“Yes, Comrade General.”
The silence was awkward.
“Comrade General, let me be blunt. I suspect everyone, and if I told you the phrases…”
“I understand, Comrade Nazarbayeva. More tea?”
“Unless you have something stronger?”
“Ah, yes… of course.”
Rumours of her drinking and other proclivities had long since reached his ears, rumours he had carefully ushered away from other receptive ears, namely those of his direct boss.
He opened his drawer and took out a small bottle of a home brewed walnut vodka, careful not to knock it against the Tokarev pistol he had set there earlier… just in case.
The Deputy Head of the NKVD poured two measures and slid one glass across the polished desktop.
“Na Zdorovie!”
“So, what do you intend to do, Comrade?”
“Clearly I need to flush these bastards out, but I’ve already tried, without luck… although I actually didn’t know who I was trying to contact. I simply used the phrases that Pekunin gave me.”
She considered speaking further and committed herself.
“VKG is important. He was listed by Pekunin. There were other names who rejected the idea… such as Molotov.”
“Molotov was asked?”
Kaganovich’s acting skills were excellent.
“Yes… so… who is VKG?”
“No idea, Comrade Nazarbayeva.”
The listeners exchanged knowing looks.
Kaganovich poured another drink before asking the big question.
“What do you intend to do, Tatiana?”
“Nothing yet, Comrade. I must discover who they are. I hoped you could help me with that?”
“Possibly.”
Nazarbayeva sat upright in an instant, the guarded comment sending a charge of electricity through her brain.
“You know about this… you know about all of this, don’t you, Comrade General?”
“I know some of it, Tatiana.”
“Who are these bastards… these traitors… these…”
He held up his hand and gestured her to sit down.
“Traitors? No. Patriots… men who love the Rodina… yes.”
Her eyes narrowed as she digested the words and assigned them meaning.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“I love the Motherland as I love my own children, Comrade Nazarbayeva. As a patriot, I’m prepared to act against enemies of the Rodina, be they inside or out.”
She downed the latest drink in one and stood again.
“I arrest you in the name of…”
“Sit down, you stupid woman… SIT!”
The door flew open and two guards, armed with state-of-the-art AK-47s, tumbled through the opening, alerted by the shouted word.
Kaganovich held out a calming hand.
“Thank you, Comrades, You may wait outside. A small disagreement, nothing more.”
The two NKVD guards noted that the woman’s hand was on her empty holster, as if to grab for its missing contents, but ceded the room under orders.
“Please… sit down, Tatiana.”
She did so and accepted a refilled glass, her mind whirling with the enormity of the situation.
“Your old general… Pekunin… provided us with a way to get messages to the Allies regarding the potential for a change of leadership, one that he considered was the only way to save the Motherland from oblivion… and this was before the demonstration of atomic weapons by our enemies.”
“But…”
“But just listen. What you have heard is quite true. We went to war on false accusations… false information deliberately enhanced by our leadership to whip up a frenzy across the country. The Allies never intended to attack us…”
“But…”
“Listen! They never intended to attack us… never.”
He calmed down enough to continue in an even voice.
“We were sent to war by a leadership that simply wants more power and influence. All the dead, ours and theirs, are on the hands of men who care nothing for death… save their own!”
Nazarbayeva went to interrupt but hesitated, her mind in a turmoil.
“Your sons have been needlessly sacrificed on the paths of their ambition! You know I speak the truth, Tatiana.”
He listed each in turn.
“Vladimir… sacrificed on a suicidal mission contrived for purposes of revenge and little more.”
“Oleg… Oleg deliberately betrayed by your leaders to advance some sort of tryst with Franco… which never even got off the ground. They sat in front of you and confessed it… they confessed it!”
“Ilya assassinated by an agent of the NKVD… I’ve seen the reports on that one too… three sons, Tatiana, three sons…”
“You don’t have to tell me what I’ve sacrificed for the Rodina, Comrade Polkovnik General!”
Kaganovich nodded and held out his hands by way of apology, the palms upwards, almost as if to advance and embrace the woman.
“Forgive me, Tatiana, but you’ve sacrificed too much… and not for the Rodina… no, for them. We all have. My son Gennady wounded and a prisoner in Italy… a cousin badly injured in pilot training, and two nephews lost in Germany… and my niece Mara… darling Mara…destroyed by napalm in the Moselle… and it’s been for nothing.”
“Not for nothing!”
“Yes, for nothing!”
Tatiana teetered on the edge of an abyss, almost for the first time seeing her personal losses as a totality, and alongside that, the dawn of appreciation that they really might have been sacrificed just for other’s personal ambitions.
The prop that had been her understanding that her sons had died for the Motherland started to crumble before Kaganovich’s eyes.
He understood the mental struggle that was going on in front of him.
“Tatiana, your sons died in the uniform of the Red Army, serving the Rodina, but under false pretences… circumstances that were contrived by the leadership… a leadership that has betrayed the trust placed in it… a leadership that must be replaced so that the Motherland can survive.”
A tear rolled down her cheek as she looked up into his eyes.
“But Comrade Stalin is our leader… we owe him so much… so much…”
He offered his handkerchief.
“Comrade Stalin brought us through the Patriotic War but has since steered the Rodina down the paths of his own, and others, agendas. How many more mothers must mourn because of his… because of their personal agendas?”
“But the Allies have just attacked us!”
“Did they? Come on then. What signs did you see? What intelligence did you miss? You gave no warning to the GKO… did you fail?”
“Quite clearly I failed, Comrade General.”
“As did I… but there were no signs… were there?”
“No… except…”
“Except?”
“The Germans… there was something going on with them… nothing solid… just rumours.”
“Indeed… but that aside… our leadership intends to take us back to war again… a war that would have seen new terrors on both sides. I talk of atomic weapons and the biological and nerve agents we captured from the Germans or secured from the Japanese.”
He stood and looked out of the large window.
“You know yourself, the submarine was carrying Anthrax. It was the plan to insert that into the drinking water in Northern Germany. That plan was already in motion, Tatiana… a plan from which you were excluded.”
A thought struck her like a thunderbolt.
“Raduga… the whole thing… running to take the war back to the Allies… before they attacked… if they attacked… it didn’t matter if they attacked?”
“No, Tatiana… it didn’t.”
“Atomic… biological… nerve gas… everything?”
“Yes, and we both know it has been for some time… in fact… it never really stopped and was always offensive in nature, despite what you were told.”