Beria wondered if it was significant that Stalin's secretary did not have a flexipad. They were precious instruments, rare and valued, not just for their near magical powers, but for the status they conferred on those chosen few who were authorized to possess them.
Stalin had three, but he almost never used them. He still carried his most important documents around wrapped up in newspaper, and filled his pockets with scraps of paper covered in crayon scrawl-everything from the number of T-34s produced last month to the latest results of the never-ending search for traitors, and they pored through the enormous library of the British warship.
At last, Stalin appeared and bade them both enter his sanctum. The Soviet leader's office was a long, rectangular space, lined with heavy drapes but well ventilated, which it had to be because of the ornate Russian stoves that lined the walls. As winter closed in, the Vozhd was often found leaning up against one of the heaters, trying to unknot the muscles of his aching legs. For now, however, he strode right past them, making for the huge desk in the far right corner. Beria slid in behind him like a python. Malenkov, who was cursed with a pair of breeding hips like some enormous Georgian baba, waddled along like a goose, trying to keep up.
"You tested Khrushchev?" Stalin asked without preemption. "He confessed?"
Beria knew the question was directed at him. "Another miracle, comrade. He would have signed a statement saying he was Hitler's mistress, if I'd asked. And we were right to imagine that the drug protected him from feeling even the harshest interrogation. Again, I believe I could have shot him in the genitals and he would not have flinched. At least not much."
Stalin turned his flat, Asiatic glare on Beria. "A pity we did not discover this earlier. When we still had some of them to question."
Malenkov grinned maliciously, but Beria was ready for the attack.
"We still have the woman. She is being transferred to a special hospital where her 'inserts' will be removed."
"And she will survive?"
"I hope so."
"Make sure she does," growled Stalin, "or I will allow Malenkov here to fulfill his destiny. At least as it relates to you."
Malenkov did not react for a full second, standing as he was, as still as a corpse. Then, just like a reanimated dead man, he brought up his little notebook and jotted down an entry in Comrade Stalin's Instructions before closing it just as slowly.
Stalin managed a lopsided grin at the charade.
Beria fumed silently to himself. Your time will come, Melanya…
5
It was revealing to see how well the SS and the NKVD worked together. Colonel Paul Brasch supposed he should not be surprised. They were cut from the same cloth. But still, four months earlier, you could not have found more implacable enemies. The hatred had been visceral, as though each existed simply to pursue the annihilation of the other.
Now, as he passed through the increasingly stringent subterranean checkpoints on his way to the mission control center, he was vetted by combined teams of German and Soviet security men. It wasn't that they were friendly with one another. He knew that under different circumstances, each would draw his weapon and gun down his opposite number without a second thought. But having served in the vast slaughterhouse of the Eastern Front, and having seen the inhuman cruelty of that conflict up close, he was amazed at the passionless and efficient way in which the machinery of the two states could knit together so quickly. The Fuhrerprinzip in action, or whatever they called it in Russia.
The unfinished complex was being hastily constructed with a massive workforce of slave labor. Again, the SS and the NKVD had cooperated well, each organization providing hundreds of thousands of bodies from their networks of prison camps. Both the scale of the project and the speed with which it had progressed impressed Brasch, an engineer with professional qualms about using slave labor for any kind of skilled work. Whatever his own misgivings, he had to admit that the twenty square miles of half-built factories, proving grounds, test labs, and barracks that made up the Demidenko Center were a marvel. It was as though Satan himself had passed a hand over the barren earth and simply conjured it up.
"We must hurry, Herr Colonel, or we will miss the rocket launch."
Brasch smiled inwardly. His current SS shadow, Untersturmfuhrer Gelder, was every bit as humorless and constipated on matters of military formality as his last minder, Herr Steckel, had been. However, he displayed none of Steckel's awe concerning the Iron Cross that Brasch had won at the front, perhaps because Gelder carried his own scars and medals from that same nightmare, and was not so easily impressed.
They picked up their pace, the fall of their boot heels echoing down the long cinder-block corridor. The paint on the walls was still so fresh that Brasch thought it was probably wet. The work crews had not completed the job, an indication of how rushed everything had been. About two hundred meters from the solid steel door that led into the control room, the paint job ended abruptly, revealing naked concrete blocks. Brasch could see bloody handprints on some of them.
Four guards stood at the doorway: two Germans, two Soviets. The latter had the primitive features of Mongols, causing Brasch an uncomfortable, momentary flashback. He had been all but overrun by a human wave of such men near Belgorod. Pins and needles ran up his back and neck as they checked his pass.
He noted with some amusement that two pink spots of high color had come out on Gelder's Aryan features at having to submit to inspection by the subhumans.
"What a world we live in these days, eh, Gelder?" he said, smiling conspiratorially.
The SS lieutenant took Brasch's comment as an indication of sympathy and shook his head. "Best not to speak of it," he cautioned, nodding at the Communist pair.
The check complete, the senior SS guard, a slab-shouldered Unterscharfuhrer, or sergeant, clicked his jackboots together and snapped out a Nazi salute. Brasch's reply was as enthusiastic as Gelder's, although for a very different reason. He was merely enjoying the discomfort that appeared now on the faces of the Mongol warriors. You have to take your fun where you can find it in the Demidenko Center, he mused.
The sergeant spun a large iron wheel mounted at the center of the blast door, reminding Brasch of the hatches on the submarine that had brought him back from Hashirajima. The two officers stepped through into a much shorter concrete passageway, also unpainted, which veered off at right angles after a few meters. They could hear the voices of the technicians bouncing off bare walls. The door closed behind them with a solid crash, and they continued on without delay, marching through a series of switchbacks before emerging into the main chamber of the blockhouse.
They were in a large room staffed by nearly fifty men and even a few women. All of the females were Soviet scientists. The German rocket program was not such an equal-opportunity employer. The bustle and excitement, the lack of interest in their arrival, and the countdown that appeared on a large alphanumeric clock all pointed to an imminent launch.