Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  In the window on Kolhammer’s fifty-eight-centimeter flatscreen, Jane Willet shrugged and raised her hands.

  He flicked a quick glance across at Spruance, trying to read his expression. The admiral still looked tired, and vaguely pissed off.

  “So what’s the question?” Spruance asked. “You don’t need permission to fire on the enemy, Captain Willet. We only have one rule of engagement. Destroy them. In the absence of further directions from Washington—or in your case Canberra—I don’t see the dilemma. Just do your duty and sink them.”

  With her eyes Willet flashed an unspoken plea at Kolhammer.

  “I don’t know that we should be so hasty, Admiral,” he said. “As I recall, nobody thought Soviet occupation of Japan was a good idea. If Captain Willet takes these guys down, the odds are that we’ll have to deal with a Communist-controlled Japan before long.”

  He could see that Spruance wasn’t happy. His mouth was pressed into a thin, straight line, and he bit down on his frustration. “I know you think differently of the Japs, Admiral Kolhammer. But we are still at war with them. They are trying to kill us. They did invade Hawaii, and slaughter tens of thousands of innocent people. If we let them wriggle off the hook and God forbid they get hold of an atomic weapon, they won’t hesitate to use it. So I say again, in the absence of different orders, we have no decision to make. We have only our duties to perform, and that means sinking those ships.”

  Kolhammer refused to give up easily. “Under normal circumstances that would be undeniable,” he said. “But I can assure you that the Politburo won’t be doing business as normal for the next few weeks. This isn’t just a military struggle to them—it’s a political one, and they are maneuvering their military forces for political effect. Hokkaido is part of that.”

  He leaned forward and looked directly into the minicam on the top of his monitor.

  “Admiral. If those red bastards get in there, we’ll have the devil’s own job getting them out. We’re not just talking about the next couple of weeks. This is about the next hundred years. Perhaps even the next thousand. Yes, we are at war with Japan. Yes, there will have to be a heavy reckoning for what they’ve done. But we are also in the early stages of an even longer war with international Communism, and Captain Willet is right to question whether or not the demands of the first conflict supersede those of the second.

  “I do not believe she should fire on Yamamoto unless he poses a clear, present, and significant danger to our Allied Forces.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Kolhammer noticed that Willet nodded brusquely. Spruance, on the other hand, looked as if he’d been handed a two-headed dog.

  “But by the logic of your own argument, Admiral Kolhammer, the very mission we are engaged in should be called off altogether. You are effectively saying that the Japs should be given a free pass to keep the Soviets out of their Home Islands. The end point to that line of thinking is that we make a separate peace with them. That we do not attack or degrade their military infrastructure, or their productive capacity. That we do not punish them for their crimes, and instead we rearm them and support them in any conflict they may have with our allies in Russia.”

  Kolhammer maintained as neutral a façade as he could with so little sleep and such a short fuse burning on his temper. “No, that is not what I’m proposing at all. I’m just saying that any attack on Yamamoto at this stage would be precipitate and unwise. This is a political question, and I think it needs to be resolved on a political level.”

  Spruance shook his head. “We can’t hold fire out here, waiting on some sort of gabfest to decide whether or not being at war with someone means shooting at them. We—”

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  It was Jane Willet. She looked especially disconcerted.

  “My comm officer tells me that she has just picked up a transmission from a flexipad on one of the ships we’ve been trailing. It’s a message for Admiral Kolhammer. An e-mail from Yamamoto.”

  32

  D-DAY + 40. 13 JUNE 1944. 0452 HOURS.

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

  There was only one advantage to the sickening reverses of the last few days. Stalin was no longer in a mood to party all night, thus sparing everyone the ordeal of his orgiastic benders.

  Nevertheless he was still a creature of the night, and the business of the Soviet state was almost entirely conducted after the fall of darkness. For Beria, this was akin to a blessed release. He had moved mountains—literally in some cases—to deliver the weapons the Vozhd had demanded. He could hardly be blamed, could he, if after two years of Herculean effort involving the labor of ten million workers, there was an extra day or two to wait?

