Final impact

Again, Marshall broke up in transmission, but again it hardly mattered. His answer was clear.

“No, sir. We will take sig…casualties against the Nazis. We’re fight…best divisions while Zhukov and Koni…their worst. We’ll have to re-supply…Atlantic…then the channel. They have a significant advan…men and matйriel, and while we can’t gauge just…they’ve advanced their indust…base, it seems obvious that they’ve used the last two years to…least some of their technol…to the same level as ours. The Luftwaffe, for…is having no better luck…their MiGs than they have against our Sabers.”

Admiral King, always the most abrasive of the personalities, cut across Marshall when it seemed as if he was finished. “Can we just deal with the other eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room?”

Roosevelt looked wary, but he nodded. Kolhammer felt a sick feeling forming in his stomach to keep his headache company.

“The Reds didn’t come up with the new planes and guns and tanks by cribbing from afar. And they didn’t get them from that Demidenko complex they were running with the krauts. That was just a hustle by Ribbentrop and Himmler to keep them on side. I think it’s pretty obvious that they’ve independently laid hands on twenty-first technology and documentation-and possibly even expertise-and they’ve grabbed quite a bit of it.”

He was staring out of the monitor directly at Kolhammer now, having learned the trick of addressing the web-cam rather than the screen image.

“Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral Kolhammer?” King concluded.

“I would,” he answered without demur.

There was a noticeable shifting among the men on screen. Nobody looked comfortable. He could sense Spruance becoming very still beside him.

“Care to have a guess at which ship you lost?”

The president stepped in before the two men could get started on one of their legendary fights. Although Kolhammer paid due deference to King as the commander in chief of the contemporary U.S. Navy, he was not directly under his command. He answered to Spruance for operational purposes, and ultimately to Roosevelt, but under the Transition Act of 1942 he was permitted to remain within his original chain of command until one year and one day after the cessation of hostilities in both the European and Pacific theaters.

It was a situation that made for some fiery clashes with the aggressive and often unpleasant Admiral King.

“Gentlemen, let’s not open another front just yet,” Roosevelt cautioned. “Admiral Kolhammer, your thoughts.”

“I suspect the Russians may have gotten their paws on the Vanguard,” he said. “It was a sister ship to Captain Halabi’s HMS Trident.”

He clearly heard a couple of stifled groans coming from speakers.

“In the first months after the Transition, I covertly placed a surveillance team inside the Soviet Union to search for evidence of any Multinational Force assets that might have turned up there, in the same fashion as the Sutanto and Dessaix were displaced and fell into Japanese hands.”

He was aware that Spruance was staring at him, and some of the others looked similarly abashed. Only Roosevelt and, curiously, the British envoy Lord Halifax did not react.

“We couldn’t sustain the team in-country for longer than six months before they had to withdraw. During their time in the Soviet Union, they picked up some indications that the Red Army somehow had gained access to twenty-first technology, but nothing conclusive could be found, and there was nothing that couldn’t be explained as a result of the Demidenko Project.”

Admiral King cut in on him. “So what? You bought that crock of shit, and pulled your guys out?”

Kolhammer was about to say that only a few moments ago King had been outraged by the fact of the team being placed in-country at all. Now he was raging because they’d been taken out.

But Roosevelt made the point redundant.

“I’m afraid I ordered Admiral Kolhammer to cease all of his activities within the borders of the USSR,” he said. “The situation with Stalin was tenuous, teetering on war really after we hit Demidenko, as you’ll all recall. It was my opinion that Admiral Kolhammer’s people were in danger of pouring gasoline on the fire. That was a mistake. We could have done with them now.”

Nobody said anything in reply. Kolhammer closed his eyes.

Here goes, he thought.

“They’re still there,” he said. “And still in contact.”

He thought the president might have him shot right then and there, so he hurried on with an explanation.

“Major Ivanov and Lieutenant Zamyatin stayed in the USSR, as they were entitled to, since their period of attachment to the Multinational Force had expired. They are operating as free agents now, doing what they can to liberate their country from tyranny.

“It is their right,” he insisted as Admiral King snorted volubly on screen. “Major Ivanov was a Special Forces officer back in our world. He was an expert in both combating and fomenting insurgencies. That’s exactly what he’s been doing, all over the Soviet Union, for eighteen months. Supporting insurgent forces.”