Crescendo of Doom

Chapter 28

Vladimir Karpov was not the only one acquainted with the harshness and cold reality of war. And the fires that burned Big Red and cast the fate of Ivan Volkov to an uncertain future were not the only flames being kindled in the east.

In a speech he delivered to officers of OKW, just months before this day, Adolf Hitler had set the prelude for what was now about to happen. It was to be the largest military operation ever mounted in human history, the practice of the dreadful art of war as it would seldom ever be seen again. By comparison, the American “Operation Desert Storm,” that defeated the Iraqi Army in just 100 hours of fast paced mechanized fighting, was only a small corps level affair. Barbarossa would be ten times bigger, a titanic clash along a line of fire and steel that would extend from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

As Hitler so darkly predicted, it would also see the practice of warfare become that unprecedented, unrelenting, and merciless fire that threatened to consume an entire continent. To say that it would be conducted with harshness was an understatement. Here men and machines would clash in a struggle where pain, misery, death and destruction were the order of the day—but this time the war in the east would be quite different.

In 1908, young Sergei Kirov had put an end to Joseph Stalin, long before he ever rooted himself in power. And with his death, much of the bitter, unrelenting harshness he visited upon his own people never happened. Yes, there were power struggles in the beginning, old rivalries. Molotov and Trotsky had to be cowed, Lenin embraced, and power centered on the one man who had been able to hold it in those tumultuous years, Sergei Kirov.

The long civil war that followed had been costly in lives, and seemed interminable. The fighting would flare up for two or three years, then quiet down, but it always left a contested boundary in the east of the Motherland, where Ivan Volkov schemed and maneuvered for power, and Kolchak and his Lieutenants held sway in Siberia.

There was misery, deprivation, and hunger that often became famine, fighting that became murderous at times, but Kirov held the Soviet state together, and kept the outlying provinces of Orenburg and Siberia at bay. He ruled, however, not with the steel hand that Stalin wielded, but by getting other men to believe in him, and to follow him out of a sense of loyalty and admiration. At times incipient conspiracies cropped up, and they were dealt with, but the vast archipelago of gulags, the prison camps in the cold hinterland of Russia that had been built under Stalin, never appeared in the Soviet state that Sergei Kirov forged.

In like manner, there was no “Great Purge” in 1934, initiated by Stalin after Kirov’s own assassination that year had been avoided. The repression and terror of the purges never stalked the land, and the Soviet Army itself was not decapitated with the arrest and execution of nearly 50,000 officers. Instead these men were still in their posts, and the long years of on again, off again fighting with the Orenburg Federation, had put a much sharper edge on Soviet steel. The military was well tried, hardened by this combat, and much more ready for the storm that was now about to be unleashed.

Divided as Russia was, Kirov’s Soviet state would not have the vast resources the combined Soviet Union had in Fedorov’s history, and particularly the oil it needed to fight a long war on the scale of the one that was now beginning. Soviet Russia had the manpower, with most of the big population centers, and a well established industrial base. Orenburg had the fuel but lacked strong industry to produce heavy weapons. Siberia had enormous untapped resources, tough, hardy soldiers, but little industry. It was also facing a three front war until Karpov reached an accommodation with Kirov. Yet the fighting with Orenburg continued, and the Japanese occupying Vladivostok were a growing threat in the far east.

When Germany began its wars of conquest, the long years of infighting in Russia suddenly changed when Ivan Volkov joined the Axis powers. The flow of oil to Russia, grudging trade that had been exchanged in periods when the civil war was dormant, now came to a halt. The Siberians had never presented much of a threat to the other two states, until Karpov arrived, pulled together the aging Siberian air fleet, began raising new divisions, and rapidly built up strength on the Orenburg frontier.

Volkov had thought to trade Omsk for peace, knowing the storm that was coming, but something in the personal rivalry that grew from his suspicions concerning Karpov and Ilanskiy led him to seek the destruction of the Siberian state. Yet Volkov was now also contending with a strong offensive in the Caucasus, launched by the Soviets in 1940 after Orenburg joined the Axis. Hitler and Germany were not then in a position to render assistance, and this forced Volkov to initially trade ground for time, and begin mustering new divisions from his own hinterland provinces in Kazakhstan.

By May of 1941, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the fighting in the Caucasus had reached Maykop, the one oil center closest to the Soviet borders. Volkov had already lost the vital Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and the big supply center at Krasnodar on the Kuban River. The front then followed the line of the Kuban, through Kropotkin to Salsk. Orenburg held a fortified region around Elista, but from there the front was nebulous all the way to the Volga. The great industrial center of Volgograd had long been in Kirov’s hands, and it was never to be called “Stalingrad.”

Yet the lower Volga was occupied by the Orenburg Federation, and an equally vital center for supplies and industry had grown up in Astrakhan. Volkov had built two important railroads from there, one to Elista and then down to Stavropol, and a second running south along the Caspian coast through Kyzlyar, Makhachlkala and on to Baku. These vital rail lines, and the sea connection from Astrakhan to other ports on the Caspian, were the primary means of getting supplies into the Caucasus, and oil out.

