The Romanov Succession

1.

In the latitudes of northern Scotland there was daylight until after ten o’clock and they made landfall by twilight with the formation intact, the three Fortresses in a V-triangle with the three transports riding below and behind them.

Alex stretched his limbs one at a time in the confined space.

Spaight was muttering in the throat mike: “If you wanted a sardine why the hell didn’t you draft one?” Spaight had that trait: every morning he made a joke—a sour joke about the weather or a caustic joke about the food. Somewhere in him was a core of bitterness; underneath the hard competence there was dissatisfaction. Alex hadn’t got too close to it but he had the feeling Spaight had been born with an impulse toward perfection and felt unfulfilled whatever he did. He was introspective and if he’d been more of a golfing backslapper he’d have had two or three stars instead of one but the fact that he had one at all was testimony to his extraordinary talent for organizing people and commanding their loyalty. He lacked a head for imaginative tactics but he had the genius of a first-rate staff officer: if you told him what had to be done he would produce everything that was needed for the job and put it all in the right place at the right time. Spaight was married and thrice a father but he kept his family rigidly segregated from his professional existence and he hadn’t once mentioned his wife since they’d left Washington. He was a soldier and she was a soldier’s woman and that was the way the game was played.

Pappy Johnson came on the headset. “Picking up some radio chatter from the Channel. I’ll cut you in.”

Static in the earphones and then he picked up the voices, quite distinct—a very calm crisp Welsh voice, “Break right, Clive, the bugger’s on your arse.”

He could hear the banging of the cannons and the fast stutter of machine guns above the whine of pursuit engines and then the same voice again, still dispassionate: “I’ve taken some tracers—on fire. I’m bailing out. Due east of Dover—I can see the cliffs. Someone save me a pint of bitter and a pair of dry drawers.”

In his imagination he could see the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the twilight wheeling among the barrage blimps; the Heinkels in ponderous formation lining up for London and the Hawks and Spitfires trying to get at them before they could drop their sticks of bombs through the swaying beams of the searchlights.

There was a break in the static and Johnson said, “Sorry, I’ve got to change the frequency and get landing instructions.”

Spaight said, “You’ve got to hand it to those bastards.”

They were dropping across the mountains of Scotland in slowly fading twilight; the hillsides were indeterminate, dark and heavy. The B-17 thundered lower between the ranges and finally he saw the lights of the runway through the perspex. The bomber descended toward them like a climber on a sliding rope.

The runway was rough; the plane bounced and pitched along the center stripe between the cannister lights. A small van came shooting onto the gravel and curved in to intercept, running fast down the edge of the runway with a big FOLLOW ME sign across its rear doors, Turning on its tail wheel the bomber went along slowly after the van, unwieldy and awkward on the ground. Pappy Johnson was complaining into his radio: “This runway’s got a surface like a goddamn waffle. This Jesus shit airfield wouldn’t get certification from the civil air board of the corruptest county in Mississippi!”

The FOLLOW ME van circled to indicate their parking place and Johnson cut the engines. It was dusk now and the tower was carping in a crisp Scottish voice: “Let’s get the rest of the wee birds down now, lads—we want to switch off these lights, don’t we now.”

He inched painfully to the hatch and lowered himself by his arms. The leg had gone very stiff. Ground crewmen climbed into the bomber and Pappy Johnson stopped by the running board of the van to look back at it the way he might have looked at a woman.

The driver gave a palm-out salute. He saw to their seating and drove them down the gravel strip and decanted them beside a wooden hangar, and sped away to meet the next plane.

Felix was there with his compact movie-actorish looks and his readiness to laugh or spill tears or burst into rages; he emerged from the hangar in an immaculate white uniform his tailor must have worked around the clock to build.

Alex saluted him. It made Felix grin like a schoolboy. “Welcome to the toy shop, Alex.”

“Where’s our headquarters?”

Felix indicated the decrepit hangar behind him. “Right here, I’m afraid. Well then come in, all of you. My God that’s a big ugly monster of an aircraft.” He turned around with a casual wave that drew them all inside and walked through a small door cut into the hangar’s great sliding gate. Over his shoulder he added, “I’ve got Sergei off in search of billets for you and your friends.”

Alex suppressed a smile. Felix was playing the game to the hilt: he’d already taken over. They’d given him a new role-leader of men—and it looked as if it was the role Prince Felix had been waiting for all his life.

2.

Black felt curtains overhung the hangar’s few small windows; the high naked lighting within was harsh even though the building was so huge that the farther corners were in shadow. “It used to be a service shop for aircraft on North Sea rescue patrol,” Felix told them. “They’ve moved most of that over to Scapa Flow now. It’s obsolete and cobwebby but it’s ours.”

The room wasn’t far short of an acre in dimension. Vertical steel supports sprouted from the cracked concrete floor here and there; the ceiling was a skeleton of metal and the roof above it was an arched tunnel of corrugated steel gone rusty in patches so that it looked like camouflage paint. Without the clutter of aircraft for which it had been designed the floor space looked infinite; the scale was intimidating, it dwarfed them all.

In the front corner a plywood partition seven feet high marked off an office that might have been used by the maintenance director at one time; it had an open doorway and Alex could see the end of a desk within. The remainder of the huge room was undivided except by the eight steel pillars—two-foot-square I-beams, the sort they built bridges out of.

It had been Vassily Devenko who’d obtained the use of it and he must have done a good deal of very fast talking because even if they’d intended to abandon the building they’d have wanted to demolish it for scrap.

Along the south wall under the blackout-draped windows were stacked dozens of wooden crates with consignment bills-of-lading taped to them. Two men in English uniforms with slung rifles stood sleepily near the door; they were not Englishmen, they were White Russians; Alex recognized them both from Finland. When they saw his face they both stiffened almost imperceptibly—the gesture of coming to attention; he nodded to them both as he went by them.

He made introductions; he said to Pappy Johnson, “Prince Felix is the man you’re going to train to drop the lump of sugar into the cup of coffee. He’s our lead pilot.”

Johnson was startled, then dubious, then polite: “Fine—that’s just fine.” He essayed a smile.

“You don’t mean to tell me I’ve got to fly one of those bloody four-engine battleships?”

“Felix is a first-class pilot—don’t let him fool you.”

Johnson was squinting. “You’re the Prince Felix Romanov that won a couple of air races.”

“In racing planes, Captain—not stinking huge blunderbusses.”

“You rated to fly multiengine?”

“I’ve flown twin. Never four.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Alex said. But Pappy Johnson did not look happy.

A short man—very wide but not fat—emerged from the corner office and strode forward in a British uniform with a colonel’s pips on the shoulderboards.

Felix said diplomatically, “Colonel Tolkachev has been showing me around.”

Tolkachev’s broad ruddy Cossack face was expressionless when he gave his formal salute. “Welcome to Scotland, Colonel.”

It was a studied slight: he knew full well what Alex’s rank was but Alex wasn’t in uniform and it had given Tolkachev the excuse to address him by the rank he’d held when Vassily had been the brigade’s general.

Tolkachev turned to John Spaight and clicked his heels. Spaight shook hands informally with the adjutant. “How are you, Tolkachev? Put on a little weight, I see.”

Tolkachev had been Vassily’s right hand and he was still Vassily’s man and there was no mistaking the enmity, it came off him in waves.

Tolkachev said, “I believe you will find the regiment in order.”

Regiment, Alex thought, picking up on it. No longer brigade. Well they’d been cut up badly in Finland.

“Where’ve you got the men billeted?”

“Across the field. They are smaller hangars than this one.”

“How many men on the roster?”

“Six hundred eighty-two combat personnel. Two hundred eleven support personnel.”

“All from the old outfit, are they?”

“We have had a few recruits. Some of the Poles came over—it looked like more action with us than they had where they were.”

“Is there still a company of Finns?”

“No sir. Helsinki recalled them to defend the border. They are fighting the Bolsheviks again you know.”

“Then we’re all White Russians with a sprinkling of Free Poles, is that it?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’ve done a remarkable job of keeping the unit intact.”

“That was General Devenko’s doing, sir.” Tolkachev wasn’t giving an inch.

“You’ve been here what, nearly a year?”

“That is right.”

“With what duties?” It was like pulling teeth.

“Miscellaneous defense,” Tolkachev replied. “We have fourteen pilots—the British supplied us with those light aircraft you saw at the end of the field. The air detachment has been flying air-sea rescue missions and spotter flights looking for enemy shipping in the North Sea. The rest of us have been manning antiaircraft stations along the coast, guarding rail shipments of war materiel, doing sentry shifts at Scapa Flow. We have done a good deal of combat training and parade-ground drilling—the General said we were going into action.”

“So you started commando training.”

“Yes sir.”

“How far along are they?”

“That would depend on the nature of the combat mission.”

Alex was tired; he’d need a clear morning head to get down to the details. “I’ll want a meeting of all field-grade officers at nine in the morning and a general formation at noon.”

“Very good sir.”

Alex turned to Prince Felix. “Well how are you then?”

Felix spread his hands wide. “Like a duck to water, old man. I’ve been flying those puddle jumpers.”

“I’ve been expecting a message from Baron Oleg.”

“It came this afternoon. It wasn’t much of a message. We’re to expect someone tomorrow evening.”

Then Oleg had kept his word. It would be someone from Spain, hand-carrying the contact drill for reaching Vlasov.

It would be none too soon. Without Stalin’s favorite Red Army general none of this was going to work at all.

3.

At six in the morning Sergei knocked and he struggled out of sleep, filled with random pains.

There was no shower and the bath water wasn’t heated because it had not occurred to any of them to light the boiler. He washed with cold water and sponged himself with a cloth; it was bracing if nothing else. When he had shaved he surrendered the bathroom to Spaight and got into his Russian dress-whites because of the regimental formation he’d scheduled for the day; and found his way into the kitchen where Sergei had eggs frying in the bacon grease.

It was a farm cottage that Sergei had rented: the little garden backed up on the airfield’s fence and the hangars were visible and within walking distance. The owner of the house was a Royal Naval Reserve petty officer serving aboard one of His Majesty’s destroyers; the wife and children were living thirty-six miles away with a sister-in-law in the town of Inverness.

It was a comfortable bungalow, very small rooms with everything in its place and chintz headrests on the armchairs.

“It’s a hell of a house to run a war from, Sergei.”

“Yes sir.”

He’d done eating and got into his second cup of coffee when Spaight stumbled groggily into the kitchen, suffering badly from the change in time. “Christ I feel like a quart hangover. I woke up trying to scrape the moss off my tongue. How you making it this morning?”

“Feeling no pain,” Alex lied. “Sit down and revive yourself on some of Sergei’s coffee.”

The cup was almost engulfed by Sergei’s huge hand when he set it down. Then he put his grave eyes on Alex. “Will there be soldierly duties for me as well, my general?”

Sergei was overage and overweight but he had lived his entire life for the single purpose of soldiering for Russia. Alex said, “You’ll fight with us, Sergei. We couldn’t do it without you.”

Sergei went back to the frypan beaming.

“John, I’m going to handpick you a parachute company. You’re going to have to equip them and train them for jumping.”

Spaight shot a quick warning glance to his left.

Alex said, “I’ve trusted Sergei many times with my life and he’s trusted me with his. You might listen when Sergei speaks—the British Expeditionary Force awarded him a DSM in the Ukraine.”

The Distinguished Service Medal was a citation the English didn’t take lightly. Spaight showed his surprise and then nodded. Sergei happily served up his eggs and ham-sliced bacon.

Alex said, “The heavier things are coming by convoy. Transports have a way of ending up in the Atlantic trench. It’s going to be another of your jobs to keep leaning on Glenn Buckner to deliver the goods we need—regardless of U-boats.”

“Tall order,” Spaight remarked. “What else?”

“You’ll be in overall command of training.”

Spaight pushed his empty plate away and swallowed the last mouthful. “Okay. Now you can tell me what I’m training them for.”

“Paratroop commando tactics. The same drill we had at Bliss.”

“Uh-huh. With the two of us trading places. I’ve already said that’s all right with me—but I’d still like to know what kind of operation I’m preparing them for.”

“Just teach them to jump out of those Dakotas. The men have seen their share of combat in Finland—you won’t have to teach them a damned thing about handling rifles or digging holes or maintaining battle discipline.”

“That’ll speed things up. My God the times at Bliss I’d have given my left nut for a training cadre that had any kind of combat experience at all. Do you have any idea how much of a godsend you were to my command, Alex?”

“You’ve seen combat,” Alex pointed out.

“Twenty-three years ago in French mud. That wasn’t combat, that was a screwed-up slaughterhouse in the trenches.”

“I’ve seen your combat record.”

“Where the hell did you turn that rock over?”

Alex said, “You took a patrol a hundred miles inside German-occupied territory on an armed reconnaissance. You came back through the lines with four German colonels and one of the Kaiser’s major-generals for prisoner interrogation—and you didn’t lose a single man. That’s what I want you to train these paratroops for. That mission all over again. To get to the objective without being seen or shot at. To attain the objective without fuss and without noise.”

“Son—if I can call a major general son—that was a nice quiet little farmhouse in the Rhine country that the Boche were using for a rear-echelon officers’ billet. Like this house here. We had to put knives in half a dozen sentries just before dawn and that was all there was to it—we caught the brass hats with their pants down standing in line waiting for the latrine. That ain’t exactly the same idea as walking into the Russian goddamned Kremlin.”

“We’re not going into the Kremlin,” Alex said.

Spaight grinned. “Aha. That’s piece number one of the puzzle.”

At seven he finished reading over the document he had spent odd moments of the past week writing. It consisted of nineteen pages of neat Cyrillic script. He folded it in thirds and sealed it in a buff-colored envelope and went in search of Sergei.

He found the old soldier cleaning a Mannlicher rifle. The tiny bedroom stank of solvent and oil. The square of newspaper on the floor was a repository for cloth patches that had come off the ramrod with star-shaped stains of tawny oil; the weapon hadn’t been dirty but Sergei had carried it around the world with him for twenty-six years and the reason he could still rely on it was that he hadn’t taken it for granted. It looked like a venerable antique but by now it was part of Sergei’s arm and he could put a bullet from it into a moving head at five hundred meters.

Sergei’s big face was the texture of old rubber that had dried and gone cracked-grey in a desert sun. Tension made him flick his tongue across his lips. “I shall be the eyes in the back of your head then.”

“You understand how it must be done.”

“I must not kill him. If he tries to assassinate you….”

“When, not if. They won’t give it up now.”

“When he tries to assassinate you I am to shoot him where it will not kill him.”

“You understand why, Sergei?”

“Of course. We must find out from him who has employed him.”

“We’ll try to make it easy for him,” Alex said. “I’ll stagger my routine. I won’t follow any pattern from day to day except for one habit we’ll show him. Every morning at exactly half-past seven I’ll leave this house and walk through the back gate in the base fence and walk straight to the main hangar. He’ll be watching my movements. He’ll try to find a pattern and he’ll learn there’s only one time of day when he can anticipate where I’ll be—half-past seven in the morning, going from here to there on foot. That’s where he’ll try to kill me. It won’t be for two or three days, perhaps a week.”

“You must go armed of course.”

“I’ve got my pistols. I’ll wear them from this morning on.” They were a pair of British Webley .45 revolvers he’d acquired from a captured Japanese lieutenant general in the mountains of Kansu Province. Once in the Shensi he’d nearly bought the farm when the hammer spring of his Smith & Wesson had broken at full cock and since then he’d carried two revolvers—revolvers because he had never trusted automatic pistols, they jammed too easily with a little mud or cold weather. He’d settled on the big .45s because when you hit an enemy with them he went down and lost interest in fighting.

Sergei was assembling the Mannlicher mechanism and began to thumb cartridges into the Krag box. Alex watched him set the safety. “I’ve got an envelope I want you to keep for me.” He produced it. “Put it where it won’t be found. These are the plans for the operation. If I’m taken out they won’t have time to try to reconstruct my plans or devise new ones. If it happens you must get these plans to Prince Leon immediately.”

“I understand.”

4.

Officers’ call was at nine. He was in the hangar by seven-forty, ready to go over the mound of papers that abstracted the regiment’s status: its personnel, its supplies, its readiness.

Tolkachev came strutting out of the office. He didn’t offer a greeting; just stood at attention waiting.

“Let’s go back to your office.” The leg twinged angrily when he strode past the Cossack.

He waited for Tolkachev to follow him into the cubicle. “Shut the door please.” There were enlisted men elsewhere in the hangar; it wasn’t for their ears.

Tolkachev shut them in. Alex stayed on his feet. He felt brittle. “We haven’t got room here for personal antagonisms. Are you prepared to work under my command?”

“I will not resign voluntarily from the regiment.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

Finally Tolkachev said, “I have been adjutant here for nearly two years, sir.”

“You’ve been used to having it your own way here. You’ve been the operations man—General Devenko wasn’t to be bothered with the details of running a unit. And in the last few weeks you’ve got accustomed to being in command—there was no one here but you. That’s got to change. Can you accept that?”

“I would be willing to take orders….”

“But not from me, is that it?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“I commend your candor, Tolkachev.”

“I must resign then?”

“No. You’re a first-rate combat soldier. I’ve got a job for you.”

“I see.”

Tolkachev didn’t see—not yet. Alex said, “I’ll want the company rosters now.”

Tolkachev got them from the files. Alex spread the papers on the desk and stood leaning over them on his hands. He studied names: put faces to them from memory and summoned recollections of their talents and excellences. Here and there he checked off a name with the blunt point of a pencil.

When he’d done he had checked fifty-eight names and he withdrew from the desk. “I need forty more than I’ve marked.”

“For what purpose?”

“Combat skills and good minds. Russians only—no Poles.”

Tolkachev bent over the rosters. Alex left him alone until he’d finished and then went over it, the names he knew and the names he didn’t know, and he erased four or five of Tolkachev’s marks. When Tolkachev stiffened he said, “I’ve got to use my own judgment.” He glanced up and surprised a look of white-hot hatred on Tolkachev’s flat face. “Give me half a dozen more. I want the very best of them.”

Tolkachev did the job again and when Alex was satisfied he put the rosters aside. “All right. Now you’re going to have to reorganize the regiment. You’ll have to shuffle the assignments. These men whose names are checked off—I want them assigned to a special training company. They’re to have a barracks to themselves. Their officers will live in that barracks with them and there’s to be absolute security maintained at all times on that building.”

