The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  “All for your dream. All for purity. You’d do this?” I wasn’t asking because I didn’t know. I was passing final judgment.

  Hans gave me a fanatic grin. “Yes. Exactly. Always yes, a thousand yeses. I will die for the cleansing. I die knowing success.” He even clenched his fist in proper triumph.

  That’s when he saw the ice axe. “No, Hans, you will not. You’re going to die right now, in a lot of pain. Then I’m going to disarm your toy.” I spoke with ruthless confidence, my face a set of bones, my skin a steel scabbard that held a sword.

  I could see in his good eye he felt doubt, felt the thrill of fear creep in as I lowered the pick side into his right shin. He screamed. I hammered him back and used the axe head to break open his left kneecap. The man doubled over in agony. I jammed the spike into his lungs, robbing him of air. He’d drown in his own blood. Then I leaned over and whispered in his ear.

  “Your whole life comes to this, Father. Zeus rutting with brown girls, making mestizo babies, lots and lots of dirty skinned children. They will all look like me. Just. Like. Me. Dark, corrupt, subhuman.” He coughed and sputtered, wheezing for breath.

  “Everything you built is gone. Cassandra dead. Her head blew apart like a melon. Your generations dead or rebelled. Your children wasted, weakened, impure.” His broken hands clawed at the pavement. Drowning hurts. A lot. He shook with panic and I jabbed his right elbow, dropping him face first into the ash and slime of the street.

  “Endgame. Turns out Pina Karthago wins after all. You died for nothing.” His whole body twisted, seeking breath that would not come. Soon he would thrash. I could see from the fear in his eyes he struggled to master his hate. The comment about Pina had touched some ugly place I didn’t fully understand.

  “And with you,” my voice was a sweet whisper, “dies all of the Stasi. Dies all of the Democratic Republic.” Then I left him curled up, his face a rictus of a scream, sucking in a breath he could not feel. He’d be dead in another minute or two but I needed the time.

  The timer read 00:11:53:XX.

  I took the axe and cleared the wreckage around the bomb. Behind me there was movement on the street. That would be the Team Culper. I pulled off my hat and glasses to speed up the ID process. I had, after all, just blown apart all their cameras.

  Originally, large hydrogen warheads were all built the same way using a peculiar firing mechanism. They hyperaccelerated a plutonium pellet into a nearly perfect sphere of enriched material, starting the reaction. Modern nukes employ more sophisticated methods to create tighter, better controlled reactions. But in 1989, they built them big and bold. The Tzar Bomba in front of me had the classic profile. I checked the wiring and timer. Modern make, welded to the chassis and soldered in place with special brackets. There were special explosive seals layered over several areas where the wires and timer’s met. The only thing not rigged was the firing tube. Even the slightest deviation could limit the yield. Turn the firing chamber enough and it would not even reach critical mass.

  Using the axe, I tapped the cylinder. It had been sealed on each end using an unknown metallurgy technique. The chamber was ramrod straight and intersected both spheres in near perfect centerline of both. The bomb would fire true. The rings and main bomb I ignored. They could not fire without the igniting pellet. Once they did, it would not matter. Thanks to Hans’s extensive and very sensible booby trapping, the warhead had exactly one vulnerability: the firing chamber.

  Behind me, I heard the boots. I found a thick piece of sheet metal and slid it under the rigged wires. With some quick hammering blows, I had fashioned a crude shield that separated the cylinder from the fine-tuned deathtraps on either end.

  The timer now read 00:11:02:XX.

  “Get on your knees and put your hands over your head.” The voice was cold and authoritative. An alpha male voice.

  “Culper or Syndicate?”

  “I said, get on your knees. I will not ask again.”

  “Okay. Do you know what you’re looking at?”

  The man did not reply for a moment. “Looks like a bomb.”

  “No, you are looking at a thermonuclear device. Counting down to zero. Now are you Culper or Syndicate?”

  Another pause. I looked at the seams, then traced them with the pick. They did not yield, did not even scratch. I needed overwhelming force, preferably directed and focused into a small space. I doubted they could get the Jaws of Life here in time. “Culper.”

  “Right. Why don’t you go get someone who has the ability to disarm a nuke? And grab someone with the authority to make decisions. Okay?” He didn’t answer. “You can always shoot me later. By the time you return, you’ll have a few dozen friends and I will still have the same amount of guns.”

