Moskva

27 Vistula, Spring 1945

Knocking woke him from memories of the last days at Stalingrad, during which he had questioned a Waffen-SS officer beside the statue of the crocodile, with its ring of broken children holding hands. The Nazi was on his knees, and the commissar had a pistol to his head. ‘Where are you from?’

The man repeated his name, rank and number.

‘From the city? From the country? From a village? You look like someone who comes from a village.’

The officer glared. ‘Berlin,’ he said finally.

‘Look around you,’ the commissar told him.

Obediently, the man raised his head and stared at the ruined windows, which stared blankly back.

‘See what you’ve done? This is nothing to what we will do.’

And so it proved. The Germans brought their panzers within range of the Red Army guns before the Soviet forces even crossed the Vistula. It was insane. The commissar had begun to wonder if Hitler wanted to lose. Maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted to take his Reich with him, like some barbarian king buried with his chariots, horses and slaves.

Twenty-six months later he still didn’t regret pulling the trigger on the kneeling German. Why would he? Half a million Soviet soldiers had died to hold Stalingrad. At least that many more were wounded. Between them they killed three-quarters of a million fascists and took 91,000 prisoner. A handful of those were generals, who looked surprisingly well fed compared to the emaciated state of their troops. It wasn’t as if one Waffen-SS officer was going to be missed either way.

The knocking continued.

‘What is it?’

A girl put her head round his door and he reached for her warmth on the sheet next to him and felt foolish when she smiled in the light of the candle she was carrying. ‘I’m working,’ Maya said. Across her back was a sniper rifle, its telescopic sight firmly in place. ‘So I’d better go. But the boy thinks there’s something you should see. He didn’t dare wake you himself.’

‘Another suicide?’

But she was gone.

German women began hanging themselves before the Red Army even arrived. Those with families did it only after they’d cut the wrists of the small children, even babies. The commissar had told his men not to requisition buildings without first checking their attics, where such suicides could usually be found, in various states of decay. Things were bad enough without his men going down with fever.

When the men couldn’t find German women to rape, they raped the Ukrainians, Poles and Byelorussians they freed from Nazi slave camps. Three days was the unofficial rule. Three days of raping and looting, drunkenness and murder. After that, the mayhem was meant to stop; but drunken frontoviki with submachine guns were difficult to control and sometimes it was simply safer to allow them extra days.

‘In the stables,’ Dennisov said.

The man with him nodded. ‘We just heard, sir.’

Dennisov and Kyukov were waiting for him by the front door. They looked serious.

The stable was hot, for all that winter lingered outside.

It stank of straw and dung from a nag that the soldiers had slaughtered for food that morning, butchering the carcass and dividing the meat between the tank crews and their support troops. The animal had been stunned with a bullet to the brain and finished with a second bullet, both fired head on. The filleting of the horse had been crude, brutal and swift. The men were hungry.

The butchery inside the stable was altogether more elegant, if you could apply that word to the three family pets skinned and hung in size order by their back legs from a beam. The commissar wasn’t sure you could.

Neat, perhaps.

The scene was mockingly neat.

The flat smell of fresh blood filled Major Milov’s nostrils as he forced himself inside to examine the tableau. Whoever had butchered the family pets had trimmed their carcasses so well it was impossible to tell whether they’d been male or female without getting closer than he wanted. He’d seen his share of dead humans. Soldiers beheaded by grenades and gutted by shrapnel. Family pets, though… The commissar had considered himself inured to feelings of disgust. It seemed he was wrong.

‘Get the others.’

Dennisov would know whom to fetch.

They were the ones who’d been with him from the start. The ones who’d made it this far. The ones, although no one really dared think this, who might just make it through to the end. A month now, two months…

Then they’d be in Berlin.

‘Comrade Major?’

Turning, he found Beziki, scruff-haired, half the buttons of his stolen uniform undone, half a loaf of bread pushed inside his shirt. The kid was their mascot, picked up on whim and never put down in case he carried their luck away with him.

‘Leave,’ Major Milov said. ‘This isn’t for you.’

The boy stared at the skinned animals. ‘I’ve seen worse.’ His voice fought for bravado. ‘Much worse.’

‘Of course you have. Now leave.’

The kid saluted clumsily and didn’t even bother to shrug or twist his mouth or protest. He simply slipped out of the barn as Kyukov and Dennisov came back with the others. ‘Fuck,’ Vedenin said.

‘Take a good look.’

The commissar stepped aside so they could all see the three dogs stripped down to red maps of muscle and sinew, forelegs bound, twine threaded behind the tendons in the back legs of each.