“Yes sir.”

“You don’t understand what it’s all about—that’s the way it’s going to stay, Tolkachev. These hundred men are mine—them and the pilots. The rest of the regiment will remain yours to run. You’ll continue performing the Allied defense duties you’ve been performing. You’ll have to spread yourselves thinner to make up for the men I’ve drafted. Once the new company is formed up there’s to be no contact between its men and the rest of the troops in the regiment. We’ll have our own mess hall, our own recreation areas segregated from the others. You’ll have to rotate assignments in the regiment to keep a twenty-four-hour guard patrol on the training area, including the company barracks—I can’t waste these men’s time having them pull sentry duty. I’ll want two men on each entrance. No one will be allowed in or out of the trainees’ area without a pass signed by me or by General Spaight. No one—including yourself. Is this clear?”

“Yes sir. Absolute security. I understand.”

“The sentries will be armed with live ammunition. Anyone who tries to disobey their challenges is to be shot. Not to kill but shot where it’ll hurt. Understood?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then pick good marksmen.”

Tolkachev said drily, “You have the best ones in the training company, sir.”

“Then teach the rest of them to shoot better,” Alex said gently. “All right—you’ve got a great deal to do. You’d better do it. Incidentally you’ll have to move your office—we’ll be needing the use of this hangar.”

“Yes sir. Just one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“The British have suffered us here because we’ve performed useful services. We have freed British units to go to the fronts—we have been doing the work that their own people would have had to do otherwise.”

“I understand that. You’ll go right on doing those things.”

“No sir—not quite. The reason they gave us the use of this airfield is that we have been able to fly offshore patrols and rescue flights for them. If we stop, they will probably want their airfield back.”

“You’ll have to let me worry about that, Tolkachev.” But he could see the way the Cossack’s mind was working: Suppose he throws a spanner in it and we lose our base on account of him}

Alex said, “You’re just going to have to take your chances. I’m giving you more than you’d have given me. More than you probably deserve. If a soldier’s not prepared to take orders from his superior then he’s not much of a soldier.”

“Was that how it was with you and General Devenko then, sir?” Tolkachev hadn’t hesitated: it had been there in him, bottled up, waiting for the chance to come out.

“When your commander’s orders are clearly wrong you have the right to challenge them, Tolkachev. Not otherwise. Now get out of here and get to work.”

Tolkachev’s face had gone impassive again. He drew himself up. “When do you wish it finished, sir?”

“When?”

Tolkachev gathered his dignity about him and wheeled out of the office.

The blackout curtains were open. Through the window he saw squads running the verges of the runway at double-time with heavy packs strapped to their shoulders. Sergeants barked the rhythm of the run and he recognized a captain and two lieutenants who ran along with them. Limping from the window back to the desk he wondered if the muscles of his thigh would knit in time for him to run like that before the mission took off.

Officers’ call; then regimental assembly: hard eyes full of challenge; uncertain eyes averted.

Then at two in the afternoon a De Havilland Beaver bounced lightly down the runway and decanted a passenger.

The group captain wore RAF wings and a DFC; he was short and wiry with freckled sharp features and a shock of heavy red hair. The light of merriment danced in the Scot’s eyes. His name was Walter MacAndrews.

Felix said, “We’re here by the good group captain’s sufferance.”

MacAndrews had a good firm handshake. “Heard a great deal about you from His Highness. I must say you look every inch of it.” He had to throw his head well back to look into Alex’s face.

On the way across the tarmac to the main hangar he explained, “We’ve got the responsibility for northern Scotland—air and coast watches. All the bloody patrol bases, includin’ this one. You might not believe it but I was a self-respecting Spitfire pilot once.”

Felix said. “He lost too many planes so they grounded him.” It was spoken with wicked mischief and from the way MacAndrews grinned it was evident they’d done a good bit of pub-crawling together.

MacAndrews said, “Well that’s a bit true, isn’t it, but I cost the Jerries three times as many aircraft as I cost His Majesty’s government and I thought we were square. Now I understand you’ve come to reorganize things here?”

“In a way.” Alex piloted them into the hangar office. “The regiment will be able to continue doing sentry chores and coast-watch flak tours. Railway guards, all the rest of it. But I’m going to have to pull our pilots out of it.”

MacAndrews showed a little distress. “We haven’t got that many planes to spare up here, General. We’re a bit of a shoestring army.”

“We won’t be needing the planes. If you’ve got other pilots to man them you’re welcome to take them back.”

It relieved the Scotsman. “That I can do. We’ve got a number of overage pilots not unlike myself—most of them dying for the chance to fly spotter patrols. We’ll collect the aircraft immediately.”

“I’ve got to impose on you for something else,” Alex said. “I need the use of land.”

“Land?”

“A field or a meadow. Something at least a mile long and reasonably flat.”

“For landing aircraft is it?”

“No. Something else.”

When MacAndrews saw it was all he was going to get he smiled with amusement. “And I take it you’d prefer it wasn’t a common right in the middle of a curious town full of people. Then it’s got to be something in the highlands, hasn’t it. How far afield may I go?”

“I’d like it as near here as possible.”

“Yet you want privacy. That’s a wee order, General. But there might be a spot or two. Give me forty-eight hours then—I’ll come up with something.” His eyes twinkled: “I don’t for a single minute suppose that’s all you’ll be wanting.”

“There’s only one other thing I can think of at the moment. We’ll want about thirty old cars. The next thing to junk will do—as long as they’re capable of chugging along at a few miles an hour. Don’t expect to get them back. We’ll pay for them of course.”

“Any particular make and model, then?” But there was no bite to MacAndrews’ sarcasm; he was too agreeable for that. “I can only assume you mean to entertain your men with bumper-car races on the meadow.”

“You wouldn’t be too far off,” Alex said.

Five minutes after MacAndrews’ Beaver took off a twin-engined British cargo plane made a rough landing and taxied awkwardly around to the main hangar behind the FOLLOW ME van. The first man out of the plane was not a member of its crew; his rank was too high for that.

“I’m Cosgrove, Bob Gosgrove. War Office.” The English brigadier had an empty sleeve pinned up and the face of a man weary of war. “They told you I was on my way?”

“I’m afraid not, Sir.”

“Bloody crowd of imbeciles in Communications. Well they’ve sent me up to fetch and carry for you. What do you need from us?”

“That’ll take explaining,” Alex said. “Come inside. Coffee?”

“Got it running out my ears,” said Cosgrove. He had an engaging smile; he was a gaunt grey man with a thick mane of hair and a faint resemblance to Vassily Devenko—very tall, the long angular face, the heavy hair almost white.

When Alex was alone with the English brigadier the hearty mask sagged. “All right then. What is this show about?”

“I’d have to know your authority for asking that.”

“You’d better put in a call to London then.”

If it was a bluff it had to be called. Alex rang Tolkachev on the base line and told him to get through to General Sir Edward Muir. Then while he waited he drew Cosgrove into conversation, plumbing him.

He found the brigadier forthright and direct. “Bloody hush-hush. The PM’s known far and wide for his cloak-and-dagger indulgences but I rather think most of them have come a cropper, haven’t they? Gallipoli’s a case in point. I was there, I know.”

Later he said: “The Home Office have agreed to give you use of these facilities but I hope you understand it’s a risk for them. I’m told the Assistant Secretary was a bit pained—they don’t like the idea, it may be in violation of international law.”

“I’m not a lawyer. That’s someone else’s department.”

“Up to a point,” Cosgrove said. “It means your people are going to have to be on their best behavior every moment. The slightest incident could dash the whole show. These Scots are bloody sensitive with foreigners.”

“The operational unit is restricted to base from today on, Brigadier. I don’t think we need worry on that account.”

The call came through and Cosgrove courteously left the room while Alex took the telephone.

Sir Edward’s voice crackled at him. “Hello there Danilov. Glad to hear from you.”

“I’ve got a Brigadier Cosgrove on my doorstep, General. I thought I’d better ask you about him.”

“Oh he’s quite straight. Lost his arm in Turkey in the first war. He’s a good man—the best when it comes to filling impossible orders. He’s number-two man under General Sir Hugh Craigie—chief of supply for the Military Intelligence branch of the War Office. You’ll find him a first-class hustler. What’s the American expression? A moonlight requisitioner?”

“A chiseler, you mean.” Alex was amused.

“Shall we just say he’ll find what you need and provide it.”

“How many of these people have been informed of the mission?”

“None of them. They know only that it’s got the Prime Minister’s approval.”

“Cosgrove wants to know the scheme.”

“Naturally he’d want to, old boy. It’s up to you to decide what to tell him. I’m sure he’d do a better job for you if he knew the whole truth—but you’ve got to weigh that against security. It’s your decision.”

He could picture the old man—Kitcheneresque, on the surface a relic with his manner of colonial ferocity; beneath it the acute mind that belied his age.

“What’s your schedule then? How soon may we expect action?”

“I’ve just arrived—I haven’t got a target date yet.”

“Get one. The Prime Minister will insist.” A pause on the line; then Sir Edward said, “My aide has just handed me a note. It appears you’ll have to disregard what I’ve just told you. Brigadier Cosgrove seems to be the bearer of an inquiry directly from 10 Downing Street. This is one of the Prime Minister’s confidential memos—for my eyes only, destroy after reading, all that nonsense. He seems to have decided to take advantage of Cosgrove’s trip up there.”

“It’ll be a demand for information,” Alex said.

“Yes of course.”

“Thank you General.”

“Right. Ring me if you need anything from here. Good-bye then.”

When he called Cosgrove into the Officers’ Mess the brigadier sat down with the confident air of a man who knew his credentials had just been confirmed. “I hope you had a pleasant chat with London.”

Alex walked to the window and back to exercise his leg. “The plan’s my own and it can’t be shared. It isn’t vanity-it’s a question of secrecy.”

Cosgrove nodded—unperturbed. “Yes of course. First things first, then. What will you require from us?”

“Practice bombs for one thing. Hundred-pounders. With armor-piercing points. Two tons of them.”

Cosgrove drew out a notepad and scribbled on it. “And?”

“Aviation gasoline. Petrol.”

“In what quantities?”

“Just keep it flowing—I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Do you know how difficult it is for us to get petrol into this country?”

Alex grunted. He ticked off the next item: “Uniforms for one hundred officers and men.”

“What sort?”

“Red Army. Russian.”

Cosgrove grinned brashly at him. “Now we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we.”

“You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.”

“Very well. We’ll take your people’s measurements. I’ll have them cut and dyed right here in Scotland. The insignia shouldn’t be a problem. The difficulty may be the boots but I’ll do a bit of digging here and there. Now what about arms?”

“The Americans are providing some. Mainly I’ll need Soviet weapons.”

“You mean small arms—the sort of things they stamp out in those Ukrainian works.”

“The Finns captured a good lot of them two years ago. That would be the place to start looking.”

“I’ll do what I can. What’s next?”

“I want a forger who knows the current Soviet forms.”

Cosgrove reacted with a slow sly smile. “What the devil sort of build-up did London give me?”

“And a communications man who knows Russian wavelengths. We’ll have to alter the wireless equipment aboard our aircraft.”

“A little slower, old boy. I’m still choking on your Soviet forger.”

“That’s right at the top of the list.”

“I can’t promise miracles. I’ll do what I can.”

Cosgrove’s cavalier air troubled him. It all was too much of a game, too much of an entertaining exercise. The Cosgroves and Buckners weren’t laying anything of their own on the line; the weakness of this operation was its dependency on the Allies. To Roosevelt and Churchill at this point the operation must seem a minor and rather childish adventure: you had the feeling the President had sat in his Oval Office one afternoon with Buckner and some others, screwing a cigarette into his long holder and giving the program a patronizing benediction with his jut-jawed conspiratorial grin: All right we’ll give them a hand and let them take a crack at it but let’s not shut the back door.

You couldn’t blame them—but it made for uncertain footing.

“I’ve got to have that forger.”

“My dear fellow, you people have your own man in Moscow—why not get the real thing? Have him smuggle the papers out.”

Alex said quietly, “All right. Who gave it to you?”

“We’re obliged to protect our sources, aren’t we. I’m sure you understood from the beginning there were strings attached. My government aren’t giving you their backing out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“If someone gave it to you, he could just as easily turn around and give it to the Kremlin too. I’d like to know your source, Brigadier.” He emphasized the rank in contrast to the stars on his own epaulets.

It had no discernible effect. “I don’t think there’s too much chance of that.”

Then the connection became clear in Alex’s mind and he didn’t press it further because he felt he had the answer. It had to have been someone in Deniken’s camp; they were the only ones that close to the Allied governments. And if it came from Deniken then it had got to Deniken from Baron Oleg Zimovoi—an attempt to cement Oleg’s position, an avowal of indispensability.

He remembered with displeasure Oleg’s insistent concern for Vlasov’s security: now it appeared Oleg had reversed himself when he saw an advantage to it and jeopardized Vlasov far more dangerously than Alex could have done. It would be Oleg’s manner of demonstrating to the White Russian coalition his importance to the scheme: I’m the only one with an inside man in the Kremlin—the thing can’t be done without me.

It was altogether worthy of Oleg. He wanted to be sure that after it was over the other contingents would be forced to remember the key role he’d played. They would have to reward him with a high seat in the new government. This was what he’d lived his whole life for: power. Now that it might be at hand he would use any means to secure it.

But Oleg could be dealt with. Having worked out the truth Alex was able to dismiss it.

“Can you give me dates?” Cosgrove said.

“Rough ones. Five days to organize training. A minimum of nine weeks’ training. We’re in September now—I’d say we’ll shoot for operational status in middle or late November. I’d like to cut it shorter than that but I don’t think we can.”

“You’re dealing with a great many bureaucracies. Things never happen as fast as they’re promised.”

“It’s your job to cut through that, Brigadier.”

“Quite.” Cosgrove smiled again. “By November Hitler may be making speeches from the Kremlin.”

“Evidently you’re well briefed on the scheme. Why did you bother to ask me?”

“They didn’t send me here blind. But no one knows your tactical intentions. Naturally I’ve asked questions. Certain things are implicit in your answers to them—in your requisitions. I gather, for example, that you won’t be requiring transport by sea.”

“No. I’ll want the use of two long-range aircraft.”

“Transports? You’ve got three of your own, haven’t you?”

“There’s a political echelon to follow us in. They’ll need aircraft.”

“I must say it looks bonkers to me. On the map all you can see is Jerries between here and there. You can’t go up through the Prime Minister’s fabled soft underbelly because there isn’t an aircraft in the world with the range for it. I suppose you could go in through Alaska and Siberia but it would take bloody forever. If the Nazis weren’t in Riga and pushing for Leningrad that would be your route—it’s only five hundred miles Riga to Moscow—but what’s the point of it, you can’t refuel behind Jerry’s lines.”

“Your guesses are your own, Brigadier.”

“You’re not being very cooperative.”

“I haven’t told anyone the plan—not even my own people.”

“Of course. But the PM’s getting restless about this thing. He likes to keep his hand in. You can’t keep him at arm’s length without finding him at sword’s point. You’re thinking of one kind of risk—think of the other.”

Some people were born with blue eyes and some were born to play games and both Churchill and FDR were game-players with all the dedicated enthusiasm of nine-year-old boys looming over a board cluttered with toy soldiers. Blindfold them, obscure their view of the pieces and they would become hot-tempered very quickly.

That was one level. At another level the Allies had a case for quid pro quo. They had invested trust in the scheme; they had a right to be trusted in return. It was remarkable that London and Washington had got behind the operation at all. Aristocrats in exile were commonly thought to be forever hatching fanciful schemes to regain lost thrones. For important governments to support such wild-eyed schemes was unthinkable in the normal course of things; but the course of things was not normal just now. In wartime it became excusable to interfere with the internal affairs of one’s allies because such matters could affect the global balance of power. But still you didn’t simply disperse blank checks to every exiled king and ex-president who came begging for support. You expected certain things in return. They had every right to be stung by Alex’s rebuff.

Cosgrove said, “You’ll have to give ground. If you don’t you may lose the whole package.”

“I’ll lay it out before it goes into operation.”

“Not good enough, old boy.”

“I can’t be more specific at this time.”

“Quite a politician, aren’t you.” Cosgrove scratched his shoulder; it made the empty sleeve move. “I’d hoped not to have to use this. But I’ve been instructed to render no aid and support unless we’ve reached a satisfactory understanding beforehand. I’m to report back to my superiors this afternoon. Naturally if they disapprove of my report you’ll find yourself without a mission. For example the six aircraft you prize so highly will undoubtedly be seized for use by the War Office. Must I go on?”

Alex suppressed his anger. “Very well. If you’ll set up a meeting with the Prime Minister I’ll spell out the plan—with Winston Churchill, in private. Agreed?”

Cosgrove’s relief was transparent. He rubbed his long jaw. “The PM will want his advisors around the table.”

“Negative.”

“For the Lord’s sake why?”

“I haven’t got time for a debate and I don’t want anything written down. I’ll give it to the Prime Minister in however much detail he wants. After that they can discuss it among themselves—but I won’t wait for them. I haven’t got time.”

5.

There was plenty of light but they stood in a sort of darkness because the great size of the cavernous hangar diluted the light. Ninety-odd enlisted men stood in platoon formation—four ranks, twenty-three columns, flag guards at the ends—and the six officers had their backs to the formation. Off to the side stood the regiment’s fourteen flying officers: young men, brash, apart from the others in kind, blooded in air combat over Finland and the English Channel and the North Sea. Spaight and Pappy Johnson watched from one side and Felix waited beside the makeshift podium platform until Alex had made his round of inspection.

Then Felix mounted the platform. He looked neat, trim, businesslike. The uniform he had chosen for the occasion was a simple white one without embellishment.

Felix had a surprisingly deep voice for a man his size and he had the projection of an actor. No one had trouble hearing him even though the curved high roof put a metallic echo on the edge of his words.

“Gentlemen—Russians. My name is Felix Mikhailevitch Romanov. Now we know that a Romanov is good for nothing.”

It was a bit of a pun: the Romanov was the monetary unit of old Russia, now worthless. No one laughed and there weren’t many smiles but Alex sensed a slight relaxation among them.