So Kirov’s offensive, if successful, would not only seize much needed oil reserves for his own war effort, but also cut off the flow of those resources north to the industrial center of Volkov’s state in the capital city of Orenburg. To achieve this, he would have to eventually take Astrakhan, but at the outset, with so many troops facing down the growing German threat, he did not have the divisions available to mount that offensive. The expedient course had been to try and seize Volkov’s Black Sea ports as a fall back for his Black Sea Fleet in the event the Crimea ever fell into German hands, and the oil center at Maykop as a ready source of new petroleum. The question now was whether he would have time to extract that oil, and the clock was ticking ever neared to the launch of Operation Barbarossa.

The German plan for Barbarossa was also much revised given the situation in Russia. Instead of aiming for Moscow and Leningrad, the political and industrial heart of Kirov’s State, it would place a much stronger force in Army Group South. The intent was to drive to Rostov, the major supply center sustaining Kirov’s offensive against Volkov. From there the combined Axis forces would cut off the Crimea, and all Soviet troops that had crossed the Taman Straits into the Caucasus to threaten Maykop. Once these armies were defeated, and a link was forged with Volkov’s troops, the Axis powers would then turn north and begin a combined offensive aimed at Moscow.

As strong as the German Army now looked on paper, just over 140 divisions, Halder had his misgivings about the coming storm, and not just because of the oil figures he had been fretting over. He had heard the whispered warnings of Ivan Volkov, trying to convince the Germans that their vaunted Panzer Divisions would soon be matched by the might of the Soviet Army. There will soon be strong new tanks, he had warned, and he had gone so far as to send diagrams and design plans he claimed to have obtained showing a new Russian tank to be called the T-34. Yet his intelligence indicated that the Soviets were still using tank models developed in the late 1930s, the BT-5 and BT-7, and older tanks like the T-26, T-28 and T-35. What was this T-34? It had not been seen in any Soviet units penetrated by German intelligence thus far.

Yet the sudden appearance of a new British heavy tank in North Africa had done much to awaken German military planners. Very few of these tanks had been seen, perhaps no more than 50 or 60 according to reports, but they had been able to stop Rommel twice, and halt the German counterattack in Syria. If the Soviets had anything similar… Halder did not wish to think about this, yet given the fact that the Soviet Union was allied with Great Britain, how long would it be before the Russians benefited from these new British designs?

Keitel and Jodl are correct, he thought. We must build new tanks, and quickly. Keitel tells me we have three on the drawing board, the ‘Big Cats’ as he likes to call them. For now we will have to make do with what we have, mostly Panzer IIIs, though we are getting more with the 50mm gun into the front line units now. That gun is already inadequate in my view. We will need at least a 75mm gun, and our new tank designs may soon need something bigger. Yet Rommel claims that he could not kill these British tanks with anything, even his 88s! That is most alarming.

Guderian has read the reports, yet not having seen any of this first hand, he takes them with a grain of salt. He claims Rommel is reckless, which may be so, but numbers are difficult to argue with, and now we have the battle at Rayak with 9th Panzer to consider as well. This cannot be written off as a defeat suffered by a headstrong and overly confident general, out to seek yet another medal on his chest. No. The forces we committed to Syria should have stopped the British advance on Rayak, but they could not do so. It was only when Steiner’s Wiking Division was able to concentrate, that the front was stabilized there.

In that Halder was telling himself what he wanted to believe, that the presence of at least one good German division had saved the day, but in doing this he overlooked the quality of the units that had heretofore been beaten by the British. 5th Light was undermanned, but 15th Panzer Division was at nominal strength, as was the 9th Panzer. The truth of the matter is that the British were forced to pull this new heavy mechanized unit of theirs out of the Syrian front and return it to Libya, so Rommel’s offensive was good for something after all.

But all of this is really irrelevant, he thought. I do not think Sergei Kirov has these tanks, nor will he get such weapons any time soon. So before he does, we must raise hell, strike hard, and run like the wind. Our Blitzkrieg tactics may have met an able challenger in North Africa, but Guderian remains convinced that we can still beat the Russians.

Halder looked at his watch, the ticking of the second hand seeming loud. His pulse quickened as the time swept inexorably on, counting down the last seconds that formed the wafer thin boundary between the old war, and the new war that was now about to begin. In his mind, he could already see the massed squadrons of Stukas gathering like dark crows over the borderlands, hear the shouts of the artillery officers as over 7000 guns were being elevated, perceive the low growl of the tank engines turning over in the Panzer regiments.

Tick, Tock.

It was all planned, with just that clock like precision. 3.4 million men, 148 divisions, 7100 guns, nearly 3400 tanks, and close to 2800 planes…

And when it began, the world did indeed hold its breath. It was as if a line of well muscled men had taken sledge hammers to the stalwart wall of the Soviet defensive line that stretched from Riga in the north to Odessa on the Black Sea. Before that first awful day was over, tens of thousands would die. The Germans would use the battering ram of their Panzer Divisions to smash a hole in the enemy front, and then rush through. Nearly 1500 Soviet planes were caught on the ground and destroyed, another 400 died in the skies over the battlefield, but even these staggering losses represented only 20% of the Soviet air strength, which was counted at 10,775 planes on May 15th. The Stukas pounded rail yards, trains, enemy gun positions, and any massed formation of armor they could find, and they did not have far to search.

