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Chapter One


Wreck of the L59

Wreck of the L59



Ipatiev House, Voznesenski Prospect, Yekaterinburg

Aunt Ella wore a nun’s habit, something that could not, even at the advanced age of fifty-three, quite hide that she’d been, in her youth, one of the great beauties of Europe and retained yet a good deal of that beauty.

Ella, Elizabeth Feodorovna, formerly Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, was also quite intelligent and very wise; the future Kaiser, Wilhelm II, smitten with her, had, for example, proposed to her when she’d been fourteen. He’d been soundly rejected.

Following the murder of the man she had married by a Red assassin, Ella had sold off all of her worldly possessions, which had been extensive, to found a nunnery, with a school, hospital, dental clinic, and pharmacy to care for the poor of Moscow. Though converted to Orthodoxy for her marriage, her inspiration had, in large part, been the Roman Catholic “Little Sisters of the Poor.” Before that, though, she’d gone to the Tsar to beg fruitlessly for the life of her husband’s assassin.

Thus, she was also perhaps one of the twentieth century’s better candidates for sainthood. Indeed, she was almost too much so for credence.

Even so, she was no weakling or starry-eyed idealist. While she’d begged for the assassin’s life, it was because hanging him could only be, she believed, an act of revenge, hence, she thought, unworthy of a Christian state and monarch, and useless besides. But when she’d had good reason to suspect that some patriots were about to do away with Rasputin, she’d kept her own counsel and let the murder happen, because Rasputin had been a continuing and massive threat to her sister, the Tsarina, her brother-in-law, the Tsar, and her nieces and nephew, thus to the Russian Empire and to her adopted Orthodox faith, as well.

She’d rarely wept in her life. Indeed, it had only happened when her mother had died, when her beloved husband had been murdered, and now . . . now, on her knees on the rough floor by the rude bed where she’d been praying. Now, when the full weight of the knowledge of the murder of her sister, her brother-in-law, one of her nieces and her dear little tsarevich, Alexei, had borne down on her. Now, she wept; now she asked of her God, over and over, “Why? Why? Why?”


South of Tobolsk

Why did it blow up? wondered Signalman Wilhelm Mueller, late of the German Navy, glancing up from the singed field on which lay the charred corpses of his late comrades. He’d been asking himself the same question for days.

The aluminum skeleton of a great airship, L-59, a lost leviathan of the air, lay among the bodies, its mostly skinless frame broken and crumpled on the landscape. Tattered skin fluttered from the wreckage in places, the shreds torn and charred. Amidst the ruin, and all around it, stooped men under armed guards hunted for bodies and whatever military material might be recovered. Some of them appeared to be using brooms to sweep the ice.

All the free men on the field were Russians, Poles, or Finns—Imperial Russian subjects—except for one: Mueller himself, last of the crew of the L59. Teary-eyed and bleary-eyed, he walked among the charred, broken corpses looking for the last remains of his friends. As he discovered them, usually by means of the 1878 or 1917 pattern oval Erkenungsmarke – metal ovals that had once, in 1864, been called Hundesmarke, or “dog tags” – they wore on chains or leather cords about their necks, he beckoned for one of the stretcher teams to come and take the body away to where a separate cemetery for the ship’s crew had been laid out.

Mueller came to a corpse, badly charred, with arms and legs drawn into a fetal position. It was impossible to make out features on the blackened, half-melted face. Size was no clue to identity, either; bodies shrank when burnt. Taking one knee, the German aviator brushed aside the few fragments of cloth clinging to the body, then did the same for the bits of cloth and flesh obscuring the tags. He silently read the name: Gustav Proll.

Blinking back a new flood of tears, Mueller thought, What about your wife and children, old friend? We weren’t even officially in the navy anymore. Who will care for them?


