The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  “And,” he added morosely, “it would also have a severe effect on the development of the aircraft required for delivery.”

  It was as he had feared.

  “The other option?” he asked.

  Zhdanov shuffled his papers again. “The possibility of stealing the material required has been thoroughly investigated. The trains the Americans use to carry their refined uranium from the plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Los Alamos are not heavily guarded. The actual theft could probably be accomplished by one of our partisan bands without too much trouble. Getting it and them back home might be difficult, and the political consequences of exposure would undoubtedly be grave. But these problems can be overcome.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, “there is another which cannot be. Each train carries only enough atomic material for the making of, at most, two bombs. For us to have anything less than thirty would be worse than useless. The Americans would not take us seriously. We could hardly hope to hold up fifteen trains.”

  Zhdanov turned to look at Stalin for the first time, but the General Secretary’s face held a strange expression, almost a quizzical smile. He was in fact remembering a train holdup he’d organized forty years before, in the days of the Georgian armed bands. One hundred thousand rubles had been the prize, but the denominations of the bills had been so large that anyone who’d tried to cash one had been instantly arrested. Those were simpler days.

  “Thank you, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said perfunctorily. “Has anyone anything positive to suggest?”

  He was answered with a stony silence.

  “So we cannot make it, and we cannot steal it,” Stalin said softly. “But make no mistake, we must have it. The alternative is at least five years during which the capitalist world will have the power of life and death over us. I refuse to accept that we shall win this war only to lose the peace. From this moment an atomic bomb is First Priority.

  “You” – he looked straight at Zhdanov – “will solve the unsolvable.”

  Anatoly Sheslakov thought to himself that it had been all very dramatic, but not very logical. If it was unsolvable, it couldn’t be solved; if it could be solved, it was not unsolvable. The word game did not help very much. But he had appreciated the seriousness of the situation since two that morning, when everyone in the Atomic Division had been summoned from their beds and harangued by a white-faced Zhdanov.

  Sheslakov leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and watched the people walking past his door. He left it open for the occasional glimpse offered of Zhdanov’s secretary, Tania, she of the wonderfully erect stance and lovely ankles. He harboured no amorous ambitions – in fact her personality rather grated on him – but he loved watching her; she had that physical arrogance of youth which he, and indeed his much-loved wife, had long ago lost.

  He was approaching fifty, and most of his face bore the signs of his age. The eyes though were still bright and sharp, evidence of the undimmed intellect behind them. People had often said of him, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, that he had the perfect planner’s brain, an ability to juggle an almost infinite array of variables into patterns of breathtaking simplicity that was matched only by his lack of imagination. He always replied that imagination was only the ability to stretch logic beyond what seemed, to lesser mortals, logical.

  He had been twenty at the time of the Revolution, and had joined the Red Army in a fit of enthusiasm that he still found hard to explain. But it had paid dividends. His brilliance had outweighed his late arrival in the Party, and soon he was a commissar on the way up. After the Revolution he’d risen through the ranks of the state planning organs, prospering as they did with the adoption of a fully planned economy in the late twenties. The purges of the following decade decimated his colleagues but Sheslakov always survived; he had too good a brain for the Party to waste, too austere a brain for the Party leadership to feel threatened. He was a political neuter, a problem solver whose only demand of authority was that it should provide him with an endless supply of interesting problems. The outbreak of war and his assignment to the GRU and Atomic Division had changed the nature of the problems but not, fortunately, the scope they offered to his talents.

  The First Priority was clearly a case in point. Sheslakov had all the relevant information – the military reports, espionage reports, industrial reports, scientific reports – scattered across his desk. Most of what they contained was now filed in his brain. He could see no reason to dispute Stalin’s statement that they could neither make nor steal enough atomic bombs, but his intuition insisted that this was one riddle that had an answer. And intuition, he had always thought, was nothing more than logic making use of facts that were stored in the unconscious.

