by Ken Follett
When Volodya reached the headquarters building at the Khodynka airfield, he found the air full of greyish flakes that were not snow but ash. Red Army Intelligence was burning its records to prevent them falling into enemy hands.
Shortly after he arrived, Colonel Lemitov came into his office. ‘You sent a memo to London about a German physicist called Wilhelm Frunze. That was a very smart move. It turned out to be a great lead. Well done.’
What does it matter, Volodya thought? The Panzers were only a hundred miles away. It was too late for spies to help. But he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Frunze, yes. I was at school with him in Berlin.’
‘London contacted him and he is willing to talk. They met at a safe house.’ As Lemitov talked, he fiddled with his wristwatch. It was unusual for him to fidget. He was clearly tense. Everyone was tense.
Volodya said nothing. Obviously some information had come out of the meeting, otherwise Lemitov would not be talking about it.
‘London say that Frunze was wary at first, and suspected our man of belonging to the British secret police,’ Lemitov said with a smile. ‘In fact, after the initial meeting he went to Kensington Palace Gardens and knocked on the door of our embassy and demanded confirmation that our man was genuine!’
Volodya smiled. ‘A real amateur.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lemitov. ‘A disinformation decoy wouldn’t do anything so stupid.’
The Soviet Union was not finished yet, not quite; so Volodya had to carry on as if Willi Frunze mattered. ‘What did he give us, sir?’
‘He says he and his fellow scientists are collaborating with the Americans to make a super-bomb.’
Volodya, startled, recalled what Zoya Vorotsyntsev had told him. This confirmed her worst fears.
Lemitov went on: ‘There’s a problem with the information.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve translated it, but we still can’t understand a word.’ Lemitov handed Volodya a sheaf of typewritten sheets.
Volodya read a heading aloud. ‘Isotope separation by gaseous diffusion.’
‘You see what I mean.’
‘I did languages at university, not physics.’
‘But you once mentioned a physicist you know.’ Lemitov smiled. ‘A gorgeous blonde who declined to go to a movie with you, if I remember.’
Volodya blushed. He had told Kamen about Zoya, and Kamen must have repeated the gossip. The trouble with having a spy for a boss was that he knew everything. ‘She’s a family friend. She told me about an explosive process called fission. Do you want me to question her?’
‘Unofficially and informally. I don’t want to make a big thing of this until I understand it. Frunze may be a crackpot, and he could make us look foolish. Find out what the reports are about, and whether Frunze is making scientific sense. If he’s genuine, can the British and Americans really make a super-bomb? And the Germans too?’
‘I haven’t seen Zoya for two or three months.’
Lemitov shrugged. It did not really matter how well Volodya knew Zoya. In the Soviet Union, answering questions put by the authorities was never optional.
‘I’ll track her down.’
Lemitov nodded. ‘Do it today.’ He went out.
Volodya frowned thoughtfully. Zoya was sure the Americans were making a super-bomb, and she had been convincing enough to persuade Grigori to mention it to Stalin, but Stalin had scorned the idea. Now a spy in England was saying what Zoya had said. It looked as if she had been right. And Stalin had been wrong – again.
The leaders of the Soviet Union had a dangerous tendency to deny the truth of bad news. Only last week, an air reconnaissance mission had spotted German armoured vehicles just eighty miles from Moscow. The General Staff had refused to believe it until the sighting had been confirmed twice. Then they had ordered the reporting air officer to be arrested and tortured by the NKVD for ‘provocation’.
It was difficult to think long term when the Germans were so close, but the possibility of a bomb that could flatten Moscow could not be disregarded, even at this moment of extreme peril. If the Soviets beat the Germans, they might afterwards be attacked by Britain and America: something similar had happened after the 1914–18 war. Would the USSR find itself helpless against a capitalist-imperialist super-bomb?
Volodya detailed his assistant, Lieutenant Belov, to find out where Zoya was.
While waiting for the address Volodya studied Frunze’s reports, in the original English and in translation, memorizing what seemed to be key phrases, as he could not take the papers out of the building. At the end of an hour he understood enough to ask further questions.
