Winter Storm (20 page)

Time
for a good spoiling attack with that 10th Army, thought Zhukov. Rokossovsky has
been bawling and crying for anything I can send him, and some of his units even
tried pulling off the line to fight in the suburbs of Moscow, but I put an end
to that, at gunpoint, which is one thing those ruffians understand. Now I will
remind Guderian just how far he is from Orel. We hit the flank of that road to
Serpukhov tomorrow morning.

Moscow
had not yet seen its first snow of the winter, but the
cold was slowly setting in, the rains sometimes turning to sleet, and windows
frosting over at night. On the 22nd of September, the Big Cats of Guderian’s
101st Heavy Panzer Brigade growled into the heart of Serpukhov. The same news
that had so shaken General Zhukov also fled to the capitol, bat like, on the
dark cold winds of the night.

Sergei
Kirov was awake when it came, well after midnight when Berzin tramped in, his
hard face red with the cold, hat in hand. The news of the fall of Serpukhov was
the least of his worries. That was still a hundred kilometers from the city.

“The
Germans have broken through out west,” he said. “We’ can’t stop them.”

“What
are you saying?” said Kirov. “What about 16th Army? What about the Rock?”

“They
moved up yet another panzer Division from the south. It was just enough to tip
the balance. They hit the southern edge of Rokossovsky’s defenses, and found a
hole.”

Kirov
gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening as he listened, eyes dark with
foreboding. “Where?” he said slowly.

“On the
road to Naro-Fominsk.”

“Didn’t
Zhukov just send the 7th Guards in?”

“That
was on the Road to Mozhaysk and Smolensk. Under the circumstances, Zhukov
suggests that we activate Black Snow.”

Kirov
rubbed his forehead, for that was the secret evacuation plan for Moscow that
Berzin had been quietly organizing behind the scenes.

“It
will be much colder in Leningrad,” said Kirov, and even as he did so, the
haunting warning from Fedorov echoed in his mind…
“Do not go to Leningrad in
December…”

It
wasn’t December, and this was 1941, not the year he was to have been killed
there, but yet something about the thought of the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet being evacuated to the old Tsarist Capitol bothered him. “What is the
plan?” he said heavily.

Berzin
allowed a brief pause, letting the news settle a moment before he continued.
“Better Leningrad than Kubyshev,” he said, which had been the historical
location in the original plan to evacuate the top levels of government east.
That was not possible now, because there was no safe haven on the Volga at
Kubyshev. Ivan Volkov had seen to that.

“Beria and
his men arrived last night on the special train reserved for you and high
government ministers,” Berzin continued.

“Stalin’s
old dog,” said Kirov uncomfortably.

“Our
dog now,” said Berzin. “He’ll be growling in the factory district first if we
activate the plan. All warehouses, factory sites and major business centers
will be cleared. Buildings which cannot be evacuated in five days time will be
destroyed. The subway system in the city underground will be shut down in three
days. We’ll use it to move the most important people out first, business class,
doctors, it’s a very long list. After that we destroy the electrical equipment.
Can’t have German infantry riding about on the dam subways.”

There
came the muffled sound of distant artillery fire. “Our guns?” asked Kirov.

“Does
it matter?” Berzin was the hard realist now. “The sound of those guns will
start things moving soon. There are already rumors flying all over the city.
The Germans are here, the Germans are there, and now they are coming up from
the south too. You know how it goes. On the way to the Kremlin I saw an old
woman with a bread cart near Red Square giving her loaves away for free.
Another was passing out roasted potatoes to any man in a uniform. In their
minds, they would rather see our own people take these things than the Germans.
I even saw several shopkeepers passing out warm clothing, free of charge.”

“Good
people here,” said Kirov. “They have dug all those anti-tank ditches with the
labor of their backs, sacrificed their sons and even daughters in the work
crews now.”