‘This one’s alive. It’s quivering.’

Kyukov, obviously. Fearless, almost permanently drunk, quite possibly insane… Major Milov should have known he’d be the one to go close enough to discover that for himself. ‘Probably just post-death spasms,’ he said.

‘No, sir, come and look.’

Kyukov left him no choice but to go closer.

The commissar felt rather than saw Kyukov grin as he forced himself to swallow bile. Then Dennisov – too old to be a lieutenant, apparently incapable of being promoted – pushed in and Kyukov stepped back.

‘There’s something else,’ Dennisov said. ‘Fayzulin’s been found in the pigsty shot through his head.’

‘Anyone with him?’

‘The pig woman.’

The commissar didn’t have to ask what they’d been doing, well, what their dead corporal had been doing. Screams from the outbuildings behind told him others were still doing the same. ‘She killed him?’

‘She says not.’

‘You think she’s lying?’

‘There was a Luger hidden under the straw.’

‘Shoot her. Make an example. Shoot the old man too, burn the farmhouse.’ Major Milov looked at the animals hanging from the rafters. ‘Fetch flamethrowers. Burn this place to the ground while you’re at it.’

They left an old woman, her five-year-old grandchild and a shivering aunt, knees to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around herself, alive but dead-eyed beside the smoking ruins of the farm in which they’d lived.

‘You could have been kind,’ Maya said.

He knew what she was saying.

‘I don’t kill women.’

‘You shot the one in the pigsty.’

‘That was different. She killed a soldier.’

‘You think what will happen to them won’t be worse?’

‘It’s not as if they didn’t do it to us.’

Pulling on her leather cap, Maya buckled it tight and clambered up the tank’s side, lowering herself into the cramped compartment below. This model took five and had a radio. It still stored its fuel tanks inside though, and they all understood that a direct hit meant death. It was better that way. You wouldn’t want to live, if you were what crawled from the flames.

It was two weeks before she made peace, and then only because they’d been racing towards Breslau when the order came to wheel left, run back along the banks of the Oder and help flush out the German Seventeenth. She came to find him in the cottage he’d requisitioned, stripped herself naked despite the cold and slipped in beside him, her arms tightening around him as he reached for her.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.

He guessed she was right.

It was the last major tank battle either of them fought.

Major Milov was pulled out of the line a few days later and taken back the way he’d come to the HQ of an NKVD general fifty miles behind the lines. The general handed him an order signed by Beria himself.

The commissar had been chosen for his loyalty, his bravery in battle, because he had been one of those who defended Stalingrad and because the combination of trained tank commander and political officer had caught the eyes of Stavka. Whether that meant the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters of the Armed Forces or Stalin himself the commissar didn’t know, and didn’t dare ask. From now on, though, he was outside the military chain of command and would report to those who reported direct to Beria or to the Boss himself.

As the commissar undoubtedly knew, the responsibilities of the NKVD went far beyond simple anti-partisan operations and the apprehension of turncoats, deserters, cowards and malingerers. They included the creation of sharashkas, secret defence establishments, and the future protection of the Soviet state.

‘You understand?’ the NKVD man said.

‘Yes, Comrade General.’

‘We will pick you a team.’

‘Comrade General…’ Major Milov hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I’d like to keep my old team. I command good soldiers. We fight well, we work together and our luck has held.’

The general flipped open a file.

‘Your particular friends being Maya Grossman? Vasily Gusakovsky? Pyotr Dennisov? Ilyich Vedenin, Rustam Kyukov? And Erekle Gabashville, that wretched urchin who travels with you?’

‘He’s our luck.’

Sharp eyes examined him through tiny wire-framed glasses. ‘You believe he contributes to your success?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then you’d better look after him, hadn’t you? Now, Dennisov. You know his father was a tsarist?’

‘He doesn’t talk about his family.’

‘He doesn’t have a family. His mother died, his father was shot.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Does it matter? Kyukov’s the same. Same occasion.’

‘Kyukov and Dennisov grew up together?’

The NKVD general sat back, looked at a file on his desk and fixed his gaze on the commissar. ‘Did you bother reading their files?’

‘It must have slipped my mind.’

‘Indeed. Well, they’ve both been useful on occasion. You’ll be able to tell me when this is over whether it’s time the state gave them a little more trust.’

‘May I ask what the job entails, Comrade General?’

‘Reaching Berlin before the Americans for a start. Oh, don’t worry. They’re bogged down in…’ He consulted a piece of paper. ‘The Ardennes. A forest in Belgium. You’ll be there long before they’re even close. But that’s what this is about. There’s a man we want in Berlin. The Americans want him too. Your job is to make sure we get him.’

