Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  “De-despite…our most intense efforts, the moment draws near when this front, already so heavily strained, will break. And once the enemy reaches open country, an orderly command will hardly be practicable in view of the insufficient mobility of our troops. As a result of the breakthrough by Patton’s armored spearhead, the whole Western Front has been ripped open.

  “I consider it my duty to bring these conclusions to your notice in good time, Mein Führer.” With that, he stepped back, and looked like a man prepared to die.

  The room was hushed and still. Nobody dared move. Von Kluge was visibly shaking, and when Hitler finally opened his mouth, the field marshal flinched. But the führer merely rubbed at his eyes and spoke in a cracked whisper. He was more rational, more willing to accept the realities, than Himmler had known him to be in months, possibly years.

  “If we lose France,” Hitler croaked, “we forfeit our key launching point in the U-boat war. In addition, we lose all of the material support we gain from the occupation, including millions of tons of food, and the last tungsten we can hope to get. Still, it is evident—and we must place this at the head of all of our considerations—that it has become impossible to fight a pitched battle in France. We just cannot do it. And yet, we cannot allow Patton to drive his sword toward our heart through Belgium, either.

  “We can still manage to regroup our forces, but even then only to a limited extent. Perhaps we should evacuate the coast without further ado, and allow our mobile forces to form reinforced lines that we might defend inflexibly.”

  His eyes clouded over, and he seemed to go deep into his own mind. When he continued, he almost seemed to be speaking to himself.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, “it is also evident that our forces are entirely inadequate to defend even a narrow front. Any further effort in France would be possible only if we could gain superiority in the air, yet we must—no matter how bitter this may be—preserve our new Luftwaffe units inside the Reich, employing them only as a very last resort.

  “We have lost the missile facilities. We will lose all of the U-boat bases. Our best armor is gone. When and where the last die will be cast, I cannot say.”

  The führer lifted his eyes from the ground and let his gaze fall on everyone who stood around the map table. They flickered with only the barest reflection of the fire that had once burned in them, but at least it was better than the dead man’s gaze Himmler had observed earlier.

  Hitler clenched his fists then and said, “Clearly our plan to ambush Patton from the air was betrayed, and this tells me that we have not done enough to root out the traitorous elements exposed by the Emergence. We must do everything we can to hunt these spies down, and levy the most severe punishments.”

  Nobody but the führer dared look at Himmler, but he knew everyone in the room was waiting for his response. He had seized the responsibility for safeguarding the Reich and its leadership against fifth columnists like Rommel and Canaris. He had bathed the state in an ocean of blood to wash away their malign influence. But it had not been enough. He would have to do more. He set his features to demonstrate the steely resolve he would bring to the task, but this was undermined by what the führer said next.

  “We must involve everyone in Army Group West, conducting this struggle with the utmost fanaticism, and standing firm everywhere. Because mobility, a war of movement, is no longer possible for us. At least in the west. But we have substantial forces securing the border in the east. It is time to review that situation. The Soviets are not yet a threat—they remain greatly weakened by our earlier efforts against them.

  “Thus we must temporarily draw down our forces in the east, which are doing nothing, to secure our western flank before it becomes impossible to move them at all. We must hold the line against the Allies until we possess the weapons necessary to strike back at them.”

  With that, his eyes bored into Himmler.

  “And when do you think that will be, Herr Reichsführer?”

  14

  D-DAY + 29. 1 JUNE 1944. 2003 HRS. THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

  “It has begun, Comrade Secretary. The Germans are moving at least half their divisions away from the edge of the DMZ. They are heading west.”

  Joseph Stalin clasped his hands together and showed off a mouthful of yellowed teeth to his assembled cronies: Beria, Foreign Minister Molotov, and Central Committee Secretary Georgi Malenkov.

  “Excellent. Just excellent. And so, Beria, do we stand ready?”

  The head of the NKVD nodded, though without much enthusiasm. It wasn’t that he had misgivings about the operation. No, it was just that Laventry Beria was mindful of any path he walked, checking for dangerous pits along the way. It made him a very calculating individual.

