Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  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 actually 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 compil
ed 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.

  It was getting late, which meant that Stalin would soon arrive at the Little Corner to begin work. He lived nocturnally, and had done so for years. It didn’t bother Beria. As a secret policeman, he preferred the darkness. He considered opening his flexipad and doing some file work, but neither he nor Malenkov had moved since they’d arrived, and it seemed as if to do so now would be to give away an important advantage. So Lavrenty Beria sat in the funereal waiting room, with its shoulder-high dark wood panels, its polished floors and dreary drapes, its worn red and green carpets and, of course, its guardian, the unchanging Poskrebyshev, sitting at his immaculate desk, scratching at papers with his fountain pen.

  Beria wondered if it was significant that Stalin’s secretary did not have a flexipad. They were precious instruments, rare and valued, not just for their near magical powers, but for the status they conferred on those chosen few who were authorized to possess them.

  Stalin had three, but he almost never used them. He still carried his most important documents around wrapped up in newspaper, and filled his pockets with scraps of paper covered in crayon scrawl—everything from the number of T-34s produced last month to the latest results of the never-ending search for traitors, and they pored through the enormous library of the British warship.

  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.

  Four guards stood at the doorway: two Germans, two Soviets. The latter had the primitive features of Mongols, causing Brasch an uncomfortable, momentary flashback. He had been all but overrun by a human wave of such men near Belgorod. Pins and needles ran up his back and neck as they checked his pass.

  He noted with some amusement that two pink spots of high color had come out on Gelder’s Aryan features at having to submit to inspection by the subhumans.

  “What a world we live in these days, eh, Gelder?” he said, smiling conspiratorially.

  The SS lieutenan
t took Brasch’s comment as an indication of sympathy and shook his head. “Best not to speak of it,” he cautioned, nodding at the Communist pair.

  The check complete, the senior SS guard, a slab-shouldered Unterscharführer, or sergeant, clicked his jackboots together and snapped out a Nazi salute. Brasch’s reply was as enthusiastic as Gelder’s, although for a very different reason. He was merely enjoying the discomfort that appeared now on the faces of the Mongol warriors. You have to take your fun where you can find it in the Demidenko Center, he mused.

  The sergeant spun a large iron wheel mounted at the center of the blast door, reminding Brasch of the hatches on the submarine that had brought him back from Hashirajima. The two officers stepped through into a much shorter concrete passageway, also unpainted, which veered off at right angles after a few meters. They could hear the voices of the technicians bouncing off bare walls. The door closed behind them with a solid crash, and they continued on without delay, marching through a series of switchbacks before emerging into the main chamber of the blockhouse.

  They were in a large room staffed by nearly fifty men and even a few women. All of the females were Soviet scientists. The German rocket program was not such an equal-opportunity employer. The bustle and excitement, the lack of interest in their arrival, and the countdown that appeared on a large alphanumeric clock all pointed to an imminent launch.

  Brasch watched Gelder stiffen noticeably as he caught sight of the official party that stood in the far corner of the room. Three NKVD generals and a handful of SS officers were gathered around the diminutive figure of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Even Brasch tightened up somewhat. Before the Emergence, Himmler had been an almost mythical figure. With the terrible purges of the last few months, that aura had grown even more powerful. Indeed, he was the führer’s most frightening weapon: a one-man Vergeltungswaffe, protecting Hitler from those thousands of enemies who had been unmasked through information contained within the files of the future-ships.