Clearly they found his chances wanting. The military officers remained stone-faced, but he could see all too well the shameful joy in the eyes of the civilian ministers, especially Malenkov. That fat freak was practically wetting himself with suppressed mirth.
Standing in his place at the table, struggling to control the tremors that wanted to turn him inside out, Beria fought for his life.
“Comrade General Secretary, it was necessary to adopt the harshest measures with the captives. If I might be allowed to remind you, they attempted to destroy their own ship when apprised of its situation. And there was no way for us to know that they possessed the inserted devices that allowed them to withstand so much pain. Indeed, we did not even know we were killing them! Our methods seemed to yield few results until it was too late.”
Stalin did not shout. He didn’t respond at all. He played with his empty pipe, which Beria knew from long experience was infinitely more worrying.
Finally he spoke. “And the last of them, the Negro woman. You knew about her inserts. Did you not?”
“Yes, we knew,” he cried. “And we tried to remove them. I have written authorization from you, approving the procedure. Nevertheless, it was no easy thing to dig such a device out of a woman’s spine. Little wonder that she died on the table.”
“For which you jailed the doctors, if I remember correctly,” Stalin replied. “They failed and they were punished.
“You failed. So?”
A grin slithered across Malenkov’s ugly face, like an eel, but Beria concentrated on bargaining with the Vozhd. “The bomb we dropped on Lodz did not fail. It wiped the city from the map and sent the Germans into full retreat toward the Oder.”
“Yes. And where are the follow-up attacks?” Stalin asked. “I was assured that we would pave the way to Berlin with these weapons.”
“And we shall. We shall,” he declared, using a cuff to wipe away the sweat that was leaking from the top of his head, plastering down what was left of his hair. It was a warm summer’s day outside, but the heavy purple drapes in the room remained drawn, on his own recommendation. He had read about sound guns that could be pointed at a window to pick up the conversations being conducted within. Presumably the heavy drapes would act as a baffle.
“How shall we?” Stalin asked. “How shall we press the advantage, when you tell us you cannot deliver the weapons?”
“That is not what I am saying,” Beria replied. “We have three more warheads under construction right now, as we speak. But these are not gasoline bombs. They are horribly complicated devices. One slip and the entire facility could be destroyed. And where would we be then? At the mercy of Churchill, who wants to use his own bombs on us. At the mercy of Truman, soon enough, who has proven in the other world that he will act with utter ruthlessness, when the occasion calls for it.
“We already know that the Allies are planning war with the Soviet Union. They will not allow history to take its course. If we strike, and our assault is a failure, they will sense weakness and they will act. Have no doubt about it. They…will…act.
“We must have enough warheads to smash the Nazis with one blow, and to hold what gains we make in the next few weeks.” With that he stopped and glanced around the room to see if his words had had any effect.
He couldn’t believe it. They were actually listening. Stalin’s frozen glare had thawed, just slightly, as a hint of real interest entered his expression.
Beria, desperate to save his hide, summoned all his energies.
“The struggle against the fascists will not be the end of this war, comrades. Do we want the imperialists, the bankers and merchants, back in this room a hundred years from now? Because that is exactly what will happen if we miscalculate. We know the Allies are not capable of absorbing punishment of the sort we have endured. Can they live with ten million, twenty million dead? Can they shrug off thirty million bodies and continue to fight? No! We know they cannot. They are weak and squeamish about the true nature of conflict. They are not meant to succeed.
“But they will succeed, through pure chance, if we do not execute our next moves perfectly. The shock of Lodz has paralyzed them-for a moment. Another single warhead will not frighten them. But three, or four, or five delivered in one mighty blow? That will be too much for them to endure. They will collapse before us.”
As he paused to draw breath, Marshal Timoshenko, the defense minister, interrupted. “Comrade, you sound as if you are already making war on the Allies. But we are not at war with them. We fight the Nazis.”
