Hammer of Angels: A Novel of Shadowstorm (4 page)

Three weeks later, a thermobaric cruise missile launched from a U.S. warship annihilated a terrorist base masquerading as a research facility outside of Riyadh. All the lab personnel were killed, along with fifty members of a visiting German Youth troop. This story was picked up by every news outlet in Greater Germany.

Four days later, Chancellor Erich Honecker declared he would sever Greater Germany's alliance with the United States.

That same day China loudly renewed her demand for the United States to transfer control of Korea and Japan to the Nationalist Republic of China.

These events occurred during an election year and severely damaged President Reagan's approval ratings. Democratic challenger Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson made significant gains. Two weeks later Mr. Jackson was elected president.

Upon taking office last week, President Jackson immediately initiated his combination of liberal domestic programs and aggressive foreign policy. In his first presidential press conference he condemned Greater Germany's plan to “betray” the North Atlantic Alliance and threatened dire consequences should they follow it through.

ANGEL is a harbinger of those dire consequences.

Next afternoon, Wednesday, January 21, 1981, 3:46
P.M.
EST

ExOps Training Facility, Maryland, USA

“Scarlet, ten left,” Brando's comm voice says, “and stay down.”

I dog it ten yards up Main Street, crouched so low I'm almost doubled over. Then I hit the deck. My heavy breathing blows little puffs of dust off the floor. Dirt sticks to my sweat-soaked face. I blink hard to get the salty dust out of my eyes.

A turret pops out of a stand of plastic bushes on my left and noisily sprays the air above me with rubber ordnance. I slide on my stomach and aim Li'l Bertha at the bullet-bot. My pistol locks on and flashes “Target Acquired” in my Eyes-Up display. I pull the trigger and return fire. My lightweight practice slugs ping off the turret's metal shell, which signals the Training Control Center,
Ya got me, pardner
.

Brando comms, “Next station, 60 right, fly-by.”

I spring to my feet and pump my legs for sixty feet. I look to my right. “Fly-by” is IO slang for “don't stop moving,” so this next part will be something extra hairy. A bright light flashes from a little house on the right side of Main Street. As I turn to riddle this target, the floor plunges out from under me. I've got just enough momentum to grab the far lip of this insta-pit with my free hand. Then my body smacks into the pit's wall and knocks the wind out of me.

I hang there for a moment, gasping. My partner comms, “Scarlet, hurry! We've got another station to get through and only thirty seconds to do it.”

That's easy for you to say, Darwin.
I pull myself out of the pit and wheeze on down the road.

“Okay, last one. Three hundred straight ahead, top speed.”

I mentally activate my sidearm's safeties so she won't accidentally fire as I swing my arms as fast as I can. My sneakers slap the floor and my hair blows behind me as I race up to twenty-something miles per hour. I can hit the high thirties with Madrenaline in my blood, but Brando and I are supposed to be able to complete this training sequence without using my Enhances. Each run-through is different, and I've screwed it up three times today. This is the closest we've gotten to completing it.

Brando comms, “Twenty seconds remaining!”

Ahead of me is a clear path to the finish line. All I need to do is jog to it and—

Wrong.

Three bullet-bots fall from the roof in front of me. They bounce up and down on long rubber cables. Each bot emits a thin red laser beam. All three beams point at my chest, and the bots fire a volley of rubber bullets.

I hold Li'l Bertha in front of me while I leap away from the bouncy-bots' bullets and laser beams. Her target indicator is blank.

“Darwin, what's happened? Why can't my pistol get a lock?”

“They've got jammers. You'll have to—”

I charge the leftmost bot.

“—find a way around them.”

The left bot locks on to me as it swings to the bottom of its arc. I throw myself at it and grab the bungee cord above its body. The bot hauls me off the ground, and I sail up toward the roof.

I swing like Tarzan and wrap my bot's cord around the other two cables before I drop off at the bottom of the next bounce. The bots are still live, but now they can only point in a fixed direction. I avoid the static laser beams and cross the finish line with less than a second to go.

