Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  Ivanov heard the tailgate of a truck drop down outside, and the shouts of NCOs ordering their men into the street. Risking a brief glimpse through the lace curtain, he was able to confirm that the troops were NKVD, not Red Army. He saw Skarov consult with a senior lieutenant, who mostly nodded and took orders from the civilian in the black leather coat. The officer soon had his men detailed into four-man squads to search the buildings up and down the street.

  He and Franco had five, maybe ten minutes before one of the squads stumbled across their lair.

  “Okay, now we must leave,” said Ivanov. “We go your way at first, but then we go mine.”

  They did not spend long underground this time, and they moved with much greater haste and almost no concern for stealth. The ground beneath them rumbled. Bursts of gunfire, shouts and sometimes screams, even the occasional crump of a grenade reached them as if from a great distance, amplified and distorted by the weird acoustics of the buried city. It sounded like construction work.

  “Marius,” explained Franco, as though the sounds of battle needed explaining.

  The special forces veteran wondered how much of this clash would be reaching the ears of anyone listening on the other side of the Wall. Aside from the rumbling vibrations beneath the streets, perhaps none of it-or even if it did, no one would take notice. That appeared to be the Roman way.

  Rome was a frontier city now. A great metropolis fated by a broken history to sit on the boundary between two empires. Like Berlin in his youth, like Budapest and Constantinople before them, like Tokyo now, Rome was a shadow factory. And the shadows had teeth and claws.

  He and his guide avoided the fighting, hurrying through tunnels, some of which were simple root cellars and basements, avoiding the deeper passages where it seemed a great battle was now being fought. A battle that few would know about, beyond those who survived it.

  “Up, up now,” said Franco as he pushed through an iron-cage door and into the barrel room of a bar or tavern. The smell of wine gone sour was very strong even though the subterranean space was mostly empty.

  “Where are we now?” Ivanov asked. He had decided the time was almost upon them when he would have to reassert control of this minor disaster.

  “An old taverna,” the other man said, pointing at the rough wooden beams just over their heads. “Closed by the Communists, but we still meet here sometimes.”

  “Of course.” Ivanov was beginning to understand just how vast was the city hidden beneath the view of its occupiers. It wasn’t just a matter of subterranean caves and tunnels. There was another Rome, a free Rome, hidden just beneath the surface of things in every street and alleyway above them.

  “Explain to me, describe for me, exactly where we are going, and what I will find on the surface,” the OSS operative said, standing his ground and halting Franco’s progress toward the wooden staircase at the far end of the cellar.

  The Italian frowned, impatient to keep moving, but he did as he was asked. “It is as I tell you, Russian. We are under the night markets for this district. These are the approved markets where farmers are allowed to sell what is left after the Communists have taken everything else.”

  Ivanov gestured for him to hurry on with his explanation. He was well aware of how the city government in the Soviet-controlled sector ran the marketplaces. Again, learning from the lessons of future history, the Kremlin had allowed its subjects some freedom. Not a lot, but enough to avoid the completely empty shelves that had done so much to undermine the rule of the Communists in Ivanov’s own time.

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I need you to describe the tactical environment. How many stallholders, roughly? How crowded is the market? How many patrols? Are they on foot or is there a checkpoint, or a police station nearby? How many entrances and exits are there-where do they lead to?”

  His guide understood now and nodded his head.

  “What for do you need to know this, Russian?” Franco asked. “You have a plan, yes? I will need to know.”

  “I have an idea for a plan, but first I need to know what we are walking into.”

  The mafioso took a moment to think it through before kneeling to draw a rough map of the small piazza above them. As he described the layout of the markets, and the usual ebb and flow of customers, all watched over by regular street patrols of the People’s Polizia, Ivanov’s idea for a plan began to take shape.

  8

  South Rome (Allied sector)

  Nothing ever happens at a reasonable hour in this country, thought Harry. What sort of cocktail party kicks off at ten in the evening, for God’s sake? Along with his empty stomach, it was a gripe that occupied the prince’s mind as he fitted the fighting knife into the sheath strapped inside his left forearm. By 2200 hours, went Harry’s reasoning, a civilized cocktail hour was over, and anyone with half a brain and a decent buzz on had already partnered up with some willing trollop and was back home, pants down, on the tool.