The German onslaught would drive into a massive Soviet military force, comprised of 4.5 million personnel in 300 divisions, with 50 of those being tank divisions, and 25 more being mechanized divisions. They would field an astounding number of tanks, mostly pre-war models, but over 20,000 strong, more than five times as many as the Germans had, supported by 48,000 artillery pieces! Kirov’s armies outnumbered the Germans in almost every category, but one—the Russians had only 270,000 trucks, less than half as many as their adversaries, and their forces suffered from this general lack of mobility, especially when facing an enemy that placed a premium on rapid deployment and lightning swift movement. That said, most German infantry divisions were still relying on horsepower of the four legged kind to drag their guns forward through the mud, with over 700,000 horses employed.

The German operational art, the balance of tanks, AFVs and supporting weapons in their units, the training and skill of their troops, all weighed in their favor. At one point in the line, along the Bug River at Pratulin, the Germans would employ a devious tactic that surprised their own troops as well as the enemy—the tauchpanzers.

The old canceled plans for Operation Seelöwe had envisioned the offloading of tanks in water up to 25 feet deep on the English coast, and an ingenious method was devised to permit that, and allow the tanks to advance on the sea floor itself to reach the shore. Special adhesives were used to seal off the tanks to water penetration, inner tubes surrounded the wide seam between the turret and tank body, and a long snorkel was attached to the tank to feed air to the crews. The gun barrels were plugged with a rubber cap. Blind under water, the tanks were to be steered by using a compass. To prevent water in the exhaust, a one way valve was attached there.

To test the principle, tanks were rigged out and ferried out to sea near the Island of Sylt, then sent down long ramps into the water to the sea floor below, where they would attempt to drive to the nearby shore. When the invasion of England was cancelled, the units trained were sent off to form a regular panzer regiment, but the special conditions at Pratulin reminded a staff officer that they might just wade their tanks right beneath the river, and catch the enemy by surprise. It worked as planned. Manfred Graf Strachwitz led the attack of the 18th Panzer Regiment, with the German infantry gawking at the tanks as they lumbered down the muddied river bank, and disappeared beneath the water.

In later years the idea of amphibious tanks would become more common, but this was a first, and it achieved the desired surprise when the Germans literally drove 80 tanks under the river, instead of trying to get bridging units in place under heavy enemy fire.

In most places, the tried and true methods would be used, and the art of rapid cross river assault had been perfected in France during the rapid advance of the Panzer forces there. In the south, these defended river lines were arrayed one after another, a series of natural water barriers formed by the Southern Bug, Prut, Nistru, Danube, Dniester and Dnieper all forming major obstacles to rapid forward movement.

But here the Germans had reorganized their plans to put those “good German divisions” on the line, pulling the Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf units together into one korps, and adding a new unit that was not in any order of battle Fedorov could read about. Hitler had been so pleased with the performance of Grossdeutschland at Gibraltar, that he order the formation of another “Sturm” division, with its units built around cadres of the elite Brandenburgers. So it was that the “Brandenburg Motorized Division” came into being, and would lead the attack of the SS Korps as a specialized infiltration and breakthrough unit. Instead of snorkeling tanks, the highly trained and daring officers of the old Brandenburg commandos would lead the way, with the best troops in Germany behind them.

And this also worked as planned…

Chapter 29

Volkov’s hands tightened on the hand rails of his armored capsule when the explosion rocked his ship. The RS82 rockets struck the tail of Big Red, and the resulting explosion was so violent that Orenburg had been dealt a fatal blow. The fireball had expanded to sear the side of the great airship, where it had been hanging in the skies no more than 200 meters above Krasny, in a perfect position to blast that ship to pieces. The fleet flagship had turned smartly, its rapid descent corrected, and was just beginning to climb again when the explosion occurred. Within minutes, the gashes torn in Orenburg’s side by a hundred fragments of Big Red’s shattered duralumin frame, had fatally compromised the ship’s buoyancy.

Through the chaos of that moment, as the airship rolled in the sky, fires spreading rapidly to engulf its tail and rudders, Volkov heard his Security Chief shouting frantically over the voice tube to his capsule.

“Sir! Are you all right down there?”

“What’s happening?” Volkov had shouted back, though he knew very well what was happening. He could feel the ship shuddering in the sky, hear the hiss of helium escaping from the lacerated gas bags, feel the queasy roll of Orenburg as the flight crew struggled for control. The sight of Krasny falling from the sky was a chilling prelude to what was now about to happen to his own ship. They were going down, and Volkov gritted his teeth, his eyes searching frantically for the overhead lever that would eject his capsule into free fall so that he could escape.

“Kymchek! I’m using the escape pod! Save yourself! Get off the ship, and by god, if you make it out alive round up every man you can find and get a security detail to my landing site.”

