Final Impact (24 page)

It would be time to leave this particular bunker soon. It wasn’t wise to linger in any one place too long. The Allies’ ability to peer deep into the Reich was almost preternatural, and the
Reichsführer-SS
had no desire to be turned into “pink mist,” as the Emergence types said.

He was waiting on a report from Paris, after which he would return to Bunker 13 for a few hours to check on the führer’s progress before moving to another secure facility for the night. They had all been living like this for too long. It was demeaning, the way the Reich’s ruling elite had been reduced to scuttling about like petty criminals. Himmler removed his glasses and used a clean handkerchief to wipe the lenses. There was something about the recycled air in this subterranean hideout that seemed to affect them. He forever had to polish the things if he wanted to see clearly.

Not that there was anything worth seeing, or reading, in the pile of documents covering his desk. It seemed apparent now that Major General Brasch had betrayed them. What a foul, bitter irony given the number of innocent men who’d no doubt died in the purges following the Emergence. Himmler did not regret having taken the sternest measures to root out defeatists and conspirators within their midst. So high were the stakes, it was better that ten innocent men die than one genuine traitor go free. And the men he had killed to correct the false record of his own last days in the other world—well, they, too, had died for the Fatherland.

Given the saboteurs and recidivists discovered all too late within the crew of the
Dessaix,
it was to be expected that the most abominable lies would have been planted about him. He would
never
have worked to undermine the führer. Why, the very idea of it! But of course, he had to remain above suspicion if he was to carry on his work.

A bitter, bitter paradox. Those researchers had done their job, and been punished for it.

Brasch, meanwhile, had sold out his birthright and had been rewarded with promotions, luxuries, and that most rare and precious of indulgences, trust. Himmler wasn’t a man given to violent passions, but as he read the reports, he was entirely unable to still the tremors that stole over his whole body as he tried to contain his rage.

As second in command of the Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research and an active participant in its predecessor organizations, Brasch had enjoyed an intimate knowledge and understanding of the country’s most important weapons programs—both their strengths and their weaknesses. Now those secrets had been lost to the Allies, and there would be no recovering, not with the Bolshevik horde now descending upon them from the east.

And not with the führer incapacitated as he was.

Yet another dolorous report came from the SS medical officers assigned to Hitler’s case. They now theorized that he had suffered an apoplexy that might permanently cripple him. The news was being kept from everyone except Himmler, while he waited to see if the führer recovered, and planned for the possibility that he might not.

His assistant knocked quietly at the door. “It is here,
Herr Reichsführer.
The cryptographic section has just finished decoding the message.”

Himmler took the folded piece of paper and dismissed the young officer. They’d had this transmission for three-quarters of an hour already, but because of the
Trident
’s code-breaking computers, all of the most important signals had to be sent using onetime pads. It significantly slowed down exactly those communications that most needed to be sent quickly.

His heart pounding, he unfolded the note and read the first line.

BRASCH HAS ESCAPED.

If it were possible, his hands shook even more violently. A spell of dizziness came over him, and he found it impossible to focus on the rest of the message. Not that it mattered. The details were unimportant. What mattered…

“Herr Reichsführer.”

Himmler looked up, his head spinning.

His assistant was back, and he was ashen-faced. For a moment the SS leader expected him to announce that the führer had died. But he didn’t.

His news was much worse.

20

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1521 HOURS.
POLISH AIRSPACE.

The flight was entering its sixth hour when the message came through from Moscow. There was a few minutes’ delay while the radio operator broke open the sealed envelope containing the one-use code pad and translated the orders.

Proceed to primary target.

A simple message, with the power to change the world.

Kapitän
Semyon Gadalov eased the big jet bomber around on its new heading. A flick of the intercom switch, a brief series of orders, and the technicians began to arm the device down in the bomb bay. Suddenly Gadalov wasn’t just flying an airplane, he was wielding the most terrible weapon ever invented.

The Carpathian Mountains crawled past to the south—an illusion caused by distance and altitude. They were traveling very quickly—more than a thousand kilometers per hour. It was astonishing, given that just two years ago Gadalov had been flying an Il-4 with about a third of the speed. No matter how many times he went up—and admittedly the Tupolev had only been cleared to fly three months ago—he never failed to be awed by the power of her Mikulin turbojets, the great span of her swept-back wings, or the feeling that he could fly forever. She was a precious jewel, one of only three such craft built so far. Exactly
how
precious was shown by the fighter escort she commanded. Two full squadrons of new MiG-15s had joined up with her just north of Kiev.

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 façade, 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.