Final impact

At such an altitude it was impossible to make out anything but the most dramatic features of the landscape below. Somewhere down there, the Red Army had crushed one of the rebel Ukrainian militias, but at twelve thousand meters the countryside looked idyllic, a rich quilt of brown-green earth and golden fields unmarked by human folly or ferocity. Small lakes, ponds, and rivers caught the midafternoon sun, throwing starbursts of light out to the curve of the horizon.

It was an unusually beautiful prelude to what he understood would be a day of unmitigated horror.

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1633 HOURS.

MOSCOW.

Beria, who was trying to keep his consumption of vodka and champagne within limits, could feel the malign energy gathering in the room, like a snake coiling itself for the strike.

Apart from the two diplomats, the twenty men present were all high-level party officials. Survivors, for the moment. The only military officers were messengers who came and went every half hour to mutter into Stalin’s ear. In the far corner of the dining room, the British and American ambassadors were trying their best to maintain a dignified faзade, turning down as many drinks as they could diplomatically refuse. They looked less than happy, and if Beria had been in a better mood he would have smiled at their discomfort, knowing that by the end of the day their long faces would be positively funereal.

His own face, however, wasn’t really beaming, either. Despite the fact that decorum, or the lack of it, demanded that he play the role of toastmaster at these foul, drink-sodden debauches, he hated the fucking things. Despised them, in fact. Only Stalin, the drunken gangster, could truly enjoy himself. And in Beria’s opinion the old monster was rapidly losing his grip on his health and sanity under the pressures of the war, the Emergence, and his own bestial appetites.

This party, for instance, had officially begun at lunchtime, when the first bottle of champagne had been uncorked. But all the party magnates, bar Stalin, had arrived still sick and exhausted from the previous day’s binge. That one had begun, as always, in the early evening, when Stalin declared their business over for the day.

In truth, he did very little business in his office now. The empire was run from his dinner table and private cinema. That was even more galling for the NKVD chief. With the world less than a day away from an epoch-shattering change, the supreme leader of the USSR insisted that his closest advisers join him in his specially constructed theater for a “Tarantino marathon” followed by a “little bite”-which inevitably devolved into a terrible, vomit-flecked orgy lasting six hours or more.

Unfortunately the Vozhd had always been a great fan of the cinema, especially American gangster movies and westerns, and with the discovery of the Vanguard came access to her electronic library. After being carefully vetted by the NKVD, thousands of hours of movies and television had been released for Stalin’s perusal. Almost none had been approved for public viewing, but that didn’t mean that the chief himself couldn’t watch them.

After all, who could say no to Stalin?

Certainly not Beria. There were any number of files on the Vanguard that had been too dangerous to release from NKVD control, including a number of books and articles about Beria himself that had made the secret policeman’s head swim when he’d seen them. But they were mostly gone now, deleted along with the unfortunate men who’d found them. The months of nearly paralyzing terror he’d suffered, while covering up evidence of his own less-than-perfect sycophancy at the end of Stalin’s life in the future, were but an unpleasant memory. Even so, he found himself subject to random fits of horror at the prospect that anyone might gain access to such information, despite his precautions. He had probably sent two and a half million people to their deaths or into exile based solely on the Vanguard’s archives.

Yet who knew what incriminating documents lay in wait in the files of the Clinton or the Trident? How long could it be before some capitalist spy would try to blackmail him?