Designated Targets

Stalin placed his empty drinking glass on a silver coaster and leaned forward to pick up the model again.

The NKVD had retrieved it from the Vanguard. It was a model of the ship that had materialized at the edge of the Siberian ice pack. A beautiful weapon; unusual, with its three hulls and featureless deck, but deadly looking nonetheless. Like an assassin’s dagger. How strange that it had arrived a whole day before the Pacific Emergence.

Stalin wished for just a moment that the burdens of state didn’t have to lie so heavily on his shoulders. He would have loved to make the journey to the special facilities that were being constructed around the ship, just to see it with his own eyes. But such things were not possible.

Then he snorted in amusement. Was there anything that could be called impossible nowadays?

“Vozhd?” his secretary asked. “Something amuses you?”

“Life amuses me, Poskrebyshev. Life, and everything about it. Tell me, are they here yet?”

“Yes. They are waiting outside.”

“Well, bring them in, bring them in.”

Poskrebyshev carried his narrow-shouldered, slightly hunched frame out of the room. He’d never really been the same since the NKVD had executed his wife. He had an impressively ugly countenance, which Stalin admired because it frightened visitors who came to the Little Corner. That countenance wore a perpetual scowl.

He reappeared, with Beria and Molotov in tow. The secret policeman seemed as chipper as ever, which was to say not at all, but at least relentless morbidity was his natural state of being. Molotov, like everyone in high office these days, looked as though the executioner stalked his every move.

They sat in hard wooden chairs in front of Stalin’s desk. He spoke first to Molotov. “So, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich, we have acceded to the fascists’ request for assistance on this one little matter, and I can see that you are still not happy.”

“I doubt the British will see it as such a trifle,” said Molotov. “They are rather fond of Churchill, and will not appreciate the fact that we have helped the fascists to kill him.”

“Yet our involvement is quite deniable,” said Beria. “Our man should be able to get himself out to Ireland, and then home when he is done.”

Stalin, like his foreign minister, still was not sure.

Britain had come close to declaring war on Russia when he’d impounded the ships of convoy PQ 17 at Murmansk, just before signing the cease-fire with Germany. Their anger was quite reasonable, he admitted. With one backhanded sweep, he had done more to damage the Royal Navy than Hitler’s oafish admirals had managed in two and a half years.

The vessels were still there: thirty-five merchantmen and their escorts, including four destroyers, ten corvettes, two antiaircraft auxiliaries, and four cruisers. He had been scrupulously fair, refusing every German entreaty to turn the ships over to the Kriegsmarine. And the crews were being held in relative comfort, given the deprivations of wartime Russia.

But it was important that he maintain the facade of neutrality, and that meant detaining the combatants. The matériel in the holds of the ships had always been meant for his country, so he kept the hundreds of tanks and bombers, the thousands of trucks and other cargo. The trucks, in particular, had been very useful, when it became obvious that the Vanguard could not be moved. He stroked the model of the trihulled warship.

The Nazis, with their pathetic attempt to deceive him with the Demidenko project, would have fainted dead away if they could see what Kaganovich and Zhdanov had built around the Vanguard. Well, they would know soon enough. His country might be poor, but it was still a giant, and vast amounts of her resources were now being directed to exploiting the windfall of the Vanguard. If he could just keep the fascists and the capitalist gangsters at war with each other, and away from his own jugular for a little while longer, he would soon be able to strike at them both, and set history right.

The Nazis dismal efforts at maskirovka would come back to haunt them, for while it was true that Demidenko was draining much-needed men and matériel from his real efforts, it was also costing Hitler and Himmler an unknowable amount of treasure to maintain the facade of rapprochement. And his Soviet engineers were ingenious enough to quietly learn enough from the “mistakes” at Demidenko to advance the Vanguard project all the much more quickly. If only they’d been able to take and keep more of the crew alive . . .

But as dialectical materialists, they would work with what was, not what he might wish to be.

“All right, Beria,” said Stalin. “Your man is cleared to help the fascists, but there must be no way of tracing our involvement. Do you understand?”

“I will take all necessary measures,” Beria replied.

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

“They’re coming,” said Halabi.