Triumph (1993) Page 9

  The captain, white-faced, clambered to his feet. "Y-Yessir."

  Patton snorted with disdain. This fool won't last long. TO have to put him in the line and see whether he makes a man of himself or gets himself killed.

  He looked across the river again, seeing far beyond the horizon. To Berlin. There's nothing on the other side of that river that can stop me, he told himself. I can make a dash to Berlin just like I made the dash across France. If only Ike will let me. Instead of leaving it to the goddamned Russians, I can take Berlin. I can do it! I know I can. God didn't let me come this far just to leave the biggest prize of all to those godless communist sonsofbitches.

  If only Ike would listen to reason.

  Abruptly, he turned away and started back toward his jeep, where a driver waited together with a sergeant carrying a Thompson submachine gun. The captain scurried after the striding general.

  "Get on the two-way and find out where General Bradley is. I've got to see him right away. Get a plane ready for me."

  They piled into the jeep and were off in a cloud of dust.

  One hundred sixty air miles to the north. Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery stood on the western bank of the river Weser and peered through his field glasses at the city on the other side.

  "That's Hamelin town?" he asked.

  Major General Francis de Guigand replied with a smile, "Yes, it is. The Pied Piper has fled, though, and the rats still infest the the city. Rather large rats, with swastikas on their armbands, you know."

  Montgomery was a little bantam cock of a man, perky, with sparkling bright eyes and a tan beret perched jauntily on his head. He wore a turtleneck sweater with no indication of his rank visible. None was needed. Everyone in the world recognized Monty on sight; he was more famous than most cinema stars. De Guigand, his chief of staff' since Montgomery had taken command of the Eighth Army at El Alamein, had seen Monty rise to the position of chief of all Allied ground forces in the European Theater of Operations.

  But it was a virtually meaningless title rather than an actual position of power. Eisenhower and the Yanks were running the show and they knew it. This rankled Monty more each day.

  "Be a shame to flatten the town," Monty said.

  "Rather."

  "Still, it can't be helped. If Jerry is holed up in there, we'll have to pry him out."

  "Artillery?"

  "By all means. A good pounding. The tanks can cross upriver and take what's left from the rear."

  "Right."

  Clasping his hands behind his back, Monty turned away from Hamelin town and began walking slowly back to his staff car.

  "Do you realize how close we are to Berlin?"

  "Less than two hundred miles, I should say," de Guigand replied.

  "Yes, quite right. I could cover that distance in a week, you know. Ten days, at most."

  De Guigand hesitated. As an Englishman he wanted to have Britain gain this ultimate triumph. Britain had been at war for more than five years now. At one time Britain stood totally alone against Hitler, had borne the brunt of the Nazi fury and survived it. Now victory was so close he could taste it, and Eisenhower had decreed that it would be the Russians who would be allowed to take Berlin.

  "A bold, full-blooded thrust," Montgomery said, shaking a clenched fist in the air. "We could do it, man! I could do it!"

  "If Ike let you," said de Guigand.

  "Eisenhower," Montgomery said with disgust. "He's no general. Not a fighting general. Never was and never will be. A bloody politician, that's all he is."

  De Guigand said nothing.

  "I can take Berlin. Winston knows I could."

  "It's the logistics, Monty. You know that. Ike would have to bring his own Americans to a halt and give you every bit of petrol and ammo he has. He won't stop Bradley's forces. He can't, actually, not without having Washington come down on him like a ton of bricks."

  "But Berlin, for god's sake!"

  "It's going to the Russians, Monty. Put it out of your mind."

  "Never! I haven't come all the way from El Alamein to have the history books say I failed to reach Berlin."

  De Guigand sighed inwardly. You know the bloody war's over when generals begin to worry about how they will appear in the history books. But then, he thought, Monty was worrying about the history books at El Alamein, and even before.

  Chapter 14

  St. Aifrique, 11 April

  "Y'know," said Private Loller, "there must be a special three-star general back in the Pentagon that picks out the worst places on Earth to put army bases."

