What?”

  “BRAKES! NOW!”

  Raj stomps on the brakes. Our truck lurches forward and suddenly slows. I skid like a hockey puck into the cargo area. The motorcycle smacks into the truck, and the driver flips over his handlebars. His grenade thunks to the pavement and slides alongside his motorcycle before it detonates and blows the bike’s front wheel off. A moment later, the motorcycle’s gas tank explodes and sprays a flaming pool of gasoline across all three lanes of the highway.

  I’m crumpled under one of the benches, tangled up in the rifle’s strap. My face is pressed into the grubby deck, which is gradually being covered with liquid, wet and sticky. The road vibrates my molars. I close my eyes.

  A big bump makes me open them again. A girl sits on the other bench. She reads a Spider-Man comic book. She’s about my size, maybe a couple of years younger than me. She puts down the comic book and gawks at me. Two dark lenses slide down over her eyes. I see myself reflected in the lenses. Left Me sips a coffee, and Right Me puffs a cigarette.

  Her left arm turns into a long knife which she uses to slice her legs and right arm off. Then she chops off her own head, which bounces across the floor until it stops directly in front of my face. Her lenses retract and reveal her wide-open eyes. She shrieks, “Die my dear? Why, that’s the last thing I’ll do!“ Then she breaks into wild, hysterical laughter.

  24

  Same morning, four hours later, 11:52 A.M. GMT

  English Channel off Dover, Province of Great Britain, GG

  When I was young, bath time wasn’t about getting clean, it was about adventure. My dad gave me a set of kid’s books about ships and a fleet of toy boats for my eighth birthday. For months I read the books over and over. During my nightly bath, I’d play with the little plastic boats and reenact the Battle of Trafalgar where Admiral Nelson defeated the Barbary pirates or when the U.S.S. Constitution single-handedly sank all the Spanish galleons.

  Although my sense of naval history was somewhat fractured, I still wound up with a strong sense of how much action happened in the English Channel. What those stories never communicated was how freaking crazy it is to ferry a gunshot victim across the Channel in a small powerboat in the middle of winter. It’s a good thing I haven’t eaten much lately or this little craft would have a fresh coat of Half-Digested Chunklet Beige.

  I don’t even know how I got into this thing. Raj must have put me here. The last thing I remember is passing out in the back of that truck. Then I had a long, commercial-free series of nightmares. I woke up once, here in the boat, when Brando replaced my bandages and connected a can of blood plasma to my intravenous port. When the plasma was empty, he switched me to a can of antibiotics and saline solution. That can is tucked into a pocket in my SoftArmor vest. A length of tubing connects it to my IV port.

  I’m wrapped in a big wool blanket, snuggled into the boat’s prow. Brando is tucked in behind me to cushion the boat’s rocking motion as it battles the waves. Despite the cold, I’m covered in clammy sweat. My Eyes-Up display shows my pulse is fast and my blood pressure is low. I face backward, which probably doesn’t help my seasickness, but it does let me watch our new buddy pilot the boat.

  Victor Eisenberg’s face is slick with salt spray, and the morning sun throws his chiseled features into sharp relief as his blue eyes beam anxiously across the approaching waves. He’s right to be on edge. If a big wave hits this teeny boat from the side, we’ll flip over and go down to Davy Jones’s locker.

  “How’s that?” Victor comms on our team channel.

  “A little more left,” Brando answers. “There. Good.”

  As long as we stay upright, we’ll get where we’re going. Navigation is easy for my partner, his onboard system has a full global positioning system built into it. You never get lost with El Brando around.

  I comm, “Ahoy there, Cap’n Vicberg.” Between the arctic wind, the heaving waves, and the blaring outboard engine, it’s too loud for regular talking.

  Victor looks at me. His white teeth gleam when he smiles. “Darwin,” he comms, “she’s awake.”

  My partner shifts position so he can see me. “Hey! How do you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  “Can you give me some more detail?”

  I launch a diatribe about my nausea, my dizziness, and that I’m freezing even though I’m wrapped in enough wool to keep a Scottish family in underwear for a decade. I’m also in a lot of pain despite my Overkaine.

  “Are you still bleeding?” he asks.

  I move my left hand across my torso to examine the bandage over my right side. My fingers are so numb I can’t feel them at all. I can only tell I’m touching my bandage from how it feels on my torso. My hand wriggles out from under the blankets. My fingers have blood on them. Most of it is dry, but some of it’s fresh. My fingernails have a bluish tinge to them.

