"Prime Minister, you cannot give up hope," he insisted. "They surprised us with the landings in Queensland because it was insanity. They lost half their troops just getting ashore, a disaster by anyone's measure. And yes, they've rolled over dozens of small towns, but as soon as they hit MacArthur's defensive line, they stopped dead-literally. They have no chance of reaching our main population or production centers. They're terrified to the point of impotence of engaging with Spruance's fleet because of the Havoc and the Kandahar's battle group.
"Yamamoto is like a drowning man desperately grabbing at anything to stay afloat. He-will-lose."
Curtin's tired, watery eyes glared defiantly up at him over the rims of his glasses. "Then what are they doing here?"
4
MOSCOW, USSR
The killer was well known, at least to his most important victims. Blokhin was the man's name. He had served under the Tsar in the Great War, but had switched his loyalties to Lenin's Bolsheviks by the early 1920s. He had been a secret policeman ever since, rising to head the Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department, a rather bloodless title for the lord high executioner of the Soviet Union.
Nikita Khrushchev, who would now never become the Communist Party leader, groaned as the heavy iron door swung open and Blokhin entered the room. Through the sweat and blood that clouded the vision in his one good eye, he could make out the hem of the leather butcher's apron that was nearly as legendary as the ogre who wore it. It was said to be so heavily stained with the blood of the thousands of Polish officers Blokhin had personally executed at Katyn that it could never be cleaned. There was probably more life in that filthy tunic than remained in Khrushchev's entire broken body.
Blokhin spoke to a couple of NKVD guards, his flat, Slavic features hardly moving as he did so. The pair stomped over to where Khrushchev lay on the cold concrete floor and pinned him beneath their boots. The agony of their hobnails grinding into his already tortured flesh and broken bones summoned up screams the former Politburo magnate had not thought he would be able to voice. His throat was already raw from what seemed like a lifetime of screaming.
He was dimly aware of Blokhin's heavyset form as it advanced on him, and for one irrational moment he wondered if he might have lived had Stalin agreed to liquidate the executioner, as Beria-the head of the NKVD-had once desired.
But that was madness. The Soviet Union had no shortage of executioners.
After all, Yezhov-that poison dwarf-had tortured and killed unknowable numbers of enemies, only to be killed in turn by Beria. He had died begging and screaming and thrashing against his fate, and all Khrushchev had left was a determination that he would not go out like that. He knew there was no return from this very special section of Lubianka. Best then to consign his shattered carcass to the release of death with what little dignity he could muster.
Naked, covered in his own filth, nearly toothless, his face a bruised ruin, one eye gouged out, nubs of broken bone poking through torn flesh at half a dozen places on his body-the very concept of dignity was ludicrous. But he would not beg for his life. He would-
A small sting in his neck. He wouldn't have noticed it amid the blizzard of pain, were it not for the fact that Blokhin had grabbed one of his torn ears just before he jabbed the needle in. This was unexpected. Death by injection. It was not standard. It was…
A trickle of soft, indescribably sweet pleasure. No, it wasn't that, either. It was… an absence of pain. It spread from the site of the small sting, flowing down his spine and out along his thin, scabrous arms and legs. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Even his mind, which had been as badly abused as his body, found itself floating on a summer breeze, drifting away from the horrors of his torture. The beatings remained in his memory, but now he felt so disconnected from them that they were as easily endured as the thousands of beatings and murders he himself had ordered over the years. Other people's misery, he'd learned, was a much lighter burden than one's own.
Even when the guard flipped him over roughly, so that his skull hit the floor with a crack and the glare of the cell's naked lightbulb shone into his dying eye, he did not care.
"So, Nikita Sergeyevich, you have lost weight. The regimen here agrees with you, da?" That was a new voice. A familiar one.
