Final impact

The Soviets had restricted all access to the ruins of Lodz, ostensibly because of the danger of radiation poisoning, although they had been more than accommodating when it came to requests from London and Washington for briefings on the atomic raid. While the Red Army liaison officers who flew into England especially for these meetings would not discuss details of the USSR’s atomic program, they were more than happy to provide reams of evidence from Poland about the destructive power unleashed by the workers’ state.

“I guess the message is clear enough,” Spruance muttered as footage restarted on the main screen, showing a superfire that had destroyed even more of Lodz than the initial blast.

“Yeah, Don’t fuck with the revolution,” Kolhammer said. “Jesus, what a shambles. I wonder how close we are to lighting off our first one.”

“A lot closer now, I’ll wager,” Spruance said.

Kolhammer didn’t bother to reply. It was a laydown that whatever capacity existed, it would be used to accelerate the Allied atomic program. But it wasn’t his business to know about the progress of the Manhattan Project, even though so many of its resources had come from his original Multinational Force. Nearly a thousand personnel from the Clinton had been allocated to Groves.

He wasn’t completely out of the loop, of course. The decision he’d made two years ago to dispatch Ivanov to the Soviet Union had taken on an entirely new character. Far from being considered “dangerous and stupid”-in the well-chosen words of Admiral King-it was looking like a remarkable act of foresight. Ivanov’s little group was about the only card they had to play.

“Admiral Spruance, Admiral Kolhammer, excuse me, sirs. We’ll have the link in two minutes.”

Both men straightened and turned away from the video display. A young woman, a ’temp, was standing behind them.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Spruance said. “We’ll be right along.”

Kolhammer shook his head as he took one last look at a loop captured by a Big Eye drone that had been moved over Lodz by the Trident. The Soviets had protested that, of course, but not too energetically. They were more than happy for the West to see exactly what they were capable of accomplishing.

“Let’s go,” Spruance said.

They left Intel and walked a short way down the corridor to a comm shack, a much smaller room with three screens, glowing blue and displaying a countdown.

…0056

0055

0054…

Kolhammer and Spruance settled themselves in front of the flat panels as the female ensign checked the videoconferencing connections.

“How long till the Havoc gets back to us?” Spruance asked.

“Willet will be on station in about two hours,” Kolhammer said. “She’ll deploy drones and start taking the feed immediately. Raw data should arrive in the first burst by thirteen hundred hours. Her intelligence boss will give it a cover note, but we have a lot more analysts than she does, so a full picture will probably be another few hours.”

“Until then I suppose we can take the Soviets at their word.”

“Yes. If they say they’re going to attack the Home Islands, they undoubtedly will.”

“Do you think they’ll use another atomic bomb?”

Kolhammer shrugged. “We’ll know when we know. Lodz might have been their one shot in the locker. Even assuming they grabbed the Vanguard, and I think that’s a safe assumption now, you can’t build a nuclear weapon out of box tops and rubber bands. It’s a very difficult task, and it chews up tremendous resources.”

“Ten seconds,” the ensign announced.

“I hope to God you’re right, Admiral,” Spruance said. “I wouldn’t like to think of old Joe Stalin with a locker full of those things.”

“That’s why I doubt he has many yet,” said Kolhammer. “If he did, he’d have used them on everyone. Including us.”

The three blue screens flickered into life, with each displaying a different video window.

“Links verified secure,” a sysop announced through the speakers. “Level One encryption.” He had a British accent. Probably one of Halabi’s people.

In the screen on the far left sat Churchill, Eisenhower, and a clutch of American and British staff officers. They seemed to be in an underground bunker, and Kolhammer assumed it was the war rooms in London, which had been fitted out with some of the Trident’s communications gear. In the center screen he found the president and the Joint Chiefs, back in Washington, and on the right-hand display was General MacArthur, beaming in from the South West Pacific Area Command in Brisbane. In the top left-hand corner of each screen a small separate window displayed the local time.

The sound came on with a crackle a few seconds after the video.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.” It was President Roosevelt. “By now you’ll all have been properly informed about the Soviets’ atomic attack on the Germans in Lodz.”

Not just the Germans, Kolhammer thought.

“I believe General Eisenhower is going to update us on the situation in Western Europe.”