  “Uh, okay. Stay put. Don’t touch anything.”

  00:09:34:XX. The moment the boots began to fade in the distance I reloaded the Steyr. Eighteen shots of directed force in a square centimeter. I reckoned the angles, tried to guess where a ricochet would take the slug, then rammed another two heavy chunks of steel debris though the underside of the shield.

  00:08:17:XX. No one had come. No one would be able to come on time. I did a few dozen calculations in my head, gave up on the complexity, and took my best instinctive guess. Then I fired the Steyr point blank, two centimeters from the edge, across a diagonal axis of the cylinder. The boom deafened me.

  00:08:14:XX. The nuke had not detonated and the timer continued. A small chunk of the cylinder had been blown off in roughly the direction I had planned. Small red lines of blood trickled from my gun hand where needle like shards of debris had splashed back and sliced through my skin. I fired again. Then five more times, widening the hole, breaking open the mechanism. Then I tried prying it open with the axe. The axe snapped. I fished behind me and grabbed the second one. The pick edge had been sheared in a prior blast. In a brief glance, I saw my cat bag had also been shredded. RIP Epic Cat, you served me well.

  00:06:51:XX. I put the entire mag into the cylinder wall, reloaded, and put another eleven shots through the cylinder before the weight of the bomb ripped the larger end free in terrifying shriek of grating steel. The plutonium bullet now faced the street and would hit an angle. It still might bounce a portion back into the main bomb.

  00:05:43:XX. I tossed the gun and hoisted the globe and severed tube from the floor. It weighed several hundred kilos. I pulled it out into the street and away from the bomb until my knees buckled. As I stood up, Newbury Street offered me a glimpse of hell. All around me stood armed men, their faces covered in goggles and face plates. They stood vigil in subdued black, their forms melding with the chthonic blanket of ash and destruction. It seemed as if a hundred killers had risen from black graves. None moved, so I ignored them.

  I yanked off my jacket and made a sled of sorts for the bomblet. Across the street, an overturned UPS truck lay agape, its roof blown apart. It had slid down the stairs of some kind of hair salon. The truck now closed off the shattered windows and door. Only a small hole into the salon remained, the work of a package being shot through the sidewall. I tested the sled. The ash lowered the frictional coefficient and the damned thing slid.

  00:04:27:XX. With a fierce yell, I pulled on the jacket and tore across the street in a series of faltering slides. My knees were pulps of red and my shoes had become slushy black stumps of ash and pain. I reached the UPS truck, lifted the sphere, and then hoped for the best. The weight of it buckled the walls and then, after a moment of hanging as if weightless, the whole thing eased down the length of the truck and rocketed through the hole. I dove head first after it. The whole thing had started to slide on the floor, banging the delicate wiring and timer as it went. I put my hands under, got my fingers half crushed for my troubles, and stopped the hammering as it slid to a stop, the jagged metal pipe now stuck in the drywall beneath the hair dye station. Something feel on me and I was covered in burning dust.

  00:03:50:XX. I rose, staggered a couple of times and found a piece of debr
is to plug the hole. Inside two florescent lights floated adrift of their moorings, casting a swinging arc of light and shadow over me. I started to pack more and more flat debris against the mouth of cylinder. Until I found the wigs. I dumped all of them on the bomb, stuffed them as close as possible to the edges of the tube, and then packed them in with clothes and a pair of broken chairs.

  00:02:49:XX. There was nothing more that could be done. When the bomb fired, one of several theoretical possibilities existed. In a perfect world, the plutonium pellet would race down the pipe and hammer the insulation in the wall, driving through it into the cement in the floor of the store beyond it. Some dust and fire would be inevitable since plutonium was pyrophoric—the pellet would ignite upon hitting metal. If I had done my prep well, and the middle of a bombed out salon with a smashed truck for a window covering seemed perhaps unideal, I would live and the highly lethal plutonium would not detonate as a dirty bomb.

  But Hans, that wild joker, could have rigged the device to simply blow. Or trigged all the devices to go at the same time. I hoped not. It would mean we’d have a massive dirty bomb blowing plutonium dust across Boston. It might wipe out enough of the Culper Ring and Syndicate to make Hans dream a reality. Or merely kill me.

