Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  He wondered if any of the Uzbeks he’d seen taken away a year ago had ended up here. The Soviets were increasingly using mechanized equipment like tractors and bulldozers. The factories east of the Urals were immense, monstrously so, and they had been running twenty-four hours a day since they’d been built. But he’d heard rumors of this facility since his first days back on home soil, in 1942. It would have been built with slave labor. Hundreds of thousands of workers had probably been needed. Just clearing the forests around the site had to have been the work of an army.

  “How long will it take us to reach the Chukchi?” he asked.

  Kicji carefully placed the food he had been eating back in a pouch. He scratched at his thin beard. “Moving with care, it will be three days there. Four back—with more men it is slower.”

  “And how many men can we expect?”

  “How many can you arm?”

  “Thirty.”

  In fact, he had arms caches from which he could outfit many more than that, but although he trusted the guide, he wanted to make certain that if Kicji was captured by the NKVD, he could only give up misinformation.

  “Thirty we can find,” Kicji said. “But we will need to talk to different families. Maybe three or four.”

  “I understand,” Ivanov said. Like many nomads, the Chukchi formed bands held together by familial ties. It probably wouldn’t be possible to gather all of the men he needed from one tribe. “Ahmed, Sergo? Are you agreed? We shall raise a party, and take a sizable convoy.”

  “God willing,” the jihadi added.

  “As always,” Ivanov conceded.

  “I agree,” Sergo said. “I like it.”

  “And you, Vendulka?”

  The medical officer had remained quiet, as was her wont. Ivanov always asked her opinion last, although hers was the viewpoint that meant the most to him.

  “We will have to be quick,” she said. “We can jam their communications in the passes, where they would fail anyway. But if they’re high-value targets, they will be missed quickly.”

  “Of course.”

  Zamyatin raised the glasses to her eyes again. Still frowning. “The haze has cleared a little. Take a look,” she said.

  Ivanov retrieved the binoculars. He could make out an airfield to the west of the facility. Two small silver planes were coming in to land. “MiGs,” he said.

  “Rocket planes?” Ahmed Khan asked. “They have rocket planes now?”

  “Yes,” said Ivanov. “MiG-Fifteens. Jet fighters.”

  D-DAY + 29. 1 JUNE 1944. 2041 HOURS.

  U.S. EMBASSY, MOSCOW.

  The Soviet foreign minister, as immaculate as ever in a dark English suit, positively beamed at Averell Harriman. The American ambassador was hurriedly thinking of ways to stall for time, but he didn’t need to. Molotov refused to stay for a drink, which was unheard of, begging off with the claim that he had to get to the British mission, as well.

  He turned and hurried out the front door, never having penetrated farther than the entrance hall of the embassy. Harriman read through the top-page summary again. It would take hours to trawl though the two-inch-thick sheaf of documents he’d just been handed.

  “Well, sir? Is there anything else?” asked his chief military liaison, Colonel Squires.

  “Good God, isn’t this enough? They’re back in the war. They’re releasing our sailors and ships. And they’re attacking Japan, for good measure. You’d better get everyone in, Colonel. We’re going to be up all night. I’d best give the Brits an early warning, too. Oh, and I’ll need a secure channel to Washington. I’ll use the Samsung.”

  The army officer snapped to attention. “Very good, sir. I’ll get Mr. Wilson to call your wife, tell her you’ll be late.”

  “Tell her I won’t be home at all tonight,” he said grimly.

  He had a feeling this was going to be very much like the days after the Allies had bombed the Demidenko center and everyone had sat around on tenterhooks waiting to see whether it would push the Soviets into an open declaration of war on the West. It hadn’t—perhaps only because Moscow had denied all along that such a facility even existed. Or perhaps because, as the British argued, it was a chimera designed to draw attention away from other, more important facilities.

  Harriman was vaguely aware of an increase in the bustle of activity throughout the embassy, as junior officers and diplomats were roused from their offices or called in from their homes. He walked slowly back to his office, where his secretary already had the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Clark-Kerr, waiting on the telephone. The secure line.