Belov discovered that Zoya was not at the university, nor at the nearby apartment building for scientists. However, the building administrator told him that all the younger residents had been requested to help with the construction of new inner defences for the city, and gave him the location where Zoya was working.
Volodya put on his coat and went out.
He felt excited, but he was not sure whether that was on account of Zoya or the super-bomb. Maybe both.
He was able to get an army ZIS and driver.
Passing the Kazan station – for trains to the east – he saw what looked like a full-blown riot. It seemed that people could not get into the station, let alone board the trains. Affluent men and women were struggling to reach the entrance doors with their children and pets and suitcases and trunks. Volodya was shocked to see some of them punching and kicking one another shamelessly. A few policemen looked on, helpless: it would have taken an army to impose order.
Military drivers were normally taciturn, but this one was moved to comment. ‘Fucking cowards,’ he said. ‘Running away, leaving us to fight the Nazis. Look at them, in their fur fucking coats.’
Volodya was surprised. Criticism of the ruling elite was dangerous. Such remarks could cause a man to be denounced. Then he would spend a week or two in the basement of the NKVD’s headquarters in Lubyanka Square. He might come out crippled for life.
Volodya had an unnerving sense that the rigid system of hierarchy and deference that sustained Soviet Communism was beginning to weaken and disintegrate.
They found the barricade party just where the building administrator had predicted. Volodya got out of the car, told the driver to wait, and studied the work.
A main road was strewn with anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’. A hedgehog consisted of three pieces of steel railway track, each a yard long, welded together at their centres, forming an asterisk that stood on three feet and stuck three arms up. Apparently they wreaked havoc with caterpillar tracks.
Behind the hedgehog field an anti-tank ditch was being dug with pickaxes and shovels, and beyond that a sandbag wall was going up, with gaps for defenders to shoot through. A narrow zigzag path had been left between the obstacles so that the road could continue to be used by Muscovites until the Germans arrived.
Almost all the workers digging and building were women.
Volodya found Zoya beside a sand mountain, filling sacks with a shovel. For a minute he watched her from a distance. She wore a dirty coat, woollen mittens and felt boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back and covered with a colourless rag tied under her chin. Her face was smeared with mud, but she still looked sexy. She wielded the shovel in a steady rhythm, working efficiently. Then the supervisor blew a whistle and work stopped.
Zoya sat on a stack of sandbags and took from her coat pocket a small packet wrapped in newspaper. Volodya sat beside her and said: ‘You could have got exemption from this work.’
‘It’s my city,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I help to defend it?’
‘So you’re not fleeing to the east.’
‘I’m not running away from the motherfucking Nazis.’
Her vehemence surprised him. ‘Plenty of people are.’
‘I know. I thought you’d be long gone.’
‘You have a low opinion of me. You think I belong to a selfish elite.’
She shrugged.
‘Those who are able to save themselves generally do.’
‘Well, you’re wrong. All my family are still here in Moscow.’
‘Perhaps I misjudged you. Would you like a pancake?’ She opened her packet to reveal four pale-coloured patties wrapped in cabbage leaves. ‘Try one.’
He accepted and took a bite. It was not very tasty. ‘What is it?’
‘Potato peelings. You can get a bucketful free at the back door of any Party canteen or officers’ mess. You mince them small in the kitchen grinder, boil them until they’re soft, mix them with a little flour and milk, add salt if you’ve got any, and fry them in lard.’
‘I didn’t know you were so badly off,’ he said, feeling embarrassed. ‘You can always get a meal at our place, you know.’
‘Thank you. What brings you here?’
‘A question. What is isotope separation by gaseous diffusion?’
She stared at him. ‘Oh, my God – what’s happened?’
‘Nothing has happened. I’m simply trying to evaluate some dubious information.’
‘Are we building a fission bomb at last?’
Her reaction told him that the information from Frunze was probably sound. She had immediately understood the significance of what he’d said. ‘Please answer the question,’ Volodya said sternly. ‘Even though we’re friends, this is official business.’