Khrushchev blinked the tears from his eye. He tried to wipe them away, forgetting his broken fingers, but the guards still pinned him to the cold floor. Each crushed a wrist beneath one boot, and they held long rubber truncheons in their hands. He didn't care. They could do as they pleased. It's a free country. The thought made him chuckle in spite of himself.
"Is there something funny, my friend. Why do you laugh so?"
Khrushchev coughed up clots of dark blood and a few broken pieces of his teeth as he regarded his latest visitor across a gulf he could not fathom. Beria stood there like a snake in human form. He had stepped from behind Blokhin, appearing without warning.
His former friend, now chief tormentor, wore a general's uniform and carried a small cosh. Khrushchev recognized it from previous beatings. Early on, in this new phase of their relationship, he had repeatedly wet himself when it had appeared in Beria's thin, white hands. Now it was just a curious artifact. He didn't even flinch when the NKVD boss took three long strides toward him and bent down to smash him across the jaw with it. An awareness of blinding pain flashed through his thoughts, but at no stage did it connect with his concerns. Then the pain faded, and he did not care that it had been visited upon him.
Nikita Khrushchev, despite the fact that he was teetering on the edge of mortal existence, found himself fascinated. What on earth were they doing to him?
Beria just smiled. "I can see that you are intrigued, comrade. But before I can satisfy your curiosity, I wonder, would you mind signing this confession for me? I know it has been a matter of some difficulty between us. But I thought I might seek your indulgence one last time. The Vozhd is pressing me for a resolution. You understand, my friend."
Khrushchev did. After all, they had known each other for years. A few years anyway, which counted for something in the charnel house known as the Soviet Union. It was Beria who had warned him off his friendship with Yezhov, just before the perverted little monster had been snatched up and fed into the meat grinder. Why, that made him closer to the NKVD chief than poor Blokhin over there, who had once served loyally under Yezhov, and nearly died for it.
As Beria squatted beside him and motioned for one of the guards to step off Khrushchev's arm, the fallen Communist felt something that was akin to love well up within his breast. It was suddenly very important that he make a gesture of good faith for his old friend.
What did it matter what had passed between them? He didn't care that he had been made to lie in his own excrement while Blokhin and Beria beat him on the soles of his feet with iron bars. He did not care that they had tied him to a chair and beaten his legs until they were black masses, then returned to beat the bruises so that it felt like boiled water had been poured over them. It was no longer even a concern that Beria had gouged out his eye with a gloved thumb, and then crushed the ruined eyeball as it hung on his cheek.
He didn't shudder as he recalled the memory. He had seen worse, and had ordered worse things done.
"What is it I'm to sign?" he croaked.
"You forget?" asked Beria. He seemed disappointed. "It is your confession. That you worked as a German agent to undermine the defense of the Southwestern Front."
Khrushchev's thoughts moved as slowly through his mind as a child's balloon in the air of a hot summer's day. He recalled the rout and encirclement at Kharkov only dimly. It was from his past life. Before Lubianka.
"I do not remember so well, Lavrenty Pavlovich," he confessed. "But I am quite certain I was not a German agent."
Beria smiled, a gesture that fell on Khrushchev like a shaft of spring sunlight. "It matters not. Will you do me this favor anyway? Will you sign this for me? For the Vozhd?"
Sinking dee
per into narcotic lassitude, Khrushchev was ashamed of himself for quibbling. With a great effort he took the confession in the broken claw of his free hand. The weight suddenly came off his other arm, and a fountain pen appeared. He could not concentrate sufficiently to read the document, but he had seen enough of them over the years. He knew it mattered not.
His signature was barely legible, and he smeared blood on the paper.
A dreamy, almost happy indolence had taken hold of Khrushchev.
"Fascinating," Beria said quietly as he turned to leave.
Khrushchev felt himself forever tottering on the edge of blessed sleep, but he never quite tumbled over. With a great effort he managed to rouse himself to speak. "Tell me, Lavrenty Pavlovich," he croaked at Beria's retreating back. "When your time comes, will you be able to withstand the pain?"
