Three Kings (Kirov Series) (7 page)

In the end,
Dakar was seen as an outpost that would have to rely on the French Navy for its
defense, and Darlan was inclined to position his fighting ships farther north
to defend Casablanca. It was a strange logic, for the British planners had
already determined that they simply did not have the force to consider an
amphibious landing against Casablanca, but they saw the presence of heavy
French naval units at Dakar as a most dangerous threat that simply had to be
eliminated.

Operations
were planned to heavily reinforce Force H and mount another major engagement
there, but when Admiral
Plancon
was ordered to bring
all his capital ships north to Casablanca, and make that place the principle
base of the Atlantic
Force De Raid
, British planners now saw an
opportunity to use the amphibious force Admiral Keyes had labored so long to
build. They would take any table scraps that fell from French control, and it
soon became clear that a second operation against Dakar could now proceed.

The
plan then would be to begin with Shrapnel against the Cape Verde Islands in
tandem with the second attempt at Dakar. These in hand, the navy would roll
north to Operation Puma against the Canary Islands. Once taken, those islands
would become the primary base for Force H, with the new Naval Headquarters
Atlantic under Admiral Somerville at the Port of Las Palmas on the Grand Canary
Island.

What
the British did not know was that the Germans had good reasons for asking the
French to pull out of Dakar. They had other fish to fry, and they could also
see that the war was now heading to the Middle East. It was a strange push pull
in the war where both sides moved in the same direction, the Germans and French
gave as the British sought to take, but for a reason they kept very secret
until their plan was ready to take real form and shape.

Admiral
Keyes was quite happy to have Dakar back on his target list for possible
combined operations by the Army and Navy. He saw these moves in as
prerequisites to larger operations against French West Africa, but when Keyes
inquired as to further plans, he was surprised and dismayed to learn there were
none!

Any
landing on the Atlantic coast of Africa would find itself with two thousand
miles of inhospitable terrain between that place and the real center of gravity
for the war now—Egypt. Britain’s war effort would be to maintain a wedge
between the advancing armies of the Third Reich, and the Orenburg Federation.
The French
Force De Raid
aside, other Vichy holdings in Africa would be
ignored. Britain would fight on, but the battle would be waged somewhere
else—in the Western Desert, where Wavell and O’Conner were meeting now to plan
the first steps in the long road home to victory.

Yet
other men were meeting as well, and in a strange quirk of fate the name of
General Richard O’Connor would also figure prominently in their planning.

Chapter 6

“Forgive
me if I do not
call you my Führer,” said Volkov. “I mean no disrespect, but heads of state
follow other protocols, do they not?”

“Call me the devil if you wish,”
said Hitler, “as long as you remain my trusted adjutant, all will be well.”

It was a meeting that had been
planned long ago, but with developments in the war now heating up, the time was
ripe for Adolf Hitler to meet with the shadow to the east, Ivan Volkov, the man
who sat on all that oil, the man who held a knife at Sergei Kirov’s back.
Hitler was no fool. He knew that Volkov’s disposition was not one to easily
bear his trust. The man had schemed and assassinated his way to power over many
long years, ruthlessly eliminating one foe after another until he forged his
Orenburg Federation on the fringes of the Soviet heartland. The one man he
could not outmaneuver had been Sergei Kirov, and now the war would settle their
long simmering rivalry—or I will settle it, thought Hitler.

The place for this meeting was
also symbolic of the Führer’s real interest in treating with Volkov—Ploesti.
Hitler had come by train from Austria, Volkov in a squadron of four airships
that crossed the Black Sea from his territory in the Caucasus. Ploesti was the
oil center of Romania, and Hitler was keen to tour the facilities, where he
made suggestions on how Germany could improve production, and increase oil
flows and deliveries by rail to the Reich. It was his final stop before returning
to Germany, a handshake here with Ivan Volkov, and a word on what was soon to
come in his march to world domination.

