Angel, Archangel (19 page)

There were other impressive German aircraft still at Farnborough.
Impressive to him and the rest of the EAEU, that was.
To people like Rear Admiral Welland, they were just angular lumps of metal, no different to the RAF’s machines.

In the end, three hundred and sixty Lancasters went to Berchtesgarten.
Only three hundred came back.

Just then the phone rang.
It was Mulvaney.

“Back at Farnborough?
What is, man?”
Staverton barked into the receiver, with no idea what Mulvaney was crowing about.

The station commander seemed taken aback.
He didn’t want to mention the 163G by name, even though they were supposed to be speaking on a secure line.

Staverton banged his fist on the desk the moment he remembered Fleming, the 163C and Rostock.
He looked at his watch.
Fleming and the cargo would have been back at Farnborough for over an hour by now.
He hadn’t thought of them in a long time.
For some months, Churchill had been pressuring him to let go of the EAEU and devote all of his time to his special duties as Cabinet adviser.
So far, he had resisted all attempts to tear him away from his creation at Farnborough.
Perhaps it was time to reconsider.

At least he’d have Fleming back in the Bunker to help him try and sort out this mess.
The flight test programme of the 163C could go on without him.
Archangel had priority over everything.

“Is the package safe and sound?”
Staverton asked, more out of courtesy than interest.

“Yes, sir.
We’re just unwrapping it now,” Mulvaney replied.
“If you’re going to put Fleming up for a decoration, you know you can count on my endorsement.”

“Of course,” Staverton said, by now anxious for Mulvaney to get off the line.

“I’d like to add for the record, sir,” Mulvaney continued, “that he has proved himself not only to be a very able intelligence officer, but also a decisive man of action.
The way he acquitted himself over the booby-trap incident has placed him high in our admiration.”

Staverton had also felt a surge of pride when he was told about Fleming’s courage at Rostock.
“Your opinion will be recorded, Paddy.”

He thanked Mulvaney and put the telephone back onto its cradle.

The long range rocket fighter, wonder weapon of Hitler’s Alpine Redoubt.
A few days ago it was all he could think of.
The corner of his mouth twitched into a smile.
Funny how it just wasn’t important any more.

And then he had an idea.

He picked up the phone and asked to be put back through to Mulvaney at the Royal Aircraft Establishment.

* * * * * * * *

The GAZ which Krilov had commandeered at the airfield jolted its way over the pot-holes that pitted the streets on the outskirts of Ostrava.
Its gears crunched uncomfortably, because the driver had never taken anyone more senior than a colonel, much less a marshal, and he was having difficulty controlling his nerves.
The private weaved his way precariously through the thousands of Red Army troops, many of whom sang the folk songs they had known since childhood, as they marched through the night towards the front.

The sight of these men swarming towards the final battle, the condensation of their breath illuminated in the glow of the headlights, was magical to Krilov.
The last time he had seen action, the fascists had been pouring through the rubbled remains of the Moscow suburbs.
Now the tables were turned, the atmosphere of impending victory all around them was intoxicating.

At last they reached the sprawling marshalling yards where the machinery and munitions that had been forged and assembled in factories deep behind the Ural Mountains arrived by train on its way to the fighting.
Krilov had never seen anything like it.
Despite the black-out imposed on the town, clouds of steam produced by the trains that pulled in and out of Ostrava every minute glowed a deep orange, illuminated by the raging coal fires that powered the heavy locomotives.

At each of the checkpoints that took them deeper and deeper into the marshalling yards Krilov did the talking.
One glance from the guards into the interior of the GAZ, the instantaneous recognition of the marshal’s stars on Shaposhnikov’s shoulders, was enough to see that they were swiftly waved through to siding 94.
Krilov stared in awe at the still hissing locomotive and its drab olive-coloured wagons, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other munition trucks lined up in the military railway yard, but for one thing.
The moment the jeep drew near, the elite VKhV troops which surrounded the train bristled, guns pointed menacingly at the GAZ, the source of the intrusion.

