Sacrifice Read online

  Before Golovanov could reach the glass doors, however, they were swung briskly open, and out strode General of the Army Ivan Yeremenko, who rapped his heels, snapped a smart salute, and then held out his hand. ‘Comrade Marshal,’ he greeted him.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Golovanov, taking off his cap and banging it against his coat to shake the rain off it, ‘you could have done better with the weather. Comrade Yeremenko. Just because I believe in the strategic value of rain, just because I am impervious to it, that doesn’t mean to say that you have to put it on for me specially.’

  Yeremenko shook his hand. ‘How was your journey?’ He wrinkled his nose up at the grey clouds. ‘Yes, I’m sorry about the weather. Not like Tbilisi, I’m afraid.’

  They went inside, and walked noisily across the marble-tiled foyer, under a huge angular portrait of Lenin, his sharp chin pointing westwards. Golovanov said, ‘Germany’s always the same. I spent the last year of the war soaked to the skin. Wet right through to my combinations. I can’t remember a single day when it didn’t rain. But I suppose, well, memory can play tricks.’

  The lift doors rumbled open, and Yeremenko ushered Golovanov inside. Colonel Chuykov and Major Grechko did not attempt to join them, but waited in the foyer for the lift to return. They knew that Golovanov didn’t like to be crowded too closely by his subordinate officers. ‘If I want to be breathed over, I can take a ride on the metro,’ he always said.

  As the lift rose upwards, Yeremenko, said, ‘You shouldn’t have to worry about the rain this time, marshal. It will be over in eight days, at the most, and the long-range forecast is excellent. Sunbathing weather.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Golovanov. Then, as the lift whined to a stop on the third floor, ‘You did remember to call Inge?’

  Yeremenko nodded.

  Golovanov clasped Yeremenko’s arm. ‘I’ve been thinking about her, you know.’

  Yeremenko said, ‘Everything is arranged, marshal. We have dinner tonight with Commander Kiselev and Admiral Perminov; then Major Poplavskiy will drive you to Herbertstrasse. Fräulein Schültz has been told to expect you.’

  ‘I bought her a necklace, you know, in Tbilisi. Diamonds and hematite.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be delighted, comrade marshal.’

  Yeremenko’s tone was very close to being a parody of lubricity, but Golovanov knew how vulnerable he was when he spoke of Inge. Yeremenko had visited the Golovanov dacha often enough during the summer months to have become well-acquainted with Katia Golovanov; and he knew that if she were ever to hear about Inge, her reaction would be volcanic.

  Apart from that, Yeremenko had made a bristling success of his recent appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, in place of the disgraced General Voroshilov, and Golovanov suspected that Yeremenko’s promotion to marshal was imminent – even before B-Day, perhaps. Yeremenko was efficient, calculating, and smart, and for the time being he was one of the Defence Council’s favourites. Better not to make an enemy of him, especially now that events were beginning to move so rapidly. This summer would make or break the careers of many high-ranking Soviet officers, even those who had come to consider through thirty years of peace that they were reasonably safe from political purging.

  ‘She’s a bright girl, Inge,’ said Golovanov, as if he were trying to justify his eagerness in asking about her so soon. ‘Very bright! She talks, she dances, she can cook, too!’

  ‘Galubtsi?’ asked Yeremenko, obliquely. Golovanov frowned at him, but said nothing. Galubtsi was Russian stuffed cabbage; and it was conceivable that Yeremenko was being sharply suggestive.

  They walked the rest of the way along the corridor in silence. Their shoes echoed on the wax-polished floor. There was a distinctive smell in the building of electronic equipment that had been switched on too long, and fly-spray, and Balkan tobacco-smoke. Every Soviet staff building seemed to smell the same.

  It was exactly 229 metres from one end of the corridor to the other, and they had walked it at a smart pace, but Golovanov wasn’t even breathing heavily when they reached the doors of the strategic conference room. Although he was 63 years old, he exercised ruthlessly every day, an hour of weight-training and aerobics. He was short and squat, with immense shoulders that were emphasized by his lavish marshal’s epaulettes. His head was like a small boulder of brown granite, on to which somebody had scratched two slitted eyes, a slitted lipless mouth, and thin lines to represent sparse brushed-back hair. All that was expressive about Golovanov’s features were his white brambly eyebrows.

