Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  The crew were tense but professional. The four of them had trained every day for more than a year, working in mock-ups of the bomber before this one became available. Lieutenant Gologre, his navigator-bombardier, delivered a constant stream of position reports from the glassed-in nose cone. Smedlov, his copilot, obsessively checked the flight instruments, making sure nothing could short-circuit the mission at this stage. And Jerzy, the tail gunner, watched over the technicians as they prepared the bomb, providing a running commentary via the interphone that had been installed specifically for this moment.

  At such an altitude it was impossible to make out anything but the most dramatic features of the landscape below. Somewhere down there, the Red Army had crushed one of the rebel Ukrainian militias, but at twelve thousand meters the countryside looked idyllic, a rich quilt of brown-green earth and golden fields unmarked by human folly or ferocity. Small lakes, ponds, and rivers caught the midafternoon sun, throwing starbursts of light out to the curve of the horizon.

  It was an unusually beautiful prelude to what he understood would be a day of unmitigated horror.

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1633 HOURS.

  MOSCOW.

  Beria, who was trying to keep his consumption of vodka and champagne within limits, could feel the malign energy gathering in the room, like a snake coiling itself for the strike.

  Apart from the two diplomats, the twenty men present were all high-level party officials. Survivors, for the moment. The only military officers were messengers who came and went every half hour to mutter into Stalin’s ear. In the far corner of the dining room, the British and American ambassadors were trying their best to maintain a dignified faзade, turning down as many drinks as they could diplomatically refuse. They looked less than happy, and if Beria had been in a better mood he would have smiled at their discomfort, knowing that by the end of the day their long faces would be positively funereal.

  His own face, however, wasn’t really beaming, either. Despite the fact that decorum, or the lack of it, demanded that he play the role of toastmaster at these foul, drink-sodden debauches, he hated the fucking things. Despised them, in fact. Only Stalin, the drunken gangster, could truly enjoy himself. And in Beria’s opinion the old monster was rapidly losing his grip on his health and sanity under the pressures of the war, the Emergence, and his own bestial appetites.

  This party, for instance, had officially begun at lunchtime, when the first bottle of champagne had been uncorked. But all the party magnates, bar Stalin, had arrived still sick and exhausted from the previous day’s binge. That one had begun, as always, in the early evening, when Stalin declared their business over for the day.

  In truth, he did very little business in his office now. The empire was run from his dinner table and private cinema. That was even more galling for the NKVD chief. With the world less than a day away from an epoch-shattering change, the supreme leader of the USSR insisted that his closest advisers join him in his specially constructed theater for a “Tarantino marathon” followed by a “little bite”-which inevitably devolved into a terrible, vomit-flecked orgy lasting six hours or more.

  Unfortunately the Vozhd had always been a great fan of the cinema, especially American gangster movies and westerns, and with the discovery of the Vanguard came access to her electronic library. After being carefully vetted by the NKVD, thousands of hours of movies and television had been released for Stalin’s perusal. Almost none had been approved for public viewing, but that didn’t mean that the chief himself couldn’t watch them.

  After all, who could say no to Stalin?

  Certainly not Beria. There were any number of files on the Vanguard that had been too dangerous to release from NKVD control, including a number of books and articles about Beria himself that had made the secret policeman’s head swim when he’d seen them. But they were mostly gone now, deleted along with the unfortunate men who’d found them. The months of nearly paralyzing terror he’d suffered, while covering up evidence of his own less-than-perfect sycophancy at the end of Stalin’s life in the future, were but an unpleasant memory. Even so, he found himself subject to random fits of horror at the prospect that anyone might gain access to such information, despite his precautions. He had probably sent two and a half million people to their deaths or into exile based solely on the Vanguard’s archives.

  Yet who knew what incriminating documents lay in wait in the files of the Clinton or the Trident? How long could it be before some capitalist spy would try to blackmail him?

