Hammer of Angels: A Novel of Shadowstorm (11 page)

All the cold stone walls show up as a black backdrop to the little row of houses that give off enough heat to gently glow orange. Six bright red man blobs are spread around the tops of the walls and towers.

I comm, “Not too many guards.”

“Yeah. The Ravenmaster was right about them stripping the garrison to provide extra manpower up north.”

“Which building are we headed for?”

He holds up his index finger. “Hang on. I'm asking Grey and Raj to begin their diversion.”

Raj must have been champing at the bit for this request. Brando has barely finished comming to me when a bright flash illuminates the sky at the Tower's north side. A loud boom and rumble indicates Raj has opened fire on one of the outer guard posts, as far away from our path as possible.

My partner remains crouched. “We're headed for the Waterloo Block, that big building against the west wall. We need to wait until the guards in front are drawn away.”

Raj and Grey have sucked the wall guards into a noisy exchange of small-arms fire that parrots off the walls and buildings. I scope out the front entrance to our target building. Two troopers posted there have unslung their rifles and alternate between looking at each other and looking toward the firefight.

Meanwhile, it's gotten even chillier. “I'm freezing! Did it get extra icy all of a sudden, or is it just me?”

“It might be the ghosts,” Brando comms back. “We're on top of the old scaffold site.”

“I didn't think many people got executed in here.”

“Not many famous people, but lots of regular people died right where we're crouching.”

I shiver and try to use mental telepathy to get the two guards to leave their post. An explosion outside belches a fireball into the sky. The two bozos bolt up to the walls.
Finally!

Grey and Raj can't keep this up forever. Their ungodly racket will lure cops like a thirty-story neon doughnut, so we quickly scramble across the courtyard. Brando pulls one of the Waterloo's front doors open. I brace Li'l Bertha in front of me and burst through the entrance. My partner waits a few seconds, then pops in behind me.

We're in a large, unoccupied, dimly lit hall. The floor, walls, and twelve-foot ceiling are all made of wide oak planks. The furniture here consists of a few card tables with metal folding chairs around them. A large and incongruously colorful jukebox stands in the corner.

“Where are we going?” I say over my shoulder.

“Eisenberg is up on the third floor with the other politicals.”

“How many guards are left in here?”

Brando pauses. He must be comming with Grey or Raj while he's talking to me. Then he says, “The Ravenmaster wasn't sure, so we need to watch out.”

The rules of engagement for this Job Number include lethal force, but only for SZ troops or if we're under extreme duress. Otherwise I need to attempt nonlethal takedowns. That's why we've been a pair of Sneaky McSneakersons and why we have the boys doing all this diversionary nonsense instead of simply killing our way in here like we normally would.

We find an ancient stairway to the right of the main hall. Heavy stone blocks rise from the treads and form a shallow arch over our heads as we trot up the bleak spiral. A radio broadcast echoes from upstairs. We pass the shadowed second story and ascend into the lights of the third. We emerge into a large open area.

This chamber may have once been part of the king's quarters, but now it's a hodgepodge of cages bolted to the floor. Two uniformed palookas sit at a table. One thug reads a newspaper while the other jamoke leans toward a small radio and listens to a very loud German news broadcast. Radio Guy slowly turns his head as we come out of the stairway. Whatever he was expecting, it obviously wasn't a pair of scuba divers. He blinks hard, confirms that yes, it
is
two scuba kids, and draws in breath to call a warning to Newspaper Guy. That's as far as he gets because I've already covered most of the distance to him before he can form any words. He's so shocked by how fast I move that he tips over backward in his chair to get away from me.

Since Radio Guy is already on the floor, I shift my trajectory and lance myself feet first into Newspaper Guy's chest. He exhales a loud whoosh as a cubic meter of beer breath gusts out of his lungs. I hop up and turn to deal with Radio Guy, who's regained his feet and drawn his sidearm. I lunge forward and swipe his pistol right out of his hand. Then I punch him so hard he flips over and lands on his head before sploogling onto his back.

I lean over Radio Guy and stick my index finger in his face. “Stay!”

He goes cross-eyed tracking my finger. His flabby chin waggles up and down. He says, “
Jah!
Okay!
Jah!
” and sticks his hands up. I take a pair of handcuffs from his belt and slap them on his wrists.

Meanwhile Newspaper Guy is crawling around on all fours. There's a puddle of puke under his wheezing mouth. Blood drips out of his nose into the vomit. That may have been my best flying kick ever! I'll have to tell Raj about it. Of course, if Raj had done it, this goombah's bones would have exploded out of his skin like calcium rats leaving a sinking meat ship.

Our spectacular entrance has all the prisoners on their feet. This makes it easy to find our man. I load Grey's image of Eisenberg onto my Eyes-Up display and jog up and down the rows of cages until I find a matching face.

