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Chapter Three


Late War Stokes Mortar with highly optimistic Anti-Aircraft sight

Late War Stokes Mortar with highly optimistic Anti-Aircraft sight



Forty-eight Versts south-southwest of Tobolsk

Soldiers will complain; it’s in the nature of the beasts. Here and now, one of them was complaining that, “Just when Tobolsk started to feel like home, of course we get rousted out to move out into the snow again.”

Somewhere to the south of the town, in a long arc, a dozen riders and the twenty-two ski-equipped men of Kostin’s platoon of grenadiers were spread out, screening against the approach of the Red force from Yekaterinburg.

Not sending Kostin to aid Turgenev in the rescue of the tsarina’s Aunt Ella had led to something of a row between her and Kostyshakov. He’d finally settled it by pointing out that, “In the first place, Tatiana Nicholaevna, if we don’t stop the Reds there won’t be anyone left alive for your aunt to advise. But in the second place, with all those Bolsheviks coming here, Yekaterinburg will have been denuded. There’s a better than fair chance that Turgenev can rescue your aunt on his own, and sooner.”

The empress was still sulking a bit. He hoped she’d get over it.

Now, while the Exec, Basinets, and Sergeant Major Blagov ran things in the rear, pushing the companies to assimilate and train the new recruits as quickly as possible, Kostyshakov and the Grenadier company, plus the operations sergeant major, the Finn, Nenonen, were out looking for the perfect ambush site to take on and destroy the oncoming Bolsheviks.

“There isn’t one, sir,” was Nenonen’s judgment, a judgment Kostyshakov had come to share. “We’ve been up and down this area for two days now; there is no place where we can catch the entire Red force, at one time, and destroy it. There are only places where we can catch pieces of it, here and there, and destroy them. That still leaves their numbers and firepower to wear us down and destroy us.”

“Won’t be any better if we try to make a stand at Tobolsk,” said Kostyshakov. “Even with the old fortress walls at the Tobolsk Kremlin, they’d just overwhelm us with those same numbers and firepower. And there’s no line we can defend from that they don’t have the numbers to outflank us at. The rivers aren’t even obstacles for another couple of months, they’re avenues of approach.”

“Yes, sir,” the Finn agreed.

“What’s that town over there?” Kostyshakov asked.

“Not much of a town,” Nenonen commented, “but it’s called ‘Toboltura’ or ‘Degtyareva;’ I’m not sure which town begins or ends where. Toboltura used to be ‘Toboltura Yurts,’ I understand, though I don’t see any yurts there now. There’s another one, Kutarbitka, further southwest.

“Still, even though not much of a town,” the Finn continued, “or towns, those dozen or score of houses in Toboltura would be useful to keep our men from freezing at night.”

“‘Freezing at night . . . ’” Kostyshakov repeated, wonderingly. “‘Freezing at night.’ Hold that thought.”

He had a sketch of the area that had been prepared by one of the Cossack horsemen, Sergeant Kaledin, who did double duty as the unit’s equine veterinarian. It showed the river as a sort of unstrung bow shape, running northeast to southwest, with two narrow islands sticking up above the ice. He could see the islands from where he stood, and thought, You know, if you hadn’t been told those were islands you likely wouldn’t know.

“Yes, sir,” said the operations sergeant major. “We’ve another problem if we try neither to ambush them nor to stop them at some line on the ground; if we want to raid them at night we’ll have to know where they’re set up at night. Sure, Strat Recon told us they move about eight versts a day. But eight could mean seven to nine easily enough . . . or six . . . or ten. Two to four versts is a lot of variation for a target only three or four versts long, enough to fuck up the movement from an assembly area to a line of departure to raid them. And that’s especially true once the sun goes down.”

“So what are you thinking, sergeant major?” asked Kostyshakov.

