Hammer of Angels Read online

  The ground rushes up and smashes into the aircraft. Our thunderous impact sets off a chorus of warning lights, wailing sirens, and the screeching drumbeat of metal grinding itself into scrap. The main rotor blades snap off, and without their wind resistance the engine spins like a Tasmanian dreidel.

  Schmidt bails out again and staggers toward the woods. I unbuckle the pilots and shove them out their doors. Then I jump out.

  “Darwin, we good?”

  “Fantastic. The clearing can’t hold more than two choppers at once, so the other three can’t land to help.”

  I have Li’l Bertha unload a volley of Incendiaries into the two disabled aircraft. Flames gush from their interiors. I haul ass back to Brando and our stuff. He straps on his gear, I shoulder my bag, and we melt into the shadowy woods. When we’re a safe distance away, we stop to watch my handiwork. Two fiery blasts sharply silhouette the German troops as their rides explode in their faces.

  If I’d been a Girl Scout, their slogan would have been: “Take only pictures, leave only blazing helicopters.”

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-212

  TO: Office of the President of the United States

  FROM: Office of the Executive Intelligence Chairman

  SUBJECT: Popular opinion of the Gestapo within GG

  Dear Mr. President,

  As requested, we discreetly polled a representative selection of Greater German citizens about their notorious secret police. In brief, it is the most loathed organization in Europe.

  One of the few Nazi holdovers, the Geheime Staatspolizei has maintained Nazism’s dark traditions of bigotry and terror-mongering. Citizens labeled as dissidents are abducted by Gestapo officers to “protect the Reich from social weakness.” Most Germans are appalled, frightened, and frustrated that “…our advanced society acts this way.” It can be fairly said no German in their right mind welcomes a visit from the paranoid and violently unpredictable Gestapo.

  We conclude that officers of the Geheime Staatspolizei should be considered “fair game” during Operation ANGEL. Germany’s current antislavery sentiment will be immune to the fate of these sadists. No one will miss them but their mothers.

  Yours,

  George H. W. Bush, XIC

  12

  NEXT MORNING, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 3:30 A.M. GMT

  YORK, PROVINCE OF GREAT BRITAIN, GG

  We lurk in the shadows like a pack of coyotes, eyes beaming, and peer up the street at Gestapo headquarters. Our hiding place—a dank unlit alley—is just a couple blocks from the town hall, where Brando and I snatched Mayor Brun two days ago. Now we’re here to liberate the forty or fifty victims of last night’s roundups. Ironically, one of the victims is Mayor Brun.

  York is small. It occupies less ground than Washington’s National Mall. The ancient city center is a charmingly disorganized heap of old houses and cobblestones dominated by a towering cathedral called the Minster. Despite its diminutive scale, York is still the biggest pile of bricks this far north of London. This is why the Germans, like the English before them, use it as a base for controlling upper England and Scotland.

  Before the war, the town hall was one of the few official buildings here. Then the Reich converted what seems like half of York into government offices. Those Teutons love their bureaucracies.

  The Gestapo moved into a long, low rectangle of stone that used to be a fine arts academy. The first two floors are original and fit in with the street’s Olde England vibe. The top three floors were obviously added much more recently by some blind, piss-drunk bureaucrat with absolutely no sense of style.

  Gestapo HQ is the most feared building in the region. Streetlights strike the facade at odd angles and obscure its shape instead of revealing it. A razor-wire-topped fence circles the property, but its purpose is to keep prisoners from getting out. Nobody tries to break into this place.

  Our mission brief practically begged us to use “unlimited force” against the Gestapo officers inside. Apparently the secret police are so reviled—even by Greater German citizens—that the suit-and-ties back home aren’t worried about us turning popular opinion against the Rising by liquidating as many Gestapo creeps as we can.

  A puff of wind shoves tiny icicles into my eyes. Behind me, a voice whispers, “Shit, I’m fucking freezing.” It’s Jade, the other Level on this job. She presses against her Info Operator, a quiet, thin, brown-haired twenty-two-year-old named Pericles.

