Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  “Follow quickly now, Russian. Your friends will not be far behind.”

  The temptation to assure Furedi that they were not his friends was strong, but Ivanov held his tongue. His fate was now almost completely in the hands of this gaunt-looking stranger with iron-gray hair.

  Franco tapped on a metal pipe by the only door, a coded sequence of some sort, and Ivanov shook his head as he recognized a ship’s speaking tube. Franco lifted the hinged metal cap at the end of the tube and blew into it as if he were playing a trumpet. Listening with the intensity of a safecracker, he had an answer in a few short, harsh words in the local language. An argument of sorts ensued, but it seemed that Ivanov’s guide had the better of it, given his satisfied nod when he flipped down the cap again.

  “We wait. Not long. They send help.”

  Ivanov said nothing, taking the opportunity to rearm himself from his small backpack, a precaution that Franco was happy to follow. The Italian took out a handgun and fixed a suppressor. As the mission principal, Ivanov enjoyed the privilege of carrying the big artillery. He had chosen an MP5K-PDW over the more commonly used reengineered Uzis preferred by other operatives. Heavy firepower in a tight, compact package; a simple fold of the stock had made his passage through the Roman underground much easier and more secure.

  Pausing for a moment to clear away any filth and muck that might interfere with his weapon’s operation, he covered the tunnel they’d just exited with the suppressed muzzle, prepared to provide a proper welcome to any interlopers. Tweaked by the OSS Field Operations shop for the reliability normally found in an AK-47, Ivanov’s MP5 could generate a cyclic rate of fire of 800-plus rounds per minute, easily emptying the drum mag’s 100 rounds in less than 20 seconds. With a muzzle velocity of 375 meters per second, anyone who attempted to follow them would find a stiff wall of copper-jacketed hollow points ready to persuade them otherwise.

  “Nice gun,” Franco commented. “My capo has two just like it.”

  “I do not doubt that,” Ivanov said quietly.

  They stood in silence for another five minutes, listening for the approach of Furedi’s allies, who would presumably appear from the street. And listening even more intently for the NKVD to come bursting up from below.

  A soft knock at the door-another coded cadence by the sound of it-and Franco admitted two men dressed in dark, threadbare civilian suits. Like Furedi, both were middle-aged, with sunken cheeks and eyes with all the light burned from them.

  It didn’t feel like a setup, but Ivanov was careful to keep all three grouped within a tight firing arc. For their part, they did nothing to arouse suspicion, such as separating and approaching him from different directions. Still, he kept the safety thumbed off while the Italians conducted an urgent council of war in low, hurried tones.

  “It is settled. We go back now,” Franco announced when they were done.

  “Where? To do what?” Ivanov asked. He was willing to defer to this man’s judgment in matters of navigation, especially under fire, but picking a fight with the NKVD, and with Skarov in particular, was shading into the realm of strategic decisions that were well beyond the guide’s responsibility.

  “To kill them,” replied one of the new arrivals. He was the slightly older of the two, Ivanov thought: a little taller, somewhat sturdier too. He didn’t have quite the harrowed and hungry look of Franco and the junior man. He looked well fed and well used to being obeyed.

  “I am all for the killing of NKVD,” said Ivanov. “It is what I live for. But you will not live for long if you go back down there now looking for a fight. You will fight and you will lose.”

  The three Romans exchanged a guarded look as though they thought themselves in the presence of a dangerous fool.

  “Perhaps,” said the man he now took to be their leader. “But we agreed to help you because you were sent to us as a man who has killed many Communists. This is good. You have brought more Communists for us to kill. Also good. They are below our feet right now-we are watching them. So let us do what you were sent to do. Let us kill them all.”

  Dusk was quickly gathering outside on the quiet streets. A gloomy darkness pooled around them as Ivanov tried to reason with the mafioso.