Felix said: “Romanovs have also been known for their frivolity and for their troublemaking. Very well. I have come here, by your leave, to make trouble. To make trouble for the tyrant Josef Djugashvili who calls himself ‘Stalin’—steel. His name, we know, might better be ‘blood.’”

Felix stood absolutely straight up. His eyes moved gravely from face to face. “I would speak to you of the Russian people, and their nature—proud, tempestuous, filled with elemental cruelties and great passions. We have always been lavish expenders of our own blood. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on the crushed corpses of one hundred thousand subjects. Ivan the Terrible—Genghis Khan—the rulers of Russia have extracted an awful toll in blood. In our Civil War—in which some of you fought—Russia expended the lives of twenty-five million human beings.

“But Josef Stalin has introduced murder and terror on a scale that has never been attempted by the despots of the past.

“Six years ago Stalin began to purge the secret police and the Red Party of those leaders who threatened his power—at least in his imagination. And four years ago he turned his attentions to the military. In the end thirty thousand top-ranking officers were liquidated at Stalin’s whim—including the head of the Army itself, three of the five Marshals, thirteen of nineteen army commanders and more than one hundred divisional commanding generals. These were merely the top officers—the thirty thousand. The ranks have been decimated. Men like you—Russian soldiers. Kulaks, peasants, workers. There have been single days when in the streets of Moscow alone a thousand people have been shot to death. At this point in time the toll has reached ten milliort victims—one Russian out of fourteen!

“I speak to you of these things for a reason. You fought in Finland. You saw the state of the Red Army. You came to know firsthand the pitiful state of the Russian people.

“It is our wish to change that state. It is our wish to restore dignity to our great motherland. To bring freedom and self-respect. To remove the yoke of terror and slavery. To free Russia.”

Felix lifted his hands from his sides—an elegant all-encompassing gesture. “We do not intend to restore a czarist dictatorship to the throne of St. Petersburg—to replace one tyranny with another. Our sole aim is to depose the Stalinists—to open Mother Russia to liberty and to make it possible for our homeland to choose its own freely elected government.

“I was chosen to lead this movement by the leaders of the Free Russian Movement in Exile. I think you know who we all are. We’re not a secret cabal. The heads of all the principal exile groups are participants in this movement—the Socialists, the conservatives, the liberal wings—all of us have banded together with one common goal: the liberation of the motherland.”

They were breathless now—some of them had spent their lives waiting to hear these words.

Felix said: “There are just over one hundred of us in this building. It is up to us, and us alone, to bring freedom to Russia. We hundred men have been asked to change the lives of hundreds of millions.

“I shall be at the controls of the leading aircraft when we go to do battle with the Bolshevik devils. I do not ask you to go to war and fight for me. I ask you to follow me into the battle. It was felt I should lead you because the people of Russia might respond to me—to my name. But I do not ask you to follow me out of any idea of loyalty to my person or to the dynasty of the Romanovs. I ask you to join out of love for Mother Russia. And if I fail you I expect to be treated accordingly.

“I have told you what it is that we intend to do. Now General Alexsander Danilov will tell you how we intend to do it.”

When he mounted the platform Alex held himself suitably erect but Felix turned and offered his arms and Alex accepted the bear hug with more than simple formality. He was overwhelmingly proud of the young prince. It had been a fine speech: brief, strong, candid, whole. It had electrified every man in the vast hangar.

Some of the officers had beads of sweat on their foreheads. Sergei Bulygin—holding a pennant standard at the right end of the formation—had tears on his cheeks and was beaming with a pride he seemed almost unable to contain. Pappy Johnson, who neither spoke nor understood Russian, stood agape: Spaight had been murmuring a translation in his ear.

Their emotions had been brought to a peak; now he had to steady them—get their intellects working.

He said, “Rigid security is now in force. All leaves and passes are canceled and any unauthorized contact with persons outside this unit will be treated as a court-martial offense. This stricture applies to officers as well as enlisted men. You are not to communicate with anybody about anything. You are not to speak one word to anyone outside this unit. That applies to your former comrades in the regiment as well as to outsiders. No one outside this room is privy to our plans and we must keep it that way. Our area will be guarded by sentries from the remainder of the regiment but you are not to speak to those sentries except to identify yourselves when it is necessary to pass through their positions. Are there any questions?”

No one spoke: no one moved.

“You have all volunteered blind for this mission—not knowing the nature of it when you agreed to stand forward. But I have to remind you that it is too late now to change your minds unless you are prepared to spend several months in solitary confinement. That alternative is offered to anyone who prefers it. It is not a punishment, it is a means of insuring that our plans are not leaked until after the mission has been completed. Questions?”

Again there were none; he shifted his stance to take weight off the bad leg. “Very well. The mission is twofold. Part One is the isolation and destruction of the Bolshevik leadership—Stalin and his key aides. Part Two is the seizure and operation of key headquarters and centers of communication.

“Part One is solely the concern of our fourteen pilots and their combat leader, Prince Felix Romanov. Stalin will be attacked and destroyed from the air, by bombardment. The details of that scheme are not important to the rest of you.

“Part Two requires the engagement of sixty-eight of you—officers and men—on the ground. These sixty-eight will be dropped into selected spots by parachute. Wearing Red Army uniforms and carrying forged papers, you will infiltrate headquarters of the Red Army and centers of wireless and print communications. You will neutralize the occupants, taking them by surprise, and you will take over the operations of those centers until you can be relieved by a second wave who will arrive when they have received the signal that the mission has been accomplished.

“The second wave will not consist of men from this unit. It will be manned primarily by military and political leaders who are prepared to take over the reins of the Russian government. As Prince Felix has told you the identities of these men are not secret. They include Prince Leon Kirov, Baron Oleg Zimovoi, Count Anatol Markov and quite a number of others. Prince Felix Romanov will become head of government. I will command the Armies of Russia until such time as we are able to reorganize the General Staff. The German Army must continue to be resisted in the field.

“I have told you that the plan requires sixty eight men from this unit. There are ninety-six of you here. The difference between those two figures represents those of you who will wash out during training. The sixty-eight men who effect the liberation will be the best among you. If you intend to be among them then you will need to be just a little better than the next man in training.

“Can sixty-eight men seize control of the largest country in the world? I would point out to you that Lenin did exactly that in nineteen-seventeen with just one hundred and fourteen shock troops. Do you think we can do as well, gentlemen?”

There was silence in the hangar after the echo of his question stopped reverberating—and then abruptly the room rang with a deafening roar from a hundred throats.

The word they shouted was “Da!”

After formation he retired to the partitioned office with Spaight and Pappy Johnson. Spaight said, “How long have I got?”

“Seven weeks starting Monday.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.”

“If you can’t do it you’d better say so. Right now.”

Spaight dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. “God damn it the hell if I can’t.”

Pappy Johnson said, “Man I’m still trying to get my breath.”

“Get it fast,” Alex told him. “You’re going to be in the air fourteen hours a day.”

“Shee-yit.” Johnson was leaning against the sill on both hands. After a moment he gathered himself and turned about. “I got two problems right off, Skipper.”

“Name them.”

“First thing, I don’t speak but two words of Russian. No, three. Da, nyet and tovarich.”

“And your accent’s atrocious,” Spaight remarked drily.

“How’m I supposed to train fifteen Russian pilots?”

Spaight said, “They’ve been attached to the Royal Air Force for a year and before that nearly all of them were flying combat in China or Spain. English is the international pilots’ language. You won’t have trouble with that.”

Pappy absorbed that. “The other thing ain’t so easy.” He turned to Alex. “Ain’t enough high-octane around here to taxi those Forts once around the ballroom. How can I teach them anything if I can’t get them off the ground?”

“You’ll have gasoline by the beginning of the week. In the meantime you’ll have your hands full setting up a ground school. Only five of them have ever flown bombers.”

“Five’s a lot better than none. One more thing then. Where’m I going to find grease monkeys who’ve laid eyes on a B-Seventeen?”

“Colonel Buckner has three ground-crew chiefs on the way here from Boeing. They should arrive tomorrow. Any more problems?”

“Is there anything you forgot to take care of?”

“We’ll spend the next seven weeks finding that out.”

“Well here’s one for starters. You’ve given me pilots but what about navigators and bombardiers, gunners, all that stuff? A Flying Fortress takes a combat crew of ten, Skipper.”

“We’ll wash at least thirty of the ground troops out of training thirty days ahead of D-day. You’ll have those thirty days to make air gunners out of them. I know it’s not enough time but do what you can. We’ll have Red Air Force markings on the planes and the plan doesn’t include shooting our way in. You might run into a stray Luftwaffe plane but I doubt it.”

“Fair enough. But—”

“As for navigators and bombardiers you’ve got a pool of fifteen experienced fliers to draw from and you’ve only got six airplanes. Three bombers, three transports that don’t need bombardiers. Your copilots will have to double as navigators but their problems won’t be acute—it’s a simple flight plan once it’s in motion. If the weather’s bad we won’t go in anyway, we’ve got to have optimum weather for the mission. Six pilots, six copilots—that leaves you three spare pilots. They’ll be your bombardiers. Next question?”

“No. But if you’re fixing to take over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with three B-Seventeen bombers and sixty-eight ground troops then you have got the balls of a brass gorilla.”

6.

The grey Bentley had handsome Coventry coachwork and a high kneaded leather seat in which Count Anatol Markov sat bolt erect. At the count’s elbow was a telephone to speak with the driver but there was no need for that. The car had picked him up at the customs gate and now moved him almost without sound through the streets of north London and across toward Highgate.

Anatol observed dispassionately that bomb damage in this sector didn’t seem severe. Here and there a house had been shattered and twice they had to detour around cratered streets but north London had hardly been turned into rubble; either the newspapers had exaggerated the Luftwaffe’s efficiency or other areas of the city had taken the brunt of Hitler’s air war.

The Bentley made the left turn off the Archway Road at Highgate Wood and slid smoothly to the curb before a high Victorian house faced with genteel stonework and brick. Count Anatol’s index finger pried the watch out of his waistcoat pocket and snapped the gold crested lid open. It was four-fifteen.

“Ivanov” was a name like Smith or Jones or John Doe: a common pseudonym; but it happened that Ivanov was Baron Yuri Lavrentovitch’s real surname and that this was the only common thing about him. His grandfather had been a minister in the government of Alexander III and the genius for finance could be traced back a dozen generations in Ivanov’s lineage.

The Baron was bald except for a grey monk’s fringe that went around the back of his head like a horseshoe. His physiognamy was that of a Mediterranean Scrooge—fleshy at cheek and jowl but querulous at jutting chin. He wore a dark Saville Row suit with mother-of-pearl buttons down the center of the waistcoat; it had been tailored to the millimeter but it wouldn’t have convinced anybody that he was English. He was no bigger than a twelve-year-old schoolboy.

Count Anatol towered over him but it didn’t trouble the Baron. “Sherry perhaps?”

“I had my fill of it in Spain. I would prefer whisky.”

Ivanov spoke to a servant in English that was too quick and slurred for Count Anatol to follow. When the servant left the room Ivanov settled into a Queen Anne divan that dwarfed him ludicrously. He had made no effort to scale the furnishings of his house to his own proportion; it appeared to be a matter of complete indifference to him.

Count Anatol’s preference ran to hard chairs with straight backs. He drew one up from a corner. “You look very well.”

“My dear Anatol, for a man my age I look bloody marvelous. I cannot say the same for you.”

“It was a rather nervous flight from Lisbon. A Messerschmitt gave us a looking over.”

“I suppose it serves to remind the Portuguese who is in charge.”

“Are we expecting anyone else?”

“No. There was to have been someone to speak for the Grand Duke Mikhail but it did not prove practicable for anyone to make his way here from Munich. I keep in contact with them of course—in the diplomatic bags through Zurich.” Baron Ivanov held a key post with an international bank in London and the firm’s German banking operations continued to function under the Reich to provide Speer and Krupp with capital for war production. “When necessary we can arrange more rapid communication but I prefer not to strain that avenue with anything that’s not vital.”

“I am afraid it is an avenue you shall have to open wide. There is not much time left.”

“That’s what we are here to discuss.” The Baron spent his life dealing with the tyrants of finance; it wasn’t a profession for a man with nerves.

The servant brought drinks. Neither of them spoke until the man had left the room. Then Anatol said, “Our General Danilov must have begun his exercises in Scotland by now.”

“He arrived last night with six aircraft. Three heavy bombers, three transports, two American officers—one a brigadier.”

“You are keeping close watch on him,” Anatol said.

“Not as close as I should like. He has shunted my key man there into the cold. But we will work around that.” The sealed brass humidor on the side table was crested with the Imperial Russian Eagle. The Baron selected a Havana. “Has Danilov revealed his plan to any of you?”

“No.”

“He appears to be as difficult to deal with as his brother was.”

“More so. At least we had Vassily Devenko’s sympathies.”

“Not to the point where he felt free to confide in any of us.”

Anatol said, “He’d have done so when the time came. Alex will keep it to himself until the last moment—then he will go first to Leon, not to us.”

“We must circumvent that.”

“That may require extreme measures.”

“My dear Anatol, the entire scheme is extreme. With Danilov we have one advantage over his brother—we need not fear his ambitions. Vassily had it in him to be another Stalin. Alexsander Danilov isn’t that sort.”

“I have seen the changes power can effect in men,” Anatol said.

“Danilov lacks the ruthlessness for it. I have studied his dossier. He is not a killer—not the kind who takes pleasure in it.”

Anatol resisted the impulse to ask the Baron if he had had a hand in Vassily Devenko’s assassination.

The Baron ashed his cigar. “You indicated you had important information.”

Down to the meat of it now. Anatol said, “I have Vassily Devenko’s plan.”

If Ivanov was surprised he made no show of it. “How did that happen?”

“I was the first to think of searching his body after he was killed. I was not observed.”

“He carried the plans on him?”

“A notebook. A shorthand cypher—it has taken me this long to translate it. That is why I did not communicate earlier.”

“Have you got it with you?”

“In my head. The notebook is in my vault but I have had the translations destroyed.” Anatol leaned forward a bit in the high-backed chair. “Devenko’s was the superior plan.”

“Why?”

“There are too many variables in Alex’s alternative.”

“He has not revealed his plan. How can you criticize it?”

“I know this much about it. It entails luring the Kremlin elite into a trap outside Moscow. It involves aerial bombardment and support from the Allied governments which must be maintained right up to the end in order for the scheme to work. If that support is withdrawn at any point then the Danilov plan is aborted. He must have uninterrupted support from at least two governments that we know to be capricious. And he must depend on the weather as well—he can’t hit a target from the air if there’s a storm. There must be a good many other imponderables but those are two we know of.”

“And the Devenko plan?”

“Straightforward. Relatively simple. A regimental infiltration of the Kremlin. It relies on surprise but that is the only variable.”

“Why didn’t Danilov want to use it then?”

“I was not present when he outlined it for Leon. But I suspect his motives. He’d had a quarrel with his brother—they were estranged. They fought for my daughter’s affections among other things. I suspect Alex is refusing to follow Vassily’s scheme simply because it was Vassily’s. He may feel compelled to prove he can do it his own way.”

“You think the man would jeopardize the operation merely to prove a point?”

“It is more than a point. It is an obsession, I think.”

The Baron said, “And you suggest…?”

“Alex should be removed.”

“Removed how? And replaced by whom?” The baron’s tiny hand held the cigar idly before his breastbone. His voice was calm. “You see the difficulty. We lack the votes to have him dismissed by the coalition. He has always been a favorite of Leon’s. I would not be amazed to learn that Leon arranged the assassination.”

“Leon?”

“To make room for his own protégé.”

Anatol shook his head with disbelieving amusement. But it was half an answer to the question he had not asked earlier-only half because it might be a smoke screen; the Baron was clever enough.

“We should have to remove him by violent means,” the Baron said, “and such things have a way of being traced back to their origins.”

“No one has traced Vassily Devenko’s murder back to its origins.”

“Someone will. In time. No; if we had a part in Danilov’s death and it came to light before we cemented our positions of power then we should lose our chance forever. The risk is too great.”

“No greater than the risk of losing it all by supporting Alex.”

“Answer my second question then.”

“We have men capable of commanding the operation. The plan in Vassily Devenko’s notebook is quite detailed. It should not require great imagination to put it into operation—only persevering leadership. I am sure Tolkachev could handle it, for example; the regiment is accustomed to following his orders.”

“Tolkachev is a staff officer. He lacks the spark for command. I cannot see men following him into the jaws of death.”

“It was not a cavalry charge with naked sabers that Vassily had in mind. The operation would not require that sort of leadership.”

“Yes. But would the Red Army fall into place behind him after the coup?”

“Will the Red Army fall in behind Alex and Prince Felix?” Anatol riposted.

“They may when they realize it was Alex’s initiative that sparked its success.” The Baron sucked on the cigar; it hollowed his cheeks and gave his face a predatory cast. “I have the highest respect for your judgment, Anatol. I am only anticipating the arguments my colleagues will raise. It is a great risk to upset the operation now that it is in motion. You must be very certain of your stance.”

“I’ve weighed the alternatives.”

The Baron said, “You do not like Danilov personally, do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Who can say. Chemistry perhaps.”

“Politically he is too liberal for you of course.”

“That goes without saying. I should think you would feel the same.”

“I do. But we are not putting him forward as a political candidate. He has a remarkable record as a soldier.”

“Perhaps. It is my impression he is too susceptible to his emotions.”

“Warmth is an essential quality in a leader.”

“I do not agree,” Anatol said.

“I am not a warm man myself but I recognize its value in others. Your daughter flew to America some weeks ago to meet him in New York.”

“She was acting as Leon’s envoy.”

“It was a bit more than that.”

“What is it you wish me to say?”

“I want you to admit you do not approve of your daughter’s being in love with him.”

“Irina is a grown woman. I do not interfere in her life.”

The suggestion of a smile. “You were much happier when she was dallying with Vassily Devenko. He was more your sort of son-in-law.”

“I would have preferred that naturally.”

“I must ask you to examine your motives, Anatol. Spend the night—consider it all. We shall discuss this again in the morning.”

7.