“Victor?” I say to the thin, fierce-looking prisoner behind the bars. One look at him and I can see why he's called the Hammer. He bears his lean, muscled body like a ramrod, you could chop down trees with his chin, and his burning stare barbecues the inside of my skull.

Victor Eisenberg's file says he's in his forties, but in person he looks early fifties. Not regular fifties, mind you. More like that super-rugged, frontiersman fifties where he still drinks the young cowpunks under the table and then chucks their boozed-up asses over a barn.

The man examines me and says, “American.” It's not a question. His eyes travel down and then back up all five feet four inches of my scuba-clad body. He nods appreciatively and states, “It's about time.”

I'm not sure if he means it's about time Americans got involved in the abolitionist movement or if it's about time an American chick in skintight clothes busted him out of jail. B rando grabs a ring of keys from Radio Guy and opens the door to Eisenberg's cell. Victor walks out, stretches his arms over his head, then takes Brando's keys and tosses them to the prisoner in the next cell. The other prisoner opens his own door, then flits around unlocking all the other cells. My partner and I each drag one of the guards into separate cells and lock them in.

The freed prisoners gather in front of Victor.

“Men,” Victor barks, “introductions will have to wait, but I think you all know me. We arrived separately, yet we will escape together. To do so, we will harness our energy as a group to overwhelm our opponents and take back our freedom. Are you ready?”

The man standing closest to Victor says, in German, “Yes, sir!” This is followed by a ragged but lusty chorus of “Yes, sirs.”

Victor turns back to us. “Okay, little Americans, what's the plan? Victor Eisenberg and these men are at your service.”

Brando comms his boss to report we've picked up a squad of pissed-off guerrillas, and would he like us to grab him anything as we torch our way out of here?

CORE PER-BB-342

Sunday, February 15, 1:47
A.M.
GMT

Tower of London, London, Province of Great Britain, GG

ExOps agents are trained to expect surprises, and surprises are usually bad. But Victor's instant company of fighting men is a very pleasant exception. A few of these bruisers are even tougher-looking than the Squad troops I work with back home. Their only weakness is their current lack of weaponry, but we're about to rectify that shortcoming.

I'm up on the outer wall's parapet. In front of me, twelve regular German Army guards are exchanging small-arms fire with Grey and Raj. The troopers are so focused on the street below they don't notice my dangerous group sneaking up the stairs. Brando has stayed in the courtyard with Victor and half of his insta-army while I've led the rest up here to disarm these guards. Li'l Bertha perches in my left hand like an obedient peregrine, ready to unload an assful of liberty into these pigs.

My nine men wait behind me like a long, silent shadow. I raise my hand to signal them to get ready. Then I have Li'l Bertha lock on to the nearest guard's backside and load up some maiming-caliber slugs. Her artificial intelligence sets the other eleven butts as targets 2 through 12 and spins her gyroscope once to signal me she's ready. I mash down on the trigger. My pistol automatically gyros from one Kraut heinie to the next, and before you know it, a soccer team's worth of Germany's finest have collapsed to the stone walkway, howling in pain. Victor's men rush past me like a vengeful wind and stomp the Fritz's heads. My ex-prisoners load up on German weapons, and we all scurry back down to the main courtyard.

Brando comms, “Grey and Raj, hold your fire. The wall guards have been neutralized.” The sudden silence reveals the men's excited breathing as they distribute the guards' rifles to the members with the most military experience. It also lets us hear the approaching police sirens.

Raj comms, “Darwin, I've got opposition coming across the Tower Bridge. Grey and I can slow them down, but hurry up in there. We're behind schedule.”

“Roger that,” Brando comms. “We're dealing with significant scope creep. Do you need help holding the bridge?”

Raj comms, “Affirmative, if help is available.” He pauses, then shifts to a more conversational tone. “What'd you do, recruit Mary Poppins?”

I comm, “More like Peter Pan.”

Brando confers briefly with Victor, who dispatches ten gun-toting members of his company to fight their way outside and help Raj fend off der Kops. This leaves us with Victor and eight of his men to bust into Carbon.

The outer Tower guards have been disabled with bullet wounds to their asses and blunt-force trauma to their heads, so they're out of the game. It's a quick run from the Waterloo Block to the White Tower's base. Up close, the old keep is as imposing as it must have been the day they built it. I circle the building to find an entrance. The only doorway is twelve feet off the ground. I call my partner over to me. He's followed by Victor Eisenberg and his men.

Brando says, “This can't be how they get in and out of this building every day. There must be another way in.”

“Well,” I say, “I don't think we have time to search for it. Darwin, get on my shoulders. I'll bounce you up to that doorway.”

“We'll need more than two of us. The Krauts may have drained their garrison, but this is still Carbon we're breaking into.”