  He lit another cigarette and closed his eyes. What were the arguments against the theft? He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, in neat capitals, “NOT ENOUGH CAN BE STOLEN.” Not enough for what? For a possible war against the Americans? No, for deterring the Americans from starting such a war. The Americans would know how much of the Uranium-235 had been stolen, and consequently how many bombs could be made. A dead end, it had to be. So why didn’t it feel like one? He could see no hidden assumptions. There had to be something else.

  Sheslakov spent the rest of the afternoon attacking the problem from the other end, checking through the reports covering a possible acceleration of the Soviet program. He could find no hopes there. Feeling, for him, unusually frustrated, he ate dinner in the GRU canteen and went for a walk along the river. It was a warm evening for early May, the sky clear after the day’s spring showers, and he surrendered himself to pleasant reveries, secure in the knowledge that parts of his mind were still carefully sifting through the problem.

  It was just after eight when, sitting on an old capstan and staring across the water at a factory gutted by a German bomb, he found the hidden assumption he’d been searching for. And in the seconds that followed the pieces of an answer seemed to slip into each other like the parts of a matryoshka doll.

  He lit a cigarette and sat for a few moments more watching the evening shadows lengthen. Then he walked briskly back to Frunze Street, collected a bottle from his office, and took the elevator back down to the floor that housed the GRU Secretariat. As expected, he found Olgarkov still at his desk, a mountain of a man surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. Seeing the bottle, Olgarkov produced two glasses from a drawer with a magician’s flourish.

  They drank each other’s health and Sheslakov sank into the sofa beneath the window.

  “Two things, Pyotr Alexeyevich,” he said.

  “First Priority, I assume.”

  “Word spreads fast.”

  “Words like those do.”

  “One, I want a report from Rosa, in Washington, as quickly as possible.” He dictated the questions he wanted answered. “How long?”

  “It will have to come out through Alaska,” Olgarkov replied. “A week, perhaps ten days.”

  “That’s quick enough. The other half won’t be so easy. I want a man with experience in covert operations and the sort of loyalty rating that Comrade Beria would envy. Plus, he must be completely fluent in American English.”

  “And you need him tomorrow, I assume.”

  “Of course.”

  Olgarkov examined the bottom of his glass, then looked up. “Is the NKVD cooperating?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Then I know one possibility,” he said, holding out his glass.

  After making the drop, the pilot wiggled his wings in farewell and disappeared over the trees.

  “What the fuck do they think we’re doing out here?” Kuznetsky shouted angrily, kicking the half-open crate. “Holding nonstop parties?”

  Yakovenko groaned. “Not more vodka?”

  “Enough to keep the brigade drunk for a week.”

  “Maybe there’s food in the other crate.”

  The two men walked around the edge of the clearing, dousing the circle of fires as they went. The other crate h
ad also broken open, spilling chocolate bars across the damp grass.

  Yakovenko took the wrapping off one and bit into it. “Better than nothing,” he said. “In fact it tastes good.”

  “Chocolate and vodka,” Kuznetsky said disgustedly. “Moscow’s idea of a balanced diet.”

  “Imported chocolate at that,” Yakovenko added, passing him the wrapper. “Where’s it from?”

  “Made in the U.S.A.,” Kuznetsky translated, “For Military Personnel Only.”

  “That’s us. Should make you feel young again.”

  Kuznetsky grunted. “Come on, let’s load this up. Plus a few bottles of vodka, say fifty. We’ll leave the rest here.” They picked up the crate and carried it across to their vehicle, a T-34 tank that had clearly seen better days. The bodywork was pitted with the scars of battle, and the gun barrel was missing. But it still moved as long as there was gas in its tank.

  “How are we going to carry the vodka?” Yakovenko asked as they lashed the crate behind the turret.

  Kuznetsky’s reply was drowned by the sound of another plane, this time unmistakably German, passing overhead at about five hundred feet.

