Free The Red Eagles by David Downing

excitement. The train was due in a few minutes, and she began to walk slowly up the platform, wondering again whether there could be any other explanation for the new instructions.
    She couldn’t think of one. Moscow was going to orderher to “sell” Wim Doesburg something that Berlin would buy. Moscow’s interest in the uranium train had been rekindled with a vengeance. Put the two together and it could add up to only one thing. She still didn’t see how it could be done, but the idea itself was brilliant. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without her because she was the only link with the Germans. This was
real
action at long last.
    The train arrived, its locomotive belching black smoke into the clear blue sky. She took a seat in the front car, listened to the conductor’s cries of “Manassas” reverberating down the platform, and checked her watch as they began to pull out of the station. Exactly nine minutes later she left her seat and walked back two cars, stopped for a minute to make sure she wasn’t being followed, then continued toward the rear of the train. Another two cars down, she and Matson went through their fortnightly ritual, knocking into each other and exchanging dropped copies of
The Saturday Evening Post
. She had her usual glimpse of highly polished brown shoes, uniform, weather-beaten face, heard the Tennessee drawl intone “So sorry, ma’am” and her own voice say “It’s nothing – really.”
    In the club car she took a seat at the bar and ordered a Coca-Cola. No problem, there never was, but still her pulse insisted on racing. She forced herself to sit there until the thumping had subsided, then locked herself in the washroom to examine the contents of the envelope left inside the magazine.
    It was all there. A complete timetable, obviously copied from an internal railroad document, annotated with crew changeover points and watering stops. An explanation of the Friday timing – “an optimilization of clear paths,” whatever that meant. A list headed “Locomotives Rostered for This Duty.” And four photographs of the train itself, from different distances and angles, marked May 5 on the backs. That clinched it. Faulkner hadn’t mentioned photographs, butMoscow must have asked for them, and there could be only one reason.
    She put everything back in the envelope, the envelope back in the magazine, and caught sight of herself in the mirror as she turned to leave. “Yes,” she told her reflection. “Oh yes!”
     
    Thirty hours after leaving his group at Lukomskoye, Kuznetsky was driven down Lenin Prospekt toward Moscow’s hub. It was his first sight of Moscow, actually of anything bigger than a village, for more than two years.
    He had never liked Moscow, and had somehow contrived to spend only a few months of his twenty-six Soviet years in the capital. A homesick Muscovite had once drunkenly explained to him that his city combined the best of the West, its commitment to reason, with the best of the East, its spirituality, and therefore qualified as paradise on earth. Kuznetsky had always thought it was the other way around: the East’s lack of reason allied to the West’s lack of spirituality – a soulless bazaar.
    He’d had a good night’s sleep at the Partisan HQ on the city’s outskirts, once he’d given up the bed for the more familiar texture of the floor. It was surprising how quickly one lost the knack of civilized living; he’d had problems with the cutlery at breakfast and the toilet had seemed almost obscene.
    He’d also lost more weight than he’d realized. The NKVD colonel’s uniform he’d left behind in 1942 was now several sizes too large, and it reeked of mothballs.
    The Kremlin loomed across the river. The car swept across the bridges, past the Borovitsky Tower and across Marx Prospekt into Frunze Street, drawing up at the massive portals of the Defense Ministry. The driver opened his door and Kuznetsky climbed out. The guard at the door examined