Triumph (1993)

by Ben Bova

  Grigori pulled his arm free and nearly flew back to the main building. It was not until he was safely in his bed with all the lights out and the covers pulled up over his chin that he realized he had never actually seen the man's face. Nothing but the glow of his cigarette and the shadows cast by the shrubbery. He said he was a soldier.

  Grigori trembled in his bed.

  But once they returned to Moscow and Stalin was about to send the Sword to the War Museum, Gagarin found himself persuading his master to keep the Sword in his office. He marveled at his own audacity. Use the Sword, he said to himself, his innards quaking with fear and rage.

  Chop his head off with it. A small, meaningless act of defiance. Not even in his dreams did Gagarin see himself using the Sword against Stalin.

  Yet he trembled. He slept poorly. He requisitioned the tape recorder to listen to his own nighttime mutterings.

  That had happened sixteen months ago. He still trembled.

  Chapter 8

  Berlin, 2 April

  The long table was supported on six rough sawhorses. Three powerful lamps dangling from the bunker's concrete ceiling lit the relief model in harshly pitiless glare.

  "You can see the situation quite clearly, my Führer,"

  General Heinrici was saying. "Zhukov's First Byelorussian Army Group has established several small beachheads on the western bank of the Oder, here—" he pointed with a long stick to the tiny red flags stuck into the relief model, "—here, and here."

  Hitler nodded. At his side stood Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht, nodding in synchrony with his Führer. Known behind his back as lakaitel, the lackey, Keitel's main function was to agree with Hitler under any and all circumstances. Otherwise he rarely had anything to say. His greatest recent achievement had been to sit as one of the judges of the generals who had tried to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

  Across the table General Heinz Guderian scowled sourly at the relief model. The brilliant innovator who had perfected the armored blitzkrieg tactics that had crushed Poland and France, Guderian had fallen out of favor with his Führer two years earlier when he reported the truth of Germany's impending collapse on the eastern front. He had remained loyal to Hitler during the July crisis and denounced the would-be assassins, even though he had known of their plot and had not reported it. Now, with Berlin itself threatened by the advancing Russians, Guderian had been summoned back into the Führer's presence.

  "Koniev's First Ukranian Army Group is about one hundred twenty kilometers to the southeast, along this front," Heinrici went on.

  "And Army Group Vistula? What are your defensive dispositions?" Hitler asked, his voice low but firm.

  Heinrici glanced at Keitel, who looked away. The Russians had just encircled the 20th Panzers and were in the process of shredding them into hamburger. Zhukov was consolidating his bridgeheads on the Oder's western bank and there was damned little between the Russians and Berlin.

  Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici was a practical man and a good soldier. He had bled the Russians white while retreating across the Carpathians in Silesia. But now there could be no retreat. Berlin must be defended to the last.

  Turning his blunt, humorless face to his Führer, he said, "We can make them pay for every centimeter of ground they advance. But we cannot stop them. Not without massive reinforcements."

  Hitler nodded and heaved a mighty sigh. "Then you shall have them, General. Every available man. I promise this to you."

  "That is very good, my Führer."

  "With all respect, sir," Guderian asked from across the table, "where will these reinforcements come from? Our troops in the west are fully engaged against the British and the Americans. The same for our forces in Italy."

  Hitler glared at him, then pointedly turned his back to Guderian and asked Heinrici, "What are you doing now? How long can you hold them off?"

  Heinrici ran a hand across his scalp, shaved so severely that he almost looked bald. "I know Zhukov," he said, "and how he operates. He will use his superior strength in artillery to bombard our forward positions for a full day or more. Then he will launch his tanks at us in overwhelming numbers."

  Hitler scowled.

  "Therefore," Heinrici continued, "I will withdraw my men from the forward lines when the bombardment begins. Let Zhukov blast away at empty trenches. When the smoke clears and the tanks move in, we will reoccupy the forward positions and destroy his armor."

