Брайан Гарфилд: The Romanov Succession

The machine was in the driveway beyond the farther grove. He waved them all down in the shadows; he merged himself with the bole of a pine.

The truck rolled into sight, crunching snow—a cleated halftrack with a general’s star on the fender, canvas hooped over the bed. Alex heard the quick whistling intake of Sergei’s breath through teeth. He crouched frozen against the tree with the tommygun in both hands but his fists didn’t seem to have much grip in them. He stared bleakly as the half-track drew up by the dascha and soldiers dismounted from the truck—a full-strength line squad of Red Army soldiers armed with 7.62-millimeter rifles and grenade belts and automatic weapons.

A very tall officer emerged from the truck and spoke to the men; they marched into the compound while the tall officer turned a full circle on his heels. Bundled in a heavy coat, muffler wrapped around his face, he was a figure of immense size. Recognition grenaded into Alex’s belly until sour liquid flowed up into his mouth.

The giant tramped forward into the trees—moving idly as if seeking a private spot to urinate. While he walked his head turned incessantly—watching everything. He clasped his hands behind his back and stopped once to turn around and look up at the sun; creases made rings in the back of his neck and then he came on ahead into the trees and stopped not ten feet from where Alex stood with a gun trained on his heart. The giant was looking elsewhere but he spoke distinctly in a low baritone:

“Condottieri—I am Kollin. Don’t show yourself but speak if you can hear me.”

“Right here, General.” And his finger curled around the trigger.

Vlasov came around ponderously and his eyes went bright behind the lenses of his heavy eyeglasses—like an animal at night pinned by the beam of headlights.

“We have lost,” he said, very soft.

“I know.”

“You must get out as best you can. Do not wait for the rest of your men—they will not make this rendezvous. Yours was not the only team that went into a trap.”

“But we’re the only team that got out of it. Are you telling me that?”

“Yes.” Vlasov’s face was all rough crags and shadows. “It was not I who betrayed you, General Danilov.”

“Who then?”

“Beria had a signal. I do not know from whom. We all were betrayed. Someone gave Beria the plan—not four hours ago. They only had time to remove the High Command from the train. Sending the empty train on as a decoy to draw you into the trap—that was Beria’s idea.”

A bitter wave of defeat flooded Alex’s chest. He stared ruefully at the huge general.

Vlasov said, “Your bomber crews were superb, I am told.” He swayed toward a tree as if he required its support, then with a violent tremor he sat down with his back to it, hands pinched between his squeezed-together knees. Behind the glasses his eyes went lifeless and turned inward as if in search of a strength that had disintegrated. “So near—so near. But the steel bear is safe in the Kremlin—there is nothing we can salvage. Nothing.”

Momentarily Vlasov’s easy acceptance of defeat outraged him but he made his voice kind: “You had better come out with us.”

“No. Beria’s informant did not know my identity. They know there is a traitor among the generals but Stalin trusts me more than any of them except Zhukov.”

“Can you stay after this?”

“I must. One must continue the illusion that there is always one more chance.” Vlasov struggled to his feet like an old man. “The traitor may have given Beria your intended escape route. You will have to improvise a different escape.” And then he was walking away as calmly as he had arrived, hands clasped in the small of his back, boots squeaking on the snow.

The low sun charged the light with gold. He halted the little column in the woods across the road from the hospital and spoke softly:

“We’ll wait for full darkness.”

The hospital was a massive bleak structure towering over the barracks behind it. In ambulances by the side of the building military drivers dozed at the wheel. Alex studied the lay of it while he still had light; he moved back and forth along the road, staying within the trees, making an end-to-end reconnaissance of the compound. It was the Seventh Red Army Hospital—headquarters for the medical department of the Moscow Military Area—and there was a good deal of activity: ambulances, army trucks, buses, staff cars with medical flags on them to indicate they carried doctors of high rank. Personnel flitted in and out of the compound on bicycles and those on foot queued for the civilian buses which arrived at twelve-minute intervals, turned around, stopped to discharge and collect passengers and went back the way they’d come—on the Moscow road.

It was a monolithic building of Byzantine brick, four stories high and the size of two city blocks in area; it had been built in the days of Peter the Great as a state building for the administration of provincial districts and it had the turreted gingerbread finish of its period. The only thing loftier in sight was the crenellated onion dome of a church a quarter of a mile up the road.

They waited until the sun went down—a bit after four o’clock—but the moon was up by then and it etched the winter branches in serene light and Alex had to decide whether to move anyway or to wait for moonset. The temperature had dropped steadily during the twilight hours and there would be a risk of frostbite in waiting but that would be preferable to capture; he decided they would stay put until they had full darkness.

He walked along close to the wall, fingertips dragging it lightly, trying to focus his flagging concentration. In the intense cold he felt sleepy and knew the dangers of that. He approached the column of ambulances from their rear. Sergei was close on his heels and the three survivors of the commando were strung out along the wall behind, invisible even to Alex. There were no stars; a scudding overcast had pushed the moon away.

He reached the back of the ambulance and moved along the narrow passage between its body and the hospital wall. Reached up for the handle of the passenger door—pulled it open and spoke to the driver and heard Sergei yank the driver’s door open and haul the driver out. There was no sound; Sergei’s knife had gone true. There were no interior lights in the ambulance—they would be disconnected as a matter of routine security. Alex moved on to the second ambulance slowly and without sound while Sergei slipped forward along the opposite side of the ambulance line. They repeated the maneuver with the second ambulance: Alex distracted the driver and Sergei dispatched him.

They took the third ambulance and Alex pushed the remaining three soldiers into its rear compartment. Then he joined Sergei in the cab.

The ambulance drove north at high speed on the freshly plowed Leningrad road. The illumination of its slitted blackout lights was minimal but speed was more important than caution because they had to be past the Leningrad line before daylight. Twice they had to pause for armed convoys and once they nearly ran down a marching battalion of soldiers who flung themselves into the banked snow along the verges as the ambulance shot by in the night. Alex had the wheel; driving gave him occupation, it excused him from brooding on the failure, but he could not keep his mind from the bitterness of it. Felix, he thought. Full of spirit and dash: Felix would have been more than they’d expected of him—he’d had the genius of leadership but it had taken these last weeks to reveal it in him and now it was negated, the absolute waste of early death—Felix and Ilya Rostov and the sixteen men they’d carried aboard their bombers; and Majors Postsev and Solov because Vlasov hadn’t been able to warn them—all the commandos must have walked right into the traps by now. Nearly a hundred men had to be counted dead or worse. In military terms it was a small casualty list but they were not victims of combat, they were the casualties of betrayal and his bile came up with the anger that focused on vengeance. If it takes the rest of my life….