“We need to be able to make them halt in a particular place we want them to halt, or to take advantage of it if they halt where we want them to, anyway. We can do that if we make a decent guess of roughly where they’ll be and set up assembly areas for the two battalions where they can move up by an already reconned route, to already reconned defensive positions that hold the Reds in place.”

“Yes, but then what?”

“Then I’m thinking we start chopping them into bite-sized pieces, then pile on and destroy the pieces one at a time. Might take a few days to do it.”

“A few days of being under their artillery might be a few days too long,” said Kostyshakov.

“Good point, sir, but that means that taking out their artillery is going to be job one.”

“No, actually,” Kostyshakov said, “Job one is rounding up all the townsfolk and moving them to Tobolsk, so they can’t tell the Reds we were scouting here. Job two is fixing the Reds in place and doing so at the right time. Job three is the artillery. After that we’ll have to play it by ear . . . although . . .”

“Sir?”

Kostyshakov faced north, feeling a stinging wind on his face.

“ . . . although we might have a bit of help from Russia’s best general. I want tents for our men, in their assembly areas, warming tents, at least. I want firewood cut, turned into charcoal, and brought to those en masse. I want the houses of that town reconnoitered, fortified, obstacled, and ready to give the Reds enough of a bloody nose to make them pause and think. And I want enough additional cooks—men, women, I don’t really care—collected to give our men at least two and preferably three substantial hot meals every day, plus tea, bread, and soup on demand.”

“Sir, I’m . . .”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant Major, this is a job mostly for the quartermaster. I was just thinking out loud. Now let’s go look over our future battlefield in more detail, because, yes, this is going to be our future battlefield. And I’ll want to know some likely spots their artillery will set up.”

The wind began to pick up a little, which made Kostyshakov smile. After thinking about it a second or two, the sergeant major joined him, the two making a pair of lupine grins, dripping with menace.


Imperial House, Tobolsk, Russia

“Your Imperial Highness, you wanted an artilleryman to help . . .” began Leonid Panfil, going to one knee.

“Stop that!” commanded Tatiana, rising from her cluttered desk “Stop that immediately! If you only knew how I detest all that nonsense, how uncomfortable and embarrassed it makes me!”

“I’m sorry,” said the Jewish soldier. “I was told—”

“Don’t be sorry,” she insisted, “it’s not your fault. It’s not that well known that I’ve never liked any of that kind of ceremony—well, to be honest, any of any kind of ceremony—and I hope to dispense with it in time, completely . . . well, maybe for the most formal affairs and those honoring others.

“My father, you see, and his, and his, all the way back to the seventeenth century, thought they owned Russia. I, on the other hand, am pretty sure that it’s really Russia that owns me. The Prussian, Frederick, said it before me; I am just the ‘first servant’ of the state.

“And, yes, I need an artilleryman to help me with this.” She held up a yellow-stained pamphlet, ragged and strongly reeking of old urine.

“What’s your name and where are you from?” she asked, noticing for the first time how very, very thin the Jewish noncom was; also that his hair, graying a bit about the temples, was just beginning to thin.

“Panfil, Your Imperial Highness, Leonid Panfil, Corporal for now, though supposedly there are a bunch of promotions awaiting orders to be read off. I’m from Belyov, south of Moscow. But I don’t read that language, whatever it is,” he said, pointing at the pamphlet. “English, I’m guessing.”

“That’s all right,” she replied. “It is English and I do. But I don’t understand half of what I’m reading, if that. So what I want us to do, you and I, is for me to read the English then explain to you what I think a passage means, then for both of us to work out what it really means. Come,” she gestured, “let’s make use of those comfortable chairs. And”—here she passed over a pencil and some writing paper—“you get to take the notes while I get piss all over my hands.”

Panfil’s eyes widened until she laughed and said, “I did that often enough working in the hospital with wounded soldiers. It’s not important.”

