Winter of the World (124 page)

A two-year-old boy walked into the room and inspected him with frank curiosity. He was dressed in clothes that were evidently homemade, and he had an Oriental look. ‘Who are you?’ he
said.

‘My name is Lloyd. Who are you?’

‘Walli,’ he said. He ran out again, and Lloyd heard him say to someone outside: ‘That man talks funny!’

So much for my German accent, Lloyd thought.

Then he heard the voice of a middle-aged woman. ‘Don’t make such remarks! It’s impolite.’

‘Sorry, Grandma.’

Next moment Maud walked in.

Her appearance shocked Lloyd. She was in her mid-fifties, but looked seventy. Her hair was grey, her face was gaunt, and her blue silk dress was threadbare. She kissed his cheek with shrunken
lips. ‘Lloyd Williams, what a joy to see you!’

She’s my aunt, Lloyd thought with a rather queer feeling. But she did not know that: Ethel had kept the secret.

Maud was followed by Carla, who was unrecognizable, and her husband. Lloyd had met Carla as a precocious eleven-year-old: now, he calculated, she was twenty-six. Although she looked half-starved
– most Germans did – she was pretty, and had a confident air that surprised Lloyd. Something about the way she stood made him think she might be pregnant. He knew from Maud’s
letters that Carla had married Werner, who had been a handsome charmer back in 1933 and was still the same.

They spent an hour catching up. The family had been through unimaginable horror, and said so frankly, yet Lloyd still had a sense that they were editing out the worst details. He told them about
Daisy, Evie and Dave. During the conversation a teenage girl came in and asked Carla if she could go to her friend’s house.

‘This is our daughter, Rebecca,’ Carla said to Lloyd.

She was about sixteen, so Lloyd supposed she must be adopted.

‘Have you done your homework?’ Carla asked the girl.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow morning.’

‘Do it now, please,’ Carla said firmly.

‘Oh, Mother!’

‘No argument,’ said Carla. She turned back to Lloyd, and Rebecca stomped out.

They talked about the crisis. Carla was deeply involved, as a city councillor. She was pessimistic about the future of Berlin. She thought the Russians would simply starve the population until
the West gave in and handed the city over to total Soviet control.

‘Let me show you something that may make you feel differently,’ Lloyd said. ‘Will you come with me in the car?’

Maud stayed behind with Walli, but Carla and Werner went with Lloyd. He told the driver to take them to Tempelhof, the airport in the American zone. When they arrived he led them to a high
window from which they could look down on the runway.

There on the tarmac were a dozen C-47 Skytrain aircraft lined up nose to tail, some with the American star, some with the RAF roundel. Their cargo doors were open, and a truck stood at each one.
German porters and American airmen were unloading the aircraft. There were sacks of flour, big drums of kerosene, cartons of medical supplies, and wooden crates containing thousands of bottles of
milk.

While they watched, empty aircraft were taking off and more were coming in to land.

‘This is amazing,’ said Carla, her eyes glistening. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘There has never
been
anything like it,’ Lloyd replied.

She said: ‘But can the British and Americans keep it up?’

‘I think we have to.’

‘But for how long?’

‘As long as it takes,’ said Lloyd firmly.

And they did.

1949

Almost halfway through the twentieth century, on 29 August 1949, Volodya Peshkov was on the Ustyurt Plateau, east of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. It was a stony desert
in the deep south of the USSR, where nomads herded goats in much the same way as they had in Bible times. Volodya was in a military truck that bounced uncomfortably along a rough track. Dawn was
breaking over a landscape of rock, sand, and low thorny bushes. A bony camel, alone beside the road, stared malevolently at the truck as it passed.

In the dim distance, Volodya saw the bomb tower, lit by a battery of spotlights.

Zoya and the other scientists had built their first nuclear bomb according to the design Volodya had got from Willi Frunze in Santa Fe. It was a plutonium device with an implosion trigger. There
were other designs, but this one had worked twice before, once in New Mexico and once at Nagasaki.

So it should work today.

The test was codenamed RDS-1, but they called it First Lightning.