  “Today I did not come here to kill Communists,” he began. “And you know that. Today I came to talk to a woman called Anna, the woman of an important Party man, to learn something from him. That did not happen, and I don’t know why. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead, but that man remains the reason I came under the Wall.”

  “We are the reason you came under the Wall,” said the mafioso. “We gave you Franco because our friends the Americans told us it would help to kill more Communists. You cannot speak to this man you were looking for now. But that does not matter. Providence has set another goal before us. We must go now. While we still know where they are.”

  Ivanov held up his hand. “All right. We will go back down. But there is a man down there, a Communist called Skarov …”

  “We have heard of him,” said the leader, almost dismissively. “A man with many sins to answer for. Perhaps today he will answer for them.”

  “Perhaps,” Ivanov conceded. “But first he needs to answer to me. Killing a handful of Beria’s snakes means nothing if you do not clean out the viper’s nest. If I can get to Skarov, find out from him what happened to the man I was supposed to meet, I might learn something that will bring us all much closer to the day we can kill or drive away all of the Communists. Not just the few down in the sewer below us.”

  The other man’s face was becoming lost in the gloom. His eyes, already dark and sunken, seemed to disappear as the last of the light faded away.

  “All right then,” he said. “I can make no promises about what will happen. Only the good Lord can know that. But we will try to preserve the life of this Skarov so that he might make his confessions to you.”

  The man’s strange choice of words and his demeanor gave Ivanov pause for a moment. There was something about this man, something familiar, he thought. He was no mere killer. He seemed more than that. And then Ivanov caught the resemblance as Franco turned slightly to listen to the street outside.

  It was Marius Furedi. The priest. It had to be.

  5

  North Rome (Soviet sector)

  Occupied Rome often suffered from brownouts and occasional full-blown power failures in the early evening, when demand peaked. The few streetlamps that ran off the city grid in this part of Rome flickered and died as the infiltrators emerged from the secret warehouse. Light spilling from the open windows and doors of apartments overlooking the alleyway died at the same time. Ivanov wasn’t sure whether this happened by mere chance or the design of his companions. He was grateful for the cover, whatever the case.

  Franco introduced his companions as Marius and Giorgio. The Russian could see a strong family resemblance in the eyes of Marius and Franco. Marius, however, had none of the coarseness or bravado of a midlevel gangster about him. His English was more fluent, more sophisticated, than Franco’s, and when he spoke even briefly, he betrayed the cultured intelligence of a man who had been trained by an academic order. Perhaps the Jesuits. They were very active beyond the Wall.

  He wore no clerical garb about him, but twice Ivanov saw him reach for a nonexistent rosary or scapula about his neck. Franco and Giorgio, on the other hand, gave the impression of men who had spent their entire adult lives in the lower orders of a criminal organization. Their banter was softly spoken and sparse, but littered with the crude argot and curses of the Roman street. It made sense that the Furedis should work together, he supposed. No bond was closer than blood. But an operational connection between the mafia and the Church? That would bear thinking about later-presuming there was a later.

  The four men were only exposed to the street for half a minute as they hurried from the black-market warehouse to a run-down pensione across and a little way up the alley. Ivanov and Franco removed their night-vision goggles and returned their weap
ons to the satchels they carried, but the small, fast-moving procession-two dark-suited men and two in disgusting, soiled coveralls-would surely draw the attention of any patrols or informants.

  Yet the street was deserted. The windows, balconies, and doors of the apartment buildings overlooking them remained empty. Had Ivanov been leading a platoon of troops down this narrow, deserted alley, his skin would have prickled with the sense of something being wrong, of the threat gathering just beyond the edge of perception. But here he felt … cloaked. As though the city itself had deliberately looked away from them, choosing not to see what was in plain sight.

  This was probably one of those neighborhoods where Russian troops and the People’s Polizia trod quickly and lightly, and mostly around the edges. He would not have been surprised to discover that many of the bodies of the occupiers and collaborators that turned up in the river had breathed their last here.

