Chapter Eleven
A Younger Aunt Ella in a Happier Day
Yekaterinburg, Siberia
Turgenev and the bulk of Strat Recon were gone, leaving Mokrenko in charge and on his own.
I hope to see them all come back, thought the lieutenant.
At this point, Mokrenko had six heavy machine guns, nine hundred thirty-seven rifles, including a couple of hundred which were privately owned, brought in by volunteers, and about a thousand troops, sixty percent of whom were untrained and an eighth or so of whom were trained, but female.
He had no other officers but from the women’s group, and the women, he decided, really needed their own to stay with them.
Imagine, then, the former sergeant’s relief when an elderly colonel, fat, bearded, and dark gray, walked into his headquarters and said, “I know you, sergeant . . . you were the one who stopped the train robbery.”
“Well, hello, Colonel Plestov,” replied a beaming Mokrenko. “Wonderful to see you, sir. By the way, it’s Lieutenant of the Guards now, sir. No chance to change insignia . . . no insignia to change to, for that matter.”
“Lieutenant of the . . . you were one of those who rescued the royal family, weren’t you?”
“What we could save of it, yes, sir. I was part of a group sent forward to determine and send back their precise location to the people who actually launched the rescue, and to prepare the way. We participated after that, yes, but were not central to the operation.”
“They also serve, Serg—Lieutenant; they also serve. Speaking of which, could you use whatever help an old man can give you?”
“I don’t need an old man’s help,” replied Mokrenko, “but I could use an old and brave soldier’s hand, yes. I just wish I had some artillery to put you in charge of. Let me ask you, sir: what can you do for us? We’re expecting a strong column of Reds to show up in a few days, and all I have—well, all except for the women—is well-meaning but untrained rabble, half a dozen machine guns, and no other officers . . . again, excepting the women.”
“Women? Women? You’re shitting me, right?”
“Yes, sir, and no, sir; I have about a short company’s worth of women under their own captain. They’re actually pretty good girls and better than half decent soldiers. Couldn’t have liberated Yekaterinburg without them, sir.”
“Indeed? Well, I’m too long in the tooth for active combat and I know it. If I didn’t know it, my wife—who, you may recall, is altogether too honest, in her own way—would surely tell me. I could take over logistics for you.”
Mokrenko’s head and eyes rolled ecstatically as he breathed a sigh of nigh unto infinite joy. “Sir, that would be an immense relief. I’m nearly lost, logistically, without my usual boss, Guards Captain Turgenev. Let me tell you what we’ve got going so far . . .”
Alapaevsk, Siberia
They could have ridden, of course, ridden and skied. And perhaps that would have been less difficult and more comfortable. But to Turgenev and his men, the safety and comfort of their party came in a distant second to finding and rescuing the Imperial prisoners in the hands of presumptively murderous Reds.
Thus, instead of trying to ride their Yakuts and glide on their skis, for days on end, the seven men of the group not left behind in Yekaterinburg—Turgenev, now Sergeant Koslov, “Goat,” Sarnof, Timashuk, Shukhov, Peredery, and Popov—rode in an open truck, driven by Curran, and with the top down on Maynard’s auto. In two trucks behind them rode the Yakuts, covered by blankets against the wind chill, with a couple of men in back likewise bundled against the cold. Further behind, after the Yakuts, was an empty truck, on the theory that the captives might be hurt badly enough they’d need to stay prone. The vehicles and drivers had been commandeered by the senior teamster, Garin, though he remained behind to lead the teamsters seized earlier.
The road . . . well, it wasn’t actually much of a road, a mix of mush, snow, rock, and dirt, all intermixed with potholes, ridges, and lonesome bumps. Moreover, the vehicles’ suspensions, while just barely up to the demands of keeping the car and trucks from falling apart, were in no way up to keeping the passengers from taking an awful beating.
If it hadn’t been for the time, thought Turgenev, cold and miserable, with aching chest and kidneys, I’d rather have ridden the horses. No, that’s not exactly true, I’d rather have walked! These things are the devil’s contraptions. . . .
Maynard, conversely, was having a very good time, laughing as he wheeled over and around all manner of misery-inducing impediments.
Man, thought Turgenev, was never meant to move at—he spared a glance at the shifting needle that told the speed, then did some mental calculations—my God! Fifty versts an hour! And not on a nice smooth railroad!
