Angel, Archangel (27 page)

“What about the Germans?”
Vorontin asked.

“Not even Hitler would sanction the use of chemical warfare on German soil.
No, believe me, if we have to use these weapons, the way is clear to do so.
But given the readiness of our conventional forces I don’t expect any serious hitches.
The chemicals are just an insurance policy.”

By the time he had paced the streets for an hour, Kruze had got most of the anger from his exchange with Staverton out of his system.
He hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him to the station, then changed his mind and asked to go by the hospital first.

The taxi waited in front of its great gothic exterior, while Kruze made his way towards the main entrance.
As he walked, he carefully removed the service ribbons from his chest and wrapped them in his handkerchief.
They wouldn’t make much of a memento for Billy, but they were all he had.

He approached the duty desk.
The nurse was not the one who had spoken to him and Penny on their last visit.
She looked up from her book and smiled.

“Can I help you?”

He put the handkerchief on the desk.
“I wanted to leave this for one of your patients,” he said.
“A little boy by the name of Billy Simmons.
He was brought in a few days ago following the Strand explosion.”

“You’re Squadron Leader Kruze, aren’t you?”
She turned the book over and stood up.
Her expression had changed.

“That’s right.
How did you know?”

“We’ve been trying to get hold of you and Mrs Fleming all afternoon,” she said, then paused.

“Billy died shortly after two o’clock.
I’m terribly sorry.”

He looked at her incredulously.
“You must have got the wrong patient.
Billy had broken his legs, that was all.
He was getting better.”

She tried to put a hand on his arm, but he shrugged her off.

“There was a complication,” she said.
“The doctors didn’t see the blood clot.
By the time it had entered his brain it was too late.
There was nothing they could do.”
She paused again, watching the shock on his face.
“We tried to contact you at your base, but they weren’t accepting any calls.”

Kruze did not need to hear any more.
He turned on his heels and walked through the exit, leaving the tiny bundle of ribbons where he had placed it on the desk.

By the time the nurse was through the doors, the taxi was already pulling out of the gates.

CHAPTER SIX

“Comrade Beria,” NKVD Major Shlemov said, “I think I have found something which is not as it should be.”
He coughed, awkwardly.
“I need more guidance.”
He had rehearsed the opening words of his speech for the last half an hour, but somehow it still came out wrong.
The directive had been vague, so it was hard to know exactly what Beria was looking for.

“You’ve had the entire night to get answers.
I want them now,” Beria said from behind his immense desk.

Shlemov got out his notepad.
“We pulled the Krilov woman in for questioning and -”

“You did what?”
The NKVD chief slammed his fist down on the blotter.
“I thought I told you to be discreet.”

“There were many dead ends.
No one knew anything about these three men - nothing concrete, anyway.
We needed a break.”

Beria waved his hand.
His mood could change in an instant, Shlemov had learnt that.
“Continue then, but start from the beginning,” the NKVD chief said.

Shlemov looked back to his pad.
“I have had my men examine the records of Shaposhnikov, Nerchenko and Krilov, but individually they’re clean.
Oddly, however, their paths crossed for the first time three years ago when they taught at the Voroshilov Military Academy.
Were you trying to establish a particular link, Comrade Beria?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Beria growled.
“Carry on.”

“It was when Shaposhnikov was Commandant and Krilov and Nerchenko were on his staff teaching tactics and strategy.
Apparently, they were rather friendly, although you would never have guessed it from the way they behaved at the Academy.
They almost crossed the street to avoid each other.”

“How do you know this?”

“We interviewed some of the Academy’s ‘42-43 intake.
Shaposhnikov was extremely popular - his particular brand of patriotism appealed to the young lions whose fields and cities had just been sacked by the fascist invaders.”

“This jingoism, do you think it could be a blind?
Would it be possible, for instance, that he was involved in pro-Western activities?”

“No, quite the opposite, that was the strange thing.
These lecturers were so anti-Western that they made no distinction between Nazi, British, or American.
I know the fascists had only just been driven back and feelings were riding high, but even so, their rhetoric was remarkable for people who were never seen with each other.
To the students of Voroshilov, all five of them spoke with one tongue.”

