enthusiasm of our French brothers for supporting us is nowhere near as high as I had been informed it would be.”
“Why?”
Molotov thought he could smell the odor of Beria’s perspiration and tried not to look at the man. “Comrade Stalin,” Beria said, “while there were some initial attempts to interrupt the French transport system, these were very few and far between; therefore, the French police and army were quickly able to put them down. Further, we have now confirmed that French troops are beginning to ride the trains and protect the highways, as well as the oil pipelines that the Americans have laid across France. While our brothers in France might have been willing to assault the Americans or the British, there is a very real reluctance on their part to attack their brother Frenchmen.”
Stalin nodded. “But that means our intelligence reports are correct; the French armies are being pulled out of Italy and Austria.”
Beria’s head bobbed. “Yes, comrade, it does. Although it does not appear to be occurring in any great numbers yet, the withdrawal of the French has begun.”
“Comrade Stalin,” said Molotov, “it would appear that the time for any diplomatic initiatives is not yet at hand. The military aspect of this war must play itself out a little longer before anyone will be willing to negotiate. We have been deeply involved in the French question and have been out of touch with the military. How does Zhukov progress?”
Stalin placed his pipe in an ashtray with a sound that made a distinct crack. “Slowly, far too slowly. The Allies are putting up too good a fight, particularly in the air. However, we are bleeding them and we will prevail.”
The admission concerned Molotov. He had often heard Stalin say that the democracies were weak and would not fight either hard or long. Now he was granting them a grudging level of respect. In that regard, there was no other choice. The Russian armies had not yet broken through the Americans.
“Zhukov,” Stalin said, “predicted a war of three to six months. He is confident that the Allied lines will crack under our pressure and this current war of small gains will soon become one of movement and great leaps.” Stalin chuckled. “Zhukov also reminded me that the Red Army is now without its greatest general, Adolf Hitler.”
Molotov and Beria laughed along with Stalin. It was common knowledge that, but for the incredible military blunders ordered by Hitler, the battle against the Germans might have had a different ending.
“The Americans and British fight, give ground, and fight again,” Stalin said. “Sometimes they throw us off balance with counterattacks and bombing raids. I have to give them their due; they are much better and more determined than I thought they would be. We will, however, still win.”
With that, Stalin dismissed them. Alone, he pondered the information he’d received through his intelligence services. For almost a year, the German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs had been working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and had been passing American nuclear secrets to Russia. Prior to that, Fuchs had been living in England and passing British secrets to the Soviet embassy. It was amazing, Stalin thought, just how much damage one man could do if he really tried. Incredibly, it seemed to be a matter of ideology for Fuchs, as he had refused all offers of money.
Normally never one to look back on past decisions with regret, Stalin wished that he had ordered the development of an atomic energy program such as the Americans had. From all of Fuchs’s accounts, the project was titanic. Worse, if Fuchs was correct, it would soon be successful. He wondered if Soviet physicists and other scientists would have been able to develop an atomic weapon as rapidly as the Americans had. At least they now knew that the bomb was feasible. That would save them from making so many wrong turns into scientific dead ends as the Germans had done with their nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg. When the time came, Russia would develop an atomic bomb much faster than the Americans were now doing.
Before that, Stalin knew he needed two things. First, he needed to establish hegemony in Europe to protect the Soviet Union and enable him to project the revolution. Second, he needed time to develop his bomb. The information Fuchs had provided would shave years off the task.
Although everyone in the Soviet Union knew that their nation was at war with the United States and Great Britain, the implications of that fact did not affect everyone’s thinking in precisely the same way. Baku, a city south of the Caucasus mountain range and on the edge of the Caspian Sea, was literally on the border between Europe and Asia as defined by geographers who felt that such a distinction was necessary. Baku itself was only about a hundred miles from the border with Iran, which was now under British control after having flirted with the Nazis. Somewhat as a result, portions of Iran’s oil-rich northwest had been occupied by the Soviets at the start of the war. Despite the drama of the Barents Sea convoys, Iran had long been the main entry point for Allied Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union. Supplies entered at the Persian Gulf port of Abadan and were shipped overland from there.
Baku and the surrounding oil fields had been the target of Germany’s 1942 offensive. The German goal was to either take the area or seal it off from the rest of Russia. Either way, they wanted to deprive the Soviets of a major and critical source of petroleum.
The Germans had failed, although they had come very close. They had directly threatened the oil fields around Grozny before being pushed back. The defenses of both Baku and Grozny logically faced northward to where the German menace been launched. As the war had drawn away from the Caucasus, so too had a large number of the implements of war. Many of the antiaircraft batteries had been removed, as had most of the defending aircraft. The war was far away. The oil fields were safe.
If the fact that a new war was raging over the horizon was any concern of Major General Vassily Guchkov, he did not show it. If he wondered why he had been left behind with a rump section of the Fourth Air Army, consisting of five hundred obsolescent fighter planes, it was no concern of his. What did concern him was that he hated Baku. It was full of black-ass Muslims whose faith was the Koran and not Lenin, who spoke a hideous Turkic type of language, and who hated Russians with an unspeakable passion.
It was not yet midmorning and he was already thinking of the private session he would have with the big- breasted blond typist from Kiev who functioned as his daytime mistress. As usual, she would serve him a light lunch in his office and then perform oral sex upon him. He felt it refreshed him for the rigors of the rest of the afternoon, which invariably concluded with bouts of heavy drinking. His adjutant would then drive him to his palatial quarters and turn him over to his night mistress, a plump local woman with very basic tastes who hated oral sex. She was also afraid she’d have her throat cut by her fellow Muslims if she ever left Guchkov’s employ, and she was right. Left alone on the streets she wouldn’t last thirty seconds.
All in all, he thought, it wasn’t a bad life. Let the others get shot at by the Yanks. He, Vassily Guchkov, would enjoy life despite the vulgarities of Baku and its people. The weather was nice, the women pliant, and he had several thousand men who saluted him.
His reverie was jolted by the distant sounds of low-flying aircraft and attendant explosions. Belatedly, the air raid sirens started to howl, sending civilians and noncombatants running frantically to the shelters.
What the hell is going on? Guchkov thought. He ran the few dozen yards to his combat command center, huffing badly, and received word that strange planes were overhead and dropping bombs. He looked out the window just as one of the planes flew past and was horrified to see the insignia of the United States Air Force on a P-51 only a few hundred feet above him. The fighters were bombing and strafing his airfields and the antiaircraft defenses.
“Scramble the planes,” he yelled, and he was informed that it was already happening, but too late. Most of the planes he commanded were being destroyed on the ground, as were the antiaircraft guns.
The fighter attack lasted only a few minutes, then there was blessed silence and the sound of the all-clear. He wondered who had decided it was safe, but his thoughts were again interrupted when the sirens shifted to the danger sound, sending the civilians screaming and running back to the shelters. The planes were returning.
“Where are my fighters?”
His adjutant, a slim young major named Brovkin, shrugged and looked at him with something bordering on contempt. “Either destroyed on the ground or unable to fly because of craters in the runways. Those few who did make it up appear to have been shot down. Oh yes, General, they’ve been strafing and bombing our antiaircraft positions.”
Guchkov sat down hard in a chair. He was fifty years old and had been in the Soviet military for more than thirty of those years, and never had anything like this occurred to him before. Even when the Luftwaffe was
