Malenkoy stared at him as if he were an inmate in a mental institution. “But there couldn’t have been more than a few thousand shells in the corral, hardly enough for one artillery barrage along a ten kilometre stretch of front,” he said cautiously.
“Shut up and concentrate on the road,” Shlemov yelled. The jeep veered wildly about the track, trees whistling past on the left, a steep ravine falling away to the right. Shlemov paused, running over the facts once more, trying to find a hidden flaw in his argument. It would help to talk it through.
“A few weeks ago, we received information that a consignment of shells had gone missing from a weapons production facility at a place called Berezniki, in the lee of the Urals. Although an immediate inquiry was launched, neither the munitions, nor a plausible explanation for their disappearance from Factory 497, were ever produced. It was presumed that there had been some incompetence in the filing of the manifest, so the individual responsible was punished. Incident closed, or so we thought.”
“And it is those shells which have turned up here?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“How can you be sure? One shell is identical to another, is it not?”
Shlemov looked at Malenkoy in a pitying way. “Berezniki is our country’s principal centre for the manufacture of chemical weapons. In the twenty-five years we have been producing them there has never once been an instance where a kilo of the stuff has gone missing, let alone a hundred tonnes of it. I’m telling you that what I just saw was part of the missing Berezniki consignment and that it was brought here on the orders of Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. I believe that he, Nerchenko and Krilov have formed some plan to unleash hydrogen cyanide on this front as part of a hideous, madcap scheme they have dubbed Archangel.”
Malenkoy almost put the GAZ into the ravine. “Every man, woman and child within a radius of a hundred and fifty kilometres,” he whispered. “It’s not possible.”
Ritter held the FW 189 in a figure-eight pattern over Chrudim a few hundred feet above the intermittent cloud cover. Menzel divided his time between monitoring the signals that poured from the massed tank regiments below and working the Hasselblads when a gap in the clouds allowed his cameras to take pictures of the olive-brown mass of armour in and around the town.
In the brief moments that he was not doing either he glanced up nervously, looking past Ritter and their fanatical gunner, Julend, who was still muttering do-or-die oaths over the intercom, for the Yaks which must surely be coming for them at any moment. Much to their relief and amazement, the only Russian fighter patrol they had seen either failed to spot them, or for reasons which baffled Menzel — seeing as they were a tactical reconnaissance aircraft much prized by Yak pilots — left them alone in pursuit of bigger fish further to the west. As for ground fire, Ivan had to be blind, or out of ammunition. So far, everything had been much too easy for his liking.
He forced himself to concentrate on their primary SIGINT mission. Although Menzel spoke Russian, there was little use for the skill in the Aufklärungsgruppe since most of the radio traffic was in code. He merely recorded the signals and left it to others back at HQ to decipher them, a task of almost child-like simplicity, he had been told, since the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe had long since possessed the means of unravelling Ivan’s principal code networks.
“How much fuel have we left?” he asked Ritter.
The pilot stared at the gauges, then tapped them with his forefinger, a gesture that summed up the Luftwaffe’s confidence in its equipment over the last few months, Menzel thought bitterly.
“Enough for another thirty-minute stooge before returning to base,” Ritter said matter-of-factly. “Where are all the fighters you told us about, Herr Hauptmann?”
Menzel was on the point of voicing his misgivings about the unnerving lull that existed on the Eastern Front above Chrudim when a transmission of such energy screeched in his headphones that he cried out with pain. He instinctively grabbed the scratch-pad and held his pencil poised above the paper for the dots and dashes that would begin flitting at lightning speed through his receiver. He was still joggling the handle that adjusted the DF loop beneath the aircraft for the optimum fix on the signal when the clear tones of the radio operator burst through his headset. For a moment his pencil hovered above the paper as he recovered from the shock of hearing an open voice channel over his equipment, then he began writing.
When he stopped two minutes later, his whole body numbed by what he had just heard, he turned to Ritter and, in a voice that he tried to control, ordered him to swing the Uhu round to the west and hold the vector for forty kilometres.
Had the FW 189 stooged over Chrudim a few minutes longer, Menzel would have had much more to write down on his scratch-pad than the signal that had flashed from Shlemov to Beria’s headquarters in Moscow. Within moments of the Uhu banking off towards Branodz, the DF loop which was the ‘ears’ of Menzel’s SIGINT equipment lost all further transmissions because of the temporary masking effects of the mountains over which they now sped as low and fast as the aircraft’s two Argus engines would propel them.
In the darkness of the radio hut in Chrudim Shlemov remained by the radio as Beria had instructed, waiting for the call-back signal. He had rattled off his findings as quickly as possible, fully aware that the longer he spoke, the greater the risk of his transmission being picked up by an eager sparks operator at Konev’s HQ in Branodz. Apart from the danger of Nerchenko or Shaposhnikov learning that the plan they called Archangel had been compromised, Shlemov had received explicit orders before leaving Moscow that the NKVD was to take the lead and wrap up the investigation into Shaposhnikov’s conspiracy, if that’s what it was. It would be a bitter end to all their work if Konev moved to arrest the plotters and received all the kudos — glory that rightfully belonged to the NKVD — from Stalin.
There was a faint crackle over the headset as the connection between Beria’s radio-telephone was re-established between Moscow and Chrudim. Beria’s voice was instantly recognizable to Shlemov, despite the atmospheric distortions through which the signal had battled for hundreds of kilometres before reaching its final destination.
“Shlemov?”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“Make your arrest, extract a full confession and dispose of them with extreme prejudice.”
“It will be done, Comrade.” He was about to shut down the equipment, but something told him that Beria was not yet finished.
“I know why he has done it,” Beria said, his voice an eerie mixture of hiss and static. “Write this down. It may help you when you deliver the coup de grâce.”
A moment later, Shlemov had all the evidence he needed to put the Archangel conspirators in a shallow grave somewhere in the woods on the edges of Branodz.
The Uhu roared down the valley, jinking and weaving to avoid sporadic bursts of light arms fire from the forest below. Menzel was too busy navigating to use his machine-gun in the nose, leaving the job of suppressive fire to Julend, whose MG 81s chattered with an intensity that was matched only by his howls of delight each time an Ivan patrol scattered from a clearing under a hail of his bullets.
“My God!” Menzel came up from his calculations as the full impact of the radio transmission sank into his soul. “Those barbarians are going to kill us all with the stuff they’ve got stored down there.”