Designated Targets

At last, Stalin appeared and bade them both enter his sanctum. The Soviet leader’s office was a long, rectangular space, lined with heavy drapes but well ventilated, which it had to be because of the ornate Russian stoves that lined the walls. As winter closed in, the Vozhd was often found leaning up against one of the heaters, trying to unknot the muscles of his aching legs. For now, however, he strode right past them, making for the huge desk in the far right corner. Beria slid in behind him like a python. Malenkov, who was cursed with a pair of breeding hips like some enormous Georgian baba, waddled along like a goose, trying to keep up.

“You tested Khrushchev?” Stalin asked without preemption. “He confessed?”

Beria knew the question was directed at him. “Another miracle, comrade. He would have signed a statement saying he was Hitler’s mistress, if I’d asked. And we were right to imagine that the drug protected him from feeling even the harshest interrogation. Again, I believe I could have shot him in the genitals and he would not have flinched. At least not much.”

Stalin turned his flat, Asiatic glare on Beria. “A pity we did not discover this earlier. When we still had some of them to question.”

Malenkov grinned maliciously, but Beria was ready for the attack.

“We still have the woman. She is being transferred to a special hospital where her ‘inserts’ will be removed.”

“And she will survive?”

“I hope so.”

“Make sure she does,” growled Stalin, “or I will allow Malenkov here to fulfill his destiny. At least as it relates to you.”

Malenkov did not react for a full second, standing as he was, as still as a corpse. Then, just like a reanimated dead man, he brought up his little notebook and jotted down an entry in Comrade Stalin’s Instructions before closing it just as slowly.

Stalin managed a lopsided grin at the charade.

Beria fumed silently to himself. Your time will come, Melanya . . .

5

DEMIDENKO CENTRE, UKRAINE

It was revealing to see how well the SS and the NKVD worked together. Colonel Paul Brasch supposed he should not be surprised. They were cut from the same cloth. But still, four months earlier, you could not have found more implacable enemies. The hatred had been visceral, as though each existed simply to pursue the annihilation of the other.

Now, as he passed through the increasingly stringent subterranean checkpoints on his way to the mission control center, he was vetted by combined teams of German and Soviet security men. It wasn’t that they were friendly with one another. He knew that under different circumstances, each would draw his weapon and gun down his opposite number without a second thought. But having served in the vast slaughterhouse of the Eastern Front, and having seen the inhuman cruelty of that conflict up close, he was amazed at the passionless and efficient way in which the machinery of the two states could knit together so quickly. The Führerprinzip in action, or whatever they called it in Russia.

The unfinished complex was being hastily constructed with a massive workforce of slave labor. Again, the SS and the NKVD had cooperated well, each organization providing hundreds of thousands of bodies from their networks of prison camps. Both the scale of the project and the speed with which it had progressed impressed Brasch, an engineer with professional qualms about using slave labor for any kind of skilled work. Whatever his own misgivings, he had to admit that the twenty square miles of half-built factories, proving grounds, test labs, and barracks that made up the Demidenko Center were a marvel. It was as though Satan himself had passed a hand over the barren earth and simply conjured it up.

“We must hurry, Herr Colonel, or we will miss the rocket launch.”

Brasch smiled inwardly. His current SS shadow, Untersturmführer Gelder, was every bit as humorless and constipated on matters of military formality as his last minder, Herr Steckel, had been. However, he displayed none of Steckel’s awe concerning the Iron Cross that Brasch had won at the front, perhaps because Gelder carried his own scars and medals from that same nightmare, and was not so easily impressed.

They picked up their pace, the fall of their boot heels echoing down the long cinder-block corridor. The paint on the walls was still so fresh that Brasch thought it was probably wet. The work crews had not completed the job, an indication of how rushed everything had been. About two hundred meters from the solid steel door that led into the control room, the paint job ended abruptly, revealing naked concrete blocks. Brasch could see bloody handprints on some of them.