Hammer of Angels Read online

  He beams. “I think they will see to it nothing happens to me, Frau Van Daan.”

  We say another round of good-byes in the garage. Marie tries to convince us to take her car. We politely say no thank you.

  She presses us. “How do you plan to travel?”

  Considering Marie is a CIA stringer and an underground slave smuggler, she can still be preciously innocent sometimes.

  “Marie,” I answer, “we’re Americans. If we need anything, we’ll just steal it.”

  This cracks her up. She’s still laughing as she walks inside.

  The four of us slink away from her brightly lit house and fade into the night. At the end of Marie’s street we turn toward the train station a few blocks away. Our first task is to get out of the area.

  A few minutes later we enter the train station’s parking lot, which is full of free cars.

  “All right, boys.” I rub my hands together. “Mamma wants leather seats.”

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-3922

  ANGEL SIT-REP: IRELAND. 22 February 1981

  Entire island aflame with rebellion. German resources strained beyond capacity. Local underground has high morale and many new recruits, most of whom have begun work to maintain an orderly transition to home rule.

  —Pericles, IO/Jade, L5 Interceptor

  35

  THREE DAYS LATER, THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 5:11 P.M. CET

  ARRAS, PROVINCE OF FRANCE, GG

  The ground swirls, my ears ring, and my stomach barely hangs on to the lunch I stole earlier today. The concussion is so intense that my entire body feels like it’s been flattened in a vise. The sky rains shredded concrete, burning paper, powdered glass, twisted metal, and splintered wood. It looks mighty loud.

  At Camp A-Go-Go, they taught me that 90 feet from a deafening blast is 210 feet too close. They didn’t go into why it’s too close, or if they did, I wasn’t paying attention. Either way, I find out now because I lose my hearing, my sense of up and down, and my ability to form coherent sentences or even single words.

  “Scarlet, you all right?” I can’t tell if it’s Brando or Falcon.

  “Yeh, shuzz kug thuff.” Fuck, I can’t even comm straight right now.

  “What?”

  “Ee’m oka!” Oh, forget it.

  Our ROAR Tour has entered the Somme, made famous during the Great War for the unprecedented scale and savagery of the battles that happened here. Sixty years later, the region’s farmers still find dud artillery shells buried where the trenches used to be. Lord only knows what lies buried even deeper. Our action today is a dust speck compared to those sprawling campaigns, but it’s gotta be the noisiest dust speck ever.

  The debris falling around me used to be the Wehrmacht supply center for Belgium and northern France. Last night, one of Victor’s Circle of Zion contacts advised him that if this facility suffered a devastating explosion, it would…well, actually he had me at “explosion,” so I stopped listening.

  The smoke clears a bit, revealing the pancaked army warehouse. The ground has stopped clobbering me, but I’m still too dizzy to walk. I crawl on all fours until a pair of hands helps me up. It’s Brando. He drags me away from the blazing wreckage. Falcon arrives, and the two of them wrap my arms over their shoulders.

  This job began nine hours ago when we paid a visit to a liquor store owned by another one of Victor’s underground connections. The guy had three beer kegs full of fertilizer-based explosive waiting for us in his back room. Brando estimated that if these suckers went off together, the resulting crater could be a bathtub for the Statue of Liberty.

  We gingerly loaded the kegs into the trunk of our Mercedes, then went shoplifting for breakfast. We’ve developed a few routines to defeat the security at grocery stores. My favorite is when Victor distracts the employees with his impressive stockpile of jingoistic wisecracks.

  Ever hear the one about the Austrian who married his rooster?

  We spent the rest of the day staking out this supply depot, waiting for the shifts to change. As soon as the day crew was gone, Victor started the car, rolled up to the front gate, and savaged the young guard with a terrifying hurricane of Teutonic attitude.

  “Open up!” Victor barked at the guard.

  The sentry was nonplussed. “Your identification, please.”

  “WHAT?” Vic screamed. “Why, you insignificant worm! I’ll have your balls on a pike! Open this fucking gate!”

