King watched the President go, wondering what had happened to the missing Marine. The young black man had vanished a week after they’d arrived, taking with him some information on urban warfare and guerrilla warfare. Hoover had not been happy; hardly anyone had been, but the prospects for total disaster were far too high.
Sighing, wondering if Colonel Palter was having a better day, Ambassador King left the airport and headed for his current residence. There was work to be done; America had to fast-forward its development, or the streets would run red with blood.
Brest
Poland
15th August 2004
The shooting was beginning to die away as Colonel Tibaski ordered his tanks forward. The Polish resistance had fought bitterly, but they were seriously outclassed from the start; the NKVD had deployed thousands of heavily-armed troops in the region and could call upon the support of the Red Army if necessary. The city had been stubbornly defended, but the Great Stalin had ordered him to reduce it if it killed every Pole within the city; he’d been honoured to have been chosen for the mission.
“Fire,” he commanded, and the tanks fired as one. New training methods, working on improving their coordination, had been ordered; the results of the early exercises – he’d heard – had been disastrous. If the fascists – who seemed to be the Rodina’s friends at the moment – had chosen to attack, the Russians would have spilled far too much blood before forcing them back to ultimate victory.
Tibaski allowed himself a smile as the shells, designed for high explosive rather than armour-piercing, exploded within the city. The defences, never strong, began to collapse; the NKVD occupation troops had done a good job of exterminating the remains of the Polish aristocracy that had prevented their people from embracing the glories of communism; without their knowledge, the defenders knew little of the art of defence. Being amateurs, they’d piled the defences up; single shells were having radical effects.
He chuckled, ignoring the sidelong looks of his subordinates. The commanders who’d failed so badly in the series of exercises had also been sent to the gulag; there, they would serve the motherland far better than they had in their undeserved positions. The radio, apparently bought from the Germans, buzzed one long sequence; the Poles were offering a surrender.
“I have my orders,” Tibaski muttered to himself, and turned to the radio. “No mercy!”
From their vantage point high above the Soviet formation, the four-man SAS team watched the carnage, cursing their ill fortune. Their mission, to make contact with the known – and apparently undiscovered – centre of Polish anti-Soviet resistance in Brest had apparently failed, for no reason of their own. The communications officer, Corporal Boris, worked on his tactical radio, transmitting a burst signal to an orbiting drone, high over Germany, while the rest of the team recorded the atrocity.
“Shit,” Captain Lewis muttered. Their insertion from a minisub had been routine; nothing had led them to believe that the Soviets were slaughtering everyone. Instead of the encounter they had expected, they were bearing witness to a mass slaughter. As he watched, the Poles were lined up and shot; the young, the old and those in between. The strong men were rounded up and tied to trucks specially designed for prisoners; they, Lewis suspected, would be working as slave labour. The young women…
A scream rose up from a corner of the village and he squeezed his weapon tightly. A young man leapt up and ran towards the scream; the Russian shot him neatly once in the back. The girl, hardly in her teens, was being brutally raped; Lewis could see blood everywhere.
“We’ve got to do something, man,” Corporal Tamlin said. The Welshman sounded horrified; the girl’s screams cut off as the Russian sliced her throat. “Please…”
“What can we do?” Lewis asked him, ensuring that he had a recording of the Russian faces and their uniforms; green shoulder tabs meant NKVD, he suspected. “There are four of us. We have four M-16s and a handful of grenades. What do you think we can accomplish that’s worth our deaths?”
Tamlin’s gaze dropped. “Sir, I know the risks, but we could…”
“There are over a thousand Russians down there, slaughtering the entire town,” Lewis snapped. “The people we came to meet are gone; there’s nothing for us now, but to leave.”
“Orders from command,” Corporal Boris said. “They want us out of Poland in a week; they’re sending the submarine to meet us.”
“Can you ask them to do something?” Tamlin pleaded. He’d passed selection, but Poland was his first real SAS mission. Lewis felt for him; the young man who hadn’t seen all the horror of life yet. “Surely they could slip a fully-armed team in here, behind enemy ranks…”
“There are too many other things to do,” Lewis said. He took one last look at the burning town. “It’s time to go.”
Tibaski pulled himself out of the Polish tart – she’d clearly been no virgin – and slit her throat with one slash of the knife. The NKVD troops had divided into formations; one group was completing the kill-sweep, one group was guarding the prisoners, and one group was… enjoying the spoils of war.
“Excellent work, Colonel,” the commanding general said. He’d served the great Stalin during the last purge; he seemed to take an ungodly delight in purging Poles who would one day rise up against Russia. Their apostry, or so the rumours had said, would threaten the Soviet Union – and so they had to be killed. “Have your men finish the women off, and then we can pull out.”
Tibaski snickered dutifully at the weak joke. “Yes, Comrade General,” he said. “We’ll finish them all off for you.”
The General smiled. “The great Stalin has commanded that we purge every last Pole,” he said. “How long do you think it will take us?”
Tibaski cupped his balls. “A lot of fun,” he said. “Once this task is complete, the Poles will never threaten the Rodina again.”
The Kremlin
Moscow
20th August 2004
Stalin seemed almost like a happy man for once, rubbing his big hands together with glee. “A triumph,” he declared. “Would you not agree, Comrade?”
Molotov frowned. Stalin rarely called anyone ‘comrade.’ He was certain that it boded ill for him. “I think that a lot of progress has been made,” he said. Stalin’s orders, based upon the history files the Germans had made available to him, had been simple. Exterminate the Poles; crush their spirit. Ensure that they never dare to lift a hand against the Russians again. “We have crushed all organised sources of Polish resistance.”
“Splendid,” Stalin said. “The German ambassador, the fop with the stupid name, has protested at the millions of fleeing Poles, but the Germans are as eager as we to terminate the threat before it has even begun. They have even assisted us.”
Molotov nodded once, knowing he had to phase his concerns just right. “Comrade, we have destroyed most of their cities,” he said. “However, there are thousands of their people in the woods and in the hills, hiding from us. They’re fighting back.”
“We do not need to occupy them permanently,” Beria’s silky-sweet voice said. “Stage by stage, we destroy their food and fuel sources. Day by day, we weaken them further. Come the winter, how many of them will survive? Now we know better than to use a forward defence position, we will base our western defences on the Stalin Line, and let Poland die for two years.”