  "Good! Excellent!" Hitler beamed and clapped his hands. "That is what we did in the trenches on the western front in the last war. Excellent!"

  Heinrici felt a small glow of pleasure at having brightened his Führer's mood, even if only momentarily. Keitel smiled broadly. Guderian looked skeptical.

  "Now then," said Hitler, "let me go about the work of getting you the reinforcements we need."

  "My Führer," said Guderian, in a tone that could not be ignored, "it is my duty to ask the practical questions, no matter how unpleasant they may be."

  Keitel began, "This is no time for such—"

  "This is the only time we have!" Guderian shouted at the field marshal. "The Bolsheviks are attacking with two hundred divisions; more than two million men, six thousand tanks and assault guns. How can we reinforce Heinrici? Where will the troops come from? As far as I can see we have fewer than two hundred tanks available. Hardly any artillery remains. How can we reinforce Berlin with men and equipment that don't exist?"

  Hitler banged his fist on the table top. "Enough! I will not listen to such defeatist talk. How dare you speak to me like that? Don't you think I am fighting for Germany? My whole life has been one long struggle for Germany! I am working night and day like a slave to save this city, to save this nation from the Bolsheviks and all you can do is raise objections. I know there are difficulties. Of course there are difficulties. You always concentrate on the problems—all of you." His eyes swept the room.

  "I alone must bear all these burdens! You are no help to me. None of you understand the total situation in the way that I do."

  Hitler tottered along the side of the table, one hand on its edge to keep him steady. "For more than twelve years now I have led the German people to greatness and every step of the way you generals opposed me. Don't deny it! I know it's true. When I gave the command to send our troops into the Rhineland in Nineteen Thirty-five you generals opposed me. You were frightened to march into Austria, you were crapping in your pants over the Sudetenland. But I persevered. I won! I created a greater Germany, greater than your wildest dreams. I alone!"

  Keitel murmured, "Of course you did, my Führer."

  "And now, now when there are difficulties, now when the whole world has turned against us, you offer me no help at all. I must plan the defense of Berlin. I must bring together the forces for the counterattack against the Bolsheviks. I alone! And what do you do? You complain and whine and wheedle. All of you!"

  "My Führer," Guderian said softly, "this is not Nineteen Thirty-five. Germany is surrounded by enemies. Enemy troops are marching across German soil."

  "Don't you think I know that?" Hitler roared. "I know it better than any of you. But look—look at the map! We hold much more of Germany than they do! I can show you, I can prove it with a ruler and compass! The amount of German territory they hold is tiny compared to the amount we still have! Tiny!"

  Still on the other side of the table, Guderian asked, "But what does that matter if—"

  "Traitors!" Hitler screamed. "I am surrounded by traitors and defeatists!" Pointing a wavering finger toward Guderian, "You saw the films of the July conspirators, their executions. You watched them wriggling like fish on the ends of the piano wire while their pants fell down and they crapped their guts out. It could happen to you! It could happen to any one of you! I will not have defeatists around me! I will be merciless with the traitors in my midst!"

  Suddenly he stopped, panting for breath. Keitel eyed Guderian uneasily. Hitler turned away from the relief model and h
eaded for the steel door. Keitel clicked his heels and gave the Nazi stiff-arm salute to his Führer's retreating back. Guderian stood absolutely still, his face dead white.

  Once the steel door clanged shut Heinrici turned back to the model and shook his head wearily. Reinforcements?

  From where? Guderian was entirely right. The Führer was living in a dream world if he thought he could find enough troops to stop this avalanche of Russians.

  "You should not have upset the Führer," Keitel hissed at Guderian. "When he becomes angry like that, anything could happen."

  Guderian made a bitter smile. "What's the matter, Willy? Are you afraid to die? We are all dead men already. Don't you understand that?"