  “Good thing we had the fires out,” Yakovenko said placidly, opening up another bar of chocolate.

  “That’s three tonight—”

  “It’s only the second.”

  “I was talking about German planes. There’s going to be another sweep soon.” He stared up at the sky. “The full moon’s due in a couple of days … Forget the booze. We’re going back.”

  Driving the T-34 through the forest was a slow, nerve-racking business, but Yakovenko enjoyed the challenge, and Kuznetsky, on the rim of the turret, was left to his thoughts. He wondered whether it would be better to go back underground this time rather than move the whole brigade east for a few weeks. Surely the Germans couldn’t spare that many men anymore, not with the offensive that everyone knew was coming in June. Yes, they should go underground and sit it out. In two months they’d be behind their own lines again. And he’d have to find a new job. And make a decision about Nadezhda.

  The first light of dawn appeared through the trees ahead; the birds seemed to be clearing their throats for song. Kuznetsky loved this time of day: its sense of promise was indestructible, immune to human realities. He would miss the forest, really miss it. He’d have to join the bigwigs and get a dacha in the woods, somewhere like Zhukovka but farther out.

  They were nearly home now, though no outsider would have noticed signs of habitation. The brigade, some eighty strong, lived in a connecting series of camouflaged dugouts beneath the forest floor; fires were lit only at night, and then only underground. Even the T-34 had a subterranean garage. The lookouts, Kuznetsky noted with satisfaction, were as alert as ever, signaling them in from their perches in the trees. He was reminded yet again of the tales of Robin Hood, which he’d read as a boy.

  Nadezhda was still sleeping, her long black hair falling across her face. As he lay down beside her, determined to get an hour or so’s sleep, she snored gently and placed her arm protectively around his chest. He smiled and stroked her hair.

  When he was her age he’d been playing hookey from school in Minnesota, bad-mouthing his parents, feeling up Betty Jane Webber in the hay loft, ignoring stupid questions like “What are you going to do when you grow up, Jack?” He had known nothing, experienced nothing, done nothing.

  This sixteen-year-old lying beside him had seen her parents and brothers hanged, had killed at least three Germans, and had had at least one lover before him. It was only in sleep that she still looked a child. In sleep she almost had enough innocence for both of them.

  He was wakened by Ovchinnikova less than an hour later. “We’ve got a visitor,” she said.

  It was a young girl, seven or eight years old, from a nearby village. She was sitting with Yakovenko eating a chocolate bar. “They’ve got an informer,” Yakovenko explained. “They were going to string him up right away, but Mikhailova – remember her? – insisted that they follow all the proper procedures and have a trial. So Liliya here was awarded the fifteen-mile walk to fetch you.”

  Kuznetsky groaned.

  “Breakfast?” asked Yakovenko, holding out a chocolate bar.

  It was a beautiful spring morning, a bright sun warming the air and flooding the eyes with fresh colours. Swiveling his head around, Kuznetsky couldn’t find a single wisp of cloud in the sky.

  He was sitting on a piece of rubble waiting for the trial to begin. He’d given Morisov half an hour to put together the evidence, and it seemed like longer. He opened his pocket watch and was caught as usual by the beauty of the face that stared out of the photograph inside the lid. Anna, he called her, but he had no idea what her real name was. The only thing he knew about her was that the man who’d carried her picture had died in a ditch outside Lepel, with both hands vainly trying to stop the hole where his throat had been.

  It was almost eleven. “Grigory,” he shouted.

  “Ready,” Morisov shouted back. “Bring out the accused,” he said to Mikhailova, who stood holding a pitchfork.

  The man was brought out. He was about thirty, with a broad face that seemed ill at ease with his emaciated body. His face was covered in red welts; obviously not everyone had been prepared to wait for the proper authorities. He was clearly terrified.

  The same old scene, Kuznetsky thought. The same circle of cottages, the same ring of onlookers, eyes bright with fear and lack of food. The crimes had changed, and the names of the criminals. Counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs, kulak profiteers, Nazi informers. His duty was the same. Liquidation. He listened to Morisov.