“Five?
Who were the others?
I can only account for Shaposhnikov, Krilov and Nerchenko.”

“Generals Badunov and Vorontin.”

“Why do the students remember this rhetoric as particularly remarkable?”
Beria asked.
“Anti-Western doctrine is something that should be encouraged, albeit with some subtlety, don’t you think?”

“Quite comrade.
I merely recorded the students’ observations.”

Beria began to lose patience.
“This is all very interesting, Comrade Shlemov, but how do you know that they were operating in unison if they were never seen together?”

Shlemov coughed.
“Policeman’s instinct, I suppose.”

“But no evidence?”

“Not until we spoke to Valentina Krilova.”

Beria appreciated the use of the word ‘spoke’.
Chances were they had beaten her half to death.
“Why her, especially?”

The NKVD major mirrored his superior’s thin smile.
“I thought she was bound to know something, Krilov being the Marshal’s aide.
He took up the post shortly after Shaposhnikov was called back from the Academy as Chief of General Staff.
I also thought it would draw less attention pulling a colonel’s wife out of bed at three in the morning.
Generals’ wives can be a little more difficult.”

Shlemov brought out his notepad again, skimming through the pages until he found the relevant section.
“As for Shaposhnikov, he did have a family, but the records show they died shortly after the October Revolution.
Nerchenko has a daughter, but we haven’t had time to question her yet.”

Beria looked levelly at Shlemov, trying to read the face for a sign that his relationship with Nadia Nerchenko had surfaced.
He was satisfied that the policeman knew nothing.

“Remember what I said about discretion,” Beria cautioned.

“Yes, Comrade Beria.”

“Go on about the Krilov woman,” the NKVD chief said.
“Perhaps it was a good decision.
It depends on what you found.”

“She told us everything she knew, I’m sure of that.
Shaposhnikov, Krilov and Nerchenko had been meeting regularly for months in Krilov’s apartment, even though they appeared to shun each other at the Academy.
That’s odd for a start.”

Beria nodded.
Come on, Shlemov, he thought, tell me something I don’t know.

“They never let her into the room where they talked.
She thought they were probably reliving old campaigns - as old soldiers do over a bottle of vodka or two.
That was when she told us about Operation Archangel -”

“What?”

“Archangel.
It was about the only snippet she caught.
She thought it was some battle they had fought together during the last war and they were just reminiscing.
She heard them mention it several times on different occasions.

I think she only told us because she thought it wasn’t of any importance.”

“And when was this operation?
I have to confess I’ve never heard of it.”

“You won’t have.
Comrade Beria.
We did a check.
Neither our own side, nor the fascists for that matter, have ever staged a military operation by that name, in this war or the last.”

“What did it suggest to you, then?”
Beria liked the methodical way Shlemov worked.
It was the reason he had picked him for the job.
He just wished the man would speed things up.

Shlemov sucked the end of his pencil.
“Nothing at the time, but there is more.”
He turned the pages of his notebook.
“She broke down.
Told us that her relationship with her husband had never been particularly strong, but when Krilov left her two days ago, she was convinced that they weren’t going to meet again.
There was something rather final about his goodbye that’s had her worried ever since.”

“Where has he gone?”

“On Shaposhnikov’s miracle tour of the Front - hardly any cause for concern, I thought at first.
I mean, they’re unlikely to go anywhere near the fighting.
But here’s the interesting part: their first port of call, according to Shaposhnikov’s itinerary, is Branodz, HQ of the 1st Ukrainian Front.
Nerchenko is second in command there, under Marshal Konev.”

“So you think that Archangel is something in the future?”

Shlemov shrugged.
“Perhaps it is the Stavka’s given name for an action against the fascists.”

Beria ran through the minutes of the last few sessions of the Supreme Stavka in his mind.
There had never been mention of any operation by the name of Archangel.
He remembered something else, however, that made his stomach knot with excitement.
“What if I were to tell you that Badunov and Vorontin have also been meeting up with them, only at Nerchenko’s apartment.”
The eyes sparkled behind the wire frames of his glasses.

Shlemov forgot his place momentarily.
“How can you know this?”

“I know it, Shlemov, never mind how.”

The NKVD major felt the perspiration under his uniform, but Beria was racing towards the next link in the chain.

