Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  “Hard to say what they might do if and when things kick off,” Plunkett conceded of the five Soviet diplomats. “We have pretty thorough coverage on all of them. As best we can tell, there are no real players there. A couple with military experience, because-well, who doesn’t nowadays? But nothing of note. And we have each of them marked, anyway. It’s Beria’s people who are making a bloody nuisance of themselves.”

  By now Harry could see for himself what Plunkett meant. He recognized the British ambassador-backed into a corner, engaged in an animated discussion with a short, bald character, who seemed to be leaking sweat from every pore in his body. The man’s cheap, ill-fitting suit shone where the light caught it, and his frightened eyes darted back and forth between another pair of slab-shouldered Soviet brutes, who were doing their best to slowly, surreptitiously, force their way through a cordon of Plunkett’s people. Undoubtedly, the human bag of sweat and nerves was none other than Valentin Sobeskaia.

  From this distance, the contest between the Russians and the embassy’s security people was fascinating to behold. It had not come to open blows yet, but Beria’s men were not far off. The larger of the two was toe to toe with an enormous black man, whose dinner jacket probably cost more than the Russian earned in a year.

  Harry smiled at the sight of his former regimental sergeant major. He almost laughed. In fact, he felt his spirits lifting for the first time since he had seen Julia, so many hours before.

  “Viv,” he said. “Everything is going to be fine. Or not. But better than I’d thought, anyway.”

  “Indeed. Sorry, I suppose I should’ve mentioned it. Mr. St. Clair is here in a private capacity, as a businessman, of course …”

  Harry waved off Plunkett’s explanation. “Oh, I’m not at all surprised that old Viv would be mixed up in all this, Agent.”

  “I’ll gather more troops if you think you’re good for this, sir?” said the SIS man.

  “Good to go,” Harry replied as he watched the big West Indian shift his center of gravity slightly while holding on to the wrist of the NKVD thug attempting to get past him. The former SAS noncom drew the other man’s hand across his body and inflated his chest with a deep breath. The move was quick and almost impossible to see, if you didn’t know what to look for. But Harry could hear the crack as St. Clair broke the man’s elbow. The Russian’s face turned yellow, then white. Sweat beaded his high forehead and the muscles in his jaw line knotted as he ground his teeth together.

  But he did not retreat. Instead, he used his close proximity to St. Clair to attempt a killing blow. Harry saw the flash of a blade appear in his good hand just in time. It looked like an oyster knife, stolen from the buffet.

  “Viv, old man! On your left,” he called out, distracting both Russians but not St. Clair. It was not his first bar fight. St. Clair ratcheted up the torque on the armlock as Harry lunged forward and grabbed the attacker’s knife hand, crushing it back into the joint and twisting viciously, breaking that limb too. The NKVD hard man groaned and staggered away from the confrontation. He looked as if he was about to vomit.

  “Bloody Russians,” said Harry. “Never could handle their drink.”

  “Nice to see you, guv,” beamed his old sergeant. “Heads up …”

  The West Indian interposed himself between Harry and the second attacker, who had moved up quietly on his blind side. St. Clair’s hand shot out and back-fisted the man in the testicles. Harry flinched when he heard the crack. Plunkett took the victim by the arm, not gently, and propelled him away from the ambassador and Comrade Sobeskaia.

  “Nasty,” Harry muttered with a heartfelt grimace. “I think I heard one of his goolies pop.”

  “That’s disappointing, guv,” said St. Clair. “I was aiming for both.”

  Harry looked down as he felt a hand gripping his biceps. It was Sobeskaia, who had detached himself from the ambassador.

  “Your Highness, you must get me out of here. You must get me away. They mean to kill me. I know what they are capable of.” The man was dangerously close to babbling.

  “Oh, I think we all know what they’re capable of. Get a grip, man-but not on me.” Harry prised the Russian businessman’s fingers from his upper arm. Sobeskaia’s hands were cold and clammy. Panic sweat.

