“He wanted to use Bundeswehr infantry,” Stirling said. “He thinks they can take the bunker.”
Cunningham snorted. “They’ll be slaughtered,” he said. “They’re not trained for such a mission.”
Stirling nodded. “General Rommel is as aware of that as you are,” he said. “However, he feels that Germany has to be saved from Himmler, whatever the cost.”
“The priority is landing and securing a lodgement in the Netherlands,” Hanover said sharply. “That takes priority. After that, well we’ll see.”
“There is one other point,” Admiral Grisham said, before the meeting could break up. “Do we proceed with the operation in Japan?”
Hanover nodded. “Admiral Yamamoto swore blind that he knew nothing of their junta’s decision to attack the Americans, and I’m inclined to believe him. Seeing he’s told us where most of the airfields are, we can gamble some ships to support him.”
He sighed. “If we don’t, I think we might end up having to nuke them,” he said. “Anything is better than that.”
The Kremlin
Moscow, Russia
15th May 1942
Vladivostok held out against steadily growing American pressure. Stalin was pleased; it wasn’t the total defeat of the Americans he’d hoped for, but it was better than losing Vladivostok quickly. The Americans had surrounded the city, and were bombarding it with shells, but they had been bloodily repulsed from their attempt to seize the city directly.
“Thanks to my adroit diplomacy, we have arranged for a Japanese army to move up and relieve the city,” Stalin said. Molotov, who remembered it as his adroit diplomacy, said nothing. “We have dozens of Japanese to go visit their ancestors, and we save our own men.”
Molotov frowned. “Comrade, we have a more pressing problem,” he said. “The British deployed a nuclear device within Germany, ending the German bioweapons program.” Or at least the one they told us about, he thought coldly. “They are clearly overcoming their… scruples about using the weapons.”
Stalin shrugged. “They will not turn a weapon like that on our civilians,” he said. “If they were using them, they would have used them on Vladivostok and ended the resistance there, to say nothing of Japan.”
Molotov hesitated. “Comrade, we should talk peace,” he said.
Stalin’s voice was icy cold. “Comrade, that brought down the Tsars and the Provisional Government that followed them,” he said. “They displayed weakness at the wrong moment and we jumped on them.”
Molotov, who knew that it had been Lenin’s government that had concluded a humiliating peace, didn’t dare to mention it. “We have to solve our problems,” he said grimly. “We have not yet tapped out the manpower in Russia itself, but we now have three separate fronts to worry about; Vladivostok, Iran and Sweden. We also no longer have any advantages in tanks; the Americans have developed shells that make their tanks able to kill ours, and they have always been better with aircraft.”
He shuddered. General Iosif Apanasenko had poured the Red Air Force out like water, trying to crush the American fleet. It had failed and the casualties had been horrifying. The Americans had taken a battering, but their success at cutting the Trans-Siberian Railroad had limited what reinforcements could be sent.
“Himmler may discuss a separate peace,” he continued. “Japan may discuss such a peace; they would be insane not to at least consider the possibility. Now that Germany has faced what the British call a ‘tactical’ nuclear strike, someone may overthrow Himmler and discuss a peace with the British. The British might even demand that they join them in invading us as part of the surrender terms.”
Stalin shook his head. “Himmler will never discuss a peace agreement that will not leave him with his head,” he said. “Between the British and the Americans, no one will want to leave him alive. How can he surrender knowing that one of the surrender terms will be his head on a silver platter with an apple in his mouth?”
Molotov blinked, wondering where Stalin had learnt that phase. It wasn’t a normal Russian one, and as far as he was aware it wasn’t a Georgian one either. “Then perhaps the British will entice someone into taking power,” he said, and winced inwardly. Such a suggestion could only fuel Stalin’s paranoia. “There are Germans who don’t like him.”
“I wonder why,” Stalin said. Molotov laughed dutifully. “I am certain that we can rely on Comrade Himmler” – he chuckled heavily – “to stay in power. Now, what about the progress of our own smallpox weapons?”
Molotov shuddered. Despite a determined effort by the Communist Party, not every one of Russia’s teeming populations had been inoculated. Indeed, the use of biological weapons in Afghanistan and Central Asia had rather damaged any faith the nations – riddled with superstition as they were – might have had in Russian medical science, which was of course the finest in the world.
“Comrade, they used such a terrible weapon on the Germans, just to prevent them using such weapons,” he said. “If we manage to deploy one, what will they do to us?”
He had a dreadful vision of mushroom clouds marching from west to east across the Soviet Union, forever consigning it to the garbage can of history. The few survivors would envy the dead; they would never have the chance to live in the Worker’s Paradise.
“They would not dare to act against us,” Stalin said. “With Himmler’s help, we should have a nuclear weapon by the end of the year.”
Molotov hesitated. The attempts at building a nuclear device had come with a dreadful cost; Soviet manufacturing was not up to the standards of what was required. A leak in the Urals, a leak of radioactive material, had infected thousands with radiation poisoning; the NKVD had rounded them all up, shot them and buried them in mass graves. He shuddered; he still didn’t know if that was an accident, or deliberate German sabotage.
“We won’t have enough to prevent the British – or the Americans – from destroying us,” he said. “Why would they hold off from destroying us, one city for the entire United Soviet Socialist Republic?”
Stalin’s eyes glittered. “We will inform them that we have more devices,” he said. “We will be reasonable, Comrade; we will give them Europe, and Himmler and his men will flee to us. We will offer to make concessions, perhaps even to do the hard task of wiping the Japanese from China. But we will not surrender and we will not accept any restrictions, as long as we remain penned up.”
He grinned a toothy grin, the kind of grin that swam towards swimmers with a fin on top. “They will look at us, trapped in our desolated country, unaware that we know where all the minerals are buried, and they will leave us there. Let them deploy their bases in India, in Germany, in China; they will see nothing from us. In ten years, in twenty years, they will grow weak, and relax, and then a single hammer blow from us will bring them shattering to the ground.”
Molotov stared at him. He knew, deep in his heart, that it would not work. Stalin’s plan, to eat crow while the Allies grew lax, wouldn’t work. Truman was not Roosevelt, and Hanover didn’t rule Churchill’s England. And even if they did, the USSR itself was tottering; Trotsky was hammering away at its foundations. Not a day went by without some new outrage, and the NKVD was running around in circles.
He searched for the right words, and they didn’t come. Rebellion was seething in the Ukraine and Belarus, without even the threat of a German invasion to hold them beside Russia. Nearly half a million soldiers were deployed there, the results of the largest military build-up the world had ever seen, and they were all that was keeping the population down. Rumours – rumours that the natives would soon face the same kind of population reduction measures as the Poles had already faced – were widespread; no one believed Radio Moscow when there was Radio Free Ukraine.