Krilov spoke once to the driver, words which were lost to Shaposhnikov over the venting water vapour from the boiler of the train, but the look on the petrified private’s face told him that Krilov had cautioned him to say nothing about what he had seen that night.
Krilov told the driver to wait, then the two of them stepped from the back of the GAZ.

The major in charge of the VKhV company snapped to attention the moment he recognized the two men.
He had only met them once before; the day they had come to him with top secret orders for a mission of vital importance to the State.

“Identify yourself,” Krilov barked.

“Major Donitriy Vasilevich Ryakhov, Military Chemical Forces.”

Krilov cast a sidelong glance at Shaposhnikov.
The Marshal smiled coldly back at him.

“What is your strength, Ryakhov?”
Krilov continued.

“One chemical defence company of fifty men, Comrade Colonel.”

“Is the consignment intact and, as important, does anyone know it is here?”

Ryakhov looked affronted.
“All containers are present and accounted for.
No one has questioned us or examined the wagons.
Even if they had, Comrade Colonel, my men knew what to say.”

Krilov cocked an eyebrow at the VKhV major.
Ryakhov felt compelled to continue.
“Sanitation equipment for the front,” Ryakhov blurted, beginning to feel hot and sticky beneath his uniform.
“My men are taking cleansing facilities and delousing fluid to Branodz, regional Stavka HQ, just like the papers say.”

“Any trouble with your travel documents, your new aliases?”

“None, Comrade Colonel.”

Krilov drew closer.
“You have never questioned your orders, have you, Ryakhov?”
The major shook his head violently.
“If not you, then perhaps your men have seen fit to discuss what is going on here.”

Ryakhov felt the sweat dribbling down his back.

“Comrade Colonel, neither myself nor my men have breathed a word about this to anyone, of that I can swear.
They all appreciate, like I do, that if word of the impending fascist chemical attack reaches our troops on the front line, it would have a disastrous effect on morale.”

Krilov patted Ryakhov on the shoulder.
“Good.
It is important for your men to realize that this shipment is nothing more than a sensible precaution, a deterrence to any aggression on the part of the enemy to resort to chemical attack.”

The sweat began to freeze on the major’s back.

Shaposhnikov stepped forward from the shadows.
“Have you ever seen the effects of a chemical bombardment, Comrade Major?”
He asked flatly.

“Of course,” Ryakhov stammered.
“We have practised extensively against live subjects.”

“Live subjects, really?
Criminals, or racial subhumans, I suppose.”

Ryakhov hid his disgust.
“No, farm animals.
Sheep, goats and pigs, Comrade Marshal.”

“Then you know nothing,” Shaposhnikov said.
“In 1916, I lived through a Prussian chemical artillery bombardment that lasted the best part of an hour.
I never found out what type of gas it was, I just knew it killed you rather quickly.
In my trench we only had five masks per platoon and I was one of the lucky ones.
I watched the man next to me cough his guts out, until after two minutes he begged me to put a bullet through his head, so I obliged.
Do you know what kind of gas could do that?”

“It was probably phosgene, or one of the other lung irritants,” Ryakhov whispered, not sure where all this was leading.

Shaposhnikov grunted.
“What have you got in there?”
He asked, pointing to the long line of wagons stretching out behind the locomotive.

“Hydrogen cyanide, Comrade Marshal.
It attacks the bloodstream.”

“Tell me what it did to your goats and pigs?”
Shaposhnikov asked, with a sneer.

“Severe vomiting within seconds, incapacitation within minutes and, shortly afterwards, death from internal bleeding.”

The Marshal of the Soviet Union seemed unmoved.

“What would happen if it were used against the enemy, with surprise on our side?”

“It would carry on the wind killing everyone in its path.
It has a persistency of about an hour, that is to say, it would be safe for us to advance any time after that.
I don’t think we would find many people alive.
Ten per cent, at the most.”

“How far does it carry?”

“It depends on the wind strength, Comrade Marshal.
If the bombardment were very heavy, it could perhaps reach one hundred and fifty kilometres behind enemy lines.”

Shaposhnikov looked down the line of wagons, then turned to Ryakhov.
“Good.
Very good, Ryakhov.
I just wanted to know.”
He nodded to Krilov, then stepped back into the shadows.