  “I just had Molotov over here,” Harriman said without preamble. “He’s on his way over to you right now. They’ve declared war on Germany and Japan. They’ve got twelve million men on the move right now. Stalin wants a summit with the president and Mr. Churchill as soon as possible to discuss ‘common goals.’”

  “Good grief,” Clark-Kerr said. “This is a bit of a turnup for the books. What details do you have?”

  Harriman looked at the document Molotov had just delivered. “He’s dropped a lot of paper on us. It’ll take a few hours to work through it. In fact, we should divide the task, half and half. That’ll be much quicker.”

  “I’ll have my intelligence johnnies call yours when we get our package. Divvy up the work, although I’ll need to send a preliminary report to London.”

  “That should be possible. Molotov included a three-page summary as a top sheet. Boiled down, it says two things. The men and ships from PQ Seventeen are being released, and the Soviet Union is now at war with the Axis powers.”

  “I see,” Sir Anthony said. The two-word phrase was heavy with unspoken thoughts. To himself, however, Harriman could not help thinking, Where in God’s name is this going to end?

  D-DAY + 30. 2 JUNE 1944. 0053 HOURS.

  NKVD HEADQUARTERS, LUBIANKA, MOSCOW.

  Laventry Beria examined his penis. It was hard, and the fish-belly-white flab of his expanding gut threatened to engulf it. As often happened after days of nigh-unbearable stress, he found himself all but overcome by an irresistible surge of sexual energy as soon as he was released from the source of the tension.

  He had just spoken to Professor Kurchatov again, and been reassured that the weapon would fire as intended. Initial reports from the Ukraine indicated that the nationalist counter-revolutionary forces had been crushed under the advance of Zhukov’s front. That wasn’t the primary intention, of course, just a happy side effect of pouring so many tanks and divisions across the western Ukrainian plains. The new weapons, developed under his supervision using information taken from the Vanguard, were sweeping through the German defenses like a scythe.

  All in all, he had done well. Much better than so many others charged with the defense of the Motherland. As he sat alone in his office, the door locked and defended by his bodyguards, colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia, he rummaged around in his drawer, pushing aside his bloodstained blackjack clubs, numerous pairs of silk stockings, two pairs of panties, and pile of pornographic photographs as he searched for…

  Ah, here it was. The love letter from Irina, his current favorite among the stable of female swimmers and basketball players he kept to satisfy his appetites. She was a good writer, with a strong clear hand, and a truly amazing ability to recall their Herculean lovemaking in the most exacting gynecological detail. He had his cock in hand and was about to begin when the phone rang.

  It was Stalin. Beria had had a separate phone line put in to ensure that he could identify calls from the supreme leader when they came in. A man could die badly in the USSR simply because he didn’t answer the phone in time. Beria had authorized a number of such executions himself.

  He snatched up the receiver, suddenly fearful that Stalin could tell that the hand holding the phone had been wrapped around his engorged member just moments earlier. Keeping all trace of fear from his voice, he answered as briefly as he could. “Yes, this is Beria.”

  Half expecting the general
secretary to berate him, he was reassured by Stalin’s matter-of-fact tone, until he realized what the madman was asking. “I want the bomb tested under battlefield conditions. I’ve decided it would be a waste of resources to blow it up in Siberia where there are no Germans beyond the gates of our punishment camps. Arrange to drop it on Hitler’s Army Group East. Konev tells me they are trying to organize themselves around Lodz.”

  Completely detumescent now, the lovely Irina all but forgotten, Beria felt an instant headache wrap itself around his temporal lobes. It was like being squeezed in the paws of a giant ape. His mouth opened and closed a few times before words finally came out. “But, I cannot. That is, Kurchatov says—”

  “Do not tell me what is possible and what is not. You have boasted often enough about the impossible tasks you have achieved on Projects One and Two. Surely building the bomb was the major impossibility. I would have thought dropping it posed no problem at all. It is just a bomb after all, Beria. It is meant to be dropped upon someone, yes? And please do not tell me otherwise, or I shall have you nailed to the thing when it goes off.”