After they were seated, she took the reeking pamphlet and began to translate, “‘Light Trench Mortar Drill Regulations.’ Then there’s some parenthesis with L.T.M.D.R. inside them. I guess . . . oh, yes, that just an abbreviation of the title, isn’t it? Oh, of course, it is. Then there’s a number, ‘41973.’ Any idea what that might mean? No. All right; we’ll skip it for now. Okay, the title on the cover repeats itself. So, ‘Chapter One, Paragraph One, The School of the Squad’? That’s a funny usage. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the British . . . oh, wait, no, this is an American manual. That might make it tougher; their language is English but it’s not exactly the same English.”

Panfil looked contemplative for a moment, then suggested, “We could do this better if we had one of the devices in front of us. Why don’t I—?”

“No, not you,” Tatiana replied. “Maria!”

A pretty head stuck itself in the door. “Yes, Your Imperial Majesty?”

“Send to Guards’ Headquarters that I want one of those mortars brought here, with all its equipment.”

“At once!” The head disappeared.

“She insists on being as formal as possible in front of others,” the tsarina said, with a minor note of exasperation in her voice. “And now, back to work until the thing gets here.”


“Okay,” said Panfil, when they were a little deeper into the Amerikansky mortar manual, “we don’t have enough guns for a platoon and hardly have enough sergeants and corporals to go around, with all the expansion taking place. I’d say, Highness, that we need to figure out how to write up ‘School of the Platoon’ as ‘School of the Section,’ where section means two guns under maybe a sergeant.”

“How do we do that?” asked Tatiana.

“I think we need both guns and full crews. I can pretend to be the section sergeant—I’m supposed to be promoted to starshiy unter-ofitser in a day or two, anyway—so we’ll need a couple of yefreytor and eight radovoy.

“Why not starshiy feyyerverker,” Tatiana asked, “These are cannon, aren’t they?”

“I’m infantry,” Panfil explained. “I ended up in the gun section because I can speak, read, and write good French when the only manual we had for the guns was in French. And these are considered infantry weapons, anyway, as are the 37mm cannon.”

“Ah,” she said, not really comprehending that but understanding fully that it didn’t matter if she understood it or not. “So, anyway, both mortars, two superior privates and eight privates?”

“Probably could use at least one of the shells, too,” he said.

“Maria!”

“She obeys you with alacrity,” Panfil observed.

“My family didn’t call me ‘the Governess’ for nothing,” she replied, perhaps a bit smugly.

While waiting, Panfil stood and walked around the office. He stopped at a bookcase, behind the desk that once had been the tsar’s, and began to peruse the titles.

“He didn’t much care for Jews, did he?” Panfil asked.

“I’d apologize for him,” Tatiana said, “but would it really do any good?”

Panfil shook his head, dismissively, then continued to peruse the collection of books.

Spotting a brass implement of some kind, half seen inside a leather pouch, Panfil began to reach for it. He stopped himself and asked, “May I?”

“Surely.”

Picking the thing up, he began unfolding lenses and handles, until he had what looked almost like a pair of opera glasses. Rather, they would have looked like that except for the compass set into the right side.

“Hmmm . . . next pair of opera glasses with a compass built in will be the first. This is military.”

Walking to the window, he checked the apparent binoculars against a distant target. Blurry, he thought, turning a knob he expected would bring them into focus. “Hmmm . . . low power. Not really . . . well, well, well.”

“What?” Tatiana asked.

“It’s a Rangefinder,” Panfil said. “Not too precise, I don’t think, but good enough for, say, riflemen. Or, come to think of it, maybe mortars. What’s the range of those things?”

Tatiana began fingering through the piss-soaked manual. “It says maximum effective range is seven hundred and fifty yards. In arshini that would be . . .” she began to scratch with a pencil onto some paper . . . “nine hundred and sixty-two arshini.”

“Hmm . . . this is calibrated in yards, not arshini. But, we’re the only ones to use the arshin. I’ll bet you, your highness, that the sight, when we see it, will be in yards, as well.”

“Is that useful, then?” she asked.

“Oh, I think it might be.”