He reached for the lever, never thinking a moment like this would come. He had always been above the heat of combat, immune to the violence he set in motion with his iron will. Now his pulse was rising with the thought that this emergency system had never been used before. What if it failed to operate? What if the parachute would not deploy? He could be plunging to his death at that very moment, but there was nothing else to be done.

He found the lever, pulled hard, and was relieved when the securing clamps released, and the weight of the capsule allowed it to fall freely away from his burning ship. Agonizing seconds passed, then the sharp tug of the chute deployment stilled his fear, and he eased back, collapsing against the bulkhead and gaping out the observation window, seeing burning fragments of the chaos above falling like molten rain. A man fell screaming, then another. Some were saved as their parachutes also deployed, though he saw one chute suddenly engulfed in flames from the falling burning cinders. Crew members from both the stricken airships were leaping for their lives, each with the same hope and fear that wrenched his own chest.

Seconds passed, and he finally realized, with great relief, that his parachutes were going to hold. The capsule was descending through a grey-white cloud, and then it broke through, allowing him to see the green rolling taiga below. All he had to do now was survive the landing.

“Damn you, Karpov!” he swore, venting his emotion. “I’ll see that you burn in hell!” He realized now what must have happened. Big Red was the same ship that dropped that terrible fire bomb on his troops some months ago. And he had seen Karpov use the weapon again, savaging the ships of the Caspian Division and sending Salsk and Sochi to a fiery end. There must have been another bomb aboard Krasny, mounted in the tail cargo holds. My God! He fired those rockets at his own ship this time, just so he could detonate that weapon. I will never underestimate that man’s black heart and soul again!

Down he went, falling until the capsule plunged into a stand of trees, in a wild moment of snapping branches. But the woodland actually helped to cushion his fall, which might have been much rougher had he struck some rocky clearing, or worse, fallen into a marshy tundra bog. In one last chaotic moment, he tumbled down through the stand of trees until his chute, tangled on the upper branches, brought his descent to a sudden halt. He was thrown to one side, his shoulder bruised, but then it was over.

There, in that relative silence, he cursed his enemy a hundred times, and bewailed his own fate as he did so. How could he have allowed this to happen to him? He was Ivan Volkov, Secretary General of the Orenburg Federation! He should still be up there, high above the storm, sipping his brandy and receiving reports of the destruction of the Siberian Fleet, but Karpov, damn his soul, had literally come from nowhere to ambush his ships just as victory was within his grasp. How could this happen?

A hundred other questions were in his mind now. What was happening on the ground? Has Colonel Levkin taken that railway inn? What about the rest of his fleet? Would they know what to do now that Orenburg had fallen.

Orenburg, the fleet flagship, a 16 gun leviathan with 200,000 cubic meter lift… The sound he heard next was the final horrendous chaos of the falling airships. It was somewhere behind him, a terrible roar and crash of twisted steel. Then his adrenaline rushed, and instinct took over. He had to get the hatch open, get out of this damn capsule, and get to his men on the ground. Where had he fallen? Thankfully the drift of his capsule on the rising winds of the storm had allowed him to escape the pandemonium in the sky above. He looked for the emergency supply satchel—food, ammunition, water—and then he wrenched the hatch open, seeing he was perched about six feet from the forest floor, suspended by the tough straps of the parachute harness.

He was out through the hatch, grunting as he fell to the ground. A man in his sixties now, he was never expecting a moment like this, yet here it was. He felt his old instincts for survival kick in. You’re alive! You’re on the ground now, but it is imperative you get to your men. Where in god’s name am I? First things first. I must get away from this capsule. If Karpov saw me escape this way, then it is only a matter of time before he orders every man at his command here to look for me. But what is happening at Ilanskiy?

He listened for a moment, after the terrible sound of the falling airships had finally subsided, eyes closed. He could hear the crump of mortar fire over his right shoulder, and he turned in that direction, knowing that must be the fighting at Ilanskiy. Then he heard a much louder boom, the sound of a great cannon firing, and the thunder of its round hitting home. Good lord, he thought. Where did they get that heavy artillery? He started away, his legs stiff, but moving with the urgency of his need.

This was far from over.

“What’s happened to the 2nd Battalion?” Colonel Levkin was huddled in a barn at the far edge of the farm his men had been battling for.

“Melnik was just on the radio. They’ve run into more armor—five or six light tanks, but we weren’t expecting them.”

“Nor those damn armored cars! Has he gotten around that hamlet?” Levkin pointed to Sverdlova, where a wide flanking movement was underway with four companies involved.

“Not yet. Sir. They reached the road leading up to Ilanskiy, but that is where they ran into those tanks. He says there’s another column coming in from the east. They could be getting up reinforcements, sir.”

“Which is what we’re going to need in short order. This attack looks like it will become a defense within the hour. We’re already three companies light, and even the full twelve companies were not enough to take on a full regiment. What was Volkov thinking? He promised me heavy air support, but we’re not getting it. What in God’s name is going on up there?”

“Somebody caught hell just now sir. A big airship fell about ten kilometers to the south of the town. Maybe that’s the last of the Siberian fleet, sir. We got news that Pavlodar and Krasnodar should be here soon with two more companies. They landed by parachute half an hour ago on the road to Kansk.”

