The Long Hard Road

Chapter Thirty-Two: Reflections on the Eve

Ten Downing Street

London, United Kingdom

15^th May 1942

Dear God, what have I done?

Hanover stood at the window as the War Cabinet filed in. They had all supported the decision, in the end, but it had been his decision to make. He shuddered; the human race had lived in mortal fear of nuclear weapons for seventy years – only one had been detonated since 1945 – and he had deployed three of them in two years. The third target…

He shook his head as the room fell quiet. The BBC hadn’t heard about it yet, but Radio Berlin was screaming about the attack, claiming that an entire city had been vaporised. It was nonsense, of course, and Hanover knew that some of the population would believe the lies. Nuclear warheads were linked up with civilian deaths; everyone knew that, didn’t they?

“Major Stirling?” Hanover asked, still staring out of the window. Stirling had been bothered about something later; Hanover had no idea what. It was a mystery on top of a whole stack of mysteries, starting with the current status of the German bioweapon program.

Stirling spoke to Hanover’s back. “The blast faded within two miles of the impact point,” he said, “with a steadily degrading damage radius after the first mile. Although its impossible to be certain, radiation should be minimal, all concentrated within the target zone. Satellite observations are far from perfect, but the blast does not seem to have caused a radioactive cloud.”

Hanover nodded slowly. “Unfortunately, a lot of German civilians seem to have panicked, because of Radio Berlin,” Stirling continued. “The German police and SS are on the streets in force, trying to prevent a mass exodus from the site, but everyone nearby who saw the blast is panicking.”

“Serves them right for trying to convince our own people that we’re barbarians,” Cunningham commented. “Did we get all of the germs?”

“We think so,” Stirling said. “Certainly, we subjected the entire place to a massive blast of pure heat, so if any survived there, it will be a dark miracle. It would have taken seconds to vaporise them all.”

“Microseconds,” Cunningham corrected pedantically.

Hanover coughed. “Does it matter?” He asked dryly. “Carry on, Major.”

“Yes, sir,” Stirling said. “Mengele, the captured doctor, swears blind that there are no other facilities, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to have several more running without him knowing about it.”

Hanover nodded. “The agent involved is to get the Victoria Cross,” he said. There was no argument. “Has Mengele told us anything else useful?”

“Apparently, he thinks he cracked the secret behind the contraceptive,” Stirling said. “Ironically, if he had been allowed to experiment, he might well have turned it into a disease and sterilised everyone. The really interesting information, however, is what Stewart’s camera was able to tell us.”

He adjusted the display. “As you know, the device stored information that we were never able to relate to anything before,” he said. “Thanks to being in emergency mood, everything was secured and stored on the camera itself, including hints as to the location of Himmler’s bunker.” He paused. “From what we asked Stewart – she’s not in good shape – Himmler seems to have dug under all of Berlin.”

Cunningham scowled. “That’s why we were never able to make sense of the transmissions we did get,” he said.

Hanover nodded. “Interesting, for the moment,” he said. “How is she?”

“We have her at RAF Lyneham for the moment,” Stirling reported. “She’s not in good shape at all; she was beaten, raped several times and then lost a lot of blood for Mengele’s experiments.” He frowned. “There is massive scarring inside her vagina; she may never be able to have children, and the Germans were clearly interested in examining the remains of the broken leg she’d had when she was twelve. Mengele was competent enough to repair the surface damage, but the bastard couldn’t be bothered to do it right.

“Mentally, she’s fighting back, which is a good thing,” Stirling concluded. “She’s working hard on trying to recover, although it will be a long time before she’s fit to go back to work. She was apparently talking earlier and wants to meet the team that saved her; she seems to think she can interview them for the BBC.”

“Baron Edmund is going to have problems with that,” Hanover observed.

Hathaway cleared her throat. “There is, of course, the minor problem of her sleeping with the enemy,” she said. “It didn’t go down well with the public; you saw the demonstrations outside the BBC buildings in London and Manchester. Parliament was debating a private member’s bill for heavy punishment of collaboration.”

