“Yeah, Don’t fuck with the revolution,” Kolhammer said. “Jesus, what a shambles. I wonder how close we are to lighting off our first one.”

“A lot closer now, I’ll wager,” Spruance said.

Kolhammer didn’t bother to reply. It was a laydown that whatever capacity existed, it would be used to accelerate the Allied atomic program. But it wasn’t his business to know about the progress of the Manhattan Project, even though so many of its resources had come from his original Multinational Force. Nearly a thousand personnel from the Clinton had been allocated to Groves.

He wasn’t completely out of the loop, of course. The decision he’d made two years ago to dispatch Ivanov to the Soviet Union had taken on an entirely new character. Far from being considered “dangerous and stupid”-in the well-chosen words of Admiral King-it was looking like a remarkable act of foresight. Ivanov’s little group was about the only card they had to play.

“Admiral Spruance, Admiral Kolhammer, excuse me, sirs. We’ll have the link in two minutes.”

Both men straightened and turned away from the video display. A young woman, a ’temp, was standing behind them.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Spruance said. “We’ll be right along.”

Kolhammer shook his head as he took one last look at a loop captured by a Big Eye drone that had been moved over Lodz by the Trident. The Soviets had protested that, of course, but not too energetically. They were more than happy for the West to see exactly what they were capable of accomplishing.

“Let’s go,” Spruance said.

They left Intel and walked a short way down the corridor to a comm shack, a much smaller room with three screens, glowing blue and displaying a countdown.

…0056

0055

0054…

Kolhammer and Spruance settled themselves in front of the flat panels as the female ensign checked the videoconferencing connections.

“How long till the Havoc gets back to us?” Spruance asked.

“Willet will be on station in about two hours,” Kolhammer said. “She’ll deploy drones and start taking the feed immediately. Raw data should arrive in the first burst by thirteen hundred hours. Her intelligence boss will give it a cover note, but we have a lot more analysts than she does, so a full picture will probably be another few hours.”

“Until then I suppose we can take the Soviets at their word.”

“Yes. If they say they’re going to attack the Home Islands, they undoubtedly will.”

“Do you think they’ll use another atomic bomb?”

Kolhammer shrugged. “We’ll know when we know. Lodz might have been their one shot in the locker. Even assuming they grabbed the Vanguard, and I think that’s a safe assumption now, you can’t build a nuclear weapon out of box tops and rubber bands. It’s a very difficult task, and it chews up tremendous resources.”

“Ten seconds,” the ensign announced.

“I hope to God you’re right, Admiral,” Spruance said. “I wouldn’t like to think of old Joe Stalin with a locker full of those things.”

“That’s why I doubt he has many yet,” said Kolhammer. “If he did, he’d have used them on everyone. Including us.”

The three blue screens flickered into life, with each displaying a different video window.

“Links verified secure,” a sysop announced through the speakers. “Level One encryption.” He had a British accent. Probably one of Halabi’s people.

In the screen on the far left sat Churchill, Eisenhower, and a clutch of American and British staff officers. They seemed to be in an underground bunker, and Kolhammer assumed it was the war rooms in London, which had been fitted out with some of the Trident’s communications gear. In the center screen he found the president and the Joint Chiefs, back in Washington, and on the right-hand display was General MacArthur, beaming in from the South West Pacific Area Command in Brisbane. In the top left-hand corner of each screen a small separate window displayed the local time.

The sound came on with a crackle a few seconds after the video.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.” It was President Roosevelt. “By now you’ll all have been properly informed about the Soviets’ atomic attack on the Germans in Lodz.”

Not just the Germans, Kolhammer thought.

“I believe General Eisenhower is going to update us on the situation in Western Europe.”

Everyone on screen shifted slightly as they switched their attention to a different screen. Neither he nor Spruance had to, as an experienced operator down in the Clinton’s communications center reformatted their display to bring Eisenhower to the middle screen.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” the general said before launching into his delivery. “As of six hours ago, the two main German army groups in Western Europe were in total disarray. They were already suffering badly from our coordinated air campaign, but had begun to adapt to that by breaking down into smaller units and moving to enmesh themselves with forward elements of the Allied advance, making it difficult to target large formations for strategic interdiction.

“Following the attack on Lodz, however, such mobile forces as remained intact have begun to redeploy east, back into Germany, leaving comparatively modest blocking forces to delay any pursuit on our part. General Patton’s Third Army continues to make deep thrusts into the enemy’s northern flank. Patton’s lead elements are now threatening the German city of Bonn. In France, Paris has fallen to the Free French Armored Division, but street fighting has broken out among Resistance factions.”

Eisenhower paused at this point to look up into the web-cam.

“The French Communist Party has called for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the people of the Soviet Union, and invited the Red Army to help them liberate the French masses. Moscow has denied any such intention, but they also haven’t asked their French comrades to lay down their arms. For the moment, the city remains under curfew and Free French forces are attempting to put down the insurgency.

“Fighting in Italy continues, although the Germans have begun to evacuate their forces from Rome as ours approach from the south. Negotiations are under way to declare Rome an open city, though our intelligence sources within the capital indicate that fighting has broken out between Communist cells and the interim administration. The Italian Communists are also calling for the Red Army to move south and liberate them. The Germans are reinforcing the Gothic Line along the Apennines with some of their troops from the south, but most appear to be headed for Germany.”

Eisenhower finished reading from his notes and turned to Churchill, who was sitting beside him. “Mr. Prime Minister?”

The famous voice filled the small communications room where Kolhammer and Spruance sat. “General Eisenhower’s briefing runs up to six hours ago, because at that time we received a direct communication from the German foreign minister asking for a cease-fire, as a preliminary step to opening peace negotiations on the Western Front.”

Kolhammer heard Spruance curse softly beside him. For his own part, he merely lifted his eyebrows. He’d been expecting something like this. He noted that only Roosevelt and General Marshall seemed to take the news in stride. They’d obviously been briefed before the linkup.

“As significant as this development might be,” Churchill continued, “it is just as important that Herr Ribbentrop was acting on the orders of Reichsfьhrer Himmler, not Herr Hitler. It appears that some ill fortune may have befallen the Nazi leader, but at this stage we don’t know the nature of his situation. We do know, however, what they are offering: a complete cessation of hostilities, withdrawal of all German forces to their 1939 positions, and, most risibly, an alliance against what Foreign Minister Ribbentrop is calling the Bolshevik menace to civilization.