‘Okay. Do you know what an isotope is?’
‘No.’
‘Some elements exist in slightly different forms. Carbon atoms, for example, always have six protons, but some have six neutrons and others have seven or eight. The different types are isotopes, called carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14.’
‘Simple enough, even for a student of languages,’ Volodya said. ‘Why is it important?’
‘Uranium has two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. In natural uranium the two are mixed up. But only U-235 is explosive.’
‘So we need to separate them.’
‘Gaseous diffusion would be one way, theoretically. When a gas is diffused through a membrane, the lighter molecules pass through faster, so the emerging gas is richer in the lower isotope. Of course I’ve never seen it done.’
Frunze’s report said that the British were building a gaseous diffusion plant in Wales, in the west of the United Kingdom. The Americans were also building one. ‘Would there be any other purpose for such a plant?’
She shook her head. ‘Figure the odds,’ she said. ‘Anyone who prioritizes this kind of process in wartime is either going crazy or building a weapon.’
Volodya saw a car approach the barricade and begin to negotiate the zigzag passage. It was a KIM-10, a small two-door car designed for affluent families. It had a top speed of sixty miles per hour, but this one was so overloaded it probably would not do forty.
A man in his sixties was at the wheel, wearing a hat and a Western-style cloth coat. Beside him was a young woman in a fur hat. The back seat of the car was piled with cardboard boxes. There was a piano strapped precariously to the roof.
This was clearly a senior member of the ruling elite trying to get out of town with his wife, or mistress, and as many of his valuables as he could take; the kind of person Zoya assumed Volodya to be, which was perhaps why she had declined to go out with him. He wondered if she might be revising her opinion of him.
One of the barricade volunteers moved a hedgehog in front of the KIM-10, and Volodya saw that there was going to be trouble.
The car inched forward until its bumper touched the hedgehog. Perhaps the driver thought he could nudge it out of the way. Several more women came closer to watch. The device was designed to resist being pushed out of the way. Its legs dug into the ground, jamming, and it stuck fast. There was a sound of bending metal as the car’s front bumper deformed. The driver put it in reverse and backed off.
He stuck his head out of the window and yelled: ‘Move that thing, right now!’ He sounded as if he was used to being obeyed.
The volunteer, a chunky middle-aged woman wearing a man’s checked cap, folded her arms. She shouted: ‘Move it yourself – deserter!’
The driver got out, red-faced with anger, and Volodya was surprised to recognize Colonel Bobrov, whom he had known in Spain. Bobrov had been famous for shooting his own men in the back of the head if they retreated. ‘No mercy for cowards’ had been his slogan. At Belchite, Volodya had personally seen him kill three International Brigade troops for retreating when they ran out of ammunition. Now Bobrov was in civilian clothes. Volodya wondered if he would shoot the woman who had blocked his way.
Bobrov walked to the front of the car and took hold of the hedgehog. It was heavier than he had expected, but with an effort he was able to drag it out of the way.
As he was walking back to his car, the woman in the cap replaced the hedgehog in front of the car.
The other volunteers were now crowding around, watching the confrontation, grinning and making jokes.
Bobrov walked up to the woman, taking from his coat pocket an identification card. ‘I am General Bobrov!’ he said. He must have been promoted since returning from Spain. ‘Let me pass!’
‘You call yourself a soldier?’ the woman sneered. ‘Why aren’t you fighting?’
Bobrov flushed. He knew her contempt was justified. Volodya wondered if the brutal old soldier had been talked into fleeing by his younger wife.
‘I call you a traitor,’ said the volunteer in the cap. ‘Trying to run away with your piano and your young tart.’ Then she knocked his hat off.
Volodya was flabbergasted. He had never seen such defiance of authority in the Soviet Union. Back in Berlin, before the Nazis came to power, he had been surprised by the sight of ordinary Germans fearlessly arguing with police officers; but it did not happen here.
The crowd of women cheered.
Bobrov still had short-cropped white hair all over his head. He looked at his hat as it rolled across the wet road. He took one step in pursuit, then thought better of it.