A sign flashed by: Alapaevsk. Then it was onto a bridge, crossing the Nevya River, with the bulk of the lake-like river to the west and the steep-sided bluff of the main industrial area to the northeast.
The road in the town was substantially different from the road leading here from Yekaterinburg. Pothole, rock, ridge, and ditch disappeared in favor of sheer mud. Maynard’s auto bogged down up to the axles within a hundred meters of leaving the bridge behind.
Turgenev looked north and decided. Not a chance it’s any better through the town. Horse time.
“Koslov?” the captain demanded.
“Here, sir!”
“Get the Yakuts off the trucks.”
“Peredery and Popov?”
The latter stuck his head out. “Here, sir, both of us.”
“You two stay here to guard the vehicles. The rest of us are moving forward by horse.”
An old woman, bent and worn with the cares of years and decades, came out, carefully keeping her feet from the sea of mud that fronted her little wooden porch.
“Madam,” Turgenev asked, “can you direct me to the Napolnaya School?”
“Do you mean the one where they’ve locked up the royals?”
“The same; I bear important dispatches and orders from Moscow. Lenin has decreed they are to be brought to him.” This continuous lying really doesn’t sit well with me.
The woman passed over the directions, adding, “You had best hurry, then. I’ve heard a rumor they’re all to be shot.”
Lower Selimskaya Mine
“I’m not going any further,” said Grand Duke Sergei Mihailovich. “Not one step.”
The grand duke was a cousin of the late Tsar, Nicholas the Second. It would have been easy to mistake one for the other in a dim light, provided they were wearing some kind of headgear, since Sergei was more or less bald. He’d never married, finding in his cousin’s ex-mistress, the beautiful Polish ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, all the family he wanted or needed. This had remained true even after Mathilde had also taken up with his cousin, Andre. No one really knew to whom the resultant child belonged, but Sergei had taken the boy up, raising him as his own, anyway.
He’d led and loved the military life and, if he was no great shakes as a soldier, it still could be said that he was honest, brave, and tried to the best of his ability.
“So you’re not going to follow orders?” said the Chekist, Pyotr Startsev. “Have it your own way then.” At that, Startsev drew his pistol and shot the grand duke once through the head, dropping him to the ground like a sack of meat. At six foot three the grand duke’s corpse was large enough to make an audible thump as it hit, despite the soft ground.
“I trust,” said the Chekist, after the women stopped screaming, “that I won’t have to be as harsh with the rest of you.”
It was with that shot that Elisabeth Feodorovna knew that her prayers to offer herself as a sacrifice to save the others had been ignored, and that they were all doomed.
“Move them on,” Startsev ordered the rest of his party. They were all still blindfolded, with their hands bound behind them, as they had been since leaving the school, hence there was a good deal of stumbling and several complete falls.
“Oh, take their blindfolds off,” Startsev ordered, “but leave their hands bound.”
“Hey, Boss,” asked Startsev’s assistant, Ryabov, “could I have a word with you? Sort of privately?”
“Just move them on once they can see,” said Startsev, before turning to ask, “What is it?”
In a low voice, Ryabov asked, “Just this; since we’re going to kill them anyway, is there any reason the boys shouldn’t have a good time with the women before we kill them?”
“We’re not in that much of a hurry,” Startsev mused. “Yeah, sure, why the hell not? It’s not like they’ll suffer overlong for it, and the boys will have a nice memory to warm them on a cold night. Yeah, go ahead and fuck ’em.”
“Great, Boss, and thanks!”
“Keep them tied and toss the men in first though.”
“I think we ought to rough them up a bit, too,” said Ryabov. “They’ll be more cooperative that way.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“I brought a couple of bottles, too, Boss, if you don’t mind.”
“After the men are in the mine!”
“Sure thing, Boss.”
Napolnaya School, Alapaevsk
The half dozen prisoners taken by Turgenev and his men knelt on the cold floor in a simple line, with their feet bound and their hands bound behind them. Turgenev had been able to take them during their meal, without a shot being fired. It remained to be seen if shots would still be fired, though.
