Romanov Succession (24 page)

It hit him and he turned slowly, adjusting to it, absorbing it.

Bitterness bubbled to the surface and Irina said, “I couldn't trust anyone but Leon to listen to me. The rest of them—even my father—I knew they'd turn me aside. They're not in the habit of listening to a woman's ideas,”

She combed the hair away with her fingers and tossed it back. “Do you know how long ago it came to me? It was when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. A week before Hitler invaded Poland. Almost two years ago. I knew one of them would violate the pact—one of them would attack the other and that would be our chance.

“The whole conception was mine, darling. The coalition, the design for a new government, the choice of Felix to be the figurehead. Dear old Leon saw the possibilities at once. We've worked together ever since. We had to think of every objection—we had to have an answer for everything.”

She watched him without guile but he took his time thinking it out.

She said, “May I stay now?”

“I can't refuse you, can I.”

“No.” she said. “I planned it that way, don't you see?”

He buckled the holsters flat against his waist and when Sergei locked the bolt of the Mannlicher rifle Alex opened the door and went through it quickly. Walking down the short driveway and across the narrow highway he had time to survey the barrens on either side. Sergei was back there in the corner of the house with two windows to observe through and if anything stirred in the brush Alex would hear the pane shatter when Sergei's rifle moved.

Everything in him twanged with taut vibration. He heard the distant screech of the gulls and the movement of a vehicle somewhere. The gate sentry demanded his pass and got it and then he was crossing the tarmac toward the main hangar, still ready to dive flat.

It was a little far to hear the glass breaking out now but the haze hadn't lifted and he didn't think a long-range shot would do the job under these conditions; if they really meant to kill him this time they wouldn't chance it until conditions were optimum. It still was possible they hadn't meant to hit him at all; it might have been a warning but if so it was meaningless because there'd been no message. That was the crux: in Boston the shooting had had all the earmarks of a deliberate miss but on the face of things that didn't make any sense since it served no purpose he could discern. There was an answer to it somewhere but he didn't have enough facts to know where to look for it and therefore the only thing he could do was assume the worst but go on about his business. If the threat had been contrived to slow him down it wasn't going to succeed.

He stepped into the hangar and took a very deep breath and tramped back toward tht office.

Irina had given him something new to chew on and part of him resented it because he couldn't spare much of his mind to explore it. She was telling the truth about the scheme: there'd be no point in lying, it was too easy to confirm. But that didn't mean she'd told the whole truth. She was holding something back.

John Spaight was waiting in the office and Alex said, “Let's get to work.”

9.

“We haven't got any time at all,” the Undersecretary growled. “Kiev is in flames. They've got Guderian down there now—Third Panzer Division at the spearhead. Von Mannerheim has Leningrad encircled. Von Bock has three armies and three Panzer groups within two hundred miles of Moscow. Stalin's losing people at the rate of twenty thousand a day—casualties and prisoners. It's going to be over within a month.”

Colonel Glenn Buckner was so tired he had to keep blinking. It was nearly three in the morning. He stuck to his guns. “It's far too early to cancel the operation. This time of year a hundred and forty-odd years ago Napoleon was right at the gates of Moscow and we know where that got him.”

“Napoleon didn't have a Luftwaffe or three Panzer groups.”

Buckner said, “We've got people in Fairbanks doing tests on mechanized equipment. When it gets cold enough you can't run a tank—the oil solidifies.”

“It's not cold in Moscow, Glenn. It's raining for God's sake. That's the best possible weather for tank warfare—a little mud lubricates the cleats. Right now Rommel would probably rather be on the Russian front where he wouldn't have sandgrit ruining his panzers right and left.”

Buckner tried a new tack. “You and I both spent enough time in there to know what those people are like when they get stubborn.”

“They're not stubborn now. Stalin's had to take ruthless measures to keep them in the lines at all. They're bugging out the first chance they get.”

“Don't you see that's exactly why we've got to proceed with Danilov's operation? It's the only chance we've got to get the Russians back on their feet and back into the war against Hitler.” He couldn't suppress the yawn any longer but it gratified him that the Undersecretary responded in kind.

The Undersecretary took his hand down from in front of his mouth. “We're just wasting time and money and matériel. The war in Russia will be decided long before these White Russians get off their butts. All we're doing is lining their coffers.”

Buckner let his silence argue for him. When the rest of them had been fighting to gear up for war production the Undersecretary had concentrated his attentions on deciding what decorating scheme to use in the overhaul of the State building. But he had the Secretary's ear—they were old cronies—and because he'd spent two years in the Moscow Embassy he'd been assigned as liaison between Foggy Bottom and the Chairman of JCS: it made him Buckner's opposite number. He was a clever politician and Buckner had to depend on his sense of self-aggrandizement—his willingness to subordinate prejudice to ambition.

Buckner said, “We're not gambling much. If it fails it hasn't hurt us. If it succeeds we'll both be looking good.”

“If I saw any chance of it succeeding.…”

“What have we got to lose? A handful of airplanes. Some fuel, some ammunition, a little money. Hell if we lose the planes we can write them off on the books as training accidents.”

“That's not the point and you know it. The repercussions if a whisper of this ever gets breathed.…”

“If Stalin loses the war we're not going to have to worry about his good opinion of us.”

“I wasn't talking about Stalin. I was talking about the American voter.”

“The next election's not until nineteen forty-four.”

“Nuts. It's not that easy and you know it. It's pur money and our supplies that are keeping England alive right now. Put a hint of this operation in the press and what happens to the President's Congressional support for his war measures? You know how thin the margin is at best. Give the isolationists ammunition like this and that's the last we'd see of Lend-Lease or any other war-support program. England could go right down the tubes. That's the real risk of it—that's what concerns me.”