  Sergeant Nick Hollis looked up from the boots he was polishing. "What's the matter, Loller? Don't you like it here?"

  From across the tent, Kaplan sing-songed, "Oh, I love it here. I love the army. I never had it so good."

  Loller lay back on his bunk, a soft-faced youngster with the hard cynical eyes of a combat veteran, and laced his fingers together behind his head, looking up at the dull khaki fabric of the tent billowing slightly in the breeze.

  "Yeah, I can just see that lard-assed general back there in Washington: 'Where can I find a place in all of France that's infested with flies, covered with dust, is hot by day and cold at night, and as far as possible from Paris? That's where I'll put the Hundred and First!"

  "You couldn't get into Paris anyway," said Sanderson, stretched on the bunk next to Loller's. "The fuckin' officers have it all sewed up for themselves. Rear echelon types. No fighting units allowed in, they might mess up the Mona Lisa or something."

  Jarvick, as usual, had his nose buried in the latest issue of Stars and Stripes that he could find. But he put the paper down and said, "The hell with Paris. I'd Hke to get to Aries, where Van Gogh painted. It's not all that far from here."

  "Van who?"

  "Van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh."

  "Who's he?"

  "An artist. A painter."

  "What'd he paint? Houses or outhouses?"

  Jarvick gave them all a sour look and went back to his newspaper.

  "Drop your socks and grab your cocks!" a voice bellowed from just outside the tent flap.

  "Holy cow!"

  "Kinder!"

  A sawed-off, thickset man with a homely face ducked into the tent. A huge bulge distended his jaw and he was grinning from ear to ear.

  "Kinder!" They all bunched around him, pounding him on the back, pumping his hand.

  "You're back!"

  "How're the feet?"

  "I thought they'd send you back to the States."

  Staff Sergeant Alven Kinder looked around for a place to spit, stuck his head out the tent flap momentarily, then rejoined his platoon mates.

  "They saved all my toes, so they didn't have to send me home," he said. "McAuliffe himself pinned a bronze star on me and sent me back to take care of you poor slobs."

  "You can have 'em," Hollis said with real fervor. He had been acting squad leader since Kinder had been sent to hospital with badly frostbitten feet after Bastogne.

  Hollis felt an almost overwhelming wave of gratitude that Kinder had returned to take the responsibility off his hands. He noticed Jarvick watching him, his face serious, somber. Hollis grinned at him. So I'm a grasshopper, he said to himself. I like being a grasshopper.

  Sergeant Kinder took one of the empty bunks. Four months after the Bulge, half the bunks were still unoccupied.

  The 101st Airborne had held Bastogne even though totally surrounded. When the Germans demanded surrender, General McAuliffe replied with a single word: "Nuts."

  Since the end of the battle, the division had been quartered in rest-and-recuperation camps far from the fighting.

  "So what's going on outside?" Jarvick asked. "We've been stuck here and they don't tell us anything."

  Kinder shook his head, still lopsided from his plug of tobacco. "Well, you're all getting medals, for one thing . . ."

  "Goodie," said Kaplan, acidly. "Then we'll all be official heroes."

  "We got the unit citation last
month," Hollis said.

  "Yeah, but these'll be individual decorations," Kinder said. "Bronze stars, purple hearts. I hear there's even a couple of silver stars coming up. There's talk of Eisenhower himself coming down here to hand them out."

  "I don't like it," Hollis grumbled. "Why don't they send us home and decorate us there?"

  Kinder's grin faded. "There's a whole truck convoy of replacements comin' in."

  "Oh-oh."

  "They're gonna bring the division back up to full strength."

  "Christ, haven't we done enough fighting?" Loller snapped. "What the hell do they want from us?"

  "Hey, you dogfaces are famous, what more do you want?" Kaplan wisecracked.

  "I want to go home!"

  "Amen, brother."

  Kinder shook his head like a disappointed schoolteacher whose students had failed his test. "You know what they say: the shortest road back to the States—"

  "Is through Berlin," they all chorused back at him. To a man, they razzed their returned staff sergeant with the fervor that only combat veterans can muster.