“No one in the revolution outranks Ilyich,” said Turgenev. “No one has the right to deny him anything. I don’t have time to play games. So I am going to ask you each, once, where did they take the prisoners Ilyich wants brought to Moscow. If you refuse to answer, that will be the last thing you refuse. And you had better hope there’s no God or Devil, no Heaven or Hell, but Ilyich will still revile your names.”
Give them the excuse they need to talk.
“Where did they take the prisoners? One . . . two . . . three.”
And a good reason to.
On “three” Turgenev discharged his pistol into the head of the man to the extreme right of the line. His brains, along with a good deal of blood and a number of skull fragments, flew out onto the floor in front of him, even as the limp body flopped forward.
Turgenev took a step to the left, while thinking, Mokrenko has perhaps been a bad influence on me . . . or maybe a good one. Maybe a good one in this world.
As soon as warm muzzle of the M1911 touched the back of the head of the next man, he blurted out, “There’s a mine to the north of here. Take the north road to Nizhnaya Sinyachika. It will T-out on an east-west running road. Take a left, maybe one or two versts and south of the road a little, there’s a mine. They’re taking them there.”
“To kill them?”
“Well, yes, of course. Those were the orders from the Perm Soviet.”
“Very good, thank you. I can’t spare a man to guard you, sorry, and, since you are a party to a kidnapping and what we hope is only an attempted murder . . . Koslov, have these men shot then meet me outside to saddle up and race!”
Lower Selimskaya Mine
All but one of the rifles were stacked in tripods together.
One by one the men in the group had been clubbed and beaten half unconscious or even dead and then tossed into the mine. The number of splashes, however, did not equal the number of men tossed. Moreover, lighter splashing suggested that someone had gotten free of his bonds and saved himself. That promised more trouble later.
But later was later; for now it was the turn of the three women. Their faces were left alone, other than for a few hard slaps each, so that the men could enjoy their looks. Neither were they clubbed, so that they wouldn’t simply be lying there, as if dead. Instead, they were, each of them, brutally punched in their abdomens until they wept with the pain.
“Leave the others alone,” Ella begged. “Please! . . . oof . . . They’re just . . . aiaiaia . . . simple women . . . oof . . . . . . oh God! . . . I’m the aristocrat here . . . aiaiai . . . I’m the one you want revenge on.” Weeping then, tears flooding down her elegant face, Ella began to vomit from the beating. This earned her another, harder slap.
The Reds didn’t listen, anyway. Once the women were beaten into pure helplessness, their clothes were roughly torn away, leaving them stark naked but for rude socks and worn shoes on their feet. Somebody—Ryabov, she thought—used her underwear to wipe the vomit from Ella’s face.
She’d never borne a child. Her body retained almost all of the beauty it had had in her twenties. The Reds, almost as a single man, licked their lips in anticipation.
“Don’t worry, Princess,” Ryabov said. “We’re all going to have you and then we’ll take turns with the other two, as well.” With a show of contempt he ripped from Ella an icon—a “not made by human hands” image of the Savior, given her by the late Tsar—and tossed it contemptuously to the ground. Then, with a one-handed shove he knocked her flat on her back.
“Hey, two men; get over here and hold the bitch’s legs apart!”
One of the other men, not so detailed, said, “I’ll get the aristocrat later. For now, I’ll make do with this nun.” At that, he pulled Varvara Yakovleva up by her hair, lowered her to her knees, and said, “Open wide!”
Ella couldn’t get a decent count. It had started with Ryabov, of course, thrusting like a pig while two men held her legs far apart. That should have hurt . . . and had.
It hadn’t hurt merely because she was dry. Nor because Ryabov was anything special, in the stallion department. Rather, she’d never had much sex in her marriage and none at all, with anyone, since the murder of her husband. Vaginally speaking, she was almost a virgin and had torn, much as a virgin might.
It should have hurt more than it did, both physically and emotionally.
It hadn’t. In a way, the beating had been a bounty, causing an endorphin surge and insulating her against the pain and some of the humiliation. But drugs wear off. By the seventh or eighth rape—she had lost count—the pain in her vagina was far worse than the beating had been. This was so, even though she was no longer dry but well-lubricated with a mix of semen and blood.
With a grunt and a hard thrust her current rapist finished and climbed off of her. He’d smelt abominably; they’d all stunk since the second, reeking of cheap vodka, harsh tobacco, and filthy, rotten teeth.
