Red Inferno: 1945 (24 page)

“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.

A
LTHOUGH 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 slaughtering the Red air force in the early days of the Great Patriotic War with Germany, he had been safe in a training command near the Urals.

“This time it’s their bombers and we can’t stop them,” Brovkin practically sneered.

The sky was clear, and overhead they could see the sunlight reflecting on the American planes. The effect was a silver twinkling of what looked like scores of tiny flying fish. He fervently wished they had been fish. Guchkov knew he was safe where he was because he now understood what was happening. The Allies had built up an air army of their own near Tehran and were going to use it to do what Hitler and his Panzers could not—destroy the oil fields!

All day long, the bombers came in waves, and he could see, hear, and smell the effects of the bombing. He could also see the fires where the wells and storage tanks had been set aflame. Dozens of dark, greasy fingers of smoke searched for the sky and many more fires must have been unseen in the distance.

At night the fighters returned, vectored in by the flames. They crippled attempts to repair the runways and hit anything they could see. They also denied sleep to the exhausted Russians and the terrified people of Baku. In the morning the bombers returned. Communication lines were damaged so Guchkov had no detailed information, but he did manage to find out that the bombs were falling all over the Caucasus region.

In his frustration, Guchkov got roaring drunk and beat up his night mistress, while the blonde stayed prudently out of his way. As the communications situation improved a little, he managed to find out that virtually the same thing was happening to the refining center at Ploesti and the oil fields in Romania. Although the battles for those areas were not as one-sided as the devastation around Baku, the reports of destruction mirrored his.

It didn’t matter. His command and his career had been destroyed. If his planes and guns had inflicted any real damage on the American tormentors and their airplanes he was not aware of it.

When, after a couple of days, there was a real lull in the attacks, he took a quick tour of the area. Most of the wellheads had been destroyed and were burning furiously, as were the refining and storage areas. The main rail lines from Baku to Rostov had been severed in a score of places and would require major reconstruction before any oil could be shipped. That is, if oil could ever again be brought from the ground in the first place. The totality of the disaster appalled him.

There were very few reports of bombers being shot down, and when he did find one crashed on the ground, he went to it and stared at the scattered rubble of the giant plane. It was a B-29. Soviet intelligence had said they were in the Pacific. This meant they were coming to Europe to join in the war. He calculated the range. Based in Iran, they could hit most of southern Russia. The cities of Odessa, Sevastopol, Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad could be bombed, perhaps even Moscow.

“Did we get any prisoners?” Guchkov asked.

“Half a dozen,” Brovkin replied.

“Kill them.”

Brovkin disagreed. “I would like to interrogate them first, comrade General.”

“Of course,” Guchkov said. He didn’t see the look of relief on Brovkin’s face. No prisoners would be murdered if he could help it.

Stunned, and in a drunken near-stupor, Guchkov allowed himself to be driven back to his office. There were radio messages from Stavka on his desk asking for information about the disaster. How badly were the fields hit? they asked. Would the flow of oil be interrupted? If so, for how long? When will oil be shipped again?

What they didn’t directly ask was who was to blame. Everyone knew who was to blame. Major General Vassily Guchkov, that’s who. Guchkov sobbed. He sent a coded message that the fields had been destroyed, as had all the supporting facilities and the transportation lines. Yes, he said, the fields could produce oil again, but not in this year of 1945. Maybe in 1946, but he doubted that.

Guchkov knew he was to blame and would be punished brutally. They had left him five hundred planes and he had failed. That the planes were shit, the pilots were poorly trained, and that the best mechanics had left as well, so that at least a third of the planes had been grounded for mechanical problems at the time of the assault, was no excuse. That he had no radar and his inherited antiaircraft guns faced north and not south was his fault as well. He was doomed.

Guchkov told his staff he did not want to be disturbed. He went into his office and closed the door. He took a seat behind his desk and pulled the Tokarev automatic pistol from its holster, stuck it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

Outside Guchkov’s office, his staff jumped at the sound of the shot. A couple of them rushed for the office but were stopped by Brovkin. “Why bother hurrying?” he said. “Just another of his messes we’ll have to clean up.”

Later that night, his nighttime mistress tried to make a run for it. She got about a hundred yards before she was caught and had her throat slit.

T
ONY SIPPED HIS
thin potato broth and looked across the small fire they’d lit to warm their food. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the feel of that knife alongside his throat. The man on the other side of the fire had said his name was Joe Baker and would give neither his rank nor his branch of service. But he did say he was with the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. To Tony, the OSS was the stuff of legend. Cloak-and-dagger boys trained to kill and destroy. They made movies about the OSS, and here he was with one of those people. It was even more comforting than the bombing attack during his captivity at the work camp that had gotten him into so much trouble in the first place.

Baker was the man who had been watching him in the Russian camp, and now looked innocuous enough. Like Tony and the others, he was a little on the small side and thin, although unlike the two Poles who were now Tony’s only other companions, Baker looked like he was in fine shape, like an Olympic distance runner.

After Baker had been convinced that Tony would not betray him, they had located Vaslov, who then found the other Pole. The remaining refugees had already scattered.

Baker, it turned out, had also been rounded up by the Russians and forced to work and had chosen that same evening to make his break. He had suspected Tony was an American by the fact that he looked fairly healthy, and then had confirmed it by reading Tony’s lips when he was trying to communicate with Vaslov.

Baker had assumed leadership of the little group. No one had argued. Baker could be lethal when he wanted, as the incident with the knife had proven. He had told them that it was better they remain few in number so as to not attract either attention or people who might talk under torture. When Tony had told him about the two Jews, Baker had been deeply touched. Tony, who didn’t think Baker was his real name, now thought that the OSS man might be Jewish.

Baker said he had a job to do and he could do it either alone or with the help of a handful of others. Too many would get in the way. His assignment was to cause as much harm as possible to the Russian transportation system. Specifically, he was to find their local oil stores and call in air strikes on the small shortwave radio he’d parachuted in with and hidden. As a last resort, he would try to destroy the targets himself.