Beria did not want to let the defense minister escape by the agency of his success. He stared the man down.

“We are stalled at the Oder,” Marshal Timoshenko said. “The fascists have created an impenetrable boundary with these nerve weapons. But in Southern Europe we progress. Our forces have overrun Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Albania. They have entered Greece and northern Italy, the southern regions of Austria, and fresh air assault divisions are being readied to jump into southern France. I can guarantee that within two weeks Vichy France will be ours. The Allies will hold the northern half of the country. I foresee a border that stretches probably from Belfort to La Rochelle. Italy will be cut off entirely. Switzerland can be neutralized.”

Timoshenko’s delivery had been forceful and confident. Beria was grudgingly impressed. The man had somehow made a virtue of failure. For the inability to break through at the Oder was surely failure of the worst sort.

Stalin, however, seemed mollified.

“And Project One,” he said, turning to Beria. “I hope you have something positive to report. Have you finished the two bombs?”

The NKVD chief couldn’t help himself. He smiled.

“No. I have finished three.”

The T5 was wearing off, but they had everything they needed to know.

Ivanov finished writing up his report for the compressed data burst. The glow of his flexipad was the main source of the light in the fetid-smelling cave where they crouched. A couple of whale oil candles flickered farther down the narrow tunnel, filling the cramped space with dark smoke and a pungent aroma.

“What will we do with them?” Vendulka asked.

Ivanov shut down the flexipad’s word processor and dropped the file into a dispatch tray. Internal software agents began to encrypt and compact the long file, which comprised about five gigs of text, audio, and video images.

He regarded the unconscious scientists with professional reserve. As was normal with interrogations carried out through the use of the T5 drug, he had accumulated a great number of irrelevant facts: details concerning their families, their hometowns, the menu at the Sharashka canteen where they ate. All of it useless.

It did humanize them, however. They were no longer simply ciphers to be decoded. The younger one, Anatoly, was recently married. His mother and father had died of starvation during the collectivist period of the 1930s. His wife was pregnant. He hated the cabbage soup.

The older one, Viktor, who had been injured in the ambush, had a secret stash of forbidden literature in his laboratory. He had a wife and five children, all of them grown. Three had died in the first year of the war. He liked the cabbage soup, as long as there was enough pepper to spice it up.

“Kill them,” Ivanov said.

Vendulka grimaced.

“We cannot take them with us,” he said, refusing to allow her response to sway him. “We were lucky to get this far. If we want to get out with our skins intact, we have to move fast and light. Just the five of us.”

“And the Chukchi?” she asked.

“They came to fight the Bolsheviks.” He shrugged. “They don’t want to run away, and they think we are cowards for doing so. They will stay and delay the pursuers.”

His flexipad beeped. The file was ready for transfer. He held it like a talisman.

“They understand that we need to get this message out. That it will hurt the Stalinists if we do. That is enough for them.”

Vendulka was clearly unconvinced. She was a medical officer, and it wasn’t within her nature to snuff out a life for the reason of simple convenience. Ivanov appreciated that part of her character. Even with all the shit they’d been through to survive the last two years, she had never become like him. A simple killer.

He looked at the scientists.

“Best you leave now, Vennie. They will not suffer.”

Her eyes implored him to walk a different path, but he held her gaze without remorse. They lived because they had been careful.

If Stalin or Beria found out they were behind so many of the rebellions that had flared up across the Soviet Union, he would think nothing of assigning a million men to hunt them down. It was only because they remained invisible that any of them still drew breath.

He didn’t need to explain it to her. She wasn’t naпve, or willfully stupid. It was just that Vendulka Zemyatin had somehow maintained feelings for her fellow man, while Ivanov had not. It probably had more to do with the lives they had led on the other side of the Transition. Hers had been relatively clean and uncomplicated. His had been spent fighting the worst sort of scum.

After Beslan he had never been the same.

Vendulka sighed and removed herself.

The scientists were still in a drug-addled stupor. They would not suffer, as he had promised.

Ivanov took a small metal case from his backpack. He removed two syrettes of letha-barb and in turn jabbed each man in the neck. The life ran out of them like air leaking from an old tire.

The Spetsnaz commando gathered up the rest of his gear and hurried back out toward the entrance of the cave. He had to crouch to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. A couple of clumps of bloodied scalp and hair attested to others who had not been so careful.

The sun was up, pouring over the rugged peaks of the Koryak Ranges. Kicji was waiting for him, chewing on a strip of smoked reindeer meat. He offered a piece to Ivanov, along with a bladder full of soju, a Korean rice wine.

“Thanks,” he said. It would do for breakfast. Probably for lunch, as well. “Any sign of the Bolsheviks?”

He could hear the distant whine of jets and the mushy, dampened thud of rotor blades. The sounds were distorted as they echoed around inside the myriad gorges and defiles of the mountains.

Kicji nodded, pointing to the northwest. “Three valleys over. Some of the Chukchi are fighting to draw them away.”

Ivanov nodded. He was surprised, though. He hadn’t arranged a diversion. Kicji had seemed to read his mind. For a wizened old man who looked like an evil charm that had fallen off a witch doctor’s wand, he was sharp.

“The Chukchi decided this among themselves. Ten men stay behind. The rest might get away.”

Ivanov mulled it over. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the taste of clean air in his nostrils. “They understand that they cannot come with us?”

Kicji snorted. “They do not want to. They called you the blunderers. They say your footfall would bring down the side of a volcano, it is so heavy.”

“Fine.” Ivanov shrugged. “We will separate this morning, then. After I have sent my message.”

Kicji nodded, and left to inform the Chukchi. They were so well hidden in crevices, under hanging rocks, and inside the caves that riddled these mountains, Ivanov could not keep track of them. Good. It meant the NKVD would have the same problem.

His own team, Vennie, Sergo, and Ahmed Khan, had huddled down to share some food and drink before the day’s march.

Ivanov quickly unpacked his comm gear, setting up the pulse unit and its dish on a small collapsible tripod. He jacked in the flexipad and set the program to transmit an encrypted signal on wide-area datacast. The burst would travel outward in an arc for five thousand kilometers. He had no idea whether it would pass over a Fleetnet node, but he had to assume that Kolhammer had moved some assets into the area to take the feed.

To be certain, he would repeat the process whenever possible until he received verification that the signal had been intercepted. It was a ham-fisted, inefficient method of communicating such important intelligence, but without satellite cover they had no choice.