The next one squatted on her chest, waving a monstrous penis in her face. At first, she thought he was going to do what she thought she’d seen one or maybe two of them doing to Varvara. But no. This one said, “You may think you’re all high and mighty and aloof, Princess. But when I stick this in you, you will scream; I guarantee it.”
I will not scream. Nothing they can do can make me scream. My God stands beside me, even in this hour. Nothing they can do to my body can matter . . .
Oh, God, she wanted to scream when the Red forced himself into her, to scream, to cry, even to beg . . . But I will not, no, no, no, not ever. But, oh, my dear God, it hurts, it hurts sooo much.
That went on for a while, every second and every thrust a new torment. Still, she would not cry out or show anything but indifference.
The Red stopped for a moment. “You’re a tougher cunt than I thought. But you’ll scream now, I guarantee it, bitch.”
With that he pulled out, got to his knees and roughly flipped Ella over onto her stomach, before lowering himself onto her back. She felt him groping to line himself up. Then she could feel the head of his penis beginning to push into her from behind and steeled herself for what she knew would be the worst tearing of all.
But it didn’t come. Instead, she heard a fusillade of shots and then the Red rolled off her back and flopped to the ground on his own back, moaning.
X X X
Dismounting, Turgenev left one man, Timashuk, to hold the horses. Then he led the remaining three to the north side of the road and began following the wood line west. It hadn’t been hard to figure out where the mine was; a dozen or so wagons were clustered in a little open area just off the road. And then there were the screams, female screams of utter pain and degradation. As they got closer, they could hear male laughter interspersed with the screaming.
Even without seeing it, Turgenev and the men with him knew what was going on. Still, he and they resisted doing what they wanted to do, to charge at full speed with their machine pistols and Lewis Gun blazing.
A bare fifty meters from the mine, Turgenev signaled the others to halt. He crawled forward himself, on his belly, until he could take in the scene. Barely, he resisted the urge to vomit. When he had a good idea and, more importantly, could articulate what was going on and explain what he wanted, he crawled back to where the men waited.
There, whispering, he sketched out a map on the ground with his left index finger and gave his orders.
The Lewis gun barked, spilling the blood, guts, and brains on the only rapist obviously armed on the site. Turgenev and Sarnof bolted to place themselves between the stacked rifles and the rapists, while Koslov and Shukhov, the latter bearing the Lewis Gun and swinging it menacingly, stepped out from the wood line. Meanwhile, Koslov butt-stroked the Red who was trying to jam himself into the anus of one of the women, freeing her of his weight. The corporal made a point of not looking down at her.
Startsev drew the pistol with which he’d murdered Grand Duke Sergei. He was not nearly fast enough. Before he could properly aim at anyone, Shukhov had put half a dozen bullets into the Bolshevik’s lower abdomen and legs. One of those—by luck or by divine providence—had torn away Startsev’s penis and testicles. He screamed and moaned without surcease as he lay on the ground. When he realized what he was now missing, Startsev added a good deal of weeping interspersed with the screams.
Covered by Turgenev and Koslov, Sarnof and Corporal Koslov first retrieved some rope they’d noticed on the wagons, along with half a dozen blankets. Looking away, they passed the blankets to the naked women and then tied all the men’s hands and feet together. When that was done, they went back to Turgenev and asked, “What do we do with this lot, sir?”
Turgenev looked around the site and said, “There’s plenty of lumber here to crucify the lot, but I see no nails and we lack enough rope to make crosses. There’s plenty of wood to impale them all, too, but we lack the time to sharpen them enough, while the ground’s too hard to dig proper support holes.”
His eyes came to rest on a long section of fence. Nodding, and remembering what had been done to the nuns, and with what almost happened to Ella deeply in mind, he said, “Stick a bayonet five or six times up each of their arses. Then untie their hands and tie them to the fence so their arms are at about forty-five degrees. When they’re all tied, smash their legs.”
To Timashuk, who had arrived leading the horses, Turgenev said, “See what you can do, if anything, for the ones in the mine.”
Nearby, Bolsheviks were screaming as cold steel was rudely shoved into the rectum of each one, twisted, then shoved in again, and again, and again, and again. Fresh blood flowed with each jab, running across unwashed buttocks and down hairy legs.