  Chapter 15

  Moscow, 11 April

  A week had gone by since Gagarin had placed the mysterious wafer from the Sword into Stalin's desk drawer. A horrible, terrifying week.

  The Great One was dying. That seemed painfully clear.

  He had lost so much weight so suddenly that his marshal's tunics hung on him Hke bags on a scarecrow. His iron-gray hair was falling out in patches; even his mustache seemed frayed and ragged. He shambled when he walked, he seemed exhausted, utterly weary. His mind wandered. He muttered confusedly, often in his native Georgian tongue.

  Whatever the source of the wafer's magic, its power had caught Gagarin, too. He ached in every joint of his body.

  His gums bled and his teeth felt loose. His hands were blistered as though they had been burned. He dared not go to a doctor; he bought salve and did the best he could for himself. He too had lost weight, but not as much as his older master.

  We are both dying, Gagarin told himself. It is just as well.

  I am killing him, and the act of it is killing me.

  Stalin had still not decided whether Zhukov or Koniev would lead the assault on Berlin. For the past week the armies in the field had stopped their headlong advances. As Zhukov had wished, they were being resupplied, the weary men given a brief respite before the final battle for the Nazi capital.

  No one dared to comment on the sudden deterioration of the Man of Steel. But one week to the day after Grigori had placed the wafer in Stalin's desk, he received a memorandum from Beria, asking that the subject of "cooperative leadership arrangements for the post-war period" be placed on the agenda for the meeting of the Council of Ministers scheduled for the next morning.

  When Gagarin showed the memo to Stalin, the Great One merely nodded and grunted. Then he added, "The meeting will, take place in my conference room, here. Not in the ministers' chamber. And only the inner cabinet, not the entire crowd of them."

  "Yes, sir," said Gagarin. He knew how tired and aching Stalin felt. He felt it himself.

  The inner cabinet consisted of four men: Beria, Georgi Malenkov, Viachislav Molotov, and Nikita Khrushchev.

  Plus Stalin, of course, who sat at the head of the table in the small, stuffy conference room.

  Gagarin sat at his usual tiny desk in the corner, taking the minutes of the meeting. It hurt his blistered hand to grip the pencil. They droned through problems of steel production, grain planting schedules for the collective farms, intelligence reports on Japanese activities in Manchuria.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Stalin's pockmarked face. "I want those factories in Manchuria," he muttered. "Once we enter the war against Japan, those factories are to be dismantled and carted back inside the Soviet Union."

  Khrushchev scribbled a note on the yellow pad in front of him.

  They asked about the progress of the war. Stalin assured them all was well. Berlin was within reach. "Zhukov and Koniev are both dying to be the first into Hitler's capital."

  He started to laugh, but it ended as a hacking cough. The Man of Steel pulled out a handkerchief and brought it to his lips as he tried to control the coughing fit. The handkerchief came away bloody.

  "You need a doctor, comrade secretary," said Beria, in his soft near-whisper.

  "No. I will be all right."

  "But ..."

  "No doctor," Stalin said, a hint of the old iron in his rasping voice. "Continue with the meeting."

  For a long moment there was utter silence. Grigori could hear Stalin's labored breathing in the stillness of the room.

  Then Beria, with a glance at the others around the table, said, "We should discuss leadership arrangements for the post-war period."

  Stalin leaned back in his chair and reached for the pipe that had rested unlit in the massive steel ashtray on the table before him.

  "What do you have in mind?" he asked.

  Beria gave an uneasy smile and said, "I believe Comrade Khrushchev has been working on this matter."

  Was Beria in on the English scheme? The sudden thought startled Gagarin. Was he working with the British, or allowing the British to proceed with their assassination plot, in the expectation of assuming power himself? Or was it Khrushchev, or one of the others? This plot with the Sword could not possibly have gotten so far if someone high in power were not a part of it. Grigori was instantly convinced of that. What if all of them were in on it, all of them working to murder the Great One, using poor Grigori as their cat's paw just as the British were doing? His head swam with the thought of it; he felt giddy, knowing that whatever happened, he would not outlive his dying master.

