Lieutenant Filomenko clutched the Tokarev pistol so tightly he thought the grip might leave a scar on his palm that would last for the rest of his life. Not that he expected to live much past the next few minutes.

As an officer in a Soviet penal battalion, he had a very short life span anyway. He’d been attached to this particular “forward unit” for one month, when all of its other leaders had been killed in the advance through the Ukraine and across the Polish plains. The rules were straightforward. Survive the month, and he could “retire” back to a rifle company, his four weeks of service counting sixfold when it came to calculating his army pension.

At that he almost laughed. Climbing through piles of corpses torn asunder by German artillery, how could the prospect of old age be anything but a cruel joke.

“Move your fucking asses,” he screamed at his men, firing off a couple of rounds from the handgun to encourage them forward. It was hard to think of them as “his men,” though. These were the walking dead. Criminals. Traitors. Cowards. The very bottom of the barrel.

Wearing blue tunics and black caps they ran forward, shoulder-to-shoulder, only the most trustworthy of them actually armed with imperial-era Mosin-Nagant rifles. Like Filomenko they would shoot down any who wavered. Many of them had no boots. Others had fashioned crude footwear from rags and even sheets of tree bark. If by some miracle they survived the poisoned ground, the swim across the Oder under heavy fire, and the scramble up the far bank, most of them would have to throw themselves onto the fascists with only their bare hands and their teeth to use as weapons.

Filomenko didn’t expect to get that far. Hopping quickly over the mounds of his slaughtered comrades, he recited a silent prayer. To be caught even whispering it would mean permanent exile to a penal battalion.

That thought brought forth another ironic chuckle.

“Hail Mary full of grace…”

The field sloped gently down toward the river. The ground in between was thick with the dead, but already he could tell the difference between the smashed and shattered remains through which he was currently forced to move-a Stygian field of severed limbs, shredded torsos, and spilled viscera-and the eerily peaceful scene that lay ahead. The soft ground was largely undisturbed, but was carpeted with hundreds of bodies, all of them twisted into hideous contortions. Filomenko expected to taste or smell something besides burned earth and scorched remains, but other than the usual stench of a battlefield, there was nothing.

Perhaps the poison had cleared.

“…the Lord is with thee…”

He had time enough to wonder why the Germans weren’t firing at them, and he noticed how dry his mouth had become. He was used to that, of course. Before a big push he routinely instructed his men to carry extra canteens. Although admittedly had hadn’t bothered with these animals.

“Blessed art thou among women…”

Oh no.

He saw the first man go down about thirty meters in front of him.

“Keep going, keep going,” he roared. “Speed is your only hope. Push through.”

He squeezed off a couple of shots in the air just above the bobbing heads of the front rank.

“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…”

The men pressed on, many of them screaming a guttural war cry. As Filomenko cleared the last of the bodies destroyed by artillery, he fumbled at his hip for a water flask. He was thirstier than he had ever known.

He blinked away tears and snuffled up a runny nose. Still moving forward, he tried to raise the flask to his lips but missed, hitting himself in the cheekbone.

“Holy Mary mother of God…”

The front ranks were down now. Tangled up with the arms and legs of the men who had gone before, and died.

It was no use. They would not get through.

Another soldier in another army might have turned back. But not a Russian. One of the convicts turned around and jerkily attempted to retrace his steps. Filomenko shot him in the face.

“Forward! Forward!”

A dizzying wave of nausea enveloped him, and his chest felt so tight he thought he might be having a heart attack. It felt as if he’d run thirty kilometers, not the two and a half they had just covered. His legs buckled at the knees and he fell forward, landing with a bone-jarring thump next to a man who was shrieking and gurgling, clawing at his own eyes.

Filomenko’s bowels evacuated, massively and violently. He vomited with such force that surely he must have ejected a part of his own stomach. Great spasms began to convulse his body, and he found himself facedown, thrashing involuntarily, sucking up clods of dirt.

“Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…”

Lieutenant Filomenko wanted to cry out. But he couldn’t.

It wasn’t a simple thing to make an atomic bomb. Not a simple thing at all. If only the Vozhd would realize that.

Beria had a piercing headache and was sick with worry precisely because Stalin refused to accept this fact. The general secretary sat across the desk from him, regarding the NKVD chief with a cold, implacable stare. It was a look as empty of human feeling as the expression on a bronze statue. Indeed, any sculptor who produced such a likeness would probably be shot. None of the other men in the room gave him the slightest hint of sympathy.

“I have been pushing and pushing, Comrade General Secretary,” Beria protested. “I even had a couple of laggards and their families removed from the program and transferred to a punishment camp, just to encourage the rest.”

“Really?” Stalin said. His expression didn’t change. No one else dared speak.

Beria was about to reiterate how stern and uncompromising he had been in pursuit of the business of state, but something in Stalin’s tone stopped him.

The supreme leader of the Soviet Union spoke again in a chillingly flat manner.

“Perhaps you should not have done that, Laventry Pavlovich. Your methods have been somewhat crude, yes? If you had not been so heavy-handed with those few British sailors who survived the Emergence, perhaps we would not be having this unpleasant conversation. Perhaps we would be toasting the victory of the workers in Berlin. Or London. Or Washington.”

This was intolerable! Stalin accusing him of being crude!

Beria was only too aware that every eye in the conference room was now resting on him. The chill in Stalin’s gaze was repeated a dozen times around the table as the other members of the Stavka, the supreme Soviet war council, weighed the risk of incurring his wrath should he survive this meeting.

Clearly they found his chances wanting. The military officers remained stone-faced, but he could see all too well the shameful joy in the eyes of the civilian ministers, especially Malenkov. That fat freak was practically wetting himself with suppressed mirth.

Standing in his place at the table, struggling to control the tremors that wanted to turn him inside out, Beria fought for his life.

“Comrade General Secretary, it was necessary to adopt the harshest measures with the captives. If I might be allowed to remind you, they attempted to destroy their own ship when apprised of its situation. And there was no way for us to know that they possessed the inserted devices that allowed them to withstand so much pain. Indeed, we did not even know we were killing them! Our methods seemed to yield few results until it was too late.”