Northwest of L59’s corpse, a great pyre of what remained of hundreds of corpses—Reds, their collaborators, and sundry criminals—still smoldered between the River Irtysh and a warehouse that normally held those prisoners now engaged in the hunt for recoverable material to the south. The pyre reeked of overdone pork, a stench that had Tatiana Nicholaevna Romanova, Empress of all the Russias, on the verge of nausea. That she’d signed the death warrants for most of those shot and then burnt added an unseemly guilt to the rising urge to vomit.

“Get me out of here, Dan,” she said to her escort, Daniil Edvardovich Kostyshakov, late of the Kexholm Regiment of the Imperial Guards as well as of Camp Budapest and Ingolstadt’s Fortress IX. “Please, somewhere else, quickly, before I lose the contents of my stomach.”

Without a word, guided by perfect understanding, Dan flicked the reins of the sleigh on which he and Tatiana rode, sending the furry Yakut horse that drew it trotting to the south and upwind of the source of the stench. Two further sleighs, bearing armed guards, followed, while a half dozen guardsmen, horse-borne, kept station at a distance. If all else failed, and the guard detail proved inadequate, both the empress and Daniil had machine pistols slung over their shoulders.

The move wasn’t quite quick enough; within a dozen of the horse’s paces Tatiana had to bend to the side and empty the contents of her stomach onto the ice.

“I’m sorry,” she said, recovering in the freer and cleaner air south of the great pyre. “I just . . . the smell . . . and knowing I created it . . . my orders did. Somehow, it’s even more real smelling it than it was hearing the firing squads at work.”

Dan shook his head in negation. “You did the right thing; none of them would have improved with age.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “But how can I know that?”

“If you don’t know it, Tatiana Nicholaevna, everyone else does.”

The empress shook her head, doubtfully.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as Dan continued to direct their sleigh in the direction of the monstrous airship.

“There are lots of men with rifles in the town, most of whom are anti-Bolshevik, but a sad dearth of ammunition for them. My quartermaster—”

“The rat-faced one?” she interrupted. “That’s not very kind of me, is it? I don’t mean it unkindly, but I know no better way to describe him.”

“Romeyko; yes, him.” Facing her, Dan raised a disapproving eyebrow. “You could maybe try describing him as one of the better quartermasters in the army. Or maybe as a man as responsible as any for the rescue of yourself and your sisters.”

Seeing Tatiana flush with shame, Dan looked forward again and continued, “He’s trying to salvage what can be salvaged from the airship. I don’t have a lot of hope but if he can scrounge enough to give a fighting load to the eleven or twelve hundred men in the town who are armed and whom we can trust . . .”

Maybe trust, he thought, guiltily, remembering that three of the Romanovs had been murdered by a man of his own organization, a man in whom far too much trust had been placed.


Romeyko and Mueller saw the escorted sleigh at the same time and began to walk over from separate start points. The quartermaster was considerably closer.

Seeing them, Daniil said to Tatiana, “That’s the German aviator who lost all his friends. Given how important they were to saving who could be saved, and how much you’ve lost, too, you might want to have a private word with him.”

“I will then,” she agreed.

With the quartermaster now close enough, Daniil asked, “And what have you been able to recover?”

“It’s a lot better than I expected,” the unlovely supply officer said. “In the first place, the fire, while hot, was short-lived. The wooden boxes are charred, more or less and here and there, but the contents are largely intact. Some of them broke open on impact, which is why I’ve got men sweeping the ice.

“Better still, I had on my wish list two or three of those British Stokes mortars. Never thought we’d see them but Feldwebel Weber or Major Brinkmann apparently came through in the end, sometime after we left. Haven’t much of a clue about how to use them, of course, and one of the sights appears to be broken. We might be able to fix it, though; it’s very simple. I have two tubes and a few hundred rounds of ammunition. Based on the smell, my best guess is that the ammunition and manuals were stowed somewhere very close to the urine bladder. They stink like it, anyway. It may be that the liquid helped preserve them from the fire, too. The manuals are damaged, mind, but maybe not so much that a clever English speaker can’t figure the things out.”

