The Timetable
Kolvograd — Day Ten
At half past two in the morning the telephone on General Yusef Baranin’s desk rang once, and stopped, which was the signal that someone was coming up the stairs with paper.
He was already awake.
He had not been to bed.
He sat at the head of the long table in the war-aims room of the Annex on Stepnaya Street, in his shirtsleeves, with a glass of tea gone black in front of him and a map of the Corwyth Direction pinned to the wall opposite, and he looked at the map without appearing to.
The pins on it were red for Concord formations and blue for the enemy.
There were far too many red pins in a cluster around the city of Dulbin and not nearly enough of them along the river Varn, three hundred kilometers to the west, where the war was.
Lieutenant Colonel Ilya Marchuk came in without knocking, which was permitted at this hour and no other.
He was thirty-nine, stooped, sallow, and he carried a single sheet of flimsy paper in both hands as if it were hot.
“Dulbin and Ryazh-Uzel,” he said.
“Both transshipment yards, General. Eleven minutes apart. Charges on the signal towers and on the switch gear, and the fuel depot at Dulbin has been fired. The rail bureau reports thirty-one trains standing on the main line between the two.”
Baranin did not move.
“The Forty-Fourth Guards?”
“Nine trains of the Forty-Fourth are at Dulbin. Its tank regiment is on them.”
“On the trains.”
“On the trains, General.”
It was very quiet in the room.
Outside, on Stepnaya Street, a snowplow scraped once along the curb and was still.
Baranin looked at the pins around Dulbin, red on red on red, eleven thousand men and four hundred vehicles standing motionless in a freight yard while the army they were meant to reinforce lay in the mud on the far side of a river, and something cold and controlled settled in him, like a hand closing around a bar.
He knew the yard at Dulbin.
Everyone in the Direction knew it.
It was where the broad gauge of the Concord’s railways ended, and the narrower gauge of the Corwyth lines began, and every tank and every shell that went west had to be lifted off one train and set on another.
It was the neck of a bottle.
A child could see that it was the neck of a bottle.
He had said so, in writing, in March.
“Get me Raskin,” he said.
Colonel Pavel Raskin came at three, in his tunic, unshaven.
He was fifty, broad, tired, a career railway man with a soft Tavlin accent and reading glasses on a string, who ran the Direction’s logistics section and who was, in the general’s private estimation, the only honest man on the staff.
He had brought a memorandum.
Baranin had known he would.
“It is my duty to report,” Raskin began, in the cautious voice of a man reading his own epitaph, “that the movement timetable for the Corwyth counter-thrust, as issued on the sixth, cannot be achieved. The damage to Dulbin and Ryazh-Uzel alone adds nine days. I have set out the calculation. A minimum of nine days from today is required before the Forty-Fourth can reach its assembly area, and even that assumes…”
“Let me see it.”
Raskin passed it across.
Four pages, typed, with a diagram.
It was excellent.
It was clear and exact and it named its assumptions, and it was addressed, in the first line, to the Political Deputy of the War-Aims Desk, with a copy to the Chairman’s office.
Baranin read to the end and set it down.
Then he picked it up and tore it in half.
He tore it again.
He dropped the pieces on the table.
The room had gone absolutely silent, and every head at the far end, the two duty clerks, the map officer, Marchuk, had turned to stone.
“You are a logistics officer,” said Baranin.
“You are not a prophet.” He had not raised his voice.
It came out level, low, so precise that it seemed to have edges.
“The timetable of the sixth was approved by the Committee for the Corwyth Direction. It carries the Chairman’s own signature. You will tell me now, in front of these officers, what you imagine you are doing by writing to a political deputy that the Chairman’s timetable is impossible.”
“General, I. . .”
“You imagine you are being helpful.” Baranin leaned forward.
“You are being a fool. If that page reaches this building’s political section tomorrow, you will not be a colonel of railways. You will be a wrecker. Do you know what happens to wreckers?”
Raskin’s face had gone the color of candle wax.
“Yes, General.”
“Then you will withdraw from this room and think about it. You will give me your written apology by noon. You are dismissed.”
Raskin saluted.
It took him two attempts to find his hand.
He went out.
Baranin sat for a moment looking at the pieces of paper on the table.
The clerks did not look at him.
Then he stood, went to the door, and stepped out into the corridor.
Raskin was standing at the window at the end of it, one hand on the radiator, his shoulders hunched.
He turned when he heard the footsteps.
He looked at the general with the flat, exhausted hatred of a man who has been humiliated by someone he respected.
Baranin walked up to him.
He stopped very close.
He spoke in a voice pitched below a whisper.
“That page would have been on Sechenov’s desk by nine,” he said.
“Every word of it. He would have read it twice and taken it to the Volkovna liaison by ten, and by noon there would have been two men in your office with a car downstairs. I know. I have seen it done. I saw it done to a man I had known for eleven years.”
Raskin stared.
“Now it is ash, and you are a fool who wrote a foolish memorandum and was properly humiliated for it in front of witnesses. That is a small offense. That can be forgiven by Friday.” The general’s face did not change.
“You will go back to your section. You will not put the nine days on paper again. You will carry it here”—two fingers, very briefly, tapped Raskin’s temple—”and when I ask you for a real number, you will give it to me in person, in this corridor, and nowhere else.
Do you understand me?”
There was a long silence.
Somewhere behind the wall a teleprinter began to chatter.
“I understand, General,” said Raskin, very quietly.
“Good.” Baranin turned and walked back toward the war room.
Behind him, Raskin stood at the window with his palm against the cold iron, and the hatred had gone out of his face and something worse had taken its place, which was understanding.
