Since the strategic rocket site at Penemunde was liberated by the Western Allies, Department 7 lost out on that windfall of missile technology, yet still managed to secure many top scientists and designs for their homeland. By far, their greatest boon came during the occupation of Berlin.
While the Western Allies busied themselves searching the city for war criminals, the Soviets searched for secrets. A safe in the home of a Messerschmitt engineer yielded the formula for a synthetic oil necessary for turbine engines. The diary of a Krupp manager held the key to the metallurgy of the exhaust nozzle of the V-2 rocket.
In this fashion, Department 7 brought secrets home to Russia and gave Soviet scientists the facilities they needed to adapt them to the Red Army.
By the summer of 1952, all of the captured German technology had been evaluated, much incorporated, and some abandoned. With its primary mission complete, the head of Department 7, Boris Ulinev, decided to change the objective of his section.
Scientific Operations had been a passive agency; it had no agents in the popular sense, nor did it create anything original. Ulinev set out to change all that. Because Scientific Operations had always dealt with technology that was ahead of its time, Ulinev began setting up operations that would only come to fruition far into the future. Spending millions of rubles supplied by the Soviet government, Ulinev directed the eight hundred scientists on his staff to concentrate their efforts leap-frogging current technology and developing devices far more advanced than anything on any drawing board in the world.
Like Kelly Johnson’s “Skunk Works” at Lockheed, which developed the SR-71 spy plane long before the materials were available to build it, Scientific Operations began designing and testing rudimentary multiwarhead ballistic missiles even before Sputnik was conceived. A Department 7 theoretician came just a couple of molecules away from discovering carbon fiber. And a team of experts began working on circuit boards for computers while the rest of the world still marveled at the power of the vacuum tube.
One project in particular became the pet of Boris Ulinev and subsequently the potential triumph of Ivan Kerikov. Presented to Ulinev by an intense young geologist named Pytor Borodin, the project was as audacious as anything yet attempted by Department 7. In fact, it might rival the greatest feats of mankind.
The undertaking, code-named “Vulcan’s Forge,” had its genesis on Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946, when the United States conducted the first underwater nuclear test as part of Operation Crossroads. It took four years, until 1950, for the data from that test to reach Department 7, stolen by a female agent who seduced a lab technician at the White Sands Testing Grounds in New Mexico, where the volumes of information and tons of samples were warehoused. Pytor Borodin became involved due to a happenstance comment from a colleague, who mentioned that a hitherto unknown alloy had been created by the Bikini explosion. Borodin quickly became obsessed, going so far as to request a clandestine submarine reconnaissance to Bikini in late 1951 in order to collect additional samples of sand, water, and debris from the seventy-four ships the U.S. intentionally sank as part of the test.
For eighteen additional months, Borodin labored at his task until he was able to present a far-reaching plan to Boris Ulinev. It seemed tailor-made for the new direction Scientific Operations was to take.
The opening phase of Vulcan’s Forge called for the detonation of a nuclear weapon deep under the Pacific Ocean. Because all atomic materials were under the direct control of the army, Ulinev had his team secretly build one. This alone took more than a year. Department 7 also established a large dummy corporation and secreted money in various accounts in Europe and Asia. All in all, Vulcan’s Forge wasn’t ready to commence until the spring of 1954.
Once the opening gambit had been played, the only thing left to do was wait for nature to take her course. For forty years the waiting dragged by, through the height of the Cold War, through the opening of Eastern Europe, and through the collapse of the Soviet Union herself. During this time, Boris Ulinev died and was replaced, and his replacement was himself replaced, and so on, until Ivan Kerikov reigned as the head of a much diminished department. Of all the plots and projects launched by Ulinev in the 1950s, only Vulcan’s Forge remained viable.
Unfortunately, its raison d’être had vanished. The mighty struggle between communism and capitalism was all but over. The massive arms race during the 1980s had brought the Soviet Union to her economic knees. Though gamely trying to keep pace in conventional and nuclear forces, Reagan’s gamble on Star Wars technology had chimed the death knell for Russia. The Soviet Union had no response to SDI but capitulation. America paid for the arms buildup with a four-year recession, but Russia paid with her very existence.
Bit by bit, Russia began withdrawing into herself. Aid to Cuba was slowed to a trickle, then shut off completely. Troops were pulled from the fifty-year occupation of Berlin. Aeroflot suspended most international flights. Within Russia, programs and departments began to vanish. The state-run diamond mines at Aikhal in central Siberia were surreptitiously sold to a London consortium linked to the Consolidated Selling System. The Blackjack bomber, the MIG-29 Fulcrum, and Russia’s aircraft carrier program were all shelved. Officers began committing suicide because they were worth more to their families dead than alive. The staff of the KGB was cut by more than fifty percent.
Bold projects like Vulcan’s Forge had no place in the New World Order. During his first four years as head of Scientific Operations, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kerikov had guarded and nurtured Vulcan’s Forge for pure patriotism and duty. But now, the very fabric of what he believed had torn through, and Kerikov started to protect the project from the auditors for simple greed. He planned to steal Vulcan’s Forge for himself in a coup as brilliant as the original plan laid down by Pytor Borodin forty years before.
Time, once so abundant, had run incredibly short for Kerikov. The Bangkok Accords had seemed a providential gift when first proposed, but now it had become necessary to delay them at a substantial cost in bribe money paid to the ambassador of Taiwan and to Gennady Perchenko and Perchenko’s superior in the Foreign Office.
Department 7 could ill afford the huge payoffs. Kerikov had been able to dodge the auditors for months, but now they were here, in his office, asking questions that he was unwilling to answer.
“Ah, here we are,” the ferret said, pulling a sheaf of notes from his briefcase. “It seems that your department paid for the refitting of a refrigeration ship called the August Rose four years ago at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars. An affidavit from a shipyard foreman in Vladivostok states that the sonar system installed on the ship is far superior to anything he’s seen on our strategic submarines. Would you care to comment on that?”
Kerikov felt a pressure building behind his eyes, a force that threatened to blow apart his entire head. Security concerning the refit of the August Rose had been airtight, yet here was the entire story being laid out before him. The constraint of time he’d felt a moment ago had just tightened with the relentlessness of a garrote.