  “No-no-no,” he said, vaguely aware that he was close to babbling. “It is not that…” Although in fact he had no idea if the bomb was ready to be used under field conditions. “It is…it is just that…the effects. Yes! The effects are not like a normal bomb. There is the radiation poisoning. If we drop it near our own armies, we will kill them, as well.”

  Stalin’s voice came through the earpiece, cold and full of menace. “If you drop a bomb near anyone, Beria, you will kill them. So do not drop it near them. Use it when Zhukov and Konev are still a safe distance away.”

  “But the poison remains,” he protested. “Possibly even weeks later, it will not be safe to walk through Lodz.”

  “It is not safe to walk through Lodz now. And I did not say to destroy the city. The Germans have built many factories there. I do not want them destroyed. Just emptied for our use, when they have been cleaned of your atomic poisons. Do you understand now, Beria?”

  And he did.

  “It is a brilliant plan,” he gasped.

  “Of course,” Stalin said. “It was mine. I am not a fool, Beria. I understand this new weapon. Talk to Kurchatov and Zhukov. Consult with the meteorology service. And drop the thing when the wind is blowing west. We shall destroy Army Group East and take Lodz without losing a single Red Army private.”

  “Indeed we shall, a brilliant, brilliant plan,” he agreed.

  “Then make sure it works,” said Stalin.

  15

  D-DAY + 30. 2 JUNE 1944. 0922 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON. IN TRANSIT, PACIFIC OCEAN AREA.

  “Data links verified secure, Admiral. But they’re unstable. The relay is patchy and might drop out.”

  “Thank you, Brooks. You did a good job just getting it through.”

  Real-time global conferencing was only a happy memory for the surviving members of the Multinational Force. They were a day out of Pearl, still close enough for the Siranui to relay the signal back to fleet on Honolulu. From there a daisy chain of the new EC-121 Super Connies fitted out with both AT and salvaged twenty-first comm gear shunted the signal on to the National Command Authority’s dedicated ADSL network—a hack job constructed of new coaxial cable and a simple but ingenious hijacking of a portion of the old copper wire telephone network.

  Kolhammer sat next to Admiral Ray Spruance in front of a flat-panel display with an attached web-cam. It was like being back at college again. Spruance had cross-decked from the Enterprise for the conference, a hookup that included the Joint Chiefs, British ambassador Lord Halifax, and the White House. The screen in Kolhammer’s ready room displayed only the conference participants—each in their own window—while a separate screen next to it ran a data package from Hawaii with the latest information from the new European front. He and Spruance managed to view that data before Lieutenant Brooks fully established the precarious link with the United States.

  As he scanned the package, Kolhammer’s stomach felt as though he’d been force-fed a few pounds of molten lead. The reports were all text-based. There was no multimedia coverage of the Soviet attack, hopefully because no such capacity existed in the USSR, but more likely because they were hiding their true capabilities.

  The Communists had hit the soft German eastern flank with a gargantuan assault, supported by some very sophisticated weaponry. The Sovs were back, and they were packing serious heat. Intercepted German signals spoke of jet fighters raking the skies clear of every plane they encountered, of great, lumbering, twin-bladed helicopters bristling with automatic cannons and rocket pods. Whole armies seemed to be outfitted with automatic weapons—doubtless they’d turn out to be AK-47 variants—and shoulder-fired rockets that proved lethal to all but the most heavily armored tanks and vehicles. Probably RPG-2s or even-7s. The speed of the Soviet advance testified to enormous fleets of armored personnel carriers, accompanying thousands of T-34 tanks.

  It was like a nightmare from the 1950s.

  “Gentlemen, I believe we’re ready.”

  It was Henry Stimson, the secretary of war.

