The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  “And if they don’t cross?” Morisov asked.

  “Then we’ll have problems, but we won’t be any worse off than we are now,” Kuznetsky answered. He got up to indicate that the decision had been made. Half an hour later he led the group down toward the river. They came out of the trees a hundred yards downstream from the bridge, whose upper structure was still reflecting the moonlight. Within minutes that light was gone, the bridge no more than a series of triangular shadows against the starry sky. The group edged their way along the bank, the sound of their breathing barely audible above the current.

  Yakovenko stretched his legs and almost cried out with the pain of cramp. They had been sitting inside the underslung girders of the bridge for almost twelve hours, darkness had fallen, and Kuznetsky still showed no inclination to move. He sat there, ten yards away, legs crossed like Buddha, a poem on his knees, the one the Hungarian deserter had written out for him the year before.

  It was written by a Communist, Kuznetsky said, but Yakovenko thought it sounded too melancholy for a real Communist. The poet’s name was Attila Joszef. And the poem was called “Consciousness.” The Hungarian had said that Attila threw himself under a train years before the war. A messy way to die, and not much fun for the railway workers who had to pick him up. Kuznetsky was always reading it; he had to know it off by heart now, Yakovenko thought.

  Yakovenko massaged his calves, still thinking about Kuznetsky. They had been comrades-in-arms for more than two years now, and in that time his opinion of the commissar had changed only for the better. The man’s qualities as a leader had become more and more apparent, but it wasn’t just that. The man himself had changed, and not in the usual way. Yakovenko had seen any number of men – and women too – hardened by the partisan life, but Kuznetsky was the only person he’d known who seemed to have been softened, humanized by it. God alone knew what he’d done before the war – he never spoke of it, never hinted, ignored any direct questions – but whatever it had been, it must have taken a toll.

  Yakovenko himself had been an office worker with the railways, had been called up, propelled to the front, and found himself left high and dry by the German advance, all in the space of a few days. For six months he had survived alone in the vastness of the Pripet Marshes, living off lichen and birds’ eggs and whatever scraps he could beg from isolated villages. He’d been picked up by the brigade on the very day that Kuznetsky had been parachuted in as the new commissar and, like everyone else, had loathed him. He wasn’t just hard – that would have been acceptable – but he also was pitilessly correct. If the book said show no mercy, he showed none. If the book said nothing, he still showed none. Yakovenko knew he wasn’t the only one who’d toyed with the idea of putting a bullet through the new commissar’s back.

  But slowly and surely two things had changed. The brigade had been honed into a formidable fighting machine and Kuznetsky turned into a human being. Even a likeable one. He still let little slip, but the rules themselves had changed: they were his now, not Moscow’s, and they nearly always made perfect sense. He was still hard, but he now seemed aware of his own hardness, and somehow that made all the difference. Occasionally over the last few months Yakovenko had felt almost sorry for him, for the responsibility that seemed to bear a little more heavily each day. Nadezhda had made him happier but she’d also become one more responsibility.

  He had watched Kuznetsky at the trial of that poor peasant bastard the week before. All the old self-righteous correctness had gone. Perhaps a man had only so many death sentences to give, even in times like these. If so, he guessed that Kuznetsky was near the end of his rope.

  Kuznetsky was not meditating; he was simply bored. It was too dark to continue with his task of memorizing the poem; he thought he had it all now but he couldn’t see to check. Like a pile of hewn timber, he silently mouthed, the world lies heaped up on itself, one thing presses and squeezes and interlocks with the other, so each is determined. And here we sit, he thought, waiting to shake the pile. By day a moon rises in me and when it’s night outside – a sun shines here within. It was more than a poem, more like a poem full of poems. He’d never read anything like it, never anything that seemed to speak to him so directly, as if he were already living out its lines. Your wound is the world – it burns and rages, and you feel your soul, the fever. Amen.

