Dr. Parsons squinted out the clubhouse window at the eighteenth hole. Its fairway was a thin blanket of glistening virgin snow. No, that wasn't right, it wasn't quite virgin. There was a line of tiny footprints across it, the little divots of an animal trail.
Dr. Parsons had to close his eyes and look away. The glare was too bright, the high noon sun shining off the white snow. Dr. Parsons opened his eyes, let them re-adjust to the gloom of the unlit clubhouse, and then returned his attention to the lists of numbers scattered on the table in front of him:
Five million, five hundred thousand. That's how many troops the Soviet Union lost in 1941, the first year of Germany's invasion. The number was mind-boggling. They were only estimated to have about six million troops on the entire German front. How was that even possible? How could the Soviets have survived? How could they still be fighting?
And even that didn't tell the whole story. Germany had already occupied almost of third of the Soviet empire. Sixty-six million Soviets were now living under German rule. And those were the most productive parts of the Soviet Union: the Ukraine and its other western territories. Sixty-six million civilians, five and a half million soldiers, over three million hectares of farmland, all gone, poof, under the tread of nazi boots.
And yet they kept fighting. How did they keep fighting?
The answer lay in the Soviet Union's population of 199 million people. It had seemed mad of Germany, a nation of only 80 million, to invade a nation over twice as populace.
But they had cut that population by a third. It was now only one hundred and thirty-three million. After one more year like 1941 its population would actually be less than Germany's. The Germans didn't seem so mad, after all.
But Germany hadn't had another year like 1941. Somehow the Russians had absorbed their immense losses and rebuilt their army from the recruitment class of 1923 – the Soviet Citizens who were born in that year and so were 19 years old in June of 1942. Their population wasn't just immense, it was young, the Russian elderly having been culled by World War I, the Communist Revolution, famine, and the flu epidemic of 1918. Ironically, the tragedies and violence that had plagued twentieth-century Russia also made her more fit for war.
But it took more than people to fight a war. It took industry. It took weapons, steel, aircraft and gunpowder. Russia couldn't fight forever, because it couldn't produce forever.
Or could it?
The Soviet Union had built six thousand, six hundred tanks in 1941. With the loss of so many factories and so many workers that number should have gone down. But, according to Dr. Parson's army of spies and analysts, tank production had gone up, not down. It was expected to reach almost 25,000 in 1942. Twenty-five thousand. Almost four times what they produced in 1941, and more than four times what Germany produced in that same year.
There was a tapping on the window and Dr. Parsons looked up from his papers. It was the British spy with the mis-shapen nose, the man Dr. Parsons had begun calling, in his imagination, "flat-cap".
But the spy wasn't wearing a flat cap today. Today, despite the cold and the snow, he was bareheaded. Instead he had a scarf pulled up over his face and squinted his gunmetal eyes against the bright sunlight.
Dr. Parsons rose from his seat, tramped across the carpeted floor, flipped the bolt on a French door and swung it open.
Flat-cap stepped inside and stomped his boots free of snow. He pulled down his scarf to reveal a wolfish grin. "Cozy little office you have he here," he said, sarcastically meaning the opposite. The clubhouse was vast, designed to accommodate hundreds of people. But Dr. Parsons was alone.
Dr. Parsons shrugged. "It suits me," he replied. Then he wandered toward the bar. "Would you like a drink?"
"I would," flat-cap replied. "Where's your friend? The one who likes to carve little wooden toys."
"On a mission in Turkey." Dr. Parsons opened the liquor cabinet to display the former country club's top shelf collection. "What would you like?"
"I'm not picky," assured flat-cap.
Dr. Parsons poured them both a generous helping of Johnny Walker Black. Then he returned to the table he'd been using as a desk and placed one of the glasses across from himself.
Flat-cap sat down at the indicated place and took a swig from his glass.
"What have you got for me?" asked Dr. Parsons, taking a much more modest sip of his own drink.
"Exactly what you asked for," flat-cap replied. He withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. "Mind if I smoke?"
"Not at all," said Dr. Parsons. He watched patiently as flat-cap lit a match with his thumb nail, puffed his cigarette to a glowing ember, and then slipped the spent match back into his pocket.
"What do you do with the cigarette butt?" Dr. Parsons wondered. "And the ash?"
"Excuse me?" Flat-cap didn't quite follow.
"You put the spent match back in your pocket," Parsons explained. "I assume out of habit. Because you don't want to leave a trail of match sticks to mark where you have been."
"That's right," flat-cap nodded.
"But your cigarette is going to leave ash and a butt. Do those go in your pocket too?"
"If they have to," flat-cap admitted. "But I usually stuff them back in the cigarette pack. I'd rather have dirty cigarettes than dirty pockets. And it's helpful, too. You'd be surprised how often a packet of ash comes in handy."
"How so?"
"Makes a nice polish if you're afraid you might have left fingerprints. Can use it to melt snow or ice. Can rub out a bloodstain. Plenty of uses."
