It was Russell’s turn to smile. ‘And has your life gone well?’
Varennikov missed the hint of irony. ‘Yes, I think so. There have been troubles, setbacks, but we are still going forward.’
‘And were you always interested in atomic physics?’
‘It’s been the most interesting area of research since the mid-thirties, and I… well, I never really considered any other field. The possibilities are so enormous.’
‘And what are you hoping to discover in Berlin?’
‘More pieces of the puzzle. I don’t know – there were so many brilliant German physicists before the war, and if they received enough government backing they should be ahead of us. But they probably didn’t – the Nazis used to describe this whole field as ‘Jewish physics’. Or the German scientists might have refused to work on a bomb, or worked on it without really trying. We don’t know.’
‘How powerful will these bombs be?’ Russell asked, curious as to current Soviet thinking.
‘There’s no obvious limit, but large enough to destroy whole cities.’
‘Dropping them sounds a dangerous business.’
Varennikov smiled. ‘They’ll be dropped from a great height, or attached to rockets. In theory, that is.’
‘And in practice?’
‘Oh, they won’t actually be used. They’ll act as a deterrent, a threat to possible invaders. If we had owned such a bomb in 1941 the Germans would never have dared to invade us. If every country has one, then no one will be able to invade anyone else. The atomic bomb is a weapon for peace, not war.’
‘But…’ Russell began, just as footsteps sounded behind him. The openness of their discussion might, he realised, be somewhat frowned upon in certain quarters.
Varennikov seemed unconcerned by such considerations.. ‘And harnessing atomic power for peaceful purposes will transform the world,’ he continued. ‘Imagine unlimited, virtually free energy. Poverty will become a thing of the past.’
Colonel Nikoladze sat down beside the physicist.
‘We’re imagining a better world,’ Russell told him.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Nikoladze replied. He didn’t care what they were talking about, Russell realised with a sinking heart. Varennikov could tell him that Stalin was partial to goats, and no one would protest. They hadn’t even forbidden him from writing about the mission once the war was over. Why bother when he wouldn’t be around?
‘I hear it went well today,’ Nikoladze said.
‘We’re still in one piece,’ Russell agreed. ‘When do we go?’
‘We leave for Poland early tomorrow. And if all goes well, you’ll be dropped over Germany early on Thursday.’
‘Four of us?’
‘Yes,’ Nikoladze answered. ‘The two of you, Major Kazankin who you’ve already met, and Lieutenant Gusakovsky.’
It seemed small for an invading army, but that was probably the point. If the Germans noticed them, it wouldn’t matter if they were a thousand-strong – they still wouldn’t get away with a single sheet of paper. But four men had a reasonable chance of passing unobserved. They could all get under one big bed if the situation demanded it. And the smaller the group, the better his own chances were of eventually cutting himself loose.
‘The final offensive began this morning,’ Nikoladze was saying. ‘More than a million men are involved. Assuming all goes well Stavka hopes to announce the capture of Berlin on this coming Sunday – Lenin’s birthday. So you’ll have three days to complete your mission and remain undetected. An achievable target, I think.’
Later, back in the small two-bunk room they shared, Russell asked Varennikov where Nikoladze was from.
‘He’s from Georgia. Tiflis, I think.’
Georgians seemed to be running the Soviet Union, Russell thought. Stalin, Beria – Nikoladze would have powerful friends.
‘He seems competent enough,’ Varennikov said with a shrug.
‘I’m sure he is. What made them select you from all the other scientists working on the project?’
‘Several reasons, I think. I speak English well enough to talk with you, I speak and read a little German, and I know enough about the matter in hand to recognise anything new. There are other scientists with a much better grasp of German,’ he added modestly, ‘but their minds were too valuable to risk.’
There was no obvious let-up in the Soviet bombing of the German defences during the night, and the members of Paul’s anti-tank unit saw little in the way of sleep. Roused bleary-eyed from the dugout shortly before dawn, and fully expecting a re-run of the previous day’s all-out artillery bombardment, they were pleasantly surprised to find nothing more immediately threatening than a cold but beautiful sunrise. A steaming mug of ersatz coffee had rarely seemed so welcome.
The respite lasted several hours, the Soviet guns finally opening up, in deafening unison, on the stroke of 10 a.m. Low-flying aircraft were soon screaming overhead, shells and bombs exploding in the wood around them. For thirty long minutes they huddled in their trenches, knees drawn up against their tightened chests, praying that they didn’t receive a direct hit. When a shell landed close enough to shake their ramparts, Paul fought off the temptation to risk climbing out in search of the new crater. Everyone knew that no two shells ever landed in the same spot.
As on the previous day, the gunners shifted their focus after half an hour, and began pummelling the German forward defences some two kilometres to the east. A look through the unit’s periscope revealed the familiar curtain of smoke above the invisible Oderbruch. Tank guns boomed in the distance.
An occasional plane still flew over their position, but the rain of shells had stopped, making movement beyond the trenches a relatively safe affair. The gun emplacements had survived several near misses, and the outer door to the dugout had been blown in, but the only real casualty was their football pitch, which now featured a large crater where the centre circle should be. Neumaier looked ready to kill, and Paul’s consoling remark that further fixtures were unlikely elicited a bleak stare.
Hours of nervous waiting followed. They could hear the battle, see it reaching for the sky in smoke and flame, but had no way of knowing how it was going. Were the Russians on the point of breaking through, or simply piling up corpses in the meadows? No one, with the possible exception of Haaf, actually expected the ‘turning of the tide’ their Führer was demanding, but stranger things had happened. Maybe Ivan had finally run out of cannon fodder. It had taken him long enough.
More likely, he was just taking his time, grinding down his opponent with the same remorseless disregard for life he’d demonstrated from day one. And any moment now his tanks would rumble into view.
But when? The unit radio just crackled, and no runners arrived with orders. Utermann sent two men off to battalion, in search of news and additional shells. Paul, on observation duty, watched a steady stream of laden ambulance carts lumber west towards Diedersdorf, and found himself remembering a long-ago birthday party, and the seemingly endless string of coloured flags which the hired magician had drawn from his sleeve.
The emissaries returned with neither news nor shells, but bearing two dead rabbits. The smell of cooking soon wafted along the trenches, and by three in the afternoon they were all licking grease from their fingers. As they dined a Soviet plane passed high overhead, and several leaflets drifted down amongst them. ‘Your war is lost – surrender while you still can’ was the basic message – one that could hardly be argued with. But here they were.