The Red Eagles

by David Downing

Sheslakov went back to the file.

  After the Revolution, Smith – now Kuznetsky – had been thoroughly investigated. He’d come out clean, and since he’d already proved himself with the partisans, commanding his own group in the Chita area for over a year, he’d been snapped up by the Cheka in Irkutsk. Since then it had been all promotions and special assignments: head of the Chita NKVD 1931–34, commissar attached to special anti-kulak forces in the Saratov area, the West Ukraine, and the Crimea, 1934–37, administrative adviser in Spain 1937–39. He’d been sent back to the Far East in 1939 to a post in the Commissariat attached to Zhukov’s General Staff, had still been there when the Far Eastern divisions were redeployed on the Moscow Front in November 1941. Finally, he’d volunteered for partisan duty and been parachuted into Belorussia in May 1942 as a replacement brigade commissar. For the last six months he’d been commanding the brigade, as the previous commander had been killed and not replaced.

  Why, Sheslakov wondered, would a man with Kuznetsky’s glittering record volunteer for partisan duty? The noble-gesture theory didn’t fit with the rest of his career. Had he been trying to recreate his idealistic youth? And why, in twenty years of promotions, had he never gotten himself a position in Moscow? It wouldn’t have been difficult if he’d wanted one. But he hadn’t, and that was unusual.

  Sheslakov took the fauna handbook off the third cup and took a sip. In all other respects the man was perfect, and choosing a more difficult life was no indication of disloyalty. The reverse, some would say. He lit his first cigarette of the day, watched the smoke wafting upward, then reached for the telephone.

  He was on his third call when Fyedorova arrived. He passed her the photograph without speaking, and she took it across to the window.

  Fyedorova was his “administrative assistant,” and had been since the beginning of the war. She was ten years older than Sheslakov, a small, thin woman who had worked for the GRU since its founding. Fyedorova drank to excess, cared nothing for authority, and did next to no work. Her only function, which both she and Sheslakov found self-justifying, was to act as his sounding board. For this she was perfectly equipped. Her intelligence was as purely psychological as his was purely logical; she had a wisdom, an insight into people, which he found as vital as it was irritating.

  “First reaction?” he asked as he put down the phone.

  “A wild card,” she replied, pinning the photograph to the wall opposite her chair.

  “Try this one,” he said, passing across a picture of a young, dark-haired woman.

  Fyedorova stared at it for some time. “This one tells me nothing,” she said finally, “and that’s unusual.”

  “A good start,” Sheslakov murmured. “Put it up with the other one and I’ll tell you who they are and what I have in mind for them.”

  He went through his plan, clarifying his own appreciation of it in the process.

  “Ingenious,” she said when he’d finished. “But you know that.”

  She looked up again at the two faces, both with the half-smile, as if they were looking at the same thing. “Even the best play …”

  “Depends on good acting,” he completed drily.

  “And one of our two leading actors has been forced on us by circumstance. Her file is about as useful as the people who wrote it.”

  “I’ve got Nikolai trying to trace the man who recommended her recruitment. Luerhsen, Josef. According to her file, he’s in Moscow, but his file’s disappeared.”

  She was still staring at the photographs. “Neither of them is Russian,” she said. “Zhdanov won’t like that.”

  “Zhdanov will like the alternative even less. Let’s get the script right first, then worry about the actors.”

  He picked up the phone again and, after some playful banter with the switchboard girl, whose name he kept forgetting, was put through to Sergei Yanovsky, an old friend and the head of the GRU’s German section.

  “I need to talk to you, Sergei Ivanovich.”

  “I can’t make it today or tomor—”

  “First Priority. How about twenty minutes?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I must remember that for the bread queue,” Fyedorova said. “I assume you want me here.”

  “Yes, we have a long day ahead. Yanovsky is only the first.” He picked up the phone again and made three more appointments, two in his office and one at a research institute outside the city. He’d barely put the phone down when Yanovsky arrived. The two men embraced.

