Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘Better, much.’ Axl twisted the grenade’s base free from its chrome outer shell. Four little sticks of bioSemtex sat there on the base, oily and glistening, each wired to the intelligence with a spider’s trace of optic fibre.

‘I’m disconnecting the first one,’ said Axl and yanked the connection, hard and fast. He didn’t bother to tell the apple he was about to remove the other two tubes, the intelligence would be expecting it.

Soon done. Axl screwed the grenade shut and tossed the three dead tubes out onto the grass. He now had a grenade that could kill defMoma without killing him.

‘We could use this as a suppository…’ Axl told her. He’d seen that done, more than once, and so had she from the look on her face. Kolonics was a strictly equal-opportunities atrocity: the last time he’d watched it happen a Brazilian major paid the price for upsetting his own NCOs. There’d been barely enough left to scrape off the bunker walls.

‘. . . but you’re going to incubate it instead.’ He waited while she shifted her vast buttocks and sat on the grenade. ‘And we’re going to keep this short.

‘So,’ Axl said, ‘What is this really about?’

defMoma stayed silent, but only because she was trying to work out what to say. There wasn’t much hope in her face, but it wasn’t all despair. Somewhere inside the woman was telling herself this was survivable. She was wrong.

'I'll tell you what I think,’ Axl said, cutting in just as she was about to speak. ‘This isn’t about Joan. It’s about the Cardinal. WorldBank are trying to take him down.’

She didn’t deny it.

‘Well,’ said Axl, ‘they won’t be able to ...'

Blue eyes locked onto his, hard and spiteful. Lips thinned. ‘If I were you,’ defMoma said, ‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in tired old men. They die.’

Axl shot her. What he’d had in mind was something clever involving the grenade holding her prisoner here while he made his excuses, but it just happened. . . And by the time he realised what a fuck-wit idea shooting her was, the fat woman’s heart had a third ventricle and blood was spreading across her vest. The soundtrack had gone silent.

It was the drugs, Axl told himself as a back beat started up again. Too much sulphate, not enough sleep. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic irony. defMoma certainly looked liked she couldn’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to do what he’d done.

Check ammo.

Full clip in his Browning. Three fulls velcroed to his leg and now he had her hiPower too. More than enough to check out what was alive in the other slit and kill it.

Axl drum-rolled out of defMoma’s foxhole. Common sense said approach the second slit trench silently from the back, but Axl wasn’t doing common sense. Besides they’d already been fragged. And they were kids, scared and under-trained. Been there, survived that. Axl ratcheted back the breech on his SnubPup and…

Stood.

Like anyone could be that stupid and not be on camera. He went through his first clip without even realising his finger was on the trigger, hit silence and reloaded without being aware he’d done that, either. The second clip lasted the brief seconds it took him to scramble through the gaping hole he’d just gunned in the camoNet.

160, 180, 200… The bpm were pushing hardcore, meth jungle even. In the trench up ahead a woman stood, snubPup rising, and Axl lifted the top off her skull without even thinking about it. He hosed out the trench with the rest of his clip, finishing off a grunt already wounded by his earlier grenade, splinters of bone stripping leaves from oaks as the grunt’s head vanished as cleanly as if Axl had taken it off at the neck with a chainsaw.

Tempo change. Scratch violin chopping out a warning.

Four, plus one, plus three. Two left.

Behind him.

Axl hit the ground ahead of the empty snubPup that swung butt-first towards his skull, rolled sideways and came up onto his knees rough and fast, reversing his Pup and swinging it hard by its barrel straight into a conscript’s knee, Babe Ruth style.

The grunt crumpled, eyes bulging and mouth wide, too shocked to scream. Instinctively, Axl put an elbow in his throat, silencing him anyway. Strapped to his ankle, the grunt had one of those quick-release glass blades, undetectable by ninety-nine percent of all airport scanners so Axl borrowed it.

The knife bit into flesh under the conscript’s ear opening a wide bubbling grin. All Axl needed to do to make it a necktie was reach in and yank his tongue out through the slit. Not his style. Instead he put the blade into the kid’s heart and closed his large brown eyes after he fell.

‘Borja.’

Sudden silence. Not even a click track or heartbeat.

Skin crawled across Axl’s back, hairs rising on his neck. And then he got a low tom-tom line, part goan/partVou that kicked at his stomach and shrivelled his mind into a fetal ball. Someone had just called time.

Axl knew that when he turned round the Colonel’s salt and pepper hair would still be brushed neatly back from a face that was handsome, despite too much food and not enough exercise. And beneath that full moustache the mouth would be grim but smug. Also, the man would have a gun, something expensive and it would be pointed straight at Axl’s head.

Axl was right on all the points, especially the last. The gun was a lovingly retrofitted 1896 Broomhandle Mauser 7.63 machine pistol. The only other kreigsmarine Axl had seen was in a Potsdam museum, but that version wasn’t converted for ceramics.

‘Going somewhere?’

Axl nodded. ‘Yeah, things to do…’

‘. . . people to kill. Aren’t you bit too old for all that Black Jack shit?’ Colonel Emilio smiled sadly and his smile was every bit as supercilious as Axl had expected.

‘It was just a kid’s program, for God’s sake. Cheap American v’Actors laid over a Jap backbone. It wasn’t even good. Or didn’t you notice no one bothered to made a second series?’

No, Axl could truly say he hadn’t noticed that.

‘I killed defMoma,’ Axl said, more for something to say. He was watching the Colonel’s trigger finger go white at the knuckle. Watching that happen saved having to stare into the black nothingness of the kreigsmarine’s barrel. Undoubtedly there was some way to turn this situation, Axl just couldn’t remember what it was. Black Jack would have known, except Black Jack hadn’t made it to a second series.

‘Alone, friendless, disgraced…’ Colonel Emilio smiled at Axl. ‘You do know the Cardinal’s finished, don’t you?’

So everyone kept telling him. Axl felt he should have been glad. Maybe. Less than three hours left to get himself to the Nuncio’s cruiser and apparently he didn’t need to anymore.

‘Still, life isn’t all bad,’ said Colonel Emilio. ‘You killed my troops.’ The Colonel didn’t sound too disappointed. ‘And I get to kill you. And you didn’t even know what this was all about.’

‘But you’re going to tell me anyway…’

Colonel Emilio shrugged. ‘What’s the point… The rest of us are doing realpolitik and you’re still running scripts from a kid’s novela. I should have had you killed in La Medicina before this all started.’

Axl nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you should have done.’ He was staring past Colonel Emilio at a shiny object picking its way laboriously over twigs and splintered branches towards the Colonel’s heel. Maybe that whole Alessi retro-chrome shtick. hadn’t been the design disaster he’d originally thought.

The gyrobike ate up the road like Axl was in some advertisement for nanetic shaving dust, penis transplants, sperm-freezing facilities… Something typically macho but tender.