  Even though Jade is a bit older than me, I’m senior to her since I graduated from Camp A-Go-Go before she did. At Level 5, she’s also four Levels junior to me, but that doesn’t matter too much tonight as our assignments are so different. Jade and Pericles’s job is to conduct good guys to safety, while Brando and I are here to ferry bad guys to the Great Beyond. Jade’s an Interceptor like me, but her Skill Ratings lean toward sneakier missions, more like an Infiltrator. This contrasts with my Skill Ratings, which skew toward the bada-boom things a Vindicator does.

  Brando and I met Jade and Pericles earlier this afternoon. My partner and I spent the day in Arvid’s dairy truck, riding along as he did his deliveries. He returned to Milk Central at lunchtime to retrieve the second Interceptor-IO team. I have no idea how they were transported to Yorkshire, and if I asked them, they wouldn’t tell me. We compartmentalize our contacts and sources in case any of us are captured by the Fritzes. The rest of our information, however, is all shareable. Brando and Pericles spent the ride to York syncing their intel. They looked so serious that I suggested they do a Vulcan mind-meld. Jade laughed, held her fingers in a V shape, and said, “Live long in jodhpurs.”

  While the boys transferred their mungobytes of data, Jade and I compared our gear. Her sidearm is the reliable .30-caliber Lion Ballistics LB-502. We’ve got a lot of the same Mods and Enhances, except for our defensive setups. I’m protected by my reinforced skeleton, and I use Madrenaline to help me evade enemy gunfire.

  Jade doesn’t need any of that. She’s equipped with an amazing radar system called Vapor. The Vapor Mod senses incoming objects and zaps instructions to her muscles to slip her body out of harm’s way. Vapor makes Jade almost impossible to hit, which plays into her stealthier mission style.

  At 5'8" Jade is four inches taller than me, so she’s a faster runner, and her hand-to-hand skill rating is better than mine. My acrobatics rating blows hers away, but to be fair, it blows everyone’s away; I was on the Olympic gymnastics team when ExOps recruited me.

  There’s no Skill Rating for looks, but the girl is gorgeous. She has lush hair, porcelain skin, and ice-blue irises set in almond-shaped eyes with very long lashes. And that’s only from the neck up. The rest of her is equally hubba-hubba.

  This isn’t a beauty contest, though, so the fact that she’s better-looking than me is irrelevant. Not that I’m bad-looking. Honestly, a man who’s shorter or younger than Jade might ask me out first. Especially a man who’s both. Like my partner, y’know, just for example, could choose to walk right around her and grab little ol’ me.

  Hypothetically speaking, of course.

  Some ultra-attractive women don’t bother with personalities, but Jade is an exception. She has a good sense of humor and is très cool even though she wigged out when I showed her Li’l Bertha.

  “HOLY SHIT! What are you doing with a 505?”

  I shrugged, like, aw shucks, but she pressed me on how I’d acquired such an advanced weapon. By then, Arvid had delivered us to our sparsely furnished safe house in Haxby. I looked around the room conspiratorially. Brando and Pericles were engrossed in a game of chess on Pericles’s magnetic travel set.

  I leaned in close to her. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Jade slyly peeked over both shoulders and nodded her head.

  “She used to be my Dad’s.”

  “You have Big Bertha’s pistol?”

  “Wait,” I said. “How do you know about him?”

  “Scarlet, every kid at camp knew about your father.”
r />   “You went to the one in Maryland?” I asked.

  Jade looked at me like she thought I was kidding, then saw I was serious. “Scarlet, I was there with you,” she said. “We used to call you A-J, remember?”

  Wow. I’d forgotten some of the kids at AGOGE used to call me that. One of our teachers was a stuffy and proper old gentledoof who called attendance with his students’ full names. He’d bellow, “Miss Alixandra Janina Nico!” and I’d raise my hand. To spite him we used really short nicknames with each other, like A-J.

  I couldn’t remember being in class with Jade, but she didn’t seem put off by my absentmindedness. She was a little starstruck by my reputation and dazzled by my amazing gun. I resisted telling her how Dad woke up his pistol’s AI and turned Li’l Bertha into the world’s first sentient firearm. I’m not supposed to have this insane weapon in the first place and don’t need Jade bugging Cyrus about why her sidearm isn’t a smart gun, too.

