What Axl had going for him… Hell, the only thing he had going for him was the chameleon net screening off the trench he’d just been in. Somewhere back in those trees the Colonel would know his shit had hit the proverbial, but not yet how. Another flip and roll took Axl to the edge of defMoma’s foxhole and he dropped into it, breech ratcheted back and diodes doing the walk/don’t walk dance.
‘You.’ defMoma was slumped at the bottom of her foxhole, staring at an arm twisted awkwardly in front of her. White bone glistened through a long gash in pink flesh and blood dripped from one ear. Other than that she was untouched. Axl’s second grenade had fragged at least five paces in front of her foxhole, half filling it with earth, and it was only mischance that a sliver of chrome had opened her arm all the way from wrist to elbow, leaving red edges where the flesh used to meet.
She had her semi-smart hiPower holstered on a green webbing belt but her gun hand was useless. ‘I surrender,’ the woman said flatly and the music in Axl’s head went into a holding loop.
‘Surprise me.’ Axl sat back against the edge of the foxhole, SnubPup on his knees, muzzle towards her gut. Digging casually into a pouch pocket for his last grenade, he snapped off the plastic cover and activated what passed for its intelligence.
‘Okay,’ said Axl, ‘this is where you sit still, understand?’
The fat sergeant looked at the flecks of flesh matted into Axl’s hair and the blood painted in splashes across his face and nodded. Yeah, she understood.
‘I’m going to take out three threads,’ Axl told the grenade. ‘And then we’ll go over to voice mode for detonation. So you can do a better job of helping me.’
‘That’s not advisable.’
Axl sighed. ‘I’m going to do it anyway,’ he said, ‘so I’d be really grateful if you didn’t do anything stupid. But first ...' Axl glanced at defMoma, head cocked to one side. ‘I need your sulphate…’ The fat woman didn’t move.
‘Alternately,’ said Axl, ‘I can defuse the grenade with these.’ He held up both hands, showing defMoma the rapid shakes that softened his fingertips to a snare-drum blur. ‘Your choice.’
Axl caught the sealed packet she tossed him, ripping out the corner with his teeth and pushing his tongue through the gap, chemical cunnilingus.
‘Better, much.’ Axl twisted the grenade’s base free from its chrome outer shell. Four little sticks of bioSemtex sat there on the base, oily and glistening, each wired to the intelligence with a spider’s trace of optic fibre.
‘I’m disconnecting the first one,’ said Axl and yanked the connection, hard and fast. He didn’t bother to tell the apple he was about to remove the other two tubes, the intelligence would be expecting it.
Soon done. Axl screwed the grenade shut and tossed the three dead tubes out onto the grass. He now had a grenade that could kill defMoma without killing him.
‘We could use this as a suppository…’ Axl told her. He’d seen that done, more than once, and so had she from the look on her face. Kolonics was a strictly equal-opportunities atrocity: the last time he’d watched it happen a Brazilian major paid the price for upsetting his own NCOs. There’d been barely enough left to scrape off the bunker walls.
‘. . . but you’re going to incubate it instead.’ He waited while she shifted her vast buttocks and sat on the grenade. ‘And we’re going to keep this short.
‘So,’ Axl said, ‘What is this really about?’
defMoma stayed silent, but only because she was trying to work out what to say. There wasn’t much hope in her face, but it wasn’t all despair. Somewhere inside the woman was telling herself this was survivable. She was wrong.
'I'll tell you what I think,’ Axl said, cutting in just as she was about to speak. ‘This isn’t about Joan. It’s about the Cardinal. WorldBank are trying to take him down.’
She didn’t deny it.
‘Well,’ said Axl, ‘they won’t be able to ...'
Blue eyes locked onto his, hard and spiteful. Lips thinned. ‘If I were you,’ defMoma said, ‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in tired old men. They die.’
Axl shot her. What he’d had in mind was something clever involving the grenade holding her prisoner here while he made his excuses, but it just happened. . . And by the time he realised what a fuck-wit idea shooting her was, the fat woman’s heart had a third ventricle and blood was spreading across her vest. The soundtrack had gone silent.
It was the drugs, Axl told himself as a back beat started up again. Too much sulphate, not enough sleep. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic irony. defMoma certainly looked liked she couldn’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to do what he’d done.
Check ammo.
Full clip in his Browning. Three fulls velcroed to his leg and now he had her hiPower too. More than enough to check out what was alive in the other slit and kill it.
Axl drum-rolled out of defMoma’s foxhole. Common sense said approach the second slit trench silently from the back, but Axl wasn’t doing common sense. Besides they’d already been fragged. And they were kids, scared and under-trained. Been there, survived that. Axl ratcheted back the breech on his SnubPup and…
Stood.
Like anyone could be that stupid and not be on camera. He went through his first clip without even realising his finger was on the trigger, hit silence and reloaded without being aware he’d done that, either. The second clip lasted the brief seconds it took him to scramble through the gaping hole he’d just gunned in the camoNet.
160, 180, 200… The bpm were pushing hardcore, meth jungle even. In the trench up ahead a woman stood, snubPup rising, and Axl lifted the top off her skull without even thinking about it. He hosed out the trench with the rest of his clip, finishing off a grunt already wounded by his earlier grenade, splinters of bone stripping leaves from oaks as the grunt’s head vanished as cleanly as if Axl had taken it off at the neck with a chainsaw.
Tempo change. Scratch violin chopping out a warning.
Four, plus one, plus three. Two left.
Behind him.
Axl hit the ground ahead of the empty snubPup that swung butt-first towards his skull, rolled sideways and came up onto his knees rough and fast, reversing his Pup and swinging it hard by its barrel straight into a conscript’s knee, Babe Ruth style.
The grunt crumpled, eyes bulging and mouth wide, too shocked to scream. Instinctively, Axl put an elbow in his throat, silencing him anyway. Strapped to his ankle, the grunt had one of those quick-release glass blades, undetectable by ninety-nine percent of all airport scanners so Axl borrowed it.
The knife bit into flesh under the conscript’s ear opening a wide bubbling grin. All Axl needed to do to make it a necktie was reach in and yank his tongue out through the slit. Not his style. Instead he put the blade into the kid’s heart and closed his large brown eyes after he fell.
‘Borja.’
Sudden silence. Not even a click track or heartbeat.
Skin crawled across Axl’s back, hairs rising on his neck. And then he got a low tom-tom line, part goan/partVou that kicked at his stomach and shrivelled his mind into a fetal ball. Someone had just called time.
Axl knew that when he turned round the Colonel’s salt and pepper hair would still be brushed neatly back from a face that was handsome, despite too much food and not enough exercise. And beneath that full moustache the mouth would be grim but smug. Also, the man would have a gun, something expensive and it would be pointed straight at Axl’s head.
Axl was right on all the points, especially the last. The gun was a lovingly retrofitted 1896 Broomhandle Mauser 7.63 machine pistol. The only other kreigsmarine Axl had seen was in a Potsdam museum, but that version wasn’t converted for ceramics.