“Yes,
and the best of them are all that we have left,” said Berzin. “The Moscow
Militia Division is now posted on the road to Naro-Fominsk. Many have little
more than their shovels and picks. We found rifles for most. Unfortunately,
when the locals saw us arming the trench diggers, it started a quiet panic. The
streets have been so empty these last several days, as there have been no
regular army units in the city. Now they are starting to get busy again. People
are packing up their belongings on anything that will move them. They are
already starting to flee to the north on the main roads. No one can use the
rails except the army, but soon the army will not be able to use those roads.
They will be choked with refugees.”

“Damn,”
said Kirov. “Where are the rest of those Siberian Shock Armies Karpov promised
me?”

“Third
Shock Army was pulled off the trains yesterday by General Zhukov. He wants to
use it to replace the armies we pilfered from his strategic reserve.”

“He’s
still thinking about his damn counterattack? That was not planned until
December!”

“The
Germans might be sitting here by then,” said Berzin.

“Not if
I have anything to say about it. Tell General Zhukov that he is to put the
Siberians back on those trains and bring them here!” Kirov’s finger came down
hard on the table. “Right here, to Moscow where the real battle for the life of
this nation is being fought!”

“He
won’t want to hear that.”

“I
don’t give a damn what he wants. This is an order! The Siberians will come to
Moscow immediately. I will pull them off the trains here, then march them right
through the city—ten times if I have to, round and round Red Square until the
sound of their boots drowns out these whispers and rumors of panic. Tell Beria
that the first building he demolishes without my direct order will be the last
thing he sees as it comes down. Then give orders that none of my personal
baggage is to be loaded on that train. I’m staying right here. We will not
evacuate the government either. I will not go to Leningrad…”

“But
sir… Some of the ministers are very important men, wealthy men, in spite of the
humble roots of our revolution. Power and wealth still beget power. They won’t
want to sit here if the Germans do get into the city, and we risk losing a
great deal more than buildings if that happens—we risk losing control…”

“I will
go to the Politburo this morning and speak to the assembly,” said Kirov. “I
will ask them to stay and fight on.”

“Just
like Stalin did,” said Berzin, only there was cold murder in his eyes when he
asked them each that question. You read the material.”

“Yes,
but Stalin would not abandon the capital, nor will I. The Kremlin Guard will
fight for Red Square if we must, and if the Germans do come here, they we’ll
paint that square red again with their blood.”

“Sir,
we’ve seen this twenty times over. You saw what happened at Minsk, and at Kiev
and Orel. Once the panic starts, it will be hard to stop. Stalin had to order
the NKVD to literally gun down any person in the city who refused a direct
order—right there on the spot. To hold Moscow, he had to put more fear into the
population here than the Germans could, and sir… you are not that man. This
says nothing of your courage or determination to fight on, but I do not think
you will set our dog loose on this city. You told me to keep Beria and his men
under a very tight leash. It doesn’t take much before a panic becomes a riot.”

“We’ll
use the NKVD if we must,” said Kirov, “but I want no wanton killing. The
Siberians are the key. Don’t you see? When the people here see them, men coming
from over a thousand miles away, and from another free sovereign state, to
defend their city, there will not be a man among them who will turn his back
and run. I will address the city on radio tonight. We stay, and we fight. Now
get those orders off to Zhukov, and get that Siberian Shock Army here
immediately.”

*

Lavrentiy
‘Nobi’ Beria did not take the news lightly. Altered states or not, he was the
same ruthless and determined man he had been when Josef Stalin held his leash.
A short, round-faced bespeckled man, he did not appear in any wise to be the
monster that lurked within. He became Kirov’s adjutant in 1920 when the Red
Army took Baku where he was studying. A member of the Cheka at that time, he
was swept up in the chaos of the city and imprisoned in spite of his pleas that
he was a loyal Bolshevik. It took the direct intervention of Sergei Kirov to
save his head, and he soon pledged himself to the security services of the state,
which he found a most beneficial environment for the advancement of his own
ambitions.