A dark old Austin came chugging up from the gate. It was one of the regiment’s vehicles and Sergei Bulygin was driving; Alex couldn’t see the passenger behind the glare on the windscreen.

He didn’t want visitors inside the restricted area. He swung through the hangar door and limped quickly outside onto the tarmac.

And suddenly he was face to face with Irina.

He looked at her over a stretching interval until her mouth softened and parted and her long breath lifted her breasts. He felt his throat thicken; when he lifted his hands she came forward, hurrying with her fluid free stride: she gave him both her hands and her eyes danced above her wicked blinding smile.

“It’s all quite official,” she said. “I’m here as a courier.” But there was mischief in her eyes.

Sergei dropped them at the bungalow and drove away beaming conspiratorially. Irina had one large grip. He carried it inside and she said, “At least tell me you’re pleased to see me.”

He swept her into his arms and she turned her face up for his kiss.

Abruptly she curled away from him and delved into her voluminous handbag.

It was a bulky brown envelope sealed with wax and a Spanish diplomatic stamp. “Oleg said it was vital.”

“We had word he was sending a messenger. I hardly thought….”

“I should have come in livery and a little red cap. Hadn’t you better open it?”

“In a while,” he said. “Glass of whisky? It’s all we’ve got. But it’s good unblended local product.” He realized he was still staring in disbelief. “You’ve put a damned lump in my throat, Irina.”

“I’m glad I haven’t lost the power to enthrall. Scotch whisky will do.”

When he came back she was sitting in the parlor with one leg across the arm of the chair. It was a pose no one else could have brought off with dignity. She tossed back her whisky and displayed her subtle mocking smile. “You’re being heroic again. I confess it suits you. What happened to your leg? You’re favoring it.”

“A man used it for target practice.”

Her face changed. “Hadn’t you better tell me about it?”

“In Boston a few days ago. It was a rifle. The bullet hit the doorjamb beside me—it was wood splinters that nicked me. It isn’t serious.”

“Did they capture him?”

“No.”

“Of course it’s the same ones who murdered Vassily.”

“Possibly.”

“You sound dubious.”

“It was hardly a hundred yards. He’d have killed me if he’d meant to.”

“Then you’re convinced he wasn’t shooting to kill?”

“I’m not convinced of anything—but there wasn’t much wind and he had an absolutely clear shot. You can kill a man at five times that distance with a good rifle.”

“Perhaps his sights had been pushed out of alignment somehow.”

“It’s possible,” he conceded. “I think he’d have had time to correct his aim and fire again.”

“Wasn’t there any trace of him? Didn’t you see him?”

“No to both questions. If we knew who he was we’d know why he did it.”

“They may try it again—someone better with a rifle.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve taken certain precautions. Talking about it won’t clear it up—let’s have a look at your package from Oleg.”

It was a brief letter folded into a book—Clausewitz’s On War, a very old volume, the second Russian edition; published in St. Petersburg in 1903. He riffled the pages but there were no underlinings or marginal notations.

Oleg’s letter was written sparsely in a formal Russian free of post-Revolutionary innovations.

The last part of it was pure Oleg—the gratuitous needle jabbed into his old foe, Irina’s father. Alex tore the last page off and passed it to Irina.

She uttered a bawdy bray of laughter and gave it back to him. “Doesn’t he realize how transparent he is?”

“Oleg sees enemies behind every tree. It’s his stock in trade. Part of the way he keeps his following together—he convinces them they’re being persecuted.”

She cocked her head and squinted at him. “I never saw you take such a sly interest in politics before.”

“I’ve got to take an interest in these people when they’ve got it in their power to cripple my plans.”

Irina pressed it. “What do you want, then?”

“To do this job. Do it well.”

“And then what? Afterward.”

“I suppose they’ll find a place for me in the new setup.”

“And that’s all?”

“I’m a soldier. It’s what I do.”

“To justify your existence?”

“Is that wrong?”

“It’s too simple.” She showed him her impatience. “Alex, it’s no good. You keep yourself so hidden—I wish you’d give me something more to go on.”

Things stirred in him; he stood up and moved around the little parlor. Finally he said, “Do you know why I took this job?”

“Tell me then.” She cocked her head, smiling as if she’d won a point. “It’s all tied up in what happened between you and Vassily.”

“We were holding a section of the Finnish left. It was cold—my God, the snow. The Reds had no stomach for it. They were surrendering in groups—platoons of them, whole companies. All they wanted was to be put away in a warm place where nobody was shooting at them. We must have had a thousand of them in the prison compound…. It’s something you have to know,” he said in a different voice. “I still feel Vassily standing between us.”

Irina lowered her face; the fall of her hair hid it from him. “Poor Alex.”

“Moscow kept throwing new divisions in and we’d give ground for a while—draw them into it, tire them out; then we’d spit them out again and move back to where we’d been before.

“It was the biggest army in the world and we were whipping them. We were feeling reckless and invincible. If you’ve been like that you can understand how the Germans expect to conquer the world.

“We weren’t sure how many people Stalin was willing to sacrifice to prove his point up there. We were all filled with success and the general feeling was that Stalin couldn’t afford to squander too much against a second-rate power like Finland when he had Hitler to think about. We had a few contacts in Russia, we knew pretty much the extent of the purges there and we knew Stalin had wiped out millions of his best fighting men. He still had unlimited manpower to draw on but it was rabble—civilians who didn’t have much stomach for fighting. Vassily kept harping on that. But I kept realizing Stalin still could afford to lose twenty for every one of ours. I was inclined to set up entrapments, make it expensive for them and minimize our own casualties. It didn’t make sense to me to go on the attack. Not in those circumstances.”

“And Vassily wanted to attack, was that it?”

“Well he kept attacking them whenever he had a chance to. I couldn’t prevent that; but that wasn’t what blew it up. A few times he ordered me out to chase a retreating Red column and I argued the point with him. Sometimes he’d win the argument, sometimes he’d let me win it. We had different theories but we worked well enough together—he needed me around to steady him.”

“Then what went wrong?”

He chose his words. “We were on the border—right on the border. We’d pushed them back to it again, I think it was the fourth time in five or six weeks. It was the third time we’d used the same patch of forest for a headquarters. We were on fairly high ground there, we could see right down into Russia. From that corner of Finland it’s about thirty miles to Leningrad.”

He heard the breath catch in her throat. Her eyes were wide with a tension that was almost erotic.

“He wanted to take two of our battalions out of the lines. Dress them in Red prisoners’ uniforms and march right into Leningrad. He wanted to wage guerrilla war there—blow up installations, sabotage industries, wipe out commissars.”

Irina sat back slowly; her hands wrenched at each other. “How like him. How gallant—how adventurous.”

“How stupid,” Alex said. “It would have been suicide. We’d have been hanged for spies. But that wasn’t the point I tried to get across to him.”

“No,” she said. “You’d have been more concerned about the Finns.”

“That was it. As soon as Stalin got wind of what we were up to he’d have had the excuse to commit the Red Air Force and a massive army to the border campaign. He’d have overrun the whole of Finland in a matter of weeks. That was what Vassily wouldn’t see.”

“How did you stop him?”

“I told him if he didn’t give it up I’d inform Helsinki of his plans. They’d have pulled us out of there overnight and he knew it. He never forgave me for that—it made me an informer.”

“You had to do it.”

“I had to do a lot of things over the years to keep Vassily from plunging into one thing or another. Out in China he wanted to turn his back on the Japanese and go after the Chinese Communists in the mountains. He’d have left a thousand square miles wide open to the Japanese. I reasoned him out of it that time. This time I had to threaten him with exposure. He couldn’t stand that.”

“You hated him—didn’t you.”

He drew a breath. “I spent half my life protecting him from his wild impulses. Up there on the Finland border I used up my tolerance and charity.”

“Because you knew you were a better man than Vassily.”

“A better soldier at any rate.”

“And that’s why you’ve taken this job.”

“I’m guilty of the sin of pride.” He stood unmoving, watching her face. “He couldn’t have brought this thing off, Irina. He’d have gone for glory instead of reality—he’d have blown it. I’m going to succeed where Vassily would have failed. All right, I’m an ambitious fool. There it is.”

After the longest time she palmed the hair back from her temples. “Darling, take me to bed and hold me in your arms. I don’t want to talk any more tonight.”

8.

In the morning she was watching him with a drowsy expression that told him she wasn’t quite awake enough to be sure whether she wanted him to make love to her. But she was enjoying the way his eyes traced the contours of her nakedness.

“I don’t suppose you realize what time it is.”

“Quarter to seven,” he said. “The men have been up for two hours.”

“How inexcusably uncivilized.” She yawned and stretched and sat up; she looked somehow bruised by the daylight when he threw the curtains back. He stood to one side in the shadows and swept the Scottish scrub with an alert scrutiny. Two sentries stirred at the gate and a solitary guard marched along the fence farther down. Beyond the bleak military buildings the highlands lifted in faint craggy tiers into a mist the color of the North Sea. A pale disc of sun rode low above the headlands in a grey overcast and he saw gulls beating their way toward the glint of food. A low haze covered the green-grey earth and the tufts of weedy bushes were indistinct along the flatlands tilting toward the sea. The air had that heavy sweetness that landsmen called the smell of the sea and sailors called the smell of land.

If there was a gunman he was well hidden and in any case it was a poor light for shooting. Nevertheless he closed the curtains before he turned back to Irina and bent over the bed. She gave him a soft-lipped kiss and when he straightened he watched for her quick slanting glance of mockery which was the next thing to a smile but she was looking at the bandage on his thigh. Then she tipped her head back and searched his eyes with an odd intensity.

He began to get into his fatigues. Irina propped both pillows behind her, drew her knees up and leaned forward. She was hunching her shoulders together, pressing her breasts against each other as if to suffocate something.

He sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks; he felt her hand on his arm. “What?”

“Nothing. I only wanted to touch you.”

“You’ve got such a strange look on your face, Irina.”

She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “May I stay, Alex? Is there something useful I can do here?”

“It would be better if you went back.”

“Why?”

“The rest of them are confined to barracks and the training areas. They’d resent it.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“I’d want to spend the evenings with you—the nights.”

“Yes.”

“There isn’t time for it.”

“Doesn’t it help, knowing you’ve got someone who cares what happens to you?”

“Of course it does.”

“I want to be here, Alex. I want to watch it take shape. I’ve got a stake in this.”

He threaded his belt through the loops, waiting for her to come out with it.

She said. “There were a lot of Free Poles in the brigade. Auchinleck was putting together a great deal of human flotsam to hold back the Afrika Korps. The Poles volunteered to fight in North Africa. Vassily didn’t like desert warfare—he was toying with some silly idea of taking the rest of the regiment back to China. Then Leon told him about this project and naturally it galvanized him—he forgot about China. But this scheme wasn’t Vassily’s idea. And it wasn’t Leon’s.”

It hit him and he turned slowly, adjusting to it, absorbing it.

Bitterness bubbled to the surface and Irina said, “I couldn’t trust anyone but Leon to listen to me. The rest of them—even my father—I knew they’d turn me aside. They’re not in the habit of listening to a woman’s ideas,”

She combed the hair away with her fingers and tossed it back. “Do you know how long ago it came to me? It was when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. A week before Hitler invaded Poland. Almost two years ago. I knew one of them would violate the pact—one of them would attack the other and that would be our chance.

“The whole conception was mine, darling. The coalition, the design for a new government, the choice of Felix to be the figurehead. Dear old Leon saw the possibilities at once. We’ve worked together ever since. We had to think of every objection—we had to have an answer for everything.”

She watched him without guile but he took his time thinking it out.

She said, “May I stay now?”

“I can’t refuse you, can I.”

“No.” she said. “I planned it that way, don’t you see?”

He buckled the holsters flat against his waist and when Sergei locked the bolt of the Mannlicher rifle Alex opened the door and went through it quickly. Walking down the short driveway and across the narrow highway he had time to survey the barrens on either side. Sergei was back there in the corner of the house with two windows to observe through and if anything stirred in the brush Alex would hear the pane shatter when Sergei’s rifle moved.

Everything in him twanged with taut vibration. He heard the distant screech of the gulls and the movement of a vehicle somewhere. The gate sentry demanded his pass and got it and then he was crossing the tarmac toward the main hangar, still ready to dive flat.

It was a little far to hear the glass breaking out now but the haze hadn’t lifted and he didn’t think a long-range shot would do the job under these conditions; if they really meant to kill him this time they wouldn’t chance it until conditions were optimum. It still was possible they hadn’t meant to hit him at all; it might have been a warning but if so it was meaningless because there’d been no message. That was the crux: in Boston the shooting had had all the earmarks of a deliberate miss but on the face of things that didn’t make any sense since it served no purpose he could discern. There was an answer to it somewhere but he didn’t have enough facts to know where to look for it and therefore the only thing he could do was assume the worst but go on about his business. If the threat had been contrived to slow him down it wasn’t going to succeed.

He stepped into the hangar and took a very deep breath and tramped back toward tht office.

Irina had given him something new to chew on and part of him resented it because he couldn’t spare much of his mind to explore it. She was telling the truth about the scheme: there’d be no point in lying, it was too easy to confirm. But that didn’t mean she’d told the whole truth. She was holding something back.

John Spaight was waiting in the office and Alex said, “Let’s get to work.”

9.

“We haven’t got any time at all,” the Undersecretary growled. “Kiev is in flames. They’ve got Guderian down there now—Third Panzer Division at the spearhead. Von Mannerheim has Leningrad encircled. Von Bock has three armies and three Panzer groups within two hundred miles of Moscow. Stalin’s losing people at the rate of twenty thousand a day—casualties and prisoners. It’s going to be over within a month.”

Colonel Glenn Buckner was so tired he had to keep blinking. It was nearly three in the morning. He stuck to his guns. “It’s far too early to cancel the operation. This time of year a hundred and forty-odd years ago Napoleon was right at the gates of Moscow and we know where that got him.”

“Napoleon didn’t have a Luftwaffe or three Panzer groups.”

Buckner said, “We’ve got people in Fairbanks doing tests on mechanized equipment. When it gets cold enough you can’t run a tank—the oil solidifies.”

“It’s not cold in Moscow, Glenn. It’s raining for God’s sake. That’s the best possible weather for tank warfare—a little mud lubricates the cleats. Right now Rommel would probably rather be on the Russian front where he wouldn’t have sandgrit ruining his panzers right and left.”

Buckner tried a new tack. “You and I both spent enough time in there to know what those people are like when they get stubborn.”

“They’re not stubborn now. Stalin’s had to take ruthless measures to keep them in the lines at all. They’re bugging out the first chance they get.”

“Don’t you see that’s exactly why we’ve got to proceed with Danilov’s operation? It’s the only chance we’ve got to get the Russians back on their feet and back into the war against Hitler.” He couldn’t suppress the yawn any longer but it gratified him that the Undersecretary responded in kind.

The Undersecretary took his hand down from in front of his mouth. “We’re just wasting time and money and matériel. The war in Russia will be decided long before these White Russians get off their butts. All we’re doing is lining their coffers.”

Buckner let his silence argue for him. When the rest of them had been fighting to gear up for war production the Undersecretary had concentrated his attentions on deciding what decorating scheme to use in the overhaul of the State building. But he had the Secretary’s ear—they were old cronies—and because he’d spent two years in the Moscow Embassy he’d been assigned as liaison between Foggy Bottom and the Chairman of JCS: it made him Buckner’s opposite number. He was a clever politician and Buckner had to depend on his sense of self-aggrandizement—his willingness to subordinate prejudice to ambition.

Buckner said, “We’re not gambling much. If it fails it hasn’t hurt us. If it succeeds we’ll both be looking good.”

“If I saw any chance of it succeeding….”

“What have we got to lose? A handful of airplanes. Some fuel, some ammunition, a little money. Hell if we lose the planes we can write them off on the books as training accidents.”

“That’s not the point and you know it. The repercussions if a whisper of this ever gets breathed….”

“If Stalin loses the war we’re not going to have to worry about his good opinion of us.”

“I wasn’t talking about Stalin. I was talking about the American voter.”

“The next election’s not until nineteen forty-four.”

“Nuts. It’s not that easy and you know it. It’s pur money and our supplies that are keeping England alive right now. Put a hint of this operation in the press and what happens to the President’s Congressional support for his war measures? You know how thin the margin is at best. Give the isolationists ammunition like this and that’s the last we’d see of Lend-Lease or any other war-support program. England could go right down the tubes. That’s the real risk of it—that’s what concerns me.”

No, Buckner thought. What really concerned the Undersecretary was that he’d be charged with having had a role in the discredited scheme and his own head would tumble into the basket.

Buckner said, “There’s only one answer to that. We’ve got to make damned sure we keep the lid on it.”

“Easy to say.”

“We’re doing it. After all there’s damned few of us in on it. Six or seven of us including the President.”

“It’s not good enough, Glenn. We’ve got to have a back door.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You’re the expert in nihilistic machinations.”

“I’m just a country boy. Let’s keep it to words of two syllables.”

“There’s got to be a cancellation button.”

“Come again?”

“A button to push. To give us instant cancellation of the program. These people aren’t Americans—we can’t just order them to call it off on our say-so. We’ve got to have leverage.”

“You can relax then,” Buckner said. “That’s been taken care of.”

10.

Pappy Johnson stood under the wing of the airplane exposing his teeth. He pulled his cigarettes out of the bicep pocket of his leather flight jacket and offered one to Calhoun.

“Thanks.” Calhoun took it and poked his face forward to accept a light from Johnson’s cupped match. Calhoun had a small triangular face and the black-nailed hands of a mechanic. He had arrived during the night by train from Glasgow where the flight from the States had dropped him off with his two companions.

“They’re your airplanes as of now,” Johnson told him. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to get them ready for training.”

“Well first off we’ll have to mount those turrets.” On the ferrying flight the dorsal and belly turrets of the B-17S had been removed and stowed inside to reduce air drag.

“Uh-huh. And you’re going to have to modify the C-Forty-sevens. Those cargo doors open outward. That’s no good for parachute drops.”

Calhoun didn’t even blink. “You want ‘em to slide or you want ‘em to open inward?”

“What’s faster?”

“Open inward. It’s still a welding job but we can handle it.”

“All right. Rig lines for the ripcord clips and run some benches down the insides for the men to sit on.”