  One of Stalin’s maids, a dumpy Georgian in a plain gray smock and white bib, cleared the plate of aragvi from in front him. A personal creation of Stalin’s, it was a thick stew of mutton, eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, and black pepper, all of it drowned in a glutinous spicy sauce. Famine stalked the land, with so much of the state’s productive capacity given over to crash programs developing new technologies-indeed, whole new industries-but in here there was no such discomfort to be found, judging from the bacchanalian feasts served at Stalin’s dacha. When one stupidly valiant servant from the Ministry of Agriculture had written to Stalin about the number of peasant children who were dying of hunger, the man was arrested and shot, though not until he had been shown propaganda films resplendent with imagery of well-fed kulaks seated in front of tables groaning with fresh food.

  The disturbing thing was, Stalin actually believed that the images were real. Beria knew that, as his body grew more bloated and ravaged by gluttony and alcoholism, the Vozhd was losing his mental capacities along with his physical. It was a conclusion he probably would have formed of his own volition, but also confirmed by the uncensored future histories and biographies contained within the British ship’s electronic library.

  Controlling such information gave him great power, but with it came the risk that Stalin would one day turn on him, deciding he had become a threat. The bowdlerized versions of history he served up were dangerous enough. He had almost wet his pants when he’d had to tell the full Politburo about the collapse of the USSR and its replacement by a gangster-capitalist state. There was no way in hell he was ever going to admit the existence of something like that biography they’d found on the ship-what was it called? — Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Even having laid eyes on the cover was tantamount to a death sentence. He had personally burned every page in the book, but not until he’d read it three times, made coded notes of its contents, and then hidden them in a hundred different files, just in case he ever needed to call upon the information.

  And now, through his intoxication-which was considerable-he watched the American diplomat Harriman sip at a glass of white wine while Molotov tried to brute him into downing the whole thing in one gulp. Beria knew he should really push himself up, stagger over, and play the bluff Georgian host, insisting that Harriman drink up and taking umbrage when he refused. But he was engorged with food and drink, and he worried that if he moved he would foul himself. Nobody was allowed to leave the table to go to the lavatory unless Stalin said so, and he hadn’t called a break in more than two hours.

  So instead Beria took another shot of pepper vodka, poured by Nestor Lakoba, the Abkhazian boss, and tried to throw it down manfully. His throat locked and he vomited prodigiously into his own lap, causing great mirth around him. Stalin, sitting at the head of the table as always, roared with laughter.

  “You cannot be a true Georgian then, Beria,” he snorted. “Look. Our foreign friends are in much better shape than you. Perhaps you are a spy, yes? A plant?”

  It could have been a bad moment. Stalin’s moods were so changeable, his rages so arbitrary, that such a joke could easily turn into something much more significant. But the NKVD chief was saved by another bout of racking cramps, and he tried to hurl yet more bile into his lap, causing Stalin to dissolve into fits of giggles.

  “Here, wash your mouth out with this,” he insisted, forcing a half-empty bottle of white wine on Beria. There was no question of demurring. He took the bottle and used it to rinse
out the chunks of acid-tasting aragvi while Harriman and the British ambassador Clark-Kerr stared at him with unconcealed disgust.

  Well, very soon now, he’d show them.

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1708 HOURS.

  POLISH AIRSPACE.

  Six fighters remained close to the Tupolev, guarding it like sheepdogs. Their comrades had moved ahead to clear the skies above Lodz of any German aircraft, but none had been found. The city’s garrison was cut off, bypassed by the Red Army and hunkered down for a long siege. Gadalov knew that a number of divisions from the Far East had been detailed to bottle up the Germans inside, but he tried not to think about them. He’d been assured that the Soviet forces were far enough back from the city to survive the blast and its aftereffects. But he wasn’t so sure. The precautions they were taking just in delivering the bomb spoke of something quite extraordinary.