  “Sir, I…uhh…”

  Twenty years as a Wehrmacht officer has made Colonel Eisenberg a grand master of intimidation. “Listen, you walking stack of pig intestines, I’m delivering three kegs of Bavaria’s finest for your commanding officer’s birthday celebration. Every second your stupidity makes him wait will be another fistful of SHIT he shoves down your throat! OPEN THE GATE, YOU PISS-BLOODED MANURE-FOR-BRAINS WHORE SPAWN!”

  There’s no tirade like a German tirade.

  The petrified soldier threw the gate open. Victor drove into the depot with absolute disregard for the posted traffic patterns, and his truly obnoxious parking job blocked three loading bays. The moment he was out of the car, he began storming around, terrifying the night crew. Meanwhile, the boys and I carefully humped the three kegs down to the basement.

  Then Victor, Brando, and Falcon got in the car and roared out the front gate. I stayed hidden among the crates and barrels until Brando commed that they were clear. Then I sparked up the leftover smoke grenade from Brussels and threw it into a ventilation shaft. By the time white fumes started drifting out the other vents, I could already hear soldiers asking one another if they smelled something burning.

  Now.

  I pulled the fire alarm and hollered, “FEUER!” FIRE!

  Other voices echoed my shout, and the entire shift ran for the exits. When all I could hear was the alarm, I beat feet out a side door. This was when I underestimated the minimum safe distance from our keg bombs, which is why Brando and Falcon are still lugging me across a field.

  We make it to where Victor waits in our misappropriated Mercedes. My partner deposits me in the backseat, then scoots in next to me. F-Bird gets in front. Victor sticks the car in gear and puts the pedal to the metal. The acceleration is the last straw for my poor stomach.

  Here it comes!

  I open the window just in time to puke all over the outside of our gigantic luxury motorcar. I flop back inside. My skin shimmers with stinging sweat.

  Brando takes my hand. “I don’t suppose it would help if you ate something?”

  “Guh.” My tongue tastes like flat orange soda, stomach acid, and half-digested cheese pretzels. “No.” At least my hearing has returned.

  Ahh, the glamour of a career in espionage.

  Victor studies me in his rearview mirror. “You don’t look well, Scarlet.”

  “All part of the act.” I take a slow breath. “Vicberg, that was a great performance.”

  He smiles. “Danke, fraulein. It was my pleasure.”

  I lean toward my partner. “How’d we do?”

  “Well,” Brando says with a shrug, “half the building flew away, and the rest collapsed like a house of cards. I’m not sure how many of the contents were destroyed, but I’d say we achieved our objective.”

  Falcon nods and quietly says, “That was outrageously rad.”

  The kid looks and sounds like Dad, and he inherited my father’s chops with weapons and technology, but he has his own way of expressing himself. Plus, he’s so much younger than I ever remember my dad. These aspects have made it easier for me to accept him as our new teammate. Maybe my pre-cloning-era mind has decided Falcon is a long-lost cousin from Dad’s side of the family and left it at that.

  He has our family sense of humor, for sure. I came up with an acronym for Really Outrageous and Radical to tease Falcon about saying “outrageous” and “rad” so much. He loved it and christened Victor’s series of missions the ROAR Tour.

  Our tour’s goal runs parallel with the objectiv
es of Operation ANGEL, namely, to foster an environment of chaos and confusion within the Reich. Victor’s long-term intention is to spread the slave rebellion across as much territory as possible. His immediate objective is to give the Circle of Zion a head start on the Krauts. To this end we’ve been tactically speed-blasting our way south from Calais.

  Brando asks, “Victor, what do you think? Should we go to Saint-Quentin or Amiens next?”

  “Whichever is closer.”

  “Saint-Quentin it is.” Brando still holds my hand. “Think you can hold down some food?”

  “Maybe. Lemme try one of Marie’s eternity biscuits.” Supposedly these thick, crackerlike biscuits never go stale. My partner rummages in our burgled cooler. Victor peeks in the rearview mirror again, but not at me. He’s checking out whatever’s behind us.

  “Scheisse, Polizei!”

  The rest of us spin in our seats. There’s a single police car following us with its lights flashing.