Tatiana raised one index finger. “I can read, write, and speak English quite well, Colonel. It was really my first language, since it was the language my parents shared that they spoke best. Give me the manuals and . . . well . . . someone who understands artillery, at least, for terms I won’t be familiar with.”

Romeyko nodded slowly, using the time gained to collect his thoughts on the subject. Piss? The Tsarina of all the Russias is going to cover her hands with PISS? Ultimately, he decided, Well, her choice, after all, and said, “That would be a great help, Your Majesty. I’ll find an artilleryman for you. Or Corporal Panfil, maybe, who’s probably as close as we’ve got.

“Most of the rifles also made it through,” Romeyko continued. “The two spare heavy machine guns have their water jackets pierced, but I think we can fix them locally. Think, not sure. My assistant is out hunting down some kind of metalworking shop, or maybe a blacksmith, all else failing, for the job. The pioneer tools are largely intact. Also, one of the Germans sent us nine more Lewis Guns in our caliber, which is certainly helpful. Likewise a few dozen of those Amerikansky pistols, though not much ammunition for them.”

Romeyko pointed in Mueller’s direction, saying, “There’s something else, too. The German told me about it. We had no clue before but . . .” The quartermaster let his voice trail off as Mueller had arrived at the sleigh.

Everyone could see from his red, puffy eyes that the German had been crying. Tactfully, no one mentioned it.

“The quartermaster tells me you have something for us, Herr Mueller,” prompted Kostyshakov.

“Yes, sir. Well, two things. While the radio aboard the airship was wrecked, there may be enough useable pieces and spare parts to reconstruct it. I’m not sure but I’ll try. The other thing is that the ship, itself, its frame, was different from any other airship ever built. It was designed to be taken apart and turned into a radio tower.”

“Can you still?” Tatiana asked. “I mean, it looks twisted up pretty badly in places.”

“I think so, Your Majesty,” Mueller said. “The sections are aluminum—strong for its weight is not the same thing as all that strong—so not so hard to twist back into shape, more or less.

“The other thing is . . . well . . .”

“Go on,” Tatiana urged.

“Your Majesty, I am concerned about the families of my friends; my own family, too, for that matter. We were all officially discharged from the Navy for this mission. That means no survivors’ support for the wives and children. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Do you have a list of names and addresses?” the empress asked.

“Not full addresses, Your Majesty, only down to cities and towns, and I am not one hundred percent about those, not nearly.”

“Who could you ask?”

“No one comes to mind,” he replied. “If I can find the notebook of our senior enlisted man, I suspect I’d find their addresses, too. But so far, I can’t find it. It may have burnt.”

“Look for it,” said the empress. “You find me where to send money and I will support the families of the men killed trying to rescue us. I’ll sell jewelry if I must.”

“Does that go for my dead, too, Highness?” Kostyshakov asked.

“Yes,” Tatiana replied, “and you should have brought it up to me sooner. Speaking of soonermy aunt?”

“Repairs on the telegraph line are complete,” he answered. “I am sending out the first grenadier platoon, less its dead and wounded, under their platoon sergeant, Feldfebel Kostin, first thing in the morning. I don’t have another qualified officer to spare and, if they can link up, Turgenev’s judgment is sound. On skis, Kostin can probably catch up to Turgenev and Strat Recon before they get to Yekaterinburg. And, Your Majesty, no matter what you demand, that is the best I can do.”

And that’s probably the truth, too, thought Tatiana. Oh, my poor Aunt Ella.


Fifty Versts East of Tyumen, Russia

The expedition to pinpoint the location of Aunt Ella was making slow progress through the trackless Siberian wastes.

“I wish we’d had time to learn to ski,” said Lieutenant Turgenev, leading his little Yakut horse through the snowdrifts of this mostly unsettled and completely un-roaded part of Siberia. Like the rest of the men of Strat Recon, Turgenev now wore winter whites over his uniform.

