“Thus we must temporarily draw down our forces in the east, which are doing nothing, to secure our western flank before it becomes impossible to move them at all. We must hold the line against the Allies until we possess the weapons necessary to strike back at them.”

With that, his eyes bored into Himmler.

“And when do you think that will be, Herr Reichsfьhrer?”

“It has begun, Comrade Secretary. The Germans are moving at least half their divisions away from the edge of the DMZ. They are heading west.”

Joseph Stalin clasped his hands together and showed off a mouthful of yellowed teeth to his assembled cronies: Beria, Foreign Minister Molotov, and Central Committee Secretary Georgi Malenkov.

“Excellent. Just excellent. And so, Beria, do we stand ready?”

The head of the NKVD nodded, though without much enthusiasm. It wasn’t that he had misgivings about the operation. No, it was just that Laventry Beria was mindful of any path he walked, checking for dangerous pits along the way. It made him a very calculating individual.

He consulted the flexipad in his hand, although it wasn’t really necessary. He was more than familiar with the details of the operation at hand.

“I would never have thought that terrorist criminals could prove so useful,” he said. “The trial of the Ukrainians proceeds. Their nationalist guerrillas-along with the Chechens, the Balkars, and Tatars-all remain in open revolt. We have given much publicity to the Red Army’s actions in response. This provides cover for the movement of Zhukov’s and Konev’s forces, although the world remains fixated on Western Europe.”

Stalin, playing with his pipe behind his desk in the Little Corner, regarded Beria through eyes as black and unreadable as polished stones.

“But your troops have the situation in hand? We are not about to leap into one battle with another raging at our hindquarters, are we? And these recidivist splitters, they have proven to be much more adaptable than you had imagined, no?”

“Everything is in hand,” Beria insisted as a small spasm of terror shuddered through him. “Grozny has been depopulated. The fighting there continues mostly in the countryside. The three nationalist armies of the Ukrainian traitors remain significant forces in context, but they are about to be crushed by the fifty-four armies under our command. We have twelve million men ready to fight. Nine thousand tanks. Sixty thousand tubes of artillery and all the special technologies, of course…although the numbers are really the concerns of the marshals. I simply state these facts to reassure you that we have nothing to be concerned about.”

“And Task Number One?” Stalin asked.

“Is ready,” said Beria. “Professor Kurchatov says we shall be able to test-fire a warhead in two days.”

“And he anticipates success?”

“He would not dare to mislead me about this. He understands the consequences of miscalculation. And of course, he has been locked away in the Vanguard Sharashka, so he knows nothing of the German activities. They did not even factor into his thinking when I spoke with him.”

Stalin seemed pleased, and Beria relaxed inwardly. The Soviet leader relit his pipe and began to puff, leaning back and turning the hard wooden chair to part the heavy drapes and peer through the windows at the soft pink-and-orange light of a Russian spring’s evening. Beria waited patiently for him to say something.

Molotov and Malenkov kept their own counsel. Nobody in this room really trusted one another. They never had, and the murderous purges of the post-Emergence period had reinforced that base level of paranoia. If Beria could have pulled out a gun, he would have shot both of the others without a moment’s thought. But Stalin’s Georgian bodyguards would have gunned him down before he could pull back the hammer.

“What of the Americans’ Manhattan Project? Do we have any idea of how advanced they are?”

Chagrin distorted Beria’s features. He commanded the most fearsome intelligence service in the world, yet he could not answer Stalin’s question, as the party boss well knew. He had only asked because of the embarrassment his question would cause.

“We do not know for certain. In the weeks after the Emergence their counterintelligence operations swept up a number of our most useful contacts. It caused some grave problems. But we must assume that they, like us, are well advanced. And of course, they cannot know of our progress because they do not know of the Vanguard. It will come as a terrible shock to them.”

“And to Hitler,” Molotov added.

“Most especially to that little bastard,” Stalin growled, but not without a hint of good humor. “We must ensure that the first bomb does not kill him. I would hate for him to be spared the realization of what is about to happen.”

“Again, that is a matter for the air force marshals,” Beria said.

Stalin spun his chair slowly around to face them again. “And you, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich,” he said. “You are prepared?”

The foreign minister held up two large brown envelopes. “I have the notes ready to send to the British and American missions,” he answered, “along with all the supporting documentation they will require. The sailors and merchantmen we have been holding are already en route to port, if I am not mistaken.”

He looked to Beria for confirmation, and received it as a nod. Impounding the Allied convoy PQ 17 two years earlier had been a rash act, although he would never say so to Stalin-or to anyone really, as it would certainly get back to the Vozhd. The action had nearly pushed the Allies into declaring war on the Soviet Union, and only the dire strategic situation of 1942 had saved them. The democracies could not afford another enemy.

Beria, who had sent millions to their deaths, had made sure that the Allied personnel were interred under the most humane circumstances possible. A ham-fisted oaf like Malenkov would have liquidated them, but now they provided a perfect sop to the Americans and British, a way to convince them of the Soviet Union’s good intentions. They were being trucked back to their ships, which remained at anchor in Murmansk, and would be free to leave on Stalin’s say-so.

All that was required was for the leader of the USSR to give the final order, abrogating the cease-fire with Nazi Germany and unleashing the Red Army into Western Europe, as well as upon the Japanese Home Islands. London and Washington would be told within minutes that the Soviet Union was reentering the struggle at their side. They wouldn’t, however, be informed that by the end of the struggle, the political map of the world would look very different from its outline at the end of the “original” war.

Nevertheless, they could probably work that out for themselves. And since the USSR would be a nuclear power within forty-eight hours, there wasn’t much they could do besides offer their lukewarm thanks for the assistance.

Stalin picked up a phone that connected him to Zhukov’s headquarters.

“Marshal,” he said, “this is Stalin. You will proceed.”