At such an altitude it was impossible to make out anything but the most dramatic features of the landscape below. Somewhere down there, the Red Army had crushed one of the rebel Ukrainian militias, but at twelve thousand meters the countryside looked idyllic, a rich quilt of brown-green earth and golden fields unmarked by human folly or ferocity. Small lakes, ponds, and rivers caught the midafternoon sun, throwing starbursts of light out to the curve of the horizon.
It was an unusually beautiful prelude to what he understood would be a day of unmitigated horror.
D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1633 HOURS.
Beria, who was trying to keep his consumption of vodka and champagne within limits, could feel the malign energy gathering in the room, like a snake coiling itself for the strike.
Apart from the two diplomats, the twenty men present were all high-level party officials. Survivors, for the moment. The only military officers were messengers who came and went every half hour to mutter into Stalin’s ear. In the far corner of the dining room, the British and American ambassadors were trying their best to maintain a dignified faзade, turning down as many drinks as they could diplomatically refuse. They looked less than happy, and if Beria had been in a better mood he would have smiled at their discomfort, knowing that by the end of the day their long faces would be positively funereal.
His own face, however, wasn’t really beaming, either. Despite the fact that decorum, or the lack of it, demanded that he play the role of toastmaster at these foul, drink-sodden debauches, he hated the fucking things. Despised them, in fact. Only Stalin, the drunken gangster, could truly enjoy himself. And in Beria’s opinion the old monster was rapidly losing his grip on his health and sanity under the pressures of the war, the Emergence, and his own bestial appetites.
This party, for instance, had officially begun at lunchtime, when the first bottle of champagne had been uncorked. But all the party magnates, bar Stalin, had arrived still sick and exhausted from the previous day’s binge. That one had begun, as always, in the early evening, when Stalin declared their business over for the day.
In truth, he did very little business in his office now. The empire was run from his dinner table and private cinema. That was even more galling for the NKVD chief. With the world less than a day away from an epoch-shattering change, the supreme leader of the USSR insisted that his closest advisers join him in his specially constructed theater for a “Tarantino marathon” followed by a “little bite”-which inevitably devolved into a terrible, vomit-flecked orgy lasting six hours or more.
Unfortunately the Vozhd had always been a great fan of the cinema, especially American gangster movies and westerns, and with the discovery of the Vanguard came access to her electronic library. After being carefully vetted by the NKVD, thousands of hours of movies and television had been released for Stalin’s perusal. Almost none had been approved for public viewing, but that didn’t mean that the chief himself couldn’t watch them.
After all, who could say no to Stalin?
Certainly not Beria. There were any number of files on the Vanguard that had been too dangerous to release from NKVD control, including a number of books and articles about Beria himself that had made the secret policeman’s head swim when he’d seen them. But they were mostly gone now, deleted along with the unfortunate men who’d found them. The months of nearly paralyzing terror he’d suffered, while covering up evidence of his own less-than-perfect sycophancy at the end of Stalin’s life in the future, were but an unpleasant memory. Even so, he found himself subject to random fits of horror at the prospect that anyone might gain access to such information, despite his precautions. He had probably sent two and a half million people to their deaths or into exile based solely on the Vanguard’s archives.
Yet who knew what incriminating documents lay in wait in the files of the Clinton or the Trident? How long could it be before some capitalist spy would try to blackmail him?
One of Stalin’s maids, a dumpy Georgian in a plain gray smock and white bib, cleared the plate of aragvi from in front him. A personal creation of Stalin’s, it was a thick stew of mutton, eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, and black pepper, all of it drowned in a glutinous spicy sauce. Famine stalked the land, with so much of the state’s productive capacity given over to crash programs developing new technologies-indeed, whole new industries-but in here there was no such discomfort to be found, judging from the bacchanalian feasts served at Stalin’s dacha. When one stupidly valiant servant from the Ministry of Agriculture had written to Stalin about the number of peasant children who were dying of hunger, the man was arrested and shot, though not until he had been shown propaganda films resplendent with imagery of well-fed kulaks seated in front of tables groaning with fresh food.
The disturbing thing was, Stalin actually believed that the images were real. Beria knew that, as his body grew more bloated and ravaged by gluttony and alcoholism, the Vozhd was losing his mental capacities along with his physical. It was a conclusion he probably would have formed of his own volition, but also confirmed by the uncensored future histories and biographies contained within the British ship’s electronic library.
Controlling such information gave him great power, but with it came the risk that Stalin would one day turn on him, deciding he had become a threat. The bowdlerized versions of history he served up were dangerous enough. He had almost wet his pants when he’d had to tell the full Politburo about the collapse of the USSR and its replacement by a gangster-capitalist state. There was no way in hell he was ever going to admit the existence of something like that biography they’d found on the ship-what was it called? -Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Even having laid eyes on the cover was tantamount to a death sentence. He had personally burned every page in the book, but not until he’d read it three times, made coded notes of its contents, and then hidden them in a hundred different files, just in case he ever needed to call upon the information.
And now, through his intoxication-which was considerable-he watched the American diplomat Harriman sip at a glass of white wine while Molotov tried to brute him into downing the whole thing in one gulp. Beria knew he should really push himself up, stagger over, and play the bluff Georgian host, insisting that Harriman drink up and taking umbrage when he refused. But he was engorged with food and drink, and he worried that if he moved he would foul himself. Nobody was allowed to leave the table to go to the lavatory unless Stalin said so, and he hadn’t called a break in more than two hours.
So instead Beria took another shot of pepper vodka, poured by Nestor Lakoba, the Abkhazian boss, and tried to throw it down manfully. His throat locked and he vomited prodigiously into his own lap, causing great mirth around him. Stalin, sitting at the head of the table as always, roared with laughter.
“You cannot be a true Georgian then, Beria,” he snorted. “Look. Our foreign friends are in much better shape than you. Perhaps you are a spy, yes? A plant?”
It could have been a bad moment. Stalin’s moods were so changeable, his rages so arbitrary, that such a joke could easily turn into something much more significant. But the NKVD chief was saved by another bout of racking cramps, and he tried to hurl yet more bile into his lap, causing Stalin to dissolve into fits of giggles.
“Here, wash your mouth out with this,” he insisted, forcing a half-empty bottle of white wine on Beria. There was no question of demurring. He took the bottle and used it to rinse out the chunks of acid-tasting aragvi while Harriman and the British ambassador Clark-Kerr stared at him with unconcealed disgust.