Final impact

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.