“Full complement in each plane?”

“Just about. They’ll carry twenty-seven each, isn’t that the drill?”

“You can squeeze in more than that if you need to. Depends how far you’ve got to stretch your fuel,” Calhoun said. “Which reminds me, I can’t work on these engines unless I can run them up. What are we supposed to run them on, spit?”

“Use what you can find. We’ll have it pouring in by Monday.” He hoped it was true. All he knew was what General Danilov told him.

“Okay. Anything kick up on the way over here I should look into?”

“Mine was all right. The ferry pilot on the second Fort said his number three was running a little ragged—high head temps and he couldn’t keep it in synch.”

“I’ll tell Blazer to take a look. Most ground crews have to take an engine apart to find out what Blazer can tell just by listening to it run.”

Pappy Johnson dropped his cigarette and squeezed it under his boot. “They’re your babies. Nice meeting you. I got to get to work.”

He strode to the main hangar and waved vaguely to the two generals in the office—the Russian one and the American one—and went straight on back to the rear of the huge building.

Prince Felix Romanov was on his feet near one of the small windows. He was watching the Boeing arrivals across the field spread canvas over the engine nacelles of the big airplanes. The wiry prince was dressed in tailored coveralls that fitted like a tux; Johnson suppressed a smile.

The rest of them—the fourteen pilots—had cigarettes cupped in their hands and they looked ready to be bored. These were old-line combat pilots and he was going to have to shake them up.

“Good morning gentlemen.”

Some of them nodded; some of them murmured something or other. Prince Felix flashed a grin at him and took a seat at the end of the bench.

There was a blackboard and a little lecture podium. Johnson posted himself behind it. “It’s not an office party, gentlemen. Siddown.”

He waited for them to sort themselves out on the three long benches and then he said, “I’m sure there are at least a thousand men who know more about precision bombardment than I do.” He looked slowly from face to face. “However I don’t see any of them here.”

He had their attention. “Anybody have trouble understanding my English?”

A few of them shook their heads; the others didn’t answer. “I don’t know who’s got rank here other than His Highness but as long as we’re in training here I’m the boss. When I tell you the sow’s fat then she’s broad across the back. Just you remember I’m in charge here and we’ll all get along fine.”

He saw a slow grin spread across Prince Felix’s face. The others took their cue from that and he knew it was going to be all right.

“Now you’re going to make mistakes. You don’t think you will. But you will. I don’t mind mistakes but I don’t want excuses. Fair enough?”

Abruptly he turned to the blackboard and dashed a quick rough sketch that approximated the outlines of a four-engine bomber.

“The B-Seventeen Flying Fortress has something like seventy-five thousand working parts. In the next few weeks we’re going to have a lunatic schedule around here because you misters are going to have to learn about a lot of those parts. In an emergency in the air you’re going to have to be able to act as your own flight engineers. This afternoon we’re all going to climb around inside those aircraft and find out what holds them together. You’ll work your way up from the tail turrets to the cockpits. By the time you get that far you’ll be able to repair a busted elevator cable or free up a jam in the bomb-bay racks. And then we’re going to tackle the instruments. You misters are mostly used to flying peashooters, I understand. You’re going to have to learn a whole new rule book about instruments. You’re going to have to learn how to sort out a hundred different facts you’ve got at your fingertips in that cockpit—information about your course, your altitude, your airspeed, rpm’s, manifold pressures, fuel levels, horizon attitude, engine temperatures, synchronizations, mixtures, radio equipment, a lot of other stuff. You misters are going to have to memorize an encyclopedia full of facts and you’re going to have to be able to recite them back to me on call.”

An hour later he was still having at them.

“Now one thing you ought to remember if you don’t want to get dead. Keep the nose down when you’re taking off with a heavy load on board. Pushing the nose up, trying to climb—that’s no good if you’re at too steep an angle to get speed. You won’t get height that way, you’ll only stall out. These are heavy machines. You must always sacrifice altitude, no matter how little you have, to get speed. Is that clear?

“Now I remind you these airplanes are not peashooters. They are not designed to do aerobatics. You try doing a loop-the-loop and your wings will come right off. Just bear in mind Newton’s Law. In a Fort you come down easy and smooth or you come down like a falling safe. There ain’t no in-between. But you’re going to learn how not to fly on a roller coaster. You’ll learn a constant glide. The first time you try your hands on those controls you won’t believe it can be done but you’ll learn it.

“Bear in mind one other thing. These aircraft are rated to fly at twice the altitude you’ve been used to. At high altitudes lack of oxygen can cause a blackout and quick death. Use your masks.”

By now they were reeling a little; they’d filled notebooks. He said, “One more thing. About your parachutes. If you have to ditch and you’ve pulled the ripcord and the parachute does not open, here’s what you do.”

He stepped aside from the podium and stood unsteadily, the muscles of his left foot making constant corrections in his balance while he twisted his right leg around his left, shoved both arms straight up in the air and wrapped his right arm around his left arm.

Then he said, “It won’t do you a bit of good but it’ll make it a little easier for the rescue party to unscrew you out of the ground. Okay let’s take a five minute break.”

They stood up laughing.

He gathered them with the thunder of his voice. “Knock it off. Recess is over.”

They returned to the benches and Pappy Johnson leaned on the podium.

“The object of training is to get you misters into a condition where you can put a one-hundred-pound bomb on a postage stamp. Near-misses count in a game of horseshoes; they don’t count here. Now we’re going to make it a little bit easier for you because we’re going to limit the training to low-altitude bombardment. That’s because it’ll simplify things for all of us if all we do is train you to fly one specific mission. So I’m not going to fill your heads with the tricks of high-altitude bomb placement or how to evade flak at ten thousand feet. Those things won’t be your concern. Your problem is going to be strictly deck-level attacks.

“You’re thinking the enemy will be able to hit you with rocks. Let me tell you misters that ain’t your problem. At combat speed a B-Seventeen travels nearly two hundred yards in two seconds. You aren’t likely to get shot down by rifles or machine guns from the ground. They won’t even get a chance to start shooting before you’ve gone out of range.

“No. Your problem, gentlemen, when you’re flying treetop in a B-Seventeen, is going to be a lot worse than that.

“You’ll be going in low all the way. Flying in the grass where Uncle Joe Stalin won’t find you. You’re going to fly so low you’ll have mud on your windshields. At that kind of altitude an aircraft can fly into thermal updrafts that act like concrete walls. It’s going to feel as if the air’s full of boulders. You’re going to have to manhandle those Fortresses every inch of the way to the target and if you take your hands off the control yoke for a split second you’re likely to find yourselves digging a tunnel with the nose of your airplane.”

He stood up straight. “I think it’s time we went out and had a look at what a real airplane looks like. If you misters will follow me?”

11.

Baron Yuri Lavrentovitch Ivanov’s house had been built for a titled cousin of Lord Nelson’s. The drawing room was very high, very dark and very English—a soft dark polish of woodwork and padded leather.

Count Anatol took pride in his ability never to let feelings get the better of him but he had to fight the impulse to pace the room: he tried to force his mind into the discipline of reading but his eyes kept returning impatiently to the Seth Thomas clock on the oak mantel.

Finally the Baron came in quickly on his short legs; he still wore his topcoat. “My deepest apologies, Anatol.”

“I am not in the habit of being kept waiting.”

“A cipher came in through the bag. I have just decoded it. There has been a complication.” The Baron shouldered out of his coat and threw it across a chair; he tossed an envelope on a low table and dropped into a leather reading chair beside it. “Did you know that Stalin employs a double?”

Anatol felt his spine tighten. “No.”

“He suffered a severe breakdown shortly after the German attack. He had to be spirited out of Moscow to a retreat in the Kuybyshev. For more than two weeks in June and July the Soviet government was run by Beria and Malenkov. They employed a double to put in public appearances to allay suspicions in Moscow. Obviously this was no last-minute deception—they must have had the understudy well-trained and waiting in the wings for just such an emergency. For those seventeen days the top Soviet echelon was powerful enough to manage things in Stalin’s absence. They kept the machinery functioning during the worst days of the panzer drive into Russia. They are stronger men than we have credited them.”

“It only confirms what both Devenko and Danilov have insisted on—we cannot merely assassinate the top man, we must eliminate the entire palace guard.”

“Quite. But that reasoning doesn’t apply in the calculations of our people in Germany. They have been moving forward on the assumption that they need only kill Stalin. They feel there would be no further resistance to a German victory. The Grand Duke Mikhail is eager to see Hitler win it.”

“I know. That’s why we did not take him into our confidence.”

“His people know something is in the wind. Rumors have ways of wafting across warring borders. They know we are up to something. That is why I had hoped one of them could meet us this week—I wanted to throw them off the scent. If you had told them to their faces that we were not trying to beguile Mikhail I think they might have believed it. Mikhail thinks of you as a friend—he trusts you.”

“He has gone over to the Nazis. He is hoping Hitler will put him in the Kremlin—Mikhail would rather have a puppet throne than none at all. I want to see Russia ruled by Russians, not by an Austrian house painter.”

“It is academic now what we tell Mikhail’s group about our plans. It appears they have a plan of their own.”

“What?”

“Mikhail’s people have concocted a plan to assassinate Stalin.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite sure. My informant says they plan to kill Stalin and make use of the double who has been so considerately prepared by Beria. The double will issue a few crucially wrong orders to the Red Army. The Germans will march into Moscow and the double will sue Hitler for peace. Only two men know about the existence of the double—Beria and Malenkov—and they are to be removed early on.” The Baron added drily, “You must grant it is an ingenious plan.”

Anatol was stunned; he wasted no effort trying to hide it. “How soon is it to take place?”

“As soon as possible, I should imagine. Why should they wait? Hitler is within three days’ march of Moscow. If the Red Army withdraws from his front there will be nothing to stop him.”

Anatol watched the Baron’s small expressionless face. “We must prevent it.”

“How? There is no time to effect our own coup ahead of them. Clearly Danilov requires several weeks yet before he is in readiness. And there would be no time to substitute Vassily Devenko’s plan.”

“There is one way.”

“Forgive me but I do not see it.”

“It is quite simple,” Anatol said. “We must warn Stalin.”

12.

At five Alex presided over a ground-company meeting of field officers. The four of them stood on the tarmac beyond the shadow of the main hangar.

Across the field Pappy Johnson’s pilots were swarming over the bombers like children. A nimbus layer filtered the highland sun’s direct rays and even now there was a thin smell of winter in the air.

John Spaight and the two Russian majors wore gabardine jump suits with bellows pockets. Major Ivan Postsev and Major Leo Solov had worked in tandem since the inception of the Russian Free Brigade under Vassily Devenko in 1934; in combat they were remarkable. If one needed support the other would appear with his men—ready, knowing what his partner wanted of him; there would be no evident signal but each of them had that trick of soundlessly imposing his will on the other.

Physically they presented a ludicrous contrast. Postsev had the muscular strength of ten but to look at him you wouldn’t have thought he’d have made it through the day: he was a cadaver—pasty and wrinkled. Solov was squat and had a smashed face; his ears were like scraps of beef liver; he moved with a dangle-armed roll. He was cautious by training but not by nature; with Postsev it was the reverse.

“We’re going to be officer-heavy,” Alex told them. “That’s the way I want it because when we go into operation we’ll be in squad-size teams. I want an officer in command of each team. But for training purposes we’re splitting the company down the middle. There’ll be two platoons—one of you will command each of them. You’re going to have to be ahead of the others because General Spaight can’t be everywhere at once—you’ll have to lead a good bit of the training yourselves. Any problems?”

Postsev said, “All our pilots seem to be in bomber training. Who is to fly the parachute training flights?”

“You won’t start jumping from aircraft for more than a month yet. By then we’ll have the air contingent sorted out and six of the pilots will be assigned to the paradrop transports. In the meantime you’ll be learning to jump from a rapelling tower.”

“Which brings us to a thorny one,” Spaight said. “We haven’t got a rapelling tower.”

“Tomorrow morning Colonel MacAndrews is sending us a dockyard construction team with a mobile crane. They’re going to tear one of those small hangars apart and use the girders to build a tower on top of this hangar. It’ll give us a hundred-and-twenty-foot slide drop. It’s a little shorter than usual but it’ll have to do. I’ve got MacAndrews’s word it will be ready to climb by Thursday morning.”

The regiment already had its obstacle course in the woods beyond the far end of the runway—coiled concertina barbed wire, trenches, inclined logs, culverts, climbing trestles, even a stream that came down out of the dark highlands beyond and flowed across the slope and down toward the Inverness flats.

Alex said, “You’ll have to sort out your drivers. Make sure they’re qualified on the vehicles they may have to commandeer. Most of the Soviet staff cars are Packards. The lorries and ambulances are mainly Daimlers and Mercedes.”

The two majors nodded. That equipment would be roughly the same as they’d had to contend with in Finland.

“All right. Now we’ve got a defector. Brigadier Cosgrove’s bringing him along tomorrow morning. You’ll have about ten days with him. He’s a Red Army officer—a lieutenant colonel. He crossed the line into Finland about three weeks ago. I don’t know what incentives the British have offered him to cooperate with us but I’m told he’s coming here voluntarily. I want you to pump him dry. Everything he knows. Make a note of every piece of information no matter how insignificant it may seem. We want everything from their order-of-battle to the gossip in his officers’ mess. When we go in we’ll be posing as officers and men from his battalion. You’ll have to know the names and ranks of every officer in that battalion and as many non-coms and enlisted men as he can give you. And not just names—physical descriptions, peculiarities, backgrounds, gossip—you’ve got to be able to behave as if you really know those people, in case you run into someone who really does know them. Once you’ve got the information you’ll pass it on to your men and be sure they’ve got it straight. Every night I want the men briefed on these things—and I want them awake enough to absorb it. All right?”

Major Solov said in his thick Georgian accent, “It would save time if we could detail subordinates to some of this. To continue the debriefings while we are in training during the day.”

Spaight said, “We can’t pull anyone out of training for that.”

Alex said, “I’ve got someone who can do it for us.”

At the hangar door Sergei appeared, beckoning; Alex excused himself and went that way.

“It’s the telephone. Brigadier Cosgrove, from Edinburgh.”

He closed the office door behind him before he picked up the phone. “Danilov here.”

“Bob Cosgrove. You may recall we discussed your meeting with a certain naval official?”

“I recall it.”

“It’s been laid on for this Friday—nineteenth September. It would be most appreciated if you could make yourself available in London.”

“What time?”

“Sometime in the evening. The arrangements are rather informal—I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes.”

“I should come by rail if I were you—one can’t promise good flying weather in London, can one. Not to mention the Luftwaffe. Do you recall the address I mentioned to you this morning?”

“Yes.” It was a Knightsbridge pub: Cosgrove had said, It’s a contact spot. I chose it at random. If we meet in London we’ll meet there. I’m giving you this now because I shan’t want to specify an address over the telephone.

Cosgrove said, “Five o’clock Friday then. We’ll have dinner and then confer with the Navy. Come alone, of course.”

He didn’t mean that the way it sounded; he meant Be sure you’re not followed.

13.

“Really we need cloaks and beards, darling—we ought to be carrying black bombs with sputtering fuses.”

She sat up straight at the kitchen table and twisted her head to ease the cramped muscles. On the table the Clausewitz was dog-eared and the pad beside it was cluttered with pencil-printing and numerals in alternate lines; the numerals stopped two-thirds of the way down. That was as far as she’d got with it. It had taken nearly three hours to do that much.

“Oleg must have stayed up nights to dream this up. Nothing could be clumsier.”

“It’s secure,” he said. “Unless they know what book to use there’s no way on earth to break the code.”

He stepped behind her chair and kneaded the back of her neck. She tipped her face back and smiled, upside-down in his vision; he bent to kiss her.

Then he had another look at his wristwatch. Where the devil was Cosgrove’s radio man? It was getting on for eleven o’clock; the first contact with Vlasov was scheduled in something less than three hours.

She misinterpreted his gesture. “I deplore your lack of confidence,” she said mischievously. “I’ll finish it in time.”

“All right. But where’s that damned radio?”

A chill highland mist hung about the bungalow; he extinguished the parlor lights before he stepped outside for a breath of air. The night was total; the base was blacked out. He heard the disembodied growl of a vehicle moving across the tarmac not too far away; in the mist he saw nothing. If there was a gunman out there good luck to him.

He turned his head to catch the moving vehicle’s sound on the flats of his eardrums. It was on the runway itself and when it stopped it was by the main hangar. The engine idled for several minutes and then he heard it go into gear and start moving again. Back toward the main gate, changing through a couple of gears, never getting into high. It stopped briefly—getting clearance at the gate—and his ears followed it out to the high road. He heard it come forward in the night. The two slitted lights were ghostly emerging from the mist; he stepped back out of the drive.

The lights went out; the ignition switched off. He heard the door open and he spoke merely to identify his presence: “Hello?”

A brief but absolute stillness; then a heavy breath and a stranger’s voice: “Who’s that—who’s that?”

“General Danilov. Are you looking for me?”

“Cor, you gimme such a fright, sir!” A vague shape swam forward in the fog.

“You’d be Cooper?”

“That’s right, sir. Lance Corporal Arry Cooper. You want this rig inside the ouse?”

“I’ll give you a hand.”

It turned out to be a small van. Lance-Corporal Cooper opened the back doors and they manhandled the shortwave transceiver across the lawn into the house.

“Just set it down on the floor and stand still until I shut the door and get some lights on.”

When he switched the lamp on he saw he’d been fooled completely by the voice. He’d expected a weasel-faced little Cockney. Cooper was as wide and muscular as a Percheron draft horse. He had a handsome square young face with a thatch of yellow hair combed neatly across his forehead.

Cooper stood at attention but his eyes roved about the homey little room. I’m sorry I’m so late, sir. It was the fog and all. I lost me way three times. I’m not a native here.”

“I gathered that much, Cooper. Let’s set it up on this table, shall we?”

The wireless set was a bulky monster; it had to weigh a good hundred pounds. The case lifted off like that of a motion-picture projector. Cooper turned the empty case upside-down and it wasn’t empty after all: a thin wire was coiled neatly against the lid, snapped down with leather straps.

“Ave you a ladder then, sir?”