No, Buckner thought. What really concerned the Undersecretary was that he'd be charged with having had a role in the discredited scheme and his own head would tumble into the basket.

Buckner said, “There's only one answer to that. We've got to make damned sure we keep the lid on it.”

“Easy to say.”

“We're doing it. After all there's damned few of us in on it. Six or seven of us including the President.”

“It's not good enough, Glenn. We've got to have a back door.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You're the expert in nihilistic machinations.”

“I'm just a country boy. Let's keep it to words of two syllables.”

“There's got to be a
cancellation button.”

“Come again?”

“A button to push. To give us instant cancellation of the program. These people aren't Americans—we can't just order them to call it off on our say-so. We've got to have leverage.”

“You can relax then,” Buckner said. “That's been taken care of.”

1O.

Pappy Johnson stood under the wing of the airplane exposing his teeth. He pulled his cigarettes out of the bicep pocket of his leather flight jacket and offered one to Calhoun.

“Thanks.” Calhoun took it and poked his face forward to accept a light from Johnson's cupped match. Calhoun had a small triangular face and the black-nailed hands of a mechanic. He had arrived during the night by train from Glasgow where the flight from the States had dropped him off with his two companions.

“They're your airplanes as of now,” Johnson told him. “You've got twenty-four hours to get them ready for training.”

“Well first off we'll have to mount those turrets.” On the ferrying flight the dorsal and belly turrets of the B-17S had been removed and stowed inside to reduce air drag.

“Uh-huh. And you're going to have to modify the C-Forty-sevens. Those cargo doors open outward. That's no good for parachute drops.”

Calhoun didn't even blink. “You want ‘em to slide or you want ‘em to open inward?”

“What's faster?”

“Open inward. It's still a welding job but we can handle it.”

“All right. Rig lines for the ripcord clips and run some benches down the insides for the men to sit on.”

“Full complement in each plane?”

“Just about. They'll carry twenty-seven each, isn't that the drill?”

“You can squeeze in more than that if you need to. Depends how far you've got to stretch your fuel,” Calhoun said. “Which reminds me, I can't work on these engines unless I can run them up. What are we supposed to run them on, spit?”

“Use what you can find. We'll have it pouring in by Monday.” He hoped it was true. All he knew was what General Danilov told him.

“Okay. Anything kick up on the way over here I should look into?”

“Mine was all right. The ferry pilot on the second Fort said his number three was running a little ragged—high head temps and he couldn't keep it in synch.”

“I'll tell Blazer to take a look. Most ground crews have to take an engine apart to find out what Blazer can tell just by listening to it run.”

Pappy Johnson dropped his cigarette and squeezed it under his boot. “They're your babies. Nice meeting you. I got to get to work.”

He strode to the main hangar and waved vaguely to the two generals in the office—the Russian one and the American one—and went straight on back to the rear of the huge building.

Prince Felix Romanov was on his feet near one of the small windows. He was watching the Boeing arrivals across the field spread canvas over the engine nacelles of the big airplanes. The wiry prince was dressed in tailored coveralls that fitted like a tux; Johnson suppressed a smile.

The rest of them—the fourteen pilots—had cigarettes cupped in their hands and they looked ready to be bored. These were old-line combat pilots and he was going to have to shake them up.

“Good morning gentlemen.”

Some of them nodded; some of them murmured something or other. Prince Felix flashed a grin at him and took a seat at the end of the bench.

There was a blackboard and a little lecture podium. Johnson posted himself behind it. “It's not an office party, gentlemen. Siddown.”

He waited for them to sort themselves out on the three long benches and then he said, “I'm sure there are at least a thousand men who know more about precision bombardment than I do.” He looked slowly from face to face. “However I don't see any of them here.”

He had their attention. “Anybody have trouble understanding my English?”

A few of them shook their heads; the others didn't answer. “I don't know who's got rank here other than His Highness but as long as we're in training here I'm the boss. When I tell you the sow's fat then she's broad across the back. Just you remember I'm in charge here and we'll all get along fine.”

He saw a slow grin spread across Prince Felix's face. The others took their cue from that and he knew it was going to be all right.

“Now you're going to make mistakes. You don't think you will. But you will. I don't mind mistakes but I don't want excuses. Fair enough?”

Abruptly he turned to the blackboard and dashed a quick rough sketch that approximated the outlines of a four-engine bomber.

“The B-Seventeen Flying Fortress has something like seventy-five thousand working parts. In the next few weeks we're going to have a lunatic schedule around here because you misters are going to have to learn about a lot of those parts. In an emergency in the air you're going to have to be able to act as your own flight engineers. This afternoon we're all going to climb around inside those aircraft and find out what holds them together. You'll work your way up from the tail turrets to the cockpits. By the time you get that far you'll be able to repair a busted elevator cable or free up a jam in the bomb-bay racks. And then we're going to tackle the instruments. You misters are mostly used to flying peashooters, I understand. You're going to have to learn a whole new rule book about instruments. You're going to have to learn how to sort out a hundred different facts you've got at your fingertips in that cockpit—information about your course, your altitude, your airspeed, rpm's, manifold pressures, fuel levels, horizon attitude, engine temperatures, synchronizations, mixtures, radio equipment, a lot of other stuff. You misters are going to have to memorize an encyclopedia full of facts and you're going to have to be able to recite them back to me on call.”

An hour later he was still having at them.

“Now one thing you ought to remember if you don't want to get dead.
Keep the nose down
when you're taking off with a heavy load on board. Pushing the nose up, trying to climb—that's no good if you're at too steep an angle to get speed. You won't get height that way, you'll only stall out. These are heavy machines. You must always sacrifice altitude, no matter how little you have, to get speed. Is that clear?