At that point Maria Romanova returned, carrying the entire mortar on her own. “The shells will be along shortly,” she said.

“Your sister is very strong,” Panfil observed.

“Always been that way. She used to carry her teachers around, just pick them up from the floor and carry them. When she was little. But I am still ‘the Governess.’”


The eleven men, including Panfil, along with the empress, took a break in the field south of Imperial House. Panfil was decidedly unimpressed with the quality of the men he’d been given for the task, and more than a little worried that he’d be put in charge of them permanently. Tatiana, still holding her piss-reeking manual, came over to where Panfil was writing down what would become the Russian manual for the Stokes.

“Should we be trying to get a whole platoon of these, Leonid?” the tsarina asked.

He thought for a few seconds before answering, “We should be trying to get a great many more of these, Highness, yes, but I don’t think we should be aiming for six-gun platoons, the way the Americansky manual would have it.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Seems to work for them.”

“It’s the range,” he explained. “These can only cover about the frontage of a dispersed company. Six guns and thirty-nine men are too much to dedicate to a mere company. The whole company would be doing nothing but carrying ammunition for them, too. But two guns, or a maximum of three, given the rate of fire, are just enough to keep the enemy’s heads down, to destroy the machine gun positions of a platoon, or supporting a platoon, or to make a covered and concealed position to the front of a defending company a lousy assault position. And every man could carry one, in a pinch, two shells, which would be a good deal of sustained firepower.”

“Why aren’t you an officer, Leonid?” she asked. “You’re very bright.”

“I’m a Jew . . . maybe not much of an observant Jew, but a Jew nonetheless. The Imperial Army wasn’t much for Jewish officers, though the Bolsheviks are full of them.”

“Then why aren’t you a Bolshevik?”

“Because I value both the truth and my soul, Highness, where Bolshevism is nothing but lies, while those who follow it damn their souls.”

Tatiana looked skyward, a bit as if consulting the divinity. “The man—a very dear friend—who saved me from the murderer who slaughtered my parents and sister, and tried to kill the rest of us, was half-Jewish. He should have been an officer, too.” She turned her eyes back to Panfil. “I’m going to fix this problem. I don’t know exactly how, yet, but I am going to fix this.”

Panfil shrugged. He knew bucking culture was about the hardest thing there was to do. Instead of answering the unanswerable, he stood up and said, “All right, you lazy louts; break’s over. On your feet and fall in with your mortars.”


“What is this thing, Leonid?” the tsarina asked, holding up a glass and steel block, with mirrors inside, a bar that jutted down from the bottom, to which were attached to more bars, ending in a flexible metal yoke that was plainly intended to attach to the barrel. “The box it came in has ‘sight’ stenciled on it, but I can’t find a word or a picture in the manual to suggest any such sighting device.”

“I’m not sure, Highness, but I suspect it’s an exercise in ridiculously excessive optimism.”

“Optimism? How?”

“May I?” He took the sight from her hands and, after fiddling with it for a bit, attached the entire apparatus to the barrel. Two pieces of metal jutted from the top, ending in a ring. One of these stuck out, while another lay against a not-quite-oval shape, marked with roman numerals.

“Hmmm . . . I doubt that’s a complete answer. Is there another piece?”

She looked in the box and pulled out another device, this one with a strap rather than a yoke. “Like this?”

“Yes . . . and I think this attaches . . . yes, there we go.” Panfil stepped out of the way to show the second device attached to the front of the barrel. He then stepped around the mortar so he could see through the first piece. “Yes, as I suspected; this is to engage aircraft. It’s aimed too high to do anything against ground troops or with aiming stakes. If you aimed with it at a target on the ground, the muzzle would be so low that the baseplate would skip across the ground. Aircraft? What could they possibly have been thinking?”

“Wouldn’t work, huh?” she asked.

“It would take a miracle,” was his reply, “if not even two miracles.”


