“I do not believe she should fire on Yamamoto unless he poses a clear, present, and significant danger to our Allied Forces.”

Out of the corner of his eye Kolhammer noticed that Willet nodded brusquely. Spruance, on the other hand, looked as if he’d been handed a two-headed dog.

“But by the logic of your own argument, Admiral Kolhammer, the very mission we are engaged in should be called off altogether. You are effectively saying that the Japs should be given a free pass to keep the Soviets out of their Home Islands. The end point to that line of thinking is that we make a separate peace with them. That we do not attack or degrade their military infrastructure, or their productive capacity. That we do not punish them for their crimes, and instead we rearm them and support them in any conflict they may have with our allies in Russia.”

Kolhammer maintained as neutral a faзade as he could with so little sleep and such a short fuse burning on his temper. “No, that is not what I’m proposing at all. I’m just saying that any attack on Yamamoto at this stage would be precipitate and unwise. This is a political question, and I think it needs to be resolved on a political level.”

Spruance shook his head. “We can’t hold fire out here, waiting on some sort of gabfest to decide whether or not being at war with someone means shooting at them. We-”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.”

It was Jane Willet. She looked especially disconcerted.

“My comm officer tells me that she has just picked up a transmission from a flexipad on one of the ships we’ve been trailing. It’s a message for Admiral Kolhammer. An e-mail from Yamamoto.”

There was only one advantage to the sickening reverses of the last few days. Stalin was no longer in a mood to party all night, thus sparing everyone the ordeal of his orgiastic benders.

Nevertheless he was still a creature of the night, and the business of the Soviet state was almost entirely conducted after the fall of darkness. For Beria, this was akin to a blessed release. He had moved mountains-literally in some cases-to deliver the weapons the Vozhd had demanded. He could hardly be blamed, could he, if after two years of Herculean effort involving the labor of ten million workers, there was an extra day or two to wait?

Oh yes, he could.

Stalin was the master of finding blame where none existed. Beria himself was something of a savant at the practice. If he had failed, he would be facing a gruesome end in one of his own cells. But as he seated himself at the long table in the Politburo meeting room, Beria felt the giddy, light-headed joy of knowing that his life would go on.

Not everyone there that early morning could be so confident.

Well, at least there was no drinking.

Stalin could be such an animal when the alcohol flowed. His moods were entirely arbitrary, and you never knew from one minute to the next whether you would see the dawn. Beria was convinced that if he hadn’t been excused from that nightly debauch, two days earlier, he wouldn’t have been able to drive the project through to fruition. So he probably owed Hitler and Tojo a favor.

Or Himmler and Tojo, rather, if that was how the dice had fallen. Nobody could be certain what was happening in Berlin at the moment. It was always so when empires died. The same air of madness had preceded the end days of the Russian monarchy.

Anyway, fuck them all.

He was going to live, and the Soviet state was going to prevail. Not just over her immediate enemies, but over her original foes as well. The capitalist democracies.

He took a cold, reptilian pleasure in letting his gaze fall on every man in the room who had reveled in his discomfiture of the previous weeks. For Malenkov he reserved a particularly chilling gaze and was rewarded when the oafish swine flitted his porcine eyes away anxiously. Beria could imagine the dread Malenkov was experiencing, as if the cold finger of a dead man had been laid at the base of the spine, making the heart lurch and the balls contract upward.

Stalin strode in, looking disheveled and gaunt. Scraps of paper fell from the pockets of the uniform the marshal had affected ever since the fascists had attacked in 1941. Nobody dared meet his gaze. Even Beria thought it wise to examine the folder that lay on the table in front of him.

He had one small item of bad news: a partisan attack on a convoy in Kamchatka that had killed a number of middle-ranking researchers. But such things were unfortunately commonplace across all of the republics. More importantly, he had good news from Project One. Given the extra time and a touch more encouragement from the NKVD, Professor Kurchatov’s team had succeeded beyond expectations.

It was a happy day for Laventry Beria.

By way of contrast, the defense minister and navy chief looked physically ill. As well they should. Okhotsk had been a disaster of the first order. Yumashev had assured them all that he possessed the resources to carry out the invasion and protect the beachhead. Now he was dead, luckily for him, and Kuznetsov would be forced to deliver the report, but Soviet maritime power, and its prestige in the East, had been comprehensively fucked. When Beria thought of the resources that had gone into the building program at Vladivostok-the millions of men and the staggering sums that had been spent so profligately to create a modern Pacific fleet, virtually from nothing-it was a disgrace. If just a fraction of those funds and a few hundred thousand of the laborers had been devoted to his projects, then he would not have had to suffer through the fear he had endured.

“So, Admiral Kuznetsov,” Stalin said as he seated himself at the head of the table. “Tell me exactly how you failed.”

Stalin’s voice was quite low, almost inaudible. Beria noticed a few of the others straining forward to make out his exact words.

The man for whom they were intended had no difficulty understanding their import, however. He blanched a sort of gray-green shade and began to babble about some sort of secret Japanese terror weapons, and possible interference by the Americans, possibly even by Kolhammer himself.

While he spoke, Stalin used his fingertips to trace patterns on the polished wooden surface of the conference table. His pipe lay in front of him, but he never moved to fill it, or to light it.

“All of our intelligence spoke of Yamamoto moving south to engage the Americans at the Marianas,” Kuznetsov said. “Our liaison staff in Washington and London confirmed the same. The Americans expected to meet him. They told us they were moving to engage him decisively. And these rocket bombs. These suicide attacks. Nobody had seen the like before-”

“Rubbish!” Stalin shouted, smashing an open palm down onto the table so hard that a few drops of water sloshed out of Beria’s glass a good three meters away. “The Japanese have been using kamikaze attacks for months!”

“But not with these sorts of planes,” Kuznetsov pleaded. “They were like the missiles we heard of, the ones that smashed the Americans at Midway. They were so fast, and since they were being piloted they were able to adjust course to avoid flak and to pick and choose their targets. If Spruance had encountered them without warning, the result would have been the same.”

“Ah, but there you are wrong, aren’t you, Admiral,” Stalin said. “Because we now find out that Spruance has encountered them, and completely neutralized the threat. Something of which you have proven yourself incapable.”

“But…no, I did not-”

The supreme leader of the Soviet Union cut him off by slamming his hand into the table again, this time in a closed fist. “Enough! I have had enough excuses. Timoshenko, do you bring me excuses about the Western Front? Beria, what about you?”