Dr. Parsons nodded, impressed. "I would have thought it would be easier just to kick the habit."
Flat-top grinned again, revealing his tobacco-stained teeth. "Learn something new every day, ain't that right doc?"
"Indeed it is," agreed Dr. Parsons. "So what else are you here to teach me?"
"Kursk," flat-top replied. He took another swig of Johnny Walker.
"Is that supposed to mean something?" Dr. Parsons frowned.
"It means something," flat-cap assured him. "It's the name of a village in Russia."
"And why should I care about a village in Russia?"
"It's where they're deploying the Tiger."
Dr. Parsons didn't react. He just let the information wash over him. The Tiger was the new German super-tank, the plans for which flat-top and his colleague had delivered a couple of months ago.
"Of course it's not the only place," flat-cap qualified his assertion. "Some are being sent to Sicily, others to Africa. I'm sure your boys will be running up against them soon." Flat-top was referring to America's recent landing of troops in North Africa. "But the bulk of them are going to Kursk."
Dr. Parsons leaned forward and swept papers away from his table top, excavating a map of Russia that lay underneath. "Show me," he said.
Flat-top stood up and walked around the table until he stood behind Dr. Parsons. He looked over Parson's shoulder for a minute and then placed his finger on the map. "Here," he said. He held his cigarette between his middle and forefinger, tapping his ring finger on the dot that marked Kursk. Smoke rose up from the cigarette, like the little village had been bombed and was on fire.
Dr. Parsons quickly scanned the military symbols marked on the map – little squares and crosses and dots that represented Russian and German positions. What the symbols revealed was a salient – a bulge – of Russian forces beginning to push out from the rest of their lines to threaten Kursk, which was currently under German occupation. If the salient increased, the Germans would only require two thrusts on either side of that bulge to cut it off and surround it – two pincers just like the Russians had done outside of Stalingrad.
Dr. Parsons fished for another set of papers, this one an analysis of Soviet industrial capacity. He moved his finger down the columns of numbers until he found "tanks" again. There it was in black and white: twenty-five thousand to Germany's six-thousand.
And that wasn't all. The columns of numbers told a fascinating story. Despite the German bombings, despite their capture of factories, despite Russia's loss of so much productive territory and workers, they were projected to out-produce the Germans in virtually every important category: rifles, aircraft, artillery and ammunition. The only category in which Russia lagged behind was warships.
"So what've you got for me in return?" flat-top asked.
But Dr. Parsons didn't answer. He was concentrating too hard on the numbers. The Germans would have this data, too. And the Germans were no fools. Hitler may be a fanatic, but his Generals and military staff were practical professionals. They'd be seeing the same data Dr. Parsons was seeing and drawing the same conclusions.
"This is supposed to be a two-way street, you know," flat-top grumbled. "We give you information from the Danish network and you give us information from your agents in Stalingrad."
Still Dr. Parsons didn't answer. But the mention of Stalingrad caused him to drop his eyes to that little dot on the map next to the Volga. The Germans had failed to secure the Baku oil fields. They'd failed to take Stalingrad and cut off the Volga's river traffic. The Soviets were drafting more new recruits than the Germans, and out-producing them in weapons of war.
The truth stared Dr. Parsons in the face. It was the same truth German military planners had drawn, the same truth that motivated Hitler to sacrifice his Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad and divert all his forces for a single, defining battle around an insignificant-looking village to its northwest.
"Control's not going to be very happy if I return empty-handed," flat-cap warned.
"The Germans have lost," Dr. Parsons announced, finally glancing up from the papers to look flat-cap in the eye.
Flat-cap stared back, too stunned to speak.
"Destroying the Kursk salient is their last chance," Dr. Parsons continued.
"What about Stalingrad?" flat-cap countered.
"Stalingrad is over. Hitler is sacrificing Sixth Army to pin down as many Russian forces there as they can."
"That's what your spies are telling you?" asked a skeptical flat-cap.
Dr. Parsons lied with a nod. He didn't have to tell the truth about how he came to his conclusion, just like flat-cap was almost certainly not telling the truth about where he got his information. All that talk about a Danish spy network was almost certainly nonsense. "Hitler's like a riverboat gambler down to his final stake," Dr. Parsons explained. "He knows his only chance left to break even is to push all his remaining chips to the center and hope that the ball lands on red."
Flat-cap put out his cigarette and carefully stuffed the butt back into the paper pack. "So he hasn't lost yet."
"No, but he will."
"Not if the ball lands on red."
"He needs the element of surprise for that. But he's lost the element of surprise, because your Danish network just told us where he's attacking."
"Told us, not Stalin."
"Then we'll just have to make sure Stalin finds out."
* * *
Dr. Parsons left the Congressional Country Club and was back to his real offices in D.C. that night. "We need to draw up a new communique," he told Benedict, his aide, as he swept off his coat.
"Communique? To which agent?"
"Red," replied Dr. Parsons. "And Viper, by extension. Both of their missions have changed."