  Oh yes, he could.

  Stalin was the master of finding blame where none existed. Beria himself was something of a savant at the practice. If he had failed, he would be facing a gruesome end in one of his own cells. But as he seated himself at the long table in the Politburo meeting room, Beria felt the giddy, light-headed joy of knowing that his life would go on.

  Not everyone there that early morning could be so confident.

  Well, at least there was no drinking.

  Stalin could be such an animal when the alcohol flowed. His moods were entirely arbitrary, and you never knew from one minute to the next whether you would see the dawn. Beria was convinced that if he hadn’t been excused from that nightly debauch, two days earlier, he wouldn’t have been able to drive the project through to fruition. So he probably owed Hitler and Tojo a favor.

  Or Himmler and Tojo, rather, if that was how the dice had fallen. Nobody could be certain what was happening in Berlin at the moment. It was always so when empires died. The same air of madness had preceded the end days of the Russian monarchy.

  Anyway, fuck them all.

  He was going to live, and the Soviet state was going to prevail. Not just over her immediate enemies, but over her original foes as well. The capitalist democracies.

  He took a cold, reptilian pleasure in letting his gaze fall on every man in the room who had reveled in his discomfiture of the previous weeks. For Malenkov he reserved a particularly chilling gaze and was rewarded when the oafish swine flitted his porcine eyes away anxiously. Beria could imagine the dread Malenkov was experiencing, as if the cold finger of a dead man had been laid at the base of the spine, making the heart lurch and the balls contract upward.

  Stalin strode in, looking disheveled and gaunt. Scraps of paper fell from the pockets of the uniform the marshal had affected ever since the fascists had attacked in 1941. Nobody dared meet his gaze. Even Beria thought it wise to examine the folder that lay on the table in front of him.

  He had one small item of bad news: a partisan attack on a convoy in Kamchatka that had killed a number of middle-ranking researchers. But such things were unfortunately commonplace across all of the republics. More importantly, he had good news from Project One. Given the extra time and a touch more encouragement from the NKVD, Professor Kurchatov’s team had succeeded beyond expectations.

  It was a happy day for Laventry Beria.

  By way of contrast, the defense minister and navy chief looked physically ill. As well they should. Okhotsk had been a disaster of the first order. Yumashev had assured them all that he possessed the resources to carry out the invasion and protect the beachhead. Now he was dead, luckily for him, and Kuznetsov would be forced to deliver the report, but Soviet maritime power, and its prestige in the East, had been comprehensively fucked. When Beria thought of the resources that had gone into the building program at Vladivostok—the millions of men and the staggering sums that had been spent so profligately to create a modern Pacific fleet, virtually from nothing—it was a disgrace. If just a fraction of those funds and a few hundred thousand of the laborers had been devoted to his projects, then he would not have had to suffer through the fear he had endured.

  “So, Admiral Kuznetsov,” Stalin said as he seated himself at the head of the table. “Tell me exactly how you failed.�
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  Stalin’s voice was quite low, almost inaudible. Beria noticed a few of the others straining forward to make out his exact words.

  The man for whom they were intended had no difficulty understanding their import, however. He blanched a sort of gray-green shade and began to babble about some sort of secret Japanese terror weapons, and possible interference by the Americans, possibly even by Kolhammer himself.

  While he spoke, Stalin used his fingertips to trace patterns on the polished wooden surface of the conference table. His pipe lay in front of him, but he never moved to fill it, or to light it.

  “All of our intelligence spoke of Yamamoto moving south to engage the Americans at the Marianas,” Kuznetsov said. “Our liaison staff in Washington and London confirmed the same. The Americans expected to meet him. They told us they were moving to engage him decisively. And these rocket bombs. These suicide attacks. Nobody had seen the like before—”

  “Rubbish!” Stalin shouted, smashing an open palm down onto the table so hard that a few drops of water sloshed out of Beria’s glass a good three meters away. “The Japanese have been using kamikaze attacks for months!”