“Good! The minute they’re assembled, have them come here. Damn! Those bastards are putting up one hell of a fight for that farm house. We need heavy weapons. We’re getting pounded by those big railway guns—another thing I warned Volkov about. Kymchek said they were still out east near lake Baikal! This is going to get much worse before it gets better. Get another message off to the Ob River attack an see if there’s any progress there. Otherwise, we need everything they can airlift, and as quickly as possible!”

When Karpov saw that escape pod fall from Orenburg, he knew it was Volkov. Now all he could think of was getting on the ground to capture him before he slipped away. The chaos in the sky around them slowly subsided, and he peered through his field glasses, seeing that the other two enemy airships Big Red had been dueling with had fled to the north. He smiled.

Watching those two big monsters die like that had just the right effect, yes? We’ll see how quick they are to tangle with us now. One look at Tunguska will freeze their blood!

He took a quick mental count of the fighting thus far. He had killed two enemy ships in that first ambush, appearing right in the thick of their formation, and at perfect altitude. I could not have planned it better, he thought—then again, I did plan it! I knew I would get here. I willed all of this to be, and Mother Time had no choice but to obey, because I’ve got her by the throat again.

Then I got that third ship, and now the fleet flagship! That’s four enemy ships destroyed, and a fifth had a bad tail fire. Tyrenkov tells me at least two others were detached earlier, or so he has learned. There still may be another four enemy ships nearby. As for my fleet, Angren took a beating in that last fight, but Abakan is still in good shape. But we’ve lost Tomsk, Yakutsk, and now Krasnoyarsk, god rest their souls. I had to do what was necessary, but Big Red did not die in vain. They took Orenburg down with them, and that may make all the difference here. Tunguska can handle any other ship they have. We’re twice the size of their battlecruisers.

Soon he had a much better picture of their situation, his signal intercept team had been listening to enemy ship-to-ship radio traffic. Another enemy ship, Saran, had been damaged so badly that it crashed north of the town. The rest of Volkov’s fleet had been ordered to withdraw to the north.

Good, he thought. That will give us time to pull things together. Angara was badly hit, and had to be grounded southeast of Ilanskiy, But I make the count four to two at the moment. We may get Talmenka up from the front soon to better those odds, and with Tunguska, I could probably beat those other four ships single handedly! This is looking very good.

Then he thought of Volkov down there somewhere, possibly alive. He wanted to get on the ground, but knew that he had to remain on overwatch. The enemy could get further reinforcements as well. We’ve only faced half their full battlefleet so far. They’ve another twelve airships on their side of the line, but many may be too far away to intervene here. The thing to do now is to drive off those last four enemy airships. Only then can I contemplate getting on the ground to find Volkov.

Tyrenkov is already down there. I must signal him at once. He can alert the Tartar Cavalry and watch the roads east through Kansk, He must do everything possible to find Volkov. But think! What would I do if I were Volkov now? First off, he’ll get to his men on the ground, but he’ll realize he’s marooned here, sharing the same fate as the men he ordered into this stupid attack. So he’ll try to get airborne again, as soon as he can. That could be why those last four enemy ships have broken off. They’re consolidating all their remaining air power into one division. Volkov might be trying to rendezvous with one of those ships.

Yes, that’s what he has to be planning now. He’ll hover with one ship, lower a sub-cloud car to the ground level, and leave the other three on overwatch. So that means I should be able to find that bastard just by finding those last four ships of his.

“Bogrov!” he turned to his Air Commandant now. “Deploy our Forward Topaz Radar equipment and tell Abakan to do the same. They are to form up and take the van. We’re steering north to find those last enemy airships!”

Karpov rubbed his hands together, eager to get in the hunt.

Far below, Volkov had picked his way to the edge of the woodland, moving warily to the northeast towards the sound of the ground battle. He hunched behind a fallen tree, staring across a small clearing, and could see men moving there. From their uniforms he knew they were his own troops, and he started across the clearing, running as fast as he could, winded and tired when he reached the far side. Then he heard men shouting, the sound of a motorcycle revving its engine. A rider wheeled up on a motorbike, halting some fifty yards off and firing a machinegun at him!

“Cease Fire! Damn you! This is Ivan Volkov! Now get over here with that motor bike at once!”

The stunned rider knew one thing when he heard it—that voice, deep and threatening. He had heard it a hundred times in radio addresses, but what was Volkov doing here? He edged close, then saw a man in a plain grey uniform with red piping, and his heart skipped a beat when he recognized the General Secretary. He scooted over to the man’s side, saluting and blathering out an apology, saying he had been ordered to watch this clearing.

“Never mind, never mind, you idiot. Where is Colonel Levkin?”

“At the farm, sir, coordinating the attack. Just over there.”

“Get off that bike!” Volkov would ride the rest of the way, motoring to find Colonel Levkin in a few minutes time. Every man in the headquarters was surprised when Volkov motored up to the back side of an old barn in a cloud of dust, growling like the motorbike. He would hear Levkin’s report, then get all the remaining men of the motorcycle platoon together here to form an escort and security detail.