  “Don’t mind him, guv,” said St. Clair. “I’ve got him sorted.”

  The ambassador, an ex-Royal Navy man, Harry recalled, did his best to calm their would-be defector and draw him away from Harry and Viv, who had now been targeted by three more NKVD goons.

  Harry took up station next to the forbidding presence of Vivian Richards St. Clair-six feet four inches of hard-packed West Indian carnivore. The reception roared on around them, largely oblivious to the quietly violent struggle playing out near the sausage rolls and party pies. Harry understood now why Carstairs and Walker had not let him bring a weapon other than the pig sticker strapped inside his forearm. It would be too tempting to open up on the Smedlovs, and God knows how many bystanders would’ve been cut down in the cross fire. He supposed the only reason the Sovs hadn’t opened up on Sobeskaia was thanks to the metal detector out in the foyer. They hadn’t been able to get any artillery inside, contemporary ceramics and plastic munitions being what they were. Which is to say, complete arse.

  They must have wanted this character back quite badly, though. Because while everybody was keeping things relatively nice on the surface, beneath that it was obvious they intended to either escort Sobeskaia out of the joint or leave his corpse behind.

  “What are you even doing here, Viv?” Harry asked, as they watched the approach of the three Soviet strongmen.

  “Just trying to turn a quid, governor,” said his onetime NCO. “I’ve got a lot of old boys from the barracks on my books now, you know. Turned over a mill in profit last year for the first time-after tax, of course. Not easy to do with Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue having its paws so deep in my funds. Oh, no offense, guv.”

  “None taken, Sergeant Major. Wakey wakey, here comes trouble …”

  The NKVD emerged from the jostle of the crowd in a two-up, one-back formation, hoping to engage Harry and St. Clair into defending themselves and Sobeskaia from the first attackers, while the third slipped in with a blade or perhaps a poison point, whatever they intended to use on him. Harry caught himself nervously running his thumb over his fingertips, anticipating the confrontation before it arrived. He breathed in and out and tried to empty his mind. To play the ball on its own merits, as he had said to Plunkett. He waited, knees slightly bent, his weight focused forward on the balls of his feet, eyes settled on the center mass of the man who seemed to be coming directly at him.

  Before the Russian could reach him, Harry stepped out and closed the distance between them, shifting off-line just before their bodies met, fending away the slashing blade that tried to open him up. He turned outside the short arc described by the knife, stamping down on the Russian’s instep with the heel of his expensive Italian loafers. Bones cracked, and the man grunted, but not without trying to drive an elbow into Harry’s solar plexus. He foiled that with a high-low block that appeared to most onlookers as though he was patting a friend on the shoulder, and perhaps directing him toward the food table with a gentle push on the elbow. In fact, he had unsheathed his own blade and buried it deep into the triceps of the other man, who lost control of his weapon hand and dropped his own blade to the floor.

  St. Clair, he noticed in his peripheral vision, appeared to have a friendly arm around the shoulder of his Smedlov, and was swinging him around, laughing as though he had just been told a particularly ribald joke. The third man, who was making directly for Sobeskaia now, suddenly found his approach blocked by the deadweight of his colleague, whose neck had been snapped by the former SAS sergeant. The dead man-he was most certainly dead, thought Harry-dropped to the floor, tripping the last NKVD agent and a waiter carrying a tray of drinks. The enormous crash of shattering glass brought a momentary lull to the roaring buzz of the party, but on
ly for a second or two. Plunkett appeared with a couple of offsiders, raised both eyebrows at the carnage in the corner, and tut-tutted Harry.

  “The idea was rather to avoid an incident, you know.”

  “He choked on a particularly long ribbon sandwich,” Harry replied, nodding at the body of the Russian spy on the floor.

  Plunkett’s people were already muscling away the walking wounded from Beria’s snatch team. Or hit squad. Or whatever they were. Most of the onlookers who had no idea what was going on backed off. A couple of them offered their medical expertise, and one woman fanned herself into a complete faint. Adding to the confusion.