Beria
soon distinguished himself as a ruthless and capable man, active in Georgia and
the Caucasus until those states were lost to the Whites. Yet it was during that
tumultuous time that he met another man, a Lieutenant in Denikin’s
organization, and one who seemed most interested in him. The Lieutenant
encountered him in Armavir, moving north in a small column, towards the safety
of then Red occupied Rostov. This time it was the White Army that was planning
to do away with Beria, but this Lieutenant seemed to have a good deal of pull
with Denikin’s troops, and Beria’s life was spared again.

Yet he
spent a good long while with the Lieutenant, the two men often seen after that
in the dark corners of a roadside inn drinking together, and talking long into
the night. Lavrentiy Beria was never the same after meeting that man. If
anything he was colder, more heartless, a man who saw himself as well above and
beyond those around him, and viewing others as mere chattel to be used for his
own dark purposes.

Slowly,
and with surefire certainty. Those purposes saw him rise in the internal
security apparatus until he was head of the NKVD. There, in Moscow as his
headquarters, Beria had sound proof offices built where he would bring women he
had rounded up earlier that day, and brutally rape them, delighting to the
sound of their screams, which could not be heard beyond the doors and walls of
his lair. The bones of young girls were later to be dug up in the gardens of
his Moscow Villa, all victims of his rapacious appetite for depravity.

Sergei
Kirov tolerated him simply because of his strong armed efficiency, though he
had little real love for the man. And over time, the inverse was also true.
Beria came to regard Kirov as a kind of imposter at the head of the Bolshevik
Party, and once, he was seen shaking a finger at a poster bearing Kirov’s image
and saying to an associate NKVD Colonel: “He doesn’t belong there—not at
all—and one day I will tell you why!”

How he
came to know what he claimed to know was a mystery, but Beria had an uncanny
knack of sniffing out counterrevolutionary plots and schemes, breaking up
fledgling cadres of conspirators, and slowly filling up the state prisons that
Kirov permitted for those enemies that could not embrace his style of Soviet
Communism. So as long as Beria was useful, his brutality and depravity were
tolerated, though Berzin personally loathed the man, and often lobbied Kirov to
have him removed as head of the NKVD.

“The
man is grown too big for his britches,” he would say to Kirov in their quiet
meetings alone. “He’ll be a problem one day.”

And
that day had finally come.

The
rains fell cold and hard that morning, and a harsh wind swept in from the grey
skies, chilling down the city as dusk approached. Beria had three battalions of
NKVD in Moscow as the muscle end of Berzin’s Black Snow plan, now hanging in
suspended animation due to Kirov’s stand fast order. Beria got the news as he
was preparing to deploy his first battalion into the underground subway system,
where thousands of people had taken refuge when the German bombers came, and
many simply stayed, being refugees that had been swept into Moscow by the
advancing tides of war, and with no place else to go.

Occasionally,
Beria would haunt the dimly lit underground, moving like a shadow with his
contingent of big, well armed brutes, the Grilikovs of his handpicked security
guards. If he found a particularly pretty woman, and sometimes a lovely boy or
two, they might soon disappear, never to be seen again. But mostly he was all
business, deciding where the key subway junctions and intersection points were,
and plotting how he would flush out the system when the time came, thinking of
the people there as no more than sewage.

The
order to deploy for stage one of Black Snow finally came, and Beria had all his
best men moving to their assigned posts when Berzin found his armored Mercedes
limousine on a quiet street, and gave him the news. The evacuation order would
not be given. Kirov would address the city that evening via radio, and the
Siberians would be moved in as soon as they arrived.

“The
Siberians?” he said, with wide eyed disapproval. “That scum Karpov has been
sending us?”

“Don’t
be so ungrateful,” said Berzin. “Those men are the only reason the Germans
haven’t broken through to the capital sooner. They fought well at Tula.”

“Not
well enough,” said Beria. “Hiring them on as mercenaries was always risky, but
here? In the city? In Moscow itself? This is inviting disaster!”

“It may
be our only hope of salvation,” said Berzin. “In the meantime, take no further
action in the business district unless you hear from me directly. As to the
subways, leave them as they are for the moment.”