I turn to Victor. He's not too tall, and he's thin. I think I can get him up there. Victor looks at me quizzically—he's not sure what we're talking about. I say to Brando, “Sure, but let's get you up there first so we don't have to explain it.”

I stand under the high doorway, face the wall, and take a knee. Brando walks to me. We grasp each other's hands, and he steps onto my front leg. He presses down on my palms, climbs up onto my shoulders, then turns around so we both face the same direction.

“Ready?” I ask.

He bends his legs into a crouch. “Ready.”

I stand up for a moment and then crouch down too so we're stacked up like two coiled springs.

I say, “On three. One, two, three!” Brando and I simultaneously flex our legs and launch him up to the small landing in front of the doorway. I hear muffled exclamations from the men. This isn't how we've always done this. I used to just grab my partner and vault the two of us over things together. That turned out to be dreadful for the Mods in my knees, so we came up with this cheerleader routine to reach high places.

I turn and point at Victor Eisenberg. “Your turn.”

Eisenberg quietly gives one of the men directions, indicating with his hands to form a perimeter around the building. Then he walks in front of me and says, “Okay, red hair.”

Victor's not as graceful as my partner and of course we haven't practiced this together, but it's not a bad first-time Scarlet boost. He lands with his arms and midsection on the landing and his legs dangling over the edge. Brando grabs Victor's arm and helps him up. Once both of them are set, I bend down, take a big breath, and fire myself into the air. Brando and Victor reach out to guide me in. I land on my feet and brace my hands against their arms. Presto! Now for the door.

“Darwin, do we care if the Germans know how we got in here?”

He answers, “I'd say no. To your point earlier, we're probably never coming back.”

I boot up my gun. The door is heavy oak, but we only care about the hinges on the door's right side. We press ourselves to our left, and Li'l Bertha draws a bead on the hinges. I set her to use .50-caliber Explosives and fire seven shots. Stone shards and wooden splinters crease the air and ricochet into the courtyard. All three of us put our shoulders into the door and shove it open far enough for us to slip inside.

The moment we're in, Li'l Bertha lights up and frantically spins her gyro. I switch to night vision and spot a charging figure with something shiny in his hand.
Boom! Pow!
My assailant absorbs two .50-caliber Explosive bullets at point-blank range and flies away from me in three seventy-pound blood-spewing chunks. A fog of mortal remains splatters all over the stone walls and floor. The dead man's weapon—a sword—clatters to the ground.

“Is this idiot for real?” Brando says. “A
sword
? We've obviously got firearms.”

I switch Li'l Bertha to less dramatic ammunition. “Maybe he thought we were Picts.”

Victor bends down and picks up the sword. He wipes off the handle and flips the weapon back and forth, testing its balance. He shrugs and takes it with him as we move into a large central room. The gore-streaked stone walls loom up sixteen feet or so and support a heavy wooden ceiling.

The Germans are using this area as an office, with rows of desks, filing cabinets, and computer servers. Thick electrical cables snake from the servers, crawl up the walls, and slip into the ceiling. In the back is a kitchen and meeting area. A large conference table in the far corner has sprouted three trembling pairs of hands.

We creep into the room's center. There's a lot of furniture and gear in here, plenty of places for troublemakers to pounce from. “Darwin,” I comm, “go get those three people and find out if we're in the right place.”

My partner calls out, in German, “Stand up!” When the three pairs of hands don't move, he blares,
“Schnell!”
Six hands rise into the air to reveal six arms, three heads with frightened faces, and three bodies wearing white dress shirts and neckties.

Victor doesn't look at our new friends. He studies the rest of the room, in particular a large flight of stone stairs that lead up to the next floor.

Brando corrals the three necktie schnooks and fires questions at them in rapid German. They nod, point upstairs, and answer in even faster German. While my partner interrogates the neckties, he comms to me, “They say there's a large lab upstairs for cloning humans.” He pauses while the neckties tell him something else, then comms, “The facility is heavily guarded.” Another pause. “It seems like these three are computer programmers. They write software for Carbon.”

“Ask them who attacked us when we came through the front door.”

My partner barks his question at the programmers, listens to their answer, and comms to me, “That was an SZ sergeant assigned to watch them.”

The Staatszeiger. “I assume I can use unlimited force on these shitheads?”

Brando looks back at the crimson film of residue pooling in the corners near the entrance. “Yeah, I'd say the SZ is fair game.”

“Well, all right, then. Let's go upstairs and get some.”

Victor asks, “What about these three?”

Brando says, “I've told them to hide down here. They'll be perfectly happy to see us eliminate the guards.”