South of Tobolsk

With Tatiana’s guards in tow, they’d trudged the mortars, both of them now, down to the open area, south of the town and not all that far from the corpse of the L59. Some of the men carried the pieces of the Stokes, others carried four shells apiece. The quartermaster’s assistant had refused to issue even that many until the empress had put her foot down, literally. Now, set up and ready to go, with their translated manual and the original in hand, they waited to figure out the ammunition.

“The manual calls it an ‘all ways impact fuse,’” said Tatiana. “What’s that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Panfil said, “But I am pretty sure I don’t like it. If the thing will go off ‘all ways,’ what’s to prevent it from going off in the tube?”

“Well, neither the British nor the Americans are complete idiots; if they’re using these things they’re probably mostly safe to use.”

Panfil scowled. “Yes, Your Majesty . . . ’mostly.’ That’s not an especially good word to use around high explosives. It’s like being, oh, I dunno, mostly dead as opposed to all the way dead. You’re still dead.”

“Even so,” she insisted, “let’s get on with it.”

“Let’s? Let us? Oh, no, Tatiana Nicholaevna. Here I must put my foot down. If this thing goes off in the tube, and you are hurt or killed, Kostyshakov won’t just shoot me; he’ll skin me alive.”

He just might, thought the Empress of all the Russias. She considered arguing it anyway, then realized her guards would, without doubt, humiliate her by forcibly carrying her off if she refused.

“All right,” she conceded, “where do you want me to go?”

Panfil thought about it. Fragmenting shell casing? Two and a quarter funt of high explosive? “You get your imperial . . . mmm . . . self about an eighth of a verst to the north. It should be safe there. But . . .” Here Panfil took off his helmet and told her to put it on. She was on the point of refusing when he explained, “At this range, if the shell goes off in the tube, the helmet won’t do me any good, but it might do you some at that range. Mind, you need to stay away until I tell you it’s safe.”

Note to self, she thought, if dealing with mortars in the future, I have my own helmet; I must bring it.

“The rest of you lot,” ordered Panfil, “get thirty arshins away and get on the ground.”

Taking Panfil’s helmet, Tatiana put it on, adjusted the strap, and began the short trek to the north. Just a moment after she finished turning around, she heard a loud bang and then saw something flying up into the air, end over end. How high it went she had no good basis to judge, but she thought it had to have been at least a few hundred arshins in the air. She followed it with her eyes, spinning up; she saw it seem to stabilize in the air, and then she followed it, still spinning, down to the ground, where it formed a large and immensely dirty cloud. Shortly after that she felt the concussion of the blast, not bad at that distance, but still noticeable.

She watched as Panfil brought up two men at a time, then talked them through the process of “aiming” the mortar, estimating range, preparing the shell, and dropping it down the tube. She saw, too, that he switched them off, so that everyone got experience of both.

That seems very sensible. Yes, must do something about commissioning worthy soldiers, no matter their background.


“The Stokes,” said Panfil to the empress, on the trudge north back to the town, “is as much a matter of art as science. I need five or ten times the number of total rounds we have to even get them ready to use the things with genuine skill.”

“But we don’t have that many,” she said. “Are there other things you can do?”

“We might be able to make some dummies out of wood to train them in dropping the shell down the tube,” he answered. “It’s not worth much but is better than nothing. For the rest, just drill, drill, drill, I guess. Well, that and range estimation exercises.”

“Best you can do,” she said. “It will have to do. But wait . . .”

“Yes, Your Highness?”

“The manual mentioned a practice shell. Could we make some of them in a hurry? Maybe wood filled with enough lead to give the same weight and shape, and a small charge to kick it out.”

“We can try,” Panfil said, “but I’m not sure what can be done in enough time. We’ll be leaving soon to fight.”

Ignoring this, Tatiana said, “And as long as you’re thinking about training shells, think about making real ones, maybe with fins or something to keep them nose-on.”


