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Few men dared speak so boldly to Stalin; Zhukov had won the right by his successes first in Mongolia against the Japanese, then defending Moscow from the Germans, and finally in holding the Lizards at bay through the winter just past. Stalin sucked on his pipe. It was empty; not even he could get tobacco these days. He said, “Georgi Konstantinovich, you saved this city once. Can you not do it again?”
“Then I had fresh troops from Siberia, and the fascists were at the end of their tether,” Zhukov answered. “Neither applies here. Without some special miracle, we shall be defeated-and the dialectic does not allow for miracles.”
Stalin grunted. Like so many revolutionaries, especially Georgian ones, he’d had seminary training. Now he said, “The dialectic may not allow for miracles, Comrade Marshal, but nevertheless I think I may be able to furnish you with one.”
Zhukov scratched his head. He was a blocky, round-faced man, much more typically Russian in looks than the slender Molotov “What sort of miracle do you have in mind?” he asked.
Molotov had wondered the same thing, but all at once he knew. Fear coursed through him. “Iosef Vissarionovich, we have discussed the reasons for not using this weapon,” he said urgently. “As far as I can see, they remain valid.”
That was as close as he’d come in years to criticizing Stalin.
The general secretary whirled around in surprise, the pipe jumping in his mouth. “If the choice is between going down to defeat after using every weapon we have and yielding tamely without making every effort to hit back at the enemy, I prefer the former.”
Zhukov didn’t say anything. Ivan Koniev asked, “What weapon is this? If we have a weapon that will let us hurt the Lizards, I say we use it-and to the devil’s grandmother with the consequences.”
After Zhukov, Koniev was the best general Stalin had. If he didn’t know about the explosive-metal bomb project, the secrecy was even more extraordinary than Molotov had imagined. He asked Stalin, “May we speak freely of this weapon?”
The pipe waggled again. “The time has come when we must speak freely of this weapon,” Stalin answered. He turned to Koniev. “We have, Ivan Stepanovich, a bomb of the sort the Lizards used on Berlin and Washington. If they break through at Kaluga and advance on Moscow, I propose to use it against them.”
With his crooked front teeth, Koniev looked even more like a middle-aged peasant than Zhukov did. “Bozhemoi,” he said softly. “If we have such-you are right, Comrade General Secretary: if we have such bombs, we should use them against the foe.”
“We have one such bomb,” Molotov said, “and no prospect of getting more for some time. No one knows how many of these bombs the Lizards have-but we may be about to find out by experiment.”
“Oh,” Koniev said, and then again, in a whisper, “Bozhemoi.” Glancing nervously at Stalin, he went on, “This is a choice we must face with great seriousness. One of these bombs, by report, can devastate a city as thoroughly as several weeks of unchallenged bombardment by an ordinary air force.” Now the pipe worked angrily in Stalin’s mouth. Before he could speak, Molotov said, “These reports are true, Comrade General. I have seen photographs of both Washington and Berlin. The melted stump of the Washington Monument-” He did not go on, both from the remembered horror of the photographs and for fear of further antagonizing Stalin. But he was too afraid of what would happen if explosive-metal bombs began to be used freely to keep silent.
Stalin paced back and forth. He did not put down the incipient rebellion at once, which was unusual. Maybe, Molotov thought, he has doubts, too. Stalin nodded to Zhukov. “How say you, Georgi Konstantinovich?”
Zhukov and Stalin were the same sort of military team as Molotov and Stalin were a political team: Stalin the guiding will, the other man the instrument that shaped the will to practical ends. Zhukov licked his lips; plainly he was of two minds, too. At last he said, “Comrade General Secretary, if we do not use this weapon, I see nothing that will keep us from being overrun. We may be able to continue partisan warfare against the Lizards, but not much more. How can what they do to us after we use the weapon be worse than what they will do to us if we do not use it?”
“Have you seen the pictures of Berlin?” Molotov demanded. By then, he was certain he had raised Stalin’s wrath, but he was too upset even to be frightened. That was most unusual; he would have to examine the feeling later. No time now.
Zhukov nodded. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I have. They are terrible. But have you seen pictures of Kiev after first the fascists and then the Lizards went through it? They are just as bad. This bomb is a more efficient means of destruction, but destruction will take place with it or without it.”
As always, Molotov held his features immobile. Behind that unsmiling mask, his heart sank. It sank still further when General Koniev asked, “How do we deliver this bomb? Can we drop it from an airplane? If we can do that, can we have some hope of putting an airplane where we most need it without the Lizards’ shooting it down?”
