He coughed loudly, and the colonel yelled at the men to attend to his words.
"Please, please, stand at ease," said Himmler.
They unbent just a fraction.
"You men make me proud to be German," he said. "You have all volunteered for this most dangerous mission, and it will take you into the deepest recesses of the enemy's lair. You are few in number, but the effect of your actions will be unmeasurable. To me, you personify all that is great in our party. You are supermen, and my best wishes go with you. Heil Hitler!"
"Heil Hitler!"
Himmler bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment, and Skorzeny yelled at the pilots to spool up the Dakota's two engines. As they coughed into life, thick smoke and blue flame belched from the cowlings. Skorzeny slapped the first man in line on the shoulder and he turned with mechanical precision to climb into the cabin. The others followed, until only Skorzeny was left.
"The fuhrer has much to occupy him right now," said Himmler, "but he wanted me to tell you that he will be thinking of you and your men especially."
An uncharacteristic solemnity came over the SS colonel. "Thank you. That is most gracious, Herr Reichsfuhrer. We shall earn that honor, or die to a man in trying."
They saluted, and Skorzeny disappeared in through the darkened door of the plane.
MOSCOW, USSR
The lights hadn't been put out in the Little Corner for nearly a week. Even with Hitler's attention elsewhere, this was a very dangerous time for the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin had napped only fitfully during the last three days, although physically he felt fine, thanks to the medicines his physician had been given from the British ship named Vanguard.
Sitting in his office, the Soviet leader allowed himself a rare moment of relaxation, sipping from a long glass of hot tea, as he contemplated a world remade in his own image. It might take another ten years, and it would without a doubt be a bloody business. But at the end of it, the revolution would be safe from fascists like Hitler, traitors like Khrushchev, and imperialists like Churchill and Roosevelt.
There would never come a day when his statues were tipped over and melted down for scrap. Indeed, he amused himself by imagining a statue large enough to replace the Washington Monument. A great towering Comrade Stalin to keep a stern watch over the liberated workers of the United Soviet States of Amerika.
"More tea, Comrade?" asked Poskrebyshev. "Before the others arrive?"
"No, I will need a bucket under the desk, if I drink any more."
Stalin stretched his tired frame. A light dusting of snow lay on the cold stone laneways of the Kremlin, outside his window. He knew he would feel more secure once that white blanket was properly draped over the Motherland. Zhukov was doing wonders with the Red Army, now that he had time to train and equip his divisions properly. When the thaw came, no matter what the correlation of forces in the West, the Soviet Union would be safe behind an Iron Curtain.
That phrase, which Beria had taught him, was most appealing. Having faced annihilation at the hands of the fascists a few short months ago, Josef Stalin was much taken with the image of an iron curtain falling across the frontier with Germany, no matter who controlled it.
He suspected that it would be the Allies. Their industrial capacity supplied them with an advantage that would be nearly impossible to overcome. And now, augmented with the wonders of the next century, they would surely triumph over the fascists.
But he would not be helping them. Not if that support meant the eventual collapse of the revolution. Or the conquest of the Rodina by a- What was Beria's phrase? A digital Hitler. The situation had been so finely balanced that when that mincing dandy Ribbentrop had offered a cease-fire, he had not dared let the opportunity slip by. Not when the reports from the Pacific illustrated how powerful the weapons were that the fascists had obtained. For one very tense week, he'd actually expected Himmler's storm troopers to crash in through his windows at any moment, cocooned in armor that made them virtually invulnerable.
Of course, he'd been wrong about that. As it had turned out, those bastards had only picked up the table scraps, while the bulk of the windfall had gone to Roosevelt and his allies.
But that didn't matter now.
Stalin placed his empty drinking glass on a silver coaster and leaned forward to pick up the model again.
The NKVD had retrieved it from the Vanguard. It was a model of the ship that had materialized at the edge of the Siberian ice pack. A beautiful weapon; unusual, with its three hulls and featureless deck, but deadly looking nonetheless. Like an assassin's dagger. How strange that it had arrived a whole day before the Pacific Emergence.
Stalin wished for just a moment that the burdens of state didn't have to lie so heavily on his shoulders. He would have loved to make the journey to the special facilities that were being constructed around the ship, just to see it with his own eyes. But such things were not possible.
Then he snorted in amusement. Was there anything that could be called impossible nowadays?
"Vozhd?" his secretary asked. "Something amuses you?"
"Life amuses me, Poskrebyshev. Life, and everything about it. Tell me, are they here yet?"
"Yes. They are waiting outside."
"Well, bring them in, bring them in."
Poskrebyshev carried his narrow-shouldered, slightly hunched frame out of the room. He'd never really been the same since the NKVD had executed his wife. He had an impressively ugly countenance, which Stalin admired because it frightened visitors who came to the Little Corner. That countenance wore a perpetual scowl.
He reappeared, with Beria and Molotov in tow. The secret policeman seemed as chipper as ever, which was to say not at all, but at least relentless morbidity was his natural state of being. Molotov, like everyone in high office these days, looked as though the executioner stalked his every move.
They sat in hard wooden chairs in front of Stalin's desk. He spoke first to Molotov. "So, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich, we have acceded to the fascists' request for assistance on this one little matter, and I can see that you are still not happy."
"I doubt the British will see it as such a trifle," said Molotov. "They are rather fond of Churchill, and will not appreciate the fact that we have helped the fascists to kill him."
"Yet our involvement is quite deniable," said Beria. "Our man should be able to get himself out to Ireland, and then home when he is done."
Stalin, like his foreign minister, still was not sure.
Britain had come close to declaring war on Russia when he'd impounded the ships of convoy PQ 17 at Murmansk, just before signing the cease-fire with Germany. Their anger was quite reasonable, he admitted. With one backhanded sweep, he had done more to damage the Royal Navy than Hitler's oafish admirals had managed in two and a half years.
The vessels were still there: thirty-five merchantmen and their escorts, including four destroyers, ten corvettes, two antiaircraft auxiliaries, and four cruisers. He had been scrupulously fair, refusing every German entreaty to turn the ships over to the Kriegsmarine. And the crews were being held in relative comfort, given the deprivations of wartime Russia.
But it was important that he maintain the facade of neutrality, and that meant detaining the combatants. The materiel in the holds of the ships had always been meant for his country, so he kept the hundreds of tanks and bombers, the thousands of trucks and other cargo. The trucks, in particular, had been very useful, when it became obvious that the Vanguard could not be moved. He stroked the model of the trihulled warship.