  There also existed the potential that all this wild hammering and abuse had changed the alignment of the explosives, the pellet or both. I could be impaled with a three kilo shard of metal. The unstable device could simply blow apart, perhaps killing me and covering the nearest blocks with tiny fractions of plutonium dust. Or perhaps some combination of bad luck and Hans’ viciousness awaited me.

  I’d limited the radius of effect and closed off the site of detonation. Anything less than a full scale detonation in all directions should limit the dust to the sealed room, more or less. It didn’t make me any less dead. Perhaps Pina could collect on my $4B price and fund the rebuilding.

  00:02:33:XX. The dad phone on my hip rang. I had been sitting, staring at the swinging lights, thinking about Sonia. I hit the speaker. When I didn’t answer, a rich voice filled the room. “Hello, Spetz.” Pina Karthago had my number. Of course she had it.

  “Afternoon, Pina. Sorry about the mess.” I smiled.

  “What’s the time on the clock?”

  I looked. “Same as out there like as much. Two minutes and some change.”

  “May I ask what you’re doing?” Did she not know? Had no one explained it?

  “I’m sequestering the firing mechanism of the warhead so that it does not reach critical mass. If I’ve done it correctly, only this section will fire.”

  There was a quiet pause. “I think I see. The technicians guessed you did that. No one understood why you dropped down a hole.”

  “That why you’re calling?”

  “No, Spetz. I know why you did that. You’re limiting casualties. You told me yourself. You cannot stand life to be lost when you can save it.”

  00:01:44:XX. “And you Pina. You’re like that too?”

  “If I am?”

  I laughed and the room echoed with my rumbling voice. It sounded oddly godlike. “C’mon. I’m likely to be blown to pieces here. No more games. Darcy said you wanted to save the world. Was she right? Was this whole war because Wickham didn’t want to save the occasional widow and orphan?”

  “And Zeus wanted to rule it and Hans hated everyone. It was all those things at once.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the world fade for a moment. The shockwave and hammer blows from the truck being tossed like a ragdoll had begun to catch up with me. It got quiet.

  “Spetz?” I opened my eyes. Pina sounded far away and hollow.

  00:00:36:XX. “Yeah. Sorry. Take care of my people, please.” The room started to go dark. I had succumbed to shock and was fading.

  00:00:20:XX.

  00:00:11:XX. She called me Cookie Monster and danced on my toes.

  00:00:00:00.

  Chapter 14

  Aftermath

  In the spirit of no good deed ever goes unpunished, I woke up strapped to a gurney in a room full of dials and torture implements. They had my shirt off and lots of little sticky pads attached to wires running along my body. Several monitors bleeped and whizzed, keeping track of my vitals. Around me swarmed a small cadre of trained professionals, none of them dressed as doctors. I watched them for a few moments and realized my pulse and breath rate had not changed appreciably.

  Fact: awake and asleep I had similar vitals. Fact: I was alive, a prisoner and surrounded by people dressed in dark, non-descript clothes. Fact: the place was clean and the cadre looked rested, showered, and were unarmed. Not a combat boot or whiff of burning automobile among them. Fact: some of them spoke amongst themselves with a slight Boston accent.

  The Culper Ring had taken me into custody and, from the age of the cuts on my hands and chest, I’d been sedated or drugged for close to a week. It might not even have been the first time Id woken up, but I did feel more or less cogent this time `round. My medical bugs tended to stymie efforts to drug me into submission precisely because my heart rate and brain waves tended to do odd things when people poked me with chemicals.

  I tried to take stock, closing my eyes and thinking through the possibilities. Pina had been speaking to me. She clearly had pull with the Culper functionaries. So she had opted to let them take me. Given my recent salvation of the entire city, the Ring and most of The Web, she would have had a strong case for taking me with her when she left. Or Bernard certainly could have.

  That meant Pina Karthago saw a purpose in me being strapped to a gurney, pumped full of drugs. This had been Bernard’s long war, corrupted by renegades within both The Syndicate and Section 22. Why let me be taken prisoner? Because Pina saw it the other way around. The Culper Ring were my prisoners, having foolishly taken me into their inner sanctum and given me access to something The Syndicate wanted.