Mokrenko, walking beside his officer, could only agree. “We’d have made faster time, yes, than we are with having to let the horses spend about half of every day scraping through the snow to graze and half the remainder leading them through things we have enough trouble with ourselves.”

Strat—for “Strategic”—recon was a hand-picked group of men, somewhat reinforced now to cover its losses and its previous deficiencies. Beyond the survivors of the first version, Turgenev, himself, Sergeant Mokrenko, Corporal Koslov, also known as “Goat,” Cossacks Novarikasha and Lavin, Signaller Sarnof, Medical Orderly Timashuk, and Engineer Shukhov, they’d had added to them another signaller, medic, and engineer, Popov, Gazenko, and Peredery, respectively. In addition, the ranks had been culled for a single Cossack to make up for the loss of Visaitov, killed foiling a robbery on a train. This man was Cossack Bulavin.

Natalya Sorokina and Sergei Babin had been left behind, the former as lady-in-waiting to the empress, the latter as a much-needed staff officer on what was about to become brigade staff.

Those bare twelve had also been reinforced with better arms. A half dozen machine pistols of the killed and badly wounded from the rescue force, plus one Lewis Gun, had been turned over to Turgenev. Moreover, it wasn’t quite true that nobody was skiing. The new additions had learnt the skill back in Bulgaria, while preparing for the mission. Conversely, none of them but the Cossack had ever learnt to ride a horse. Hence Popov, Gazenko, and Peredery skied behind the two sleighs carrying the team’s supplies, outsize equipment, and the single portable telegraph set.

Suddenly, Mokrenko, his horse, and the lieutenant’s, stiffened.

“What is it, Sergeant?” Turgenev asked.

Mokrenko took a moment to answer, eyes closed and concentrating hard. Finally, he said, “Men, I think, sir, numbering between several hundred to as many as two or three thousand, heading this way.”

Turgenev listened for a bit, finally hearing a steady crunchcrunch-crunch from a great many booted feet.

“Bugger!”

Noise carries in cold, dense air. There was no sense in announcing a change of direction and little more in trying to move as a column; the approaching horde might arrive before the last man had turned.

“Give me your horse, sergeant. Then you walk back the way we came, telling them to turn right immediately, not where I am turning.”

“Yes, sir. How far?”

“Half a verst, that should be far enough to hide. And for God’s sake, hurry!”

Stomping back through the ice and snow, Mokrenko gave the orders and as brief an explanation as possible. “Probable Reds, many, heading this way. Turn right immediately, half a verst . . . Probable Reds, many . . .”

As soon as they’d turned, walked, and then stopped, the horsemen coaxed their Yakuts down to the prone and took cover. Meanwhile, the sleigh drivers and mounted men took out some commandeered white sheets and draped them over the Yakuts and sleighs, before doing the same with their own horses.

Mokrenko trooped the line forward, inspecting the camouflage. “Adjust your sheet, Sarnof; I can see the runners of your sleigh . . . get your head down, Bulavin, right after you finish covering your horse; the lieutenant needs to see but you do not . . . crawl over behind that snowdrift, Popov . . .”

Before he had quite made it to the lieutenant, he caught his first glimpse of the approaching mass. Mokrenko immediately dropped to his belly, then crawled forward over the snow and ice to where his officer and their horses lay, the lieutenant being likewise prone but with his field glasses studying the presumptive Reds.

“I make it about . . . let’s see . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine companies, big ones,” Turgenev passed on. “A mass of heavy-duty sleighs are following them. They’ve got their lead company formed up ten across, and about twenty deep, arms linked, just packing down the snow by stamping it down. Clever technique, really. Aha, the lead company has stopped and is splitting up to the sides while the next one moves up to take their place on stamping duty.”

The lieutenant went silent then, for a bit, just watching the procession.

One of the good things about this officer, thought Mokrenko; he’s cool in a crisis.

