“Anyone else,” Roosevelt asked, looking from window to window.

“The admiral is correct,” Kolhammer said. “Every foot of ground they take, they will keep, and when the Nazis are done with, they’ll come looking for more.”

“General Marshall,” Roosevelt said, “has your staff made any headway in working out where the Soviet advance is likely to run into ours?”

The image jumped, and the sound crackled in and out, but Kolhammer was able to make out most of what Marshall said.

“It’s only a ver…rough guess, because…on’t know the Russian order of…their full capabil…But given the…they’ve cut through the Germans so far, and the number of divisions we face in…rope, you could be looking at a meeting…around Bonn. They would most likely also take all of Eastern Europe, Nor…Italy, and significant areas of southern France, perhaps penetrating as far…Rhфne River.”

“And this is predicated on the assumption that they don’t have any nuclear weapons,” Roosevelt said.

“It is, sir. We feel that if…had them, they’d have used them.”

A cold iron spike of pain began boring slowly into Kolhammer’s frontal lobes. If the Communists ended up with most of Europe and a big piece of Asia, the rest of the twentieth century was going to look very different from the one he knew. He heard Roosevelt ask Spruance for his assessment of how much things had changed in the Pacific theater. The admiral explained that initially, at least, it might make things easier, with Yamamoto and Tojo forced to deal with this new threat to their rear. In the medium to long term, however, it meant trouble.

Kolhammer followed the discussion with one part of his mind, but at the same time he couldn’t stop himself from wondering how much the president had learned from the alternative history of this war.

It had been accepted for a long time, back in his world, that Stalin had played both the U.S. and British leaders for a couple of rubes at the Big Three conferences. Neither of them had shown any real understanding of the bestial nature of the Communist regime, and they had labored under the naпve assumption that they could do business with Moscow as though it were just another difficult nation. But the USSR under Stalin-and for many years afterward-had been a charnel house every bit as foul as the Third Reich. Its leaders were brutes and criminals with a will to power that even Hobbes would have considered psychotic.

And now, of course, those “brutes” all knew the ultimate fate of their glorious revolution. To Kolhammer the outcome was clear. They had been heading toward this from the moment Manning Pope had opened the wormhole. This war wouldn’t be over when Hitler was crushed. It would only end when a Sherman tank burst through the gates of the Kremlin, or a T-34 rolled into the Rose Garden. Assuming the combatants didn’t all die in a nuclear exchange first.

He wanted to say all that, but restricted himself, when asked, to explaining what intelligence-gathering assets he could deploy far in advance of Spruance’s task force, to determine what-if any-consequences had flowed from Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan.

“With midair refueling, we can get AWACs on station in eight or nine hours,” he explained. “But they can’t stay for long. It’s just too far away. Both the Siranui and the Havoc are outstanding platforms for this sort of work, and lest anyone lack confidence in the former, I’d remind you that she is now staffed entirely by U.S. Navy personnel. However, the Siranui is an integral part of this battle group, and losing her is like putting out our eyes.

“The sub, on the other hand, we can live without, and she is a naturally stealthy vessel. Captain Willet is already stationed well in advance of the task force and could be off the Marianas in three days, or the Home Islands in four. This is exactly the sort of work she was originally designed to do. I’d suggest sending her with all dispatch.”

“Do we need to talk to Canberra about that?” Stimson asked.

“No, sir,” Spruance answered. “They’ve assigned her to us under her original rules of engagement. For the duration of the operation, the Havoc is our asset to deploy as we see fit. She doesn’t need to refer back to her national command.”

“Good, then,” Roosevelt said. “See to it.”

“We have other assets we could deploy,” Spruance added. “A couple of our destroyers are carrying SEAL and Force Recon teams. They were going to insert to support the landings, but we could probably retask some of them to gather information about the Japanese reaction to these developments.”

Roosevelt consulted with his navy and Marine Corps advisers, who agreed it would be a good idea, as long it didn’t significantly detract from the primary mission of the task force.

“Well, gentlemen,” the president continued, “I suppose we should prepare ourselves for the worst. What is the phrase your people use, Admiral Kolhammer? The eight-hundred-pound gorilla? I think we need to talk about it. General Marshall, leaving aside the atomic question for now, can we fight and win against the Red Army in Europe?”

Again, Marshall broke up in transmission, but again it hardly mattered. His answer was clear.

“No, sir. We will take sig…casualties against the Nazis. We’re fight…best divisions while Zhukov and Koni…their worst. We’ll have to re-supply…Atlantic…then the channel. They have a significant advan…men and matйriel, and while we can’t gauge just…they’ve advanced their indust…base, it seems obvious that they’ve used the last two years to…least some of their technol…to the same level as ours. The Luftwaffe, for…is having no better luck…their MiGs than they have against our Sabers.”

Admiral King, always the most abrasive of the personalities, cut across Marshall when it seemed as if he was finished. “Can we just deal with the other eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room?”

Roosevelt looked wary, but he nodded. Kolhammer felt a sick feeling forming in his stomach to keep his headache company.

“The Reds didn’t come up with the new planes and guns and tanks by cribbing from afar. And they didn’t get them from that Demidenko complex they were running with the krauts. That was just a hustle by Ribbentrop and Himmler to keep them on side. I think it’s pretty obvious that they’ve independently laid hands on twenty-first technology and documentation-and possibly even expertise-and they’ve grabbed quite a bit of it.”

He was staring out of the monitor directly at Kolhammer now, having learned the trick of addressing the web-cam rather than the screen image.

“Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral Kolhammer?” King concluded.

“I would,” he answered without demur.

There was a noticeable shifting among the men on screen. Nobody looked comfortable. He could sense Spruance becoming very still beside him.

“Care to have a guess at which ship you lost?”

The president stepped in before the two men could get started on one of their legendary fights. Although Kolhammer paid due deference to King as the commander in chief of the contemporary U.S. Navy, he was not directly under his command. He answered to Spruance for operational purposes, and ultimately to Roosevelt, but under the Transition Act of 1942 he was permitted to remain within his original chain of command until one year and one day after the cessation of hostilities in both the European and Pacific theaters.

It was a situation that made for some fiery clashes with the aggressive and often unpleasant Admiral King.

“Gentlemen, let’s not open another front just yet,” Roosevelt cautioned. “Admiral Kolhammer, your thoughts.”

“I suspect the Russians may have gotten their paws on the Vanguard,” he said. “It was a sister ship to Captain Halabi’s HMS Trident.”

He clearly heard a couple of stifled groans coming from speakers.

“In the first months after the Transition, I covertly placed a surveillance team inside the Soviet Union to search for evidence of any Multinational Force assets that might have turned up there, in the same fashion as the Sutanto and Dessaix were displaced and fell into Japanese hands.”