  He pulled back on the controls and fed power into the turbojets, taking them into a climb that would top out at the plane’s operational ceiling of thirteen thousand meters. Once the bombardier gave the all-clear, the device would be released, but it would deploy three parachutes almost as soon as it fell away, slowing the rate of descent and allowing them to clear the area and record the blast on the banks of equipment back in the fuselage. Gadalov had never questioned any of these precautions during their long period of training. One did not question orders in the Red Army Air Force. But he could ponder their meaning as he lay in his bunk at night, and he had concluded that all of the rumors of a doomsday weapon were probably close to the truth.

  The voice of his copilot Smedlov crackled into his earphones. “Ten thousand meters.”

  The little MiGs kept pace with them, climbing into the sky like silver arrows.

  “Goggles,” he ordered.

  Smedlov fitted his protective eyewear and took the stick while Gadalov adjusted his own. Darkness fell over the bright afternoon world.

  “Gologre, have you fitted your eyeglasses?” Smedlov asked.

  “Da,” came the terse reply.

  The navigator-bombardier was obviously concentrating furiously.

  “Come three degrees south,” Gadalov said, and Smedlov eased the Tu-16 around just a bit as they continued to claw for altitude.

  The angle of ascent meant that he’d lost sight of the city. Only Gologre down in the glass bubble could still see the target. It occurred to Gadalov that he would probably never see Lodz again. Gologre would be the last man on earth to see it before it was destroyed.

  “Twelve thousand meters.”

  His arms ached from the strain of controlling the powerful aircraft. He had been grasping the cut-down steering wheel like some stupid peasant with his first motorized tractor, fearful that anything less than an iron grip would allow the monster to get away from him. He tried to relax but found that his heart would not stop pounding.

  He forcefully pushed away any thoughts of the people he was about to kill. Originally they’d been briefed to attack an army in the field, but Moscow had changed those orders only a day ago. The intelligence officer who’d delivered the preflight briefing had told them that the fascists had withdrawn most of their troops into the city, and so it would need to be attacked directly.

  Again, Gadalov did not question his orders.

  But a distant voice whispered to him that he was about to kill thousands of innocent Poles, as well as their German occupiers. With a Herculean effort, he shut down the voice.

  “Twelve thousand, five hundred meters.”

  He could feel the bomber straining for purchase in the thin atmosphere. Leveling off, he found that he could see the city after all, but it was much closer than he imagined.

  “Open the bomb bay doors,” he ordered.

  Smedlov slowly wrenched back the levers, and at once they all felt the aerodynamics change as the great steel shutters groaned open down in the belly of the aircraft. It was a clear day, with the sun dropping gently toward the horizon. In peacetime it would have been quite pleasant down there in Lodz. Gadalov had an uncle who’d worked as a machinist in one of the textile mills before the Great War, and the old man still spoke fondly of the time he’d spent in Poland’s second city. Wages were high compared with Russia, and a skilled workman could earn his keep with more than a little left over to spend in the taverns, some of them hundreds of years old, along Piotrkowska Street.

  The antiflash goggles allowed Gadalov to view the city even though he was more or less staring into the sun. Apart from a few fires burning here and there, it seemed unremarkable, even quiet. Large swathes of green parkland broke up the gray urban cityscape.

  “Coming up on target,” Gologre announced.

  He was employing the large octagonal marketplace in front of the town hall as his aiming point. Gadalov was wary as they approached, assuming that with such a concentration of German forces inside the city, there would be heavy flak. But apart from one brief line of tracer fire that came twisting up out of what looked like a factory district, there was nothing.

  Probably saving ammunition for massed raids.

  Gologre’s voice crackled through his headset again. “Release point in ten, nine, eight…”

  Gadalov concentrated furiously on maintaining a steady course. The fighter escorts had all fled by now, as they had practiced so many times. They were alone in the sky above Lodz, their destinies linked with so many thousands of lives below them for just a few more seconds.

  “…three, two, one…”

  “Bomb released!”

  As soon as he felt the tug of separation Gadalov hauled the giant aircraft around and opened the throttles, to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the doomed city. He waited, every muscle singing with tension, for the flash and the shock wave they’d been warned to expect.