  Hurrying into the pensione, they passed by an old man smoking a hand-rolled cigarette who paid them no more attention than he did the scrawny black, one-eyed cat mewling and circling around his boots, looking for food. He didn’t even wrinkle his nose at the stench of their filthy coveralls. It was as though they were not there.

  Marius led them down a narrow corridor smelling of boiled tomatoes and burned garlic. They passed through two apartments that appeared to have been turned into one by amateurs with sledgehammers. A hatchway under a flight of stairs led down to another flight, taking them back underground. Ivanov reached for his night-vision goggles, but Marius stayed his hand. The Russian heard a match strike, and half a second later it flared into light. The priest-not that he had identified himself as such-touched it to a candle. The taper took the flame and the mellow golden light bathed the men. Ivanov was careful not to look directly at it, trying to preserve at least some of his night vision.

  They were back underground again, in some sort of storeroom. Wooden shelving lined the walls of a long, narrow chamber, close enough that Ivanov could not stretch both arms out. Glass jars and terra-cotta pots appeared to fill most of the shelf space, with tinned food and bags of rice, stamped A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE USA, stacked near the entrance.

  “This way,” said Marius, who had armed himself with his brother’s weapon. Silencer and all. Franco was now carrying an old British Sten gun. Unsilenced. Giorgio had procured a shotgun from somewhere, all of them tooling up as they made their way down here in darkness.

  Ivanov retrieved his own weapon, the MP5, from his bag. He had to reattach the suppressor since the submachine gun would not fit in the knapsack with it screwed on. As a precaution, he also fetched out and fitted his NVGs, although he didn’t turn them on, keeping the lenses flipped up.

  “From here on we must be quiet,” Marius said. “As quiet as the grave-unless you wish to find your grave today, Russian.”

  Ivanov replied with a flat stare. For the moment he felt numb, a dangerous place where his temper had been known to slip in the past.

  The elder Furedi was unaware of Ivanov’s state of mind. He gestured for them to follow. The four men crept down between the long lines of preserves and American food aid, stacked high on both sides of them. The far end did not culminate in a rock wall, as it had first appeared in the dark, but in old, gray, woolen blankets, hung over an exit that had been carved into the bedrock of the city perhaps a thousand years ago, perhaps more.

  As he had been doing for most of the day, Ivanov crouched low to avoid hitting his head on the roof. Franco had cleaned out his scalp wound and applied a salve. They didn’t bother with bandages since they wouldn’t adhere to his sweat-soaked, dirty scalp anyway. Still, he did not care to reopen the wound before heading down into the sewers again. Assuming that’s where they were headed. There was no telling underground. He might spend the next hour belly-crawling through a drainage pipe, or creeping across the roofline of a long-buried village.

  Marius led them deeper into a series of tunnels that seemed to have been carved out of the city’s foundations for the very purpose of concealed movement. It was possible, even likely, that Marius knew of these tunnels because they remained in the collective memory of his Mother Church. The early Christians were, at times literally, an underground movement.

  It seemed they walked, and occasionally crawled, for nearly half an hour. At first, Ivanov wondered how these Romans could possibly know where Skarov and his men were anymore. The NKVD would not have given up the chase, and might well have poured more searchers into the hunt. But there wasn’t the slightest chance that Skarov would have remained in the chamber close to the hotel laundry, where he had first forced his entry into the underground world.

  That small mystery resolved itself soon enough, when Marius stopped a few minutes into the journey to speak into another voice tube, exactly like the one Franco had used back in the warehouse. Clearly, the Furedis were receiving updates on the Russians’ whereabouts from allies elsewhere in the tunnel system. Alerted to the presence of the speaking tube, Ivanov began to see them sprouting from the wall at seemingly random intervals. Minutes might go by without encountering one, then two or three would appear at the juncture of a couple of tunnels. The priest and his bandit companions appeared to be intimately familiar with the layout of the ancient passageways and their crudely effective communication system. Ivanov wondered when it had been installed. Obviously not when the tunnels were dug.

