"A little slower, old boy. I'm still choking on your Soviet forger."

"That's right at the top of the list."

"I can't promise miracles. I'll do what I can."

Cosgrove's cavalier air troubled him. It all was too much of a game, too much of an entertaining exercise. The Cosgroves and Buckners weren't laying anything of their own on the line; the weakness of this operation was its dependency on the Allies. To Roosevelt and Churchill at this point the operation must seem a minor and rather childish adventure: you had the feeling the President had sat in his Oval Office one afternoon with Buckner and some others, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a cigarette into his long holder and giving the program a patronizing benediction with his jut-jawed conspiratorial grin: All right we'll give them a hand and let them take a crack at it but let's not shut the back door.

You couldn't blame them-but it made for uncertain footing.

"I've got to have that forger."

"My dear fellow, you people have your own man in Moscow-why not get the real thing? Have him smuggle the papers out."

Alex said quietly, "All right. Who gave it to you?"

"We're obliged to protect our sources, aren't we. I'm sure you understood from the beginning there were strings attached. My government aren't giving you their backing out of the goodness of their hearts."

"If someone gave it to you, he could just as easily turn around and give it to the Kremlin too. I'd like to know your source, Brigadier." He emphasized the rank in contrast to the stars on his own epaulets.

It had no discernible effect. "I don't think there's too much chance of that."

Then the connection became clear in Alex's mind and he didn't press it further because he felt he had the answer. It had to have been someone in Deniken's camp; they were the only ones that close to the Allied governments. And if it came from Deniken then it had got to Deniken from Baron Oleg Zimovoi-an attempt to cement Oleg's position, an avowal of indispensability.

He remembered with displeasure Oleg's insistent concern for Vlasov's security: now it appeared Oleg had reversed himself when he saw an advantage to it and jeopardized Vlasov far more dangerously than Alex could have done. It would be Oleg's manner of demonstrating to the White Russian coalition his importance to the scheme: I'm the only one with an inside man in the Kremlin-the thing can't be done without me.

It was altogether worthy of Oleg. He wanted to be sure that after it was over the other contingents would be forced to remember the key role he'd played. They would have to reward him with a high seat in the new government. This was what he'd lived his whole life for: power. Now that it might be at hand he would use any means to secure it.

But Oleg could be dealt with. Having worked out the truth Alex was able to dismiss it.

"Can you give me dates?" Cosgrove said.

"Rough ones. Five days to organize training. A minimum of nine weeks' training. We're in September now-I'd say we'll shoot for operational status in middle or late November. I'd like to cut it shorter than that but I don't think we can."

"You're dealing with a great many bureaucracies. Things never happen as fast as they're promised."

"It's your job to cut through that, Brigadier."

"Quite." Cosgrove smiled again. "By November Hitler may be making speeches from the Kremlin."

"Evidently you're well briefed on the scheme. Why did you bother to ask me?"

"They didn't send me here blind. But no one knows your tactical intentions. Naturally I've asked questions. Certain things are implicit in your answers to them-in your requisitions. I gather, for example, that you won't be requiring transport by sea."

"No. I'll want the use of two long-range aircraft."

"Transports? You've got three of your own, haven't you?"

"There's a political echelon to follow us in. They'll need aircraft."

"I must say it looks bonkers to me. On the map all you can see is Jerries between here and there. You can't go up through the Prime Minister's fabled soft underbelly because there isn't an aircraft in the world with the range for it. I suppose you could go in through Alaska and Siberia but it would take b.l.o.o.d.y forever. If the n.a.z.is weren't in Riga and pushing for Leningrad that would be your route-it's only five hundred miles Riga to Moscow-but what's the point of it, you can't refuel behind Jerry's lines."

"Your guesses are your own, Brigadier."

"You're not being very cooperative."

"I haven't told anyone the plan-not even my own people."

"Of course. But the PM's getting restless about this thing. He likes to keep his hand in. You can't keep him at arm's length without finding him at sword's point. You're thinking of one kind of risk-think of the other."

Some people were born with blue eyes and some were born to play games and both Churchill and FDR were game-players with all the dedicated enthusiasm of nine-year-old boys looming over a board cluttered with toy soldiers. Blindfold them, obscure their view of the pieces and they would become hot-tempered very quickly.