“What’s happening, Levkin? Have you taken that railway inn?”

“Sir… resistance is much heavier than we expected, and we’re three companies light. Reinforcements are only now arriving on Pavlodar and Krasnodar.”

“Those ships have returned? Good! What about Talgar?”

“No word on that ship yet.”

“Very well, circumstances have forced me to ground here, Colonel, but I must get airborne again as quickly as possible.”

“We’ve lost the Orenburg?”

“Forget that!” Volkov shouted now. “Where is Pavlodar?”

“Sir? That ship is to the east, along the road to Kansk. They were bringing in a reserve company.”

“Good. Tell them to hold where they are, and descend to ground level. Krasnodar will stand on overwatch. I’ll get there as quickly as possible. Signal all our other ships to move to the north and form a strong battlegroup.”

“But sir—we need air cover here! They out gun us badly, but even with the additional troops off Pavlodar and Krasnodar, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get to the objective. We need heavy weapons! They’ve been pounding us all morning with those heavy railway guns. My companies are down to four and five squads each.”

“Don’t worry, Levkin. I’ll get you support in due course. For now, do as I have ordered! I’ll want any man on a motor bike to meet me on that road to Kansk in ten minutes. See to it!”

Volkov was desperately planning his escape. As for the fate of the men he had led here, that was as far from his mind now as his stateroom in the capital back at Orenburg.

Chapter 30

The reports were coming in to the Main Intelligence Directorate in the Kremlin, known as the GRU. First founded in 1918 by Trotsky, it had gone through many evolutions over the years, a vast intelligence network with operatives all over the world. Internally, it also competed with the KGB, NKVD, and other military intel units, but in Kirov’s Russia, the GRU was the real head of the snake when it came to military intelligence.

It was presently led by Ian Karlovich Berzin, also known simply as “Janis,” a hard man with short cropped hair, penetrating eyes and a ruthless disposition. A former member of the Cheka, Lenin had used him to head up his “Red Terror” in the early years of the Russian Civil War before Kirov fully consolidated power and moderated those policies. He served in the diplomatic corps before the war, until he was recalled and transferred to Moscow to become head of the “Red Archives.” Stalin would have had him arrested in the purge of 1938, but that never happened, and so Berzin soon was moved from his post at the Archives to head of the GRU, and he was soon to be called “the spy of spies.”

There in “Berzin’s Kitchen,” as the GRU was called, plots and secret operations were cooked up that often aimed at shaping the political structure of any nation designated an enemy of the Soviet Union. Spain had been so designated once, where Berzin personally intervened in the Spanish Civil War, advising the Republican forces under his code name “Grishin.” To this day, Sergie Kirov still called him that in their private meetings, for Berzin had the ear of the General Secretary from the moment he consolidated power. He was thought to be a most gifted man, with vast knowledge and instincts that often seemed prescient to his rivals and foes. How he came by the information he so ably used to unhinge enemies of the state, no one knew—except perhaps Sergei Kirov himself, who often met with Berzin in a highly secure room within the Red Archives.

A central records depot for Soviet intelligence, the Red Archives also had a secret room open only to Sergei Kirov, and a very few handpicked confederates in the Central Authority. Berzin was one of them, and there he was amazed to see the strange documents Kirov had secreted away, newspapers, books, photographs depicting a world, and a history, that Berzin could scarcely imagine. He learned that all these things had been collected by the General Secretary himself, though he was never told how Kirov had come by them. At first he believed them to be fabrications, preposterous documents dreamt up by some story teller—until Kirov took him into his confidence one day, and told him a story that changed his life forever.

“The material,” as it was called by the two men in their secret conferences, was fantastic and unbelievable to Berzin in the beginning. Yet, he was soon convinced of its veracity when events depicted on the pages of those secret books began to take place with almost clock-like accuracy. He learned of the rise of Adolf Hitler, long before that demon ever emerged on the world scene, and he had been directed by Kirov to eliminate him.

On three occasions, Berzin had mounted special operations attempting to find and kill Hitler, but in each case, something had happened to frustrate the attempt. They were small things, one a careless slip of the tongue that exposed an agent and blew his cover, the second a simple street accident that killed his assassin just an hour before the planned attack. The third time it had been a mere loose boot lace, which saw a man stumble, rattle a half open door, and be exposed as the saboteur he was.

Finally, Sergei Kirov came to the conclusion that some men, through the sheer magnetism of their will, were destined to come into the world, like weeds invading a garden. Once they got rooted, and matured beyond some unknown nexus point in their darkened life histories, they became impossible to eliminate. He had managed to get to one despicable weed before it bloomed and seeded the Devil’s Garden of the emerging Bolshevik Revolution, Josef Stalin—but he could not pluck out the life of Adolf Hitler before he became the mortal threat he now was. The energy driving that man’s forward momentum along the meridians of history was simply too great.