At six the Committee for the Corwyth Direction met in a room on the second floor of the Presidium, under a high ceiling and two portraits, one of a bearded man in a tight collar and one of a woman in a fur hat, both of whom had been dead for forty years and were still, in every meaningful sense, in charge.
Eleven men sat at the table.
At its head, in a leather chair, sat Osip Kravets, Chairman of the Security Council, sixty-four, wide, ruddy, with a bull’s neck and small, shrewd, close-set eyes.
Baranin had briefed him eleven times in ten days.
He had learned that the Chairman disliked bad news and disliked good news that came too easily, and that the safest course was to bring him news that had been made to look as though it had been fought for.
Colonel Ivo Sechenov sat at Baranin’s right elbow.
He was the war-aims desk’s political deputy, a tall, stooped, courteous man of fifty-five with a bald head and gentle brown eyes and a habit of touching the tips of his fingers together when he listened.
He wrote nothing down.
He had never been seen to write anything down.
Baranin had once counted the number of men who had lost their commands after Sechenov had sat, silent and smiling, through a meeting at which they had spoken, and had stopped at nineteen.
“General,” said the Chairman.
Baranin rose.
“Comrades. I can report that the counter-thrust in the Corwyth Direction proceeds on schedule.”
He spoke for eleven minutes.
He described the enemy’s crossing of the Varn, which had been repulsed at Sennet.
He described the sabotage at Dulbin and Ryazh-Uzel, characterizing it as an enemy provocation which had been anticipated and would be dealt with.
He gave the objectives: the Varn line by the twelfth, the Kessa junction by the thirteenth, and the crossing at Ossenfeld by the fifteenth.
He did not say that the Forty-Fourth Guards was sitting in nine trains in a burning freight yard.
He said that formations were “concentrating in the assembly areas.” Every word of it was accurate.
He had spent two hours composing it.
“The Forty-Fourth,” said the Chairman, when he had finished.
“It will be forward by the eleventh?”
There was a pause, of the kind a man notices only afterward.
“By the eleventh, Chairman,” said Baranin.
“Good.” The Chairman lifted a heavy hand and let it fall on the table.
“The Direction will not fail me.”
“No, Chairman.”
Sechenov, at his elbow, touched the tips of his fingers together.
He did not look at Baranin.
He looked at the far wall, at the woman in the fur hat, with an expression of mild and thoughtful attention.
They went down the marble staircase together afterward, the general and the political deputy, in the thin grey light of the Presidium’s tall windows.
“A very sound presentation,” said Sechenov, in his soft, unhurried voice.
“I confess I noticed a slight difficulty.”
“I would be interested to hear it.”
“You said the Forty-Fourth would be forward by the eleventh. It is my understanding that the Forty-Fourth is at present in Dulbin. I am required by my office to note the discrepancy between its position and the timetable.” He smiled.
“Of course, I am sure there is an explanation.”
“There is,” said Baranin.
He did not slow his pace.
“The explanation is that the enemy has done what he was always going to do. The junction yards at Dulbin were identified as vulnerable in a security assessment submitted in the spring by the Rail Directorate’s chief of security, Colonel Levan Dzhugash.”
He said it evenly, looking straight ahead.
He felt the words go out of him, one at a time, quite cold.
“Dzhugash reported the vulnerability,” he said, “and recommended the installation of a guard regiment at the yard. The recommendation was not acted upon by the Rail Directorate. I have the file.”
Sechenov had stopped on the stair.
He was looking at Baranin with an attention that had become, all at once, very warm.
“How very interesting,” he said.
“The Rail Directorate. And Colonel Dzhugash, who saw it coming.”
“Who saw it coming, and whose recommendation the Directorate declined.”
“And the file is with you.”
“The file is with me, Ivo.”
Sechenov considered this.
Then he smiled, gently, as at a gift.
“I shall take a copy to my liaison this morning. It is very important that we understand where responsibility lies.”
“Naturally,” said Baranin.
He went on down the stairs.
He did not look back.
He had not told the political deputy that the spring assessment had been submitted to the war-aims desk, not the Rail Directorate, and that the recommendation had been declined at his own desk, by his own initials, on a day when there had been no guard regiments to spare.
The file existed.
It said what he had said it said.
It did not say who had signed the last page.
That page had been removed, three days ago, by a man who had known it would be needed.
Colonel Levan Dzhugash would be taken from his home at four that afternoon.
Baranin would learn it at five and would not stop reading the report in his hand.
At noon the orders went out over the general’s signature.
Twenty-two thousand men and four hundred vehicles would leave the yards and the assembly areas by road, by whatever rail could be cleared, by whatever means could be found, and move west to the Varn by the timetable of the sixth.
They would begin with the Sixty-First Assault Regiment, whose second battalion was already on the river and would be expected to hold its ground until the tanks arrived.
The tanks were nine days away.
At a quarter past twelve Baranin sat alone in the war-aims room with the door shut.
He took a sheet of paper from the drawer.
In his small, upright hand he wrote a single figure: 9, and beneath it a short line of explanation, the yard, the gauge, the trains.
It took him less than a minute.
It was the true timetable.
It was exact.
It was the most useful document in the building.
He looked at it for some time.
Then he struck a match and held the corner of the page to the flame, and turned it slowly in his fingers until it had gone to a black curl, and dropped it in the ashtray, and ground the ashes to nothing with the end of a pencil.
A man who had never written down the truth could not be shown afterward to have known it.
He opened the window.
The cold came in, and the sound of the snowplow on Stepnaya Street, and far off across the roofs of Kolvograd the first trucks of the Sixty-First, going west, in the grey.