“For now. For now!” Beria replied, exasperated. “But only for now. I am not talking about an atomic strike against the Allies, Marshal. They will have their own bomb program, and if we hit them they will strike back at us. But a coordinated atomic assault on the Germans, a wall of atomic fire along the Oder, to open the way for Konev and Zhukov, that will stun the Allies, paralyzing them with fear.”
He turned back to Stalin, whom he noted was filling his pipe.
“We have always understood that the ends of this war are political, not military,” Beria said, more calmly now. “The destruction of the Wehrmacht is a precondition for final victory, but it is not the victory itself. How many times have you yourself said that, Comrade General Secretary?”
Stalin shrugged, but a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. His arbitrary nature could be fatal, but it might save a man’s life, too.
Beria was still sweating, but it was with excitement now, as he sensed his escape. Perhaps even victory. The sour odor of panic was abating, just a little.
Malenkov looked ill again.
“Kurchatov has thousands of technicians working on production at the Vanguard site. Thousands more are racing to stay abreast of him at Kamchatka. I cannot say that he will have four or five warheads available at the stroke of three this afternoon. But he assures me we are close. Very close.”
Stalin leaned back and lit his pipe. Puffing on it, he raised a thick cloud of gray, acrid smoke. “Marshal Timoshenko,” he said, pointing the stem at his defense minister. “Do you need Beria’s bombs to break through at the Oder? What latest news have you from there?”
The cavalryman’s bald head shone in the lamplight. His hooded, slightly Asiatic eyes remained dark pools. He had been surpassed in Stalin’s affection by Zhukov, but he remained a formidable figure. The purges of the late 1930s and the post-Emergence period had come nowhere near him. Nothing in the electronic files incriminated him, and Beria had to admit that he had done sterling work mechanizing the Red Army in preparation for its return to combat. When he spoke he betrayed no fear of the secret policeman. All the more reason for Beria to be wary of him.
“Zhukov reports that the Nazis are increasingly using the nerve agent to seal their eastern borders. At first we thought it was simply gas, but the British and Americans have relayed to us their suspicions that some Emergence weapon is more likely. It is being delivered by artillery shell and aircraft, and once contaminated, a piece of ground remains impassable for an indeterminate length of time.”
Beria leapt on the possible weakness. “Well, perhaps you could devote yourself to determining how long that might be, Marshal.”
Timoshenko’s lips curled back from his teeth. “We are doing just that, Comrade Beria. At the moment we have no good news to report. The entire northern advance, more than six million men, has been held up as we search for a way through. While we waste time, the Germans are reinforcing with divisions stripped from the west.”
The foreign minister, Molotov, spoke up. “I have been in constant contact with the British and Americans via their embassies, but I cannot gauge whether they are letting the Germans in front of them escape because they are incompetent, or because they wish us to do their fighting for them.”
“No,” Stalin said. “They wish us to do their dying for them. Churchill thinks like us in many ways. He does not have our power, but he sees the same basic truths. This war is no longer about defeating Germany. It is abo
ut dismembering the carcass of Europe. I do not think we can expect much relief from them. Marshal Timoshenko, they have not yet come to our aid in the Pacific, have they?”
Timoshenko shook his head and looked over at the people’s commissar of the navy, Admiral Kuznetsov, a relatively young man in this group of aging party members.
Beria felt confident enough in the change of dynamics to quietly take his seat again. It felt like slipping into a hideout.
“The Americans have made no move toward cooperating with us,” Kuznetsov responded. “In fact, they seem to have ceased offensive operations around the Japanese Home Islands. There has been no indication of any Allied submarine activity in the last forty-eight hours. It is almost as though they have decided to leave the Japanese alone.”
“Good,” Stalin said. “Then we shall take the islands from under their noses. The postwar correlation of forces in the Pacific will be much more amenable that way.”
His gaze fell on Beria again.