  The fetid stink of the sewers and drains was not nearly as powerful down here. Not initially anyway. When his nostrils flared and his nose twitched at the first strong whiff of raw effluent, Ivanov wondered if they might be approaching their destination. The candle Marius was using to light their way had burned down about half its length. Their pace slowed and eventually he brought them to a halt where the tunnel widened slightly before splitting into two diverging passages. He motioned for the others to gather closely around him.

  “We must be very quiet now,” he said in a voice so low, Ivanov was forced to lean forward to make out each word. “We will separate here. Franco, you will take the Russian to the upper gallery. Giorgio and I will join Stefan and Marco on the southern terrace.”

  The last two names meant nothing to Ivanov, but he assumed these were the men Marius had consulted. Were there more of them around? he wondered. Did they work for the priest, and for his masters in the Vatican, the warrior monks of Circostanze Particolari? Or were they from Franco’s “other” family. He hoped the latter. If they were about to do battle with an NKVD strike team, he preferred to have killers and thugs on his side rather than ecclesiastical agents. Although, for all Ivanov’s certainty that Marius Furedi was a soldier of God, the man had about him the cold, detached air of an actual soldier who had seen enough death to become fatalistic about his own chances.

  “Franco will lead you, Russian,” said the priest. “Follow him and do as he says. The Communists have reinforcements. We have counted fifteen of them in the chamber ahead and more on the way.”

  He must have seen the look on Ivanov’s face.

  “It matters not,” he assured the Russian. “We shall kill them all.”

  “But not Skarov,” warned Ivanov.

  “No. He is not there.”

  The numbness disappeared, replaced with a low, boiling cauldron of anger deep behind his eyes. Ivanov let some of the tension loose from his left hand before squeezing it into a fist, so tightly that knuckles popped. So now they were off on a forlorn hunt to bag a few foot soldiers for no apparent end.

  “Do not concern yourself with him,” said the priest. “He has returned to the surface. We are watching him, and we will take up our business with him when we are done here. If you want your foe, you must draw him back down. And making a sacrifice of his men will do just that.”

  Fury and murder burned behind Ivanov’s eyes, but he had not survived so long in this game by allowing himself to vent his feelings uncontrollably. More than ever he was beholden to these Italians. Not just to guide him through the world beneath the street
s of the city but to guide him back toward his original objective-the contact at the Grimaldi. And now also to Skarov, who seemed to be using Sobeskaia as bait. Ivanov diverted his anger and used it to clear his mind, burning away fear, extraneous thoughts, and any desire he had to slit the throats of his Roman companions. With a deep breath, he clamped down on ill feeling and turned his wits to the task at hand.

  “It is for the best,” Marius told him. Franco nodded solemnly beside him, at least having the good grace to look a little ashamed. Giorgio remained as he always had-a stone-faced killer.

  Marius blew out the candle and Ivanov reached instinctively for his NVGs. Still set to infrared, they picked out the heat signatures of the three Italians but little of the background detail. The men appeared like three red ghosts floating in the vacuum of space. Switching to low-light amplification was a surprise. The tunnels were more brightly illuminated than he would have imagined when the priest extinguished the candle. A hot wash of photons was leaking from a powerful light source nearby.

  The Furedis and Giorgio moved off without apparent difficulty. Franco trailed his fingertips along the ceiling and the rough-hewn rock face of the ancient shaft. The other two disappeared before Ivanov could see whether they were negotiating their way in the same fashion. For the moment, he decided he would stick with LLAMPS vision, adjusting the photon gain as they drew closer to the light.

  The tunnel took a sharp turn to the left and climbed steeply up a flight of worn steps carved directly out of the granite floor. A millennium or more of foot traffic had smoothed the edge of the steps and eroded a deep bowl in each of them. Franco was moving very quietly now, reminding Ivanov of an old and mangy but dangerous cat. He drew to a stop a few paces beyond the top step.