The nuns, Varvara and Ekaterina, hadn’t been quite as badly abused as had Ella. Blanket-wrapped, they were able to make their way to her. On the way, Varvara stopped to pick up one of the bottles abandoned by the captive reds. She took a swig, swished it around her mouth several times, then spit it out on the ground. She did this five times before she actually took a healthy slug of the not particularly healthy distillate.
Then she and Ekaterina framed themselves to either side of Ella, sitting her up. Varvara held the bottle up to Ella’s lips, but she batted it away and let out a single, horrible, piercing shriek containing everything she’d felt over the course of the entire, vicious gang rape. Only then did she start to cry.
After their anal bayonet-rapes, the Bolsheviks had been, one by one, dragged to the fence and had their hands tied to the top rails. Indeed, so tightly were they tied that, within the hour, deprived of blood, the flesh of those hands would die anyway. Already they and the wrists were monstrously swollen around and above their bindings.
If there had ever been an iron bar on site it was nowhere to be found. No matter, shitty and bloody bayonets notwithstanding, the four rescuers used the Reds’ own rifles to break the legs of each. Their screams redoubled now. The ones whose legs hadn’t yet been broken screamed and begged for mercy.
“Too late for mercy,” said Turgenev. “You should have shown mercy to your victims.”
Moreover, with broken legs, none of them could stand any longer. Instead, they had to drop—something which further damaged their already ruined legs—to where only their swollen, dying wrists supported them. Within a mere ten minutes breathing had become quite difficult. After that, to breathe they had to pull themselves up by those same dying wrists. This further agonized their broken legs, eliciting further screams.
They still begged for help, for mercy, and none more than the now-dickless Startsev. Nobody listened, though Turgenev, who seemed to have been changed by what had been done to the women, laughed at them.
It’s not strictly necessary to wait, thought Turgenev. They’re going to die or be utterly crippled no matter if they die or not. But I want the nuns to know, deep down, that they were avenged.
By the end of two hours, the Reds were just cooling meat, all life having fled.
Walking along the fence, Turgenev drew his knife across the throat of each. Blood leaked; it did not gush. “For my little Natalya,” he whispered, as he slashed every throat.
By this time Timashuk, working with Shukhov, had rigged a tripod over the mine and recovered the victims. All but two were dead to split skulls. The exceptions were Grand Duke Sergei’s secretary, Remez, who was expected to die, and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, the illegitimately born Prince, who somehow managed to avoid the split skull and leaking brains of the corpses, but was still largely incoherent with a large knot on his skull.
“Get the women and wounded into the wagons,” he said, finally. “Take the horses that aren’t needed for the wagons with us, too. Let’s go.”
“What do we do with the bodies, sir?” asked Koslov.
“Leave the Reds hanging for the birds to eat. Put the innocents in a wagon and bring them with us.”
Hotel Amerikanskaya, Yekaterinburg
“When you took the town,” said Tomas Masaryk, head of the Czechoslovak National Council, “I dispatched two riders to find the legion and bring it here.” The “legion” was the Czechoslovak Legion, composed of tens of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks, some born in the Russian Empire, other deserted or defected or recruited from POWs in Russian hands, fighting for freedom from Austria-Hungary. Masaryk himself had been en route to the United States when he’d heard of the rescue of the Romanovs and doubled back, sensing greater opportunity right here in Russia than in distant America.
“Chances of them getting here with troops anytime soon?” asked Mokrenko, briefly halting his back-and-forth pacing.
Masaryk, an old, gray man, goateed and heavily mustached, shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “There’s no real telling. I sent good men, but it is a difficult and uncertain world.”
Mentally, Mokrenko dismissed the possibility, thinking, too, If we’d left all the gold and silver here for the grabbing I’m quite sure they’d have managed to turn up.
He resumed pacing. Good thing, I suppose, that that Slovak Minister of War and French Army general, Stefanik, hasn’t shown up yet. That would be more complications that I would prefer to deal with. After all, would he listen to a former sergeant and jumped-up Guards lieutenant? Nah.
Captain Bochkareva and her assistant, Princess Tatuyeva, stood by silently while Mokrenko paced. Likewise did a few older veterans not from Strat Recon, and two prominent citizens of the town who probably could command, but hadn’t the first clue as to what they should be doing or why. One of the veterans, a lieutenant, seemed mildly ill. He shook slightly, too. There were also a couple of men in suits, with top hats, who didn’t look remotely Russian, representing the Czechoslovak delegation.