“They’ve got a heavy machine gun each on what looks like a dozen sleighs and . . . oh, shit, there are four artillery pieces following. Look like Model 1900s. Could be worse, I guess.”

The Model 1900 was an almost modern quick firing gun, of 76.2mm, with the recuperator slung in the trail.

“Bad news, then,” muttered Mokrenko.

“Yes, very bad,” the lieutenant whispered back. “They’re not the best guns, to be sure, but they’re better than anything we have at Tobolsk. Hmmm . . . there’s one good thing.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“They’re moving slow—maybe a verst and a half an hour—that way. At that speed they must be carrying a lot of fodder and provisions . . . and it seems they are,” the lieutenant finished as a large number of sleighs hove into view.

A verst was just a little bit over a kilometer.

“We need to get word back,” Mokrenko said.

“I know, but I’m willing to bet you they’ve got a portable telegraph set, the same as we do. They probably hook it to the wires overhead when they stop for the night.”

The sergeant thought about that for a bit. “That means we need to find out two things. One is how many versts they’re moving per day. I think we can do that by counting off paces between clusters of campfires. The other is when they’re moving again, so that we’ll know they’re not hooked up on the telegraph and we can get a message through to Tobolsk.”

Turgenev nodded and then added, “We can probably determine the latter by the distance between the former. But even without that, my guess is going to be that they’ll be moving by nine or surely by ten in the morning, probably stopped between noon and one, then stopped again by three so they can gather wood, cook, and set up for the night.”

The sergeant did some figuring in his head before announcing, “If you’re right, sir, then this lot is moving a bare eight versts a day, if that. I wonder what Kostyshakov will make of that.”

“That awaits events,” answered Turgenev. “In the interim”—and here he lowered his binoculars and took a quick glance at the sky—“we wait for sundown or for them to pass, whichever comes first, and get behind them. I think we might be able to use the road they’ve created to move faster ourselves.”


As the last rays of the sun settled down in the west, Turgenev announced, “I was wrong; there are more of them, at least three thousand in total.”

As it turned out, the Reds had encamped not so very far away, perhaps two versts to the east.

Mokrenko nodded, somberly. The lieutenant had shared the binoculars with the sergeant over the course of the time it took for the Reds to pass.

“We need to get a feel for how they set up at night,” the sergeant observed. “Kostyshakov will need to know, if he’s to plan.”

“How?” asked Turgenev.

“I’ll go, with one other Cossack—reconnaissance is, after all, our specialty—after dark.”

“Who?”

“Lavin. And, if we get caught, you will still have a competent noncom with you, Goat.”

“All right,” Turgenev agreed. “I’ll lead the rest of the section westward and set up two versts from here, and just off the road the Reds made, quarter of a verst to the north. If—God forbid!—there’s another large group coming along I’ll pull north half a verst.”

“I think that works, sir. See you there. Sir, I’m going to collect Lavin and we’re going to sleep here. The moon won’t be up for another six hours or so and, if we don’t get some sleep before spending all night on a recon, we’ll be useless tomorrow.”

“I agree. See you hopefully sometimes before sunrise tomorrow.”

X X X

The sky was overcast, clouds pregnant with snow that could begin to fall at any time. From Mokrenko’s point of view, this was perfect, enough light to see by but not so much as to make his and Lavin’s movement obvious to any guards posted.

And there were guards posted, he found, but none of them especially alert or disciplined. The first one, standing alone, leaning against a tree bordering the new road, was smoking a pipe.

Dear God, thought the sergeant, smoking? SMOKING on guard?

They gave the guard a wide berth, skirting his position by almost a quarter of a verst before turning inward again. Skulking forward from tree to tree, they actually passed between the first guard they’d found and another they didn’t suspect, finding themselves essentially inside the Reds’ bivouac. By the diffuse moonlight Mokrenko saw men cooking, standing in clusters, joking, a few drinking, and about half of them dead asleep.