  “Right,” Sheslakov said, sitting down and twirling his jade letter opener. “All you know of the German atomic program.”

  Yanovsky looked surprised for a moment. “There’s none to speak of now, though there could have been. Their technical knowledge in 1939 was the equal of anyone’s.” He lit the cigarette offered by Sheslakov. “Tea?” he asked.

  “When you’ve earned it.”

  “Okay. In 1939 the Nazis set up a Uranium Society, the Uranverein, and all the prominent scientists they had left after the emigrations were given particular tasks to do in solving the basic problem of how to make the bomb. Uranium exports from Czechoslovakia were stopped, a heavy-water production program was started. By 1941 the scientists reported that they could build a reactor that would make the U-235 they needed for a bomb. The problem – ours, too, as I understand it – was the deadline. Hitler wasn’t interested in anything that would take several months, let alone something that would need a few years, so the program wasn’t given any priority. Our information is that the German scientists, most of them at any rate, were quite relieved about this and were quite happy to work on the theory knowing full well that their consciences would never be troubled by the practice.

  “In the last year things have changed, though not that much. The Nazis are getting desperate, and all sorts of desperate solutions are being looked at. Atomic bombs are still seen as too long-term for practical use, but German atomic espionage in America has been stepped up. Fortunately most of their information comes from our Rosa, and she’s been busy confirming their pessimism. That’s about it. They have an atomic development program that might give them a bomb in ten years. Since they’ll all have been hanged within two, it’s completely irrelevant.”

  Sheslakov looked pleased. “But they have the scientific knowledge?”

  “Yes.”

  “If they had the U-235, they could make a bomb?”

  “Heisenberg actually told Speer as much. ‘Give us the U-235 and we’ll make you a bomb,’ he said. You’re not planning to give them any?”

  “When did that conversation take place?”

  “1942. June, I think. I can look it up.”

  “No need.” Sheslakov stood up. “Thank you, Sergei Ivanovich. You’ve been most helpful. But,” he added, seeing the other’s expression, “I can say no more. And” – he looked at his watch – “I’m afraid there’s no time for tea. Yelena is well?”

  “Fine. Apart from worrying about our son Mikhail.” He smiled ruefully. “You and Vera must come over. I’ll telephone you.”

  Sheslakov closed the door behind him, thinking for a second about his own son, killed three years before in the war’s first days.

  “Well, no obvious problem there,” Fyedorova said. “Tell me, why are you bothering to visit Kapitza? There’s no doubt concerning the scientific facts, is there?”

  “I like to hear everything firsthand.”

  A knock on the door heralded their next visitor, a burly man with a sour expression. He sat down without being asked. “Well, Comrade Sheslakov, I am here as ordered. I would be grateful if this business could take up as little time as possible.”

  Sheslakov sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly. “I know your time is valuable, Comrade Boletsky, but this is First Priority business.”

  Why, he asked himself, were there so many unmitigated bastards in the NKVD external sections?

  “Comrade,” he said “tell me about the U-235 trains.”

  “You have the report
.”

  “Tell me anyway,” Sheslakov said coldly, closing his eyes to help him keep his temper.

  “They leave Oak Ridge on the first Friday of each month at around 6 p.m., arrive in Los Alamos on the following Tuesday morning. Each carries ten crates, weight approximately fifty pounds, each containing five pounds of U-235. Two military police accompany the train throughout, two state police are picked up and deposited at each state border.”

  “It seems an absurdly low level of protection.”

  “It is.”

  “Why so little, Comrade Boletsky, why?”

  “Because the Americans have not considered the possibility of an attack. I think the two policemen are only there because of some instinctive desire to guard something that’s important, not because they seriously think it needs guarding.”

  “Good. Now the train – how is it composed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What does it consist of?”

  “I don’t have that information.”

