“Alright… Even if all this could happen, then what? You say you know Volkov came here that way, but you have no idea when he arrived, where he went, what he did after that. The history is largely mute on all that, until he emerges in the White movement as an aide to Denikin. So it could take our man months to find out where he went—even years. Will we just stand there like a pair of idiots and wait for our man to come tramping back up those stairs with the good news?”
“You don’t understand. He could go there and spend ten years, then come back and return before we had time to finish a cigar. He would be ten years older, but for us only a few minutes might pass. Start thinking about who we can send. We will need one of our very best.”
“But you assume he could return here at all. You are making one outrageous assumption after another, but it is all mere speculation. Anything could happen if you try such a thing, anything. It’s a very dangerous world back there. The revolution was just beginning to seed itself, and the Tsar was still a dangerous opponent. The Okhrana was very powerful, and very efficient.”
“Our man will get the job done. We must believe that.”
“And what if he does succeed? Suppose it all works as you believe. He finds you—delivers your letter. Your younger self believes it, and knows he must now find a man named Ivan Volkov and kill him, which is all another rack of balls on the billiard table. You really have no idea whether he could pull such a thing off, and if he did, then do we expect to wake up one morning for the intelligence briefing and find the Orenburg Federation no longer exists? All Volkov’s troops simply vanish? Madness! I cannot believe such a thing could ever happen.”
“I have come to believe in the impossible many times in the last year,” said Kirov. “You forget; I was acquainted with the impossible as that young man Mironov. Then, imagine that impossible day when this young Russian Captain sends me a message inviting me to a meeting in Murmansk. Lo and behold, there he is, the very same man I met in that railway inn. But he had not aged a day. Lo and behold, there is a massive battlecruiser sitting out in the bay, a ship so powerful that it can single handedly challenge entire fleets! Yes, I have seen the impossible many times, Grishin. This will only be one more impossible thing that comes true. You will see.”
Berzin rubbed his forehead, confused, and still shocked to hear all of this from Kirov. He’s desperate, he thought. He knows we are losing this war, and the pressure on him has been mounting and mounting with each passing month. We have no more divisions to send Zhukov, no more armies, so now he dreams up this crazy scheme to try and sweep half the black pawns right off the chess board. It is all utter lunacy, but what if it did happen as he says? He asked that question next.
“I have granted you the benefit of every doubt thus far,” said Berzin. “We go there, get the welcome you expect, get our men close enough to that railway inn to reach the top of those stairs. Our man goes down and arrives at just the correct year to take action. He finds Mironov, convinces him that he must kill Volkov too.”
“That may not even be necessary,” said Kirov. “We could just send our man to do the job. He does not need to find me at all with that letter.”
“Again I grant you the impossible benefit of the doubt,” said Berzin. “Our man seeks out a man named Ivan Volkov—of all the hundreds of men who might bear that name. He has no idea what he looks like, but he knows he will be thick as thieves with Denikin, so he eventually narrows down who this man must be, gets to him, and does the job. He puts a bullet into Volkov…. Then this entire world collapses before our very eyes. Yet only you and I know about it? We wake up one day as I said earlier, and the Orenburg Federation is gone. All of Volkov’s troops are now ours to command. Alright, mister General Secretary. I have stacked up all the plates, forgetting that if even one thing in this impossible stack slips, it all comes tumbling down. Here we sit on that fine morning when everything becomes more agreeable for us and Volkov’s armies disappear. This is how you think to win your victory? Magic and mayhem?”
Kirov shrugged. The rain was beginning now, a cold rain that promised the long weeks of the Rasputista were coming. Soon the country would see every road become a quagmire, and the land would be a sea of mud. The German Summer Offensive was in its last throes. They were so very close to achieving all their objectives, but soon the mud would slow them down, and then the cold. The temperatures would fall, and for a brief time the ground would freeze hard enough for armies to move and fight again. Then the real winter would begin, the snows coming so deep that nothing could move again.
Then it will be our time, he thought, our time to move and fight as we always have in the winter. But will we have anything left to fight with? Zhukov tells me he still has the Shock Armies on the line of the Don, rested, fat with supplies and equipment, and ready to try again. They failed in Operation Mars. What will he call the next one, Uranus? Saturn? Will it work? Can we survive the winter of 1942 if we do not make a Stalingrad out of Volgograd? The damn German 6th Army isn’t even fighting there. It’s all of Steiner’s SS Korps there this time—Hitler’s mad dogs, braying at the gates of the city, and Ivan Volkov on the other side of the Volga, salivating as he thinks to finally get his hands on Volgograd….
Chapter 18
“Sergei…” came the voice of Berzin again. He was watching Kirov as he gazed out the window, looking at the storm blowing in, hearing the rain on the windows, the thunder. “I know it looks black as hell for us now, but you must have hope. You must believe we can still win through. If not you, then how can we expect our soldiers to fight on? Look here at the map. The SS have been fighting tooth and nail in the Kalach bridgehead for over a month. That never happened. The Germans just waltzed right through in the material. We’ve done better this time. We avoided the pocket that formed northeast of Kharkov when Zhukov pulled out of Kursk, and we pulled everything back to the Don instead of trying to form a line west of the river. The Millerovo pocket never happened either. Don’t you see? It looks grim now, but it is not as dark as you believe.”
“You think we can win?” asked Kirov. “Tell me, Grishin. You know everything going on out there, my faithful Chief of Intelligence. You honestly think we can prevail?”
“I know we have avoided those errors I just spoke of. And in the material, the Germans captured Voronezh on the 5th of July! We are still fighting for it! They were approaching Stalingrad by late August, and here it is mid-September, and our troops still hold the line in the Kalach Bridgehead—against the very best they have. In the Material, they already had Rostov, and all the Kuban was overrun, but we still hold Rostov and the Kuban as well. That maneuver Zhukov pulled by moving the rifle Divisions out of Sevastopol was brilliant! They arrived just as the damn Germans were pushing tanks into the suburb of the city. We stopped them. Don’t you see? We are doing better than Stalin ever did. It may not seem that way, but it’s the truth.”
Kirov inclined his head, looking at the map, thinking.
“We can win, Sergei,” said Berzin with a hand on Kirov’s broad shoulder. “It won’t take miracles and magic, or all this cloak and dagger you spoke of just now. It will just take backbone, and the men who still fight so bravely for us out there in that storm. They aren’t going to sit down to a nice meal with wine tonight as we might here. For them it is live or die, and even a crust of bread is something to be grateful for. Give them that bread, Sergei. Give them the chance to win here. The Germans took most of Moscow last winter, but what did that get them but the burned out city they still huddle in? We can stop them. We can still win, not at Ilanskiy with a single man, or a mysterious letter and a string of impossible events that must all line up and salute us as we wish in order to come true. No! But we can win right here, right now. We can win at Volgograd, at Rostov, at Voronezh!”