Hanover frowned. The bill would have covered Oliver, and he wanted to keep Oliver alive. Oh what a tangled web we weave, he thought absently.

“Don’t you think she’s been punished enough?” Noreen asked sharply. The Asian woman knew what rape was like. “She’s been beaten and raped and came very close to being used as a Typhoid Mary.”

“Is she contagious?” Cunningham asked sharply. Stirling shook his head. “Thank god,” Cunningham said.

Hanover held up a hand sharply. “Enough,” he said. “Noreen… I think we can avoid prosecuting her; Anna, see to it.” Hathaway looked rebellious, but nodded. “It’s not a government issue or concern about what happens to her with her employment at the BBC, although if her information is useful enough… well, Baron Edmund owes us a favour.”

He smiled. “That’s not the most important matter at hand,” he said. “What about the vaccination program?”

Armin Prushank coughed. “We broke open the stockpiles of vaccine, broad-spectrum vaccine, as soon as we got the news from the agent in Germany,” he said. “So far, we’ve managed to inoculate every medical person, politician” – he rubbed his own scar absently – “police officer, fire officer and we’re moving down the list now.” He scowled. “Reaching people has been a problem; we have stockpiles of the vaccine moving out to GPs and just as quickly vanishing into people. Schools have been ordered to inoculate their children and to act as a centre for inoculating parents and older children, and of course the military was already immune.”

He shook his head. “We weren’t anything like as ready for it as we thought we were,” he said. “All the drills came to nothing when reality hit. If there’s an outbreak in the next two days, I don’t know if we can cope with it.”

“That’s the problem with drills,” Cunningham said. “They have everything… except the emergency.”

Hanover scowled. “Smallpox,” he said. “What an oversight.”

“And from the Oversight Committee too,” Prushank said. “Perhaps we need an enquiry…”

“Now hold on a minute,” General Cunningham snapped. “Who in their right mind would have imagined that even Hitler would sink so low?”

“Himmler,” Hathaway said. “It’s Himmler now.”

Hanover turned back to the table and glared around it. “We can slander each other and place the blame and clear our own names when it comes to writing our memoirs,” he said. He smiled; Spike Milligan’s Goon Show had broadcast a new version of Tales of Men’s Shirts, in which the war had begun with the British and German Generals writing their autobiographies. “We have a crisis on our hands.”

“If we manage to have most of the population inoculated, we should be safe,” Prushank said. “Then we can hold the enquiry.”

“Balls to the enquiry,” Cunningham said rudely.

“Silence,” Hanover said. The single word spread out and produced silence. “I’m due to address Parliament in” – he checked his watch – “two hours. It should prove to be a horrifying experience. One last point; Major, how is Rommel taking this?”

“He understands,” Stirling said. “He’s not happy about it.” He paused. “Sir, I took the liberty of sharing the information about Himmler’s whereabouts with him. He wants to put together a mission to capture him.”

Hanover sighed. “We need all of the special forces for the operation in the Netherlands,” he said. “Perhaps after that.”

“He wanted to use Bundeswehr infantry,” Stirling said. “He thinks they can take the bunker.”

Cunningham snorted. “They’ll be slaughtered,” he said. “They’re not trained for such a mission.”

Stirling nodded. “General Rommel is as aware of that as you are,” he said. “However, he feels that Germany has to be saved from Himmler, whatever the cost.”

“The priority is landing and securing a lodgement in the Netherlands,” Hanover said sharply. “That takes priority. After that, well we’ll see.”

“There is one other point,” Admiral Grisham said, before the meeting could break up. “Do we proceed with the operation in Japan?”

Hanover nodded. “Admiral Yamamoto swore blind that he knew nothing of their junta’s decision to attack the Americans, and I’m inclined to believe him. Seeing he’s told us where most of the airfields are, we can gamble some ships to support him.”

He sighed. “If we don’t, I think we might end up having to nuke them,” he said. “Anything is better than that.”