Volodya was not tempted to intervene. There was nothing he could do against the mob, and anyway he had no sympathy for Bobrov. It seemed just that Bobrov should be treated with the brutality he had always shown to others.
Another volunteer, an older woman wrapped in a filthy blanket, opened the car’s trunk. ‘Look at all this!’ she said. The trunk was full of leather luggage. She pulled out a suitcase and thumbed its catches. The lid came open, and the contents fell out: lacy underwear, linen petticoats and nightdresses, silk stockings and camisoles, all obviously made in the West, finer than anything ordinary Russian women ever saw, let alone bought. The filmy garments dropped into the filthy slush of the street and stuck there like petals on a dunghill.
Some of the women started to pick them up. Others seized more suitcases. Bobrov ran to the back of his car and started to shove the women away. This was turning very nasty, Volodya thought. Bobrov probably carried a gun, and he would draw it any second now. But then the woman in the blanket lifted a spade and hit Bobrov hard over the head. A woman who could dig a trench with a spade was no weakling, and the blow made a sickeningly loud thud as it connected. The general fell to the ground, and the woman kicked him.
The young mistress got out of the car.
The woman in the cap shouted: ‘Coming to help us dig?’ and the others laughed.
The general’s girlfriend, who looked about thirty, put her head down and walked back along the road the way the car had come. The volunteer in the checked cap shoved her, but she dodged between the hedgehogs and started to run. The volunteer ran after her. The mistress was wearing tan suede shoes with a high heel, and she slipped in the wet and fell down. Her fur hat came off. She struggled to her feet and started to run again. The volunteer went after the hat, letting the mistress go.
All the suitcases now lay open around the abandoned car. The workers pulled the boxes from the back seat and turned them upside down, emptying the contents on to the road. Cutlery spilled out, china broke, and glassware smashed. Embroider
ed bedsheets and white towels were dragged through the slush. A dozen pretty pairs of shoes were scattered across the tarmac.
Bobrov got to his knees and tried to stand. The woman in the blanket hit him with the spade again. Bobrov collapsed on the ground. She unbuttoned Bobrov’s fine wool coat and tried to pull it off him. Bobrov struggled, resisting. The woman became furious and hit Bobrov again and again until he lay still, his cropped white head covered with blood. Then she discarded her old blanket and put Bobrov’s coat on.
Volodya walked across to Bobrov’s unmoving body. The eyes stared lifelessly. Volodya knelt down and checked for breathing, a heartbeat or a pulse. There was none. The man was dead.
‘No mercy for cowards,’ Volodya said; but he closed Bobrov’s eyes.
Some of the women unstrapped the piano. The instrument slid off the car roof and hit the ground with a discordant clang. They began gleefully to smash it up with picks and shovels. Others were quarrelling over the scattered valuables, snatching up the cutlery, bundling the bedsheets, tearing the fine underwear as they struggled for possession. Fights broke out. A china teapot came flying through the air and just missed Zoya’s head.
Volodya hurried back to her. ‘This is developing into a full-scale riot,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an army car and a driver. I’ll get you out of here.’
She hesitated only for a second. ‘Thanks,’ she said; and they ran to the car, jumped in, and drove away.
(ii)
Erik von Ulrich’s faith in the Führer was vindicated by the invasion of the Soviet Union. As the German armies raced across the vastness of Russia, sweeping the Red Army aside like chaff, Erik rejoiced in the strategic brilliance of the leader to whom he had given his allegiance.
Not that it was easy. During rainy October the countryside had been a mud bath: they called it the rasputitsa, the time of no roads. Erik’s ambulance had ploughed through a quagmire. A wave of mud built up in front of the vehicle, gradually slowing it, until he and Hermann had to get out and clear it away with shovels before they could drive any farther. It was the same for the entire German army, and the dash for Moscow had slowed to a crawl. Furthermore, the swamped roads meant that supply trucks never caught up. The army was low on ammunition, fuel and food, and Erik’s unit was dangerously short of drugs and other medical necessities.