Imperial House (nee Governor’s House, nee Freedom House)

Tobolsk, Russia

While the mortar section was back in their barracks, cleaning the systems, Tatiana was at her desk, fortunately without any death warrants to sign for the nonce. Even so, though, her helmet served as a paperweight for some other utterly necessary work. She ignored, for the time being, the short stack of correspondence and forms. Instead she walked to the window to observe one of the companies—it was impossible to tell at this distance which one—drilling in what she had come to learn was called “fire and movement.” This involved one or more platoons making short rushes while others kept the enemy’s head down with fire. She couldn’t hear the men lying on the ground shouting, “Bang, bang, bang,” but she could see their lips moving as if they were.

It was easy to tell who was in charge. The older cadre from the Guards regiments all had Adrian helmets just like her own, plus white camouflage smocks. The others were in a mix of uniforms, uniforms mixed with civilian clothes, and even outright civilian clothes.

“Maria!”

Again her sister’s face appeared in the door.

“Can you please arrange for the seamstress who sewed our coronation garments to come see me? I have a special job and it’s a bit of a rush.”

“At once, Your Majesty!”

Tatiana rolled her eyes but said only, “I’ll be gone for a bit. I need to track down the quartermaster and the Brigade Sergeant Major.”


Brigade Headquarters, near Ulitsa Lazaretnaya, Tobolsk, Russia

Kostyshakov, plus Colonels Dratvin, Lesh, and Cherimisov, stood closest to the terrain model built by one of the headquarters men under the supervision of Sergeant Major Nenonen. They commanded, respectively, the newly formed Brigade of Guards, the First Battalion, Preobrazhensky Regiment, the First Battalion, Semenovsky Regiment, and the First Company, reinforced, Life Guard Grenadier Regiment. Only just further away stood Baluyev, now commanding the rather smaller than battalion-sized headquarters and support. As such, Baluyev had only been jumped up to the rank of senior captain of the guards, a lieutenant colonel equivalent. Praporschik Yahonov stood next to Baluyev, in place of the dead Lieutenant Federov.

The Brigade Executive Officer, Colonel Basinets, towered over everyone, so could afford to stand back a bit. Romeyko, though he was only a staff officer, was too important not to have been promoted with the others. Sergeant Major Blagov stood behind Kostyshakov and slightly to his right.

“Sergeant Major, status of the brigade?” asked Kostyshakov.

“The old hands, the ones from Camp Budapest, are as they always were, sir, well-trained, well-motivated. The new men are iffier, frankly. I think they’ll be okay as long as they have one of our old hands to lead them, but if they ever lose their leadership don’t expect anything but a complete breakdown.

“One thing is good though. Somehow, Her Highness managed to get the women of the town, led by some of the seamstresses, to sew white camouflage smocks for everyone who lacked one. I doubt if there’s a white sheet or piece of canvas left within a dozen versts.”

Kostyshakov nodded. He’d seen it, though he hadn’t known where the new smocks had come from and had just assumed Romeyko had seen to it.

“She beat me to it, did our girl,” said the quartermaster. “By the time I got around to it, it was already being done. She’s also nagged me for a few rifles and some ammunition. She armed her sisters and servants with them.”

Blagov added, “She’s also dismissed her guards for the time being. Says the people with her are enough to guard against a possible assassination attempt and we need the fighting men more than she does. Quite insistent about it.”

Kostyshakov smiled, decided the Tsarina was wise as well as brave, and shrugged. “Barbed wire?” he asked.

“There’s a little barbed wire in and around the town,” said Romeyko. “I can certainly commandeer it, but what good will it do? Make the enemy stop in place to laugh for a bit before he steps over it?”

“The two companies I am going to stretch out south of the river need some kind of obstacle,” Lesh said. “We’re not going to be able to dig them in much.”

“Yes, you will,” said Dratvin. “Daniil, I don’t need to dig my men in at all, given the mission. We can spend a day, maybe two, swinging axes and cutting logs—camouflage, too—to get Lesh’s crew dug in well. Myself and the leadership can spend that time reconnoitering, while the men work under the junior noncoms.”