Volodya’s truck pulled up at the foot of the tower. Looking up, he saw a clutch of scientists on the platform, doing something with a snake’s nest of cables that led to detonators on
the skin of the bomb. A figure in blue overalls stepped back, and there was a toss of blonde hair: Zoya. Volodya felt a flush of pride. My wife, he thought; top physicist
and
mother of
two.

She conferred with two men, the three heads close together, arguing. Volodya hoped nothing was wrong.

This was the bomb that would save Stalin.

Everything else had gone wrong for the Soviet Union. Western Europe had turned decisively democratic, scared off Communism by bully-boy Kremlin tactics and bought off by Marshall Plan bribes.
The USSR had not even been able to take control of Berlin: when the airlift had gone on relentlessly day after day for almost a year, the Soviet Union had given up and reopened the roads and
railways. In Eastern Europe, Stalin had retained control only by brute force. Truman had been re-elected President, and considered himself leader of the world. The Americans had stockpiled nuclear
weapons, and had stationed B-29 bombers in Britain, ready to turn the Soviet Union into a radioactive wasteland.

But everything would change today.

If the bomb exploded as it should, the USSR and the USA would be equals again. When the Soviet Union could threaten America with nuclear devastation, American domination of the world would be
over.

Volodya no longer knew whether that would be good or bad.

If it did not explode, both Zoya and Volodya would probably be purged, sent to labour camps in Siberia or just shot. Volodya had already talked to his parents, and they had promised to take care
of Kotya and Galina.

As they would if Volodya and Zoya were killed by the test.

In the strengthening light Volodya saw, at various distances around the tower, an odd variety of buildings: houses of brick and wood, a bridge over nothing, and the entrance to some kind of
underground structure. Presumably the army wanted to measure the effect of the blast. Looking more carefully he saw trucks, tanks, and obsolete aircraft, placed for the same purpose, he imagined.
The scientists were also going to assess the impact of the bomb on living creatures: there were horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs in kennels.

The confab on the platform ended with a decision. The three scientists nodded and resumed their work.

A few minutes later Zoya came down and greeted her husband.

‘Is everything all right?’ he said.

‘We think so,’ Zoya replied.

‘You
think
so?’

She shrugged. ‘We’ve never done this before, obviously.’

They got into the truck and drove, across country that was already a wasteland, to the distant control bunker.

The other scientists were close behind.

At the bunker they all put on welders’ goggles as the countdown ticked away.

At sixty seconds, Zoya held Volodya’s hand.

At ten seconds, he smiled at her and said: ‘I love you.’

At one second, he held his breath.

Then it was as if the sun had suddenly risen. A light stronger than noon flooded the desert. In the direction of the bomb tower, a ball of fire grew impossibly high, reaching for the moon.
Volodya was startled by the lurid colours in the fireball: green, purple, orange and violet.

The ball turned into a mushroom whose umbrella kept rising. At last the sound arrived, a bang as if the largest artillery piece in the Red Army had been fired a foot away, followed by rolling
thunder that reminded Volodya of the terrible bombardment of the Seelow Heights.

At last the cloud began to disperse and the noise faded.

There was a long moment of stunned silence.

Someone said: ‘My God, I didn’t expect
that.
’

Volodya embraced his wife. ‘You did it,’ he said.

She looked solemn. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But
what
did we do?’

‘You saved Communism,’ said Volodya.

(ii)

‘The Russian bomb was based on Fat Man, the one we dropped on Nagasaki,’ said Special Agent Bill Bicks. ‘Someone gave them the plans.’

‘How do you know?’ Greg asked him.

‘From a defector.’

They were sitting in Bicks’s carpeted office in the Washington headquarters of the FBI at nine o’clock in the morning. Bicks had his jacket off. His shirt was stained in the armpits
with sweat, though the building was comfortably air-conditioned.

‘According to this guy,’ Bicks went on, ‘a Red Army intelligence colonel got the plans from one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project team.’

‘Did he say who?’

‘He doesn’t know which scientist. That’s why I called you in. We need to find the traitor.’

‘The FBI checked them all out at the time.’

‘And most of them were security risks! There was nothing we could do. But you knew them personally.’

‘Who was the Red Army colonel?’

