Romanov Succession (39 page)

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.

10.

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.
…

11.

The body of water called Ladoga was a lake in geographer's terms but it was an oval 300 miles by 200 miles and it might as well have been an ocean. A 50-mile-wide neck of land lay between the western shore of Ladoga and the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea's Gulf of Finland; the isthmus connected Europe with Scandinavia and it was here that the opposing armies were drawn up with their flanks anchored against the two shores. The surface of Ladoga was frozen to a depth of two feet or more and would have supported the weight of route-stepping troops but there was no cover on the open ice and the war stayed in the forested hills.

At dawn an artillery duel began and from thirty miles south of the battleground Alex saw the flashes. Fifteen minutes later they began to feel the concussive rumble, transmitted up from the gravel surface of the road through the tires and springs of the Pobeda ambulance,

They had cut wide to the east around the environs of besieged Leningrad and the cleated tires of the ambulance slithered on the unpaved subsidiary track; it had been mashed down by convoys of tanks and heavy lorries moving to and from the Finnish front. The ambulance ran along in second gear bracketed between a field-kitchen supply truck and a half-track troop-carrier; steady streams of traffic moving both ways along the narrow track, skittering on the verges and occasionally colliding.

Sergei had the map open in his lap but it was a chart left over from the 1939 war, something they'd taken off a captured Russian captain in Vassily's interrogation tent; there was no way to know how much had been changed since those days. “Just ahead—the turning to the right.”

Alex obeyed the old man's navigational instructions and the ambulance heaved into a narrow rutted track. Tanks had been along here but not in the past twenty-four hours; there was a crust of fresh snow in the ruts. The trees crowded thick against the track and branches kept whipping the ambulance.

The turn had taken them out of the convoy and they were alone in deep woods. The artillery wasn't more than three or four miles north of them—to the left now. The earth shook steadily and the racket was intense. The guns had been talking for nearly half an hour and that was a little bit encouraging because an extended field-gun barrage at daybreak often presaged an assault and if the Red Army was poised to go into battle then things would be confused along the extended flanks; that sort of confusion might play into their hands.

He had a look at the gauges. The engine was running slightly hot on poor fuel but it wasn't at the boil-over point; the oil pressure was steady on fifty and the ammeter was centered. There was half a tank of fuel and that would be enough, one way or the other.

The road staggered fitfully. In clearings they passed knots of soldiers and the occasional parked vehicle. Each time he tensed up and saw Sergei lift the tommygun into his lap but no one challenged them and they chugged on into the morning. At half past ten the artillery ceased fire—a dozen miles behind his left shoulder. The track made a turning to the north and Sergei said, “Soon now,” and folded the map neatly away.

It crested a hundred yards ahead. He parked the ambulance in the road before they reached the top. He got out and took the tommygun; as he approached the skyline he went into the trees and jinked from pine to pine until he was on top. Then he slipped out to the edge of the road and looked down the far slope.

The track ran down toward the shore and made a right turn and disappeared beyond the end of the trees. Winds had swept big patches of the lake free of snow and the ice was grey and translucent. At the foot of the road where it made its sharp turning at the shoreline there was a rickety wooden dock and beside it was a ramp used in peacetime by fishermen hauling their boats in and out of the water. The ramp was covered with several inches of powder snow but its outlines were clearly defined. On the dock stood a crude corrugated structure—a sentry post with some sort of wood stove in it; smoke curled from a round metal chimney. There was a loop antenna on the roof of it. Spotters then: posted along the bank of the lake to give warning of any Finnish advance across the open ice. And there were 55mm howitzers stationed along the shore; he only saw two of them—one on either side of the dock—but there'd be a good many more strung out in the trees at the edge of the lake.

Without hurry he studied the landscape, deciphering the clues in the snowy hills and the irregular shore. Finally he faded back into the woods and tramped down to the ambulance.

They were all outside stamping their feet. Sergei dragged a glove across his face and spat in the snow. “It's all right?”