  Then it was my turn to gush. I’d been instantly envious of Jade’s Vapor Mod. The Med-Techs began offering it right after ExOps had my skeleton plated, and Cyrus refused to let me undo the plating so I could have the radar grid installed instead. They can’t be combined because the Vapor system requires the user to be as lightweight as possible. He also pointed out it wouldn’t protect me from explosions or long falls like my standard defensive Mods can.

  But I was still fascinated by Vapor, and I got Jade to let me check it out. I stood directly in front of the girl and tried to smack her, anywhere. Nothing. Not one hit. She dodged everything I threw at her. I even bull-rushed her, but Jade easily sidestepped me, and I bashed into a rickety old table full of expensive spy crap.

  All this commotion finally distracted the boys from their chess match. We huddled together on the floor and wolfed down dinners from unheated ration tins and went over our options. I forget who mentioned it first, but from this conversation came the fabulous idea of pulling a daring rescue mission at Gestapo headquarters.

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-1030

  TO: Office of the President of the United States

  FROM: Office of the Front Desk, German Section

  SUBJECT: Gestapo and SZ atrocities

  Mr. President,

  As you know, my agency has requested your authorization to employ unlimited force against the Geheime Staatspolizei and the Staatszeiger. Director Chanez has asked me to supplement our request with anecdotal evidence to aid you in your decision.

  The following events all happened in the last twelve months.

  • In Amsterdam a young couple was discovered harboring escaped Jewish slaves. Gestapo agents entered their house and removed the runaways. The secret policemen then nailed the young couple to their kitchen floor and burned their house down around them.

  • A group of partisans was captured after bombing an SZ general’s motorcade in Paris. The Staatszeiger rounded up each prisoner’s family and forced them to watch as a firing squad systematically machine-gunned every partisan into a mass grave.

  • An Italian family of seven was arrested by the Gestapo when they were betrayed by a neighbor for smuggling food to Jewish slaves in hiding. The entire family was liquidated, and the gold fillings in their teeth were used to plate the local Gestapo chief’s office doorknob.

  • In Derby, Ireland, a family of Jews living as Christians was betrayed to the Gestapo. The children were removed and sold in London. The parents’ limbs were tied to the bumpers of two trucks, and when the trucks drove off in opposite directions, their bodies were torn to pieces.

  As you have no doubt read in other reports, a large proportion of the Reich’s population is aghast at such incidents. Please feel free to contact me if you require further details or clarification.

  Cyrus El-Sarim

  Front Desk, German Section

  13

  SAME MORNING, 3:45 A.M. GMT

  GESTAPO HEADQUARTERS, YORK, PROVINCE OF GREAT BRITAIN, GG

  Six young men play basketball on the frigid cobblestones. One team of three has blond ponytails, while the other team has short buzz cuts. A ponytail sinks a bank shot for two points. The ball leaves a red smear on the backboard. The buzzes inbound, but one of them misses the pass, and the ball rolls toward me and stops at my feet.

  It’s a human head.

  The head winks and whispers—

  “Scarlet!”

  The gruesome basketball game fades into foggy wisps that float away down the murky street.

  “Scarlet, what’s wrong?” Brando asks. His brow is knitted in concern.

  I rub my forehead to clear my vision. “Nothing; I’m fine.” I shiver, but not because of the cold.

  My partner’s mouth pulls to one side. Bullshit. He stares at me evenly.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “Yes, it was another spell. But I’m fine!”

  “Hmm…well, get ready.” To Jade and Pericles he whispers, “Here they come.” Brando has been keeping watch with his millimeter-wave radar scanner in one hand and his starlight scope in the other.

  We’re across the street from a hardware store, which is next to Gestapo headquarters. Jade closes her eyes. Her expression reveals intense concentration. Her nostrils flare as she psyches herself up. She opens her eyes.

  I comm, “Ready, Jadey?”