  Gologre watched as the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city fell away from the dark womb of the Tupolev Tu-16.

  After five seconds three enormous parachutes deployed and slowed its decent to a more measured pace. Lieutenant Gologre had used the latest bombsight to line up on the Lodz town hall, but a light breeze carried the egg-shaped, four-and-a-half-thousand-kilogram load slightly northward. He had been briefed on the effects of the device and knew only too well what he was about to unleash.

  The device, modeled on the original Fat Man, was almost cartoonish in appearance, with a swollen body and oversized stabilizing fins. It was so very obviously a bomb that nobody would be foolish enough to stand staring at it as it descended, swinging gently beneath the triple canopy. A small web-cam in the nose sent pictures of the ground back to a mil-grade EMP-hardened flexipad on the Tupolev. Later, bomb damage analysts would be able to replay images of German troops and a handful of Polish civilians fleeing the gardens as the bomb dropped ever so slowly into their midst.

  Code-named “Gori,” it was an implosion device. In the center of the bulbous casing sat six and a half kilograms of delta-phase plutonium alloy. Some of this had come from the reactors on the British vessel Vanguard, but most had been bred in the Kamchatka Sharashka. Shaped into a nine-centimeter sphere with a small cavity at its center, the pit-as it was called-was actually composed of two hemispheric halves, separated by a thin golden gasket to prevent premature penetration by shock wave jets that might trigger the bomb’s neutron initiator too early. While Beria’s researchers had not been able to find blueprints for a bomb in the Vanguard’s archives, there was still a wealth of detail about the construction of early atomic weaponry, the sort of thing that the Soviet Union would have had to ferret out with a massive espionage program before the Emergence.

  Nearly half of Gori’s weight came from its trigger, a high-explosive casing that resembled a giant soccer ball nearly half a meter thick. The hexagonal pieces formed a lens around the plutonium that transformed a convex, expanding shock wave into a concave, converging one.

  At six hundred meters off the ground, four radar antennae in Gori’s nose determined that it had reached the optimum height for dischar
ge. Bridge-wire detonators fired every panel of the “soccer ball” trigger simultaneously, producing such powerful inward pressure on the plutonium core that it was squeezed into a supercritical condition.

  Three effects manifested themselves immediately: blast, heat, and radiation. There was also an electromagnetic pulse, but it had a negligible effect in the primitive environment. Such systems as might have been affected, like those on the Tupolev, had been hardened to withstand the effect.

  In the first few milliseconds energy was released in the form of high-intensity X-rays. The steel egg vaporized, and the X-rays expanded into the air above the parkland. Unfortunately for every living organism within the city and its surroundings, the air was not “transparent” to the X-rays, and so their energy was unable to freely propagate. The atmosphere began to heat up, and a ball of expanding plasma formed. Milliseconds after the initial explosion, its temperature could be measured in millions of degrees.

  A few milliseconds later, by the time the fireball had grown to about thirty meters in width, it had cooled considerably-to three hundred thousand degrees Celsius, or about fifty times the surface temperature of the sun.

  At ground zero the soil boiled and exploded, vaporized, and added its mass to the expanding plasma. So, too, every atom of organic and inorganic mater in the small park. Trees, grass, iron benches, granite flagstones, human beings, birds, insects, everything: it all fueled the atomic furnace. Even a kilometer away, solid stone buildings liquefied as the thermal shock swept over them. Lodz was crowded, and sixty-five thousand souls were consumed by the superhot plasma sphere, but the true destructiveness of Gori was still to be unleashed. A gamma ray pulse and neutron bath added their lethal effects to the light and heat of the small sun that bloomed over the city.

  The air surrounding the fireball was massively compressed, then pushed outward. Unlike even the largest chemical explosions, the nuclear blast created a very wide shock wave still thick enough to entirely surround the city’s small buildings, crushing them from all sides. The medieval core of Lodz was entirely pulverized.