  “Get it, please. I want to know how many railroad cars, whether the engine is steam or diesel, where and when the engineers are changed over, as they must be on such a long journey. I want the makeup of the train, the order of the cars involved, everything. Who is the source of information?”

  “GRU,” Boletsky said with ill-concealed distaste. “Melville, real name Aaron Matson, deputy chief of security at Oak Ridge. Rosa is his contact.”

  “Is she? What’s his motivation?”

  “Ideological.”

  “I want a full dossier on him too. Coordinate it with Barchugov. Also a complete timetable of the train’s journey, where it is at all times. And I want to know why it leaves on Fridays at 6 p.m.

  “Finally,” he said, consulting his notes for the first time, “I want everything you have on the situations at Grand Falls and the Alaskan relay station. I particularly want to know the current situation regarding American cargo-checking procedures.”

  He stood up. “I realize most of this will have to come from America, but I would appreciate whatever urgency you can muster. This is First Priority.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Boletsky replied stiffly.

  “Why,” Fyedorova asked after he’d gone, “does it matter what sort of engine is pulling the train?”

  “Steam engines have to stop for water,” Sheslakov replied as he looked for a particular file in the stacks on his desk.

  “I’m going to see Petr Kapitza,” he said, passing her the file. “This is all we have on Walter Schellenberg. When I get back you can tell me whether he’s the man to be tempted by our bait.”

  After helping herself to the bottle of vodka that Sheslakov kept at the back of his filing cabinet, Olga Fyedorova settled herself on the old cot under the window and opened the file. Holding the German’s photograph up to the light, she studied it for several minutes, trying to think herself behind the eyes that stared out at her. They were a boy’s eyes, she thought, not unlike Sheslakov’s.

  A good beginning.

  Her approach to an operation like this was completely different from Sheslakov’s. He approached it like a diagram, she like the writing of a love story, weighing up the interactions in the diagram, the way the people concerned would respond to events and, most important of all, to each other. There would be no more than ten people intimately involved in the unfolding of the plan, and several of them would remain unknown to her. It was all the more crucial then that those she wove into the plot should be known quantities, and that their strengths and weaknesses should be written in from the beginning.

  Schellenberg was a special case. He had only one decision to make, and everything that was known about him had to be manipulated in the desired direction. He came from a well-to-do family, had been educated at a Jesuit gymnasium, had studied medicine and law at Bonn University. Soon after graduation he had enlisted in the SD, the SS Security Service. All plus points, Fyedorova thought. Intellectuals were always easier to predict, particularly those who chose subjects like medicine and law. If he had studied history or physics, she would have been much less sanguine.

  The move from the Jesuits to the SS was equally indicative. To her it implied the need for an ideological father figure; the ideology itself would be the product of circumstance rather than conviction. In France before the first war she’d known Catholics who had become Marxists at almost the touch of a button; almost the same process, except, she thought with a smile, in that case it was a mother figure that was required. Anyway, Schellenberg’s ideology was sufficiently vague and indeterminate to allow the free play of the sort of intellect that chose to study law and medicine. Neither would provide a driving force, and judging from his rise through the ranks, the man was not lacking in ambition. It couldn’t be money that moved him, and she had a sneaking suspicion that power for its own sake did not attract him. Power for what, then? It must be for play, for the chance to play games at the highest level.

  That would make him ideal.

  She went back to the file. He had coordinated the intelligence from Austria before the Anschluss, then personally undertaken a spy mission to West Africa in the winter of 1938–39, checking out harbour defenses. And, she remembered it now, he had been the officer at Venlo in 1939 who had lured the two British agents into captivity.

  Games.

  From 1939 to 1941 he had worked under Mueller for the Gestapo and had reportedly been close to Heydrich. Then, in June 1941, he had been switched to Amt VI, the SD’s Foreign Intelligence Service, as its new chief. With Heydrich gone, he had gravitated to Himmler, and was now thought to be the Reichsführer’s chief political adviser. Early this year his organization had absorbed the discredited Abwehr to form a newly unified intelligence service. He was Hitler’s spy master.