I don’t have a battalion, thought Lieutenant Mokrenko. I’ve got five distinct mobs plus a support mob plus the women, who are not a mob. Thank God, at least, for Colonel Plestov, who has brought a degree of order to the support mob. More importantly, he’s getting the precious metals out of town so that if . . . no, be honest, when I lose here at least the Reds won’t have that. Rather, they won’t if I can buy Plestov enough time. Which is probably all I can do.
For the rest . . . well, there are “prominent citizens” in charge of two of my mobs. For three I have two former sergeants and a former lieutenant, the latter with only one arm and an obvious drinking problem.
With twenty heavy machine guns and crews for them, this wouldn’t be hard. I’d outpost them in the cellars of buildings around the town with interlocking grazing fires and then put the mobs, by platoons, under the command of the gun crews’ leaders to defend the guns.
But I don’t have twenty. I have six. And I don’t have six good crews. I don’t even have one good crew. I’ve got two men from Strat Recon, who trained the others a very little, and can somewhat manage their own guns.
And the Reds are supposedly coming by train. I’m actually surprised they’re not here yet. I wonder what will be in the follow-on echelons. Ten thousand? Twenty? I’m too weak to defend against those kinds of numbers. I’d be too weak if all my soldiers were well trained.
And then, too, let’s not delude ourselves. There’s an anti-Bolshevik element in the town that has stepped forward to fill the ranks. That doesn’t mean there isn’t also still a significant pro-Bolshevik element in the town, ready to rise at the first opportunity. They probably don’t have much in the way of arms, but would they need much?
So that is actually job one and, moreover, a job my civilian-led mobs are suited for.
Mokrenko stopped pacing and looked directly at the two civilians in charge of the almost two-hundred-man mobs. They were late middle-aged, prosperous and well-fed, and appeared to Mokrenko, the both of them, to have earnest and honest faces.
“Mr. Smirnov and Mr. Kuznetsov,” Mokrenko observed, “this town was, until quite recently, very pro-Red. What are your opinions on it today?”
“Still mostly Red,” shrugged Kusnetzov, stocky and with a red beard.
“Less than it used to be, after the terror inflicted on it, but there’s a strong stream of sympathy for the Bolsheviks,” the thinner and beardless Smirnov added.
“I want you two to each take half the town, divided along . . . let’s say . . . the Ulitsa Malysheva. Smirnov, take the north; Kuznetsov, the south. Compile lists of likely Red sympathizers who could organize a counter-counterrevolution. A few hundred for each of you. More if you think it’s necessary. Arrest them and lock them up in . . . well, why not be a little poetic; stick them in the Ipatiev House and provide a score or so of armed guard from each of your groups.”
“Shoot them?” asked Smirnov.
“Not yet,” Mokrenko said. “We’ll keep them alive as hostages for the good behavior of the rest.”
Mokrenko waited a few seconds, then asked, “Well, what are you waiting for? Those internal threats won’t incarcerate themselves.”
Wordlessly, the two men left to see to their new duties.
“Captain Bochkareva?”
“Yes, Guards Lieutenant?” Maria Bochkareva tended to the formal.
“We are too weak to defend, as we are right now. Therefore, we are going to attack. That is to say that you are going to attack.
“I want you to take your healthy women, plus two heavy machine guns, plus a good deal of explosive demolitions and a detonating machine, and ambush the train lines to the west. Do so at least eight versts away from the western edge of the town, and twelve would be better.”
“How am I to know,” she asked, “if an oncoming train is full of Bolsheviks or full of civilians?”
That stopped Mokrenko cold. There was, indeed, no good way to tell what was inside a train from the outside, unless there happened to be artillery on a flat car or a number of cavalry horse cars visible.
Finally, he answered, “Find your ideal ambush position and blow up the tracks there. Make it really obvious that they’ve been blown, so the train has time to stop . . . but only just enough time to stop. The Reds will dismount then. Ambush them when they do.”
“Fair enough,” Bochkareva replied. “Come on, Princess; we’ve a lot of work to do and a lot of versts to cover.