“Do not imagine that you have escaped my wrath, Laventry Pavlovich. I want my bombs, and I want them yesterday. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said in return, and his voice cracked somewhat. “Yes, Comrade General Secretary.”
“And now,” Stalin said, “let’s have some soup, shall we?”
Beria’s heart sank. He still had too much work to do.
“Oh, not you, Beria,” the Vozhd said. “You are excused. Get the hell out of here and go do your job for a change. No soup for you.”
D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 0006 HOURS.
KORYAK RANGES, FAR EASTERN SIBERIA.
In the week and a half they had been away, there had been a noticeable increase in traffic around the giant Sharashka.
Just before they had left, Ivanov had watched two silver MiG-15s come in to land at the airfield a few miles to the west of the facility. Now it looked as if an entire fighter wing was based there. Lumbering transport planes-C-47 knockoffs by the looks of them-glided in and out almost constantly during the daylight hours. Ivanov checked the time hack in his night vision goggles.
Just after midnight.
Of the forty-three fighters who were hunkered down on the ridgeline above the road that snaked all the way down to the Communists’ research base, only he and Vennie were equipped with NVG. The others in his tiny band-Sergo the Cossack, Ahmed Khan, and Kicji their guide-made do with whatever vision nature gave them. As did the three dozen or so guerrillas they’d brought back from the Chukchi lands that lay to the north.
Ivanov was impressed with the reindeer herders. They moved through the mountains like snow leopards, and he had no doubt of their hunger for vengeance against the Bolsheviks who had all but wiped out their tribesmen. They had been eager recruits even before Ivanov had supplied them with British-made Kalashnikovs.
The Russian Spetsnaz officer wormed his way up the hard rocky surface and into a small, natural bowl-shaped depression. He pulled up his goggles and used a pair of LampVision binoculars. The approaching convoy was still a few minutes away, with more than a few switchbacks to negotiate before it would reach the ambush point. He handed the glasses to Vendulka, and after a moment’s observation she passed them onto Khan and Sergo. The two men had stayed behind when Ivanov journeyed north looking for allies. They had been watching the newly built road, recording vehicle activity.
Ivanov was convinced something pivotal was happening. Even in his own time, the Kamchatka Oblast was an isolated backwater. The provincial capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a small industrial and scientific center on Avacha Bay, was entirely surrounded by volcanic mountains and could not be reached by road. Indeed, even by 2021, no roads ran into Kamchatka.
So this two-lane highway hacked out of the rock and leading up from the Sharashka had to be significant. He had no trouble imagining that thousands of lives had been lost in its construction. Sergo and Khan hadn’t been able to follow the road to its destination, but they had observed enough traffic to insist there was a better than even chance that high-value targets would be passing through the ravine between midnight and 0200 hours.
Ivanov checked the position of the convoy again. It was hidden now behind a series of switchbacks, but he could tell from the way the glow of headlights leaked upward that they were close enough. He nodded to Kicji, holding up three fingers. The wizened guide slipped away to tell the leaders of the Chukchi that they were three minutes away.
“Sergo. Be ready. Remember, I take the lead vehicle. You take the last one.”
Wrapped in a dusty cloak, the huge Cossack was a green-tinged rock monster in the LampVision goggles. He nodded once…
“I take the rear.”…then moved away to a presighted firing position twenty meters downslope. Ahmed Khan, carrying three reloads, followed him.
Ivanov uncapped his own tube and plugged the missile sensors into his goggles. A targeting grid sprang up in front of him. He heard Vendulka shoo away a couple of Chukchi fighters who had crept up to watch him use the wonder weapon.
“Flames,” she hissed, pointing at the back of the tube. “Move away or die.” That did it.