  While Carstairs and Walker waited on him, he secured the stiletto blade and practiced drawing the knife a few times without opening an artery or slicing the sleeve of the dinner jacket they had supplied. He wasn’t too concerned with Secret Service’s wardrobe budget. It just wouldn’t do to get the thing caught up on a cuff link, say, when he needed to be sticking a couple of inches of cold steel into some bolshie Ivan.

  “It’ll do, I suppose,” Harry said, but he would’ve far preferred to kit himself out properly for a caper that was almost a laydown misere to go pear-shaped. Carstairs, however, adamantly refused to let him wear a shoulder holster, or indeed carry any sort of firearm into the party.

  “We can’t have you going off half-cocked with some enormous cavalry pistol, Colonel Windsor. Lord, think of the diplomatic muddle.”

  Presumably the Foreign Office was up to arguing away the dire diplomatic consequences of him stabbing a “junior cultural attache” from the NKVD, but not if he were to shoot the fellow over the punch bowl. Well, there was always a lot of silverware lying around at these embassy piss-ups … It wasn’t beyond the realms of the possible, he could argue, should things get a little sporty with Beria’s men, that he’d just picked up the nearest shellfish fork and improvised a defense.

  “I was rather thinking of the muddle that a bloody Makarov would make of me, actually,” replied Harry, as he settled the cuff of his dinner jacket over the weapon.

  “Ah fuggedabouddit. That’s a damn fine-looking penguin suit and you wear it like a boss,” Stan Walker drawled, borrowing a bit of arcane uptime slang that had already come into and out of fashion after the Transition. “Be a pity to ruin the cut of your jib with a big-ass hand cannon stickin’ outta your armpit.”

  Harry didn’t bother arguing. The spy chiefs assured him that the floor would be crawling with about seven layers of security.

  “No matter how many goons the Smedlovs send in disguised as junior cultural pussies,” the OSS man repeated, “you won’t be needing that pig sticker.”

  Harry had insisted on fitting the knife anyway, and thankfully they didn’t object. His minders at Scotland Yard probably would have. In Harry’s experience, Mr. Plod tended to take the business of guarding their ’ighnesses very seriously indeed, even though in this world there were no bearded nutters or IRA hooligans to cause trouble. The former simply hadn’t evolved, at least not yet, and the latter had been forestalled in their murderous evolution by an accelerated political accommodation with Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority. Harry was more likely to need guarding from Jules Duffy if he stood her up again.

  His security detail, on the other hand, gave him no trouble. Carstairs had already seen them off, pulling rank when they’d all arrived at the embassy.

  “Remember, Colonel,” the SIS boss said now, as they left the Quiet Room and walked down two flights of stairs to the motor pool, “we’re not sending you in there to crack on with your usual Lord Jim commando shenanigans. You are to walk Comrade Sobeskaia out the front door, surrounded by my peop
le, who will be responsible for any such shenanigans as are needed.”

  “A human shield, then?”

  The uptime reference wasn’t lost on the temps.

  “Your own safety is as important as the Russian’s,” Carstairs intoned.

  Harry didn’t believe it for a second.

  He left the diplomatic mission on his own, save for the driver who was more than a driver. They made for Babington’s Tea Rooms on Piazza di Spagna, where the British trade mission was hosting drinks for Commonwealth and Naples Agreement member nations. Babington’s was a safe, if rather uninspired choice, in Harry’s opinion. It was old enough to have attained institutional status among the city’s English-speaking community, having survived both world wars and the chaos of occupation and division. The Cornish pasties and sausage rolls would come piping hot, the pastry crusts crisp and golden, and the scones with marmalade and the apple tea cakes would be perfect-but they’d all be served without a hint of irony. There’d be no playful rebooting of stodgy old, pre-Cool Britannia food styles tonight. He knew, from having suffered through a handful of these events already, that the embassy served up top-shelf stodge simply because the ambassador really liked top-shelf stodge.