“I’m going to need to find a miner who knows something about explosives,” she added. “Neither I nor any of my women had time for any training in that.”
“Do,” Mokrenko said. “There’s a fair chance Colonel Plestov may be able to help you there. Look him up. Also, after you ambush the train, I want you to be able to break contact and race back here. You, as the only trained group of soldiers, are going to reconstitute here as my reserve. If you can ride, you have my authority to seize any cavalry or riding horses that may be found. The colonel can probably help with that, too.
“And, as mentioned, I’m going to attach two heavy machine guns to you with carts to move them.”
“Now, as to the other three companies . . .”
Bochkareva’s women, with half a dozen one-horse carts, two heavy water-cooled machine guns, and two miners alleged to be both skilled in demolitions and none too fond of the Reds, left Yekaterinburg. They left, marching west, before Mokrenko could finish making sure his three “companies” that had at least some military leadership were deployed into position.
She stopped at the station to ask how long it took a train to stop and how long a train carrying eight hundred men would be. The answers were, “It depends.” Finally she managed to get an answer that sort of worked: “A passenger train, moving sixty or so versts per hour, can usually be stopped in about ninety seconds, or about a verst and a half. ‘Usually’ . . . if they’re at that speed . . . and they see a blockage up ahead . . . if.
“As for the length, assume twenty cars for eight hundred men, plus another two for officers, plus a dining car and a cooking car. Then there will be at least one but probably two fuel and water tenders. Probably another pusher car and its tender or tenders, too. All in, call it maybe four tenths of a verst.”
Knowing there wasn’t a lot of time for anything fancy, she called a halt as soon as she found a length of rail line that would do. It was situated just on the other side of a bridge over the River Iset, not very far from where Strat Recon and the teamsters had encamped. There were good, thick woods to the north of that section of line, which would provide cover and concealment for her troops, and a river, the Reshetka, meandering along to the south, more or less in parallel.
Where the Reshetka joined the Isets was too swift flowing and churning to be fordable. Instead, Bochkareva had a single span of rope stretched across the stream about one hundred fifty meters southwest of the junction, in a bend that would provide her troops some cover as they pulled themselves across.
Her two machine guns she ordered into positions about one hundred meters north of where she intended to have the rail line blown. In rethinking what Mokrenko had told her, she’d decided, That makes no sense. If I want them to stop then they have to see the blast that cuts the line. They’ll never see a few lengths of twisted steel rail.
The spot she chose to blast was where the Reshetka came closest to the line.
Her troops she had already divided into three platoons. One of these she stretched along the woods to the north, the other in the sparser woods to the south. The elevated rail bed would keep them from shooting each other. The third she stretched out to either side of the Iset, along its eastern bank, to cover the withdrawal of the rest.
Then she, and they, sat down to wait while the miners prepped the line.
Mokrenko found the lieutenant already drunk and his men milling about without direction. He had the man arrested and escorted to Colonel Plestov for disposition.
And I have neither an officer nor a sergeant to take his place. I think that means I am now the commander of this grouping. Shit.
Before he was marched away, the one-armed lieutenant said, “I wasn’t always like this, a drunk. It was the arm . . .”
“I suppose everyone can find an excuse,” Mokrenko said, not entirely ungently.
Then, turning to the milling troops, he ordered, his voice ringing for entire city blocks, “Entire company to assemble on me, NOW!”
Whether she’d timed the explosion properly was something Bochkareva would never know.
First, before the train even appeared, she heard the whistles repeatedly. This, she understood, was not for the sake of pedestrians on the tracks, but to let the other cars and locomotives know that a turn or halt was coming, for them to begin their own braking.
Ah, hell, she thought, as the implication dawned on her, they’re not going to be coming at sixty versts an hour, are they?
Captain or not, she had little education. Quickly changing her calculation for when to detonate the explosives on the line was beyond her. Even if she had been able to do the math in her head, the skill would have been useless since she didn’t know how much the train would slow for the curve. Nor could she hope to judge the speed of the train that would soon be visibly oncoming from the front. She really couldn’t have judged it from the side.
If you survive this, Maria, you need to see about schooling. As is, you’re a decent sergeant who got bumped to captain without any qualifications but a fighting heart.
She spared a glance at the miner on her right, manning the blasting machine that would send a locally generated jolt to the blasting caps in the charges.