  He folded the dog-eared sheets and replaced them in his tunic pocket, looked at his watch but couldn’t make out the hands. It didn’t matter; he’d always been able to judge the passage of time. Ten to eight, he reckoned, ten minutes more to the halfway point between sunset and moonrise. They had no idea what they would find up top; all five German vehicles had rumbled across that morning, making the girders creak alarmingly, but the occasional footfalls on the planks above told him that at least some men had been left behind. He thought he’d recognized six different voices but that didn’t mean much. There could be fifty men up there.

  His head said eight o’clock. “Okay,” he whispered. The partisans stretched their limbs to the limits allowed by the confined space and precarious footholds, then climbed quietly along the inside edge of the lateral girders, four on each side of the bridge. At a hand signal from Kuznetsky, he and Morisov led the others up the abutments in a rush, firing from the hip before any target was visible, the noise of the machine guns shattering the peace of the evening.

  Breasting the rise, Kuznetsky saw three Germans already falling in the hail of bullets. Fifty yards away, the rest were sitting around a fire eating their evening meal. He ran for the emplacement the Germans had set up to cover the bridge but the gun wouldn’t turn far enough. Morisov zigzagged down the road still firing while the Germans scrambled for their weapons. “Down,” he screamed, at the same time pulling Yakovenko with him off into the trees. The two men crashed blindly through the undergrowth for a hundred yards or so, the road invisible to their left, their passage rendered inaudible by the continuous gunfire.

  Nadezhda had followed them, and Kuznetsky led his two companions to the left, moving more quietly now. They reached the road, concealed from the Germans by trees on a bend. “Grenades,” he whispered, and they advanced stealthily toward the enemy’s rear, Yakovenko and Nadezhda on one side of the road, Kuznetsky on the other.

  The Germans had lacked the time or the sense to put their fire out, and their backs were lit by the flames. The grenades weren’t very well aimed. Two overshot and one exploded in the pail of food, but the surprise was enough. The Germans leaped to their feet, their hands stabbing skyward in surrender.

  Yakovenko looked at Kuznetsky, who nodded and resisted the urge to turn away as the machine gun cut them down.

  There had been nine altogether, and only the sergeant looked a day over seventeen. All were spattered with blood and what looked like vegetable stew. Farther up the road, Morisov lay dead in a pool of his own blood. The only other casualty was one of Sukhanova’s fingers.

  “Pity about the food,” Yakovenko muttered. “I could do with a change of diet.”

  Kuznetsky waited impatiently while Tolyshkin put a tourniquet on Sukhanova’s hand, and then led the group off into the forest. They still had ten miles to walk.

  * * *

  The moon was high in the sky when the seaplane glided across the tops of the trees and gracefully splashed down on the surface of the lake. Nadezhda let go of Kuznetsky’s arm to help douse the signal fire as the pilot brought the plane in toward the shore. He had expected more tears from her but there hadn’t been any. She had asked him, simply, “Shall I look for you after the war is over?” And he, suddenly decided, had replied just as simply, “I’ll be looking for you, my love.”

  Now he stood on the rocks by the lakeshore, waiting for the plane to come nearer, the group gathered above him on the outcrop. Yakovenko was in command now, and to Kuznetsky’s astonishment he’d felt tears on his own cheeks as they’d hugged farewell. It was like leaving family, except that he’d not felt anything like that when he’d left his own bac
k in Minnesota.

  He waded out into the lake, feeling the icy water numbing his legs, and clambered aboard the two-seater. Christ, he was tired. The pilot grunted a welcome, revved the engine, and turned the plane back toward the middle of the lake. Kuznetsky thought he had a last glimpse of the group disappearing into the shadows as the craft gathered speed across the water and headed up into the moon. Now the tops of the trees were thirty feet below. He fastened the goggles, felt the bitter wind on his cheeks. The pilot shouted something about the German lines – Kuznetsky supposed they’d be passing over them in a short time. He didn’t really care. What could he do about Germans four hundred feet below? Piss on them, that was all.

  Amy put the book back into her bag and got to her feet. She felt too restless to read, too full of suppressed excitement. The train was due in a few minutes, and she began to walk slowly up the platform, wondering again whether there could be any other explanation for the new instructions.