  Chapter 9

  London, 3 April

  Harold Adrian Russell Philby was born in India in 1912. His father, St. John (Jack) Philby, was an arrogant dynamic man who spent a lifetime in the far reaches of the British Empire doing everything he could to confound his fellow Establishment Englishmen. It was Jack Philby who convinced King ibn-Saud to sell his oil leases not to the English, but to the upstart American oil men.

  For reasons that his son never fathomed, St. John Philby detested the Establishment in London. He loathed the clubs and cliques to which he had been born. He spent his life in the heat and passion of the Middle and Far East. He nicknamed his son Kim, after the boy in Kipling's novel who was born of English parents but lived as an Indian lad.

  Kipling's fictitious Kim spied for the British in India against the tsarist Russians. Kim Philby, however, lived in London and spied for the communist Russians against the British Empire.

  He was very successful at his spying, so much so that, by 1945, he was highly placed in the Establishment's own Secret Intelligence Service. He did not regard his activities for the Russians as spying, exactly. He had learned at his father's knee that men such as Churchill were snobs and racists who regarded themselves as better than other men.

  He had been taught at Cambridge, during his university days, that the great experiment in communism being tried in Soviet Russia was mankind's only hope for a better, more decent world.

  In his deepest soul, Kim Philby was certain that Britain—the ruling Establishment class, that is—was basically fascist.

  The war against Hitler was not a battle of ideology but of naked power. The Establishment would not tolerate any nation acquiring enough power on the Continent to challenge the British lion. The Establishment went to war against Hitler just as they had gone to war against Napoleon: to preserve their own privileges and superiority.

  Now Kim Philby sat in his office at SIS headquarters in London and pondered the two reports resting on his desk.

  He was a boyishly handsome man of thirty-three, with thick dark hair and a trim athletic figure. He drank a bit more than he should and he knew it, but the alcohol and his sedentary lifestyle had not yet begun to bulge his waist. His eyes were calm and gray, the gift of his placid mother. They did not flash and simmer as his father's did; Kim kept his passions well hidden, under painstaking control. He never raised his voice. To the men around him he was a good, reliable, quiet worker. His superiors were very pleased that Kim fit in so much better than his wild-eyed, bombastic father.

  The two reports on his desk were very different. One was neatly typed on official stationery with a proper security classification stamped in red at its top and bottom. The other was scrawled on a torn piece of notebook paper that Kim had picked up at a secret rendezvous in the pub down the street from SIS headquarters.

  The scrawled note was difficult to decipher, but apparently one of the Soviet agents among the scientific chaps had come across something curious. He was asking for a face-to-face meeting to pass on his information. Too intricate to put into a short note.

  Philby took the torn tablet page in his hand, balled it up, and tossed it into his wastebasket. Face-to-face meetings were dangerous. He had never met this agent. It was foolish to let someone see your face, especially when that someone might be working for MI5, the counter-intelligence department.

  The official memorandum bothered him even more. Apparently the Yanks had made contact with Goering's people and a visit was on between the American OSS and the Reichsmarschall himself. The Foreign Office had been informed but not asked to participate.

  Bloody Yanks think they can pull off a coup by themselves, Philby thought. But he knew the true significance of this message was deeper than American arrogance. Goering himself is ready to make overtures of surrender—to the Americans. Philby knew that such a surrender would automatically include the British, but not the Russians. No, the Germans are trying to work out a deal with us so they can shift all their forces against the Red Army. If I know Fat Hermann, he'll try to convince the Yanks that we should go to war against Soviet Russia.

  That was important. Vitally important. Philby picked up his telephone and called his favorite restaurant to make a dinner reservation. There he would send this crucial information on its way to Moscow. The Kremlin has got to know, he told himself. It would be just like Winnie to let the Nazis bleed the Russian armies white and then attack the Soviet Union at the first opportunity.

  He still had the rest of the afternoon ahead of him, and that puzzling request for a meeting from the scientist fellow.

