Worcester, Massachusetts. A cold, grey morning.
J. Edgar Hoover stepped carefully over the frozen mud. His shoes were polished to a mirror shine, reflecting the overcast sky. He hated dirt.
He stood before the empty shed where Robert Goddard used to build his dreams.
"The neighbors heard nothing," a local agent reported, nervously adjusting his hat. "Just a truck engine in the middle of the night."
Hoover didn't answer. He walked into the shed.
It was stripped bare. Not a scrap of paper, not a bolt left behind. It was surgical.
Hoover knelt down. He pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket.
On the floorboards, caught in a splinter, was a single, tiny fiber.
It was red wool. Rough. Cheap.
"Russian wool," Hoover whispered. "Soviet military issue."
He stood up, dusting off his knees. His face was a mask of cold fury.
"They didn't just steal a man," Hoover said. "They stole an era."
He walked back to his car.
"Get the President," Hoover barked at his driver. "Tell him the Red Scare isn't a theory anymore. It's a kidnapping."
The Secret City, Ural Mountains.
The air shook.
It wasn't a sound. It was a physical blow to the chest. A low, vibrating hum that rattled teeth and cracked windows.
Jake stood behind a three-foot-thick glass pane in the observation bunker. He watched the concrete pad a mile away.
A jet of blue fire, fifty feet long, was blasting horizontally into the side of a mountain.
The snow around the test site instantly turned to steam. The mountain rock glowed cherry red.
"Chamber pressure steady!" Wernher von Braun shouted over the roar. He was manning the gauges, his eyes wide with manic glee. "300 bars! It is holding!"
Robert Goddard stood next to him, looking pale. He was watching his life's work being pushed beyond its limits by a teenager and a dictator.
"Cut it!" Goddard yelled. "The cooling jacket will melt!"
"Push it!" Jake ordered into the microphone. "I want to see it break!"
Von Braun grinned. He cranked the valve.
The roar deepened. The blue flame turned white. It was the sound of a dragon waking up.
CRACK.
A pipe burst. A cloud of liquid oxygen sprayed into the air.
"Shutdown!" von Braun screamed.
The flame died. The silence that followed was deafening.
Jake stared at the glowing machinery.
In his timeline, this engine took ten years to perfect. He had forced them to build it in ten days.
It was dangerous. It was reckless.
It was magnificent.
"We have the thrust," Jake said, turning away from the window. "Build the airframe."
"We don't have the aluminum alloys," Goddard protested, wiping sweat from his forehead. "We need titanium."
"You have the Tsar's train," Jake said. "Melt it down."
Goddard stared at him. "You would melt a historical treasure?"
"I would melt the crown jewels if they helped me reach orbit," Jake said.
He walked out of the bunker. The air outside smelled of ozone and burnt rock.
Menzhinsky fell into step beside him. The Cheka head held a handkerchief over his mouth to block the fumes.
"You speak the language of engineering," Menzhinsky noted softly.
"I read a lot," Jake said.
"You knew the cooling jacket would hold until 300 bars," Menzhinsky said. "Goddard didn't know. Von Braun didn't know. You knew."
Jake stopped walking. The snow crunched under his boots.
He looked at the spy chief. Menzhinsky's eyes were like black glass. He wasn't accusing; he was measuring.
"I have good intuition," Jake said.
"Intuition is guessing," Menzhinsky corrected. "You aren't guessing, Koba. You are remembering."
He opened his notebook. He made a mark.
"The engine design. The T-34 armor. The famine prediction. The graphite pile."
Menzhinsky tapped the page.
"You are not a genius. You are a man with the answer key to a test nobody else is taking."
Jake felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Ural winter.
Menzhinsky had figured it out. Not the time travel, exactly. But the nature of the cheat.
"Does it matter?" Jake asked quietly.
"No," Menzhinsky closed the book. "As long as we win. But be careful, Koba. If you know the answers, you stop looking for the questions. And the questions are changing."
Menzhinsky pointed to the sky.
"The Americans know. Hoover has sent cables to London and Berlin. They are forming a coalition."
"Let them," Jake said. "By the time they agree on a treaty, I will have a satellite passing over Washington."
"A satellite?" Menzhinsky tasted the word. "A moon made by man?"
"An eye," Jake corrected. "An eye that never blinks."
Menzhinsky smiled. It was a terrifying expression.
"God is watching," the spy whispered. "And now, so are we."
The train ride back to Moscow was slow. The tracks were clogged with military transport.
Jake sat in his compartment. Nadya was knitting something small and white.
She looked up as he entered.
"Did it work?" she asked.
"It made a lot of noise," Jake said. He sat heavily on the bench. "It scared the wolves."
Nadya put down her needles. She rested her hands on her stomach.
"He doesn't like the noise," she said. "He kicks when you talk about the rockets."
Jake reached out. He placed his hand over hers.
"He will be safe, Nadya. I am building a roof over his head. A roof made of fire."
"A roof can also be a cage," Nadya said softly.
She looked out the window at the passing birch trees. They were blurred by speed.
"My father says you are melting the church bells," she said. "To make wire."
"Copper is scarce," Jake admitted.
"The people are crying," Nadya said. "They say you are stealing their prayers."
"I am giving them a new prayer," Jake said. "Science."
Nadya looked at him. Her eyes were sad, deep pools.
"You can't cuddle science, Koba. You can't love a machine."
She picked up the knitting.
"I worry about your soul," she whispered. "I worry there is nothing left in there but gears."
Jake looked at his reflection in the dark window.
She was right. He felt hollowed out. The history teacher named Jake Vance was fading. There was only the Mechanic left.
But then he looked at Nadya's belly.
"There is something left," Jake vowed. "I promise."
The train whistle blew. It sounded like a scream.
The Kremlin. The next morning.
The office was filled with smoke. Brusilov, Taranov, and The Finn were gathered around the map table.
"The blockade is total," The Finn reported. "Britain has frozen our accounts. Germany has closed the border. No gold is moving."
"They are trying to strangle the baby in the crib," Brusilov grunted. "We have no currency to buy rubber for the tires."
Jake looked at the map.
The West thought they had checkmated him. They thought the Soviet Union ran on gold.
But Jake knew what the 20th century really ran on.
He took a red marker. He circled the Baku oil fields.
"We don't need gold," Jake said.
He looked at The Finn.
"Contact Standard Oil. Contact the Italians. Contact the Japanese."
"To sell oil?" The Finn asked. "We are already selling oil."
"No," Jake said. "To dump it."
The room went quiet.
"I want you to lower the price of Soviet crude to ten cents a barrel," Jake ordered. "Undercut the market by 80%. Flood the world."
"That is economic suicide!" Brusilov gasped. "We will lose millions!"
"And the American oil companies will lose billions," Jake said, his eyes gleaming. "The Texas oil boom will collapse. The British stock market relies on Shell and BP. If we crash the price of oil, we crash their economies."
He slammed the marker down.
"They want a blockade? Fine. I will burn the market down around them."
"It will cause a global depression," Menzhinsky warned from the shadows. "Years before 1929."
"Good," Jake said. "Hungry men don't build armies. They stand in bread lines."
He turned to the window.
He was rewriting the 20th century with a sledgehammer. He was starting the Great Depression four years early. He was starting the Space Race thirty years early.
He was the chaos variable.
"Do it," Jake said. "Turn on the pumps. Let them drown in black gold."
Menzhinsky opened his notebook.
He didn't make a mark this time. He just wrote one word.
Catastrophe.
And for the first time, the spy smiled with genuine anticipation.