“It'll have to do. They've got fifty-fives at two-hundred-meter intervals along the shore. Probably machine-gun bunkers too.”

Corporal Voroshnikov said, “Perhaps we should go farther east.”

“We haven't the fuel for that.”

Sergei said, “How does the ice look?”

“Thick enough.” He tossed the tommygun inside and climbed up. “Let's go.”

By now every shore position would have been alerted by Moscow to stop any vehicle or personnel trying to escape to the north. There was no way to bluff a passage with false papers. They might have his description.

His commando had to break through the Red line somewhere and this was the most thinly defended piece of it. Ram through onto the lake and get out beyond the range of the guns and cut a semicircular route toward the Finland shore: that was the plan now and it was all they had left. He put the ambulance in gear. The rear wheels slipped a little but then the cleats found purchase and it lurched uphill.

At the crest he still had her in low gear. He shifted before feeding fuel to the carburetor and he picked up speed smoothly on the downslope.

The ambulance bucked and wobbled, slithering from side to side in the ruts. Sergei had his window open and his gun in both hands and the cold wind was awful. Now it was two hundred yards to the boat ramp and the ambulance was still picking up speed but not too much because there'd be a hard bump at the top of the ramp: try to hold it down to something between fifty and sixty kilometers.

A man stepped out of the spotter shed—probably alerted by the noise. Shouted to someone inside the shack and lifted a rifle to his shoulder. Alex saw the muzzle zero in. Then his ears were battered by the staccato slamming of Sergei's automatic nine-millimeter. The bullets knocked the soldier back against the wall of the shack; when he slid down he left a red smear on it. Then Alex was wrenching the wheel left and smashing through the drifts at the head of the boat ramp and Sergei was twisted around in the lurching seat, spraying the doorway of the shack to keep their heads down inside. The ambulance went over the lip of the ramp: the front wheels slammed down with an impact that threw him forward against the steering wheel; it was sideslipping and he fought to correct but it kept turning and went down the ramp with the back tires spinning on the ice at a three-quarter angle: for a moment he was sure they were going to capsize. But the ambulance held upright and he fed a little fuel; the tires made a tentative grab and squirted tangentially onto the lake ice. Now they'd find out if it was thick enough to hold the weight.

He heard glass shatter musically and the confined roaring of a gun in the back of the ambulance—Voroshnikov or one of the others firing at the spotter shack through the rear windows of the ambulance. It was still spinning slowly on the ice; he had to turn the front wheels that way with the skid. The spin took them right back along the shore on the left but when the wheels vectored into the bank they gained enough traction to send the ambulance spurting forward and he turned the wheel with an easy slow motion so that it curved gently away from the shoreline and began to run out onto the frozen open surface. He kept it to a very slow curve because anything more would break them loose again, send them spinning. But it was an angle that held them too close inshore for too long and the trees erupted in machine-gun fire. He saw them chop white smears and dashes in the ice and heard the whine as they ricocheted away and then one or two of the guns had the range and there was lead chugging into the back. If one of them blew the fuel tank or ruptured the tires that was that.

He shifted up into top and put his foot on the floor. Some one in the litter bed cried out, hit. Sergei had his big shoulders all the way out the open window, shooting the tommygun empty; then he sagged back inside and slumped down in the seat. Alex flashed a glance at him to see if he'd been hit. He hadn't; he was just using as much cover as he could find. Wind whipped around Alex's face, freezing his ears and cheeks. She was up to seventy-five kph on the ice now and he completed the steady turn and straightened the steering: due north onto the lake with five hundred meters of it behind them. The shore machine guns gave it up. Ninety kph, a hundred—sixty miles an hour on surface ice and it was shaking the ambulance to pieces; the surface wasn't all that smooth. Everything rattled: the noise was so intense he didn't hear it when the shore batteries opened up. The first he knew of it was when a fifty-five punched a tremendous hole in the ice. Another shell impacted behind him and that one was close enough to rain slivers of ice on the ambulance—like hailstones on a corrugated metal roof; the noise was as terrible as the machine-gun hits had been.