  Victor looks at the speedometer. “Dammit, I’m over the speed limit.”

  Brando and Falcon trade places, clambering past each other like kids on a jungle gym. Falcon and I open our windows and face backward.

  I comm, “Darwin, what do you think? Should we take them out or let them pull us over?”

  “If a close encounter goes wrong, we’ll have to kill them. You’d better put on those bandanas and shoot out their tires.”

  Falcon and I each pull striped bandanas out of our hip pockets, tie them over our faces like Western banditos, and draw our pistols.

  “Ready?” Falcon comms to me.

  “Ready. I’ll hit the front passenger side.”

  “Roger. I’ll take out the driver’s side.”

  We both lean out our windows and take aim. The cop car has pulled in close, so this shot will be easy. I dump a .45-caliber slug into the passenger-side front tire. Nothing happens. I fire again. The tire’s center tread splits wide open, and the steel wheel clanks onto the road. Falcon’s shots snap open the driver’s-side tire, and the entire front end of the police cruiser drops to the pavement in a howling cloud of sparks.

  Time for a quick exit and a new car. We’ve compared notes and figured out I’m the group’s best getaway driver. I’ve got the most biorobotic upgrades and have spent so much time at the track that I could be a traffic cone.

  I climb up front and sit on Victor’s lap, and then he eases out from under me. Brando gives Victor his seat and transfers himself to the back with Falcon, who has left his bandana on in case he needs to provide cover fire. I floor the accelerator and leave it there. We flash down the freeway so fast that we could probably outrun a small airplane.

  Brando spots a service station at the next exit. Our car’s brake pads cook down to nothing as I sling us off the highway and into the station. It’s five-thirty in the evening, and the garage is closed. The parking area is filled with vehicles in for repairs. I park our Mercedes behind the low building, and we hunt around for our next ride. Victor swaps the Mercedes’s license plates with another car. Then he casually walks toward the road to keep watch.

  “This Opel looks okay,” Brando comms.

  Bah, Opel. We can do better than that. That’s when I see the gorgeous black Audi sedan with a sunroof and alloy wheels. There isn’t any visible damage. Maybe it’s just in for a tune-up. I try the door. It’s open.

  “Fellas, over here!” I get inside and hunt for the keys. Sun visor? Floor mat? No dice. I reach under the dash to rip out the ignition wires as the boys dump our bags into the Audi. I hot-wire the starter, and the engine growls to life. Brando jumps in front with me while Victor and Falcon pile in back.

  I ratchet my seat all the way forward, adjust the mirrors, and pilot us out of the lot. Brando directs me to the A26, and our ROAR Tour is off to bring our crime spree—uh, I mean the Rising—to Saint-Quentin.

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-4271

  ANGEL SIT-REP: HOLLAND. 1 March 1981

  The news from England has inspired local Circle of Zion cells to launch a sabotage campaign. Train yard bombed in Amsterdam, airplane hangar burned in Rotterdam. A good start.

  —King, L16 Vindicator

  36

  TWO DAYS LATER, SATURDAY, MARCH 7, 3:52 A.M. CET

  SAINT-QUENTIN, PROVINCE OF FRANCE, GG

  Except for running low on ammo for Li’l Bertha, our biggest supply problem is we’re out of cash. This doesn’t matter for meals or cars since we don’t pay for them anyway. Hotel rooms and gasoline, however, are more of a challenge. Bank robbery is way-y-y outside our mission parameters, and without direction from ExOps we don’t know where most of our safe houses are.

  On our first night out of Calais, we broke into an unoccupied motel room. It was comfortable, but we were so worried someone would barge in on us that we all slept like crap. We might as well have spent the night in the car.

  Except it’s too cold to sleep in a car in March, as we found out the next night. Victor has a lot of experience as a guerrilla, but he and his gang never stayed in cities. All of it was spent camped out in the woods, with occasional raids into towns for supplies. But the underground contacts Victor needs right now are in the more developed areas, and he never knows when they’ll be available. So we make like big-city hobos and sleep where we can.

