The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 46: The History Professor

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.