‘A high-ranking Nazi?’

‘One of their best scientists.’

He paused and after a second Major Milov realized the general was waiting to see if he would have something to say. In staying silent he seemed to have passed some sort of test. The NKVD general smiled.

‘Keep your team then. Although we’re going to give you an extra man. He’s there to look at the scientist’s papers, check that they’re the real thing. Only then will you make him an offer. Amnesty for all past crimes. Safety for his family. Free travel to the Soviet Union. His own lab. His choice of staff. A dacha.’

‘May I ask…?’

‘A bomb,’ the general said, scratching at the side of his nose with his pen, ‘to end all bombs. We can’t let the Americans have it. Stalin himself has told Beria to make sure we get there first. Stalin…’

There was a baby-faced lieutenant waiting by a brand-new US lend-lease Jeep, looking deeply uncomfortable in a uniform so new Major Milov doubted it even had lice. His hair was too long and he looked too clean. When he saw the commissar, he shuffled to attention, looked as if he was wondering whether to salute, hesitated and did so anyway. Badly.

‘You must be…’ The commissar consulted his orders. ‘Golubtsov?’

‘Yes. I mean, yes, Comrade Colonel.’

‘I’m a major.’

‘I was told you were a colonel.’

Colonel Milov skim-read the rest of his orders and it turned out the boy was right. ‘Stand straight,’ he said. ‘Let me look at you.’

Thin face, high cheekbones, slightly sallow skin and Asiatic eyes behind thick lenses held in place by wire frames. He was slight enough to be a child and visibly trembling under the older man’s gaze.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three, Comrade Colonel.’

The commissar would have put him at seventeen at the most. ‘And how long have you been in uniform?’

The boy flushed. ‘They gave me this an hour ago.’

‘What did you wear on the march?’

Golubtsov looked apologetic. ‘They sent me by train.’

‘From Moscow?’

The boy nodded.

‘All right. You drive.’

Golubtsov was more embarrassed than ever. ‘I can’t, sir. That is, no one’s ever taught me the practicalities. I understand the theory of course.’

‘Of course. What can you do?’

‘I’m good at sums in my head. I can see shapes too.’

‘In your head?’

‘The shapes the sums make.’

‘Get in,’ the commissar said. ‘And shut up. You give me a headache.’

Back at base, Dennisov, Kyukov and Maya came out to look at the Jeep and quickly switched their attention to the baby-faced lieutenant. The commissar could tell that Maya was taken with him. In a sisterly fashion, which had her hacking at his hair with a knife until he looked as unkempt as the rest of them, and stamping his cap into the slush, slapping it against a nearby wall to make it scruffy. After which, she slashed the top button from his jacket and told him to get some dirt under his nails.

She laughed when he dropped to a crouch and took her order literally.

‘Someone’s son?’ she asked as soon as they were alone.

‘Undoubtedly…’ Colonel Milov slid the orders over and watched her read them twice, the first time quickly, second time slowly, going back over the last few lines as if puzzling something out.

‘No more fighting? We’re leaving the front line?’

‘For the moment. Do you mind?’

‘I thought you might.’

He pushed across the glass of brandy he’d poured himself and looked around the farmhouse kitchen. Germany was a strange mix of the untouched and the utterly ruined. There’d been more food in the last few weeks than he could have imagined, in the countryside at least, where people could grow their own crops, kill their own animals and store grain. He’d been through towns where the inhabitants’ faces were skull-like with starvation, and the only males over seventy or under twelve.

Would he mind being out of the war?

Not really. It was already won.

He didn’t doubt they’d reach Berlin first.

There would be brutal battles on the outskirts, worse ones in the centre. But it wouldn’t be Stalingrad, where all the USSR had had in its favour was boys to sacrifice.

‘If they want us to capture this Nazi scientist of theirs, then he must be important.’

‘And the order comes from Stalin?’

‘Beria, at least. And I doubt he’d do anything without Stalin’s say-so. So yes, the order to hunt down this Schultz comes from the Boss. You’d rather be in the sniper division?’

Maya hesitated.

‘I could say you’re too good at the job to be wasted like this, that we’ll need marksmen of your calibre to take the city.’

‘It would break up the group.’

‘Giving us Golubtsov changes things anyway.’

‘You won’t mind?’

‘Of course I’ll mind. I’ll miss you.’

The look she gave him was so shocked the commissar realized he’d never admitted anything even close to that before.