  Nikita Khrushchev cleared his throat before speaking. It was his habit. Always that dreadful animal gargling noise before the words came out. He was totally bald and unhandsome.

  His ears stuck out, his smile showed gaps between his teeth. His eyes were tiny and almost hidden in folds of flesh. The suit he wore was baggy, rumpled, undecorated except for a single Hero of the Soviet Union medal he wore on his lapel. He had served as a political commissar with the army and seen the crushing early defeats that had been inflicted by the Nazis turned slowly, agonizingly into blood-soaked victories. Of all the men at the conference table, he had seen the most action in the field. He was closest to the commanders of the Red Army.

  He cleared his throat again, like a peasant nervously appearing before a magistrate, then began:

  "Comrade Secretary, once the war is ended in glorious victory—thanks to your brilliant and tireless leadership — there will be enormous tasks facing us. We will have to rebuild the areas devastated by the invaders. We will have to move our economy from a wartime basis to a peacetime one, and begin to give our people some of the fruits of the victory they have sacrificed so much to attain. We will have to demobilize our vast armies and bring the men into the peacetime economic structure—"

  "No," said Stalin.

  Khrushchev fell as silent as if a bullet had pierced his brain.

  "The army will not be demobilized. We must be prepared to defend Eastern Europe against the capitalists. And Manchuria. Iran too, perhaps."

  "But surely some demobilization will take place,"

  Khrushchev said. "Workers will be needed to rebuild and to move the economy from war production to civilian goods."

  Stalin shook his head. Gagarin saw that his face was shining with perspiration.

  Malenkov, fat and soft-looking, said, "Of course, we could import labor from Poland and Romania and the rest. We also have millions of German prisoners."

  "The point is," Khrushchev went on, impatiently, "that no one expects you to bear all these burdens almost single-handed. Comrade Stalin, as you have borne the burdens of the war. Once victory has been achieved, it will be a time for you to rest, comrade, to enjoy the glory and the love of your adoring people, to put down some of the burdens that. . . you . . ."

  Khrushchev's voice faded and died away. Stal
in was glowering at him: pale, terribly weak, sweating with pain, yet the Man of Steel silenced Khrushchev with nothing more than a glaring look.

  "So you want to take over my duties, do you?" Stalin's voice was low, murderous.

  "No!" Khrushchev squeaked. "That's not what I meant at all. That is—"

  "And the rest of you? Do you all agree that I should be put out to retirement, like a spavined horse or an aged bull?"

  No one dared to say a word.

  Without bothering to turn to look at Gagarin, Stalin asked, "Who placed this subject on the agenda?"

  Grigori, seated in his corner behind the Great One, stared at Beria. Behind his pince-nez the MGB chiefs eyes were wide with fright.

  "Well?" Stalin roared, with something like his old fury.

  "It was Comrade Beria, sir," Grigori answered in a child's guilty whisper.

  Stalin gave Beria a look of contempt. "You too, Lavrentii Pavlovich? You also want me to step down?"

  "No, of course not," Beria replied smoothly. "Comrade Khrushchev misunderstood the matter entirely. I would never even consider your retirement. Comrade Secretary. The people wouldn't hear of it. You are their father! Their leader! They would be lost without you."

  Trembling, Stalin pushed himself to his feet. He leaned both fists on the table top and stared angrily at Khrushchev.

  "You believe that the army gives you power, Nikita, don't you? Well, let me tell you something about power."

  He stopped, took a deep breath. Khrushchev had pulled his head down between his shoulders, as if expecting a beating. Dour-faced Molotov, who had been curiously silent through the whole meeting, actually slid his chair slightly away from Khrushchev's.

  Stalin raised one fist in the air, opened his mouth to speak. But no words came out. He waved his fist for a moment, then clutched at his chest and collapsed on the table top, his head making a crunching sound when it hit the gleaming mahogany. Before any of the men could react, Stalin's body slid to the floor with a soft thump.