Ivanov settled into as comfortable a position as possible, crouching down ready to raise himself up. The opalescent glow of approaching headlights grew stronger on the sheer sides of the ravine below, and his goggles began to adjust to the changing conditions. A thin green line of light, invisible to the naked eye, reached out from the launcher. An Israeli-designed B600, it was accurate out to nine hundred meters, and he was firing from a range of only two hundred. Sergo had the harder shot, but Ivanov had learned that the Cossack, trained as a young boy to fire from horseback, had a much better aim than him. He’d turned the second launcher over to him without any qualms. His only regret was the small number of rockets they had left. After this engagement there would be no more.
On the other hand, I really don’t expect to survive this operation, so what does it matter?
The LampVision goggles dialed back to minimum amplification as the lead vehicle rounded the last corner below. It was an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, very much like an old BMP, but without the tracks. An identical carrier followed behind it. Ivanov had a good minute or so to examine the vehicle, setting his goggles to record. If these things were going to roll over Western Europe, any intelligence on them would be useful.
The grinding rumble of the armored vehicles was joined by the grunt of heavy trucks shifting through gears as they negotiated the slope. He counted three of them before another BMP appeared at the convoy’s tail end.
Raising himself up on one knee, he powered up the launch system and placed the laser point on the upper deck of his target just in front of the turret. The main armament appeared to be a small cannon and a rocket that rested on a rail directly above it. Probably something like the original Sagger missile. He wondered if it was wire-guided.
A chime in his ear alerted him to target lock. Waiting a few seconds to ensure that the last vehicle in the convoy had entered the killing box, he breathed out, and fired.
The high-explosive multipurpose missile ignited and leapt away on a bright cone of fire. Reactive optics in the LampVision system damped down the searing white light to protect Ivanov from temporary blindness. The soft lime green of artificial illumination returned as the warhead sped away.
In his peripheral vision he saw Sergo’s rocket lancing downrange at the same time. They hit almost simultaneously. The HEMP rounds featured a “crush switch” in the nose of the rocket, which determined in the microseconds after impact that it had struck a relatively hard surface. Rather than detonating immediately, the weapon’s processor chips delayed any reaction momentarily, allowing the warhead to penetrate its target, at which point it went off with a spectacular explosion that caused his night vision system to dim down for nearly two seconds.
He heard the cries of Chukchi, guttural and triumphant as they opened up on the convoy from both sides of the road. Vendulka slammed another rocket into the launcher and
slapped him on the shoulder. “Clear!”
The targeting grid came up again, and he laid the designator on the second BMP, which had lurched to a halt. Its turret traversed wildly, seeking someone-anyone-at whom the gunner could fire.
BOOM.
They got off a shot, but the crew was firing blind. Ivanov pulled the trigger on the B600 as a single shell crashed into the slope two hundred meters to his left. Chunks of shattered rock and pebbles rained down around him. The second missile took off with a whoosh and speared into the troop carrier’s upper deck, with identical results. A massive flash and the thunder crack of detonation.
“To the rear,” Vendulka cried, fitting home the last rocket. “Airburst!”
As his optics came back online, Ivanov laid his sights on half a dozen infantrymen who’d spilled out of the BMP before he could hit it. Some had been knocked to the ground by the blast, but others were running to the trucks, shouting and trying to organize a counterattack. Automatic fire from the slopes lashed at the length of the stalled convoy. Ivanov readjusted his aim, choosing a canvas-topped truck. He pressed the selector for ANTIPERSONNEL and the last of his missiles snaked away.
It burst directly over the truck, spraying the ground with white phosphorous and hundreds of pieces of shrapnel. The screams of the wounded echoed through the valley as superhot beads of the incendiary chemical burned into them.
Discarding the launcher he picked up his assault rifle, an AK-47 clone identical to the ones carried by the other fighters. He squeezed off a round with a thick, flat crack! It went high, and he adjusted his aim before methodically picking off any uniformed personnel he could see below. Where the Chukchi poured in torrents of fire, the veteran special operator nailed each of his victims with one or two shots.
The volume of return fire quickly died away, and he called out to Kicji. “Let’s go.”
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