Stalin's Hammer: Rome by Birmingham John

Author:Birmingham, John [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781743340783
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers Australia
Published: 2012-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

They did not spend long underground this time, and they moved with much greater haste and almost no concern for stealth. The ground beneath them rumbled. Bursts of gunfire, shouts and sometimes screams, even the occasional crump of a grenade came as if from a great distance, amplified and distorted by the weird acoustics of the buried city. It sounded like construction work.

“Marius,” explained Franco, as though the sounds of battle needed explaining.

The special forces veteran wondered how much of this clash would be reaching the ears of anyone listening on the other side of the Wall. Aside from the rumbling vibrations beneath the streets, perhaps none of it – or even if it did, no one would take notice. That appeared to be the Roman way.

Rome was a frontier city now. A great metropolis fated by a broken history to sit on the boundary between two empires. Like Berlin in his youth, like Budapest and Constantinople before them, like Tokyo now, Rome was a shadow factory. And the shadows had teeth and claws.

He and his guide avoided the fighting, hurrying through tunnels, some of which were simple root cellars and basements, avoiding the deeper passages where it seemed a great battle was being fought. A battle that few would know about, beyond those who survived it.

“Up, up now,” said Franco as he pushed through an iron cage door and into the barrel room of a bar or tavern. The smell of wine gone sour was very strong, even though the subterranean space was mostly empty.

“Where are we?” Ivanov asked. He had decided the time was almost upon them when he would have to reassert control of this minor disaster.

“An old taverna,” the other man said, pointing at the rough wooden beams just over their heads. “Closed by the Communists, but we still meet here sometimes.”

“Of course.” Ivanov was beginning to understand just how vast was the city hidden beneath the view of its occupiers. It wasn’t just a matter of subterranean caves and tunnels. There was another Rome, a free Rome, hidden just under the surface of things in every street and alleyway above them.

“Explain to me, describe for me, exactly where we are going, and what I will find on the surface,” the OSS operative said, standing his ground and halting Franco’s progress toward the wooden staircase at the far end of the cellar.

The Italian frowned, impatient to keep moving, but he did as he was asked. “It is as I tell you, Russian. We are under the night markets for this district. These are the approved markets where farmers are allowed to sell what is left after the Communists have taken everything else.”

Ivanov gestured for him to hurry on with his explanation. He was well aware of how the city government in the Soviet-controlled sector ran the marketplaces. Again, learning from the lessons of future history, the Kremlin had allowed its subjects some freedom. Not a lot, but enough to avoid the completely empty shelves that had done so much to undermine the rule of the Communists in Ivanov’s own time.

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