John Schettler - Crescendo of Doom

Karpov rubbed his hands together, eager to get in the hunt.

Farbelow, Volkov had picked his way to the edge of the woodland, moving warily to the northeast towards the sound of the ground battle. He hunched behind a fallen tree, staring across a small clearing, and could see men moving there. From their uniforms he knew they were his own troops, and he started across the clearing, running as fast as he could, winded and tired when he reached the far side. Then he heard men shouting, the sound of a motorcycle revving its engine. A rider wheeled up on a motorbike, halting some fifty yards off and firing a machinegun at him!

“Cease Fire! Damn you! This is Ivan Volkov! Now get over here with that motor bike at once!”

The stunned rider knew one thing when he heard it—that voice, deep and threatening. He had heard it a hundred times in radio addresses, but what was Volkov doing here? He edged close, then saw a man in a plain grey uniform with red piping, and his heart skipped a beat when he recognized the General Secretary. He scooted over to the man’s side, saluting and blathering out an apology, saying he had been ordered to watch this clearing.

“Never mind, never mind, you idiot. Where is Colonel Levkin?”

“At the farm, sir, coordinating the attack. Just over there.”

“Get off that bike!” Volkov would ride the rest of the way, motoring to find Colonel Levkin in a few minutes time. Every man in the headquarters was surprised when Volkov motored up to the back side of an old barn in a cloud of dust, growling like the motorbike. He would hear Levkin’s report, then get all the remaining men of the motorcycle platoon together here to form an escort and security detail.

“What’s happening, Levkin? Have you taken that railway inn?”

“Sir… resistance is much heavier than we expected, and we’re three companies light. Reinforcements are only now arriving on Pavlodar and Krasnodar .”

“Those ships have returned? Good! What about Talgar?”

“No word on that ship yet.”

“Very well, circumstances have forced me to ground here, Colonel, but I must get airborne again as quickly as possible.”

“We’ve lost the Orenburg?”

“Forget that!” Volkov shouted now. “Where is Pavlodar?”

“Sir? That ship is to the east, along the road to Kansk. They were bringing in a reserve company.”

“Good. Tell them to hold where they are, and descend to ground level. Krasnodar will stand on overwatch. I’ll get there as quickly as possible. Signal all our other ships to move to the north and form a strong battlegroup.”

“But sir—we need air cover here! They out gun us badly, but even with the additional troops off Pavlodar and Krasnodar , it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get to the objective. We need heavy weapons! They’ve been pounding us all morning with those heavy railway guns. My companies are down to four and five squads each.”

“Don’t worry, Levkin. I’ll get you support in due course. For now, do as I have ordered! I’ll want any man on a motor bike to meet me on that road to Kansk in ten minutes. See to it!”

Volkov was desperately planning his escape. As for the fate of the men he had led here, that was as far from his mind now as his stateroom in the capital back at Orenburg.

Thereports were coming in to the Main Intelligence Directorate in the Kremlin, known as the GRU. First founded in 1918 by Trotsky, it had gone through many evolutions over the years, a vast intelligence network with operatives all over the world. Internally, it also competed with the KGB, NKVD, and other military intel units, but in Kirov’s Russia, the GRU was the real head of the snake when it came to military intelligence.

It was presently led by Ian Karlovich Berzin, also known simply as “Janis,” a hard man with short cropped hair, penetrating eyes and a ruthless disposition. A former member of the Cheka, Lenin had used him to head up his “Red Terror” in the early years of the Russian Civil War before Kirov fully consolidated power and moderated those policies. He served in the diplomatic corps before the war, until he was recalled and transferred to Moscow to become head of the “Red Archives.” Stalin would have had him arrested in the purge of 1938, but that never happened, and so Berzin soon was moved from his post at the Archives to head of the GRU, and he was soon to be called “the spy of spies.”

There in “Berzin’s Kitchen,” as the GRU was called, plots and secret operations were cooked up that often aimed at shaping the political structure of any nation designated an enemy of the Soviet Union. Spain had been so designated once, where Berzin personally intervened in the Spanish Civil War, advising the Republican forces under his code name “Grishin.” To this day, Sergie Kirov still called him that in their private meetings, for Berzin had the ear of the General Secretary from the moment he consolidated power. He was thought to be a most gifted man, with vast knowledge and instincts that often seemed prescient to his rivals and foes. How he came by the information he so ably used to unhinge enemies of the state, no one knew—except perhaps Sergei Kirov himself, who often met with Berzin in a highly secure room within the Red Archives.

A central records depot for Soviet intelligence, the Red Archives also had a secret room open only to Sergei Kirov, and a very few handpicked confederates in the Central Authority. Berzin was one of them, and there he was amazed to see the strange documents Kirov had secreted away, newspapers, books, photographs depicting a world, and a history, that Berzin could scarcely imagine. He learned that all these things had been collected by the General Secretary himself, though he was never told how Kirov had come by them. At first he believed them to be fabrications, preposterous documents dreamt up by some story teller—until Kirov took him into his confidence one day, and told him a story that changed his life forever.

“The material,” as it was called by the two men in their secret conferences, was fantastic and unbelievable to Berzin in the beginning. Yet, he was soon convinced of its veracity when events depicted on the pages of those secret books began to take place with almost clock-like accuracy. He learned of the rise of Adolf Hitler, long before that demon ever emerged on the world scene, and he had been directed by Kirov to eliminate him.

On three occasions, Berzin had mounted special operations attempting to find and kill Hitler, but in each case, something had happened to frustrate the attempt. They were small things, one a careless slip of the tongue that exposed an agent and blew his cover, the second a simple street accident that killed his assassin just an hour before the planned attack. The third time it had been a mere loose boot lace, which saw a man stumble, rattle a half open door, and be exposed as the saboteur he was.

Finally, Sergei Kirov came to the conclusion that some men, through the sheer magnetism of their will, were destined to come into the world, like weeds invading a garden. Once they got rooted, and matured beyond some unknown nexus point in their darkened life histories, they became impossible to eliminate. He had managed to get to one despicable weed before it bloomed and seeded the Devil’s Garden of the emerging Bolshevik Revolution, Josef Stalin—but he could not pluck out the life of Adolf Hitler before he became the mortal threat he now was. The energy driving that man’s forward momentum along the meridians of history was simply too great.

An early 21st Century physicist and theorist would one day describe such a man as a Prime Mover, an entity so powerful in terms of the exercise of human willpower, that he was destined to exert dramatic influence over the course of events. Berzin’s GRU had tried to eliminate others, sometime with success, and other times found their operations only aided the rise of even more threatening men. A prime example had been the successful plot to undermine the head of the White movement after the Revolution, Anton Denikin. In his place, a shadow rose within that movement that was so deep and impenetrable that not even the full weight of the GRU could pierce it. That shadow was a man named Ivan Volkov, wholly unexpected, an interloper that Sergei Kirov had dubbed “the profound anomaly” at one point in his briefings with Berzin.