Romanov Succession Part 22

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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sault 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 alt.i.tude."

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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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.

He watched them twirl down from the rapelling tower like spiders spinning filament webs. In growing darkness he walked out of the compound and unb.u.t.toned 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 bra.s.s 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 Va.s.sily's plan that had always eluded him: the only answer was that Va.s.sily had had someone of his own-or planned to get the name of Oleg's contact. But there was a possibility Va.s.sily had intended to operate through Mikhail's Kremlin network-and if Va.s.sily 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.

KOLLIN X KOLLIN X SABOTEURS TRAPPED AS PLANNED X STEEL BEAR UNTOUCHED X INTERROGATIONS UNDERWAY FOUR MEN ONE WOMAN X INTERROGATION MAY LEAD TO OTHER CONSPIRATORS X SUGGESTION AT LEAST ONE CONSPIRATOR STILL AT LARGE X MUNICH CONNECTION NOT YET REVEALED X LOCATION OF STEEL BEAR DOUBLE UNKNOWN X WILL RESUME NORMAL COMMUNICATION SCHEDULE TOMORROW X KOLLIN X CARNEGIE.

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."

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 wrist.w.a.tch 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 h.e.l.l of a waste, won't it. So don't miss any."

"How many in each cl.u.s.ter, 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 ch.o.r.e 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 b.u.t.tons. 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 b.u.mping 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 alt.i.tude 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 b.u.t.ton 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 bra.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton 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."