  Rome’s traffic, as always, was hellacious, but it was even worse tonight because of the faffing around for GATT. Still, Harry’s Rolls Royce glided through most of the snarls and traffic jams, escorted by four outriders, white-helmeted MPs on growling BMW motorcycles. To clear the way, an ASLAV-variant armored car traveled just ahead of them, flanked by its own Military Police escort. The locals, like all Italians, showed scant regard for the sanctity of traffic laws or the dignity of official convoys, but the water cannon atop the ASLAV quickly cleared a path through any obstructions. Harry shook his head at least twice as they roared past crowds of drenched and angry bystanders shaking their fists at the official procession.

  “Soak them to the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow,” he muttered to himself.

  The restaurant sat to the left of the Spanish Steps, which climbed up from the piazza to the church of the Santissima Trinita dei Monti. The stairs, the widest in Europe, as he recalled from public-school geography, were framed on the right by the nineteenth-century home of the poet John Keats. This, Harry supposed, accounted for the predictable choice of Babington’s as a venue for the cocktail party. The Steps district had become something of a Little England in the last few years, after British forces had taken responsibility for this quarter of Free Rome. Revelers spilled out of the three faux-English pubs within a beer bottle’s throw of Babington’s Tea Rooms. Dozens of Carabinieri formed a loose line between the footpath drinkers and the formally dressed guests heading into the cocktail party. That was an arrangement Harry could approve of. The city’s police on this side of the Roman Wall were likely to exercise much looser control and apply a significantly lighter hand than their counterparts a short distance to the north. Some of these Italian rozzers, who looked magnificent in their pressed and colorful uniforms, were doing their utmost to chat up the hundreds of young English and American girls there on the fringes of the crowd.

  The driver threaded Harry’s Roller through half a dozen vehicles waiting to deliver their passengers to the embassy function. The Spanish Steps seethed with the crush of thousands of people enjoying the mild night and the small outdoor cinema, which tonight was showing La Dolce Vita, in front of the grand church. The Moonlight Movie festival was just one of many cultural asides to the vast economic conference that was GATT. A boon to the city, but a bugger of a thing when you needed to be anywhere in a hurry. The crowds were simply horrendous. Especially wherever uptime movies were being shown. Piazza Navona was impassable during the Harry Potter screenings.

  The older, gnarlier, less-wizardy Harry spotted the NKVD’s inner-perimeter muscle as soon as the car slowed at the brightly lit drop-off point. Five slab-shouldered, stone-faced Slavic goons in gray, ill-fitting suits. All of them wore earpieces and stood like apes with arms akimbo-partly because their upper bodies were so overdeveloped courtesy of mandatory steroid regimens, and also because, to Harry’s trained eye, they were wearing double-harness shoulder rigs. If these men were following standard NKVD procedure, each one would be packing a longbarreled GSh-18 for his dominant hand, and a Czech-inspired Skorpion vz. 61 machine pistol in the other holster, for less accurate and discriminating “clearance work.” He felt like he was going up against a pack of weaponized gorillas with a letter opener hidden up his sleeve.

  These agents weren’t the real threat, however. They were here to draw his attention and that of the protective details supplied by Carstairs and Walker. They were bullet magnets. Salted throughout the happy, heaving crowd of civilians tonight would be other men and women who, nondescript to the point of invisibility, would do nothing to draw attention to themselves. Even if that meant making utter arsehats of themselves to fit in. The helplessly drunk American girl in a Harvard sweatshirt throwing her arms around the nearest Italian police officer could be one of Lavrenty Beria’s deep-cover wetwork specialists, or she could just be a shitfaced college student like the rest of them. You wouldn’t know until the guns came out.

  It was hopeless, utterly hopeless. He would gladly have given the whole do a miss and walked the three miles to Julia’s hotel. But duty called, as it always fucking did.

  As he stepped from the Rolls, Harry smiled and waved to the small band of press photographers, using the opportunity to scan the crowd.

  “Harry! Harry! We love your movie! We can’t wait to see it!”

