Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

by Ken Follett

  They heard voices coming from behind the double door at the far end of the room.

  ‘Back outside,’ Ilse said.

  They stepped into the corridor. Carla closed the door all but a crack, and peeped through. She saw Herr Römer and another man push a hospital trolley through the doors.

  The men did not look in Carla’s direction. They were arguing about soccer. She heard Römer say: ‘It’s only nine years ago that we won the national championship. We beat Eintracht Frankfurt two-nil.’

  ‘Yes, but half your best players were Jews, and they’ve all gone.’

  Carla realized they were talking about the Bayern Munich team.

  Römer said: ‘The old days will come back, if only we play the right tactics.’

  Still arguing, the two men went to a table where a fat woman lay dead. They took her by the shoulders and knees, then unceremoniously swung her on to the trolley, grunting with the effort.

  They moved the trolley to another table and put a second corpse on top of the first.

  When they had three they wheeled the trolley out.

  Carla said: ‘I’m going to follow them.’

  She crossed the morgue to the double doors, and Frieda and Ilse followed her. They passed into an area that felt more industrial than medical: the walls were painted brown, the floor was concrete, and there were store cupboards and tool racks.

  They looked around a corner.

  They saw a large room like a garage, with harsh lighting and deep shadows. The atmosphere was warm, and there was a faint smell of cooking. In the middle of the space was a steel box large enough to hold a motor car. A metal canopy led from the top of the box through the roof. Carla realized she was looking at a furnace.

  The two men lifted a body off the trolley and shifted it to a steel conveyor belt. Römer pushed a button on the wall. The belt moved, a door opened, and the corpse passed into the furnace.

  They put the next corpse on the belt.

  Carla had seen enough.

  She turned and motioned the others back. Frieda bumped into Ilse, who let out an involuntary cry. They all froze.

  They heard Römer say: ‘What was that?’

  ‘A ghost,’ the other replied.

  Römer’s voice was shaky. ‘Don’t joke about such things!’

  ‘Are you going to pick up the other end of this stiff, or what?’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  The three girls hurried back to the morgue. Seeing the remaining bodies, Carla suffered a wave of grief about Ada’s Kurt. He had lain here, with a sticking-plaster on his arm, and had been thrown on to the conveyor belt and disposed of like a bag of garbage. But you’re not forgotten, Kurt, she thought.

  They went out into the corridor. As they turned towards the back door, they heard footsteps and the voice of Frau Schmidt. ‘What is taking those two men so long?’

  They hurried along the corridor and through the door. The moon was out, and the park was brightly lit. Carla could see the shrubbery where they had hidden the bikes, two hundred yards away across the grass.

  Frieda came out last, and in her rush she let the door bang.

  Carla thought fast. Frau Schmidt was likely to investigate the noise. The three girls might not reach the shrubbery before she opened the door. They had to hide. ‘This way!’ Carla hissed, and she ran around the corner of the building. The others followed.

  They flattened themselves against the wall. Carla heard the door open. She held her breath.

  There was a long pause. Then Frau Schmidt muttered something unintelligible, and the door banged again.

  Carla peeped around the corner. Frau Schmidt had gone.

  The three girls ran across the lawn and retrieved their bicycles.

  They pushed the bikes along the forest path and emerged on to the road. They switched on their lights, mounted up, and pedalled away. Carla felt euphoric. They had got away with it!

  As they approached the town, triumph gave way to more practical considerations. What had they achieved, exactly? What would they do next?

  They must tell someone what they had seen. She was not sure who. In any event, they had to convince someone. Would they be believed? The more she thought about it, the less sure she was.

  When they reached the hostel and dismounted, Ilse said: ‘Thank goodness that’s over. I’ve never been so scared in all my life.’

  ‘It’s not over,’ said Carla.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It won’t be over until we’ve closed that hospital, and any others like it.’

  ‘How can you do that?’

  ‘We need you,’ Carla said to her. ‘You’re the proof.’

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

  ‘Will you come with us, tomorrow, when we go back to Berlin?’

  There was a long pause, then Ilse said: ‘Yes, I will.’

  (x)

  Volodya Peshkov was glad to be home. Moscow was at its summery best, sunny and warm. On Monday 30 June he returned to Red Army Intelligence headquarters beside the Khodynka airfield.

  Both Werner Franck and the Tokyo spy had been right: Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June. Volodya and all the personnel at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin had returned to Moscow, by ship and train. Volodya had been prioritized, and made it back faster than most: some were still travelling.

  Volodya now realized how much Berlin had been getting him down. The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them.

  Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

  Anticipating the outbreak of war, Volodya had long ago equipped his Berlin spies with clandestine radios and code books. Now it was more vital than ever that the handful of brave anti-Nazis should continue to pass information to the Soviets. Before leaving he had destroyed all records of their names and addresses, which now existed only in his head.