Hitler was very pleased with the
outcome of this diplomatic mission to the Balkans in late 1940. It had been his
intention to lay a carpet of federated states all the way from Czechoslovakia
to the Turkish frontier, and to do this he needed the allegiance of Romania,
Bulgaria and Hungary. One by one these nations fell under the shadow of his
control, some willingly, as in the case of Hungary, which had been a client
state since 1938. Others came grudgingly, for Romania had been pro-British and
an ally of Poland at the outbreak of the war. Hitler made Romania a top
priority, pleased when General
Antonescu
ascended to
the position of Prime Minister there, and then quickly signed the Tripartite
Pact to effectively join the Axis in late 1940. Now Hitler had access to
Romania’s oil producing region at Ploesti, and valuable territory from which he
could stage further operations.

With Hungary and Bulgaria also
cowed, he now planned on the final resolution of the Balkans as a prelude to
the decisive campaigns of 1941 against either Soviet Russia or the British
Middle East. Operation 25, as it was called, was the plan to devour Yugoslavia,
with armies staging on every frontier of that beleaguered state. Hitler would
move the 1st Panzer Group to Bulgaria near Sofia, the XLI Corps to Romania and
the XLVI Corps to Hungary to place a cordon of steel all along Yugoslavia’s
eastern borders. From the north, the German Second Army would stage from
Austria with three Infantry Corps, from the west, the Italian Second Army would
field a similar force, and the whole operation was happening three months
earlier than it did in the history before
Kirov
staged from Severomorsk.

Now he stared at Volkov across
the conference table, his dark eyes taking the man in, noting every line and
detail of his uniform, the insignia, his military officer’s cap. It was clear
that Volkov saw himself as a military man, while Hitler sat there in civilian
dress, the plain grey suit he often wore, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He
sized
the man up now, as a man might inspect a tool he was
planning to use for some task. That was all Volkov was at the moment—an
unwitting tool in the Führer’s hand.

So Hitler would make him his
ally, for his longstanding feud with Sergei Kirov was most convenient. He was
tying down nearly forty Soviet divisions along the frontier from the Crimea and
along the Volga all the way to the wilderness of Siberia north of Samara. That
was very useful. Those were troops Kirov could easily move to his European
theater were it not for Volkov. So he needed this man just now, and he would
have to find a way to appease him, a nice scrap or two to throw him while he
continued to devour Europe.

“I see that you have a bit of a
problem on your hands in the Caucasus,” said Hitler.

“Kirov’s troops have invaded from
the Crimea and invested Novorossiysk.”

“And he has crossed the Don south
of Volgograd. Will you stop him?”

“Of course,” said Volkov, knowing
he could not show weakness here. “He merely took advantage of the situation in
Siberia, that is all. I will reinforce that sector in due course and stop him.”

“Will you?” Hitler tapped the
table with his pencil, looking at the map. “Why the attack at Omsk, Volkov? You
had an accord with the Siberians there, and you threw it away.”

“Karpov,” Volkov said flatly. “It
was all his doing. The man cannot be trusted. He was maneuvering troops to that
frontier even as the ink was drying on the Omsk accord. So I took the necessary
step of eliminating him from the scene before we begin joint operations to
settle these affairs.” He lied about this, but lies had always served his
purpose before, and this was no different.

“I see…” Hitler knew Volkov was
lying, knew that Volkov had initiated hostilities and violated the accord,
almost as if he had planned it all from the very first. “You had Omsk,” he
said. “Now you must take it back?”

“Omsk was bait, nothing more. I
wanted to see if I could get Karpov to move off his main line of defense along
the Ob River. Then I could trap those forces in a quick pincer movement, smash
them, and eliminate this nuisance.”

“And did he take your bait?”

“To a degree. He moved up three
divisions, one in the city, two others guarding its flanks.”

“Yet he still sits on the
Ob
with the rest of his army,” Hitler tapped the map again.
“My intelligence services tell me you suffered a severe setback recently. I’m
told this man Karpov gave your troops a nasty surprise!”