“There’s a stepladder in the pantry. Will it do?”

“Ave to, won’t it.” Cooper was attaching one end of the coiled wire to the antenna lead at the back of the set. Then he carried it toward the front door, paying it out as he went. He waited by the door, not opening it, until Alex brought the stepladder and switched off the lights. Then they threaded the wire out through the window beside the front door and Alex went outside with him.

“D’you mind steadying the ladder for me, sir?”

Alex jammed its legs hard down into the earth and braced it with one hand while he hooked the other hand into Cooper’s belt and boosted him up toward the low-sloping roof.

Cooper was gone a good five minutes; Alex heard the twanging rustle of the antenna wire as Cooper drew it along after him and pulled it taut before fixing it to the chimney.

They went inside. Irina had finished coding the message. Cooper pulled the telegrapher’s key out of its slot and began twisting wires around knurled connectors. “The weight of it’s in those dry cells, y’see, sir. We can’t trust the electric up here so we carry our own.”

Alex had a look at Irina’s pad: groups of numbers—each five digits separated from the next by an X. It would mean nothing to Cooper but that was how it had to be.

“Ave you got frequencies for me, sir?”

“Set to send and receive on five-point-six-two megacycles. Have you got a wristwatch?”

“No sir, sorry to say.”

“I’ll warn you when it’s time then. We’ve got about an hour.”

He took the pad and rolled the top sheets over until he came to a blank page; he glanced back at the list of notes Irina had made and then he jotted something on the clean page and tore it out and carried it to Cooper.

“This is the message you’ll receive first.”

On the sheet of notepaper he’d written: XXX30X21901X 63302X19016X33021X90163X.

Cooper had neat small white teeth. “Same word three times, in’t it, sir?”

It meant he knew his job and that was good. “It’s a recognition signal. If you don’t get that opening you don’t respond to the message.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Now here’s your reply to it.” He gave him the second sheet.

Cooper glanced at it and nodded. To him it didn’t say Condotierri three times; it was merely a string of twenty-seven digits separated by Xs. But it was obvious he understood the procedure.

“When you’ve broadcast that recognition code you’ll continue immediately without waiting for an answer. You’ll broadcast the message on these sheets. At the end of that transmission you’ll switch over to Receive and you should get an acknowledgment that looks like this one.”

KollinXCarnegie.

“There won’t be a message from your opposite number then, sir?”

“That’ll be tomorrow night.”

Cooper nodded. “Right, sir. Got it.” He displayed his fine teeth again. “All quite mysterious-like, in’t it.”

“When it’s all over you’ll find out what it was about, Corporal. You’re part of something very important.”

“Yes sir. That’s what Brigadier Cosgrove told me.”

Irina said, “Would you like coffee, Corporal?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cuppa, madam. If you’d show me to the larder I’ll brew it meself.”

“I’m sure Sergei will be glad to do it.” She left the room.

Cooper pushed his lips forward and lifted his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything; he grinned at the doorway where Irina had disappeared, transferred the grin to Alex and then went back to his key to test the circuits. Tubes began to glow in the ungainly apparatus and Cooper twisted the tuning rheostat; the brass telegrapher’s key began to tap out staccato rhythms, picking up incoming messages on the various bands. Satisfied it was working properly, Cooper shut it down and leaned back in the wooden chair. “Well then sir, I expect we’re ready to go to war, ain’t we.”

14.

Thursday morning he watched MacAndrews’s drafted dockyard crew put the finishing touches on the spidery rapelling tower and then he spent nearly three hours with Irina interviewing Colonel Yevgeny Dieterichs, the Soviet defector. At half-past ten they took a break and he walked outside with Irina.

“He seems genuine enough,” she said.

“Keep putting him through his paces. Milk him—you know how important it is.”

“I wish I were going with you instead. Dinner at the Savoy—an evening at the Haymarket…. I could do with a bit of that. I feel as though I’ve been shipwrecked up here.”

“This was your own idea.”

“Darling, the whole blessed thing was my own idea and I confess I’m unforgivably proud of it.”

“You’ve a right to be.” The Austin was swinging up the verge of the runway toward him. “I hope the rest of us can live up to it.”

“You will,” she said, very soft. Sergei drew up and reached across the seat to push the passenger door open for him.

She stood watching while the Austin took him away toward the main gate.

They drove south and west along the chain of lochs through the dark green highlands. The sky was matted but they had no rain down the craggy length of Loch Ness. There was virtually no traffic. They ran on south at a steady forty and fifty miles per hour through the early hours of the afternoon. Maneuvering Scottish recruits were tenting on the banks of Loch Lomond and on a brighter day it would indeed have been bonnie—swards of rich grass dropping gently toward the cool deep water.

At four they picked up the smoke of Glasgow’s furnaces above the hill summits. Alex navigated from the street map on his lap and Sergei did an expert job of threading the clotted traffic. The city was dreary, black with soot.

The approach to the railway station was jammed with traffic. Alex lifted his case over the back of the seat and pushed the door open. “You may as well drive straight back unless you want to stop for supper. Pick me up here on the Sunday evening express from London—you’ve got the timetable?”

“Yes sir. Godspeed then.”

“Take care driving, old friend.” He hopped out and carried his case inside the thronged station. The scabs twinged now and then but he no longer had to make a conscious effort not to limp.

His priority pass got him a seat in a leather-upholstered compartment and he rode south into grey rain flipping through a newspaper and two news magazines he’d bought to catch up on what had been happening in the world since he’d left Washington ten days ago. In France the Nazis were retaliating against acts of sabotage by executing innocent French hostages. In Tokyo there had been an assassination attempt against Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma, the Vice Premier of Japan.

In Russia the Wehrmacht had now occupied four hundred thousand square miles of Soviet territory and the advance continued. There had been a terrible pitched battle for Smolensk. The Russian remnants had been forced to evacuate the city. Yet correspondents’ dispatches from Moscow indicated that life in the capital went on nearly as usual. Ration cards were now required but the stocks of food and necessities seemed quite sufficient. The German invasion had divided into three prongs aimed at Leningrad, Moscow and the rich industrial basins of the south. Scattered Russian resistance and the length of their own supply lines had slowed the Nazis’ advance; but the blitzkrieg continued—apparently right on schedule. Hitler meant to make his Christmas speech from Moscow.

Well past midnight he left the train at Euston Station and was collected by a War Office lieutenant who had a Daimler staff car waiting. “It’s a good thing you’ve got digs, sir. I didn’t think there’s a room to be had in all of London. I’m putting up in a bed-sitter in Paddington with an RN ensign and two Anzac lieutenants.”

They drove north and east. The blacked-out streets were virtually empty except for the occasional helmeted bobby and fire-watchman. Twice they had to dodge craters in the streets but most of the buildings were intact.

When they made the turn into the Archway Road the driver said conversationally, “There’s still a car behind us, Lieutenant.”

They turned right into Shepherd’s Hill with open ground falling away steeply to the left side of the road.

The Daimler slid to the curb and a car puttered past; Alex had a look at it but it told him nothing; there wasn’t enough light to see the driver’s face.

“Thanks for the lift.”

When the other car had disappeared over the hill he took his valise up the steps and rang. The Daimler stayed at the curb until the door opened and he stepped inside.

Baron Ivanov answered the door himself. “Were you followed?”

“Yes. I expected it.”

The tiny Baron wore an expensive smoking jacket; his bald head gleamed in the lamplight. Black velvet curtains hung heavily against all the windows; the house was rich and warm and elegant in the style of a century ago.

Ivanov showed him to a bedroom—upstairs in the rear. “I hope you will be comfortable.”

“It’s quite luxurious.”

“Anatol has asked me to see to your needs.”

“A good night’s sleep at the moment. Is there a rear way out?”

“It is a terribly steep embankment—it is almost a cliff. There is an old railway line beneath the rear garden.”

“Is there a tube station nearby?”

“At the intersection where you turned.”

“I don’t suppose there are any taxis.”

“Not this far out, but you are welcome to the use of my Bentley at any time. My chauffeur lives on the premises.”

“That’s very kind.”

“It is not kindness I assure you. According to Prince Leon you are our last hope.”

“I’m a soldier, Baron, not a Messiah.”

“Whatever I have is at your disposal. I suppose I should caution you that the last White Russian general who borrowed my Bentley was shot at for his pains. It took quite a bit of string-pulling to have the bulletproof glass replaced.”

It wouldn’t have been politic to ask why the Bentley was armored in the first place; obviously the job had been done long before Vassily Devenko’s ride in the car. The Baron had fingers in many schemes and—his enemies said—hands in many pockets; it was not unlikely his political and military alliances had impressed him with a need for prudence. The house itself was wired with a visible alarm system.

Alex expected the Baron to bid him good night and leave the room but the tiny aristocrat went to the dressing table and perched himself on the upholstered stool before it. “There is something you must do for us.”

Somewhere across London the air-raid sirens began to wail. The distant keening distracted the Baron; he said, “They rarely bomb this far north in London but if you hear the alarms you will find our shelter in the cellar. The ladder is directly under the staircase we just used.”

“Thank you.”

He began to hear the distant banging of pom-poms. The Baron said, “I am told you have a contact inside the Kremlin—someone with Stalin’s ear.”

He looked up quickly but the Baron said, “I do not intend to press you for his identity. But we need to make use of him.”

“I’m afraid I can’t—”

“Hear me out, General Danilov. As you know the bank with which I am connected has offices in many nations. I am in communication through our Zurich affiliate with the surviving German branches of our international financial structure. In theory the German offices have been nationalized but the organization still maintains its ties with our offices here in London. The financial transactions of the Grand Duke Mikhail and his people in Munich are supervised by White Russian officers of the same banks. It is through me that Count Anatol and Prince Leon and the rest of you receive information concerning the activities of the White Russian loyalists who live inside the borders of the German Reich.

“We have discovered that the German group threatens to jeopardize our own scheme. I have told Anatol Markov and he has taken the information back to Spain. It is possible you will receive instructions from Prince Leon but communications are uncertain and we haven’t much time. I’m taking the liberty of telling you this myself in case Spain does not reach you in time.”

“Go on.”

“They are planning an assassination. The design is to kill Stalin, substitute a double for him and issue orders to the Red Army—through the double—to retreat before Moscow. Russia then will have lost the war and Hitler seems prepared to install the Grand Duke Mikhail on the throne of a Vichy-style occupation government. The double already exists—a creation of Lavrenti Beria’s—a professional actor who has been transformed by plastic surgery into a remarkable likeness of Stalin.”

The breath hung in Alex’s throat. It was as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

The Baron went on in a relentless monotone:

“The Germans have shifted Guderian temporarily to the Ukraine and Georgi Malenkov is being sent there next week to stiffen the resistance in Kiev. In the meantime the administrative headquarters of Beria’s secret police have been moved to the Kuybyshev in case Moscow is occupied. Apparently Beria’s next trip down there is scheduled for a week from today. That will put both Beria and Malenkov out of Moscow—they are the only two men in the top echelon who know of the existence of the Stalin double.

“We have no clue to the identity of the assassins. One assumes there must be several because they have to take control of the double. It is possible they intend to make him docile by means of drugs or drug-induced hypnosis—the Germans have been doing experiments along those lines. Or perhaps it is a matter of bribery combined with coercion. I have no idea. But we do know the timetable. On the twenty-sixth—tomorrow week—both Beria and Malenkov will be absent from the weekly Kremlin command conference. That is when the assassination is scheduled. They intend to reach Stalin on his way into the meeting. The killing may be effected by means of cyanide gas in the ventilating system of his private lavatory in the underground command bunker. I cannot confirm that report. But the general plan and the timetable seem quite certain.”

The pulse thudded in Alex’s throat. The Baron went on:

“Our German cousins have a damnable advantage over us. Ever since the Bolshevik rising in nineteen seventeen they have maintained an active network of spies in the Soviet government. The irony is that it was Count Anatol who set it up for them—he was a partisan of Mikhail’s in the early days. They have been waiting their chance for more than twenty years and now Hitler has given it to them. It is unfortunate that their timetable is ahead of ours.”

“There’s no way to get in ahead of them,” Alex said. “We’re weeks away from operational status.”

“Of course. Their plan has the advantage of relying on a German military victory. Yours has to rely on a Russian one. Much more difficult to achieve in the circumstances. But you have the one thing that may save our cause—you have a man in the Kremlin.”

Now Alex saw it. “To stop them.”

“I think he must do more than that,” the Baron murmured. “I think he must brief Stalin and Beria on the assassination plot. It is not enough to forestall one attempt—they could make another. The network of Mikhail’s spies must be destroyed before we make our own move. Beria is the only man in a position to wipe out the entire network. He must be warned. We shall have to give your man a plausible way to have unearthed the plot. I should not think it would be dangerous for him. After all he will be saving Stalin’s life—they can only construe that as the supreme loyalty. If anything this will cement your man in Stalin’s favor.”

That part wouldn’t be difficult. Vlasov had his own G-2 staff; it would be a simple matter of selecting a wounded German prisoner—an officer would be best—and putting up the pretense of a private “interrogation.” Afterward the prisoner would have to die to prevent Beria from checking back on Vlasov’s story. Vlasov would attract no suspicion unless the plot failed to materialize; and even if it proved a false alarm it would do him no real harm—he could always claim the German officer must have been lying.

The Baron’s small round face tipped up ingenuously. “I should not mention this to any of our allies if I were you. They would want to know where I got my information and of course I am not prepared to reveal that.”

“I’ll be in contact with our man Sunday night,” Alex said. “Are there any other details?”

“None that I possess. Knowing the time and place of the attempt ought to be enough for them.”

“There’s one thing we can’t correct,” Alex said. “This is going to put Stalin on his guard. He’ll be twice as suspicious as he ever was before. He’ll be that much harder for us to reach when our turn comes.”

“That cannot be helped, can it? Good night then, General. Sleep well.”

The morning weather was in his favor—a dewy London fog. He left the house at nine by the rear door and blundered across three adjacent gardens and slipped out into the street past the side of the fourth house. If anyone had a watch on the front of the Baron’s house they wouldn’t see him at this distance. He walked at a good clip to the tube station and started down the stairs.

The Highgate station was incredibly deep and his leg was giving him trouble long before he reached the bottom. He took it slowly, favoring the leg; he looked back up the stairs several times. There were people in sight but he had no way to tell if any of them was following him.

He studied the map on the station wall. No one seemed to be taking an interest in him. He was a tall man in civilian dress with a slight limp—a war casualty, they’d assume. He dropped half-crowns in the Bomb Relief cup and boarded the clattering train.

He had to change at Camden Town and again at Leicester Square. There was quite a walk between platforms and he contrived to stop twice and survey the tunnels behind him without making it obvious what he was doing. A large number of people were following his route—making the same transfer he was making to get into the West End of London—and half a dozen of them were people who had boarded the train with him; but it meant nothing.

When the train arrived he acted as though he wasn’t going to board it. Then just as the doors started to close he dived between them.

He walked up into Knightsbridge looking for the side street to which Cosgrove had directed him; he spotted the man following him when he was only a half block from the pub. There was nothing to do but keep walking. He went right past the pub and stopped outside a Chinese restaurant to decide what to do. Under his coat his hand reached the revolver and gripped it. Next door a three-story building had been partially knocked out, the walls broken right down to the street. Men in hard helmets climbed through the wreckage with picks and spades; the upstairs parlor was quite intact with its furniture nicely arranged like a stage set. A little girl—five, perhaps six-stood bawling at the base of the pile of rubble with her hand engulfed in the grip of a policeman who kept talking quietly to her. Finally an ambulance drew up and the bobby had a short conversation with the attendants. Alex saw the bobby shake his head and the attendants took the little girl into the ambulance and drove off. The bobby whacked his fist into a heap of plaster and stormed away up the road.

Cosgrove appeared on the curb opposite. Alex shook his head very slightly and turned his shoulder toward the brigadier, pretending to read the menu posted outside the restaurant door. But Cosgrove came straight across and touched his arm. “He’s one of ours. I told him to make sure no one else had an interest in you. Rather clever of you to have spotted him—he’s one of our best men. What gave him away?”

They walked along toward the pub. The shadow stood across the road not looking at them. Alex said, “He was too interested in the chinaware. And he’s too young and healthy to be out of uniform.”

“I’ll bear that in mind—pass it on to his office. Here we are.”

“Tell me something. The man who followed me last night in a car….”

“From Euston? That was one of ours as well.”

Then evidently no one else was tracking him. He felt reprieved. Inside the pub he asked, “Where’s the meeting?”

“Not at Downing Street, you can be sure of that. Every government in the world seems to have people watching that to see who goes in and who goes out of Number Ten.” They paused to adjust their eyes to the gloom. Cosgrove said, “The meeting will be quite private, just as you requested.” He sounded miffed about it.

15.

The house was in a mews off Sloane Square: the official residence of the New Zealand minister. Alex waited in a small rear office into which Cosgrove had led him after wryly relieving him of his armament.

He sat alone in the room for nearly two hours until Cosgrove appeared. “The Prime Minister will see you now.”

Alex got up to follow him but Churchill appeared in the doorway, put his pouched belligerent stare against Alex and said, “Thank you, Brigadier.”

“I’ll see that you’re not disturbed, sir.” Cosgrove shut himself out.

“Well then,” the Prime Minister growled. He squinted at Alex and thrust the cigar in his teeth, and offered his hand. His grip was a politician’s handshake—one quick squeeze, then withdrawn. The gruff voice was hoarse and the eyes were bloodshot. “You’re the man in whose hands the world rests, are you?”

“I shouldn’t want to go nearly that far, sir.”

“Nor should I. Some of your people would have it so.” Churchill sat down with a weary grunt and folded his hands across his ample front; the cigar waggled between his graceful fingers and the hint of a smile appeared above his jowls—surprisingly gentle. “What I require of you is a revelation designed to reassure His Majesty’s Government that you are something a bit more than a pack of lunatics.” The cigar moved to the mouth and was dwarfed by the enormous head. The shrewd eyes studied Alex through the curling smoke and the voice was very deep—almost guttural. “I should think, from what Cosgrove has told me, that you have only one route open to you. A high-altitude run across the Baltic to Helsinki. Finland has got to be your jumping off point, hasn’t it? You’re within bomber range of Moscow there, and your people have friends highly placed in President Ryti’s government—certainly you’ve been able to persuade them they owe you quid pro quo for your services there two years ago.” Churchill’s eyes wrinkled, sly and pleased with himself. “Am I at all warm?”

