“Say what you would about East Berlin—and after two years Jo had a lot to say—but at least the men here were too scared to misbehave. Back in the States, every veteran thought his service gave him the right to get between her legs, and any man who’d stayed home was over-compensating for it. Never mind that Jo had risked more than any of them, playing native among her Grandma Kleiber’s people, praying not to fall foul of any of the smart Nazis…”
Did you ever wonder what would happen if dark forces stalked the streets of post-war Berlin? I mean, darker forces than Soviet spies, CIA agents, and black-market profiteers? OK, maybe that’s dark enough, but I’ve got a new story out this week that adds something more, with elritch powers stirring under the city. “It Will Have Its Way”, a historical horror story, is in the new issue of Aurealis, Australia’s longest-running small press sci-fi and fantasy magazine. Aurealis #141 also features stories from A. Marie Carter and Benjamin Keyworth, as well as non-fiction and reviews, all for the fabulously low price of $2.99, so go check it out.
The Bear’s Claws is an unusual book for me. I guess it’s an unusual book full stop, a story of a war that never happened, concerned as much with the politics and traumas of that war as with its action. It’s picking up the “what if World War Three comes?” genre that was popular during the Cold War and running with it, even though we know that war never came.
So where did this book come from? And what did we do to make it stand out as something different?
The Origins of the Story
This story starts out in the real world, with my friendship with co-author Russell Phillips. Russell and I have known each other for over twenty years now, ever since they came to Durham to visit their partner, who was part of the same live roleplay club as me. We got to know each other through games and student socialising, then went off our separate way, as often happens.
Years later we reconnected over writing and became accountability partners, meeting online once a month to check in on progress, celebrate our achievements, and push each other to write more. Russell has done a lot to keep me motivated over recent years, and I like to think that I’ve done the same for them.
Russell and I write in very different genres. While I’m away in my imagination creating worlds of fantasy, steampunk, or science fiction, they’re grounded in reality, writing non-fiction about military history and technology. But we were keen to collaborate on a book and so Russell came up with an idea.
We would write a story set during the Cold War, using the technology and tactics he was familiar with, but altering history, creating something that headed away from reality. We’d both enjoyed Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, the best-known story about a Cold War turned hot, and it was the sort of story we were both interested to tell. Between Russell’s technical knowledge and my creative writing, we felt we could create something cool.
The seeds of the story came from Russell. While there’s a whole sub-genre of books telling Cold War turned hot stories, they wanted to do something different from the rest. They wanted to tell the story from the Soviet point of view instead of the Western one. It would give us a different angle and a unique hook with which to entice our target audience.
And so a story was born.
Writing Differently About War
Both Russell and I have an unusual perspective for people writing war stories. We’re lefty, liberal, pacifistic types who would rather everybody just stopped shooting each other, but we were also raised on war stories and feel the thrill of those tales. Personally, I’ve never been near war but I know plenty of people who’ve served in the military, and respecting their perspective and experiences is important to me.
This creates a difficult balancing act. Writing a war story that will show the skill and courage of individual combatants while trying not to glorify the war itself, trying to get away from narratives of good guys versus bad guys, is difficult, especially in a conflict as ideologically charged as this one.
To that end, The Bear’s Claws tries to show different sides of its characters’ experiences. There are moments of skill and daring, but there are also more troubling ones. There’s sudden and arbitrary death, soldiers struggling with the trauma of war, problems of discipline and corruption. Most of all, there’s the experience of war as an ideological challenge.
As Vladislav Rakovich and his men head west, they find that neither the world nor the war they’re fighting in is as they were promised. While the outcome of the war is a central question of the book, so is the outcome for Rakovich. Can he hold true to his beliefs as his world is shaken? Should he?
The Other Side of the War
When Russell sent me their first draft for the start of The Bear’s Claws, I found something surprising – a scene away from the war. Following Rakovich’s sister Anna, this showed reactions to the war back home in Leningrad.
When I started expanding out a plot from those starting scenes, the strand around Anna grew. She provided an interesting contrast with her brother, as well as a different perspective on the war. After all, wars transform nations, even away from the fighting front. Politics, industry, culture, it’s all affected. The history of a war isn’t just military history.
Anna’s strand is about rebellion and resistance. Looking back, we know that the Soviet system was on its last legs in the 1980s, but at the time that wasn’t clear. Speaking out against the government was dangerous, and that’s the risk that Anna eventually takes.
Writing this section let me get into one of the great issues about how societies respond to war. There are many examples that show nations pulling together, with an external threat used to distract people from internal dissent. But other examples also exist, most notably in the latter half of the First World War, when the strains of war encouraged revolution. So do wars inherently pull people together, with only defeat undermining this effect, or can they go the other way? Can war become an opportunity for dissent?
