Triumph (1993) Page 20

  "There's still the Japs."

  The President waved a hand in the air impatiently.

  "Japan is finished. The Japanese have tremendous courage, but their suicide attacks merely show how little they have left to fight with. No, Japan is finished. The Empire of the Rising Sun will never be a powerful nation again."

  "But the Russians?"

  "We have got to find a way to convince them that allowing free elections in Poland is in their own best interest. I've told Stettinius to make clear to them that we have not fought a war that began in Poland merely to see the Polish people fall under the rule of the Soviet Union. And the same goes for the other countries of Eastern Europe. You know, Harry, our troops now occupy a good part of Central Europe and I have no intention of pulling them out until we've settled this Polish question with Moscow."

  "But the postwar zones of occupation were settled at Yalta," Hopkins said.

  Roosevelt looked out at the garden again. "I don't think we should pull our troops out of the areas they've already conquered, do you?"

  "Well, we agreed—"

  "Those agreements were more theoretical than practical. I think we should renegotiate, don't you, Harry? How would Molotov and the others react to a new conference, here in Washington, perhaps? Under the auspices of the United Nations Organization?"

  Hopkins sank back in his chair as if a six-hundred pound sack of cement had been dropped in his lap.

  "It would be an excellent way to get the United Nations off to a flying start, wouldn't it?" Roosevelt enthused. "An international conference to settle the boundaries of the new Europe."

  "Molotov won't like having it held here."

  "But he'll come. He'll have to come, if the others—Britain, France, China, the smaller nations—if they all agree to meet here."

  "Yes, I suppose he will have to come," Hopkins said weakly.

  "Good!" said Roosevelt. "Do you feel up to one more trip to Moscow?"

  "If you need me to, sure."

  "That's fine, Harry. This will be the last time, I promise you. I want you to break this idea to Molotov personally, informally. Then we can get the State Department to handle the formal arrangements."

  "I see."

  "Thank you, Harry. This will be the last time you have to go to Moscow, I promise."

  Hopkins grinned and got to his feet. He knew that Roosevelt did not make promises easily. He also knew that any promises the President made to his oldest and most trusted assistant were non-enforceable.

  Hopkins lit a cigarette the instant he stepped through the door to the outer office. Henry Stimson was on his way in, tall, spare, austere in his gray three-piece suit. Stimson coughed and nodded by way of greeting.

  The President gave Stimson his "I'm so delightfully pleased that you could come see me" smile, wheeled around from behind his desk and gestured the Secretary of War to one of the couches by the empty fireplace.

  "Sit down, Henry. Make yourself comfortable."

  They chatted amiably for a few moments. Stimson respected Roosevelt more than any President he had worked for, with the possible exception of his uncle Teddy. He knew FDR well enough to realize that the trivial chitchat would end soon enough.

  Finally the President said, "Henry, I would like you to bring me up to date on the Manhattan Project."

  Stimson thought that Roosevelt sounded almost reluctant, as if he were facing a chore that was necessary but unwelcome. He replied, "I should ask Dr. Oppenheimer to fly in from New Mexico, then, and—"

  "No, no, nothing so detailed or formal. I just want to know how the project is proceeding.'"

  Fiddling with his watch chain, Stimson said, "Progress is good. They should be ready to test the bomb in a few months."

  Roosevelt sat in silence for a few moments, his face somber.

  "How should we use the bomb, Henry?" he asked.

  "What would be the best way to employ it?"

  "Do you mean which Japanese cities should be targeted for attack?"

  "No—although that's part of it, I suppose." The President hesitated, then said, "The Japanese are beaten. Our B-29s are burning out all of their major cities. It's only a matter of time until Japan starves and collapses. Do we have to blow up entire cities with the bomb, too?"

  "The atomic bomb could convince them to surrender,"

  Stimson said. "We wouldn't have to invade their home islands and incur all the casualties which would be involved."

  "Yes, perhaps," said Roosevelt. "But what I'm wondering about is, how could we best employ the bomb to show the Russians how powerful it is? You see, Henry, it's not the Japanese we have to worry about now. It's the Russians. I want to make certain that they know we have this new weapon, that we will use it to enforce our policy decisions, and—" the President leaned forward and tapped Stimson's knee to drive home his final point, "—we will not allow any other nation to acquire atomic weaponry."

  Stimson's face went white. He looked aghast. "My god, Mr. President! What you're proposing is American hegemony— a worldwide American empire!"

  Roosevelt tried to smile but failed. Instead he looked worried, almost fearful. "Henry, once the Japanese finally give up and the shooting stops, we will have the responsibility for leading the entire world. There is no blinking at that simple fact. You may not like it. To tell the truth, neither do I. But our task does not end when the fighting stops. Rather, it truly begins. It's much easier to fight a war than to produce a just and lasting peace after the war. But that is our task now, our responsibility. There is no one else who can do it."