  “Affirmative,” I comm.

  “Crap. My med-kit only has one can of plasma.”

  “How far do we have to go?”

  Brando helps me get my hand back under the blanket. “We’ll be in Calais in fifteen minutes, but we still need to meet our contact. I have no idea if she’s around. It’s not like we were able to call ahead and make a reservation.”

  I ask, “Can I sleep some more?”

  “I’m worried about you going into hypovolemic shock from losing so much blood. Although you may have already. You were kind of raving earlier when Raj and I moved you from the truck to this boat.”

  “What did I talk about?”

  “Your father, I think. You weren’t speaking very clearly.” Brando looks over his shoulder to keep an eye on where we’re going, then turns back to me. He rotates his seating position some more so we can see each other better. His face is pale, and his hair has been blown into a blob of dark-brown whipped cream.

  Mmm, whipped cream. Big squishy pillows made of—

  “—Alix! C’mon, babe. Stay awake if you can,” Brando comms. “Uhh …” He searches for something to talk about. “Victor and I were just discussing Johannes Kruppe.”

  “Who?” I comm back.

  “The guy from our person of interest list. Kruppe. It turns out Victor knows him from military school.”

  “Johannes is a huge asshole,” Victor comms, “but very tough, too.” He says to me, “You be careful fighting him, red hair.”

  I comm, “Since when am I gonna fight Kruppe?”

  Victor then tells me Kruppe is a critical part of the Greater German slavery system. He’s the main liaison between the SZ, the Purity League, and even the Gestapo. He’s a raging anti-Semite and feels that “the fatherland still needs to fulfill its duty and solve our Jewish problem once and for all.”

  I comm again, “Ah, now I see. Yes, I am definitely gonna fight Kruppe.”

  I try to scrunch down into the bow to get out of the wind and to elevate my legs a little more. The required effort is beyond me, however, and after a minute I give up. I pull the blanket up over my head and close my eyes.

  “Who’s our contact?” I comm.

  Victor answers, “A writer I met after I got out of the army. She was one of the journalists sent to cover the annual antislavery conference in Hamburg the year I was invited to speak about my experiences.”

  “She’s also a CIA stringer,” Brando says.

  “What’s her name?”

  My partner tucks the blankets in around me. “The CIA calls her Garbo. She supplies the boys in Langley with intel, and they help her transport escaped Jewish slaves out of Europe.”

  I’m very warm all of a sudden. “Garbo … Wasn’t she the one with … the eyes? No, that
was Bette Davis. Which … one was … which …”

  I’m in the house I used to live in with my parents before it got blown up last May. I walk into our kitchen. Cleo sits at our table with a raven-haired woman I’ve never seen before. I keep my eye on this woman. She’s going to have big bug eyes and I’ll have to strangle her right in front of my mother, which Mom won’t like very much.

  The woman turns to me and introduces herself, but the second she says her name, it flies right out of my head.

  I’m in a bathtub. The raven-haired woman is in the bath with me. We’re fully clothed, but we’re both soaked from the frigid red water. I shiver. She stands up and claps her hands together. At the instant she claps, I can see her skeleton, like I have X-ray vision for the blink of an eye. Then the woman climbs out of the tub and sloshes a crimson trail of water out of the bathroom.

  I stand up and follow her. The next room is a large barracks but kind of crappy, like in a POW camp. Crudely built bunks hold dozens of people. The woman stands in the middle of the room and draws a large shape in the dirt floor. It’s a big six-pointed star surrounded by a circle.

  The woman faces me, claps her hands once more, and disappears.

  CORE MIS-ANGEL-2799

  Heavily encrypted intercept, source unknown:

  START TRANSMISSION : SHE’S IN CALAIS : TRANSMISSION END

  25

  Next evening, Monday, February 16, 1981, 8:04 P.M. CET

  Calais, Province of France, GG

  When I wake up, I’m still wrapped in blankets, but the boat has turned into a bed and the English Channel has turned into a cozy little room. Someone putters around in the dim light. For a moment I think it’s Cleo until I hear the person say something in German. Mom’s German is good, but she’s got a strong American accent. What I hear now is perfect German, although I’m not used to hearing it spoken so softly.

  “Leave Scarlet alone, Moortje. She’s sick. Off with you, now.”

  I roll onto my side and yelp as sharp, searing pain gushes through my abdomen. The person turns toward me and comes over to my bed. It’s a middle-aged woman with thick black hair and big dark eyes with green flecks in them. She studies my face.