Understanding her look, the miner said, “I truly don’t know, Captain.”
The locomotive, already sensed from its smoke and the sound of the whistle, made its first appearance coming about the bend to the southwest. No, I can’t tell what the difference in speed is.
Watching more and more of the train emerge into view, she wondered about whether it was civilian or military. This doubt, at least, was dispelled when she counted a number of cars equal to about what the railway man had told her would be needed for the force supposed to be coming.
“Are you ready?” she asked the miner.
“Yes, Captain,” he replied.
“Then . . . blow it!”
The miner pushed the plunger. Nothing happened.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
He shook his head rapidly while pulling the handle of the plunger back up. Again he pushed it and, again, there was nothing.
Suspecting treason, Bochkareva began reaching for her pistol. Cursing a storm, the miner pulled the plunger back and, once again, shoved it down.
Khawammmm! This time it worked. A substantial cloud of dirt, rock, gravel, spikes, and wooden ties began to climb skyward, leaving a growing cloud of explosive smoke and dust below. Almost immediately came the sound of shrieking and squealing steel tires trying desperately for purchase on steel rails. A frantic whistling accompanied the sound of the tires on the rails.
At no time did this cacophony end until the first locomotive reached the twisted, ruined rails, a hundred meters to the southwest of Bochkareva, the miner, and number one machine gun. At that point, it began to tip over to its own left while sliding off the remnants of the tracks and onto the dirt on that side. The tenders and at least two passenger cars followed. Once the locomotive was perpendicular to the track, instead of sliding it began to roll, then spin, all the time coming closer to Bochkareva.
Like deer in headlights, all were transfixed by the approaching multi-ton machine of doom. It spun. It bounced. And all the time, the whistle kept screaming.
Expecting death and too much in shock to avoid it, Bochkareva crossed herself. Ever after she credited that religious act with saving her life, since the locomotive spun to a stop a bare fifteen arshini from where she stood. She and those around her were pelted with clods of dirt and rocks.
Thank you, God.
Almost immediately, rifle fire erupted from both sides of the track to her southwest. Then the machine gun on the other side of the tracks added to the symphony. She immediately realized that the dead and now half-sunken locomotive blocked any fire from the machine gun near her.
She ran the few steps to the gun. “Snap out of it!” she ordered the crew who sat there, mumbled prayers on their lips. Lavin, of Strat Recon, was one of them. “STOP IT, YOU MORONS! Bring the gun to the nose of the locomotive and set up there to sweep that side of the train. And then, for the love of God, shoot!”
“I’m not dead?” wondered Lavin.
“You will be if—”
“We’re moving, Captain, we’re moving!”
Bochkareva ran ahead of the gun crew. Climbing up the side, she looked inside the cab to where the dead engine crew lay, broken and twisted by their train’s ordeal. Looking out and past them, the train, itself, she saw, was mostly a ruin, with the passenger cars a twisted rope and most of them off their tracks and on one side. The rifle fire from her women and the machine gun, the latter more effective for its sound at the moment than for its fire, kept the Reds inside with no ability to shoot back.
“Lavin!” she shouted, “forget the machine gun for now. Get up here and tell them to show a white flag if they want to live. Then to come out with no weapons, not even a pistol or bayonet, or they’ll be shot. Tell them that if they don’t surrender now, the brigade they’re facing will take no prisoners.”
X X X
Mokrenko wasn’t really overly given to vulgarity, but when he saw the column of something over seven hundred disarmed, hobbling, bleeding, and thoroughly shocked Reds being marched forward under the guard of about seven women and a cart-mounted machine gun front and rear, he could only say, “I don’t fucking believe it.”
“Where are we going to put them?” Bochkareva asked, when she drew abreast of the Guards Lieutenant.
“I don’t know yet,” Mokrenko answered. “I think I’ll dump it on Colonel Plestov.” He counted heads. “Must have been a hard fight if you lost a third of your women,” he said. “And Princess Tatuyeva? I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t lose a single girl,” she replied. “I just left one platoon back there, with most of the carts, plus the machine guns, to move the Reds who were too badly hurt, to collect the guns and ammunition, and to inventory the loot. The princess is in charge of that.”
“Holy shit!”
“Something, at least, was holy about it.”