Stalin wished for just a moment that the burdens of state didn't have to lie so heavily on his shoulders. He would have loved to make the journey to the special facilities that were being constructed around the ship, just to see it with his own eyes. But such things were not possible.

Then he snorted in amusement. Was there anything that could be called impossible nowadays?

"Vozhd?" his secretary asked. "Something amuses you?"

"Life amuses me, Poskrebyshev. Life, and everything about it. Tell me, are they here yet?"

"Yes. They are waiting outside."

"Well, bring them in, bring them in."

Poskrebyshev carried his narrow-shouldered, slightly hunched frame out of the room. He'd never really been the same since the NKVD had executed his wife. He had an impressively ugly countenance, which Stalin admired because it frightened visitors who came to the Little Corner. That countenance wore a perpetual scowl.

He reappeared, with Beria and Molotov in tow. The secret policeman seemed as chipper as ever, which was to say not at all, but at least relentless morbidity was his natural state of being. Molotov, like everyone in high office these days, looked as though the executioner stalked his every move.

They sat in hard wooden chairs in front of Stalin's desk. He spoke first to Molotov. "So, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich, we have acceded to the fascists' request for assistance on this one little matter, and I can see that you are still not happy."

"I doubt the British will see it as such a trifle," said Molotov. "They are rather fond of Churchill, and will not appreciate the fact that we have helped the fascists to kill him."

"Yet our involvement is quite deniable," said Beria. "Our man should be able to get himself out to Ireland, and then home when he is done."

Stalin, like his foreign minister, still was not sure.

Britain had come close to declaring war on Russia when he'd impounded the ships of convoy PQ 17 at Murmansk, just before signing the cease-fire with Germany. Their anger was quite reasonable, he admitted. With one backhanded sweep, he had done more to damage the Royal Navy than Hitler's oafish admirals had managed in two and a half years.

The vessels were still there: thirty-five merchantmen and their escorts, including four destroyers, ten corvettes, two antiaircraft auxiliaries, and four cruisers. He had been scrupulously fair, refusing every German entreaty to turn the ships over to the Kriegsmarine. And the crews were being held in relative comfort, given the deprivations of wartime Russia.

But it was important that he maintain the facade of neutrality, and that meant detaining the combatants. The materiel in the holds of the ships had always been meant for his country, so he kept the hundreds of tanks and bombers, the thousands of trucks and other cargo. The trucks, in particular, had been very useful, when it became obvious that the Vanguard could not be moved. He stroked the model of the trihulled warship.

The Nazis, with their pathetic attempt to deceive him with the Demidenko project, would have fainted dead away if they could see what Kaganovich and Zhdanov had built around the Vanguard. Well, they would know soon enough. His country might be poor, but it was still a giant, and vast amounts of her resources were now being directed to exploiting the windfall of the Vanguard. If he could just keep the fascists and the capitalist gangsters at war with each other, and away from his own jugular for a little while longer, he would soon be able to strike at them both, and set history right.

The Nazis dismal efforts at maskirovka would come back to haunt them, for while it was true that Demidenko was draining much-needed men and materiel from his real efforts, it was also costing Hitler and Himmler an unknowable amount of treasure to maintain the facade of rapprochement. And his Soviet engineers were ingenious enough to quietly learn enough from the "mistakes" at Demidenko to advance the Vanguard project all the much more quickly. If only they'd been able to take and keep more of the crew alive…

But as dialectical materialists, they would work with what was, not what he might wish to be.

"All right, Beria," said Stalin. "Your man is cleared to help the fascists, but there must be no way of tracing our involvement. Do you understand?"

"I will take all necessary measures," Beria replied.

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

"They're coming," said Halabi.

The giant battlespace monitor, which covered two walls of the Trident's hexagonal-shaped Combat Information Center, swarmed with hostile contacts. Thousands of them. So many, in fact, that although Posh could track each individual enemy unit, her human operators had no chance of keeping up.

Thus most of the smaller contacts were simply tagged with a number and buried under layers of more pertinent data, such as the flight of hundreds of slow transports making their way across the air-sea gap between the eastern coast of the British Isles and a series of airfields in Norway.

The highest priority contact, however, was a formation of three blinking red triangles screaming across the French countryside from an originating point just north of a village called Donzenac.

They were hypersonic Laval GA cruise missiles, and the ship's Combat Intelligence had calculated that they would impact somewhere in the U.K. in approximately four minutes. They were even curving around through Belgium and the Netherlands to put themselves well out of reach of any possible countermeasures she might have deployed. Not that there was any need. The Trident could have dealt with them had they been aimed right at her. Her Metal Storm and laser pack weapons systems were specifically designed to neutralize such threats. But there was nothing they could do from hundreds of kilometers away.

"Weapons, can we get an intercept lock?"

"Negative, Captain."

That was the answer Halabi expected. "Mr. Howard, does Posh have an attack profile yet?'

"They're ground-attack variants, Skipper. Almost certainly taken off the Dessaix at some point, and transferred to a makeshift launch tube. They may have even dismantled part of her VLS and used that."

"Doubtful," she mused.

"No projections on likely targets yet, ma'am, but if it was me I'd hit the key sector stations-Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, Debden, and North Weald. Luftwaffe's been leaving them alone, concentrating their bombers on Croydon, Rochford, and the others. Those stations are near critical, and a lot of capacity's been shifted to the undamaged fields. A hammerhead run would knock the RAF out of southern England."

"Comms, you got that?" Halabi asked. Air Vice Marshal Caterson and a couple of the other tourists began to advance on her command station. She ignored them for the moment. "Better give them a heads-up on shore. They're about to get the shit kicked out of them."

"I think you'd best explain what the hell is going on," Caterson demanded.

"Three ground-attack missiles are heading toward England at over five thousand miles an hour," she said, without betraying any emotion. "We cannot stop them. We don't know where they're going to hit, but whatever the target is, it will be gone very soon. My intelligence chief has indicated that the most likely targets are your main sector stations. There's only three missiles, but they're carrying enough submunitions to destroy all four airfields, and then some."

"I see," Caterson said quietly. "And having brought this upon us, what are you going to do about it?"

Halabi ignored the baited hook. "We're going to do exactly as we planned and stay here, providing battlespace management data, waiting for the German surface assets to attempt the crossing."

"Damn you, and your crew," he spat. "What sort of a captain are you, anyway, Halabi? Get out there and do something. You've got this God-almighty ship of yours, but you're hiding behind those destroyers that're out there protecting your worthless black hide.