  He waved at the two young women, not nearly as drunk as the Harvard girl, but still a few sheets into the wind. A long time ago, in an alternate universe far, far away, he might’ve wandered over to make their acquaintance. Here he simply mouthed Thank you and gave them a thumbs-up before heading into the restaurant.

  Babington’s entrance was crowded. There appeared to be about eight guests, all of them formally dressed like him, held up at the security desk. Harry heard the first snatches of angry Russian as he reached the back of the small knot of pissed-off Smedlovs.

  “This is intolerable,” someone growled in heavily accented English. “We have invitations right here. I can see our names there, on your list …”

  Then Harry did a double take. No, not at the Russians piled up in front of two large airport-style metal detectors-they were almost certainly NKVD-but at David Gower, the former English cricket captain. Or unborn English cricket capt … Whatever the actual fuck, he shook his head at the sight of a young man who, at first glance, was Gower’s double. Perhaps an uncle or some more distant relative.

  “Your Highness, so glad to see you-please step this way,” said the young man, with the polished tones of an Oxford graduate, and the smooth, gliding walk redolent of another, more exclusive place of learning; the Secret Intelligence Service’s close-combat finishing course at Albany Street barracks. Of slender build, with blue-green eyes, and curly blond hair that was somewhat longer than the regulation military length, he had the polished manners of a diplomat and the hard, callused hands of someone who had spent years being trained to kill with them. A mid-to-late-twenties version of Colonel Harry Windsor, in other words.

  And this fellow did look remarkably like the left-handed batsman.

  “Is there some problem here with our Russian friends?” asked Harry, shaking off his surprise and getting into character.

  “Nothing for you to concern yourself with, Your Highness,” his greeter assured him. “Just a little misunderstanding over the guest list.”

  The Smedlovs broke off from arguing with the two hard-faced door bitches (almost certainly Carstairs’s people) who had refused them entry. As soon as they recognized the man they thought of as the heir to the British throne, the Russians turned their anger on him.

  “Is this how your government demonstrates bonds of friendship and trust, sir?” said one, obviously the leader of the group. “We have been invited here tonight, then told invitati
ons no good. This is deliberate insult to the Soviet peoples.” At this, the man drew himself up and puffed out his chest.

  “And which of the Soviet peoples are you?” Harry asked pleasantly.

  “Viktor Kuryakin, second assistant secretary, Cultural Division. And you, as senior representative of Her Majesty’s government, Prince Harry, must make these amends. Otherwise, there will be international incident.”

  Harry’s eyes twinkled as he grinned and patted the Russian on the back-copping a feel of the butt of his handgun in its shoulder holster as he did so.

  “Oh, I’m sure there’ll be an incident, Viktor,” he winked, before moving into the hallway and leaving them behind.

  9

  North Rome (Soviet sector)

  The market square was small, but crowded with busy huddles of stallholders, farmers in from the countryside, and women of various ages. All of this last group, despite the late hour, were trailing bands of squalling children as they haggled for the best price on strings of garlic, vine-ripened tomatoes, or a small, straggly bunch of carrots. There were few men of working or fighting age to be seen, but here and there, knots of elder males sat in groups smoking their rough, hand-rolled cigarettes and staring straight through the passing foot patrols of the People’s Polizia and their Red Army escorts. Ivanov and Franco hung back in the entrance to a dogleg alley running off the rear of the piazza, obscured from view by a curtain of bedsheets hung out to dry from the lowest landing of an external staircase. It reminded Ivanov of the fire escapes you found clinging to the sides of apartment buildings in places like New York, except this one was made of wood. A fire hazard, not a fire escape.

  “She will return soon,” said Franco, anticipating his next question. “She is a good girl, my cousin Carlo’s daughter. She will bring us what we need.”

  The Russian did not reply. He merely nodded as he watched the crowd in the marketplace through a gap in the bedclothes, while weighing the heft of the new weapon in his right hand. He’d had to improvise: a heavy cobblestone, ripped up from the road surface and dropped into a gray, tattered pillowcase. A few twirls of the cotton sack and he had a workable cosh. A good weapon for killing without bloodshed. Well, without too much bloodshed.