  “This is a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” Harry declared. “Viv, watch my back, would you?”

  He turned on Sobeskaia, taking him by the lapel and dragging him away from the ambassador.

  “You couldn’t even be bothered wearing a proper dinner jacket,” he rebuked the terrified boyar. “Typical. I hope you’re going to be bloody worth it, my friend. With me-we’re out of here. Now.”

  Harry propelled the Russian toward a pair of swinging doors from which waiters would occasionally emerge with trays of drinks and canapes. He shot an inquiry over his shoulder back at Plunkett. “You secured the kitchens, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Marvelous. Let’s go.”

  The sudden movement, on top of the excitement of the recent confrontation, sent waves of confusion and concern through the packed masses inside Babington’s. A stone’s throw from the showdown with the NKVD, it would have been impossible to know what was happening; but people on the other side of the room soon knew that something was happening. Harry dragged Sobeskaia along behind him, with the huge bulk of Vivian St. Clair providing protection in the rear and Plunkett keeping a watching brief. The confused babble of the party guests quickly increased as the remaining Russians attempted to follow. SIS muscle intervened, leading to some ugly pushing and shoving, which generated further shouts of complaint and cries from distressed bystanders. Harry let it all fall behind him as he pulled the defector into the kitchens, almost knocking another waiter to the floor, and grabbing a handful of devils on horseback as he hurried past an unattended platter of food. He was very hungry.

  A waitress screamed, and he realized his white dress shirt was covered in the blood of the man he’d stabbed in the arm. So much for discretion.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Sobeskaia kept babbling. “Thank you, Prince Harry.”

  “He’s not really a prince anymore, you know,” said St. Clair, in disturbingly good humor. “He’s more of a celebrity really. Like you’d find on The Apprentice, if you had any decent fucking telly here.”

  “Try not to do his head in, please, Viv. There might be something in there we need later.”

  “What is this? What does this mean, about my head?” Sobeskaia asked, panicked.

  There was a scuffle at the doors behind them, and Plunkett begged off to join his people in neutralizing the other Soviet gate-crashers.

  “Oh, just in case I don’t get a chance later on, sir … er, Harry,” the David Gower look-alike said. “It’s been nice working with you, despite the chaos and madness and the general air of cocking everything up.” But he said it with a boyish grin, which Harry recognized from his own extensive repertoire.

  The two ex-commandos now hurried their charge over to a fire exit.

  “Thank you, my prince, thank you,” he continued to babble.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Harry. “Don’t make me roll my eyes …” Then he turned to St. Clair. “Have a bit of a sticky beak out there in the alley, would you, Viv? See if there are any villains lying in wait.”

  “Got it, guv,” he said, before slipping out through the fire door.

  Only now did Harry give Sobeskaia his full attention for the first time. “Right. Listen up, you. I don’t know what fucking game you’re playing. I don’t know what you’ve got that you think we might need. But if you want to get out of this place alive, you’re going to tell me now. Not a week from now, or during the debrief. Right now.”

  11

  North Rome (Soviet sector)

  Ivanov muscled the deadweight of the corpse back into the shadows under the building’s portico. The NKVD man’s bladder and bowels had let go in death, forcing Ivanov to drag the body by the head, which he had snapped off the spinal column. The loose, detached feeling of dragging so much mass around on a thin column of ruptured meat was unsettling but not unfamiliar. He was cautious not to befoul himself with the man’s bodily wastes. The clothes he had stolen from his last victim were already a little rank.

  Taking a moment to scope out his surroundings, Ivanov considered his options. Via Rodi traversed the Soviet sector, from the southwest to the northeast about six blocks north of the Wall, where it abutted the edge of the Vatican. There were fewer apartments in this part of the city, the buildings tending toward larger, boxy, modern structures given over to official use. It was, thankfully, something of a dead zone at this time of night. There were fewer witnesses to raise an alarm and fewer eyes to follow his progress as he attempted to exfiltrate the area. There were also, unfortunately, far fewer options to dispose of the body. This part of North Rome was not like the rats’ nest Franco had led him through earlier, with hundreds of dark, twisting alleys and Byzantine passageways in which he might hide a multitude of sins.