“Yes!”
Brando shouts. “Made it!”

I flop onto my back to catch my breath. The view from Camp Gaspy shows a very high, curved roof supported by metal trusses. It's like a gargantuan airplane hangar.

“Terrific,” my partner comms. “Now for the driving test.”

Sure. Whatever.
“Gimme a minute,” I comm. It takes a minute, anyway, since he has to bring the car around.

A vehicle coasts up next to me. I peel myself off the ground. Oh, God, I wish I could use Madrenaline. Brando switches to the passenger seat, and I hop in behind the wheel. Something must have happened to our previous training vehicle, which was a fucked-up black-and-white Dodge sedan, like a former police cruiser. This new car, a white BMW two-seater convertible, is quite a hot little number. The relatively few dents and scrapes tell me this sexy momma hasn't seen much track time here yet. While I coast to the start line, I take in the gorgeous tan interior.

My partner sees how impressed I am with our new wheels and says, “Drug bust.”

Ah, of course.
Sometimes when ExOps helps local cops, we get to keep the perpetrator's ride. If the D.C. SWAT team can't take care of a situation or if the FBI is in over their head, Director Chanez will send one of his Levels out with them. It never takes long after that. Regular crooks can't compete with a million-dollar murder machine designed to help topple whole governments.

I rev the engine and yell, “Think there's any cocaine left in this baby?”

Brando turns up the heater, puts on his seat belt, and smiles. “I doubt it. The mechanics probably got it all.”

I ease the Cokemobile up to the start line. In front of us, a pair of titanic hangar doors slide open. My copilot riffles through his instructions and nods to me when he's ready.

“TCC, Scarlet and Darwin ready for launch.”

The Training Control Center comms back, “Roger that, Scarlet. Arming the tree. Go on green.”

The “tree” is a tall pole supporting two vertical series of lights. Right now the top lights are lit up bright red. I press the clutch down and shift into first. My right foot floors the gas and holds it there.

The light tree flashes down: reds, yellows,
green
!

I slip my left foot off the clutch pedal. A white cloud of tire smoke billows behind us as we screech off the line. The tachometer redlines, I shift into second, and we burst out of the hangar. The sun smacks my face, and my vision Mods adjust their gamma to compensate.

I holler,
“Yeee-hahhhh!!!”

As we roar up the first straightaway, Brando feeds me his pace notes for the first turn. “Turn One. Left, 105 in, long sweep, 95 out.” This means we should enter this long sweeping left turn at a hundred and five miles per hour and exit it at ninety-five.

I zoom the Cokemobile up to a buck ten before I tap the brakes to set up a spectacular power slide around Turn One's broad expanse. I countersteer and wallop the gas before I've even passed the corner's apex. Cokey leans into this scandalous driving like a drunken businessman doing the motorboat between a hooker's tits.

Oh, I am totally getting one of these honeys.

We thunder out of the turn. My partner yells, “Turn Two. Right, 60 in, opens, 80 out.” When Brando says “opens” he means the turn gets broader as we go around.

I twist the wheel ninety feet away from the turn and downshift from fifth to third to transfer the car's weight forward. All that weight up front makes Cokey plow into the corner. When we're almost at the pavement's outer edge, I stomp the gas and shift the car's weight back onto her rear wheels. The unloaded front tires suddenly grip tighter than a Scotsman's wallet and whip us through Turn Two.

“Turn Three. Right, 70 in, opens, 75 out. Jump at apex.”

I slither us into Turn Three with my right toes on the gas and my right heel on the brakes. My left foot peppers the clutch as needed to keep our revs up. I'm doing great until we pass the turn's midpoint, where a sharp little bump kicks Cokey into the air and screws up my driving line. The car flies sideways and lands inches from the outside edge. I overcorrect, and the Bimmer tilts onto her two left wheels. Brando and I both lean the other way. I jiggle the wheel left to get us back on all fours, but now we're headed off the track.

I haul up the emergency brake, crank the steering wheel right and then left, then shove the e-brake down again. This throws us into a sideways skid. I look over my left shoulder to see where we're going.

