John Birmingham - Stalin's hammer:Rome

She sighed.

“But sometimes I just want to run away back to the twenty-first century. To the real modern world. And just hang out with people who don’t make every fucking minute of the day such a fucking effort.”

Harry dabbed at his lips with a napkin. He had finished his half of the mushroom and pushed his plate away from him a little.

“It sounds like you really need to get to the beach,” he said.

“I do. So yes, let’s do that. I was going to file a few travel pieces while I was here-write the whole trip off for tax purposes, on general principles. But you know what? I think I might just take a couple of days to be a tourist again. I can wait for you.”

Another waiter arrived to clear their plates, while a third approached with a wine list under his arm. Harry quickly negotiated a bottle of pinot grigio that everyone agreed would suit both of their mains before shooing away all of the attendants. Life as a standby royal, and later as an army officer, had at least polished up his attendant-shooing chops.

“That sounds like an excellent idea, Jules. Fucking smashing idea actually,” he declared. “I wish I could do the same and just swan off this week. But I’m stuck here doing my party-princess routine while GATT’s still on. They’ve left me a couple of hours free at lunch two days from now. Would you like to catch up then?”

Before she could answer, a frown furrowed her eyebrows. Harry looked back over his shoulder to whatever had caught her eye and found the senior of his two bodyguards approaching with a note in his hand. Messengers had also appeared for the MI6 and OSS station chiefs.

North Rome (Soviet sector)

They made the relative safety of the sewer tunnels a bare minute ahead of their pursuers. Ivanov quickly judged there to be at least a platoon of NKVD paramilitaries coming after them. The storm troopers forced entry into the sewer system by the crude but effective method of blowing up a drainage grate.

“Move!” he’d yelled at Franco when he heard the satchel charges thud and clang on the iron bars.

His guide needed no prompting. He was already heading around the nearest bend, splashing up great fantails of foul-smelling black water and scattering rats before him. Ivanov followed, his ears ringing as gunfire crashed out, cutting off the sound of a woman’s screams.

What just happened?

He had been tasked to contact a Russian man, Sobeskaia-a factory owner of some sort, someone important enough to be in town for the GATT conference-and to establish his bona fides as an ongoing source. Was the whole meeting a trap? They were supposed to make first contact with this man Sobeskaia’s mistress at the back of the hotel where the couple were staying. Had it been a trap?

Possibly not, since the NKVD had sprung it well before he arrived. Perhaps something had gone wrong at their end too. As Ivanov fled headlong into the darkness of the buried levels of eternal Rome, he did not much care. What mattered now was getting the hell out.

He powered up his NVGs, using infrared this time, and at once he could see that Furedi had done so too. Nor had the Italian needed to be told not to use the LLAMPS setting. If they stayed at this level, with some light filtering down from above, the heat signatures of the men chasing them would stand out starkly.

He heard shouts and the thudding of boots dropping into the drain behind them as Franco steered them around another bend, gesturing furiously for Ivanov to follow. He gave the impression of a man who knew where he was headed. That was good, because Ivanov had no fucking idea. The angry discordance of voices soon resolved itself into the harsh, stentorian barking of one man. A voice Ivanov recognized immediately.

Skarov .

The shock of realization was almost great enough to stop him in his tracks, but the crack of a single pistol shot, followed by Skarov’s curse, and two more shots immediately afterward pushed him on. Ivanov bet that somebody had disobeyed an order to hold fire, and the NKVD spy catcher had summarily executed him.

He bit down on a curse as his head bumped and grazed the rough brick ceiling of the drainage pipe. Stars bloomed behind his eyes and a stinging pain told him he’d opened up his scalp. It would need disinfecting. The passage narrowed around them. Franco was already bent over double in front of him. To keep up, the much larger Russian man was forced to crouch low and duckwalk as quickly as he could. He concentrated on making as little noise as possible, on not stomping on the wet bricks as he hurried along but rather pushing himself forward like an ice-skater accelerating across a frozen lake. A couple of body lengths ahead, Franco passed through the underground world like a deeper shadow on the darkness, leaving no trace at all. His field craft was exceptional, thought Ivanov. For a petty criminal, he would have made a good special forces scout.

This way , the Roman gestured, before diving into a pipe that opened into their larger conduit at hip level. Ivanov followed the slightly blurred, cherry-colored figure without hesitation. The shouting behind them had died down but not because Skarov and his men had given up. They were listening and waiting.

The pipe was slimy and smelled awful in a way that was slightly different from the usual miasma of the sewers. Even with the night-vision goggles, visibility contracted to almost nothing. Ivanov could feel the passage narrowing around his shoulders, but he forced himself forward anyway, trusting in Furedi to get them away. He could feel soft, obscene shapes and lumps of organic matter under his hands, but there was no way of telling what they were.

A barked command to give themselves up reached out from somewhere behind, but it was not followed by shots or the sudden flooding brilliance of spotlights.

He forced himself forward by inches.

The crawl through this section was long enough that Ivanov had time to ponder the presence of his old nemesis behind him. Better that than to dwell on the increasingly cramped and claustrophobic surroundings.

Alexi Skarov it was who had driven him from the Rodina, where whole armies of soldiers and spies had proven themselves unable to lay hands on Pavel Ivanov during the late 1940s. As he ghosted through the heart of Stalin’s vast charnel house, Ivanov had lit the fires of half a dozen Chechnyas and Georgias. He had inflamed the murderous passions of jihadists, separatists, and insurgents, along with mere criminals and gang lords. With these efforts he piled up a mountain of corpses and bled out whole divisions of the Red Army, spreading death and chaos from the occupied wastelands of Japan, through Siberia, down into Afghanistan and even once within the walls of the Kremlin itself.

He had so infuriated Lavrenty Beria that the poison dwarf had offered not just a huge monetary reward for his capture but the precious freedom of real choice to any man who delivered Ivanov before him. Millions of roubles hung like the sword of Damocles above his head, but also the prospect of freedom to anyone who betrayed him. Deliver Pavel Ivanov into the hands of the NKVD, promised Beria, and not a finger would be raised against you should you wish to take your reward and leave for the so-called “free world.”

It was quite a compliment, in a way. He had really pissed them off.

But material reward was not Skarov’s motivation. The demon in the tunnels behind Ivanov now was much more dangerous than any bounty hunter or freedom seeker. Alexandr Dmitry Skarov was Stalin’s executioner-in-chief. He hunted Ivanov not for money or freedom but because for him it was the right thing to do. Skarov was a true believer in the revolution. And he would spill oceans of blood to prove that belief and to secure the people from the mistakes of any false history revealed by the Transition. Or the Emergence, as it was generally known on this side of the Atlantic. To Stalin, to Skarov, to millions of other believers, the arrival of the uptimers, the way they had torn the settled order of events into bloody shreds, was proof positive that the forces of history revealed by the dialectic were undeniable. The revolution could not fail, and so it had not. Time had wrenched itself apart to set things right.