He wondered if any of the Uzbeks he’d seen taken away a year ago had ended up here. The Soviets were increasingly using mechanized equipment like tractors and bulldozers. The factories east of the Urals were immense, monstrously so, and they had been running twenty-four hours a day since they’d been built. But he’d heard rumors of this facility since his first days back on home soil, in 1942. It would have been built with slave labor. Hundreds of thousands of workers had probably been needed. Just clearing the forests around the site had to have been the work of an army.

“How long will it take us to reach the Chukchi?” he asked.

Kicji carefully placed the food he had been eating back in a pouch. He scratched at his thin beard. “Moving with care, it will be three days there. Four back-with more men it is slower.”

“And how many men can we expect?”

“How many can you arm?”

“Thirty.”

In fact, he had arms caches from which he could outfit many more than that, but although he trusted the guide, he wanted to make certain that if Kicji was captured by the NKVD, he could only give up misinformation.

“Thirty we can find,” Kicji said. “But we will need to talk to different families. Maybe three or four.”

“I understand,” Ivanov said. Like many nomads, the Chukchi formed bands held together by familial ties. It probably wouldn’t be possible to gather all of the men he needed from one tribe. “Ahmed, Sergo? Are you agreed? We shall raise a party, and take a sizable convoy.”

“God willing,” the jihadi added.

“As always,” Ivanov conceded.

“I agree,” Sergo said. “I like it.”

“And you, Vendulka?”

The medical officer had remained quiet, as was her wont. Ivanov always asked her opinion last, although hers was the viewpoint that meant the most to him.

“We will have to be quick,” she said. “We can jam their communications in the passes, where they would fail anyway. But if they’re high-value targets, they will be missed quickly.”

“Of course.”

Zamyatin raised the glasses to her eyes again. Still frowning. “The haze has cleared a little. Take a look,” she said.

Ivanov retrieved the binoculars. He could make out an airfield to the west of the facility. Two small silver planes were coming in to land. “MiGs,” he said.

“Rocket planes?” Ahmed Khan asked. “They have rocket planes now?”

“Yes,” said Ivanov. “MiG-Fifteens. Jet fighters.”

The Soviet foreign minister, as immaculate as ever in a dark English suit, positively beamed at Averell Harriman. The American ambassador was hurriedly thinking of ways to stall for time, but he didn’t need to. Molotov refused to stay for a drink, which was unheard of, begging off with the claim that he had to get to the British mission, as well.

He turned and hurried out the front door, never having penetrated farther than the entrance hall of the embassy. Harriman read through the top-page summary again. It would take hours to trawl though the two-inch-thick sheaf of documents he’d just been handed.

“Well, sir? Is there anything else?” asked his chief military liaison, Colonel Squires.

“Good God, isn’t this enough? They’re back in the war. They’re releasing our sailors and ships. And they’re attacking Japan, for good measure. You’d better get everyone in, Colonel. We’re going to be up all night. I’d best give the Brits an early warning, too. Oh, and I’ll need a secure channel to Washington. I’ll use the Samsung.”

The army officer snapped to attention. “Very good, sir. I’ll get Mr. Wilson to call your wife, tell her you’ll be late.”

“Tell her I won’t be home at all tonight,” he said grimly.

He had a feeling this was going to be very much like the days after the Allies had bombed the Demidenko center and everyone had sat around on tenterhooks waiting to see whether it would push the Soviets into an open declaration of war on the West. It hadn’t-perhaps only because Moscow had denied all along that such a facility even existed. Or perhaps because, as the British argued, it was a chimera designed to draw attention away from other, more important facilities.

Harriman was vaguely aware of an increase in the bustle of activity throughout the embassy, as junior officers and diplomats were roused from their offices or called in from their homes. He walked slowly back to his office, where his secretary already had the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Clark-Kerr, waiting on the telephone. The secure line.

“I just had Molotov over here,” Harriman said without preamble. “He’s on his way over to you right now. They’ve declared war on Germany and Japan. They’ve got twelve million men on the move right now. Stalin wants a summit with the president and Mr. Churchill as soon as possible to discuss ‘common goals.’”

“Good grief,” Clark-Kerr said. “This is a bit of a turnup for the books. What details do you have?”

Harriman looked at the document Molotov had just delivered. “He’s dropped a lot of paper on us. It’ll take a few hours to work through it. In fact, we should divide the task, half and half. That’ll be much quicker.”

“I’ll have my intelligence johnnies call yours when we get our package. Divvy up the work, although I’ll need to send a preliminary report to London.”

“That should be possible. Molotov included a three-page summary as a top sheet. Boiled down, it says two things. The men and ships from PQ Seventeen are being released, and the Soviet Union is now at war with the Axis powers.”

“I see,” Sir Anthony said. The two-word phrase was heavy with unspoken thoughts. To himself, however, Harriman could not help thinking, Where in God’s name is this going to end?

Laventry Beria examined his penis. It was hard, and the fish-belly-white flab of his expanding gut threatened to engulf it. As often happened after days of nigh-unbearable stress, he found himself all but overcome by an irresistible surge of sexual energy as soon as he was released from the source of the tension.

He had just spoken to Professor Kurchatov again, and been reassured that the weapon would fire as intended. Initial reports from the Ukraine indicated that the nationalist counter-revolutionary forces had been crushed under the advance of Zhukov’s front. That wasn’t the primary intention, of course, just a happy side effect of pouring so many tanks and divisions across the western Ukrainian plains. The new weapons, developed under his supervision using information taken from the Vanguard, were sweeping through the German defenses like a scythe.

All in all, he had done well. Much better than so many others charged with the defense of the Motherland. As he sat alone in his office, the door locked and defended by his bodyguards, colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia, he rummaged around in his drawer, pushing aside his bloodstained blackjack clubs, numerous pairs of silk stockings, two pairs of panties, and pile of pornographic photographs as he searched for…

Ah, here it was. The love letter from Irina, his current favorite among the stable of female swimmers and basketball players he kept to satisfy his appetites. She was a good writer, with a strong clear hand, and a truly amazing ability to recall their Herculean lovemaking in the most exacting gynecological detail. He had his cock in hand and was about to begin when the phone rang.

It was Stalin. Beria had had a separate phone line put in to ensure that he could identify calls from the supreme leader when they came in. A man could die badly in the USSR simply because he didn’t answer the phone in time. Beria had authorized a number of such executions himself.