  So much for his career: he hadn’t missed an opportunity. He had a house off the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a country house at Herzberg. His office was built like a luxurious fortress, with a machine gun built into his desk and alarm sirens activated by photoelectric cells. When traveling abroad he “wore” an artificial tooth containing poison and carried a cyanide capsule in a signet ring.

  That, Fyedorova thought, was particularly interesting. What kind of a man carried two suicide devices? An obsessive. In fact, the whole business about the desk reeked, not of paranoia – paranoiacs didn’t go on spy missions – but of perverse perfectionism. The medical/law student again. Here was a man who believed passionately in details, and who would probably have the two weaknesses typical of such people – an inability to see the forest for the trees and, more damning in a spy master, the compulsion to furnish from the imagination those details which were unavailable.

  She got up and refilled her glass, fixed the photograph to the wall in front of her, and lay back on the cot. “Will you bite, Walter tovarich?” she asked the picture.

  “I think you will.”

  Sheslakov had found Professor Petr Kapitza supervising the unloading of crates containing laboratory equipment. The Institute was in the final throes of its return to Moscow and chaos reigned. Kapitza’s state of mind had not been noticeably improved by the appearance of another interrogator from the Atomic Division.

  “As far as I’m concerned, the ‘First Priority’ should be saving several years’ work from these vandals,” he had exclaimed, taking in the removal corps with a sweep of his arm. “Which one are you talking about?”

  Sheslakov had given him a telephone number to ring and patiently waited in the Institute’s spacious lobby, imagining the swish of tsarist gowns in days gone by.

  Eventually the scientist reappeared, motioning Sheslakov to follow him outside. “We can talk in the gardens, where we might conceivably hear each other.”

  Sheslakov set out to be disarming. “Professor, I know your time is valuable, and I promise you that after this conversation the work can go on undisturbed. I have read the report of your conversations with General Kostylov, and there are just a few extra questions I need answe
red. First, if you were given fifty pounds of Uranium-235, could you make an atomic bomb?”

  Kapitza looked at him sharply. “Is that a random figure you’ve just thought up?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. The answer is yes, or at least the probability is very high. Two bombs, I would say.”

  “How quickly?”

  The scientist spread his arms. “That is hard to answer.”

  “A month, a year, ten years?”

  Kapitza looked up at the sky. “Two years, I would think. But I would not like to stake my life on it. The Fuchs diagram has no great surprises – the basic principles are clear. But there are always unforeseen problems.” He looked at Sheslakov again, this time with something approaching a smile. “Of course continued access to the American development process would save us from duplicating their mistakes.”

  “How powerful would such a bomb be?” Sheslakov had no reason for asking the question save curiosity.

  “Again, hard to say.”

  “A guess?”

  “I would say powerful enough to raze a city the size of Novgorod.”

  It was Sheslakov’s turn to look at the scientist. Kapitza couldn’t possibly know that his questioner came from that city. A chill raced up Sheslakov’s spine. He couldn’t resist another irrelevant question.

  “Professor, do you have any qualms about making such a bomb?”

  Kapitza laughed for the first time. “Qualms? Of course not. Qualms have never stopped scientific development. We are on a roller coaster, as the Americans say, and the ups and downs keep getting steeper, and there’s no way to get off. What use are qualms?”

  The chill was still there, so out of place on a beautiful spring morning. Sheslakov reorganized his thoughts. “The Uranium-235 – how easy is it to transport? How dangerous?”

  “It won’t explode if you drop it. But it has to be kept in small quantities or a critical mass is reached. If that happens, radiation is released, and radiation kills.”

  “So the idea of carrying five pounds of Uranium-235 in fifty-pound crates makes sense?”

  “You are well-informed. Is that how the Americans are doing it? Yes, the container for the U-235 – a steel bottle probably – would be suspended somehow in the middle of the crate, keeping it an adequate distance from the other jars in the other crates.”