“Before we examine ways and means, we still need to consider whether we should take this course.” Molotov’s impassive voice concealed the desperation that grew inside him Stalin pretended he had not spoken and answered Koniev instead: “Comrade, the bomb is too bulky to fit into any of our bombers, and, as you say, the Lizards shoot them down too readily to make them a good way to deliver it anyhow. But planes are for taking bombs to an enemy who is far away if the enemy is instead coming to you-” He let the sentence hang.
Molotov scratched his head, not sure where Stalin was going with that. It must have made sense to Zhukov and Koniev though they both chuckled. Zhukov finished the phrase for Stalin:“-you put the bomb where he will be and wait.”
“Just so,” Stalin said happily. In fact, we shall encourage him to concentrate in the sector where we shall place the bomb to make sure we do him as much damage as we can. Now it made sense to Molotov too, but it didn’t t make him any happier.
Koniev said “Two risks here. The first is that the weapon will be discovered; past maskirovka, I don’t see what we can do about that. The second is that a weapon left behind won’t go off when we want it to. How do we make sure that does not happen?”
“We have multiple devices to set it off,” Stalin answered. “One is by radio signal, one is with a battery, and one is with a clockwork manufactured by German prisoners in our employ.” He spoke utterly without irony; Molotov had no doubt those prisoners were no longer among the living. “They did not know to what device the clockwork would be affixed, of course. But it has been tested repeatedly; it is most reliable.”
“Just as well, considering the use to which it will be put.” But Koniev nodded. “You are right, Comrade General Secretary: however vile the fascists may be, they make excellent mechanical devices. This clockwork or one of the other means you noted should definitely be able to set off the bomb at a time of our choosing.”
“So the engineers and scientists have assured me,” Stalin said with a slight purr in his voice that told what would happen if the engineers and scientists were wrong. Molotov would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the men who labored on that kolkhoz outside of Moscow.
He pushed forward between Zhukov and Koniev. Both officers looked at him in surprise; he was usually a good deal less assertive at military conferences, which he attended mostly so he would know how developments on the battlefield affected the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He studied the map. Red units represented Soviet forces, green the Lizards, and occasional pockets of blue German troops that still fought on in the land they had invaded almost two years before.
Even to his unsoldierly eye, the situation looked grim. The makeshift line patched together between Sukhinichi and Kaluga wasn’t going to hold. He could see that already; not enough Red Army forces were in place to hold back the advancing Lizard armor. And once the line was pierced, it was fall back or get cut off from your comrades and surrounded. Nazi panzers had done that to Soviet troops again and again in the de
sperate summer and fall of 1941.
Nonetheless, he stabbed a hesitant finger out toward Kaluga. “Cannot we stop them here?” he asked. “Any effort, it seems to me, would be better than using the explosive metal bomb and facing whatever retaliation the Lizards may choose to inflict.”
“Even Kaluga is too close to Moscow, far too close,” Stalin said. “From airstrips behind the city, they can smash us to pieces.” But he glanced at Zhukov before he went on, “If they don’t come past Kaluga, we shall not deploy the bomb.”
“That is an excellent decision, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said fulsomely. Zhukov and Koniev both nodded. Molotov felt sweat under the armpits of his white cotton shirt. He wondered if the Tsar’s courtiers had had to tread so carefully in guiding their sovereign toward a sensible course. He doubted it-not since the days of Peter the Great, anyhow, or maybe Ivan the Terrible.
When Stalin spoke again, his voice held some of the steel that had given Iosef Dzhugashvili his revolutionary sobriquet: “If the Lizards advance past Kaluga, however, the bomb will be used against them.”
Molotov looked to Koniev and Zhukov for support. He found none. The marshal and the general were both nodding, perhaps without enthusiasm but. without hesitation, either. Molotov made his own head go up and down. Useless to argue with Stalin, he told himself Useless to antagonize him. He kept on nodding, though in his heart winter’s chill had returned to oust the bright spring day.
Heinrich Jager glanced up at the, sun before he raised the binoculars to his eyes. In the afternoon, the Lizards down in Split might have been able to spot reflections from the lenses. The hill-fortress of Klis in which he sheltered sat only a few kilometers inland from the city on the Adriatic coast.
The Zeiss optics brought Split leaping almost within arm’s length. Sixteen hundred years after it was built, Diocletian’s palace still dominated Jager’s view of the city. Fortress is a better word he thought. Actually, it was in essence a Roman legionary camp transformed into stone: a rough rectangle with sides of 150 to 200 meters, each one pierced by a single, central gate. Three of the four towers at the corners of the rectangle were still standing.
Jager lowered the binoculars. “Not a place I’d care to try attacking, even nowadays, without heavy artillery on my side,” he said.