  He consulted the flexipad in his hand, although it wasn’t really necessary. He was more than familiar with the details of the operation at hand.

  “I would never have thought that terrorist criminals could prove so useful,” he said. “The trial of the Ukrainians proceeds. Their nationalist guerrillas—along with the Chechens, the Balkars, and Tatars—all remain in open revolt. We have given much publicity to the Red Army’s actions in response. This provides cover for the movement of Zhukov’s and Konev’s forces, although the world remains fixated on Western Europe.”

  Stalin, playing with his pipe behind his desk in the Little Corner, regarded Beria through eyes as black and unreadable as polished stones.

  “But your troops have the situation in hand? We are not about to leap into one battle with another raging at our hindquarters, are we? And these recidivist splitters, they have proven to be much more adaptable than you had imagined, no?”

  “Everything is in hand,” Beria insisted as a small spasm of terror shuddered through him. “Grozny has been depopulated. The fighting there continues mostly in the countryside. The three nationalist armies of the Ukrainian traitors remain significant forces in context, but they are about to be crushed by the fifty-four armies under our command. We have twelve million men ready to fight. Nine thousand tanks. Sixty thousand tubes of artillery and all the special technologies, of course…although the numbers are really the concerns of the marshals. I simply state these facts to reassure you that we have nothing to be concerned about.”

  “And Task Number One?” Stalin asked.

  “Is ready,” said Beria. “Professor Kurchatov says we shall be able to test-fire a warhead in two days.”

  “And he anticipates success?”

  “He would not dare to mislead me about this. He understands the consequences of miscalculation. And of course, he has been locked away in the Vanguard Sharashka, so he knows nothing of the German activities. They did not even factor into his thinking when I spoke with him.”

  Stalin seemed pleased, and Beria relaxed inwardly. The Soviet leader relit his pipe and began to puff, leaning back and turning the hard wooden chair to part the heavy drapes and peer through the windows at the soft pink-and-orange light of a Russian spring’s evening. Beria waited patiently for him to say something.

  Molotov and Malenkov kept their own counsel. Nobody in this room really trusted one another. They never had, and the murderous purges of the post-Emergence period had reinforced that base level of paranoia. If Beria could have pulled out a gun, he would have shot both of the others without a moment’s thought. But Stalin’s Georgian bodyguards would have gunned him down before he could pull back the hammer.

  “What of the Americans’ Manhattan Project? Do we have any idea of how advanced they are?”

  Chagrin distorted Beria’s features. He commanded the most fearsome intelligence service in the world, yet he could not answer Stalin’s question, as the party boss well knew. He had only asked because of the embarrassment his question would cause.

  “We do not know for certain. In the weeks after the Emergence their counterintelligence operations swept up a number of our most useful contacts. It caused some grave problems. But we must assume that they, like us, are well advanced.
And of course, they cannot know of our progress because they do not know of the Vanguard. It will come as a terrible shock to them.”

  “And to Hitler,” Molotov added.

  “Most especially to that little bastard,” Stalin growled, but not without a hint of good humor. “We must ensure that the first bomb does not kill him. I would hate for him to be spared the realization of what is about to happen.”

  “Again, that is a matter for the air force marshals,” Beria said.

  Stalin spun his chair slowly around to face them again. “And you, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich,” he said. “You are prepared?”

  The foreign minister held up two large brown envelopes. “I have the notes ready to send to the British and American missions,” he answered, “along with all the supporting documentation they will require. The sailors and merchantmen we have been holding are already en route to port, if I am not mistaken.”

  He looked to Beria for confirmation, and received it as a nod. Impounding the Allied convoy PQ 17 two years earlier had been a rash act, although he would never say so to Stalin—or to anyone really, as it would certainly get back to the Vozhd. The action had nearly pushed the Allies into declaring war on the Soviet Union, and only the dire strategic situation of 1942 had saved them. The democracies could not afford another enemy.

