Rommel shrugged, he'd done better than he'd expected. He had succeeded in buying the freedom for some of his men by accepting the fate of others. Using the deaths of the bad to buy the lives of the not so bad. After five years fighting on the Eastern Front, he'd gained the reputation of the man who could pull the unexpected out of nothing but this maze was beyond him. Rokossovsky was grinning broadly. Rommel knew he was missing something.
“Erwin, if all our men will die, yours, mine, no matter which of the four we hand them over to, what do we do?”
“Find somebody else of course. But who? We've sent so many people out that there are few people left who'll take more. The South Africans have offered refuge but we're still running short of places.”
“Erwin, if one doesn't want any of the four horses in a race to win the solution is obvious. Bring a fifth horse.”
“Not another Polish Government Konstantin?”
“And why not? All the Polish troops on both sides know that they'll get massacred if they get released to one of the existing juntas. But, we bring in a fifth government, one that's been carefully prepared and knows that its chance of survival depends upon it exploiting all those men, the ones from your Polish divisions, the ones from ours, then we've got a chance. Its a tripod, the fifth government depends on the troops for its survival yet, independently, the two sets of troops don't quite have the strength to do the job. Together, the three parts will have the strength to put down the other four governments but each part, the government and the two sets of troops know that if one side lets the tripod down, they'll all go down. Anyway, its better that way, a balance of power is good in a situation like this.”
Rommel shook his head. It was a brilliant scheme, risky but brilliant. If it worked it could set up a stable Poland quickly. The four pretender governments would have no chance against the combined forces of the Polish troops released from the German and Russian armies. Fighting together, restoring order to the country instead of enduring a never-ending four-sided civil war, might just heal some old wounds. “Konstantin, that's brilliant. Of course, your fifth government will give you the borders in Eastern Europe you want.”
“Of course.”
“I'd guessed that. Who thought of this scheme? Zhukov?”
“No, his predecessor.”
“STALIN! He's dead.” Then a horrible thought struck Rommel, “He is dead isn't he?”
Rokossovsky looked as if he was going to say something and had quickly changed his mind. “I think so; you're in a better position to know than I am. You commanded the troops that made the final assault on Moscow. Did you ever find his body? The story is he died fighting as a private soldier. But there are rumors......”
“We looked; we never found any bodies that looked like his. But you know street fighting, most of the dead were hard to recognize. The stories were all the same though, then and for years afterwards, lie died fighting as an infantryman. We've always assumed that was the case.”
“So do those of us who don't know for sure and those that do say nothing. But Stalin anticipated this situation and set the scheme in motion. We have governments trained for the countries that are strategically essential to us. The original set were communist of course, they met with accidents or resigned. The ones we have now are, how shall we say, more national, in outlook but will still see things our way.”
“Konstantin, this Government you're sending to Poland. Will all the troops you're releasing to it be Polish?''
Rokossovsky's grin became positively feral, “That, Erwin, would be telling.”
Manager's Office, Simonstown Branch of the Bank of Pretoria, South Africa.
“Now, how can I help you, Mister McMullen?”
John McMullen started. To him, bankers had been far-off figures, remote entities that dealt with others. To be addressed politely by one was a strange and disquieting feeling,
“Well, it’s like this. My missus and I have just got off the boat from England and we've got this draft from the Government. They said I had to see a bank so it could be converted into real money again.”
That part had made McMullen nervous. He'd given the Embassy in London all his English money and been told there would be a draft for the South African equivalent waiting for him. He'd been worried about that, how was he to know that he would see it again. The memories of his bonuses paid promptly without argument had swayed him and he'd accepted the deal. Sure enough, when he and his wife had landed, the draft had been waiting for him.
“Ah yes. Of course. We handle many of these for our new residents. How are you settling in?“
“Pretty well, thanks. We have a place in the new arrivals hostel while we look for a place of our own. And I started work Monday. At the shipyard.”
“Good, good. Thinking of buying a place? Very wise. Right Mister McMullen, I have your draft here. It’s made out in Sovereigns of course. The financial section of the Embassy in London converted the money you gave them into sovereigns for us. We'll check that of course. Then we'll convert your sovereigns into rand for you and you will have your money. You know, you7ve timed your trip just right. There were some currency movements while you were at sea and I think you've probably made a pretty penny on the exchanges.”
“Sovereigns? What are they? How did they get into this?” McMullen's voice was suspicious and a little alarmed. The comment about buying a house had caught him off-guard. When he'd said find a place of their own, he'd meant rent one. That's what he'd always done. The idea of actually owning a house was strange.
The bank manager sighed, Inaudibly and invisibly but still sighed. That was the trouble with immigrants, especially the ones from England. They just weren't familiar with banking and how money moved around.
“Mister McMullen when England made its agreement with Germany in 1940, they effectively dropped out the Commonwealth. They were still there in name, but the rest of the Commonwealth wouldn't talk to them. The problem was that before the war, the pound was the standard currency in the Commonwealth. Essentially, all the Commonwealth countries formed a pool and negotiated currency movements as a block. Gave them much greater strength in the market you see. And the Germans moving into England kicked the center out of that system. Nobody would touch the pound and nobody knew what a rupee or a rand was. The currencies went into a tailspin. Their value went to almost nothing.
“So the Commonwealth countries got together and created a new pool currency. The sovereign. Backed by South African gold and diamonds. It’s the standard currency of all the ex-Empire countries now. Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth alike. To move currencies from one country to another, the local currency is converted to sovereigns at source then the sovereigns converted to the new local currency at destination. The sovereign pool negotiates the value of the sovereign against the U.S. dollar as a block, then they negotiate the rates of exchange of their individual currencies against the sovereign individually. It’s not the best possible system but it works and setting that up in the middle of the war was hard enough.”
While he'd been speaking, the bank manager had been looking up numbers and cranking an adding machine.
“Right, well, since you started your journey, currencies have moved because we left the Commonwealth and because of the fighting in Thailand. You got more sovereigns for your pounds as a result, and quite a few more rand for your sovereigns. It looks like you made around 15 percent on the deal while you were at sea.”