Well, this is an unusual state of affairs, thought Mokrenko. But now that we’re inside, the camouflage that got us here makes us stand out.

He led Lavin to a spot behind a sleigh, out of view of anyone who seemed awake. “Lavin,” he whispered, “take your white smock and overcoat off, then put the smock on under the coat. Yes, son; we’re going to be very fucking bold, indeed.”

Once so clothed, they were indistinguishable from the rank and file of the Red column. Starting near the back, they simply began walking to the east, keeping a mental pace count as they went. The packed snow made a good road; progress was swift.

On the way forward, bits and pieces of conversation floated on the air: “So I told the bitch, either put out or get out . . . No, no, no, comrade, as Ilyich clearly showed in State and Revolution, social democracy can never . . . hey, got anything to drink? . . .”

Only once on their forward progress was there a bad moment. One of the Reds stopped them and asked, “Password, comrades!”

“We don’t know it,” Mokrenko admitted, bluffing, “Ninth Company, don’t you know, comrade, and you know what our leadership is like. I was hoping to find out the password at headquarters, but I’m not sure where headquarters is.”

The Red shrugged, resignedly. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. This is the worst clusterfuck I’ve seen since the tail end of Brusilov’s final offensive. Nobody’s really in charge. Nobody knows what to do. We wouldn’t even be out here if Sverdlov hadn’t threatened Comrade Goloshchyokin with execution if we didn’t get on the road. Instead, we’d still be nice and comfortable back in Yekaterinburg.”

“So what is the challenge and password, Comrade?” Mokrenko asked.

The Red looked down, sheepishly. “To tell the truth, comrades, I was hoping you would know. See, I am from the Transportation Company, and if you think Ninth Company has rotten leadership . . .”

“I’d recommend we all desert,” said Mokrenko, “but we’d just freeze and starve alone out here.” Turning to Lavin, he said, “Come on, Comrade, let’s see if we can find headquarters and get the challenge and password.”

“If you find them and get them,” said the Red, pointing, “I’ll be sleeping over by that sleigh. Stop by and let me know, would you? Call out for Comrade Bortnik, or for Konstantin Maksimovich.”

“We’ll try. Hey, I’ve got a question; is anyone in the transportation company carrying firewood?”

“Maybe for themselves, but everyone else is on their own.”


“So did the Red get his challenge and password?” asked Turgenev, next morning.

“We never could find their headquarters, sir,” Mokrenko admitted. “No one seemed to know where it was. Even so, don’t totally discount them. They’re very well armed and supplied. Well, except with firewood; that, they have to collect daily. Healthy, too. I listened for coughing and wheezing and heard none. I wouldn’t expect anything too sophisticated, but if they were lined up and told to charge Tobolsk they could probably take it.”

“Right,” the lieutenant agreed. “Sarnof? Signaller Sarnof?”

“Here, sir.”

“Compose an encoded message to Tobolsk. ‘Encountered enemy regiment. Currently fifty versts east of Tyumen. Strength roughly three thousand. Yekaterinburg Reds. Marching on your position, not more than eight versts per day. Bivouac at night in a long, thin sausage. Security is poor and scouting non-existent. Red commander is Comrade Goloshchyokin. First encountered last night. One dozen machine guns and four artillery pieces, Model 1900. Not well led or disciplined. Collect firewood and cook daily, which slows them.’

“Now are you hooked up to send?”

“Yes, sir,” the signaller replied, “but, per your orders, we’re waiting for the Reds to sign off and get on the road again before we send anything. In the meantime, we listen to anything they send, but it isn’t much. And, yes, sir, we’ll take steps to make sure our message goes only to Tobolsk.”


