Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: John Birmingham
Published: 2016-05-02T19:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The stun grenade went off on the far side of the room, shattering windows and setting fire to the drapery and a few pieces of furniture. Harry was shielded from the worst of the effects by the heavy table which the staff had been setting with hors d’oeuvres and stemware for the cocktail hour. Nonetheless his ears were ringing and he blinked rapidly. It was hard to make out anything more than the most indistinct shapes. He had moved without thinking when the flash bang exploded, throwing himself at Bremmer, the pair of them tumbling awkwardly to the floor. Harry grunted when he landed on top of the German, whose oversized beer stein fell between them, winding him as effectively as a punch in the bread basket.

“Oof!”

As Harry grunted, Bremmer swore. The prince heard three muffled thuds, like a cricket ball hitting a batsman’s pads, the sound of suppressed pistol fire, unless someone had decided to bowl a few overs here in the drinks lounge. Squeezing his eyes shut, he hissed at the professor to keep his head down. The screaming started, cries of shock and pain, but mixed in with them were the sounds of curt orders barked in German.

No, not German, he realized. Yiddish, but spoken with a heavy German accent. More replies in the same language, but with slightly different accents, southern European perhaps.

Thud. Thud.

“Qlʼár dʼárʻm.”

Clear south. A woman’s voice.

Thud.

Thud. Thud.

“Qlʼár myyarʻww.”

Clear west, he thought. Rather than keeping his head down, Professor Bremmer had decided it would be more appropriate to curse up a storm and try to wriggle free from beneath the man who was trying to protect him. Harry hissed into his ear again, telling him to lie still, as though unconscious. He couldn’t be certain that Bremmer heard a word of it. His own ears were still ringing. Harry let himself go limp and closed his eyes, playing dead.

Two more shots rang out, unsilenced this time, the big booming roar of a real hand cannon, a forty-five or something like that. He heard a strangled shriek just before something heavy crashed to the floor and a fusillade of soft metallic coughing sounds replied. Glass shattered and tinkled and another man dropped noisily to the polished concrete floor, cursing in something that sounded Slavic, but not Russian.

“Stay down. Everybody stay down and do not move. There is no need for anyone else to be hurt. Stay down and do not move.”

The voice was hard and masculine, almost without accent. Bremmer had stopped moving underneath him, he was entirely rigid now, as though frozen with fear. Fair enough, thought Harry. I wouldn’t want to be doing my laundry tomorrow. The ringing in his ears had dialed back to a loud hum, but not so loud that he didn’t hear the crunch of boots on broken glass approaching. The footfall sounded heavy, like a man’s. He tried to relax, to prepare himself. He could hear alarms shrieking and ringing all over the hotel. Panicked cries, shouts of horror and distress.

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