We decided to go with the path of revolt. This was partly a storytelling choice, to create drama in the home front chapters. But it’s also a reasonable speculation based on the state of the Soviet Union in 1982. The strains of a broken system were starting to show. It’s not impossible that people would have taken a great disruption as an opportunity to push for change.
A Different Take on World War Three
The Bear’s Claws is an unusual war story in a lot of ways. It’s co-authored. It’s about a war that never happened. It walks a delicate line in its treatment of war. It’s a war story that’s also about the civilian side.
To mark the release of our new book TheBear’s Claws, here’s a little something from Russell Phillips on the alternate history he created so we could justify a Soviet army marching west…
Background to The Bear’s Claws
During the Cold War, many in the West thought that Warsaw
Pact forces might invade West Germany at any time. That never happened, so when
we came to write The Bear’s Claws, we needed to find some reason for the
war to take place. It’s never directly explained in the book, but for those
that are interested, here’s a little background.
The North
Atlantic Treaty: Article Five
The first part of the hook is article five of the NATO treaty. This states that an attack against
any one or more of the signatories in Europe or North America will be
considered an attack against them all. In that case, all the member nations
would assist the attacked nation to defend itself.
It’s important to note that this only applies in Europe,
North America, and the Atlantic Ocean north of the Tropic of Cancer. In our
book, the invasion of West Germany happens during the Falklands War. Since the
Falklands are much further south than the area covered by the NATO treaty, the
UK government couldn’t invoke article five to secure assistance from their NATO
allies in fighting Argentina.
Only the initial attack needs to be in Europe, North
America or the North Atlantic. Once article five had been invoked, NATO forces
could find themselves fighting elsewhere. This is why NATO forces operated in
Afghanistan, after the US invoked article five following the September 11th
terrorist attacks in 2001.
The Sinking of HMS Ariadne
After Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, Admiral
Jorge Anaya, part of the ruling military junta in Argentina, sent four men to
Spain to sink a British ship in Gibraltar harbour. In reality, the operation
was foiled when the men were arrested by Spanish police. In our alternative
history, the attack succeeded, and the frigate HMS Ariadne was sunk on the 3rd
of May 1982.
Gibraltar is in the area covered by the NATO treaty, and
so the UK government took the opportunity to invoke article five. When the task
force sailed to the South Atlantic to re-take the Falkland Islands, the land
forces were all British, as was the bulk of the naval forces. But in this
alternative history, an American aircraft carrier was included, and they also
provided B-52 bomber support. Other NATO allies provided naval assets.
Argentina responded by calling on other South American countries for support,
characterising the conflict as the old colonial powers trying to re-establish
their empires.
War in
Western Europe
NATO land forces in Western Europe were not directly
affected, since the British forces sent south were not intended for deployment
there. The reduction in naval forces available to North Atlantic convoys would
mean reduced escorts for any convoys reinforcing Western Europe, however. The
Soviet Union, recognising this, and that the Western powers would have to fight
a war on two fronts, took advantage of the situation and invaded West Germany.
Of course, we’ll never really know what would have happened if the Argentinians had succeeded in sinking a British ship in Gibraltar harbour. It’s entirely possible that the UK would not have invoked article five, preferring to fight alone in the Falklands. But it did allow us to base our fictional war on real events that could have had a much bigger impact.
Nastasia stood in the shadows of dirt-smeared street lamps, clutching a roll of posters in her hand. She could feel the edge of each one beneath her fingers, an edge that could as easily slice her skin as crumple beneath it.
It was a midsummer night, yet Nastasia felt an icy hand gripping her chest, freezing her to the spot where the comforting shadows would give way and expose her to the light.
“Come on,” Kirill hissed, gesturing down the street with a broad paint brush. In his other hand he held a bucket of paste, flour and water and a little cheap glue. Good enough for propaganda. Good enough when it was all they had.
Nastasia took a deep breath and forced herself to take a step forward. She had chosen this. While the Red Army marched west against the capitalists, people were struggling and starving back home. It wasn’t right and Nastasia had been brought up to do what was right.
She had also been brought up hearing stories of the gulags and KGB cells, stories whispered behind closed doors, warnings to act and dress like everyone else, to keep her head down or face the most terrible punishments.
She hadn’t had the courage to join when the protests started. But then she’d seen the march in the print district and felt her heart lift, only for it to be trampled with the protesters the army beat and dragged away. That was when she had known that she had to do something, or live the rest of her life in shame.
One arduous step after the other, she walked over to Kirill. With trembling hands she peeled a poster from the roll and held it out while he applied the paste. Then they spread it across the wall and flattened it, the paste dripping in pail globs around the edges.