Alex had to smile. “White hot, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Under any other circumstances I should be inclined to caution you against such an arrangement. You’ve already got the Americans and those terribly meddlesome British in it—I shouldn’t advise you to tangle yourselves in the additional flypaper of a Finland involvement, particularly as they’re now in the war against our glorious Soviet allies.” His humor was not without acid. “But under the present conditions your plan must, beyond question, include Helsinki. I know of no alternative refueling base within aeroplane range of your target.”

A puff of smoke timed for punctuation; and the PM went on:

“I’m given to understand you intend to draw the ruling junta out into the open and to attack them from the air with high explosives dropped in pinpoint concentration.’

“Yes.”

“You must then, I presume, be prepared to infiltrate their centers of communication. Clearly it will be vital to have immediate contact with those units of the Red Army which are engaged in the defense of Moscow and the struggle against Chancellor Hitler’s Army Group Center. In order to complete your mission with any sort of success at all, you must instantly be able to command the allegiance of those forces. Please contradict me if I’m incorrect.”

“No contradiction is called for, Prime Minister.”

“Very well then, Danilov, who’s your man in the Kremlin? Zhukov or Vlasov?”

He managed—successfully he hoped—to mask his chagrin. “Neither of them, sir. It’s intended that they both be blown up with Stalin.”

“I see. Then it is one of their immediate subordinates. Zhukov’s chief-of-staff, perhaps—or one of the army commanders.”

“I’d prefer not to divulge that.”

“You’ve got such a man, however?”

“Yes.”

“Prepared to take over the Red Army instantly?”

“Yes-exactly.”

Churchill grunted; once again the hint of a smile. “Then you’ve bloody well got a chance, haven’t you?”

The Prime Minister chewed on the cigar and then removed it from his mouth. “I like the cut of you. You’re decently cool under the sort of pressure I’ve been applying. Now I should like to hear your plan.”

Alex gathered his thoughts. “They’ve got a new battle tank,” he said. “They’re rushing it through production—they hope to have several front-line armored units equipped with it by spring.”

“The modified T-Thirty-six. I’ve seen the drawings and specifications.”

“I thought you might have,” Alex said; and both men smiled.

He went on: “The first field trials of the prototype will be held in eight weeks’ time on a proving-ground about thirty miles east of Moscow. It’s to be a thorough workout to demonstrate firepower and maneuverability. The new machine mounts a seventy-seven millimeter gun. It’s a twenty-ton tank with more than five inches of armor. They plan to have six ready for the field trials—I’m told they plan to run them against unmanned captured panzers. If the trials prove what they hope to prove they’ll make rubble of the Mark Fours.”

“One rather hopes their expectations aren’t in excess of the realities.”

Alex said, “Stalin and his commanders will attend the field trials, together with Beria and Malenkov and a group of Soviet cabinet ministers.”

“That would seem to sew them all neatly into one bag.”

“Transport to the proving ground will be by rail—the Kremlin’s special train. It’s an armored train mocked up to look like a hospital train, particularly from the air—there’s a red cross on the roof of the car Stalin and the Soviet leaders occupy. The cars fore and aft of it are concealed artillery platforms and machine-gun cars with half a battalion of crack troops from the Kremlin guard. They’ve been using the train regularly for transport of high officials to and from Moscow.”

“Go on, General.”

“Our target point is five miles short of the proving ground. The train will be reaching the top of a three-mile grade and its speed should be down to something under thirty miles an hour—probably nearer twenty. It’s carrying a great deal of armor. There are two locomotives, one front and one rear. That’s standard for Russian trains.

“Our first bomb-run will be against the roadbed ahead of the train—just at the crest of the hill. We’ll bomb the track. The train will have to stop or go off the rails. Once it’s stopped we’ll put eight thousand pounds of armor-piercing high explosive into the gun cars fore and aft of the hospital car. We’ve got as many passes at them as we need and enough bombs aboard to do the job ten times over. The attack zone is twenty-eight miles from the nearest Red Air Force interceptor field—it will take them at least six minutes to scramble a mission and another sixteen minutes to reach the target area. By that time our bombers will have done the job and gone.”

“You’re bombing the gun cars but not Stalin’s car.”

“Our assault troops will be waiting in ambush on the ground. We’ll take the hospital car on foot.”

“Surely you don’t propose to take the Soviet leaders alive?”

Alex shook his head. “But we’ve got to have a recognizable corpse—we’ve got to be able to prove Stalin’s dead. If we destroyed his carriage from the air there might not be enough of him left to satisfy suspicious minds.”

“It’s a risk, isn’t it? You say the car is heavily armored.”

“We’ll get into it.”

“Submachine guns?”

“Tear gas first. Then submachine guns. It’s not sporting.”

“No. But this isn’t a fox hunt.” The Prime Minister was squinting at him—a little uneasy, Alex thought. “Can you be sure they’ll be aboard that carriage?”

“If they’re not we’ll be warned of it in advance. We’ll abort the mission and wait for our man to set it up for us again.”

“You could rather easily have bad bombing weather.”

“If it’s too thick for bombing it’ll be too thick for tank trials. They’ll delay the trials for clear visibility. The ceiling isn’t our concern—we’ll be bombing from a few hundred feet at most.”

“But the train has antiaircraft platforms.”

Alex said, “They can’t traverse fast enough to follow an aircraft at that low altitude.”

Churchill levered himself to his feet and turned as if to examine the framed map of New Zealand on the wall. He said deep in his throat, “There’s an unwritten principle of warfare—you don’t destroy your enemy’s leaders because without them there’s no one with whom you can negotiate a peace. Of course this case is different—there would seem to be no unwritten canon against destroying your allies.”

Heavy in the front of Alex’s mind was the Grand Duke Mikhail’s assassination scheme. But it was no good giving that to the Prime Minister.

Churchill went on:

“I’d have preferred to take the pack of them alive. Put them before the public bar of justice on charges of capital crimes against humanity.” His shrewd eyes lifted to Alex’s face. “Still I suppose a good part of our world has tried them in absentia and found them guilty beyond redemption.” He touched the bow tie beneath his heavy chin and turned to the door. “Have it done then, Danilov. Bring us the beggar’s head.” It was a bitter voice, drained of illusions; the door clicked shut behind Churchill—softly, almost reproachfully.

Alex’s hands were trembling. He realized he was sweating.

16.

He watched them twirl down from the rapelling tower like spiders spinning filament webs. In growing darkness he walked out of the compound and unbuttoned the flap of one holster before he reached the gate; he walked across the road and up the twilit driveway with all his instincts alert. Cooper’s van was parked at the step and he examined both sides of it and had a look inside before he let himself into the house: he curled inside without being fired on and Sergei came away from the corner setting the safety on the Mannlicher.

Cooper came to attention and Alex answered his salute. “Is that thing warmed up?”

“Yes sir. I been monitoring the band since noon like you told me.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing but a bit of cypher from that Frog underground transmitter what uses the same frequency.”

Vlasov had said he wouldn’t be able to signal before half past six but if something had gone wrong there might have been an earlier squeal. The silence ought to be encouraging but things were too portentious for that.

He heard the Austin’s tires on the gravel and Irina’s quick step; then she was inside. Her eyes told her what she wanted to know; she said, “We’re all right then.”

“We won’t know that until we have his signal.”

“We’d have heard before now if it had gone wrong. The whole world would have heard it.”

He wished he had her aplomb.

It was six-twenty, six-thirty and then six-thirty-five and nothing triggered the brass key. He began to sweat, imagining all the things that could have happened. What if Vlasov had let something slip and they’d nailed him? Without Vlasov they were blind. It had been the one weakness for which there’d been no compensation from the beginning; he’d tried to devise alternate plans that didn’t depend on Vlasov but there wasn’t any way to do that because it always came down to the same thing: there had to be an insider who could keep them in touch with Stalin’s movements. If you didn’t know where your target was you couldn’t very well hit him.

It was one of the factors in Vassily’s plan that had always eluded him: the only answer was that Vassily had had someone of his own—or planned to get the name of Oleg’s contact. But there was a possibility Vassily had intended to operate through Mikhail’s Kremlin network—and if Vassily had already made contact with any of them before he died then they’d spill it to Beria’s interrogators now and blow the operation wide open.

Six-forty. Irina’s eyes were locked on him and her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. No one spoke. Alex turned his head to stare at the transceiver. What if Mikhail’s people had intercepted Vlasov and silenced him before he could alert Stalin and Beria?

KOLLIN X KOLLIN X…

The key chattered faster than he’d ever heard Vlasov’s fist before and Cooper’s pencil jerked across the note pad in a rush to keep up. The staccato burst was less than two minutes in duration. Cooper tapped out the acknowledgment and Alex ripped the pages off the pad and went back through the house with Irina.

The decoding was a one-person operation because they had only the one copy of the St. Petersburg edition of Clausewitz. He left Irina to it because she was faster and surer at it than he was; but the waiting ragged him until he could hardly stand it.

She said, “It’s half a victory for us, darling. But it leaves a great many things open.”

He wasn’t unnerved by that. He couldn’t help his sense of relief. It had been too close to an end to the whole thing: the planning, the training, the operation, the fate of the two hundred million. Most of the time he tried not to think in those terms because then everything became apocalyptic. It had to be held down to its own scale, not the scale of things it might affect. This was a precision military campaign with exact methods and finite individual goals: a few square meters of railway track, a few armored carriages, an airfield, two communications centers—a transmitter and a trunk switchboard—and a handful of men inside a railway car. Think beyond any of that and there was a risk of too much fear and then paralysis.

He said, “Put on your best dress. My spies tell me they’ve got good Angus beef at one of the pubs in town.”

17.

Felix arrived at the improvised Ready Room at six in the morning. It was barely light: the days were growing shorter and this morning there was rain and thick overcast. The Scotland air had an unpleasant chill. He could barely make out the shapes of the planes at their hardstands; one of the ground crewmen was indistinct in the mist on top of an outboard nacelle on his knees.

The Ready Room had leather armchairs and a few mismatched tables and a home-made bar that was open after duty hours. Felix was the first to arrive; he’d planned that. He went through the room and banged on the inner door and the orderly came through the door with sleep in his eyes and stoked the coal fire.

A week ago their training area in the main hangar had been crowded out by infantry training and Pappy Johnson had moved the podium in here. Now the blackboard stood coated with chalk dust, the ghost of yesterday’s lessons. He supposed today would be another stand-down; in view of the weather they’d have to scrub the practice strike. The rain had come from the northwest on a night wind thirty hours ago and socked in the field and there was no way of knowing how long it would stay.

All the same Felix was dressed to fly.

Pappy Johnson batted into the room and wiped drizzle off his face. He blinked and whooshed. “Always the early bird.”

“A month ago you’d have had to send someone to my quarters to root me out of bed.”

“Why the change then?”

“If they expect me to lead them I’d better be ahead of them, hadn’t I.”

“You’re all right, Your Highness.”

“I suppose we’ll have another stand-down for today?”

“No,” said Pappy Johnson. “We’re going to fly.”

“In this soup?”

“Uncle Joe Stalin may not hand us a sunshine day. I just phoned Fort Augustus. It’s not raining over there. It may not be raining over our drop zone.”

“Good enough.”

“Your turn to have me ride right-seat with you tdoay, Your Highness. Your copilot will take the flight engineer’s post.”

Two of them arrived in ground clothes because they didn’t expect to fly in the weather. Pappy Johnson looked at his wristwatch and said mildly, “You misters have exactly four minutes to get into flying gear,” and the two pilots exploded through the door.

When the door slammed Johnson said to Felix, “Those two are always a little behind everybody else. They’ll be flying right-seat in the transports when we go to war. I suppose they know that—maybe that’s the way they want it. Not everybody wants to be a stupid hero.” He grinned at Felix and slid the cigarette pack out of his shoulder pocket.

The two pilots reappeared out of breath and still shouldering into their leather jackets and Johnson made a circular motion overhead with his cigarette. They all gathered around him.

“We’re going to stations six minutes from now. The mission is the same as it was two days ago. But this time your targets will be moving.”

One of the pilots said, “What about the drivers?”

“No drivers for Christ’s sake. The steering wheels are tied to go in something that’ll approximate a straight line and they’re tying bricks on the accelerator pedals. They’ll be moving about thirty miles an hour across the meadow. The ones you miss will crash into the trees and that’ll be a hell of a waste, won’t it. So don’t miss any.”

“How many in each cluster, sir?”

“That’ll be for you to determine when you get there.” Johnson gave them all his wicked grin. “Maybe one of them, maybe five. It’s your job to stop every one of them before it gets across the meadow.”

The four of them got out of the shuttle van and stood momentarily under the wing in the rain: Felix and Pappy Johnson and Ulyanov, who would fly as engineer this flight, and Chujoy the bombardier. Felix turned his collar up and went around the outside of the airplane: he kicked the tires, he did a visual inspection of the nacelles and control surfaces. Finally Felix nodded and Ulyanov opened the forward hatch and they chinned themselves into the bomber.

It took seven minutes to go through the preflight check—the final line inspection before starting engines. It was a chore many pilots left to their copilots but Felix wanted to know the exact condition of the plane he was going to fly. It was a habit he’d drilled into himself with racing cars: more than once he’d detected a defective tie rod or brake cylinder that way.

He handed the clipboard to Pappy Johnson and his eyes searched the crowded instrument panel once more and then he put the control yoke in his hands and planted his feet on the rudder pedals and…. She’s mine.

Through the windscreen he watched the tower—barely visible in the fine rain—and finally he saw the double red flare go up: Start Engines.

“Mesh one… Mesh two…”

Pappy Johnson’s fingers sped over the toggles and buttons. Out the side screens Felix watched the oil-smoke chug from the exhausts, the props begin to turn. He swiveled his attention to the starboard side. “Mesh three… Mesh four.”

“Jigsaw Flight—go to stations.” That was the tower.

There were no runway lights. He saw Calhoun walking away dragging the chocks in the gloom; he taxied around in a tight circle and went bumping along toward the end of the runway.

He stood on the brakes and ran up each engine in turn-watching the gauges, using his ears. Inside him he felt the thrill he’d never lost in a thousand takeoffs: the Icarian desire to climb high, detached and free.

The green flare went up. He stood hard on both brakes. “Military power.”

Johnson thrust the four throttle handles forward. The rpm’s yelled at him, reaching 2700 and the plane quivered like a hound straining on a leash. Manifold pressure fifty inches… He let go the brakes and she burst forward, fishtailing a little until he steadied her.

He had to lift off within twenty-five seconds after reaching full power. The panel clock gave him eighteen seconds and the airspeed indicator gave him 75 knots; the tail wheel lifted off.

Pappy Johnson reached out and chopped the number-two throttle dead.

With the number-two prop feathered the imbalance of power wanted to slew her around to starboard and he had to stand on the left-hand rudder pedal.

Twenty-four seconds. He pushed the yoke forward. To hold her on the ground. Airspeed 80… 85… Twenty-eight seconds…

Ninety knots. He hauled back on the yoke.

She lifted off the ground and instantly he snapped, “Gear up!”

Johnson hit the gear lever as if it were an enemy’s jaw. There was the fast whine of the gear-retraction motors and he felt the added lift when the drag of the wheels had been removed: 110 knots now and he banked to clear the phone cables.

He had 300 feet and she was climbing smoothly on three engines; he reduced to 2,600 rpm and forty inches of manifold pressure and climbed at 115 knots toward the planned cruising altitude of 4,000 feet. He cut the mixtures back, trimmed the controls, retracted the flaps and heard the flap-actuating motors grind.

After a while Johnson pressed the button on his control wheel to be heard on the intercom. Felix heard his mild voice: “Try eight thousand this time. Maybe we can bust through the soup.”

“May I have my engine back now?”

“No. We’ll fly the mission on three.”

“One experience with a teacher like you would be enough to make most pilots travel by railroad the rest of their lives.”

Johnson pushed the throat mike aside. “If I hadn’t thought you could handle it I wouldn’t have done it. Would I now?”

The plane burst through ten-tenths into brass sunlight. White cloud-tops rolled away to the horizons like a vast sea.

He set his controls to cruise at 165 knots at 8,000 feet. The other two planes caught up and took station behind him and to his right.

“Give us a course.”

Ulyanov already had it for him. Felix fed the information into the autopilot and spent the next half-minute adjusting the trim with the button until he liked the sound and feel of it.

Ulyanov said, “We’ll have to dead-reckon down to the target area.”

He checked the instruments. Head temps 210°. Airspeed okay. Artificial horizon level and steady. Pressures and rpm’s okay: in synch.

He took his hands off the controls and that was when it hit him. The cold sweat burst out all over his body.

“Jigsaw One to Jigsaw Flight. Acknowledge.”

“Jigsaw Two. I read you clear, Troop Leader.”

“Affirmative.”

“Jigsaw Three. Read you very well. What’s wrong with your engine?”

“Pappy’s amusing himself. Keep your receivers open. Eight minutes to descent. Out.”

The eight minutes went by too quickly and then he had to put the nose down and it took an effort of will. He had always competed in speed sports in which you could see what you were doing. Now he had to descend blind.

He tried to make light of it: “What if someone’s put a mountain in one of those clouds?”

“You’ve been here before.”

“Ulyanov, what’s my course?”

“Dead ahead sir.”

“You’d better be right.”

“Yes sir. I know.”

There was a crag somewhere to starboard that spired to nearly 3,000 feet. At least he hoped it was to starboard. He watched the clock. Ten seconds… five… Nose down.

The heavy plane mushed down through the weather bank and he couldn’t see a thing. Pappy Johnson said, “This stuff may be very close to the ground. You’ll have to come in right on the deck. Just be sure you keep your feet inside.”

The target zone was a meadow on top of a long ridge. At its highest point it had an elevation of 876 feet above mean sea level. The idea was to attack from exactly 1,000 feet altimeter—124 feet above the ground. In theory it made the targets easy to hit but in practice the ground turbulence made it pure hell. Cool air sank into the deeper shadows and warmer air lifted from the pale places. The aircraft bucketed and pitched like a racing car with a flat tire.