  Beria, who had sent millions to their deaths, had made sure that the Allied personnel were interred under the most humane circumstances possible. A ham-fisted oaf like Malenkov would have liquidated them, but now they provided a perfect sop to the Americans and British, a way to convince them of the Soviet Union’s good intentions. They were being trucked back to their ships, which remained at anchor in Murmansk, and would be free to leave on Stalin’s say-so.

  All that was required was for the leader of the USSR to give the final order, abrogating the cease-fire with Nazi Germany and unleashing the Red Army into Western Europe, as well as upon the Japanese Home Islands. London and Washington would be told within minutes that the Soviet Union was reentering the struggle at their side. They wouldn’t, however, be informed that by the end of the struggle, the political map of the world would look very different from its outline at the end of the “original” war.

  Nevertheless, they could probably work that out for themselves. And since the USSR would be a nuclear power within forty-eight hours, there wasn’t much they could do besides offer their lukewarm thanks for the assistance.

  Stalin picked up a phone that connected him to Zhukov’s headquarters.

  “Marshal,” he said, “this is Stalin. You will proceed.”

  D-DAY + 30. 1 JUNE 1944. 1003 HOURS.

  KORYAK RANGES, FAR EASTERN SIBERIA.

  Three months had passed since Major Pavel Ivanov had transmitted any data back to the West. He had to be careful with the data bursts.

  Officially he was a free agent, a rogue agent if you got down to it, responsible to no one. He received no instructions from the Multinational Force command or the contemporary Allied intelligence services.

  Unofficially two flexipads sat on standby in San Diego and Washington, always powered up and attuned to the ID tag coded into Ivanov’s comm-boosted unit. When he sent a compressed data burst into the ether, it would find a Fleetnet node and register on the two pads. The recipients would not acknowledge it, and no messages ever came back from them. That way both Kolhammer and the top British intelligence man in America, William Stephenson, had a deniable back-channel source of information about developments in the Soviet Union.

  For two years Ivanov had been transmitting updates on the growing Red Army strength, on his never-ending search for any sign of missing 21C assets like the stealth destroyer HMS Vanguard, and on the progress or otherwise of a slew of nationalist resistance movements that had sprung up in the wake of Stalin’s separate “peace” with the Nazis. Some of these he had even fostered himself, moving secretly around the country, passing on the fruits of twenty years’ counterinsurgency experience in the Russian Federation Special Forces.

  The former Spetsnaz officer did have his qualms about what he was doing. The Bolsheviks didn’t fuck around, agonizing over their response to “terrorist atrocities.” They simply cranked up their own atrocities, on a vastly greater scale. After a train carrying minor party officials was ambushed by Uzbek separatists trained by Ivanov, the NKVD swept through the republic and decimated it, killing 10 percent of the Uzbekistani population. Beria’s men had since been back and emptied entire towns, forcing the inhabitants onto trucks and trains and shipping them off to the gulags.

  Ivanov had no concerns about the native population of this godforsaken hole. There were no natives left. When his guide, Kicji, took them through the final high pass of the Koryak Ranges at the head of the Kamchatka Peninsula, he had stopped and slowly swept one gnarled hand across the world, grunting in his heavily accented Russian, “All Koryak gone. Only soldiers now. And me.” Ivanov had trained a heavy pair of powered binoculars on the spot far off in the haze where Kicji was pointing. They had been standing on a small plateau at least two thousand meters up. The air was as sharp and as clear as he had ever known it to be, although tinged with a sulfurous smell from all the active volcanoes on the peninsula to the south.

  He had seen brown haze localized around some sort of huge camp. It was difficult to be sure, due to the distance, but it looked like a prison camp with a heavy industrial component. It was much larger, and generated a lot more aerial pollution than the usual run of camps.

  “Sharashka,” muttered the guide. “Koryak built it. They are buried inside, with many others.”

  Ivanov handed the binoculars to his second in command, Lieutenant Vendulka Zamyatin, a female medical officer of the Russian navy who had been working on board HMS Fearless at the time of the Transition. She was one of the few survivors from that ship. The pale, good-looking woman they called Vennie played with the controls on the glasses, trying to bring the Sharashka—the “special technical prison”—into sharper focus, but without much luck, to judge by her furrowed brow.