  “Ready, A-J.”

  Jade and I attach silencers to our pistols. A convoy of black cars and paddy wagons drives past our alley. Their tires rumble over the cobblestones before they fade into Yorkshire’s black fog. As senior Level, my place is on point, so I move out first. My partner is in my hip pocket as we scuttle across the street. Pericles is behind him with Jade holding the rear. Our little murder club skitters behind the hardware store and approaches the Gestapo building’s ominous, somber exterior.

  My partner and I both spot them. Two guards on the roof, surveying the street.

  Brando comms, “Two targets, straight ahead, high.”

  “Sneaky or shooty?” I ask.

  “If they see us, our mission’s difficulty will go up to insane.”

  Shooty, then.

  I comm to Jade, “You take the one on the right.”

  She nods and readies her LB-502. I set Li’l Bertha to match Jade’s .30-caliber ordnance and take aim.

  “Now.”

  Our slugs spit into the night and drill through the guards’ heads. The wind swallows the thuds of their toppling bodies. We wait a few seconds, then advance to the ten-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding our objective. Razor wire coils nastily all along the top. A metal sign on the fence shows a flailing person getting fried by a flock of lightning bolts.

  We scan the area beyond the fence with night vision, infrared, and radar. All clear. The only remaining guards are at the front entrance. Here in the back it’s five grim tiers of bricked-up windows complemented by a lonely fenced-off slab of cracked concrete.

  Jade and Pericles are going in first. Part of their assignment is to knock out the generator that electrifies this perimeter, which means they’ve gotta bounce over it. Their ingenious execution of this move impresses the hell out of me.

  First, Jade faces the fence and gets down on one knee. Next, Pericles grabs her hands and climbs onto her shoulders. The two of them squat, so they’re like a little stack of coiled springs. They simultaneously thrust their legs and Pericles catapults over the fence. Finally, Jade scrunches down and hurls herself over to join him.

  The way I’ve always done this stunt is to grab my partner and jump us over together. It’s absolute hell on my knees.

  I lean toward Brando and raise my eyebrows. “Yoink.”

  “Definite yoink,” he replies, equally inspired.

  Jade and her partner cross the barren yard to a padlocked bulkhead. According to our hand-drawn map, that hatchway leads to the basement where prisoners are kept. The map is from one of our Circle of Zion contacts. He worked here as a clerk before being dismissed for “unpatriotic tendencies.” This could mean he did a
nything from pissing off a panzer general to picking his nose in public. Not a lot of wiggle room in the Reich.

  “We’re in,” Pericles comms. I check my watch. Less than a minute. He’s quick with a pick.

  Brando reaches into his X-bag and pulls out a compact set of bolt cutters. He extends the folding handles and locks them in place.

  Jade comms, “Here we go.” The floodlights blink off, replaced moments later by dim battery-powered emergency lamps. The men out front call to each other, basically saying, “What the fuck?”

  Brando chomps his bolt cutters through the fence’s links. He makes a tall slash that we pull open and pass through. I keep Li’l Bertha ready to repel inquisitive guards, but so far we still haven’t been detected.

  A creak emanates from the shadows. Li’l Bertha swings over. The bulkhead door has flopped open. Pericles pops out and leads a long line of people to Brando’s hole in the fence. One noticeably rotund figure is Karl Brun, former mayor of York. Finally the last person exits, closely followed by Jade.

  She comms, “All captives away.” Jade tips her head toward the darkened building. “We took out the guards downstairs. You wouldn’t believe what they did to some of these people.” She follows the escaping prisoners. “The ground floor is empty, but we saw a lot of heat sigs on the upper floors.”

  “You mean a lot of dead men.”

  Jade winks. “Fuck ’em up, A-J.” Then she wheels away and disappears through the fence.

  I face the bulkhead. My mind flashes with gruesome images of Gestapo atrocities while Brando tucks in behind me and gives my shoulder a squeeze. I grit my teeth.

  It’s magic time.

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-1388

  TO: Office of the Executive Intelligence Chairman

  FROM: Office of the Ambassador, London, England, Greater Germany