  T.K. Golovanov had been born in 1922 in the old Russian town of Staraja Russa, the son of a shoemaker. His father Nikolai had been called up in the First World War, and fought as a private alongside the celebrated Konstantin Rokossovskiy. During the Great Purge of 1937, Rokossovskiy had been imprisoned, tortured, and beaten; and Golovanov’s father had been called as a witness against him, but despite having his fingers hammered flat as an ‘inducement’ to give testimony, Nikolai Golovanov had refused, and later ‘disappeared’.

  When Rokossovskiy had been released from prison to command the Soviet Tank Forces against Hitler, he had not forgotten his old friend from the days of the terror. He had made sure that young T.K. Golovanov (then a lieutenant in the 9th Mechanized Corps) was immediately promoted major; and later to colonel in the 16th Army. Under Rokossovskiy’s paternal eye, T.K. Golovanov had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Army, until by the end of the war he was a colonel-general, and a Hero of the Soviet Union.

  Now he was First Deputy of the Ministry of Defence, one of the most powerful men in the most powerful army in the world.

  Despite his unreadable face, Golovanov was an ebullient man; emotional and demonstrative in the company of friends, passionate and round-tempered. He enjoyed his vodka and he enjoyed young women: but that didn’t mean that he didn’t adore his family, too: his wife Katia and his four sturdy daughters. Every year he made a point of spending two weeks with them at their dacha at Zhiguli, and inviting scores of friends. He was ebullient, a party-goer, but he was also a survivor: he had kept his place in the elite ranks of the Red Army by being a dogged exponent of orthodox Soviet military strategy; by holding no political opinions of his own, but interpreting the fierce and heavy-handed policies of the Kremlin Defence Council down to the last letter.

  It had been Andrei Gromyko who had first called him ‘The Bear with the Broad Back’.

  Yeremenko on the other hand was calmer, wilier, but an equally astute survivor. He was tall, thin-faced, almost emaciated, a hawk to Golovanov’s bear, with bleached blue eyes and a nose as sharp as any bird of prey. Yeremenko was 55, a professional soldier whose father Y.V. Yeremenko had been a leading Stavka officer before his recent retirement due to multiple sclerosis. Yeremenko had caught the eye of Leonid Brezhnev when he was serving with the 24th Samaro-Ulyanovsk Iron Division in Czechoslavakia in 1968. He had recommended several ways in which the blatant crushing of the Czechs could be made to seem more digestible to the West; and his suggestions had earned him a speedy promotion to the Directorate of Strategic Deception, under the famous General (later Marshal) Ogarkov.

  It had been Yeremenko who had master-minded the building of a massive ‘anti-missile complex’ on the northern Moscow Ring Road, in full view of Western diplomats and journalists, in order to convince the West that the Soviet Union was far ahead of them in defensive electronics. Unnerved, the West had agreed to new disarmament talks, SALT 1; not realizing that Yeremenko’s ‘anti-missile complex’ was completely empty, and that later it would be used as a paint warehouse.

  Yeremenko’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief in Germany had come as no surprise to any of his fellow officers. It was the most influential posting in the whole of the Soviet Army, and gave Yeremenko command of four strategic fronts, a tank army, and the Baltic Fleet. Yet Yeremenko shouldered his responsibilities calmly, almost icily. He was one of the very few senior officers in the Soviet Army who wasn’t married, or even known t
o have a mistress. Nobody had ever seen him lose his temper; nobody had ever heard him raise his voice. His coldness was enough.

  Golovanov and Yeremenko reached the doors of the strategic conference room. An armed sentry standing outside gave them a sharp salute, and crashed one boot on to the floor.

  Golovanov said unexpectedly, as Yeremenko held the door open, ‘Were you ever frightened?’

  ‘Frightened?’ asked Yeremenko, impatient to get into the conference room. Eddies of tobacco-smoke swirled out into the corridor.

  ‘Yes,’ Golovanov persisted. ‘Frightened of what you were about to do; frightened of the great scale of it. We will be changing history, my friend, and geography, too.’