The Kremlin

Moscow, Russia

15^th May 1942

Vladivostok held out against steadily growing American pressure. Stalin was pleased; it wasn’t the total defeat of the Americans he’d hoped for, but it was better than losing Vladivostok quickly. The Americans had surrounded the city, and were bombarding it with shells, but they had been bloodily repulsed from their attempt to seize the city directly.

“Thanks to my adroit diplomacy, we have arranged for a Japanese army to move up and relieve the city,” Stalin said. Molotov, who remembered it as his adroit diplomacy, said nothing. “We have dozens of Japanese to go visit their ancestors, and we save our own men.”

Molotov frowned. “Comrade, we have a more pressing problem,” he said. “The British deployed a nuclear device within Germany, ending the German bioweapons program.” Or at least the one they told us about, he thought coldly. “They are clearly overcoming their… scruples about using the weapons.”

Stalin shrugged. “They will not turn a weapon like that on our civilians,” he said. “If they were using them, they would have used them on Vladivostok and ended the resistance there, to say nothing of Japan.”

Molotov hesitated. “Comrade, we should talk peace,” he said.

Stalin’s voice was icy cold. “Comrade, that brought down the Tsars and the Provisional Government that followed them,” he said. “They displayed weakness at the wrong moment and we jumped on them.”

Molotov, who knew that it had been Lenin’s government that had concluded a humiliating peace, didn’t dare to mention it. “We have to solve our problems,” he said grimly. “We have not yet tapped out the manpower in Russia itself, but we now have three separate fronts to worry about; Vladivostok, Iran and Sweden. We also no longer have any advantages in tanks; the Americans have developed shells that make their tanks able to kill ours, and they have always been better with aircraft.”

He shuddered. General Iosif Apanasenko had poured the Red Air Force out like water, trying to crush the American fleet. It had failed and the casualties had been horrifying. The Americans had taken a battering, but their success at cutting the Trans-Siberian Railroad had limited what reinforcements could be sent.

“Himmler may discuss a separate peace,” he continued. “Japan may discuss such a peace; they would be insane not to at least consider the possibility. Now that Germany has faced what the British call a ‘tactical’ nuclear strike, someone may overthrow Himmler and discuss a peace with the British. The British might even demand that they join them in invading us as part of the surrender terms.”

Stalin shook his head. “Himmler will never discuss a peace agreement that will not leave him with his head,” he said. “Between the British and the Americans, no one will want to leave him alive. How can he surrender knowing that one of the surrender terms will be his head on a silver platter with an apple in his mouth?”

Molotov blinked, wondering where Stalin had learnt that phase. It wasn’t a normal Russian one, and as far as he was aware it wasn’t a Georgian one either. “Then perhaps the British will entice someone into taking power,” he said, and winced inwardly. Such a suggestion could only fuel Stalin’s paranoia. “There are Germans who don’t like him.”

“I wonder why,” Stalin said. Molotov laughed dutifully. “I am certain that we can rely on Comrade Himmler” – he chuckled heavily – “to stay in power. Now, what about the progress of our own smallpox weapons?”

Molotov shuddered. Despite a determined effort by the Communist Party, not every one of Russia’s teeming populations had been inoculated. Indeed, the use of biological weapons in Afghanistan and Central Asia had rather damaged any faith the nations – riddled with superstition as they were – might have had in Russian medical science, which was of course the finest in the world.

“Comrade, they used such a terrible weapon on the Germans, just to prevent them using such weapons,” he said. “If we manage to deploy one, what will they do to us?”

He had a dreadful vision of mushroom clouds marching from west to east across the Soviet Union, forever consigning it to the garbage can of history. The few survivors would envy the dead; they would never have the chance to live in the Worker’s Paradise.

“They would not dare to act against us,” Stalin said. “With Himmler’s help, we should have a nuclear weapon by the end of the year.”

Molotov hesitated. The attempts at building a nuclear device had come with a dreadful cost; Soviet manufacturing was not up to the standards of what was required. A leak in the Urals, a leak of radioactive material, had infected thousands with radiation poisoning; the NKVD had rounded them all up, shot them and buried them in mass graves. He shuddered; he still didn’t know if that was an accident, or deliberate German sabotage.