“Get this stuff loaded up into the trucks and be on your way to Branodz, Ryakhov,” Krilov said.
“I want it stored in the most secure area of the stavka; Colonel Krilov will show you where.
There are some outbuildings there away from prying eyes.
As you say, we don’t want our valiant comrades on the front line to see it.
Not good for morale at all.”

Ryakhov snapped to attention.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

“Let us hope we are not provoked into using it,” Krilov added.

Ryakhov nodded, glad only that his ordeal with the two senior ranking officers was over.

Krilov and Shaposhnikov walked back to the GAZ, which had been parked out of sight of the train containing Ryakhov’s chemical forces and cargo.

“Do you think they will believe that story about the fascists threatening us with chemical weapons?”
Krilov asked.

Shaposhnikov shrugged.
“What does it matter, Kolya?

Ryakhov is more worried about what will happen to him than being hit by German mustard or chlorine gas.
He’ll never talk.
Besides, I don’t think he has the imagination to seriously believe that it is we who are considering first use.”

Shaposhnikov thought back to his days in the Tsar’s ragged army.
A long time ago, a different era.
Now the Red Army was the best equipped in the world.

One man, one rifle, one gas mask.

They climbed into the GAZ and the driver gunned the engine into life.
It was time to link up with Nerchenko, Badunov and Vorontin.
Time to put Archangel into action.

CHAPTER TWO

At close to midnight, the special advisers to the War Cabinet gathered in the underground chamber beneath Downing Street for the second time that night.
There were five of them altogether; Staverton, plus the two other intelligence chiefs and their respective aides.
Had Fleming been there, the AVM would have had his own assistant, but as it was, he was just going to have to do on his own.

Staverton took his seat at the back of the room, one row behind Rear-Admiral Welland and his aide from Naval Intelligence.
Looking at the blue-black navy uniforms, the low ceiling, the stuffy atmosphere and the great steel air-vents gave Staverton the impression he was in the bowels of a vast warship.

Major-General George Deering, assisted by his number two, a major from Army Intelligence, Eastern Section, pulled the sheet off the board on the wall in front of them, exposing the tattered maps and charts that had arrived that evening on the special flight from Pilzen.

Though principally commissioned to analyse the activities of the Wehrmacht, Deering also doubled as Churchill’s expert on Soviet tactics and strategy.

“Gentlemen, this is Archangel, the Red Army’s battle plan for the defeat of Nazi Germany and the invasion of Western Europe,” Deering said, without any trace of emotion.
“It is what the PM and the rest of us monitoring Soviet activity have feared most since the tide turned against the Nazis in the winter of 1941-42.”

Staverton craned his neck for a better look at the plans.
Deering’s team had cleaned them up as best they could, although there was not a lot they could do about the rips and tears.

“You all know by now how Archangel fell into our hands,” Deering continued.
“The fact that we have had to promise amnesty to the man who brought them in, a traitor to this country, is regrettable, but necessary.”

“You mean Herries is going to get off scot-free?”
Welland asked.

Deering was poised to turn his attention back to the board.
“Amnesty was guaranteed by Randolph Styles and underwritten by the Red Cross in return for his information.”

“That’s a pity,” Welland said.
The navy being the senior service, he was nominally the superior officer in the room, despite his equal ranking with Staverton and Deering.
“Where is he now?”

“He’s being debriefed by Military Intelligence at a safe house on the other side of Green Park.”

“Debriefed?
You make it sound like he’s one of our own.”

“You’re missing the point, Admiral,” Staverton said.
“George is right.
Herries isn’t the issue.
We can deal with him later.”

“All right, point taken,” Welland sighed.
“But how do we know that he didn’t forge the plans to save his hide?”

“I have had the very best men in this building putting these maps under the microscope.
It is their conclusion that they are neither an elaborate German forgery nor part of some sort of Soviet deception,” Deering said, trying to hide his animosity towards Welland.
“I can give you the details if you wish -”

“No, that’s quite all right, Deering.
Carry on.”
Welland’s was the question on everyone’s lips.
They had willed the forgery theory to be true.