  She couldn’t think of one. Moscow was going to order her to “sell” Wim Doesburg something that Berlin would buy. Moscow’s interest in the uranium train had been rekindled with a vengeance. Put the two together and it could add up to only one thing. She still didn’t see how it could be done, but the idea itself was brilliant. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without her because she was the only link with the Germans. This was real action at long last.

  The train arrived, its locomotive belching black smoke into the clear blue sky. She took a seat in the front car, listened to the conductor’s cries of “Manassas” reverberating down the platform, and checked her watch as they began to pull out of the station. Exactly nine minutes later she left her seat and walked back two cars, stopped for a minute to make sure she wasn’t being followed, then continued toward the rear of the train. Another two cars down, she and Matson went through their fortnightly ritual, knocking into each other and exchanging dropped copies of The Saturday Evening Post. She had her usual glimpse of highly polished brown shoes, uniform, weather-beaten face, heard the Tennessee drawl intone “So sorry, ma’am” and her own voice say “It’s nothing – really.”

  In the club car she took a seat at the bar and ordered a Coca-Cola. No problem, there never was, but still her pulse insisted on racing. She forced herself to sit there until the thumping had subsided, then locked herself in the washroom to examine the contents of the envelope left inside the magazine.

  It was all there. A complete timetable, obviously copied from an internal railroad document, annotated with crew changeover points and watering stops. An explanation of the Friday timing – “an optimilization of clear paths,” whatever that meant. A list headed “Locomotives Rostered for This Duty.” And four photographs of the train itself, from different distances and angles, marked May 5 on the backs. That clinched it. Faulkner hadn’t mentioned photographs, but Moscow must have asked for them, and there could be only one reason.

  She put everything back in the envelope, the envelope back in the magazine, and caught sight of herself in the mirror as she turned to leave. “Yes,” she told her reflection. “Oh yes!”

  Thirty hours after leaving his group at Lukomskoye, Kuznetsky was driven down Lenin Prospekt toward Moscow’s hub. It was his first sight of Moscow, actually of anything bigger than a village, for more than two years.

  He had never liked Moscow, and had somehow contrived to spend only a few months of his twenty-six Soviet years in the capital. A homesick Muscovite had once drunkenly explained to him that his city combined the best of the West, its commitment to reason, with the best of the East, its spirituality, and therefore qualified as paradise on earth. Kuznetsky had always thought it was the other way around: the East’s lack of reason allied to the West’s lack of spirituality – a soulless bazaar.

  He’d had a good night’s sleep at the Partisan HQ on the city’s outskirts, once he’d given up the bed for the more familiar texture of the floor. It was surprising how quickly one lost the knack of civilized living; he’d had problems with the cutlery at breakfast and the toilet had seemed almost obscene.

  He’d also lost more weight than he’d realized. The NKVD colonel’s uniform he’d left behind in 1942 was now several sizes too large, and it reeked of mothballs.

  The Kremlin loomed across the river. The car swept across the bridges, past the Borovitsky Tower and across Marx Prospekt into Frunze Street, drawing up at the massive portals of the Defense Ministry. The driver opened his door and Kuznetsky climbed out. The guard at the door examined his pass and called for someone to escort him up to Sheslakov’s office. On the way he consciously pulled himself together. He was out of practice at playing politics, but there was no need for anyone else to know that.

  His guide knocked at the door, but Kuznetsky pushed past him and entered without waiting for a reply. Old habits die hard, he thought. Never surrender an initiative.

  The man sitting behind the desk seemed unperturbed. He’d probably received the same training. Kuznetsky took the seat offered by the man’s flourish of the jade letter opener and for several moments neither spoke.

  His host, Kuznetsky observed, was a medium-built, middle-aged man with graying hair. He was dressed in civilian clothes, a well-cut dark blue suit, white shirt, and dark red tie. Most unusual, the shirt collar and tie were loosened at the neck, giving him a vaguely dissolute appearance. He had high cheekbones and deep-set dark eyes – Tartar blood probably – and a mouth that seemed on the verge of an ironic smile. The eyes contained the same air of amused condescension. Whoever this man was, Kuznetsky thought, he was sure of himself.

