If the fact that a new war was raging over the horizon was any concern of Major General Vassily Guchkov, he did not show it. If he wondered why he had been left behind with a rump section of the Fourth Air Army, consisting of five hundred obsolescent fighter planes, it was no concern of his. What did concern him was that he hated Baku. It was full of black-ass Muslims whose faith was the Koran and not Lenin, who spoke a hideous Turkic type of language, and who hated Russians with an unspeakable passion.
It was not yet midmorning and he was already thinking of the private session he would have with the big-breasted blond typist from Kiev who functioned as his daytime mistress. As usual, she would serve him a light lunch in his office and then perform oral sex upon him. He felt it refreshed him for the rigors of the rest of the afternoon, which invariably concluded with bouts of heavy drinking. His adjutant would then drive him to his palatial quarters and turn him over to his night mistress, a plump local woman with very basic tastes who hated oral sex. She was also afraid she’d have her throat cut by her fellow Muslims if she ever left Guchkov’s employ, and she was right. Left alone on the streets she wouldn’t last thirty seconds.
All in all, he thought, it wasn’t a bad life. Let the others get shot at by the Yanks. He, Vassily Guchkov, would enjoy life despite the vulgarities of Baku and its people. The weather was nice, the women pliant, and he had several thousand men who saluted him.
His reverie was jolted by the distant sounds of low-flying aircraft and attendant explosions. Belatedly, the air raid sirens started to howl, sending civilians and noncombatants running frantically to the shelters.
What the hell is going on? Guchkov thought. He ran the few dozen yards to his combat command center, huffing badly, and received word that strange planes were overhead and dropping bombs. He looked out the window just as one of the planes flew past and was horrified to see the insignia of the United States Air Force on a P-51 only a few hundred feet above him. The fighters were bombing and strafing his airfields and the antiaircraft defenses.
“Scramble the planes,” he yelled, and he was informed that it was already happening, but too late. Most of the planes he commanded were being destroyed on the ground, as were the antiaircraft guns.
The fighter attack lasted only a few minutes, then there was blessed silence and the sound of the all-clear. He wondered who had decided it was safe, but his thoughts were again interrupted when the sirens shifted to the danger sound, sending the civilians screaming and running back to the shelters. The planes were returning.
“Where are my fighters?”
His adjutant, a slim young major named Brovkin, shrugged and looked at him with something bordering on contempt. “Either destroyed on the ground or unable to fly because of craters in the runways. Those few who did make it up appear to have been shot down. Oh yes, General, they’ve been strafing and bombing our antiaircraft positions.”
Guchkov sat down hard in a chair. He was fifty years old and had been in the Soviet military for more than thirty of those years, and never had anything like this occurred to him before. Even when the Luftwaffe was slaughtering the Red air force in the early days of the Great Patriotic War with Germany, he had been safe in a training command near the Urals.
“This time it’s their bombers and we can’t stop them,” Brovkin practically sneered.
The sky was clear, and overhead they could see the sunlight reflecting on the American planes. The effect was a silver twinkling of what looked like scores of tiny flying fish. He fervently wished they had been fish. Guchkov knew he was safe where he was because he now understood what was happening. The Allies had built up an air army of their own near Tehran and were going to use it to do what Hitler and his Panzers could not-destroy the oil fields!
All day long, the bombers came in waves, and he could see, hear, and smell the effects of the bombing. He could also see the fires where the wells and storage tanks had been set aflame. Dozens of dark, greasy fingers of smoke searched for the sky and many more fires must have been unseen in the distance.
At night the fighters returned, vectored in by the flames. They crippled attempts to repair the runways and hit anything they could see. They also denied sleep to the exhausted Russians and the terrified people of Baku. In the morning the bombers returned. Communication lines were damaged so Guchkov had no detailed information, but he did manage to find out that the bombs were falling all over the Caucasus region.
In his frustration, Guchkov got roaring drunk and beat up his night mistress, while the blonde stayed prudently out of his way. As the communications situation improved a little, he managed to find out that virtually the same thing was happening to the refining center at Ploesti and the oil fields in Romania. Although the battles for those areas were not as one-sided as the devastation around Baku, the reports of destruction mirrored his.
It didn’t matter. His command and his career had been destroyed. If his planes and guns had inflicted any real damage on the American tormentors and their airplanes he was not aware of it.
When, after a couple of days, there was a real lull in the attacks, he took a quick tour of the area. Most of the wellheads had been destroyed and were burning furiously, as were the refining and storage areas. The main rail lines from Baku to Rostov had been severed in a score of places and would require major reconstruction before any oil could be shipped. That is, if oil could ever again be brought from the ground in the first place. The totality of the disaster appalled him.
There were very few reports of bombers being shot down, and when he did find one crashed on the ground, he went to it and stared at the scattered rubble of the giant plane. It was a B-29. Soviet intelligence had said they were in the Pacific. This meant they were coming to Europe to join in the war. He calculated the range. Based in Iran, they could hit most of southern Russia. The cities of Odessa, Sevastopol, Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad could be bombed, perhaps even Moscow.
“Did we get any prisoners?” Guchkov asked.
“Half a dozen,” Brovkin replied.
“Kill them.”
Brovkin disagreed. “I would like to interrogate them first, comrade General.”
“Of course,” Guchkov said. He didn’t see the look of relief on Brovkin’s face. No prisoners would be murdered if he could help it.
Stunned, and in a drunken near-stupor, Guchkov allowed himself to be driven back to his office. There were radio messages from Stavka on his desk asking for information about the disaster. How badly were the fields hit? they asked. Would the flow of oil be interrupted? If so, for how long? When will oil be shipped again?
What they didn’t directly ask was who was to blame. Everyone knew who was to blame. Major General Vassily Guchkov, that’s who. Guchkov sobbed. He sent a coded message that the fields had been destroyed, as had all the supporting facilities and the transportation lines. Yes, he said, the fields could produce oil again, but not in this year of 1945. Maybe in 1946, but he doubted that.
Guchkov knew he was to blame and would be punished brutally. They had left him five hundred planes and he had failed. That the planes were shit, the pilots were poorly trained, and that the best mechanics had left as well, so that at least a third of the planes had been grounded for mechanical problems at the time of the assault, was no excuse. That he had no radar and his inherited antiaircraft guns faced north and not south was his fault as well. He was doomed.
Guchkov told his staff he did not want to be disturbed. He went into his office and closed the door. He took a seat behind his desk and pulled the Tokarev automatic pistol from its holster, stuck it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Outside Guchkov’s office, his staff jumped at the sound of the shot. A couple of them rushed for the office but were stopped by Brovkin. “Why bother hurrying?” he said. “Just another of his messes we’ll have to clean up.”