‘I was coming to that. You know him. His name is Vladimir Peshkov.’

‘My half-brother!’

‘Yes.’

‘If I were you, I’d suspect me.’ Greg said it with a laugh, but he was very uneasy.

‘Oh, we did, believe me,’ Bicks said. ‘You’ve been subjected to the most thorough investigation I have seen in twenty years with the Bureau.’

Greg gave him a sceptical look. ‘No kidding.’

‘Your kid’s doing well in school, isn’t he?’

Greg was shocked. Who could have told the FBI about Georgy? ‘You mean my godson?’ he said.

‘Greg, I said
thorough
. We know he’s your son.’

Greg was annoyed, but he suppressed the feeling. He had probed the personal secrets of numerous suspects during his time in Army security. He had no right to object.

‘You’re clean,’ Bicks went on.

‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

‘Anyway, our defector insisted the plans came from a scientist, rather than any of the normal army personnel working on the project.’

Greg said thoughtfully: ‘When I met Volodya in Moscow, he told me he had never been to the United States.’

‘He lied,’ said Bicks. ‘He came here in September 1945. He spent a week in New York. Then we lost him for eight days. He resurfaced briefly then went home.’

‘Eight days?’

‘Yeah. We’re embarrassed.’

‘It’s enough time to go to Santa Fe, stay a couple of days, and come back.’

‘Right.’ Bicks leaned forward across his desk. ‘But think. If the scientist had already been recruited as a spy, why wasn’t he contacted by his regular controller? Why
bring someone from Moscow to talk to him?’

‘You think the traitor was recruited on this two-day visit? It seems too quick.’

‘Possibly he had worked for them before but lapsed. Either way, we’re guessing the Soviets needed to send
someone whom the scientist already knew.
That means there ought to be
a connection between Volodya and one of the scientists.’ Bicks gestured at a side table covered with tan file folders. ‘The answer is in there somewhere. Those are our files on every
one of the scientists who had access to those plans.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Go through them.’

‘Isn’t that your job?’

‘We’ve already done it. We didn’t find anything. We’re hoping you’ll spot something we’ve missed. I’ll sit here and keep you company, do some
paperwork.’

‘It’s a long job.’

‘You’ve got all day.’

Greg frowned. Did they know . . . ?

Bicks said confidently: ‘You have no plans for the rest of the day.’

Greg shrugged. ‘Got any coffee?’

He had coffee and doughnuts, then more coffee, then a sandwich at lunchtime, then a banana mid-afternoon. He read every known detail about the lives of the scientists, their wives and families:
childhood, education, career, love and marriage, achievements and eccentricities and sins.

He was eating the last bite of banana when he said: ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

‘What?’ said Bicks.

‘Willi Frunze went to the Berlin Boys’ Academy.’ Greg slapped the file triumphantly down on the desk.

‘And . . . ?’

‘So did Volodya – he told me.’

Bicks thumped his desk in excitement. ‘School friends! That’s it! We’ve got the bastard!’

‘It’s not proof,’ said Greg.

‘Oh, don’t worry, he’ll confess.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Those scientists believe that knowledge should be shared with everyone, not kept secret. He’ll try to justify himself by arguing that he did it for the good of humanity.’

‘Maybe he did.’

‘He’ll go to the electric chair all the same,’ said Bicks.

Greg was suddenly chilled. Willi Frunze had seemed a nice guy. ‘Will he?’

‘You bet your ass. He’s going to fry.’

Bicks was right. Willi Frunze was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, and he died in the electric chair.

So did his wife.

(iii)

Daisy watched her husband tie his white bow tie and slip into the tailcoat of his perfectly fitting dress suit. ‘You look like a million dollars,’ she said,
and she meant it. He should have been a movie star.

She remembered him thirteen years earlier, wearing borrowed clothes at the Trinity Ball, and she felt a pleasant frisson of nostalgia. He had looked pretty good then, she recalled, even though
his suit was two sizes too big.

They were staying in her father’s permanent suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington. Lloyd was now a junior minister in the British Foreign Office, and he had come here on a
diplomatic visit. Lloyd’s parents, Ethel and Bernie, were thrilled to be looking after two grandchildren for a week.