“The Americans have made no move toward cooperating with us,” Kuznetsov responded. “In fact, they seem to have ceased offensive operations around the Japanese Home Islands. There has been no indication of any Allied submarine activity in the last forty-eight hours. It is almost as though they have decided to leave the Japanese alone.”

“Good,” Stalin said. “Then we shall take the islands from under their noses. The postwar correlation of forces in the Pacific will be much more amenable that way.”

His gaze fell on Beria again.

“Do not imagine that you have escaped my wrath, Laventry Pavlovich. I want my bombs, and I want them yesterday. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said in return, and his voice cracked somewhat. “Yes, Comrade General Secretary.”

“And now,” Stalin said, “let’s have some soup, shall we?”

Beria’s heart sank. He still had too much work to do.

“Oh, not you, Beria,” the Vozhd said. “You are excused. Get the hell out of here and go do your job for a change. No soup for you.”

In the week and a half they had been away, there had been a noticeable increase in traffic around the giant Sharashka.

Just before they had left, Ivanov had watched two silver MiG-15s come in to land at the airfield a few miles to the west of the facility. Now it looked as if an entire fighter wing was based there. Lumbering transport planes-C-47 knockoffs by the looks of them-glided in and out almost constantly during the daylight hours. Ivanov checked the time hack in his night vision goggles.

Just after midnight.

Of the forty-three fighters who were hunkered down on the ridgeline above the road that snaked all the way down to the Communists’ research base, only he and Vennie were equipped with NVG. The others in his tiny band-Sergo the Cossack, Ahmed Khan, and Kicji their guide-made do with whatever vision nature gave them. As did the three dozen or so guerrillas they’d brought back from the Chukchi lands that lay to the north.

Ivanov was impressed with the reindeer herders. They moved through the mountains like snow leopards, and he had no doubt of their hunger for vengeance against the Bolsheviks who had all but wiped out their tribesmen. They had been eager recruits even before Ivanov had supplied them with British-made Kalashnikovs.

The Russian Spetsnaz officer wormed his way up the hard rocky surface and into a small, natural bowl-shaped depression. He pulled up his goggles and used a pair of LampVision binoculars. The approaching convoy was still a few minutes away, with more than a few switchbacks to negotiate before it would reach the ambush point. He handed the glasses to Vendulka, and after a moment’s observation she passed them onto Khan and Sergo. The two men had stayed behind when Ivanov journeyed north looking for allies. They had been watching the newly built road, recording vehicle activity.

Ivanov was convinced something pivotal was happening. Even in his own time, the Kamchatka Oblast was an isolated backwater. The provincial capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a small industrial and scientific center on Avacha Bay, was entirely surrounded by volcanic mountains and could not be reached by road. Indeed, even by 2021, no roads ran into Kamchatka.

So this two-lane highway hacked out of the rock and leading up from the Sharashka had to be significant. He had no trouble imagining that thousands of lives had been lost in its construction. Sergo and Khan hadn’t been able to follow the road to its destination, but they had observed enough traffic to insist there was a better than even chance that high-value targets would be passing through the ravine between midnight and 0200 hours.

Ivanov checked the position of the convoy again. It was hidden now behind a series of switchbacks, but he could tell from the way the glow of headlights leaked upward that they were close enough. He nodded to Kicji, holding up three fingers. The wizened guide slipped away to tell the leaders of the Chukchi that they were three minutes away.

“Sergo. Be ready. Remember, I take the lead vehicle. You take the last one.”

Wrapped in a dusty cloak, the huge Cossack was a green-tinged rock monster in the LampVision goggles. He nodded once…

“I take the rear.”…then moved away to a presighted firing position twenty meters downslope. Ahmed Khan, carrying three reloads, followed him.

Ivanov uncapped his own tube and plugged the missile sensors into his goggles. A targeting grid sprang up in front of him. He heard Vendulka shoo away a couple of Chukchi fighters who had crept up to watch him use the wonder weapon.

“Flames,” she hissed, pointing at the back of the tube. “Move away or die.” That did it.

Ivanov settled into as comfortable a position as possible, crouching down ready to raise himself up. The opalescent glow of approaching headlights grew stronger on the sheer sides of the ravine below, and his goggles began to adjust to the changing conditions. A thin green line of light, invisible to the naked eye, reached out from the launcher. An Israeli-designed B600, it was accurate out to nine hundred meters, and he was firing from a range of only two hundred. Sergo had the harder shot, but Ivanov had learned that the Cossack, trained as a young boy to fire from horseback, had a much better aim than him. He’d turned the second launcher over to him without any qualms. His only regret was the small number of rockets they had left. After this engagement there would be no more.

On the other hand, I really don’t expect to survive this operation, so what does it matter?

The LampVision goggles dialed back to minimum amplification as the lead vehicle rounded the last corner below. It was an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, very much like an old BMP, but without the tracks. An identical carrier followed behind it. Ivanov had a good minute or so to examine the vehicle, setting his goggles to record. If these things were going to roll over Western Europe, any intelligence on them would be useful.

The grinding rumble of the armored vehicles was joined by the grunt of heavy trucks shifting through gears as they negotiated the slope. He counted three of them before another BMP appeared at the convoy’s tail end.

Raising himself up on one knee, he powered up the launch system and placed the laser point on the upper deck of his target just in front of the turret. The main armament appeared to be a small cannon and a rocket that rested on a rail directly above it. Probably something like the original Sagger missile. He wondered if it was wire-guided.

A chime in his ear alerted him to target lock. Waiting a few seconds to ensure that the last vehicle in the convoy had entered the killing box, he breathed out, and fired.

The high-explosive multipurpose missile ignited and leapt away on a bright cone of fire. Reactive optics in the LampVision system damped down the searing white light to protect Ivanov from temporary blindness. The soft lime green of artificial illumination returned as the warhead sped away.

In his peripheral vision he saw Sergo’s rocket lancing downrange at the same time. They hit almost simultaneously. The HEMP rounds featured a “crush switch” in the nose of the rocket, which determined in the microseconds after impact that it had struck a relatively hard surface. Rather than detonating immediately, the weapon’s processor chips delayed any reaction momentarily, allowing the warhead to penetrate its target, at which point it went off with a spectacular explosion that caused his night vision system to dim down for nearly two seconds.

He heard the cries of Chukchi, guttural and triumphant as they opened up on the convoy from both sides of the road. Vendulka slammed another rocket into the launcher and slapped him on the shoulder. “Clear!”