Deering tapped the largest of the sheets pinned to the board with his swagger stick.
“I would like to draw your attention to the main assault plan.
As you can see, Archangel hinges on four initial moves, which if they are to be executed successfully, could totally wrong-foot both the Western Allies and the Germans.
I think it is important to remind ourselves, gentlemen, that Shaposhnikov is a brilliant military strategist.

“Eleven days from today - although I’m afraid we can’t necessarily depend on that date - will see a concerted barrage from forty-one thousand howitzers ranged along the six-hundred-mile Eastern Front.
The 2nd Belorussian Front in the North sector, here, under General Badunov will advance along the Stettin-Bremen Axis, where it will meet little German resistance, and will soon encounter the US 9th Army, whose lines of supply are already woefully stretched.”
Deering turned to his major.
“That’s not being too pessimistic, is it Bill?”

“No, that’s a fair assessment,” the major said.
“The 9th had a hard time trying to make for Berlin and now that SHAEF has halted it to allow the Russians to take the capital it’s pretty much lost its impetus - and, I should say, the stomach for any more heavy fighting.
Like our own boys, they know the war’s almost over.
The 9th is lined up on the western bank of the Elbe right now, with Ivan just across the water.”

Welland sank back into his chair.
Deering paused.
The sound of the ventilation system seemed to grow to a crescendo.
Deering forced himself to turn back to the map.

“The 2nd Belorussian would probably take about three to four days to reach Bremen, whereupon the 1st Guards Tank Corps, supported by men from the 19th Army and the 2nd Shock Army, would peel off towards the Rhine.
Shaposhnikov estimates in the text that they would make it to the river two days later.”

Deering pointed to the great cluster of red dots that almost ringed Berlin.

“Now to the south and the 1st Belorussian Front.
I am under no illusion that its part in the plan is quite achievable.
While the 6ist Army and the Polish 1st Army advance north and west to support the left flank of the 2nd Belorussian Front, five army divisions will envelop Berlin.
In the meantime, the 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army will head west of Berlin and take on northern elements of the US 12th Army Group.

“Further to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front under Shaposhnikov himself would push along the Leipzig-Cologne axis, engage German Army Group Centre and then proceed to tackle Montgomery’s 21st Army, which has all but defeated Model’s Army Group, and also take on parts of Bradley’s 12th Army.
I believe that we would be able to contain the 1st Ukrainian but for one thing.
The southernmost front, the 2nd Ukrainian under Nerchenko, has orders to march on the Nuremberg-Stuttgart axis where it would surround German Army Group G and then move up behind the US 6th Army Group, cutting off all escape for General Devers.”

Deering turned to face his small audience.
“In short, after one week, Shaposhnikov would have control of all land east of the Rhine.
He’s got the resources and the men to do it.”

“Then what?”
Staverton asked.

“He regroups and takes Paris.”

“Just like that?”

“Once he’s driven a wedge through our forces, there’s precious little we can do.
He’s got more than three million troops under his command, his tanks outnumber ours by almost three to one, he’s got four thousand fighters and fighter-bombers -’’

“Dammit, Deering, you’ve got to have some ideas!
You’re the Soviet specialist.
.
.”
Welland paused.
“We’ve got to bring in the Americans.”

“It’s a no-win situation,” Deering’s voice was flat.
“The PM does not want the Americans brought in yet, maybe not at all.
And the only way of stopping Shaposhnikov once he’s on his way is to mobilize more troops into Europe from the United States.”

“But that would take weeks, months perhaps.
Look how long it took us to prepare for Overlord.”

“Precisely my point, Admiral.
It’s hardly the best way to exploit the one advantage we have - surprise.”
Deering, devoid of answers, turned the floor over to Welland.
“What do you suggest, Admiral?”

“Well, without the Americans blocking the attack, it’s obvious that Shaposhnikov has to be removed.
The text tells us that he’ll be co-ordinating the 1st Ukrainian’s advance from this place Branodz.
All we need to know is when he arrives and that shouldn’t be too difficult to find out.
I suggest we send a team into Czechoslovakia and have him killed.
If he has Stalin’s backing and we manage to get rid of him, the architect of Archangel, then it will buy us time.
If he’s a maverick, operating on his own, then we stand a bloody good chance of nipping this thing in the bud.”

