Final impact

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.”