Buckner said, “For Christ’s sake.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Is that any way to run a military operation? Jesus Christ.”
“Come on Glenn. Spit it out.”
“You’ve given us the overall plan. Grudgingly but you’ve told us. Your dispatch a month ago pretty much covered as much as you wanted to let us see. You’re going to draw the Soviet High Command out of the Kremlin and hit them from the air and take over communications and headquarters on the ground. Now I want the God damned details and I’m not stepping out of this room until I’ve got them.”
“Then you’d better make yourself comfortable.”
“Is that a flat refusal?”
“Not at all. But you’ll spend the better part of the next week in this room before you find out anything from me. I’ll spell out the whole design for you when I’m ready to. It’ll be well in advance of our D-day. But it won’t be today and it won’t be tomorrow.”
Buckner blinked. “You know sometimes I think I’d have got more cooperation out of that bastard Vassily Devenko.”
“You might have.”
“I could pull your airplanes out right now, Alex.”
“No. Not while this thing has a chance of working. Don’t make threats you can’t carry out—it doesn’t help either of us.”
Buckner stood up abruptly. “You got a place to billet me where I’ll be out of the way?”
“We’ll find something.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.”
He sent Sergei off with Buckner and went back into the office. Sensations of trouble rubbed against him. Buckner acted the fool but some of it was sham; he was cleverer than he seemed. He was Roosevelt’s running dog and if he received instructions to interfere actively he’d be an antagonist to reckon with—it would be unwise to be disarmed by his blustering buffoonery. He had to be handled with extreme caution. He had to be told the plan; he had to be told soon enough to reassure him and late enough to prevent him doing anything about it.
String him along, he thought—Just keep stringing him along. And hope Buckner didn’t tumble to it too soon.
5.
On the twenty-fourth the political echelon of the Russian Liberation Coalition arrived on the tarmac and Alex was on the field to meet them with his officers—a welcoming party from which Irina detached herself to make her private greetings to her father.
The contingent numbered twenty-eight White Russian dignitaries; most of them were of noble birth. There were two Princes—old Michael from Zurich and the Coalition’s leader, Prince Leon; Felix in his dress-whites made a third prince. There were five counts, Anatol among them, and seven Barons including Oleg Zimovoi and the diminutive Yuri Ivanov who would be the new government’s Minister of Finance. General Savinov was in the party, red-faced and redolent of gin. There was one sixty-seven-year-old Admiral who had once commanded the Black Sea Fleet; and an assortment of well-dressed men most of whose faces he knew—the administrators and specialists who would take over key functions in the Russian bureaucracy.
Alex was alarmed by Prince Leon’s appearance. The old man had lost a great deal of weight. The hands dangled from his sleeves and his skin had gone the hue of veal. His movements were uncertain: he prodded the tarmac with his cane and hesitated before he put his weight on it. His weary eyes were shattered by bloodshot lines but when he came before Alex he straightened up and stabbed a finger forcefully into the air by way of greeting; and he beamed.
He’d sent the unsuspecting Buckner out to observe field training for the day. The hangar was cleared and the visitors arranged themselves on the benches; Felix joined Alex at the podium and after a suitable interval of chatter Alex brought the assemblage to order.
“We’ll be going over your individual duties in detail in the next few days with each of you. In the meantime I’ll outline the general scope of things.
“We leave here in four days’ time in eight aircraft. Our destination is a landing field on the Finnish mainland. Several of you have been in consultation with the Finnish government and I’ve made a few specific arrangements of my own. As you know the diplomatic situation’s confused because Finland is at war with the Soviets again. The Finns are no longer neutral—they’re a belligerent power. The Allies have severed formal relations with Helsinki but they won’t declare war on Finland unless the Finns enter a pact with Hitler, which seems unlikely at the moment—the Finns don’t want any part of Hitler, they only want to get back the ground they lost to Russia two years ago. Part of our arrangement is that when we’ve taken power we’re to cede that territory back to Finland. In return for that pledge the Finns are supporting this operation.
“The Soviet leaders will be on a certain train at a certain time. We know the train’s schedule—we know where to find it at a given time. We intend to stop the train by bombing it from the air. Then our ground troops will administer the coup de grâce. We’ll have Stalin’s corpse to prove we’ve done the job.”
He had to wait for the taut murmur to die away; then he went on:
“The Nazis control the approaches to the Baltic Sea. So we’ve got to carry everything with us by air. Our bombers will fly with full bomb-loads and auxiliary fuel tanks and we’ll have to stuff the transports to their maximum weight limits. For that reason I ask that you leave behind anything that isn’t absolutely vital.
“The operation—code name Steel Bear—is scheduled to take off from the Finland airstrip on a date you’ll know well in advance. The flight plan requires a nonstop flight to a target of approximately one thousand kilometers—six hundred miles—not a tough run for these planes. We’re timing our approach to coincide with the arrival of Stalin’s train at the target point. Of course it may be a bit late—they’ve had to clear the rails of snow every day for the past two weeks—but we’re prepared to circle the target area until the train appears. There’s ample fuel for that. If our bombers are challenged by Red fighters they’ll respond with the proper Red Air Force recognition code for that day.
“Our first-echelon of parachute commandos will have taken off twelve hours previously. The parachute drop will have been made by night into fields as close as possible to the target areas assigned to each team. There are a half dozen teams. One key target is the wireless transmitter towers on the Moscow-Noginsk road—they’ve become the center for outgoing transmissions since the towers on the west of Moscow were bombed by the Luftwaffe and the Nazis cut the western telephone networks. The telephone lines to the east are wired through a subsidiary central switchboard on the Noginsk line; that switchboard is the target of Major Solov’s team of paratroops. Both the switchboard and the wireless transmitter station are piped into the Kremlin. By taking these two points we cut the Kremlin off from contact with units outside Moscow, and we inform those in the Kremlin of the coup d’état.
“As some of you know we’ve been working with the assistance of a man inside the Kremlin. He’s a member of the General Staff, I can reveal that much. He will be ready to join us at the communications center the moment we have captured it and confirmed the death of the Soviet leaders. The general and I will announce that we’ve jointly taken command of the military forces of Russia.
“Major Postsev’s team will secure the Krivoy airfield, the nearest field to Moscow that’s in use at present. Prince Felix will land there after having bombed the train. He will proclaim the liberation. We’ll warn the Red Army commanders in the Kremlin that if they don’t join us we’ll cut off their communications—they’d lose control of their armies and the Germans would be able to take Moscow in a matter of hours; they’ll have little choice.