“We won’t have enough to prevent the British – or the Americans – from destroying us,” he said. “Why would they hold off from destroying us, one city for the entire United Soviet Socialist Republic?”

Stalin’s eyes glittered. “We will inform them that we have more devices,” he said. “We will be reasonable, Comrade; we will give them Europe, and Himmler and his men will flee to us. We will offer to make concessions, perhaps even to do the hard task of wiping the Japanese from China. But we will not surrender and we will not accept any restrictions, as long as we remain penned up.”

He grinned a toothy grin, the kind of grin that swam towards swimmers with a fin on top. “They will look at us, trapped in our desolated country, unaware that we know where all the minerals are buried, and they will leave us there. Let them deploy their bases in India, in Germany, in China; they will see nothing from us. In ten years, in twenty years, they will grow weak, and relax, and then a single hammer blow from us will bring them shattering to the ground.”

Molotov stared at him. He knew, deep in his heart, that it would not work. Stalin’s plan, to eat crow while the Allies grew lax, wouldn’t work. Truman was not Roosevelt, and Hanover didn’t rule Churchill’s England. And even if they did, the USSR itself was tottering; Trotsky was hammering away at its foundations. Not a day went by without some new outrage, and the NKVD was running around in circles.

He searched for the right words, and they didn’t come. Rebellion was seething in the Ukraine and Belarus, without even the threat of a German invasion to hold them beside Russia. Nearly half a million soldiers were deployed there, the results of the largest military build-up the world had ever seen, and they were all that was keeping the population down. Rumours – rumours that the natives would soon face the same kind of population reduction measures as the Poles had already faced – were widespread; no one believed Radio Moscow when there was Radio Free Ukraine.

“Lavrenty Pavlovich believes that he is on the verge of a breakthrough,” Stalin said, breaking into his thoughts with ease. “The discontented elements would be rounded up with ease, once he gets all the people into place. Then… we will have a peaceful Russia again.”

Molotov didn’t shake his head, but he knew that Beria was lying. One of his people worked in the new NKVD headquarters – the third they’d had since Trotsky had begun his campaign – and he’d reported that Beria was becoming more and more desperate than ever. In fact, he half-suspected that Beria was attempting to negotiate with Trotsky, although even Molotov couldn’t begin to imagine what he thought he could offer Trotsky, who’d publicly promised to hang Beria when the revolution came. The NKVD had no clues, no time, and its morale was dropping sharply.

A distant explosion echoed through the room. Stalin didn’t move; he seemed to have fallen into a rapt contemplation of Trotsky’s execution when he had caught. Molotov hesitated; should he slip out or stay? A second explosion, more distant than the first, announced yet another strike at Stalin’s regime. He sighed, very quietly.

“We will proceed at once with strikes against the continental United States,” Stalin said suddenly. Molotov jumped. “We have mass produced the long-range missiles, some of which will be hurled at America and tipped with high explosive. They will help to remind the Americans that we can hurt them.”

“The Germans have suggested other targets, based upon their satellite images,” Molotov said. “If we put the American soldiers in England out of action, we will be able to slow down their invasion of Europe.” He scowled; he knew that the missiles were almost certainly grossly unreliable. “They might be forced to give us another year to prepare our weapons and defences.”

“Indeed,” Stalin said. “Comrade Voroshilov informs me that the Stalin Line is fully ready for any challenge from the west.”

Molotov scowled. Not only was Voroshilov incompetent, he was also a liar. With all of the unrest in the western USSR, the Stalin Line might be stabbed in the back. Even with the massive fortifications around cities and industrial plants, the entire defence rested upon the tacit cooperation of the citizens.

“We will do as you suggest and add our missiles to those hitting Britain,” he said. “Perhaps a few could be hurled at America as well.” He smiled. “Comrade, we’ll come out of this stronger and the Revolution will be triumphant.”

Whose revolution? Molotov thought, but he was wise enough not to ask aloud. Stalin would not have been amused. He might even have decided to have Molotov executed in front of him. Thoughtfully, absently, Molotov began to consider other options, for his own personal survival, if nothing else.