  “But not with these sorts of planes,” Kuznetsov pleaded. “They were like the missiles we heard of, the ones that smashed the Americans at Midway. They were so fast, and since they were being piloted they were able to adjust course to avoid flak and to pick and choose their targets. If Spruance had encountered them without warning, the result would have been the same.”

  “Ah, but there you are wrong, aren’t you, Admiral,” Stalin said. “Because we now find out that Spruance has encountered them, and completely neutralized the threat. Something of which you have proven yourself incapable.”

  “But…no, I did not—”

  The supreme leader of the Soviet Union cut him off by slamming his hand into the table again, this time in a closed fist. “Enough! I have had enough excuses. Timoshenko, do you bring me excuses about the Western Front? Beria, what about you?”

  Beria did not want to let the defense minister escape by the agency of his success. He stared the man down.

  “We are stalled at the Oder,” Marshal Timoshenko said. “The fascists have created an impenetrable boundary with these nerve weapons. But in Southern Europe we progress. Our forces have overrun Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Albania. They have entered Greece and northern Italy, the southern regions of Austria, and fresh air assault divisions are being readied to jump into southern France. I can guarantee that within two weeks Vichy France will be ours. The Allies will hold the northern half of the country. I foresee a border that stretches probably from Belfort to La Rochelle. Italy will be cut off entirely. Switzerland can be neutralized.”

  Timoshenko’s delivery had been forceful and confident. Beria was grudgingly impressed. The man had somehow made a virtue of failure. For the inability to break through at the Oder was surely failure of the worst sort.

  Stalin, however, seemed mollified.

  “And Project One,” he said, turning to Beria. “I hope you have something positive to report. Have you finished the two bombs?”

  The NKVD chief couldn’t help himself. He smiled.

  “No. I have finished three.”

  D-DAY + 40. 13 JUNE 1944. 0629 HOURS.

  KORYAK RANGES, FAR EASTERN SIBERIA.

  The T5 was wearing off, but they had everything they needed to know.

  Ivanov finished writing up his report for the compressed data burst. The glow of his flexipad was the main source of the light in the fetid-smelling cave where they crouched. A couple of whale oil candles flickered farther down the narrow tunnel, filling the cramped space with dark smoke and a pungent aroma.

  “What will we do with them?” Vendulka asked.

  Ivanov shut down the flexipad’s word processor and dropped the file into a dispatch tray. Internal software agents began to encrypt and compact the long file, which comprised about five gigs of text, audio, and video images.

  He regarded the unconscious scientists with professional reserve. As was normal with interrogations carried out through the use of the T5 drug, he had accumulated a great number of irrelevant facts: details concerning their families, their hometowns, the menu at the Sharashka canteen where they ate. All of it useless.

  It did humanize them, however. They were no longer simply ciphers to be decoded. The younger one, Anatoly, was recently married. His mother and father had died of starvation during the collectivist period of the 1930s. His wife was pregnant. He hated the cabbage soup.

  The older one, Viktor, who had been injured in the ambush, had a secret stash of forbidden literature in his laboratory. He had a wife and five children, all of them grown. Three had died in the first year of the war. He liked the cabbage soup, as long as there was enough pepper to spice it up.

  “Kill them,” Ivanov said.

  Vendulka grimaced.

  “We cannot take them with us,” he said, refusing to allow her response to sway him. “We were lucky to get this far. If we want to get out with our skins intact, we have to move fast and light. Just the five of us.”

  “And the Chukchi?” she asked.

  “They came to fight the Bolsheviks.” He shrugged. “They don’t want to run away, and they think we are cowards for doing so. They will stay and delay the pursuers.”

  His flexipad beeped. The file was ready for transfer. He held it like a talisman.

  “They understand that we need to get this message out. That it will hurt the Stalinists if we do. That is enough for them.”

  Vendulka was clearly unconvinced. She was a medical officer, and it wasn’t within her nature to snuff out a life for the reason of simple convenience. Ivanov appreciated that part of her character. Even with all the shit they’d been through to survive the last two years, she had never become like him. A simple killer.