  Yeremenko gave him a taut smile. ‘Only because we are paid to, comrade marshal.’

  ‘Being paid is no protection from fear.’

  ‘No,’ Yeremenko agreed. ‘But at least we will be able to die in a decent pair of trousers.’

  A long way behind them, Colonel Chuykov and Major Grechko came clattering along the corridor behind them in their dazzlingly-polished boots, their thick briefing folders tucked under their arms. They were so alike they could have been brothers; brown-haired, fair-skinned, with rounded faces and dark eyebrows that met in the middle.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Bear so cheerful,’ Grechko remarked. He had been on Golovanov’s staff for nearly six weeks now, and today was the first time that he had ever seen him smile.

  ‘He’s always happy when he visits Wünsdorf,’ said Chuykov. ‘General Yeremenko has a way of making his superiors happy.’ He made a suggestive circle with his finger and his thumb. ‘Semonov told me that he’d seen her once, the wonderful Inge. The Bear was dancing with her at Sternhalle, of all places. One metre eighty, Semonov said, a good head and shoulders taller than him. Ash-blonde hair, and knockers like 8K84s.’

  Grechko grinned. 8K84s were one of the largest of Soviet missiles. ‘The pleasures of being a marshal,’ he said.

  ‘Well, who knows?’ Chuykov replied. ‘The way things are going, you could make marshal yourself in a few weeks’ time.’

  ‘I could be fertilizing the plains of North Germany,’ said Grechko. It was the first time since the beginning of the East German exercises that either of them had acknowledged the danger of what was about to happen.

  They hesitated for a moment outside the conference room and ruffled through their papers. Yeremenko was notorious for asking his superiors awkward and pernickety questions, and Golovanov would be furious if his aides were unable to provide him with every fact and every statistic, from the number of front-line missiles in the whole of East Germany to the time it would take to order up a fresh supply of bandages from the depots in Poland.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ said Grechko, swallowing drily.

  ‘I’ll stand you one later,’ said Chuykov. ‘Yeremenko doesn’t believe in liquor. He thinks it saps the virility, or something.’

  ‘Sergei said that Yeremenko was – well, you know, a bit of a ballet-dancer.’

  ‘Yeremenko? Not him. Just because he never got married. Actually, he did – he married the Army. He eats, sleeps, and farts Army, twenty-four hours a day. If he fornicates with anything, it’s a 120mm mortar.’

  Grechko said, ‘I don’t know. He just looks a bit that way.’

  Chuykov pinched his cheek. He was being playful, but it hurt. ‘And what do you think you look like, with that pretty little usi?’ He was making fun of Grechko’s moustache, which Grechko had grown after seeing Stacy Keach in The Long Riders. Grechko was a keen Western fan: he adored J.T. Edson. It had never struck him as ironic that the popular culture he enjoyed the most was the one which his Army was in existence to destroy.

  They pushed their way into the strategic conference room. It was high-ceilinged and smoky, and the only illumination came from rows of desk-lamps so that the room had a mysteriously barbarian appearance, like the inside of Jenghiz Khan’s battle-tent, blurred by the fires of pillaged Khorezm. On the far wall there was a vast large-scale map of Western Europe, as wide as a Cinemascope screen, from the west coast of Ireland to the foothills of the Urals. Beneath this map, there was a long mahogany desk, around which Golovanov and Yeremenko were already talking to the four Front Commanders of the Western Strategic Direction, as well as the Group Commander of the Western Tank Armies, and the Admiral of the Baltic Fleet.

  Facing this desk were seven rows of smaller desks, at which sat thirty or forty other high-ranking officers: Grechko recognized divisional commanders, divisional intelligence officers, commanders of the rocket services, motor-rifle troops, air defence forces, and SPETSNAZ commandos. Each of them had their deputies and their assistants, and all of them were smoking furiously.

  Chuykov nudged Grechko and discreetly pointed out B.Y. Serpuchov, the white-haired Political Commissar of the Western Strategic Direction, standing at the far end of the main desk, leafing through a folder of papers, and slowly and systematically wiping his nose.