  Ivanov scanned up and down the quiet street, his eyes playing over the blank, unlit facades. Leafless trees stood sentinel outside the anonymous-looking buildings, most of them five or six stories high. Unlike the streets of Free Rome, which were gridlocked with traffic day and night, very few vehicles were parked along Via Rodi. He counted two vans in the livery of the city government, one slab-sided Trabant sedan and, away in the distance, what looked like a horse-drawn cart. Without horses. Nowhere suggested itself as a quick and dirty dumping ground for a recently murdered secret policeman.

  Ivanov was beyond overwatch. He could not call in the cleaners as he might in the Allied sector. He couldn’t even stuff the corpse into a garbage bin. For the duration of the GATT conference, the local authorities removed all the trash cans and Dumpsters from the streets at the end of each day. The regime declared it a security measure, and rounded up a hundred or so “suspected insurgents” to back up the claim, but really they just wanted to discourage any scavenging by the city’s impoverished and hungry inmates. It was not a good look for a worker’s paradise.

  He examined the doors of the building in front of which he stood. They were massive, nearly twice as tall as him, constructed of dark hardwood, securely padlocked. No joy to be had there.

  There was nothing for it. He resolved simply to drag the body a little deeper into shadows and abandon it. A quick search yielded up some currency, a Makarov pistol with two spare clips, and a transit pass that would allow him free use of any form of public transport. The last was of marginal usefulness. The buses and trains in the Soviet sector ran sporadically, but fares were cheap. He could afford to ride them for a month with the cash he had in his pockets.

  He found the dead man’s ID card inside the breast pocket of the overcoat. His name was Stanislav Borodin, a sergant special’noy with the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Roughly translated: a master sergeant in the NKVD’s “special services” division. Ivanov pocketed that next to the ID he had taken from the body of Borodin’s colleague back at the market square. Neither of the deceased looked like him in life, death, or the black-and-white photo IDs, but very few people were apt to examine the documents too closely, and as a free pass within Occupied Rome, they beat the hell out of a bus ticket.

  He dragged Borodin as far back into the shadows as he could and arranged the body to look like he was sleeping off a drinking binge. It was not unknown among the occupying forces, although it was rare for Beria’s men to behave so unprofessionally. Such foolishness was almost inevitably fatal. If the Great Satan himself did not see to your demise, the local populatio
n almost certainly would.

  Ivanov set off once more, drifting east, then south toward Via Giordano Bruno. Back in July 1944, partisans in this part of the city had staged a brief but intense last stand against the Red Army paratroopers who had jumped into Rome when the fascist regime fell apart. Strange bedfellows these resistance fighters had been. Gangs of criminals, demobilized soldiers who had held on to their weapons, anarchists, and even some local Communists who had sided with Trotsky decades before. There had also been rumors of Allied special operators fighting alongside the Italians, in order to delay and frustrate a complete Soviet takeover of Rome. Ivanov had been working with the Office of Strategic Services since the end of the war and he had heard most of these rumors from fellow operatives. None of them, however, ever laid claim to having been on the ground here at the time.

  The burned-out shells of buildings, large piles of rubble, and occasional overgrown, weed-choked lots on both sides of Giordano Bruno spoke of high-intensity urban warfare. The Russians had done well to confine it to a few blocks, although the partisans had aided in preserving the wider city by not spreading and escalating their fight. To the trained eye of the former Spetsnaz officer, the rumors of OSS and British Special Operations Executive involvement looked less like wish fulfillment as he strode through the ruined district. Stalin’s forces had bled out here for two weeks, and yet a couple of blocks away, the Eternal City appeared untouched by war, the Transition, and even time itself. Maybe there was some truth to the stories.