The NKVD chief stopped and turned, regarded Khrushchev with the flat curiosity of a viper sizing up a small meal. "This is my time," he replied. "It has already come."
Blokhin moved to bar the door, and the two guards hoisted Khrushchev up by the arms. He knew without being told what was about to happen. He would be taken from the cell and placed in a Black Crow, driven a short distance to the killing house in Varsonofyevsky Lane and into the courtyard where stood a low, square building. The floor was concrete, just like his cell. It sloped down slightly toward one wall constructed of thick wooden logs. Taps and hoses were provided to wash away the blood. He would be placed against the wall and shot in the back of the head by Blokhin, who personally undertook the most important executions. Then his body would be placed in a metal box and driven to a nearby crematorium. Most likely his ashes would later be dumped in the mass grave at the Donskoi Cemetery.
He didn't care. Nothing mattered any longer. Not Stalin. Not Beria. Certainly not the Party or the revolution, or the tens of thousands he had sent to be killed by men like Blokhin. As they dragged him down the narrow, damp corridor he could raise neither self-pity nor hope, anger nor terror. Nothing really interested him.
Not even the odd sight of a woman in a naval uniform with a British insigne sewn onto the shoulder. She was being dragged, unconscious, out of a cell three doors down from his. At first he thought the woman had been beaten black and blue like him, but then he realized she was dark-skinned. However, her swollen, battered face did testify to a number of savage assaults, such as he had endured.
He supposed he should have wondered at her presence. What with everything that had happened. But the closest he came to curiosity was a very brief, almost preconscious moment of trying to recall what the letters HMS stood for in the name HMS Vanguard. He read that on a small cloth tag on her uniform as they passed. It reminded him vaguely of the initials VMN, standing for the "Highest Measure of Punishment." Somewhere in Lubianka there was a file with those letters written next to his name, probably in Stalin's own hand.
By the time the executioner fired a single round into the back of his head half an hour later, Nikita Khrushchev had forgotten all about her.
Natalya found her father in a remarkably good mood for a change. She could not tell him, for to voice her fears would be horribly unpatriotic, but she had been very worried about him. He had lost so much weight in the months after the Nazis invaded that sometimes, coming upon him by surprise in their bare, small four-room apartment, she didn't recognize him for a second. Not until his haunted, sunken eyes lit upon her. Then they lost that hooded darkness and became the same kind, honey-gold color that she remembered from so many happy days at the dacha, or friendly meals here in their modest apartment.
Papochka was teasing her again, flicking orange peels into her soup bowl, laughing as she squealed in delight. It was a game he often played, one she remembered from the earliest days of her life. He was wont to flick whole scoops of ice cream at her sometimes, even when her friends were at dinner. If fact, especially when her friends visited. He seemed to revel in the embarrassment his childish behavior caused her. But even blushing furiously and wishing he would not tease poor Martha so, she could not help but love him. The same way she adored his hugs and kisses, even though his mustache bristle scratched her skin, and he always smelled of foul tobacco.
He had been so kind since mother died. As she grew into her teenage years, Natalya came to understand how hard that time must have been for him, with so many responsibilities to take him away from the family.
"Papochka, will we have a holiday this year?" she asked.
Her father waved over their housekeeper, Valechka, to clear away the dishes. "You do not like it here?" he mocked his daughter gently. "You would have me send you away again?"
"No, but we have not been on holiday since the war started. And you have sent all of my books away. The apartment is very dark, and it always feels so empty. Can't we go to the seaside, like we used to? The fascists have gone, haven't they?"
"Da, my little sparrow," he said, suddenly looking tired again. "They have gone, but they will come back again. And you would want your papochka to be ready for that, wouldn't you? We must all be ready for them."