An early 21st Century physicist and theorist would one day describe such a man as a Prime Mover, an entity so powerful in terms of the exercise of human willpower, that he was destined to exert dramatic influence over the course of events. Berzin’s GRU had tried to eliminate others, sometime with success, and other times found their operations only aided the rise of even more threatening men. A prime example had been the successful plot to undermine the head of the White movement after the Revolution, Anton Denikin. In his place, a shadow rose within that movement that was so deep and impenetrable that not even the full weight of the GRU could pierce it. That shadow was a man named Ivan Volkov, wholly unexpected, an interloper that Sergei Kirov had dubbed “the profound anomaly” at one point in his briefings with Berzin.

Volkov was mentioned nowhere in the secret documents and books hidden away in the Red Archives. He was a rogue, completely incongruous, an intruder on the history like a thief that had broken into a great mansion. At first his presence was silent and stealthy, stalking the hallways of time, and probing into rooms and chambers in the history. One by one, other rivals within the White movement were quietly eliminated, and when Denikin fell, it was as if a door had been opened. Within months, the name Ivan Volkov was being spoken in fearful tones, and Kirov came to believe that this man must have some secret archive of his own.

Dubbed “the Prophet,” Volkov had an uncanny ability to find the key moments along a given meridian of causality, and there he would seed the garden with his own nefarious plots. Berzin had been directed to eliminate him, but he became another of those “slippery fish,” as Director Kamenski might describe it, and Kirov soon came to believe that Volkov, like Adolf Hitler, was another Prime Mover, with a destiny too powerful to be easily unhinged. He was deeply bothered about this, and very suspicious of Volkov.

“Perhaps I drove that man in to Hitler’s camp,” he once confided to Berzin in a briefing. “But I must tell you, Grishin, there is something very strange about this man. Yes, he has a history, like all other men. We were able to find out a good deal about him once we determined he was a potential threat within the White movement, but why does he not then appear in the material?”

Kirov soon began to believe that Volkov was not the man his simple life history depicted. They had found no record of his birth, and his parents had never been identified. This was not unusual, as the revolution had seen many men adopt new identities. Kirov’s own name had evolved from Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, to the code name Mironov, and then to his present name of Sergei Kirov. Who was Ivan Volkov before he had assumed that identity? This was something that not even the full resources of the GRU had ever been able to uncover.

What they did know, is that Volkov was now a mortal enemy of the Soviet State, and a highly dangerous threat. His own intelligence service was so good that it often frustrated the plans of the GRU, and Kirov soon came to understand that Volkov was also secretly in league with Hitler’s Germany. When war broke out, that suspicion was proved true when the Orenburg Federation formally joined the Axis. Many thought this was simply a way for Volkov to curry favor with Hitler, and gain much needed support and assistance from the German arms manufacturing industry, but Kirov told Berzin he believed it was something much more.

“This man sees and understands things about the unfolding of events that is as accurate as the information in our Archives. The very fact that the material contains nothing whatsoever about this Orenburg Federation, or Volkov’s rise to power there, means that he is a profound anomaly, a free radical, some wholly unaccountable force that is exerting influence on the history. And the lever in all this is Volkov himself. He asserts knowledge that no man of our own time could be privy to, unless he were right here with us, Grishin, and had access to the material. Are you certain that there have been no leaks?”

“Of course, sir. The fact that Volkov is so free with his boastful predictions should make that clear. Could someone be leaking all that information to him? Impossible. No sir, I agree with you. He is an anomaly. His emergence is a mystery, and his presence has obviously re-written things. Our material was once very reliable, but since Volkov has come on the scene, things can no longer be predicted with any complete confidence.

“Yes, he is another Prime Mover,” said Kirov, “just as I became one when I eliminated Stalin.” As to all he really knew about Ivan Volkov, information he had been given by Fedorov and Volsky, Kirov said nothing. He only spoke of the one thing that weighed on his mind.

“We have been unable to eliminate Volkov personally, or to crush him militarily, and that will become even more difficult now that we have the Germans snarling at our throats. What are the latest reports from the front?”

“At the outset, things were very difficult, as we knew they would be, sir. This attack was not unexpected. We could see the buildup of troops for many months, but the material indicated we still had some weeks before the guns actually fired.”

“Yes,” said Kirov, “the German offensive was supposed to begin on June 22nd. That date was well documented.”

“They hit us five weeks early, sir. We had good men on the front lines, but we needed those last five weeks to complete our final mobilization. Many units were not fully ready, the new arms and munitions not distributed, particularly to the armored units. Oil shortages have hindered production. We have plenty of tanks, but they are still largely our older models. So we have been implementing our plan, Bronirovanny Kulak, Armored Fist.” Berzin emphasized his words by clenching his own fist, the glint of battle in his eye.

“All the armor and motorized infantry is pulling back as ordered. In fact, though our losses have been heavy on the forward lines, the withdrawal is proceeding as planned. There have been no major encirclements yet, and our troops are now consolidating on the Minsk and Kiev defensive lines as planned.”

“And the south? That is where they will make their main effort.”

“We were hit very hard, and they are already over the Dniester. Their best troops are leading this attack, as we predicted. One armored force has turned south for Odessa, but their main effort is still aimed at the Dnieper bend. They have already reached Kirovgrad.”

“Kirovgrad! That is well beyond the Dniester.”