Ulitsa Lazaretnaya, Tobolsk, Russia

The eleven remaining men of the first grenadier platoon, reinforced, formed up on the street called “Lazaretsnaya,” or Hospital Street, waiting for Kostyshakov to see them off. Six of their number had been detached to form another platoon. To the remainder had been a medic, a two-man flamethrower team, the part-Tatar sniper Nomonkov, and his spotter, Strelnikov, and thirty good men skimmed from the ranks and not needed for the newly expanded Guards battalions. He duly marched out from his headquarters about fifty arshins to the east accompanied by Sergeant Major Pavel Blagov.

From further to the east there came a steady rattle of musketry as a company of the new recruits—already trained, yes, but not as well as Kostyshakov’s Guards—qualified with the rifles. Indeed, the whole area east of the Tobolsk Kremlin had been given over to training and was, bit by bit, coming to represent a close cognate of the training facilities left behind at Camp Budapest, in Bulgaria, some weeks prior. There were enough new recruits to turn both Second and Third companies, with parts of First, into somewhat light battalions, even while filling up the Fourth—Grenadier—company, to nearly a full company in strength and leaving enough for a headquarters and support company for the brigade. They’d eked out the supply of men by adding a couple score strong and healthy-looking women for the regimental mess.

As Kostyshakov arrived in front of the platoon, the platoon sergeant and acting platoon leader, Feldfebel Kostin, called the platoon to attention, then reported formally, “Sir, First Grenadier Platoon, all present or accounted for and ready to march.”

None of the men wore skis, Dan noted, though these were laid upon packs that looked overstuffed to the point of bursting.

Well, sure, there’s not much snow on the ground here and they’re going to have to eat only what they can carry.

“Have the men fall out and cluster around, Feldfebel.”

While Kostin was taking care of that, a runner from headquarters trotted over to Kostyshakov. “Message from Strat Recon, sir!”

“Sir—?” Kostin began. Kostyshakov held up a palm to command silence while he read. Finally, he told the runner, “Send back to them to continue their mission. Tell that that it would be helpful if they could prevent or slow down resupply of the Red column heading our way. Tell them they may have to—indeed, tell them that they probably will have to—rescue Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna on their own. Oh, and tell them that Turgenev is promoted to Guards Captain, K7, and Mokrenko to Guards Lieutenant. Then collect the officers and senior noncoms and have them come to headquarters in . . . two hours.”

Kostyshakov turned his attention back to the platoon. “Feldfebel Kostin?”

“Sir?”

“Dismiss the men to barracks. Orders in two hours.”

“Sir. Sir, if I may ask . . . ?”

“A lot of Reds heading our way,” Kostyshakov replied. “A lot. Not going to arrive all that soon, but since three-fourths of our men are new, we don’t have a lot of time to spare. And we can’t spare your men, either.”

Do we have a prayer of beating this new column of Reds? wondered Kostyshakov.


Ipatiev House, Voznesenski Prospect, Yekaterinburg

“Spare the others, Lord, I pray. Take me in their stead.”

Ella made the sign of the cross in Orthodox fashion, up-down-right-left, then repeated the prayer.

Ella was not alone in the Ipatiev House. With her were Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; plus four princes—the three Konstantinoviches, Ioann, Konstantin, and Igor, plus Vladimir Pavlovich Paley—the Grand Duke’s secretary, Fyodor Remez, two valets, Dr. Helmersen, and two of the sisters from Ella’s convent, Ekaterina Ianysheva and Varvara Yakovleva. That latter, amusingly enough, shared both a first and last name with a rather prominent female Bolshevik.

Word had come from the senior of their guards, Nicolai Govyrin, that they were all to be moved within a week or two. “No, I don’t know where,” he’d said, “but it’s for your own safety.”

They told us, Ella had thought, that the move from Perm to here was to be for our “safety.” Of course, they also told us we’d be there at least through May. So much for Red concern.

Ella did not say their names aloud, but in the silent part of her prayer she said, Take me, not Sergei Mikhailovich, Lord. Please do not take Ioann Konstantinovich, Lord, but send him back to his lovely wife, Helen. Take me instead . . . 

God remained silent throughout.




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