Natalya was reaching the age when she would soon be able to fight, just like her brother-well, hopefully better than her brother, who was a hopeless lout and a drunk, from all she'd heard. But she knew better than to broach that subject with her father. Since the news of the miracles, he swung between periods of black depression and unrestrained bouts of fevered joy. She worried that it was another symptom of his weariness with the war. He had even turned his legendary temper on her once, storming into the apartment one evening, slapping the homework from her hands, and shaking her violently, shouting, "What were you thinking? What were you thinking, you stupid little girl?"
She had no idea what he was talking about, but the outburst terrified her. So many of their friends and relatives had disappeared that she feared she may have said something irresponsible or ill-considered, something that might have been overheard by a zealous informer. Her father's rage seemed tainted with a fear that she had never known before, and like the little girl she had once been, she found her parent's terror infectious. Within minutes, she was shaking and blubbering and begging him to tell her what she'd done. The fire had gone out of his eyes immediately, and he'd collapsed into a chair, awkwardly pulling her down with him, onto his lap, where she had sat for so many hours as a child. He'd held her tightly to him, wiping her hot tears away.
They had never spoken of the incident again.
Her father's eyes clouded over now as he spoke about the Germans, and she wished she hadn't mentioned them. He held a piece of black bread in his hands, which he had probably been meaning to throw into her soup. Now it seemed forgotten.
"I received a very good mark for my essay on The Lower Depths," she ventured, but his mind was gone from the room.
A phone rang, and was answered by Valechka. She said a few words and hung up. "They have called for you," the housekeeper reported.
Natalya's father nodded, and the change came over him. He stood up, patted her on the head, and apologized for leaving before dinner was over. "I have important work," he explained, and he shrugged.
"I know, Papochka," she said. "Do not worry about me. I shall help clean up, and then I shall study my Gorky some more."
Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, pushed back his chair and smiled absently. "I sometimes miss Gorky," he said. "He was a great loss. Study hard, Natalya. You will have to make your way alone in this world when I am gone."
He shrugged on a heavy trench coat and walked out of the apartment.
The office was located in the same building as Stalin's apartment, in the old Senate building, sometimes called the Yellow Palace. In the time line from which the Multinational Force had arrived, it remained the center of Russian power. The Cabinet still met there, where the Politburo had reigned. Presidents Putin and Dery had both governed from the same building; Putin's chief of staff and Dery's national security adviser actual
ly working at the same desk in the same converted corridor that had once housed Stalin.
Beria was privy to all this information. As were Malenkov, Poskrebyshev, and, of course, Stalin himself. The researchers who had compiled the data from the Vanguard's computers also knew, of course. Or rather, they had known. They were all dead now.
As Beria waited in the anteroom, he wondered idly at his own fate. The air between him and Malenkov, who sat in another armchair as far away as possible, was frozen with malice. It was a fact that Malenkov would betray him, conspiring with Khrushchev and Molotov to charge him with anti-state activities. Beria would have been executed in 1953.
Well, Khrushchev was no longer an issue, and before long, Malenkov and Molotov would join him. Just as soon as Beria could convince the Vozhd to lift his halt on the great purges that had consumed the state since the discovery of the British vessel. It was like 1937 all over again. No, it was worse. Because now there was real evidence. And all that evidence pointed to a great tumor of fear and paranoia feeding on itself. It seemed sometimes, from the electronic files they'd found, that apart from maybe half a dozen stalwarts, there was nobody in this damned traitors' nest of a country who wouldn't turn on them, given half a chance.
Even Stalin's closest family.
Beria's face was a cast-iron mask, but his gut burned with acid at the memory of that discovery. What a dark day that had been, discovering Natalya's "memoirs." What an ocean of blood had been spilled to cover them over.
Malenkov, he noted with bleak satisfaction, appeared to be no more comfortable than he. The fat faggot looked even more like a weeping wheel of cheese than normal. Like an old woman with her rosaries, he fingered that stupid little notebook that was labeled Comrade Stalin's Instructions. Beria cracked open an icy smile for him, and was rewarded amply when Malenkov blanched.
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