  Sheslakov examined Kuznetsky with the same thoroughness. He was tall, over six feet, with thick, dark hair and the sort of profile you saw on hero-of-the-revolution wall posters. He did look American, but he could have passed for a Russian easily enough. The eyes – Fyedorova always told him to look at the eyes first – were quite extraordinary. Not because of anything intrinsic – because of the total contrast they offered to the rest of the man. The mouth, the posture, the sense of physical power, all shouted “Fighter”; the eyes whispered “Calm,” the calm of killers and saints. He knew now what Fyedorova had meant by a wild card.

  “Colonel Kuznetsky,” he said, “you have been provisionally selected to lead an operation outside the Soviet Union. It is not an NKVD operation, nor a GRU operation. Both apparats are working together under the direct authority of the Atomic Division, which is itself responsible only to the Secretariat.” He paused. Kuznetsky said nothing, only nodded slightly. “Your participation will be on a voluntary basis; you will understand why when you read this.” He passed across a thin folder, the words “American Rose” stenciled on the cover in red.

  Kuznetsky stared at the words. “The United States?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He read for twenty minutes, increasingly absorbed, pausing only once to examine the old woman who came in and lay back on the cot under the window. Who the hell was she? And why was she staring at him?

  Finally he closed the folder and placed it gently on the edge of Sheslakov’s desk. “When will the bait be offered?” he asked.

  “At the moment of maximum psychological impact. After the Allied invasion of France, which we expect on June 6, and before our summer offensive, which is set for June 22. The combination of a known disaster and an imminent one usually provides a potent mixture.”

  Kuznetsky looked amused. Very neat as Americans would say. “And what if the Germans throw the Allies back into the English Channel?”

  “That is unlikely.”

  “I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of hopeful assumptions built into this. Maybe correct ones. But it feels like thin ice.”

  “There is very little margin for error,” Sheslakov admitted. “But that is unavoidable when we have to be more concerned with avoiding detection and exposure than anything else … You are willing?”

  “I am not a believer in voluntary work, Comrade, but in duty. I will go for that reason.” And, he admitted t
o himself, out of curiosity. What would America look like after twenty-six years? And how would it feel to be back there?

  * * *

  “Come in, Anatoly Grigorovich,” Zhdanov boomed, “sit down, tell me some good news.”

  Sheslakov took the proffered chair. “Thank you, Comrade Secretary. I do have good news – the First Priority is within our reach.”

  Zhdanov’s ears pricked up almost visibly. “How?” he asked, offering Sheslakov the first Havana cigar he’d seen since the war’s beginning.

  Sheslakov lovingly applied the match, savoring the moment and taking an almost sadistic delight in the other man’s ill-concealed impatience. “You recall your submission to Stavka on” – he consulted his notes – “April 28 concerning the possible theft of American Uranium-235. To summarize – you pointed out that the amount we could steal would be militarily useless even if we could contain the political damage.”

  “I have not forgotten.”

  “Both problems can be avoided.” He took another puff on the cigar. If only Cuba were run by Communists! “The Americans, knowing how much material had been stolen, would know how many bombs we could make.”

  “That seems self-evident.”

  “Ah, but there is a hidden assumption, that our building of atomic bombs would necessarily be linked with our theft of the material.”

  “But it would be.”

  “Indeed, but the Americans need not know that. If we can both steal the material and convince the Americans that we have not stolen it, then the problem is solved. Our possession of atomic bombs will then be ascribed to our own domestic development program, and the Americans will have no idea how many bombs we really have.”

  “We’ll still have only two, which the military say will be worse than useless.”

  “We will have only one. We must explode the first to show the Americans we actually have the capability. I’m afraid the military, as usual, is behind the times. They just don’t understand that these atomic bombs are not ordinary weapons; the mere threat of using them will be enough. If both sides have them, no one will dare use them, and the calculations that matter will concern men and tanks and ships again. What is important is not actually having the atomic bomb, but instilling that fear into the Americans.”