God almighty, we'll be lucky if there's any rubber at all on the tires after this one. My training has taught me to not to slow down when faced with an all-out mental-patient driving disaster like this. If I even breathe on the brakes right now, we'll spin out of control. I bury the gas pedal and hold my breath. Brando grasps his door handle and hangs on for dear life.

We exit Turn Three at seventy-nine miles per hour in a massive cloud of scorched rubber.

“Hah!” I wipe my hand across my forehead. “Okay, El Brando, what's next?”

We're doing so well that I only need to drive like Maniac Junior for the next five turns. We come off Turn Eight and enter the main straightaway, ready for Lap Two.

We receive a comm from the Training Control Center. “Scarlet and Darwin, switch seats. Lap Two will be a target lap.”

Brando calls out, “Fire drill!” and grabs the steering wheel. I pull up my legs and crouch on my seat. Then I drag my partner bodily across the center console. He keeps his eyes forward as his legs unfold onto the pedals. Meanwhile I transfer to his seat and pluck my pistol out of her holster.

I click Li'l Bertha into my left palm, and she jacks into my internal systems. Her status cluster appears in my Eyes-Up display to show me her current settings and how much ammo she has left. I swing my head around to see what my field of vision will be for this lap. With the convertible top down, I have clear firing lanes in all directions except to my direct left, where my partner sits.

Brando prudently brakes into Turn One, neatly clips the top of the corner, and smoothly accelerates out. The tires barely chirp.

“You call that driving?” I tease.

“Look, Miss Hot-Rodder, I clocked the same time as you did without scrubbing a year off the tires.”

“But you'll never make the highlight reel!”

He smiles and then presses his lips together while he sets up for Turn Two. As he brakes into the corner, he comms, “Target! Right side, yellow on red.”

I spin my head and aim Li'l Bertha. A red sign with a big yellow dot has popped out of the ground twenty-five yards away. I hit it with a short burst, and the target falls back where it came from.

Brando races the Cokemobile around the course and calls out each target. I'm nailing all of them, but I've barely got time to aim and fire before I have to get ready for the next one.

We exit Turn Eight and return to the main straightaway. I sit back, smugly thinking we're done, when Brando looks in his side-view mirror. He cries out, “Target far left, yellow on black.” I swing my head around. A yellow-and-black sign is already behind us, plus it's very low to the ground.

While Brando says, “Crap, we were almost perfect, too,” I stand on my seat and climb onto the car's trunk. Biting wind hits me like a refrigerated hurricane, but the extra height I get from standing up here gives me a better angle. I hook my foot into the roll-over bar and sight on our shrinking target. I unload Li'l Bertha at full auto until she clicks empty. The target tips over.

“Got it!”

“Scarlet, sit down! We've gotta get back inside to finish.”

We're too close to the hangar. I don't have time to sit down normally because I might tumble off when my partner turns. If Brando brakes, I'll fly off the front. If we overshoot, we'll fail—
definitely
not an option.

I wrap my arms over my head and dive into the passenger-side foot well. I end up with my legs on the seat and most of my body smooshed under the dashboard. The engine is much louder down here, and hot air blows into my ear. I feel the car swerve right, speed up, then lurch to a stop. All I can see are my legs and feet, and past them the hangar's metal roof.

My partner's grinning face appears from the driver's side. “You all right, Hot-Rod?”

“Did you know there are tiny men down here who make the heater work?

“How do they do that?”

“They eat bowls of hot peppers and fart into the ductwork.”

He laughs and tries to extract me, but I'm jammed in here so awkwardly that rescuing me requires him and one of the ExOps training administrators to haul me out by my knees.

“Hey,” I say to the admin as I dust off. “What's with that last target? It didn't pop up until we were past it!”

The admin gently shrugs. “Yeah, well … it wasn't actually a firing target.”

Brando stands behind me and swacks car-floor crumbs off my jacket. He asks, “So we weren't supposed to shoot it?”

