Ted Bell - Tsar

“I have no choice, Stefan. I’d rather die out there in the snow than live the rest of my life knowing I didn’t try to save her. All right? You understand that?”

“I guess I do, Alex, God help me.”

“Good enough. Give ’em hell when the time comes. Cheers, mate.”

“Cheers.”

“Here goes nothing,” Hawke said with a smile, and then he was on his feet and running across the impossibly broad expanse of moonlit snow, head down, arms and legs pumping, the covered entryway to house only sixty or so yards away now…

He almost made it.

Shots rang out, three or four bursts of them, heavy automatic-weapons fire from the roof. There were little geysers of snow erupting all around the running and spinning Englishman. He dodged and darted, keeping his head down, sprinting like a madman, desperately zigzagging for the safety of the entryway.

The first round caught Hawke in the right shoulder and spun him completely around. Halter, watching his new friend from just inside the tree line, found the shocking sight of his red-black blood spraying voluminously over the white snow horrifying. But Hawke managed somehow to keep his feet beneath him and keep moving toward the house. Another round caught him in the left thigh, and he spun again, his left knee barely grazing the snow before he rose again and limped forward, dragging his wounded leg through the crusty snow.

Halter watched him raise the little Walther and fire at the men above who were killing him, even as yet another and another round struck him, and he collapsed to the ground. Hawke lay there, motionless, gazing up at the stars, small snow geysers erupting all around him, some missing, some of them no doubt finding their target. Halter checked his watch and looked down at the machine.

Then his eyes returned to his comrade, alone out on the snow, gravely wounded, surely dying.

He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes. Was that time enough to run out there and try to drag Hawke back to the safety of the woods? And still take out the Tsar before he used his own Beta machine to kill a million people? Maybe just enough time. But he could be shot down himself, of course, die trying to save this brave man. A man who would so willingly, so cheerfully , sacrifice his own life to save the woman he loved.

It would be a death well worth dying, he thought, trying to save the life of a man as noble as this one. Yes, he could comfortably live, or die, with that.

Or he could sit safely in the woods as Hawke died, bled to death out there on the snow, knowing that by staying put, he was perhaps saving the lives of a million souls. It was what Hawke had wanted him to do. What he’d told him to do, in fact. But if he did that, was he any more worthy than the monster they’d both vowed to kill? If he wasn’t willing at least to try to save Hawke’s life, what made him one iota better than his avowed enemy?

Bugger all , he thought, seeing Hawke’s inert body twitch as another round struck home. He might actually succeed, after all, he told himself. Save Hawke and still pull the Beta trigger in time.

It would be a very close thing.

Professor Stefanovich Halter had a decision to make.

HAWKE WAS ALIVE, for the moment, anyway. But he knew he was not far from death. Blood was pumping out of him from too many places. A gentle snow had begun to fall. He closed his eyes. The snowflakes felt like butterfly wings grazing his cheeks. He knew he’d failed. But he also knew he’d tried. And so it would end. He’d done his duty. There was nothing left to think or say. It was, finally, over.

THE SCREAMS FROM the third-floor bedroom could be heard throughout the house. The elderly Swedish servants paused and looked at each other, shook their heads, and went on about their duties. They were long accustomed to these horrible cries.

Every summer, they would come to Morto, the widowed count, his beautiful daughter, and the twin boys. And over the course of every summer, since her childhood, the father had found reason to beat his daughter. Beat her when he was angry. Or depressed. Or had swilled too much vodka after supper. Beat her and whipped her so badly that sometimes the doctor had to be fetched from the mainland.

One night, when the poor child was only ten or eleven, Dr. Lundvig had come out of Anastasia’s room with sadness in his eyes and softly closed the door. Waiting for him in the darkened hallway, he had found Katerina Arnborg, the head housekeeper. He confided that he’d seen evidence of other kinds of abuse. He whispered to her that it was so vile that perhaps the police should be notified.

But Katerina had been terrified of the count’s wrath, and so she had never told a living soul. The old doctor had never come back to Morto Island. He’d died a month or so later, drowned in a boating accident out on the fjord in the middle of the night. An unsolved mystery to this day.

The next doctor they’d had was a Russian from Stalingrad, and he never said anything to anyone when he emerged from the child’s room.

Katerina now stood on the stairway landing below Anastasia’s bedroom, listening to the two of them up there as he caned her mercilessly. She still hated herself for her cowardice, not saying anything all these years, and now it was far, far too late for that.

She’d never seen the count so drunk as when he’d arrived home from the Nobel ceremony. He was raging at his daughter as he dragged her up the stairs behind him. Suddenly, the screams coming from the child’s bedroom were even louder.

And inside the bedroom, “Get away from me, you bastard! No more. I’m a grown woman! Not your little whipping girl who cowers before the great-”

“Traitor! You think I don’t know what’s going on? I told you to rid yourself of that bastard child growing inside you. And did you listen? No! No! And…no!”

“I hate you! Do you understand that? I’ve always hated you! Even your own sons despise you for the monster you are! You have no idea how much we all laugh at your stupid arrogance, your perverted-”

“Silence! You knew what he was going to do tonight. You planned it together, didn’t you? Humiliate me before the whole world. You are a traitor, Anastasia. To me, and to all of Russia. You don’t deserve to live.”

“It’s not true. As much as I’ve learned to loathe you, I’d never conspire against you. I love Russia too much, God help me.”

“Get up! Get on the bed. And then-”

“Never! If you think that is ever, ever going to happen again, you are truly mad. You’ll have to kill me if that’s what you want. I know you’re angry with him, for what he did to you tonight, but I love him and I’m going to marry him and have his child!”

“In hell, perhaps.”

“You should see yourself now, standing there. The mighty Tsar. Beating his pregnant daughter. How majestic! How brave and noble he is! How-”

From outside, the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Heavy automatic weapons. The Tsar smiled as he looked toward the window, Anastasia’s small bedroom repeatedly lit with bright flashes from the rooftop above. He dropped the cane and moved to the window.

“Silence, daughter! You think he’s coming for you? Your great hero arrived to save you, is he? Come here and have a look!”

“Please. Just go. Leave me alone.”

“The spy is dead, Anastasia. Do you hear me? Dead.”

“What are you saying?”

“I knew he was coming here for me. Following me, this arrogant British spy. And I was ready for him. Don’t you want to see him? Your dead lover? Get up and see for yourself!”

He seized her arm and dragged her bodily over to the window, took her face in his violently shaking hand and pressed it against the windowpane, forcing her to look down into the snow-covered gardens.