That was one level. At another level the Allies had a case for quid pro quo. They had invested trust in the scheme; they had a right to be trusted in return. It was remarkable that London and Washington had got behind the operation at all. Aristocrats in exile were commonly thought to be forever hatching fanciful schemes to regain lost thrones. For important governments to support such wild-eyed schemes was unthinkable in the normal course of things; but the course of things was not normal just now. In wartime it became excusable to interfere with the internal affairs of one's allies because such matters could affect the global balance of power. But still you didn't simply disperse blank checks to every exiled king and ex-president who came begging for support. You expected certain things in return. They had every right to be stung by Alex's rebuff.

Cosgrove said, "You'll have to give ground. If you don't you may lose the whole package."

"I'll lay it out before it goes into operation."

"Not good enough, old boy."

"I can't be more specific at this time."

"Quite a politician, aren't you." Cosgrove scratched his shoulder; it made the empty sleeve move. "I'd hoped not to have to use this. But I've been instructed to render no aid and support unless we've reached a satisfactory understanding beforehand. I'm to report back to my superiors this afternoon. Naturally if they disapprove of my report you'll find yourself without a mission. For example the six aircraft you prize so highly will undoubtedly be seized for use by the War Office. Must I go on?"

Alex suppressed his anger. "Very well. If you'll set up a meeting with the Prime Minister I'll spell out the plan-with Winston Churchill, in private. Agreed?"

Cosgrove's relief was transparent. He rubbed his long jaw. "The PM will want his advisors around the table."

"Negative."

"For the Lord's sake why?"

"I haven't got time for a debate and I don't want anything written down. I'll give it to the Prime Minister in however much detail he wants. After that they can discuss it among themselves-but I won't wait for them. I haven't got time."

There was plenty of light but they stood in a sort of darkness because the great size of the cavernous hangar diluted the light. Ninety-odd enlisted men stood in platoon formation-four ranks, twenty-three columns, flag guards at the ends-and the six officers had their backs to the formation. Off to the side stood the regiment's fourteen flying officers: young men, brash, apart from the others in kind, blooded in air combat over Finland and the English Channel and the North Sea. Spaight and Pappy Johnson watched from one side and Felix waited beside the makeshift podium platform until Alex had made his round of inspection.

Then Felix mounted the platform. He looked neat, trim, businesslike. The uniform he had chosen for the occasion was a simple white one without embellishment.

Felix had a surprisingly deep voice for a man his size and he had the projection of an actor. No one had trouble hearing him even though the curved high roof put a metallic echo on the edge of his words.

"Gentlemen-Russians. My name is Felix Mikhailevitch Romanov. Now we know that a Romanov is good for nothing."

It was a bit of a pun: the Romanov was the monetary unit of old Russia, now worthless. No one laughed and there weren't many smiles but Alex sensed a slight relaxation among them.

Felix said: "Romanovs have also been known for their frivolity and for their troublemaking. Very well. I have come here, by your leave, to make trouble. To make trouble for the tyrant Josef Djugashvili who calls himself 'Stalin'-steel. His name, we know, might better be 'blood.'"

Felix stood absolutely straight up. His eyes moved gravely from face to face. "I would speak to you of the Russian people, and their nature-proud, tempestuous, filled with elemental cruelties and great pa.s.sions. We have always been lavish expenders of our own blood. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on the crushed corpses of one hundred thousand subjects. Ivan the Terrible-Genghis Khan-the rulers of Russia have extracted an awful toll in blood. In our Civil War-in which some of you fought-Russia expended the lives of twenty-five million human beings.

"But Josef Stalin has introduced murder and terror on a scale that has never been attempted by the despots of the past.

"Six years ago Stalin began to purge the secret police and the Red Party of those leaders who threatened his power-at least in his imagination. And four years ago he turned his attentions to the military. In the end thirty thousand top-ranking officers were liquidated at Stalin's whim-including the head of the Army itself, three of the five Marshals, thirteen of nineteen army commanders and more than one hundred divisional commanding generals. These were merely the top officers-the thirty thousand. The ranks have been decimated. Men like you-Russian soldiers. Kulaks, peasants, workers. There have been single days when in the streets of Moscow alone a thousand people have been shot to death. At this point in time the toll has reached ten milliort victims-one Russian out of fourteen!

"I speak to you of these things for a reason. You fought in Finland. You saw the state of the Red Army. You came to know firsthand the pitiful state of the Russian people.