Victor glowers at the neckties and brandishes his sword menacingly. The programmers blanch and retreat behind the conference table. I lead us upstairs with Li'l Bertha in front of me. Brando follows, and Victor brings up the rear. My amplified hearing catches hushed commands being whispered above. I pick out
“Jah, Hauptmann.”
German for “Yes, Captain.”

As we come up to the second floor, I comm, “Darwin, what floor is Carbon on?”

“The third and fourth floors.” I smile at him and raise one of my eyebrows. He grins at me. “So yes, you can go crazy here.” I flash him a 90-watt smile before I bang a bunch of Madrenaline and charge up the rest of the stairs. My booted feet accelerate to top speed. I wing past the top stair and sail halfway down a large makeshift hallway. This space used to be another large chamber, like downstairs. The SZ has divided it into two rows of rooms and cubicles with sheets of plywood and cheap wooden doors.

Li'l Bertha sights in on a black-shirted Staatszeiger soldier at the end of the hallway. He fires his MP-50 at me. I pop a few .30-caliber slugs into his face and twirl away from his 9-mm burst. A door to my right whips open, and a huge SZ trooper reaches out to grab me. I smack his meaty paw out of the way, leap in the air, and ram my foot into his face. The brute staggers backward but remains upright. Blood runs out of his nose. I execute an arm-swirling swim move to get behind him and forcibly eject him from the room. Private Brute stumbles through a door across the hall, where a flurry of gunfire rips him apart. A cry of dismay rings out. I imagine it translates as, “Oh, shit, Private Brute still owes me two hundred marks!”

Shouted orders bark from the little offices. Crap, there's still a gang of gorillas in here, and I'm running low on ammo. One challenge of this scuba mission is that I couldn't carry all of my regular ordnance like grenades and extra ammunition packs for Li'l Bertha. I zoom down the hall and pick up the dead soldier's MP-50 submachine gun. The big automatic weapon blankets my small frame. I grab a few extra clips from my victim's ammo belt.

I switch on my infrared vision and kick in the first door on the left. I unload what's left of the MP-50's clip into anything warm. I hoist an office chair and chuck it through the wall into the next office. I jam a new clip in my captured weapon and barge through my instant door.

Two SZ men, their body heat glowing through their black uniforms, stand and fire their guns at me. I sail over their shots and bounce across the room. The moment I land, I hurl myself into the air again. Between jumps, I riddle their torsos with 9-mm bullets. I call this move the Scarlet two-step. It lets me put out a ton of offense without becoming a target because I move laterally and vertically at the same time.

Damn, regular guns go through ammo like a kid goes through popcorn. I slap another clip into my MP-50. A warm blob approaches the office's door. I kneel down and take aim, ready to fill this dunderhead full of lead. He doesn't come in, though. His hand waves at the door, and then I hear a sharp thunk as something lands on the floor.

Grenade!

I fire myself out of the room, past the stick bomb, and slide into the hallway. Three black-shirted soldiers crouch against the wall, waiting to charge in after the grenade goes off. The first mug's eyes bug out when I flash past him.

My feet launch me back down the hall, but just as I get airborne, the grenade explodes. Its blast shoves me sideways. I hit the wall as something hot and hard whacks into my lower right leg. I land on my back and bounce down the hall like a tumbleweed. My captured MP-50 flies off my shoulder and slides toward the stairs where Brando and Victor are hiding.

My head is spinning and my leg has gone numb. Three blurry SZ soldiers pick themselves off the floor and turn toward me. They raise their weapons as I rip Li'l Bertha out of her holster. Before I can fire, the three troopers collapse in a thundering hail of bullets. Above my head, Victor waves my MP-50 back and forth like a broom. His angular features appear especially sinister in the gun's sharp bursts of light. My view of Victor's killing expression is abruptly blocked by my partner's worried face. Brando has followed Victor up the stairs to see if I'm okay.

“Scarlet! Holy crap, there's blood all over you. Where are you hit?”

“I'm fine,” I croak. My throat is as dry as a nun's love life. ”This is from the competition.”

“No, it isn't. Your right leg is cut.”

“It's only a graze.” I hold my hand out. “Help me up.” A searing wave of pain scorches up my leg. “Ow! Fuck!” My neuroinjector pumps some Overkaine into me and the pain subsides to a buzzing tingle.

I catch my breath while Victor collects ammo and another MP-50 from the dead SZ men. He hands me one of the submachine guns. Victor clicks a full clip into his captured weapon. Then he cracks a broad smile, brandishes his new toy, and says, “Ahh, now I feel whole again.” Victor Eisenberg is my kind of people.

Meanwhile, Brando eyeballs my leg. The scuba-suit material over my right calf is torn and has peeled back to show a bleeding gash three inches long. It looks like a piece of grenade shrapnel carved a deep slice across my calf without embedding itself in my flesh. CoAgs automatically flow into my bloodstream.