“You were barely supposed to
see
it. We use it to record how you'd react to having missed one.”

“Has anybody ever shot it before?”

The admin slowly shakes his head. I hold my hand out behind me, and Brando slaps me a low-five.

Two days later, Friday, January 23, 1981, 5:30
A.M.
EST

2906 Key Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, USA

“Mom!” I holler. “Where's my pants?”

“Which ones?” she yells from the laundry room downstairs.

I stand up from my duffel bag so I can shout more easily. “The black ones with all the pockets!”

“Hang on, they're coming out of the dryer!”

Dammit, I'm gonna miss my flight.

I shovel two fistfuls of socks and underwear out of my dresser and cram them into my bag. I use my Eyes-Up display to reread the packing checklist Brando commed me last night. Let's see: waterproof outerwear, thermal shirts and pants, commando makeup, repair kit for my Mods, three dozen vials of neuroinjector drugs, Li'l Bertha, and—oh, right!

Almost forgot my mission briefing.
ExOps requires its agents to keep track of their classified materials, naturally. I have to give my briefing files back to Cyrus or I won't be cleared to leave the country.

I hop over my duffel bag and snag my mission briefing folder from the floor next to my nightstand. I peek under my bed to see if I've forgotten anything else. It's still pretty tidy down there. We only moved into this house two weeks ago, and I haven't had time to subject my bedroom to my usual Bad Housekeeping routine.

Cleo hustles in with my black pants draped over her arm and a small red felt pouch in her hand. “Here are your pants, honey. Do you have everything else?”

“Thanks. I think that's everything.” I stuff the warm pants in my duffel.

“Here.” Mom hands me the red felt pouch. “I got you something for your trip to wherever Cyrus is sending you this time.” Cleo could find out where I'm going, but she takes mission security as seriously as everyone else at ExOps, so she hasn't looked. I won't tell her unless I have to, but from all my cold weather gear and the ongoing political shitstorm with Germany, she probably knows it's Western Europe somewhere.

I open the little pouch. It's … jewelry? I take out something metallic and cool. I open my hand. It's my dad's watch.

“Oh, Mom,” I whisper as tears spring into my eyes.

Cleo smiles and reaches out to stroke my cheek. “I gave it to your father when we got married. It's durable and easy to read, so I knew he'd like it. He used to tinker with it in his shop, and he wore it during some of his missions.” She takes a deep breath. “I want you to have it.”

I can't think of what to say, so I put it on. It's a man's Bulova with a black face and white numbers and arms. It dwarfs my wrist. There's no way this watch will fit me. I hold my arm down, ready for it to fall off, but it bumps into my hand and stays there. I turn my wrist over and look at the strap.

Mom says, “I had a smaller strap put on and new batteries installed.”

I say, “How long have you been planning this?”

“It was with some of your father's things at the house in Crystal City, and I brought it to a jeweler to get it sized for you. I'd actually forgotten about it. They called a few days ago to remind me to pick it up.”

I study the watch and imagine Dad wearing it on his jobs. The dial says “Waterproof,” and I decide to never take it off, even when I'm in the shower. I wrap my arms around Cleo and kiss her cheek. “Thanks, Mom. I love it!”

“You're welcome, sweetheart. Oh! There's your ride.”

Beep! Beep!

A cab has pulled up outside, ready to take me to the airport. I open my bedroom window and shout, “Be right down!” The streetlight illuminates the driver in front and my partner in back.

Cleo tries to pick up my bag for me. She grunts and oofs at its weight. She can barely even drag it.

“Mom, how about I take it and you get the door for me?”

She lets go and brushes a stray hair off her face. “Ha-hm, yes, how about we do that.”

I crouch down, wrap the bag's carrying strap over my shoulder, and stand up. The heavy bag swings into my legs as I schlep it downstairs and out to the street. Mom waits with me while the cabbie dumps my duffel in the trunk.

Brando rolls down his window. “Good morning, Mrs. Nico.”

“Hello, Patrick. Are you all ready?”