"It is our wish to change that state. It is our wish to restore dignity to our great motherland. To bring freedom and self-respect. To remove the yoke of terror and slavery. To free Russia."

Felix lifted his hands from his sides-an elegant all-encompa.s.sing gesture. "We do not intend to restore a czarist dictatorship to the throne of St. Petersburg-to replace one tyranny with another. Our sole aim is to depose the Stalinists-to open Mother Russia to liberty and to make it possible for our homeland to choose its own freely elected government.

"I was chosen to lead this movement by the leaders of the Free Russian Movement in Exile. I think you know who we all are. We're not a secret cabal. The heads of all the princ.i.p.al exile groups are partic.i.p.ants in this movement-the Socialists, the conservatives, the liberal wings-all of us have banded together with one common goal: the liberation of the motherland."

They were breathless now-some of them had spent their lives waiting to hear these words.

Felix said: "There are just over one hundred of us in this building. It is up to us, and us alone, to bring freedom to Russia. We hundred men have been asked to change the lives of hundreds of millions.

"I shall be at the controls of the leading aircraft when we go to do battle with the Bolshevik devils. I do not ask you to go to war and fight for me. I ask you to follow me into the battle. It was felt I should lead you because the people of Russia might respond to me-to my name. But I do not ask you to follow me out of any idea of loyalty to my person or to the dynasty of the Romanovs. I ask you to join out of love for Mother Russia. And if I fail you I expect to be treated accordingly.

"I have told you what it is that we intend to do. Now General Alexsander Danilov will tell you how we intend to do it."

When he mounted the platform Alex held himself suitably erect but Felix turned and offered his arms and Alex accepted the bear hug with more than simple formality. He was overwhelmingly proud of the young prince. It had been a fine speech: brief, strong, candid, whole. It had electrified every man in the vast hangar.

Some of the officers had beads of sweat on their foreheads. Sergei Bulygin-holding a pennant standard at the right end of the formation-had tears on his cheeks and was beaming with a pride he seemed almost unable to contain. Pappy Johnson, who neither spoke nor understood Russian, stood agape: Spaight had been murmuring a translation in his ear.

Their emotions had been brought to a peak; now he had to steady them-get their intellects working.

He said, "Rigid security is now in force. All leaves and pa.s.ses are canceled and any unauthorized contact with persons outside this unit will be treated as a court-martial offense. This stricture applies to officers as well as enlisted men. You are not to communicate with anybody about anything. You are not to speak one word to anyone outside this unit. That applies to your former comrades in the regiment as well as to outsiders. No one outside this room is privy to our plans and we must keep it that way. Our area will be guarded by sentries from the remainder of the regiment but you are not to speak to those sentries except to identify yourselves when it is necessary to pa.s.s through their positions. Are there any questions?"

No one spoke: no one moved.

"You have all volunteered blind for this mission-not knowing the nature of it when you agreed to stand forward. But I have to remind you that it is too late now to change your minds unless you are prepared to spend several months in solitary confinement. That alternative is offered to anyone who prefers it. It is not a punishment, it is a means of insuring that our plans are not leaked until after the mission has been completed. Questions?"

Again there were none; he shifted his stance to take weight off the bad leg. "Very well. The mission is twofold. Part One is the isolation and destruction of the Bolshevik leadership-Stalin and his key aides. Part Two is the seizure and operation of key headquarters and centers of communication.

"Part One is solely the concern of our fourteen pilots and their combat leader, Prince Felix Romanov. Stalin will be attacked and destroyed from the air, by bombardment. The details of that scheme are not important to the rest of you.

"Part Two requires the engagement of sixty-eight of you-officers and men-on the ground. These sixty-eight will be dropped into selected spots by parachute. Wearing Red Army uniforms and carrying forged papers, you will infiltrate headquarters of the Red Army and centers of wireless and print communications. You will neutralize the occupants, taking them by surprise, and you will take over the operations of those centers until you can be relieved by a second wave who will arrive when they have received the signal that the mission has been accomplished.

"The second wave will not consist of men from this unit. It will be manned primarily by military and political leaders who are prepared to take over the reins of the Russian government. As Prince Felix has told you the ident.i.ties of these men are not secret. They include Prince Leon Kirov, Baron Oleg Zimovoi, Count Anatol Markov and quite a number of others. Prince Felix Romanov will become head of government. I will command the Armies of Russia until such time as we are able to reorganize the General Staff. The German Army must continue to be resisted in the field.