  “… the accused was seen entering and leaving the Fascist administrative headquarters in Polotsk. That afternoon a Nazi punishment detail arrived here, where they immediately discovered a clearing sown and cultivated against their orders by Comrade Poznyakov. After piling the clearing with loose branches and setting fire to it, they hanged Comrade Poznyakov, his wife, and two children. The accused returned later that day, feigning ignorance …”

  Why had he come back? Kuznetsky asked himself. What stupidity.

  The accused sat on the ground, his head bowed, his right arm twitching. Kuznetsky wondered which of the stock explanations it would be.

  Morisov had finished and was now joking with one of the village women. The other partisans looked bored; they’d seen this play too many times before. “Do you still deny collaboration?” Kuznetsky asked.

  The man spoke without raising his head, a torrent of words. “I had to do it. They have my daughter in the brothel at Polotsk. She’s only eleven and they promised to let her go. I only informed on Poznyakov, no one else …”

  The rush abated.

  “I find the accused guilty as charged,” Kuznetsky said. “Have the straws been drawn?” he asked Morisov.

  “Yes.”

  Young Maslov walked forward, pulled the accused to his feet, and half dragged him off between two cottages. Why, Kuznetsky wondered, do we still have this need to execute in private? Who was the privacy for – the victim or the executioner?

  The shot echoed through the village, silencing the birds for a few seconds. Kuznetsky walked over to the group of villagers.

  “You’ll be better off in Vaselivichi,” he told them, but they knew better.

  “Poznyakov wasn’t the only one who sowed a clearing,” they told him.

  “Stenkin wasn’t a bad man,” one muttered. “He was right; he could have turned in the lot of us.”

  * * *

  Sheslakov arrived early at his Frunze Street office and found the NKVD messenger waiting outside his door with file in hand. He signed for it in triplicate, ordered his usual three cups of coffee from his secretary, and settled himself behind his desk. While he waited he studied the photograph that came with the file. Did the man look American or did he think that only because he knew he was American? Perhaps it was the half-amused expression on the face, not a common feature in NKVD portraiture. He
put it to one side as the coffee arrived; faces were Fyedorova’s speciality, not his.

  The man’s real name was Jack Patrick Smith; Yakov Kuznetsky was a literal translation of the first and last names. He’d been born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1900 to second-generation Anglo-Irish immigrants. His father had been a cop and his mother a seamstress. There had been no other children.

  Jack had joined the U.S. Army in 1918 – “to see the world” he’d told his first Soviet interrogator – and had been posted to one of the battalions used in the American intervention. In August of that year his battalion was guarding the Suchan mines near Vladivostok, the only source of coal for the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian, a footnote helpfully pointed out. For several weeks the Americans and the local population had gotten on well, but when the Revolution reached the area the Americans sided with the Whites and the mining community with the Reds. The Americans occupied the mines. One day one of their officers was shot, and the Americans went out looking for a culprit. Smith and another man, O’Connell, were sent to search the house of a miner who lived some way from the village.

  They didn’t come back.

  The Americans assumed they’d been captured by Red partisans and offered to exchange two arrested miners. They didn’t believe it when the Reds told them Smith was not a prisoner, so a meeting was arranged between him and the American commander on neutral ground. Smith told him that O’Connell had attacked the Russian miner’s daughter and that he’d shot and killed O’Connell. Smith told his commander he’d joined the Revolution and that was all there was to it.

  Sheslakov put down the file, took the handbook of Siberian flora off the second cup of coffee, and watched the steam escape like a smoke signal. An apparently ordinary American boy “joining the Revolution,” just like that. It didn’t bode altogether well. The Mongols had always slaughtered deserters on the grounds that they’d shown they could never be trusted. Still, he mused, the current condition of Mongolia didn’t say much for their judgment.