“Yes, ma'am. How do you like your new house?”

“I'm still getting used to it, but I think we'll be happy here.”

The cab driver slams the trunk shut while I bop into the backseat. Brando slides over to make room for me.

Mom leans down. “You two be careful.” Her voice is anxious, but she's being brave. “Come back safe.”

Brando and I both say, “We will.”

The cab drives us away. Cleo wraps her arms around herself and goes back inside. I check my dad's Bulova.

My partner says, “Hey, nice watch.”

“Thanks. My mom gave it to me.”

He says with a wry grin, “I've never seen brass knuckles that tell time.”

“Yes, it's huge, wise guy. You'd better hope I don't brass knuckle
you
with it. Besides, you'll thank me when we're in—” I glance at the driver. “—uh, where we're headed, and we can tell time in the dark.”

“I thought your Eyes-Up display had a clock in it.”

I face Brando and shoot daggers from my eyes. It's too dim for him to see them, so I say, “It's my
father's
watch, dummy! Plus, I can't hit smart-asses like you with my Eyes-Up display.” I whack him on his arm with my big-ass Bulova.

“Ow!” He winces and rubs his arm. “Fine! I agree. An old mechanical wristwatch is a perfect addition to our collection of digital state-of-the-art covert activities equipment.”

I swing at him again, but he quickly holds up his carry-all bag and blocks my strike. The bag—his constant companion—is a forest green military-style tactical pack he picked up in Berlin. The outer surface is an orgy of buckles, zippers, and straps. The flexible design allows it to hang over one shoulder, strap on like a backpack, or be slung across the chest, which is how my partner tends to wear it. Like my late partner's Bag of Tricks, Brando's tactical bag holds way more stuff than I'd think possible. A big X of black electrical tape on the front flap covers the hole I made when I thought he said it was bulletproof, which is why I call it the X-bag, although I've got other names for it, too.

He opens his shoulder shed and rummages around inside. Then he hands me an update to our mission brief. I try to read the paper in the passing streetlights. I can't catch any of it. My night vision is good for unlit spaces, but it isn't so great for reading. Then an old memory floats up in my mind.

Some nights my dad would pass out on the couch down in his shop either from too much work or too much drink. In the morning, if I found him down there, I'd snuggle my little grade-school self up against him. I left the lights off. I'd already learned my lesson about waking him up with bright lights when he'd had some drinks. If Dad wasn't conked out, he'd put one of his arms around me and mumble, “Hi, Hot-Shot,” and gently run his fingers through my hair. One morning I fiddled around with his watch and found a tiny button that made the whole face light up. I spent the next little while flashing Morse code messages to myself.

My attention returns to the cab I'm riding in with Brando. I put the sheet of paper on my lap and hold my dad's big watch over it. When I press the light button, the watch face casts a bright glow onto the brief. It's our mission communication codes. My partner nods appreciatively. I make an I told you so face at him, then memorize the comm codes we'll use once we've been inserted into England.

CORE PUB-GG-2399

BusinessWeek
, September 12, 1978

Greater Germany's fiscal dominance

fueled by their “peculiar institution”

Joseph Florein of Goldman Sachs built his career as an investment banker with carefully thought-out strategies and a down-to-earth communication style. His direct and honest personality has led to his second occupation as a financial news commentator for
60 Minutes
. He's a voice of calm reason in good times and in bad, but there is one thing that makes the normally imperturbable financier raise his voice.

“Year after year, financial analysts prattle on about the strength of Greater Germany's economy,” Mr. Florein said last week. “Yes. Their economy is strong because it's based on slavery!'”

Mr. Florein spoke at a fund-raiser for Free for All, a charitable organization he founded to abolish slavery in Greater Germany. Mr. Florein feels that Free for All should appeal to every American citizen, whether they are Jewish or not. “Our country suffered through slavery's shame,” he said. “When we abolished it in 1863, we were the last industrialized nation to do so. How can any American sleep at night knowing that across the Atlantic, our ally holds millions of her citizens in bondage?”