  Stimson sat as if frozen, his face a grim mask.

  "There is no one else except us, Henry," Roosevelt repeated.

  "We have got to show everyone, and especially the Russians, that we intend to lead the world into a just and lasting peace."

  "A pax Americana, " Stimson muttered.

  "Exactly," said the President, with a tired almost sorrowful sigh. "We made a bad mistake after the last war and that led to this one. I have no intention of allowing this nation to make that mistake again."

  Stimson clearly did not like the idea, but just as clearly he had no alternative to offer. He left the Oval Office looking tired and troubled.

  Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair alone. This is what victory is, he told himself. Not glory, but responsibility. Not triumph but endless burdens. His head throbbed painfully.

  Wheeling himself back toward his desk, he wondered if there might not be an old pack of cigarettes still hidden in one of its drawers.

  Moscow, 30 April

  Marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, Inspector General of the Red Army, felt distinctly uneasy in the former office of Josef Stalin. It was like visiting a haunted house. Stalin had been such a powerful personality all through the Marshal's life that he more than half-expected the Man of Steel to come walking through the door angrily demanding to know what they were doing in his office.

  For more than two weeks the office had been sealed. Ever since the fateful morning when the Great One had died, no one but his private secretary had been allowed inside. And even he, the private secretary, had died a few days later; some said he died of grief for his lost leader.

  Voroshilov personally supervised the men who were clearing out Stalin's old office, carting the furnishings off to a museum that would be erected in the Great One's honor.

  Teams of soldiers in coveralls had already taken out the desk, the chairs, and Stalin's hidden dais. Now they were emptying the bookcases, stuffing the reports that had filled them into wooden crates, to be sent to the appropriate government libraries.

  The word was that Molotov had wanted this office, but Khrushchev had beaten him to the punch and taken it for himself. Voroshilov shrugged. Such nonsense did not appeal to him at all.

  He saw that one of the coverall-clad soldiers was reaching for the Sword of Stalingrad, the last ornament still hanging on the wall.

  "Be careful with that," Voroshilov snapped. "It's going to the War Museum
."

  "Not to the Stalin Museum?" asked the captain who was checking off each item on his clipboard.

  "No. To the War Museum. It was his personal wish," said Voroshilov.

  Despite himself, Voroshilov edged slightly away as the soldiers removed the Sword from the wall and carried it outside the office. He remembered when he himself had been handed the Sword by Stalin, at Tehran, and had ignominiously dropped it. He had known that it was harmless at that point, and it should be harmless now. But still he edged away and glanced at the door, almost expecting to see the wrathful ghost of his former master pointing an accusing finger at him.

  I'll have to get someone to remove the plutonium, someone I can trust. Then the Sword can remain on public display and the plutonium can be buried somewhere forever.

  His normally dour face grew even more somber than usual. Yes, I will need a trustworthy man. He will be the last victim of Josef Stalin. The very last.

  Author's Afterword

  Although a work of fiction, this novel is based as solidly as possible on known historical data. Everything that happened in actual history prior to 1 April 1945 is assumed to be part of the background of this novel. From 1 April onward, however, events diverge in this alternate universe of the imagination.

  For those readers who are not familiar with the history of our world, Winston Churchill did indeed present Josef Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad at the Tehran Conference on 29 November 1943. It was not an assassination weapon.

  It now is on display in the War Museum in Moscow. Josef Stalin lived until 1953. Lavrentii Beria was shot soon after Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev eventually became the president of the Soviet Union and general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt never gave up smoking. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 12 April 1945.

  The Red Army captured Berlin in a fierce battle that raged from 16 April until 2 May 1945. Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April, ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday. The American and British armies stopped at the Elbe, for the most part, as Eisenhower had outlined in his memorandum of 28 March 1945. The Soviet Union occupied all of Eastern Europe and set up Communist regimes in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The ensuing Cold War between the East and West lasted until 1990.

  Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in 1952. Patton died 21 December 1945 after being injured in an automobile accident near Mannheim, Germany. Captain Glenn Miller, director of the U.S. Air Forces band, disappeared on the flight of a light plane across the fog enshrouded English Channel 15 December 1944. Hermann Goering, found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, committed suicide. To this day no one knows how he got the poison with which he killed himself Klaus Fuchs continued to spy for the Soviet Union until 1947, when he was arrested. Convicted of espionage in 1950, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released in 1959, his sentence shortened for good behavior.

  He immediately fled to East Germany, where he was made deputy director of the nuclear research institution and a member of the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party. He died 28 January 1988.

  Kim Philby was never apprehended by British justice. He continued his espionage work until 1963 when, fearing arrest, he defected to the Soviet Union where he remained until his death on 11 May 1988.

  Winston Churchill, turned out of office by the elections of July 1945, became Prime Minister once more in 1951. He lived to be 90 and was given a hero's funeral in London in 1965. Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space when he orbited the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft 12 April 1961.