  “I cannot say, but it looks much bigger than the last one,” she commented. “Maybe three times the size of the one in the Urals. It must be significant. Atomics, you think?”

  “Maybe,” Ivanov said. “Whatever the case, it’s too large to attack. I’d guess at a couple of regiments of security, maybe even a division of NKVD, given the extent of the operation.”

  He turned and smiled at his small band. Kicji, ageless, bitter, looking like a totem carved from the root of a poisoned tree. Vendulka, her beauty marred by a line of scar tissue that ran from just below her left ear and across her face, before tapering off at the corner of her mouth. Sergo the Cossack, who stood six and a half feet tall and seemed to measure a couple of ax handles across the shoulders. And the smooth, dangerous Chechen jihadi Ahmed Khan, emissary of his Caliph, who laid claim to all the lands Ivanov had so recently fought to preserve from the likes of nutters just like them.

  “So we won’t be kicking in the door,” Ivanov said.

  Kicji leaned up against an outcropping of smooth black rock. “No need to get in,” he said. “There is only one road out to the coast. Every day convoys travel it. Some small, some large. But some with many more guards. These must be important, yes?”

  Ivanov shrugged. “Probably.”

  Kicji rustled around inside a stinking fur vest and pulled out a strip of dried meat, which he began to chew. “There are many places where it is possible to ambush these convoys.”

  “Not with so few men,” Sergo said. “Not even with these.” He hefted his new and much-loved assault rifle, a genuine AK-47 with an underslung grenade launcher. Ivanov’s gift of more than two hundred Kalashnikovs to Sergo’s bandit tribe had secured their loyalty and the man’s services.

  Kicji gnawed at the jerky, reminding Ivanov of a dog with a treat.

  “We can get men from north. The Chukchi,” he said. “Many of them are buried in the Sharashka, too. They will fight.”

 
“They’re fishermen,” Vendulka said. “I served with some on the other side. They are good men, but they know nothing of fighting in the mountains.”

  Kicji smiled, showing large gaps in his teeth. “Wrong Chukchi,” he said. “Those Chukchi are all gone. They lived in villages by the sea. Little buried huts. They couldn’t run when the Russians came. All dead now. The other Chukchi are reindeer people. They move. Many still died, those on big Russian farms. But some live. They have nothing now, just revenge. They will fight.”

  Ivanov unwrapped a chocolate bar. He had never met a Chukchi, rein-deer man or fisherman. But he knew a little about them. He retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the federation’s many ethnic subgroups and their many, many blood feuds. The Chukchi were one of the smaller, more obscure, and infinitely less troublesome populations. As such, they tended to be overlooked. At best, he recalled, they were a shamanistic people, even after decades of Soviet rule and then democratic development. They believed that spirits inhabited the world, and they practiced animal sacrifice to appease those spirits. They had also been enemies of Kicji’s people.

  “I thought the Chukchi attacked the Koryak,” he said. “Drove them from their homes.”

  “Yes,” Kicji answered. “But no more Koryak now. Nobody to remember when I am gone.”

  With a shake of his head and a minimal rise of the shoulders, he managed a gesture that captured the existential horror and despair of a man who thinks of himself as the last of his kind.

  “If Chukchi die, I do not care,” he continued, “but they will kill Russians. And I care for killing Russians very much.”

  Ivanov turned to peer questioningly at the others. The Cossack was sucking slowly at his beard. Ahmed Khan, more prince than guerrilla, regarded the guide like a bad penny. And Zamyatin was staring again at the shrouded prison, a frown digging deep fissures in her forehead.

  The Spetsnaz officer finished his chocolate bar and balled up the wrapper, carefully placing it in a deep pocket. He would bury it later, with their other rubbish, when they reached softer ground, or burn it in a lava flow if they passed close to one. The morning was relatively warm, at least ten degrees Celsius. Down on the wide valley floor in the sun it might even get up to twenty or more. A pair of gyrfalcons rode a thermal a few hundred meters away, slate-gray plumage disappearing against the mountain background whenever their spiraling flight path carried them across the face of the range.