“What sort of team have you in mind, Admiral?”
Staverton asked.

“This is exactly the sort of mission that the Special Boat Squadron is trained for.
We parachute them in and have them kill Shaposhnikov.
They would be in and out in forty-eight hours.”

“And if one of them is taken?”
Staverton cocked an eyebrow at Welland.
“Admiral, the merest whiff of British intervention is going to bring Stalin down on us like a ton of bricks.”

“What’s the alternative?”

Staverton sucked his teeth.
“He has to be killed, you’re right in that, but we’ve got to make it look as if the Germans did it.”

“My dear Staverton,” Welland said disparagingly, “you don’t think I was suggesting that the SBS should go in wearing full mess dress?
They would be disguised as German paratroops, SS, traffic police for all I care ...”

Staverton stood up, walked to the map and stabbed his finger on the spot that marked Shaposhnikov’s HQ.
“Admiral, do you have any idea what your men would be up against?
There are close to one million Red Army troops in this sector alone and, if that isn’t enough, around fifty thousand partisans in these forests, all of them looking for Germans to butcher.”

Welland stared back impassively.
He disliked the AVM, because he was everything he wasn’t: brash, short on etiquette, risen from the ranks, still with a trace of that northern accent.

“So, even if your men could get in, they couldn’t get out.
And think what happens if one of them is captured.
If you were faced with the prospect of having your eyes gouged out by some swarthy Slav peasant, Admiral, would you stay silent?”
Staverton stressed the word “peasant” in a way that made Welland feel uncomfortable.
It was as if the AVM knew what he had been thinking.
He shifted his gaze to Deering.

“What about you, Deering?”

The Army Intelligence officer looked at the maze of Soviet forces ranged along the Eastern Front.
“With the all-out military option closed to us, I think we should resort to diplomacy, tell Stalin what’s going on in Czechoslovakia.
We must get him to take control of the situation.”

“You’re making the assumption that Stalin doesn’t know about Archangel,” Welland said.
“For all we know he might actually be behind it.
Just because Archangel appears to be Shaposhnikov’s baby, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t got the Generalissimo’s blessing.”

“Basically, George,” Staverton said, “we’re on our own, whichever way you look.”

Deering seemed to sag.

“What’s your solution to all this?”
Welland said, turning to the AVM.

“Well, it’s a modest idea, but I think it could work.
It’s the sum of a number of proposals discussed in this room tonight.
Like you, Admiral, I believe Shaposhnikov should be assassinated.
However, in my opinion, the only way to accomplish that is by an attack from the air - not an airborne assault, but one that masquerades as a German air-raid.”

“It sounds strangely familiar,” the Admiral said, sarcastically.

“It should do,” Staverton said.
“Berchtesgarten, remember?”

Welland averted his eyes.

“What on earth has Berchtesgarten got to do with Archangel?”
Deering asked.

“Before your days here, George,” said Welland.
“It’s a long story.
This isn’t the time or the place.”
He switched back to Staverton.
“Don’t tell me it involves that flying circus of yours at Farnborough.”

Staverton ignored the gibe.
Temperatures were already high.
“The EAEU is almost tailor-made for this job.
My men are trained to fly German aircraft, to think like Luftwaffe pilots and, in some cases, to speak like them.”

Deering suddenly saw a glimmer and could no longer contain his enthusiasm.
“My God, that’s it.
But how many German bombers have you got down at Farnborough, Algy?
Surely you can’t muster enough to mount an air raid?”

“I don’t have to,” Staverton said.
“I only need one.”

The AVM saw the surprise on every face in the room except Welland’s.

“We’ve been through all this,” the Admiral said.
“The answer is still no.”

“I want to hear him out,” Deering said.
“The PM needs a plan of action on his desk tonight and the rules are the same as they’ve always been.
The three of us have to agree a plan and a majority vote carries the day.”