“So I have taken stronger
measures,” said Volkov. “Yes, Karpov is ruthless, but I will deal with the
matter. If the bear will not come out of his cave, then I will go in after him.
I have sent another army, and a heavy squadron of my Airship Corps across the
frontier, and they are driving on Barnaul as we speak. I should reach that
place by nightfall. From there I can swing north and take his main defensive
bastion at Novosibirsk from behind. This will make a costly battle to cross the
Ob unnecessary.”

“But you must force the river to
the south first,” said Hitler. “Suppose you get another surprise there?”

“The Siberians have only two
divisions there, the 93rd and 133rd. My airship fleet can isolate that place by
cutting the rail lines. The only reason Karpov succeeded at Novosibirsk was
because of inadequate air defense against his zeppelins. All of mine were busy
elsewhere, but that has changed. Rest assured. I will cross the Ob in a matter
of days.”

“Very well. And how soon before
you finish with this distraction?”

“A few weeks… Perhaps a month.”

“And all the while Sergei Kirov
will continue to push into the Caucasus.”

“I can prevent that. It will be
necessary to utilize my armies from Kazakhstan and the Caspian region, but they
will be enough.”

“Oh? My intelligence services
tell me that the Soviets are approaching Krasnodar and threatening the oil
facilities at
Maykop
.”

“We will hold Krasnodar and stop
that attack, but even so,
Maykop
is one of our
smallest fields, no bigger than the new facilities we have near Grozny. The
real oil is much farther east, at Baku and the northern Caspian basin, and that
is what we are here to really discuss. Yes?”

“Of course,” said Hitler.
“Ploesti will only take us so far.” He was careful to include Volkov in that
statement, a vacant smile adorning his words. “I will need your oil, and the
means to get it to Germany where I can put it to good use. We now have two good
ports here at
Costanza
and Varna. Can you ship the
oil there?”

“Possibly, though all of this
depends on the outcome of this fighting in the Caucasus. Sergei Kirov has one
thing I lack—a navy. Yes, I have my airships, but they cannot guarantee safe
passage of the Black Sea while the Soviets maintain a strong naval squadron at
Sevastopol. They have an old battleship, five heavy cruisers, eighteen
destroyers and over forty submarines! Add to that the eighty odd torpedo boats
and you can understand why a sea transit of the Black Sea will not be possible
for any large movement of the oil… Unless you could assist us in neutralizing
that fleet in some way.”

There it was, thought Hitler, the
first request. He smiled. “I have no navy in the Black sea—for the moment. I
have only just moved heavy units to a position where they can soon enter the
Mediterranean.”

“That was a most significant
victory at Gibraltar, just as I predicted,” said Volkov.

“Indeed it was. But before my
battleships could hope to assist you in the Black Sea, there is still the Royal
Navy to be dealt with in the Eastern Mediterranean. We have plans for that, yet
even after they are concluded, and we dominate the Mediterranean Sea, there is
still the matter of Turkey and the Bosporus.”

“What about your Luftwaffe? They
might easily deal with the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”

Of course, thought Hitler. That
is what this man wants from me now. He flits about in those obsolete zeppelins
and yet he has no modern air force. He needs my Luftwaffe to neutralize Kirov’s
ships and protect his Black Sea ports in Georgia. Well enough.

“You realize that no state of war
presently exists between Germany and Soviet Russia. That said, I will speak to
Goering on this, and I will give you whatever support you need. We can sell you
the planes and train your pilots in their proper use. After all, I will be
wanting a good price from you on that oil! This is in my interest as well. I
cannot have Sergei Kirov sitting there with a naval threat in the heart of the
union we must now forge. Your oil, my steel, Volkov. That is the formula that
will win this war. We are so close! Only Kirov and Turkey stand between us, and
that is what we should now set our minds on. You must settle this business in
Siberia quickly, and then move those divisions to stop Kirov in the Caucasus. I
will give you all the support you need with my Luftwaffe. Then we must discuss
Turkey.”

“Ah yes,” said Volkov, “the old
Ottoman Empire, creaking and rusty, and ready to fall.”

“Well are you in a position to
strike from the east?”