  Philby got up from his desk and went to the outer office, where he told his secretary that he would be away for an hour or two. Then he strolled down the corridor to the offices of MI5, where he asked for permission to browse through their files on an Irish agent named Finnigan. Everyone in the offices knew Philby; he was well liked and fully trusted.

  Once back in the files room, Philby searched for an hour for any mention of Klaus Fuchs. There was none. Kim smiled to himself. No one knew about Fuchs. He moved to the agency's personnel files. There was nothing on Fuchs there, either. Philby's smile widened. Fuchs was not on the agency's payroll. It was safe to meet with him.

  At four in the afternoon, while the rest of the office was taking tea, Kim Philby went down the street to the Crown and Shield and sat in the last booth in the back room. A slight man with a high forehead, dressed in a rather shabby suit, hesitantly approached the booth, squinting through thick rimless glasses.

  "This is my favorite spot," he said, in a Middle European accent.

  "There's no reason why we can't share, like good comrades," said Philby.

  The password given and correctly countered, Klaus Fuchs slid into the booth. In fifteen minutes of swift whispering he revealed to Philby that a small amount of deadly plutonium had been brought to England shortly before the Tehran Conference.

  "I understand," Philby said at last. "The question is: why did they do it? What was the plutonium used for?"

  "Not for scientific research," Fuchs said. "That much I am certain of."

  "Then what?"

  "Plutonium is very dangerous. It can kill a man from its radiation after only a brief exposure."

  "But your contact carried it across the Atlantic with no ill effects, you say."

  "It was encased in lead. He was protected."

  Philby shook his head. "I'm afraid this makes very little sense to me."

  Fuchs seemed almost pathetically intense. "Don't you see? The plutonium could make a perfect assassination weapon! Silent, invisible: only a speck of it can release enough radiation to kill a man within a matter of a few days."

  Oh Lord, thought Philby. Another of Winston's mad schemes to do away with Hitler. That Professor Lindemann of his.

  "I see," he said to Fuchs. "Thank you for taking the risk of reporting this to me."

  Fuchs wanted more, but Philby would say nothing else, certainly nothing to indicate that he would send this information on to Moscow. It's enough to meet with the man in a public place; it's quite another thing to admit in so many words that one is working for Moscow.

  That evening, at his favorite restaurant, Philby passed on the vital news that the Americans were discussing a separate peace with Goering. He added, a
lmost as an afterthought, Fuchs' story about plutonium as a possible assassination weapon.

  The waiter who took his report passed it to the Soviet embassy that very evening. Before midnight the information was sent to Moscow in a coded radio message. British code-breakers had cracked the Soviet diplomatic code, of course, and the message was routinely sent the following morning to SIS headquarters, where it was just as routinely placed on the desk of Harold Adrian Russell Philby.

  Chapter 10

  Moscow, 4 April

  Gagarin received his instructions in his own apartment. It terrified him.

  He rarely received mail; only an occasional card or short letter from Yuri, from his school on the other side of the Ural Mountains. But when he climbed the stairs to his apartment and unlocked the door, he found an oblong white envelope on the floor waiting for him.

  No return address on the envelope. An odd way to deliver a letter, slipping it under the door. Could it be from one of his neighbors in the building? They were all government employees, as he was. The envelope looked official, crisp, white, good quality paper. But no return address. Not even any postage on it. It had not gone through the post office; it had been delivered by hand.

  Whose hand? Grigori's insides began to twitch as he sat himself down in his only easy chair and contemplated the letter that he had placed carefully on the end table beside him.

  It was very late. Stalin had kept going with Zhukov and Koniev well past midnight, the two field marshals presenting their plans for the capture of Berlin. After hours of maps and lists and discussion that sometimes rose to the pitch of heated argument, Stalin had dismissed them both without making a decision.

  Grigori felt drained, exhausted, so tired that he knew he would not be able to sleep. And there was this strange letter.