She stood back and smiled at her work.
“POWER TO THE UNIONS!” it read above a picture of a raised fist. “LET THE TRUE SOVIET RISE!”
The cold hand loosened around her heart and she shifted a little lighter on her feet.
“Let’s do another,” she said, laying a hand on Kirill’s shoulder.
“Where?”
“Over there.”
They stuck a poster to the leg of a bridge, another to the wall of a shop. The wet brushed slapped against paper, paste dripped, and words of defiance claimed the streets for their own.
Then a brute voice sounded behind them.
“Who’s that? What are you doing?”
Nastasia turned, heart hammering. The posters tumbled from her hands and unravelled across the road toward the approaching policemen.
Her pulse raced. For a moment she stood frozen again.
The stories returned unbidden to her mind. Stories of cells. Stories of gulags. Stories of torture and death. Stories of the police and the KGB. So many stories.
Then she was running, and Kirill beside her. Running like a hunted beast. Running because her life depended on it.
They raced along side streets and alleyways, through pools of pale electric light and stretches of shadow. The policemen ran after them, their boots hammering the ground, their shouts the barking of a hunter’s hounds.
Nastasia wanted to wail and to scream. Tears slid down her cheeks at the thought of what must come. She felt every cobble beneath her feet, saw every passing scrap of litter, the city flooding her senses, revealing itself to her one last time.
And then those heavy footfalls faltered. Snapping and snarling gave way to wheezing, which faded as they left the policemen behind.
Still she ran, muscles aching, legs stretching for every inch of distance she could gain.
At last, Kirill sagged into the mouth of an alleyway. Nastasia flopped to the ground beside him and filled her burning lungs with deep, soothing breaths.
A dizzying wave swept through her, left her shaking and hysterical. Not tears now but laughter. The sensation that had seemed like dread was transformed, becoming the thrill of survival. She gloried at her triumph in the chase.
“Guess that’s it,” Kirill said, his voice caught between disappointment and relief. “We should get off the streets.”
“No,” Nastasia said. This feeling was a revelation and she could not turn away from its light. “More posters, more paste. We still have half the night.”
“But the police…”
“We’ve outrun them once, we can do it again.” Just saying it made her grin, though she trembled as she pushed herself to her feet. She raised her fist. “Let the true soviet rise.”
Leningrad, 1982.
Just not the one you know.
Not anymore.
***
This story is set in the same divergent history as my new novel, co-authored with Russell Phillips…
The Bear’s Claws: A Novel of World War III
It’s 1982 but not as we know it. The Cold War has lost its
chill and World War III has arrived, threatening to send the whole planet into
meltdown.
Vladislav Rakovich is a young, idealistic communist. He dreams of being an officer, leading his soldiers on a mission to free the world from capitalism. But as the Soviet armies roll west, he gains his first bitter taste of command and reality hits. Can he stay focused on his aim in the face of undisciplined troops, a corrupt superior officer, and NATO’s military might? As conflict rages around him, Rakovich finds that his biggest battle comes from within as his faith in the communist cause is shaken by the horror of war.
Back home in Leningrad, Rakovich’s beloved sister Anna has other things to worry about. Drawn into a world of trade unions and protests, Anna finds herself driven by a new purpose, although her beliefs introduce her to a dangerous world where dissent can lead to disappearance or even death. Will this war birth the second revolution the nation is crying out for? Or will the people be trampled underfoot by the establishment once more?
The Bear’s Claws is a compelling and powerful story of how family, courage, and conviction can survive in a world torn apart by war.
The Bear’s Claws: A
Novel of World War III by Andrew Knighton and Russell Phillips
It’s 1982 but not as we know it. The Cold War has lost its
chill and World War III has arrived, threatening to send the whole planet into
meltdown.
Vladislav Rakovich is a young, idealistic communist. He dreams of being an officer, leading his soldiers on a mission to free the world from capitalism. But as the Soviet armies roll west, he gains his first bitter taste of command and reality hits. Can he stay focused on his aim in the face of undisciplined troops, a corrupt superior officer, and NATO’s military might? As conflict rages around him, Rakovich finds that his biggest battle comes from within as his faith in the communist cause is shaken by the horror of war.
Back home in Leningrad, Rakovich’s beloved sister Anna has other things to worry about. Drawn into a world of trade unions and protests, Anna finds herself driven by a new purpose, although her beliefs introduce her to a dangerous world where dissent can lead to disappearance or even death. Will this war birth the second revolution the nation is crying out for? Or will the people be trampled underfoot by the establishment once more?
The Bear’s Claws is a compelling and powerful story of how family, courage, and conviction can survive in a world torn apart by war.