  The morning after our second restless night, during an all-star breakfast of stolen bratwurst and Cokes, I proposed an idea: “Let’s spend the night inside a store we’re gonna rip off anyway. We’ll bust in after they close and scram before they open.”

  My three stiff and grumpy colleagues agreed it was worth a shot. That night we slept in the small warehouse at the back of a grocery store. This was better, but supermarkets open early and we barely made it out before the morning shift came in to make doughnuts and chop up dead animals.

  Last night we finally found a much better place: a gun shop. The building had a beefy security system, but anything less than Fort Knox is cake for us. We parked the Audi behind the store, and three minutes later we were inside.

  It was like spending the night in Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. Falcon found himself a well-maintained Luger, and Victor lifted a nice pair of Walther PPK pistols. I was tempted by one of those blocky Mauser C96s, but then I’d lose all the targeting abilities of my dad’s LB-505.

  Li’l Bertha can use regular bullets when necessary, although I sense she feels like it’s beneath her. Her gyroscopes shuddered a little when I manually locked her bore setting to fit the same 9×19-mm Parabellums used in Victor’s and Falcon’s new toys.

  We packed up as many boxes of ammo as we could carry and racked out for the night. The store’s sign said they didn’t open until 10:30 A.M., which sounded great to me. I really needed the extra sleep.

  The Gestapo, on the other hand, never seems to sleep at all. The pricks based here in Saint-Quentin push people around all day and drink booze all night. If they receive intel about escaped slaves or any other subversive activity, they pull a predawn raid.

  Today will be different.

  Victor met with a couple of his Circle contacts and learned there’s trouble on the Floating Railroad. A group of runaways have been betrayed to the Gestapo. Victor didn’t say how it happened, but my guess is it was a nosy neighbor in the Purity League.

  Here we face another disadvantage of working with an aggressively decentralized organization like the Circle of Zion. Vic’s contacts don’t know where the fugitives are hidden. Only those directly involved in a smuggling operation know where the Stars are kept. Except tonight, someone else knows.

  The Gestapo knows.

  Brando and Victor worked out our game plan for this morning. We’ll use the Gestapo’s knowledge against them by tailing them to their raid. Then we’ll fit them all for wooden overcoats.

  We’re parked across the street from Gestapo HQ, huddled in our car. Victor wants us to switch vehicles every couple of days, so tonight’s job will be our last in this car, which I’m
sure the poor thing is glad about.

  The Audi looks like it’s been inhabited by wild animals. The once-pristine floor and dashboard are now buried in food wrappers, magazines, newspapers, coffee cups, and soda bottles. Except for last night at the gun shop, we’ve basically lived in this car since we stole it outside Arras.

  Brando, in the driver’s seat, nods his chin toward the building across the street. “Here they come.”

  Eight Gestapo hooligans clomp out of HQ and file into a pair of cars and a heavy box truck parked next to the building. Three men per car and two in the truck. The headlights stab through the early-morning murk, their snarling engines stomp all over the peaceful late-winter silence, and the convoy moves out.

  Victor leans forward from the backseat and says, “Let’s go.” Brando starts the Audi and pulls into the street.

  I turn to Falcon, who’s sitting in back with Victor, and whisper, “Ready to be outrageous?”

  F-Bird smiles. “Don’t forget radical.”

  We met this kid less than a week ago, and it already feels like we’ve worked together for months. He and I recheck our pistols and SoftArmor as Brando remains a block or so behind the convoy.

  Victor slips his matching Walthers out of his coat pockets and places them on his lap. He activates his comm-set and transmits, “Once we know where these Geschlechtsriesen are going, we must kill them immediately.” Victor isn’t ExOps, but he’s a natural leader, and these are his missions. Moreover, it’s impossible not to follow somebody who growls the German word for “limpdicks” the way he does.

  Saint-Quentin is large enough to have streetlights, but they’re all concentrated in the compact town center. Within a few minutes we’re out in the countryside, and the black sky wraps around us like a shroud. My partner switches off the headlights, and I help him put on his starlight scope. The device fits into a band that wraps around Brando’s head, so his hands are free for perfectly sensible things like driving at night with no lights on.