“We have managed to assemble a good armored force, sir, and we are planning to counterattack soon. The trouble is that we get little air cover, so movement is difficult, particularly by rail. In spite of our alert The early days of the attack still managed to catch our air force flat footed. We lost many planes on the ground, even though we posted those alert warnings ten days ago!”

“Don’t worry, Grishin,” said Kirov, placating his spy master. “No matter how good we are, we cannot predict everything. We have already seen the discrepancies and deviations getting bigger and bigger. Soon we may not be able to rely on the archive material at all. Look what has happened! Ever since the ship arrived here, and I got that message from Fedorov, things have begun to take dramatic turns. The history is being radically altered, and I may have had a great deal to do with that myself, as you well know.”

‘The ship’ was the battlecruiser named after Kirov himself, and it was another thing that was mentioned nowhere in the material, a fact that had eventually led Sergei Kirov to determine the world he had been reading about in his secret archive was no longer the same one in which he lived.

“The air force will recover. I have faith in Khudyakov and Novikov. What about the new T-34s?” Kirov knew they would need those tanks to eventually turn the tide, that is if the victory described in the material could be relied upon. It had taken the entire united Soviet Union to achieve that, and the world was quite different now. The existing Soviet tank force was already much greater than the inventory of German Panzers, but the lighter BT-6 and BT-7s would not hold the line forever, and the T-28s were too slow and antiquated to fight the mobile warfare Kirov knew the Soviets must soon adopt if they were to match the German art of war fighting.

“We have no more than 500 T-34s ready,” said Berzin. “Production is switching to that model in all our weapons plants, but it will take time to build up numbers, and they have stolen a march on us.”

“We should have seen this coming,” Kirov shook his head. “We were well warned, Grishin. The material told us we needed new tanks, and this Fedorov also warned me when I met with him.”

“The British also have a new heavy tank, sir.”

“So I am told by your men in that theatre. When will you have more information?”

“Very soon. I have a very good man on the job there, but it is a long way to Libya where these tanks made their latest appearance. What we do know is that the Germans cannot stop them, which is why we must do everything possible to build heavy tanks like these ourselves.”

“When will you have the plans?”

“That will not be easy. In fact, we have learned very little about them thus far. We have scoured England, but this is also an anomaly of sorts, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can find no production facilities in England associated with this new tank. At first I assumed they were well hidden, perhaps even underground, but my people there are very good. This may sound surprising, sir, but we’ve turned up nothing—no factories, no materials requisitions, no evidence of a design or planning committee—nothing! I must conclude these tanks may have been built in a secret overseas facility, perhaps in the British colonies. Our man in North Africa says they first appeared out of the deep desert of southern Libya.”

“Nonsense. If they had factories there, we would know about them. You simply cannot hide facilities big enough to produce heavy tanks.”

“I thought as much, sir. So we are now looking into India. They could have been shipped in from there, and we’ll find out soon enough. That said, this is all another deviation from the material. No mention was ever made of these heavy tanks, and the fighting in both North Africa and Syria has been radically altered. The Germans have been stopped on both those fronts!”

Kirov thought about this, nodding his head. “No evidence… Just as the British found no evidence that we ever built the ship. That must have been a great surprise to them when it appeared in the middle of their battle with the German Navy last year—yes, another anomaly.”

“There is one more we must discuss, sir.”

“Karpov?” Kirov knew what was on the other man’s mind. “Any further information?”

“Only that those reports of his demise were proven wrong. His airship did not crash in the English Channel. We believe this may have been deliberate misinformation. Tunguska was spotted by our agent at Ilanskiy. And sir, there is a big battle underway there now.”

“At Ilanskiy? Why wasn’t I informed in the morning papers?”

Kirov was not referring to the Moscow news. The ‘morning papers’ were his daily briefing reports from the GRU, which he read over hot tea, blini, and good bread at his breakfast.

“We only got the information an hour ago,” said Berzin. There is an airship battle underway, and Volkov has landed a large troop contingent.”

“I see…” Kirov’s eyes darkened. “Then this offensive opening on the Ob River line three days ago was a ruse. It was meant to pull in Siberian reserves to that front, all so this attack at Ilanskiy might succeed.”

“Why would Volkov want that place, sir?”

“That is usually something I might be asking you, Grishin. Are you not head of the GRU?” Kirov smiled, indicating he was not serious. He knew full well why Berzin was in the dark about Ilanskiy. There were some things Kirov told to no other man, and his experience on the back stairway of Ilanskiy was one of them.

“For that matter,” said Berzin, “why does this Karpov fret over the place? I can only conclude it must be a new weapons facility, sir. There is construction going on there. The Siberians have also been bringing in materials from mining concerns deep in the taiga. We are getting more hard information on this, and I will have a report for you very soon, sir.”

“Where are these mining concerns you speak of?”

“Up near Vanavara, sir, which is very surprising. Those old mines there are a thousand kilometers away from this new operational base Karpov seems to be setting up at Ilanskiy, and we all know the Siberians have very few trucks to waste in hauling mineral ore half way across Siberia.”

“Indeed,” said Kirov, a light of understanding in his eyes now, though he said nothing more.