Johnson said, “You trying to scramble the eggs I ate this morning? Don’t tense up.”

“I can’t see where I’m going.”

“I know. Keep your nose down—keep on the rails.”

Felix dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.

Johnson said gently, “I told the old man you were the best in the outfit. Don’t make me a liar.”

But his aplomb had evaporated and there was no way to regain it. He pressed the Send button and had to clear his throat before he spoke. “Jigsaw One to Jigsaw Flight. Starting a nine-zero degree right turn. Guide on me if you can.”

He switched the set from liaison to intercom. “Pilot to bombardier. We’re on the briefed heading. Going down through 2,000 feet. You should be able to see your aiming point any time now.”

The plane growled steadily into a sea of matted grey.

Seventeen hundred feet; sixteen hundred. “Prepare to drop practice bombs.”

Chujoy’s voice crackled at him: “Bomb-bay doors open. Preparing to center P.D.I.”

That was the bombsight. At these altitudes a variation of as little as two feet in altitude could make a critical difference in the trajectory of the bombs.

Fourteen hundred. Thirteen-fifty. “I’m going to abort!”

“The hell you are,” Pappy Johnson snapped.

Thirteen hundred. Grey cloud rushed past the windscreen, beading up on the glass. Twelve-eighty: twelve-sixty…

Tendrils; it was breaking up….

Twelve-thirty and they were out under it—too low: the ground was right there….

Then his eyes adjusted to the perspective and he fought back the impulse to drag the yoke into his belly. He leveled off at twelve hundred feet. It wasn’t raining. Visibility was clear enough now; it was the ceiling that was bad—hanging down within two hundred feet of the ridge….

A stand of trees along the near rim; the open meadow and at the far end of it more trees—highland woods running down the slopes. And he could see the square old cars bumpety-bumping out across the meadow: four of them, their courses diverging a little because there was no one driving them. The men had been tenting there for three weeks now, setting targets for them. They’d turned the toys loose on the meadow and now it was up to the airmen to bomb the moving automobiles before they got across the thousand-foot meadow.

“Twelve hundred feet. We’re approaching the I.P,” Initial point of the bombardier’s run.

Pappy Johnson growled, “Do it good, Chujoy, or you go back by bus.”

“Center your P.D.I.”

“P.D.I. centered sir.”

“Ready to take over…. It’s your airplane.” Felix took his hands off the yoke and leaned forward to watch.

There was a stir as the bomb racks opened.

“Bombs away.”

The string of hundred-pounders left the racks and arched away earthward; he couldn’t see them but he knew. The bombardier had mirrors to watch the drop.

They were real bombs with practice warheads designed to create a small explosion—enough to prove where they’d hit even if the bomb bounced away from its point of impact.

“Your aircraft sir.”

Felix hauled back on the yoke. “How did it look?”

Chujoy was very dry. “We just blew hell out of eight patches of grass.”

Into the clouds and a steep starboard turn. “Making a three-sixty.” A full circle to bomb again. “Jigsaw One to Jigsaw Flight—report.”

“Jigsaw Two. One hit I think. Seven near-misses.”

“Jigsaw Three. No hits sir. Sorry.”

Pappy Johnson switched on his throat mike. “This time you misters will get those bombs on target or I’ll personally throw you out of these airplanes with no parachutes.”

They made five passes. The last three were good enough to make Felix beam at Pappy Johnson: on the third go they stopped three out of four motorcars in their tracks with bombs that penetrated clear through to the ground. On the fourth go they hit two out of three. On the fifth the ground echelon sent five cars onto the field and Felix’s flight hit four of them.

“The last drop looked pretty good,” Johnson admitted into the radio.

“We’re out of bombs,” Felix announced. “Close up those holes and keep it tight—let’s go home for a coffee break.”

He put the nose up into the clouds and they swam into the sunlight. “Now all I’ve got to do is find a place to put this thing down.”

“They’ll bring you in.”

“Jigsaw Tower—this is Jigsaw One. Can you give me a radar fix?”

The answer was a moment coming and he felt his jaw tighten but then the radio spoke cheerfully:

“Roger, Jigsaw One. Turn to zero-four-five and fly for eight minutes. Then turn to one-six-zero. We’ll keep a fix on you.”

Johnson was charging the flare pistol, inserting it in the fuselage tube above his head in case they made a forced landing: a flare would pinpoint them for rescuers.

Down to 1,000 feet now and about six miles to go. Pappy Johnson said drily, “You want the gear down by any chance, Your Highness?”

“What? Oh—yes. Yes.”

“Thought you might.”

He peered into the soup. There were bangs and rattles in the airframe as the wheels locked down.

“Tower to Jigsaw One. Fly one-five-five.”

“Roger. I have the runway in sight.” He glanced at Johnson: “Flaps twenty.”

“Yeah. Just remember this airplane does not have reversible props.”

The ground came up grey and wet. He came in fast—100 knots—and he had to stop the airplane before he ran out of runway so he fishtailed gently and rode his brakes and brought her in fifty yards short of the limit. He pulled off to the side to give the others room to land and when they were down he taxied her over to the hardstands and sliced an index finger across his Adam’s apple—the signal to Johnson to cut his engines.

Calhoun was walking over with the chocks when they dropped out of the hatch. “Give us a dollar’s worth,” Pappy Johnson said, “and a manicure and a good rubdown, Calhoun.”

Then Johnson turned and walked Felix toward the Ready Room. “You’ve got four weeks left to hit the targets every time. Not three out of four, not four out of five. Every time.”

“I hope we can.”

“You can do it,” Johnson said. “You’re a good outfit. Better than you think you are.”

“Are we?”

“You know you are. You just needed to have someone tell you.”

18.

At the dying end of October the three Russian noblemen boarded a trimotor at Barcelona and flew to Lisbon, A hard Atlantic sun burned in the cloudless Portuguese sky but the wind that came off the ocean was cold and whipping; there were whitecaps in the Tagus estuary.

The Peugeot that transported them through Lisbon had hard springs and stank of imbedded fumes of Gauloise tobacco; the driver was a chain-smoking Frenchman badly in need of a shave. The three Russians—Prince Leon Kirov; Count Anatol Markov; Baron Oleg Zimovoi—wore Homburgs and topcoats and their luggage consisted only of overnight cases.

The narrow streets of Lisbon thronged with human flotsam—the refugee overflow of the European war—and here and there a man could be seen walking purposefully, topcoat flying in the sinister wind; these were the ones who had somewhere to go, the black-marketeers and salesmen of information who had descended upon Lisbon in the past year like hungry ants on a dying carcass. Lisbon was the Occident’s Macao: the capital of intrigue, a living museum of every phylum and species of human vice and avarice. The crowded architecture was stone and stucco in bleak grey hues; cobblestones glistening with river spray; crumbling buildings five hundred years old that bespoke suspicion, evil, torture, Inquisition. In the passages dark automobiles crowded horse carts aside and darted homicidally among the pedestrian fugitives.

Their host’s driver slid the Peugeot through the crowds with stolid contempt and presently they were out of Lisbon along the right bank of the estuary; now the speed went up and they were wheeling along the coast road with a rubbery whine, speeding through the fishing villages—Belém, Oeiras, Estoril—finally Cascais.

Count Anatol said, “It is just up to the right now if I recall.”

Oleg was instantly suspicious: “You have been here before?”

“It was not always American Embassy property. At one time it was a villa belonging to the Graf von Schnee. One of the finest private baccarat tables in Europe. Players came from as far away as South America.”

“When men have nothing better to do with money than gamble it away….”

Prince Leon cut across him smoothly: “I think we’re here.”

The villa was on a height in a pastel cluster of genteel residences each of which had its two or three acre garden of semi-tropical vegetation: rubbery greenery, bougainvillaea, palms, grape trees, Bermuda lawns, flowers carefully tended and vividly displayed. A high wall sealed off the property and a man in an olive drab uniform and a white Sam Browne belt came to attention at the gate. The driveway was crushed seashells; it gritted under the tires.

The portico was an arched stucco affair; the villa was high and massive with walls of North African tile, predominantly pink—very bright in the sun. Their heels rang on the mosaic floor.

They had proceeded along half the length of the lofty corridor when the wide doors opened at the far end and their host revealed himself. “Welcome, gentlemen. I’m Colonel Buckner.”

“It’s good of you to come on such short notice.” Buckner arranged the seating and saw to their drinks. Then he took a place in the circle of chairs.

It had been the Graf von Schnee’s game room and the silent deep carpet remained but the room had been redesigned by its American tenants as a conference chamber; there was a long table beneath the windows but he hadn’t wanted the formality of that.

He began with casual inquiries; it was the first time he’d met any of them and he didn’t want to reveal the extent of his knowledge about them.

After a decent interval he cleared his throat and leaned forward in his seat with his forearms across his knees. “Very well then. Suppose we start by having me lay out the situation and then we’ll discuss it from there. Are there any questions you’d like to ask me before I start?”

There were none; he hadn’t expected any. They were smart enough to sound him out first.

He said, “I’m here as the informal representative of the President. I stress the word ‘informal.’ Nothing I say can be construed to be a binding commitment by my government. We’re involved in a clandestine operation—if there’s ever a public question about it we’re all bound to deny it. Even if your operation succeeds it’ll be many years before Washington will be able to admit having had any part in it.”

“That’s fully understood,” said Baron Oleg Zimovoi. “There won’t be any embarrassing exposures on our part.”

“I’m just trying to explain to you why we’d have to deny it.”

Baron Oleg produced a pipe and a pouch.

Buckner said, “Here’s where we stand. You’re trying to overthrow the Stalin government. You’ve got tacit approval and a certain amount of secret matériel support from the governments of the United States and Great Britain.

“This thing was pretty chancy from the start. There’ve always been a lot of ifs in it. I don’t know if you realize this but we very nearly lost Russia to the Nazis ten days ago—there was an attempt on Stalin’s life.”

“We were aware of it,” murmured Count Anatol Markov.

Buckner gave him a sharp glance. “Then you know the Kremlin discovered the plot in time to head it off and corral the perpetrators. They’re not fools. They’re bound to be twice as alert now as they were before that attempt—your chances are getting slimmer all the….”

“Colonel Buckner,” Count Anatol said, very cool. “The recent attempt on Stalin’s life failed because Stalin was warned in advance.”

“By whom?” He had to ask it even though he suddenly felt he knew the answer.

“By us,” Anatol told him without hesitation.

Buckner was angry and showed it. “Is it your idea of good faith to keep your allies in the dark on an issue that vital?”

“The issue is no longer vital,” Anatol said.

Baron Oleg said, “That attempt failed because we foiled it, Colonel. Stalin will not be given warning of our own attack. And it is reassuring, don’t you think, that our participation in forestalling the German attempt was not discovered by your own intelligence. It leads one to conclude that our security is very tight.”

“I’d damn well like to know how you got wind of that scheme.”

“We have access to channels of information in Germany that are denied to you, I’m sure,” Anatol said.

The Russian Count seemed made of ice: no emotion at all in his presentation. Buckner said, “It might be helpful to us all if you’d share those channels.”

For the first time Prince Leon spoke. “The time may very well come when it is mutually advantageous for us to do that, Colonel. At the moment however our alliance is fragile as you know. Clearly that makes it important that we retain what few advantages we have. They may prove useful as bargaining points as time goes by—I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“You’re very candid.”

“I try to be when the reverse would serve no purpose.”

“At least you can tell me this much. Who organized that attempt against Stalin?”

He saw them look at one another; Prince Leon nodded his visible assent and Count Anatol said, “They were White Russians—the followers of the Grand Duke Mikhail. The program had Nazi support.”

“Just as yours has Anglo-American support. That’s rather cozy—playing both ends against the middle.”

“It was hardly like that, Colonel,” Baron Oleg said. He pushed his thumb down into the pipe and prepared to strike a match. “If we had been working with them we’d hardly have given away their plan to the Bolsheviks.”

Anatol said, “It was a race between their operation and ours. We have put them out of the race—temporarily at least.”

“What did they expect to achieve?”

“A German victory. Apparently Hitler offered Mikhail the puppet throne of Russia.”

“I see.”

Prince Leon said, “I’m sure you did not summon us here to discuss the thwarted attempt on Stalin’s life last week.”

Oleg sucked at his pipe until he had it going to his satisfaction and then he said. “He asked us here in order to impose a schedule on us.”

They were damnably irritating: forever a jump ahead of him. He’d underestimated them badly. He said cautiously. “I’m not trying to impose anything on anybody. But history has a way of doing those things for us. I think we’ve reached the point where we’ve got no choice but to trust one another—there isn’t time for anything else.”

Prince Leon said, “In what matters are we to trust one another, Colonel?”

“It’s time you let us in on your tactical plan, I think.”

“Of course he thinks that,” Baron Oleg remarked to Anatol. “He has thought that from the beginning.”

Prince Leon said, “The British seem satisfied, Colonel.”

“Then perhaps the British have been approached more frankly than we have.”

He saw them glance at one another again. He said, “Danilov went to London two weeks ago. Who did he talk to? What did he do there?”

“I’m sure we cannot answer that,” Anatol said. “We were not there.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game.”

Baron Oleg took the pipe out of his mouth. “We are fighting for Russia, Colonel. Not for the United States of America. Surely you recognize that our first obligation is not to you.”

Buckner willed himself to sit back and cross his legs. “Very well. According to our latest intelligence briefs the Germans have surrounded four entire Red Armies west of Moscow—the Nineteenth, the Twenty-fourth, the Thirtieth and the Thirty-second. Von Bock has them trapped east of Smolensk. Those pockets will be wiped out or captured within five or six days at most. Guderian has the Third and the Thirteenth surrounded. That’s six entire armies, gentlemen—the better part of a million troops and God knows how many tanks and guns. The roads to Moscow will be wide open within a week. Stalin’s throwing everything he’s got left into the Mozhaisk Line and he’s put Zhukov personally in charge of it—but it’s only forty miles from the center of Moscow and the way things look right now Zhukov won’t be able to hold it for long.”

Count Anatol said, “The blizzards of winter will stop them, Colonel. Winter comes in three to four weeks.”

“And if the panzers breach the Mozhaisk Line before that?”

“We do not think they will. The German tanks are wallowing in deep mud now—quite often they have been immobilized completely. They are not likely to break Zhukov’s lines within a week or two. And those four armies on the Smolensk-Moscow road are still holding their positions, surrounded or not. As long as they remain there the Germans can’t advance with their full force.”

Prince Leon had a gentle voice. “Colonel, we began this undertaking with the understanding that it would be done within one hundred days. We expect to be in operation well within that time limit.”

“The limit has been shortened,” Buckner said flatly. “Hitler has moved faster than we had any reason to expect. We credited the Russian army with more fighting ability than it’s demonstrated.”

“No,” Leon said softly. “It was not their ability you depended on—it was their will to fight. The elimination of Stalin—the restoration of their country to its people—will rekindle that spirit.”

“I’m not sure we have time for that any more.”

Leon’s face told him nothing. It was nearly expressionless: remote, courteous, attentive. “I’m not certain I understand your position, Colonel. What is it you wish us to do—abandon the enterprise?”

“No. I’m asking you to accelerate it. To convince Danilov he hasn’t got as much time as he thought he had.”

Baron Oleg said, “There are certain things you can’t rush, Colonel. You can’t expect to make nine women pregnant in order to get a baby in one month. Nor can you execute a plan like ours with half-trained and half-equipped troops. There is no point starting the operation unless it has every possible advantage—the odds are poor enough as it is.”

Buckner shook his head. “It’s your choice, gentlemen. Speed it up or cancel it. There’s no third course.”

Count Anatol said, “That is an ultimatum, is it?”

“I’m not dictating it. The facts are.”

“No,” Prince Leon said. “It is not the facts, Colonel, it is your interpretation of them. One has the impression your President has developed—what is your expression—cold feet? The Nazis have not moved very much faster than we anticipated. They are approximately where we expected them to be by autumn—nearer Moscow than they were before but not yet at the gates of the city. We expected Zhukov to blunt their drive and he did so. We expected the rains to slow their tanks and they have done so. We now expect winter to stall the German advance and while no one can promise it there is a good likelihood it will do so. No, Colonel. The facts in Europe have not changed. It is only the facts in Washington that may have changed.”

“What are you implying, Your Highness? That we’re trying to back out of our agreement?” He could feel the blood rise to his cheeks. “My country isn’t in the habit of reneging on its commitments.”

“Oh come now,” Baron Oleg said. “You’re not in a public forum now—we are not impressed by a show of the flag, Colonel. You will renege on this agreement the moment you feel it is in your interests to do so. You have kept the bargain only because you are convinced it can still be profitable to your interests. And you are trying to increase the odds of success by shortening the schedule.”

Anatol said, “And we are trying to convince you that shortening it will do just the opposite—it will reduce the odds of success, don’t you see that?”

Oleg scraped ash out of the bowl of his pipe; when he spoke it was to Anatol. “The nearer we come to the day of reckoning the more nervous they become. It may prove intolerable—it may ruin us in the end.”

“Then we shall have to calm them down, won’t we.” Anatol turned to Buckner. “What will it take to soothe you, Colonel?”

He was beet-red to the hairline and knew it. These shrewd bastards had been weaned on Machiavelli; they were the hard realists of an old school that went back a thousand years and he hadn’t the guns for this and he knew it. But he had his instructions and he had to proceed. “I’ve told you what it will take. Move it up.”

“We can’t do that,” Prince Leon said in a reasonable way. “The timing is determined by Stalin. When Stalin moves we move. It is that simple, Colonel, and nothing you can do or say will change that.”

He watched the Peugeot turn out through the gates and then he turned to the game room and opened the side door to the chamber beyond. A thin man with short hair and a neat grey suit looked up from the wire recorder’s rewinding reels.

“Did you get it all?”

“Yes sir.”

“For all the damn good it’ll do us,” Buckner growled. “Keep it to yourself, will you? I wouldn’t like it bandied about Washington that I let three doddering old playboys make an ass out of me.”

“What now, Colonel?”

“The purpose of this little quiz session was to pry Danilov’s plan out of them. It didn’t work. There’s one more thing to try. Pack us up, Hawkes, we’re going to England.”