  Chuykov and Grechko went around and took their places, a little to the left of the large chair in which Marshal Golovanov was going to sit. They were greeted by Lieutenant-Colonel Gulayev, an old friend of Chuykov’s from the military academy at Frunze.

  ‘Drop a bomb on this lot, and you’d finish the war in three minutes,’ smiled Gulayev. He had always been known for his irreverent jokes; and they had slowed down his promotion. Most of his superiors in the Stavka took themselves extremely seriously.

  At last, after a bout of last-minute handshaking, Golovanov came and sat down, and Yeremenko raised his hand for silence. There was a flurry of coughing, and then Yeremenko said, ‘Marshal Golovanov has come to visit us today with the message from the Defence Council that we have all been preparing ourselves for. It was considered desirable for the marshal to speak to you in person, so that you will be able to understand quite clearly the historic dimensions of what is about to happen, and what your part will be in the greatest advance in the course of the World Revolution since the days of Comrade Lenin.’

  There was healthy applause, and Golovanov noticed that the political commissar was nodding in approval. Yeremenko would go far, he decided. He just hoped that he himself had the stamina and the cunning for what was to come.

  Golovanov stood up, pushed back his heavy chair, and walked across to the huge illuminated map. All that the officers in the conference room could see of him was his stocky silhouette, with a slight glint of gold on his shoulder-boards.

  ‘I have spent the past month visiting in person each of the military districts of the Soviet Union,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I have flown from Khabarovsk in the Far East to Tashkent in the south; from Sverdlovsk to Tbilisi. In fact, I arrived from Tbilisi only this morning, my last port of call before coming here. As you know, every military district has been on full-scale exercise, and every Front has been brought up to maximum combat strength and full preparedness. It has been my duty to satisfy myself and the Defence Council that the Soviet Army is at its peak – fully armed, fully alert, and in a condition of high individual morale.

  ‘What you may not know is that this tremendous military exercise has been done in conjunction with secret and vital diplomatic negotiations which, when they are successfully concluded, will dramatically alter the military picture to our advantage. I can say nothing further about these negotiations at this stage, except that I received a message in Tbilisi last night from the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Services, Marshal N.K. Kutakov, who informed me that only a few minor diplomatic details remain to be resolved.

  ‘We are on the brink of Operation Byliny, comrades. The very brink. We have already settled on a provisional date for its commencement, and everything is in readiness. Your efforts in bringing your divisions and your battalions up to scratch will be rewarded not just by recognition from your Supreme Commander and the Defence Council; but by swift victory on all Fronts.’

  Golovanov cleared his throat, and came around to the front of th
e large desk, where he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, and his chin belligerently lifted. Chuykov, even though he could see him only from the rear, thought that he looked rather like Mussolini; and he noticed the political commissar lean over and say something confidentially to Yeremenko. The world is about to change, Chuykov thought, history is about to be turned upside-down, and already the predators are elbowing their way forward.

  Golovanov said, more staccato now, ‘Operation Byliny will largely follow the standard plan for the military liberation of Western Europe, which you already know well. However, the outcome of the secret diplomatic negotiations which I mentioned will render many parts of the plan unnecessary, and whole sections of it irrelevant. Perhaps the most significant departure from the original plan is that no nuclear carpet will be used. The tactics will be entirely conventional. I am telling you this now so that you can make appropriate adjustments in requisitioning ammunition and deploying your armoured vehicles.’

  He returned to the map, and indicated with his stubby finger five points along the border which divides West Germany from East Germany. ‘Five points of maximum thrust, comrades. From Czechoslovakia to Regensburg and Munich; from Czechoslovakia to Nürnberg and Stuttgart. From the southern border of the GDR through the Fulda Gap to Frankfurt and Bonn; from Berlin along the autobahn route to Hanover. And last, along the coast to Hamburg. Five concentrated points; five fingers with which our hand will thrust its way into the heart of West Germany.’

  One Serious young intelligence officer at the back of the conference room raised his hand. Golovanov impatiently wagged a finger at him, and said, ‘What is it, comrade colonel?’

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting, comrade marshal,’ said the intelligence officer. ‘The time-scale of the standard plan for military liberation of the West is ten days. Will this still apply to Operation Byliny?’