  He had found both his parents fit and well, although his father looked harassed: it was his responsibility to prepare Moscow for air raids. Volodya had gone to see his sister, Anya, her husband, Ilya Dvorkin, and the twins, now eighteen months old: Dmitriy, called Dimka, and Tatiana, called Tania. Unfortunately their father struck Volodya as being just as rat-like and contemptible as ever.

  After a pleasant day at home, and a good night’s sleep in his old room, he was ready to start work again.

  He passed through the metal detector at the entrance to the Intelligence building. The familiar corridors and staircases touched a nostalgic chord, even if they were drab and utilitarian. Walking through the building he half expected people to come up and congratulate him: many of them must know he had been the one to confirm Barbarossa. But no one did: perhaps they were being discreet.

  He entered a large open area of typists and file clerks and spoke to the middle-aged woman receptionist. ‘Hello, Nika – are you still here?’

  ‘Good morning, Captain Peshkov,’ she said, not as warmly as he might have hoped. ‘Colonel Lemitov would like to see you right away.’

  Like Volodya’s father, Lemitov had not been important enough to suffer in the great purge of the late thirties, and now he had been promoted to fill the place of an unlucky former superior. Volodya did not know much about the purge, but he found it hard to believe that so many senior men had been disloyal enough to merit such punishment. Not that Volodya knew exactly what the punishment was. They could be in exile in Siberia, or in prison somewhere, or dead. All he knew was that they had vanished.

  Nika added: ‘He has the big o
ffice at the end of the main corridor now.’

  Volodya walked through the open room, nodding and smiling at one or two acquaintances, but again he got feeling that he was not the hero he had expected to be. He tapped on Lemitov’s door, hoping the boss might shed some light.

  ‘Come in.’

  Volodya entered, saluted, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Welcome back, Captain.’ Lemitov came around his desk. ‘Between you and me, you did a great job in Berlin. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m honoured, sir,’ said Volodya. ‘But why is this between you and me?’

  ‘Because you contradicted Stalin.’ He held up a hand to forestall protest. ‘Stalin doesn’t know it was you, of course. But all the same, people around here are nervous, after the purge, of associating with anyone who takes the wrong line.’

  ‘What should I have done?’ Volodya said incredulously. ‘Faked wrong intelligence?’

  Lemitov shook his head emphatically. ‘You did exactly the right thing, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve protected you. But just don’t expect people around here to treat you like a champion.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Volodya. Things were worse than he had imagined.

  ‘You have your own office, now, at least – three doors down. You’ll need to spend a day or so catching up.’

  Volodya took that for dismissal. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. He saluted and left.

  His office was not luxurious – a small room with no carpet – but he had it to himself. He was out of touch with the progress of the German invasion, having been busy trying to get home as fast as possible. Now he put his disappointment aside and began to read the reports of the battlefield commanders for the first week of the war.

  As he did so, he became more and more desolate.

  The invasion had taken the Red Army by surprise.

  It seemed impossible, but the evidence covered his desk.

  On 22 June, when the Germans attacked, many forward units of the Red Army had had no live ammunition.

  That was not all. Planes had been lined up neatly on airstrips with no camouflage, and the Luftwaffe had destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft in the first few hours of the war. Army units had been thrown at the advancing Germans without adequate weapons, with no air cover, and lacking intelligence about enemy positions; and in consequence had been annihilated.

  Worst of all, Stalin’s standing order to the Red Army was that retreat was forbidden. Every unit had to fight to the last man, and officers were expected to shoot themselves to avoid capture. Troops were never allowed to regroup at a new, stronger defensive position. This meant that every defeat turned into a massacre.

  Consequently, the Red Army was haemorrhaging men and equipment.

  The warning from the Tokyo spy, and Werner Franck’s confirmation, had been ignored by Stalin. Even when the attack began, Stalin had at first insisted it was a limited act of provocation, done by German army officers without the knowledge of Hitler, who would put a stop to it as soon as he found out.

  By the time it became undeniable that it was not a provocation but the largest invasion in the history of warfare, the Germans had overwhelmed the Soviets’ forward positions. After a week they had pushed three hundred miles inside Soviet territory.

  It was a catastrophe – but what made Volodya want to scream out loud was that it could have been avoided.

  There was no doubt whose fault it was. The Soviet Union was an autocracy. Only one person made the decisions: Josef Stalin. He had been stubbornly, stupidly, disastrously wrong. And now his country was in mortal danger.

  Until now Volodya had believed that Soviet Communism was the true ideology, marred only by the excesses of the secret police, the NKVD. Now he saw that the failure was at the very top. Beria and the NKVD existed only because Stalin permitted them. It was Stalin who was preventing the march to true Communism.

  Late that afternoon, as Volodya was staring out of the window over the sunlit airstrip, brooding over what he had learned, he was visited by Kamen. They had been lieutenants together four years ago, fresh out of the Military Intelligence Academy, and had shared a room with two others. In those days Kamen had been the clown, making fun of everyone, daringly mocking pious Soviet orthodoxy. Now he was heavier and seemed more serious. He had grown a small black moustache like that of the Foreign Minister, Molotov, perhaps to make himself look more mature.