  Begin with the End in Mind. Bernard wanted something and had let Pina, his wetworks expert, and now Concierge, solve the problem. For whatever reason, they imagined I would provide that solution, or a portion of it. I didn’t have many facts. Mostly I had smells and sounds. First step would then have had to be to acquire more information and take my time processing it.

  I opened my eyes and waited. When no one jumped to say hello, I stuck out my tongue and tried to lick my own face. “I can’t smell my nose.” I coughed and drooled a little. That beeped a monitor before everything settled down to the same even tempo.

  A disembodied voice announced over a well-made intercom system. “He’s awake.”

  When Sonia was little, Arkady let me take her to the movies. Olga made me promise not to let her eat popcorn so we snuck in berries and juice drinks under my coat. We watched Lilo and Stitch and the little squirt rooted for that horrible blue alien all the way through. I did my best Stitch impression, making the same sounds and trying to put my tongue up my nose a few times.

  Someone behind me, a soft woman’s voice spoke. “Looks like you still have the wrong dose.”

  A man, frustrated and sharp, answered. He had a clear Boston twang. “Yeah, pity he murdered his creator before we could ask questions. These guys don’t exactly come with instruction manuals you know.”

  A door opened and I heard the tap tap of heels. Whomever owned them was light on her feet (or him—maybe Washington’s spies had a spry cross dresser). “Actually they do.” Her voice matched my sense of her coiled power. Authority had arrived. “Thousands of pages of research, published in the Soviet archives.” That sounded depressing and, at the same time, worth looking into later.

  The man mumbled some excuse, but softly, and his footfalls moved away from the bed. A tall elegant woman came into view, with extravagant red hair and sharp green eyes. She wore a power suit with a skirt just above well formed knees. From the dimple in the suit, I could see she had a small gun under her left armpit. Her bronzed face and strong cheeks hid her ethnicity.

  “Molly pitcher, sucha bitcher. Whicher whicher…um rhyme r
hyme. Still can’t smell my nose.”

  She smiled. “They appear to be having issues with your serum levels. Do you know where you are?” Her tone was even and firm. The interrogation had begun.

  “Up the creek and my paddle went wee, wee, wee.” I laughed, then coughed. I suddenly stared at my toes and wiggled them. “Do you think I have sexy toes?”

  She smiled. “If I said yes, would you answer some questions for me?”

  The disembodied woman’s voice protested: “Director, he’s barely lucid. He’ll be no help.”

  She turned slightly to my left and looked at something over my shoulder. “According to Dr. Rafe’s report, he won’t even remember this conversation, correct?”

  “Yes, Director. Correct.”

  The beautiful woman shrugged. “Then let’s go fishing. See what we catch.” She turned to me. I closed my eyes and made my lips into fish blowing bubbles.

  “Wake up, sexy toes.” Someone pinched a toe softly. Her hands were very strong and had worn callouses, carefully ground down and moisturized, but there nonetheless. She did not have a desk job. My guess was the Ring’s own Mystery Shopper. Interesting that they also had a female head of black ops.

  I opened my eyes and rolled my head. They had done the restraints with some give. I could escape but it would dislocate one or both shoulders at a minimum. “Helllllllllloooooo. You’re pretty. Where am I?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “You? I think I’d remember a hot chick, you know. What’s under the blouse?”

  She didn’t blush. Likely she knew it was a side effect of the disinhibitors. Given her striking looks, she also had to be a fair hand at exploiting men. She leaned forward and popped the top button, revealing some lacy décolletage in soft green. “Heaven.” She made it sound like it was. “Now stay with me, Spetz. One button for each question you get right. Then the skirt and then the underwear.”

  Professionally speaking, she was not far afield. Given the drugs in my system, she was going for a controversial technique termed Limbic Forestall. The theory goes that the amygdala controls a lot of stuff including decision making, emotions, and loyalty. It’s tied to a more primitive set of systems that also moderate dopamine, pleasure, sexual arousal, and sexuality in general. The Coolidge Effect, where men are easily excited by sexual novelty, has been noted among black psych circles to yield a surprising result when combined with a cocktail of stimulants and disinhibitors. Namely, men can swap loyalties, lose their sense of rational priority, and literally rewire their sense of right and wrong when sufficiently aroused. Womankind from Cleopatra, who spike drinks with adder venom and cocaine, onwards had noticed a similar effect.