"I have told you that the plan requires sixty eight men from this unit. There are ninety-six of you here. The difference between those two figures represents those of you who will wash out during training. The sixty-eight men who effect the liberation will be the best among you. If you intend to be among them then you will need to be just a little better than the next man in training.

"Can sixty-eight men seize control of the largest country in the world? I would point out to you that Lenin did exactly that in nineteen-seventeen with just one hundred and fourteen shock troops. Do you think we can do as well, gentlemen?"

There was silence in the hangar after the echo of his question stopped reverberating-and then abruptly the room rang with a deafening roar from a hundred throats.

The word they shouted was "Da!"

After formation he retired to the part.i.tioned office with Spaight and Pappy Johnson. Spaight said, "How long have I got?"

"Seven weeks starting Monday."

"Jesus H. Christ on a crutch."

"If you can't do it you'd better say so. Right now."

Spaight dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it the h.e.l.l if I can't."

Pappy Johnson said, "Man I'm still trying to get my breath."

"Get it fast," Alex told him. "You're going to be in the air fourteen hours a day."

"Shee-yit." Johnson was leaning against the sill on both hands. After a moment he gathered himself and turned about. "I got two problems right off, Skipper."

"Name them."

"First thing, I don't speak but two words of Russian. No, three. Da, nyet and tovarich."

"And your accent's atrocious," Spaight remarked drily.

"How'm I supposed to train fifteen Russian pilots?"

Spaight said, "They've been attached to the Royal Air Force for a year and before that nearly all of them were flying combat in China or Spain. English is the international pilots' language. You won't have trouble with that."

Pappy absorbed that. "The other thing ain't so easy." He turned to Alex. "Ain't enough high-octane around here to taxi those Forts once around the ballroom. How can I teach them anything if I can't get them off the ground?"

"You'll have gasoline by the beginning of the week. In the meantime you'll have your hands full setting up a ground school. Only five of them have ever flown bombers."

"Five's a lot better than none. One more thing then. Where'm I going to find grease monkeys who've laid eyes on a B-Seventeen?"

"Colonel Buckner has three ground-crew chiefs on the way here from Boeing. They should arrive tomorrow. Any more problems?"

"Is there anything you forgot to take care of?"

"We'll spend the next seven weeks finding that out."

"Well here's one for starters. You've given me pilots but what about navigators and bombardiers, gunners, all that stuff? A Flying Fortress takes a combat crew of ten, Skipper."

"We'll wash at least thirty of the ground troops out of training thirty days ahead of D-day. You'll have those thirty days to make air gunners out of them. I know it's not enough time but do what you can. We'll have Red Air Force markings on the planes and the plan doesn't include shooting our way in. You might run into a stray Luftwaffe plane but I doubt it."

"Fair enough. But-"

"As for navigators and bombardiers you've got a pool of fifteen experienced fliers to draw from and you've only got six airplanes. Three bombers, three transports that don't need bombardiers. Your copilots will have to double as navigators but their problems won't be acute-it's a simple flight plan once it's in motion. If the weather's bad we won't go in anyway, we've got to have optimum weather for the mission. Six pilots, six copilots-that leaves you three spare pilots. They'll be your bombardiers. Next question?"

"No. But if you're fixing to take over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with three B-Seventeen bombers and sixty-eight ground troops then you have got the b.a.l.l.s of a bra.s.s gorilla."

The grey Bentley had handsome Coventry coachwork and a high kneaded leather seat in which Count Anatol Markov sat bolt erect. At the count's elbow was a telephone to speak with the driver but there was no need for that. The car had picked him up at the customs gate and now moved him almost without sound through the streets of north London and across toward Highgate.

Anatol observed dispa.s.sionately that bomb damage in this sector didn't seem severe. Here and there a house had been shattered and twice they had to detour around cratered streets but north London had hardly been turned into rubble; either the newspapers had exaggerated the Luftwaffe's efficiency or other areas of the city had taken the brunt of Hitler's air war.

The Bentley made the left turn off the Archway Road at Highgate Wood and slid smoothly to the curb before a high Victorian house faced with genteel stonework and brick. Count Anatol's index finger pried the watch out of his waistcoat pocket and snapped the gold crested lid open. It was four-fifteen.