  Kamen closed the door behind him and sat down. He took from his pocket a toy, a tin soldier with a key in its back. He wound up the key and placed the toy on Volodya’s desk. The soldier swung his arms as if marching, and the clockwork mechanism made a loud ratcheting sound as it wound down.

  In a lowered voice Kamen said: ‘Stalin has not been seen for two days.’

  Volodya realized that the clockwork soldier was there to swamp any listening device that might be hidden in his office.

  He said: ‘What do you mean, he hasn’t been seen?’

  ‘He has not come to the Kremlin, and he is not answering the phone.’

  Volodya was baffled. The leader of a nation could not just disappear. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘No one knows.’ The soldier ran down. Kamen wound it up and set it going again. ‘On Saturday night, when he heard that the Soviet Western Army Group had been encircled by the Germans, he said: “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Then he went to Kuntsevo.’ Stalin had a country house near the town of Kuntsevo on the outskirts of Moscow. ‘Yesterday he didn’t show up at the Kremlin at his usual time of midday. When they phoned Kuntsevo, no one answered. Today, the same.’

  Volodya leaned forward. ‘Is he suffering . . .’ his voice fell to a whisper, ‘a mental breakdown?’

  Kamen made a helpless gesture. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising. He insisted, against all the evidence, that Germany would not attack us this year, and now look.’

  Volodya nodded. It made sense. Stalin had allowed himself to be officially called Father, Teacher, Great Leader, Transformer of Nature, Great Helmsman, Genius of Mankind, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples. But now it had been proved, even to him, that he had been wrong and everyone else right. Men committed suicide in such circumstances.

  The crisis was even worse than Volodya had thought. Not only was the Soviet Union under attack and losing. It was also leaderless. This had to be its most perilous moment since the revolution.

  But was it also an opportunity? Could it be a chance to get rid of Stalin?

  The last time Stalin had appeared vulnerable was in 1924, when Lenin’s Testament had said that Stalin was not fit to hold power. Since Stalin had survived that crisis his power had seemed unassailable, even – Volodya could now see clearly – when his decisions had verged on madness: the purges, the blunders in Spain, the appointment of the sadist Beria as head of the secret police, the pact with Hitler. Was this emergency the occasion, at last, to break his hold?

  Volodya hid his excitement from Kamen and everyone else. He hugged his thoughts to himself as he rode the bus home through the soft light of a summer evening. His journey was delayed by a slow-moving convoy of lorries towing anti-aircraft guns – presumably being deployed by his father, who was in charge of Moscow’s air raid defences.

  Could Stalin be deposed?

  He wondered how many Kremlin insiders were asking themselves the same question.

  He entered his parents’ apartment building, the ten-storey Government House, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. They were out, but his sister was there with the twins, Dimka and Tania. The boy, Dimka, had dark eyes and hair. He held a red pencil and was scribbling messily on an old newspaper. The girl had the same intense blue-eyed stare that Grigori had – and so did Volodya, people said. She immediately showed Volodya her doll.

  Also there was Zoya Vorotsyntsev, the astonishingly beautiful physicist Volodya had last seen four years earlier when he was about to leave for Spain. She and Anya had discovered a shared interest in Russian folk music: they went to
recitals together, and Zoya played the gudok, a three-stringed fiddle. Neither could afford a phonograph, but Grigori had one, and they were listening to a record of a balalaika orchestra. Grigori was not a great music lover but he thought the record sounded jolly.

  Zoya was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress the pale colour of her blue eyes. When Volodya asked her the conventional question about how she was, she replied sharply: ‘I’m very angry.’

  There were lots of reasons for Russians to be angry just now. Volodya asked: ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘My research into nuclear physics has been cancelled. All the scientists I work with have been reassigned. I myself am working on improvements to the design of bomb sights.’

  That seemed very reasonable to Volodya. ‘We are at war, after all.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Listen. When uranium metal undergoes a process called fission, enormous quantities of energy are released. I mean enormous. We know this, and Western scientists do too – we have read their papers in scientific journals.’

  ‘Still, the question of bomb sights seems more immediate.’

  Zoya said angrily: ‘This process, fission, could be used to create bombs that would be a hundred times more powerful than anything anyone has now. One nuclear explosion could flatten Moscow. What if the Germans make such a bomb and we don’t have it? It will be as if they had rifles and we only had swords!’

  Volodya said sceptically: ‘But is there any reason to believe that scientists in other countries are working on a fission bomb?’

  ‘We’re sure they are. The concept of fission leads automatically to the idea of a bomb. We thought of it – why shouldn’t they? But there’s another reason. They published all their early results in the journals – and then they stopped, suddenly, one year ago. There have been no new scientific papers on fission since this time last year.’

  ‘And you believe the politicians and generals in the West realized the military potential of the research and made it secret?’

  ‘I can’t think of another reason. And yet here in the Soviet Union we have not even begun to prospect for uranium.’