What did Major Bovington know about Karen? “Yes,” Bobby replied cautiously.
“I heard she was in Leningrad.”
“That’s right. Studying music.”
“And I heard you have letters from her. Dozens.”
“That’s true. They came all at once, a little over a week ago.”
“What do those letters say?”
Bobby cleared his throat. “With all due respect, sir, they’re private.”
Major Bovington stood and threw up his hands, frustrated but amused. “For God’s sake, son, I’m not asking you to tell me about your love life. I mean, what do they say about Russia?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Major Bovington sighed. “I thought you were some sort of boy genius, graduated early from Columbia.”
“I did graduate early; that’s true.”
“Seems you’re a little slow on the uptake.”
“Sir?”
“All right, I’ll back up and start from the beginning.” Bovington sat down and leaned across the desk. “In 1939 Germany conquered Poland. In 1940 Germany conquered France. Right now, they’re trying to conquer Russia. They’ve conquered everyone they’ve attacked except one nation.”
“England.”
“Yes, England. You know why they haven’t conquered England?”
“Because it’s an island, sir?”
“Yes. It’s an island with a very powerful navy. A navy more powerful than Germany’s Kriegsmarine. Germany can’t conquer England because England’s navy won’t let it get close enough to land troops.”
“What does this have to do with Russia?” Bobby asked.
“You know who also had a powerful navy?”
“Who, sir?”
“France.”
“England’s strongest ally.”
“Until they were conquered in 1940.”
Bobby was starting to see the point of all this. “By Germany.”
Major Bovington nodded. “And what do you think would have happened if the Germans had added the French navy to their own?”
“They could have invaded England?”
Major Bovington shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“So why didn’t they?”
“The English didn’t let them.”
“How so?”
“By destroying them. Operation Catapult, in French Algeria. England attacked the French navy in port and killed over twelve hundred French sailors. French sailors who had been, until only a few months earlier, among England’s most trusted and powerful allies. French soldiers who claimed that they would never capitulate to Germany.”
“But they had capitulated.”
“Their government had. Their leaders had. And for that, they paid with their lives.”
“Sounds like the English are as ruthless as the Germans.”
“England survives because she was ruthless when she had to be.”
Bobby thought of Karen’s letter, of her distinction between the “real world” of war and the “dream world” of peace. “And now we’re going to do the same thing to Russia.”
Major Bovington leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I didn’t say that.”
“It’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?”
“The Germans have conquered the Ukraine and Belarus. They’ve surrounded Leningrad. They’re a summer campaign away from capturing Moscow. They’ve advanced over more ground and conquered more territory than any army in history. We’ve barely even fought. Our army is still a bunch of raw recruits. But we have something Germany doesn’t have. Steel. Fuel. Factories.”
“Industry.”
“Germany can’t keep up. But do you know what Russia has?”
“Steel. Fuel. Factories.”
“Even more than us.”
Major Bovington paused a moment, letting that reality sink in. “They’ve survived by moving their factories and their workers east. Most of their industry is now here”—the major pulled a map out from under the scattered papers on his desk and put his finger on a spot in the middle of Siberia—“at Chelyabinsk. But everyone’s already calling it Tankograd. Because that’s where the Russians now build their tanks.”
“It’s a long way from Moscow.”
“It’s a long way from anywhere. So far away the Germans can’t bomb it. But they might not need to bomb it. If Russia capitulates, the way France did, the Germans would capture it. All those factories would start making German tanks.”
“Unless we stop them.”
“Like the English did to the French.”
Bobby stared at the map, fascinated. He traced a line with his finger. “We could do it, too, flying B-17s in from the other side. Coming in from Alaska.”
“I guess you’re not so stupid, after all.”
Alaska. That was the place Karen had mentioned in her letter. She was wrong, though—Alaska was far away, thousands of miles from Leningrad. But in a more important sense, she was right. Alaska was not so far from Siberia, from Russia itself. And thousands of miles through the Siberian wilderness seemed somehow less daunting than thousands of miles through German-occupied Europe.
If she was somehow making her way to Alaska, Bobby had to be there to find her.
“I’d like to be part of it,” he blurted. “I’d like to transfer to Alaska.”
“First, Russia has to lose.”
“They will,” Bobby said.
Judging from the way Major Bovington eyed him now, Bobby knew this must have been why he wanted to talk to him in the first place.
“You’re sure?” the major asked.
“They’re desperate,” Bobby said. “They’re starving. Every military campaign against the Germans has been a disaster for them. They can’t possibly win.”
“Is that what your girlfriend says in her letters?”
“In the parts that aren’t redacted by Soviet State censors, yes.”
Major Bovington stared down at the map of Alaska. Then he looked up at Bobby, deep in thought.
CHAPTER 28
THE TROUBLEMAKER
Krause marched with a sense of foreboding. He hated being this close to the front, and he knew that every crunching step through the snow took him closer to that dreadful location.
There was little chance he’d run into Red Army forces. The Soviet winter offensive on the Leningrad front had been an utter disaster for the Russians. The Second Shock Army had been obliterated. But a few Russian soldiers had survived, and they now formed isolated pockets of Red Army resistance—cut off, well armed, and desperate, hiding in the woods and slowly starving to death.
The Wehrmacht advised its soldiers never to travel alone lest they be jumped by the stray Red Army gangs, who could be as dangerous as cornered tigers. And yet here Krause was, completely alone, because Unteroffizier Oster had no runners left he could afford to send.
Krause’s objective was to link up with the second squad, which was currently engaged in a forward combat patrol, probing the front line near Tikhvin. He was instructed to inform Corporal Greifer, the Second Squad’s leader, about the escaped prisoner and the death of the platoon’s Leutnant and Feldwebel. Oster wanted the second squad to cancel its patrol and return at once to help defend the village’s strategic bridge over the Neva.
Krause hated rivers, and he hated bridges. He hated them because he knew generals treasured them. Rivers halted an army’s advance, and bridges bottlenecked supply lines, so generals always prioritized taking and holding bridges. They willingly threw lives away by the thousands to secure river crossings.
Krause was a professional soldier, but he wasn’t a willing one. He hated soldiering. He would have preferred staying unemployed, like in the old days, before Hitler’s rise. Despite being unemployed, Krause had never wanted for money. His various admirers always took care of him. Every morning Krause would wax his signature moustache and beard into a new, outlandish design. And every evening he would take a new admirer into Berlin’s “Garden of the Beasts,” the Tiergarten park. It was a wild, wonderful time, and for Krause, the happiest of his life.