  Kolhammer watched the other military officers bring themselves to a higher state of attentiveness. The picture was low res, but even so Roosevelt looked worn out and pinched. Lord Halifax seemed almost gray, and dark smudges stood out under his eyes.

  “The latest news we have from Moscow,” said Stimson, “is that Konev’s Byelorussian front has advanced on Brest, annihilating the Wehrmacht forces stationed at the edge of the Pripet Marshes to guard their DMZ. The Nazis are pouring troops from Poland into Brest and Lodz. Zhukov seems to be maneuvering around Lodz, sending only a fraction of his Ukrainian front to probe the German defenses. Our own intercepts of German signal traffic confirm the broad outlines of the Moscow reports.

  “In the east, the Russians have dropped airborne forces onto the southern parts of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and Hokkaido. Three army fronts have moved into Manchukuo, Mengjiang, and the northern parts of Korea. What’s left of Japan’s Kwantung Army is being destroyed. There are unconfirmed reports from OSS of irregular Soviet forces fighting in northern Indochina. Their eastern forces, at our best estimate, comprise one and a half to two million men, at least five thousand tanks, over thirty thousand artillery pieces, and four thousand aircraft, a small but significant percentage of which appear to be jet-powered. Both their eastern and western armies appear to be equipped with AT weapons and equipment.”

  Nobody looked directly at Kolhammer, but it was only because they were all staring at the screen in their location where his image was displayed. Being more familiar with teleconferencing, he couldn’t miss the way everyone seemed to fix their attention on a single spot in front of them.

  At least Spruance didn’t turn to stare daggers at him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” Roosevelt said. “Well, gentlemen, I am to meet with Uncle Joe and Mr. Churchill in Tehran. What am I to say? That we don’t want Stalin’s help?”

  Admiral King, the U.S. Navy chief, spoke up before anyone else had a chance. “Pardon my French, Mr. President, but I think we need to tell him to stay the hell out of Western Europe. Once the Red Army gets itself settled in, I don’t imagine for a second they’ll make any move to leave.”

  “Anyone else,” Roosevelt asked, looking from window to window.

  “The admiral is correct,” Kolhammer said. “Every foot of ground they take, they will keep, and when the Nazis are done with, they’ll come looking for more.”

  “General Marshall,” Roosevelt said, “has your staff made any headway in working out where the Soviet advance is likely to run into ours?”

  The image jumped, and the sound crackled in and out, but Kolhammer was able to make out most of what Marshall said.

  “It’s only a ver…rough guess, because…on’t know the Russian order of…their full capabil…But given the…they’ve cut through the Germans so far, and the number of divisions we face i
n…rope, you could be looking at a meeting…around Bonn. They would most likely also take all of Eastern Europe, Nor…Italy, and significant areas of southern France, perhaps penetrating as far…Rhône River.”

  “And this is predicated on the assumption that they don’t have any nuclear weapons,” Roosevelt said.

  “It is, sir. We feel that if…had them, they’d have used them.”

  A cold iron spike of pain began boring slowly into Kolhammer’s frontal lobes. If the Communists ended up with most of Europe and a big piece of Asia, the rest of the twentieth century was going to look very different from the one he knew. He heard Roosevelt ask Spruance for his assessment of how much things had changed in the Pacific theater. The admiral explained that initially, at least, it might make things easier, with Yamamoto and Tojo forced to deal with this new threat to their rear. In the medium to long term, however, it meant trouble.

  Kolhammer followed the discussion with one part of his mind, but at the same time he couldn’t stop himself from wondering how much the president had learned from the alternative history of this war.

  It had been accepted for a long time, back in his world, that Stalin had played both the U.S. and British leaders for a couple of rubes at the Big Three conferences. Neither of them had shown any real understanding of the bestial nature of the Communist regime, and they had labored under the naïve assumption that they could do business with Moscow as though it were just another difficult nation. But the USSR under Stalin—and for many years afterward—had been a charnel house every bit as foul as the Third Reich. Its leaders were brutes and criminals with a will to power that even Hobbes would have considered psychotic.