“And what if I were to tell you,” the head of the NVKD said, “that one of Shaposhnikov’s tasks as Chief of the General Staff, a duty he took up after Voroshilov, was placing commanders in the field - at the front.”

“Vorontin and Badunov at 1st and 2nd Byelorussian sectors ...”

“Yes, his fledglings on all three fronts.
Too much power for one man.
Too much power for Comrade Stalin’s liking - and for mine.
And they meet regularly in Moscow to discuss an operation called Archangel.
Go, Shlemov.
I don’t care how you do it, but get to Branodz.
Find out what is going on there.
Do it now!”

* * * * * * * *

Malenkoy was as surprised as the dozen or so other junior officers at the HQ for the 1st Ukrainian Front in Branodz when Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Hero of the Soviet Union and Chief of General Staff, walked into the operations room unannounced, escorted by General Nerchenko.

Marshal Ivan Konev, the commander-in-chief of the 1st Ukrainian Front, snapped to attention, but tried not to wear the same startled expression as the other men in the small operations room.

Malenkoy pretended to carry on with his work, placing the finishing touches to the charts outlining the main components of his maskirovka, but he was too excited to concentrate.
The starting gun for the race to Berlin was already raised; Shaposhnikov’s sudden arrival meant that the firing hammer had just been cocked.

The Marshals seemed to measure each other up before embracing.

“Welcome to Branodz, Comrade Shaposhnikov,” Konev said.
“From here you will witness the beginning of the destruction of the heart of the Third Reich.”

“I aim to have a hand in it myself,” Shaposhnikov said, loud enough for everyone to catch the remark.
Malenkoy had heard of the man’s charisma.
Now he could feel it.

“It would be an honour to have our efforts on the 1st Ukrainian Front guided by your hand,” Konev said.

A sudden burst of radio traffic cut through the stilted exchange.
The operator, a young lieutenant, moved to silence the screech of static that accompanied the words of the field commander and listen instead to the man’s status report through the headset.

“Leave it,” Shaposhnikov ordered over the noise.
“It sounds better than any symphony to an old man who has heard nothing but the snow and leaves fall in Moscow these past months.
I didn’t know how much I had missed the battlefield until this moment.”

General Nerchenko took a step forward.
“Get on with your work,” he barked, first at the lieutenant, then at the rest of them, sweeping the operations room with his gaze.
“The Comrade Marshal will not tolerate complacency in the hour of our victory.”

Malenkoy redoubled his efforts at checking the maskirovka, even though there was nothing more to do.
His part in the build-up was all but complete and now he was only left with reporting its conclusion to Nerchenko, as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Konev bristled momentarily at the way his second in command had undermined his authority, but said nothing.
He was aware that there was some personal friendship between Shaposhnikov and his number two and he did not want to suffer the ignominy of a rebuke from the Marshal in front of his men.
He just wanted Shaposhnikov out of there as quickly as possible so that he could attend to running the war in the sector he regarded very much as his own.
The last thing he needed was interference from Moscow.

“I am afraid we have had no time to prepare a room for you, Comrade Marshal Shaposhnikov,” Konev said.

Shaposhnikov waved him aside.
“Do not concern yourself.
I will share the quarters of my old friend, General Nerchenko.
It is some time now since we taught together at Voroshilov.
We have much to talk about.”

“Perhaps you would like to begin your tour of the front?
As soon as you have settled in, that is.”
Konev wanted elbow room.

“The Comrade Marshal is tired after the long journey, no doubt,” Nerchenko cut in.
“I will take him and his ADC, Colonel Krilov, to my quarters immediately.”

“So be it.”
Konev gave a curt nod and clicked his heels.

A cry, muffled by the crackle of static electricity, burst from the radio.
The field commander’s bulletin had been interrupted by some sort of attack.

Konev shrugged it off.
“It is just a probing mission by a German reconnaissance platoon; there have been several in the past week.”

As all attention was drawn towards the exchange between the radio operator and the officer in the field, punctuated by sharp, whip-like cracks of background rifle-fire, no one noticed Krilov appear at the doorway.
He quickly surveyed the room, saw Shaposhnikov hunched over the radio, then beckoned Nerchenko.