  He looked at the scientists.

  “Best you leave now, Vennie. They will not suffer.”

  Her eyes implored him to walk a different path, but he held her gaze without remorse. They lived because they had been careful.

  If Stalin or Beria found out they were behind so many of the rebellions that had flared up across the Soviet Union, he would think nothing of assigning a million men to hunt them down. It was only because they remained invisible that any of them still drew breath.

  He didn’t need to explain it to her. She wasn’t naïve, or willfully stupid. It was just that Vendulka Zemyatin had somehow maintained feelings for her fellow man, while Ivanov had not. It probably had more to do with the lives they had led on the other side of the Transition. Hers had been relatively clean and uncomplicated. His had been spent fighting the worst sort of scum.

  After Beslan he had never been the same.

  Vendulka sighed and removed herself.

  The scientists were still in a drug-addled stupor. They would not suffer, as he had promised.

  Ivanov took a small metal case from his backpack. He removed two syrettes of letha-barb and in turn jabbed each man in the neck. The life ran out of them like air leaking from an old tire.

  The Spetsnaz commando gathered up the rest of his gear and hurried back out toward the entrance of the cave. He had to crouch to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. A couple of clumps of bloodied scalp and hair attested to others who had not been so careful.

  The sun was up, pouring over the rugged peaks of the Koryak Ranges. Kicji was waiting for him, chewing on a strip of smoked reindeer meat. He offered a piece to Ivanov, along with a bladder full of soju, a Korean rice wine.

  “Thanks,” he said. It would do for breakfast. Probably for lunch, as well. “Any sign of the Bolsheviks?”

  He could hear the distant whine of jets and the mushy, dampened thud of rotor blades. The sounds were distorted as they echoed around inside the myriad gorges and defiles of the mountains.

  Kicji nodded, pointing to the northwest. “Three valleys over. Some of the Chukchi are fighting to draw them away.”

>   Ivanov nodded. He was surprised, though. He hadn’t arranged a diversion. Kicji had seemed to read his mind. For a wizened old man who looked like an evil charm that had fallen off a witch doctor’s wand, he was sharp.

  “The Chukchi decided this among themselves. Ten men stay behind. The rest might get away.”

  Ivanov mulled it over. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the taste of clean air in his nostrils. “They understand that they cannot come with us?”

  Kicji snorted. “They do not want to. They called you the blunderers. They say your footfall would bring down the side of a volcano, it is so heavy.”

  “Fine.” Ivanov shrugged. “We will separate this morning, then. After I have sent my message.”

  Kicji nodded, and left to inform the Chukchi. They were so well hidden in crevices, under hanging rocks, and inside the caves that riddled these mountains, Ivanov could not keep track of them. Good. It meant the NKVD would have the same problem.

  His own team, Vennie, Sergo, and Ahmed Khan, had huddled down to share some food and drink before the day’s march.

  Ivanov quickly unpacked his comm gear, setting up the pulse unit and its dish on a small collapsible tripod. He jacked in the flexipad and set the program to transmit an encrypted signal on wide-area datacast. The burst would travel outward in an arc for five thousand kilometers. He had no idea whether it would pass over a Fleetnet node, but he had to assume that Kolhammer had moved some assets into the area to take the feed.

  To be certain, he would repeat the process whenever possible until he received verification that the signal had been intercepted. It was a ham-fisted, inefficient method of communicating such important intelligence, but without satellite cover they had no choice.

  D-DAY + 40. 13 JUNE 1944. 0629 HOURS.

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

  So pleased was the Vozhd that he ordered breakfast served in the conference room. Even Admiral Kuznetsov looked more relaxed. It seemed that, today at least, he would benefit from Stalin’s capricious moods.

  The main table was littered with official papers and dossiers, with plates of half-eaten food, pots of coffee, and bottles of champagne. Beria used a glass spoon to scoop dollops of Beluga caviar onto hot buttered black bread. Stalin threw grapes and hunks of cheese down the table.