John Schettler - Crescendo of Doom

Volkov was mentioned nowhere in the secret documents and books hidden away in the Red Archives. He was a rogue, completely incongruous, an intruder on the history like a thief that had broken into a great mansion. At first his presence was silent and stealthy, stalking the hallways of time, and probing into rooms and chambers in the history. One by one, other rivals within the White movement were quietly eliminated, and when Denikin fell, it was as if a door had been opened. Within months, the name Ivan Volkov was being spoken in fearful tones, and Kirov came to believe that this man must have some secret archive of his own.

Dubbed “the Prophet,” Volkov had an uncanny ability to find the key moments along a given meridian of causality, and there he would seed the garden with his own nefarious plots. Berzin had been directed to eliminate him, but he became another of those “slippery fish,” as Director Kamenski might describe it, and Kirov soon came to believe that Volkov, like Adolf Hitler, was another Prime Mover, with a destiny too powerful to be easily unhinged. He was deeply bothered about this, and very suspicious of Volkov.

“Perhaps I drove that man in to Hitler’s camp,” he once confided to Berzin in a briefing. “But I must tell you, Grishin, there is something very strange about this man. Yes, he has a history, like all other men. We were able to find out a good deal about him once we determined he was a potential threat within the White movement, but why does he not then appear in the material?”

Kirov soon began to believe that Volkov was not the man his simple life history depicted. They had found no record of his birth, and his parents had never been identified. This was not unusual, as the revolution had seen many men adopt new identities. Kirov’s own name had evolved from Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, to the code name Mironov, and then to his present name of Sergei Kirov. Who was Ivan Volkov before he had assumed that identity? This was something that not even the full resources of the GRU had ever been able to uncover.

What they did know, is that Volkov was now a mortal enemy of the Soviet State, and a highly dangerous threat. His own intelligence service was so good that it often frustrated the plans of the GRU, and Kirov soon came to understand that Volkov was also secretly in league with Hitler’s Germany. When war broke out, that suspicion was proved true when the Orenburg Federation formally joined the Axis. Many thought this was simply a way for Volkov to curry favor with Hitler, and gain much needed support and assistance from the German arms manufacturing industry, but Kirov told Berzin he believed it was something much more.

“This man sees and understands things about the unfolding of events that is as accurate as the information in our Archives. The very fact that the material contains nothing whatsoever about this Orenburg Federation, or Volkov’s rise to power there, means that he is a profound anomaly, a free radical, some wholly unaccountable force that is exerting influence on the history. And the lever in all this is Volkov himself. He asserts knowledge that no man of our own time could be privy to, unless he were right here with us, Grishin, and had access to the material. Are you certain that there have been no leaks?”

“Of course, sir. The fact that Volkov is so free with his boastful predictions should make that clear. Could someone be leaking all that information to him? Impossible. No sir, I agree with you. He is an anomaly. His emergence is a mystery, and his presence has obviously re-written things. Our material was once very reliable, but since Volkov has come on the scene, things can no longer be predicted with any complete confidence.

“Yes, he is another Prime Mover,” said Kirov, “just as I became one when I eliminated Stalin.” As to all he really knew about Ivan Volkov, information he had been given by Fedorov and Volsky, Kirov said nothing. He only spoke of the one thing that weighed on his mind.

“We have been unable to eliminate Volkov personally, or to crush him militarily, and that will become even more difficult now that we have the Germans snarling at our throats. What are the latest reports from the front?”

“At the outset, things were very difficult, as we knew they would be, sir. This attack was not unexpected. We could see the buildup of troops for many months, but the material indicated we still had some weeks before the guns actually fired.”

“Yes,” said Kirov, “the German offensive was supposed to begin on June 22nd. That date was well documented.”

“They hit us five weeks early, sir. We had good men on the front lines, but we needed those last five weeks to complete our final mobilization. Many units were not fully ready, the new arms and munitions not distributed, particularly to the armored units. Oil shortages have hindered production. We have plenty of tanks, but they are still largely our older models. So we have been implementing our plan, Bronirovanny Kulak , Armored Fist.” Berzin emphasized his words by clenching his own fist, the glint of battle in his eye.

“All the armor and motorized infantry is pulling back as ordered. In fact, though our losses have been heavy on the forward lines, the withdrawal is proceeding as planned. There have been no major encirclements yet, and our troops are now consolidating on the Minsk and Kiev defensive lines as planned.”

“And the south? That is where they will make their main effort.”

“We were hit very hard, and they are already over the Dniester. Their best troops are leading this attack, as we predicted. One armored force has turned south for Odessa, but their main effort is still aimed at the Dnieper bend. They have already reached Kirovgrad.”

“Kirovgrad! That is well beyond the Dniester.”

“We have managed to assemble a good armored force, sir, and we are planning to counterattack soon. The trouble is that we get little air cover, so movement is difficult, particularly by rail. In spite of our alert The early days of the attack still managed to catch our air force flat footed. We lost many planes on the ground, even though we posted those alert warnings ten days ago!”

“Don’t worry, Grishin,” said Kirov, placating his spy master. “No matter how good we are, we cannot predict everything. We have already seen the discrepancies and deviations getting bigger and bigger. Soon we may not be able to rely on the archive material at all. Look what has happened! Ever since the ship arrived here, and I got that message from Fedorov, things have begun to take dramatic turns. The history is being radically altered, and I may have had a great deal to do with that myself, as you well know.”

‘The ship’ was the battlecruiser named after Kirov himself, and it was another thing that was mentioned nowhere in the material, a fact that had eventually led Sergei Kirov to determine the world he had been reading about in his secret archive was no longer the same one in which he lived.

“The air force will recover. I have faith in Khudyakov and Novikov. What about the new T-34s?” Kirov knew they would need those tanks to eventually turn the tide, that is if the victory described in the material could be relied upon. It had taken the entire united Soviet Union to achieve that, and the world was quite different now. The existing Soviet tank force was already much greater than the inventory of German Panzers, but the lighter BT-6 and BT-7s would not hold the line forever, and the T-28s were too slow and antiquated to fight the mobile warfare Kirov knew the Soviets must soon adopt if they were to match the German art of war fighting.

“We have no more than 500 T-34s ready,” said Berzin. “Production is switching to that model in all our weapons plants, but it will take time to build up numbers, and they have stolen a march on us.”