“I really can’t help there,” said Cherimisov. “We’re all going to be to the west, screening.”

“I’d still like some obstacles,” said Lesh.

“Ever hear of abatis?” asked Romeyko.

“No, sir,” answered Lesh, who was still not used to his new exalted rank.

“You cut trees down and point the tops toward the enemy. Leave some of them attached to the trunks at an inconvenient height, maybe two arshins, or a tad less, so they’re hard to clear under fire. Then you cut the branches so they present a sharp point. You can cut them on a line to create killing zones, to channelize, or to tactically mislead the enemy, just like you do with barbed wire, and you can leave gaps to sortie through. You can drag some in from elsewhere to make it a thicker obstacle.”

“They’re going to be pretty obvious, though, won’t they?”

“Cut them almost flat on one side, if you need to make them lower. Also, you can probably cover them with snow to make them blend in. I wouldn’t even be surprised if we have some snowfall to help.”

Lesh nodded, thinking, Ought to help some, anyway.

“Remember, Lesh, you’re going to have all four heavy mach- . . . hmmm . . . Romeyko?”

“We got the water jackets patched up, yes, sir. How long the patches will last, however . . .”

“Right; you’ll have all four heavy machine guns, Lesh, at least initially. That’s a lot of firepower over less than two versts. Especially with terrain that’s about as flat as a blin. Also, remember, you’ll have the houses of that town . . . ummm . . . Sergeant Major Nenonen?”

“Toboltura, sir.”

“Right; you’ll have the houses of Toboltura for some shelter and fortification materials, too.”

“Sir? Private prop—”

“Fuck that, Lesh; the owners can be compensated . . . if we win.”

“The skis?” asked Cherimisov.

“I want your crew to take theirs,” answered Kostyshakov, “if not needed they can always stash them. But for the rest, they’re of no use, since they’d only take the leadership away from the new rank and file.”

Kostyshakov looked around at the faces. “Any more questions or objections?” Seeing there were none, he said, “Cherimisov takes the rest of his unit out in four hours. The rest of the brigade will follow six hours after that, order of march, Lesh, Dratvin, Baluyev. The headquarters group will accompany Cherimisov to the town of Toboltura, then establish the initial brigade command post there.

“At my mark, the time will be . . .”


Imperial House (nee Governor’s House, nee Freedom House)

Tobolsk, Russia

The power plant for the town hummed faintly in the far distance. Both Maria and Anastasia stood in Tatiana’s artificially lit office, arms folded and shaking their heads violently. In front of them, now clad in a seemingly standard uniform, over the upper part of her bulletproof jeweled former dress, with a helmet on her head and a white smock and trousers covering all, stood the Empress of all the Russias.

“You are insane, Tatiana,” said Maria, who was not remotely interested in formality at the moment. “Mad as the Mad Hatter, simply starkers. If you get yourself killed it will be on me to be Tsarina and, I assure you, I am not up to the job. I know I am not and you know I am not. Oh, no; my fate, if you live, is a useful dynastic marriage and nothing but. So if you’re killed I won’t even try. I’ll just head as far from the Bolsheviks as I can get and settle down in welcome obscurity.”

“Daniil will throw a screaming fit if you do this,” said Anastasia, less vehemently than her sister. “Even if you survive, he’ll lock us all up under guard and throw away the key. This is worse than insane; it is dumb!”

“It’s also selfish,” added Maria. “You’re doing this out of vainglory, out of sheer vanity. Nobody expects it of you. Nobody who would ever know wants it of you.”

Under their criticism the elder sister shrank for a moment, then drew herself up to her full height.

“This is none of those things,” she said, firmly. “It’s that good men died to save us, and more good men are about to. I cannot—not will not but cannot—let that pass without voluntarily taking a portion of the risk onto myself, for me, and for you two, as well. Moreover, I don’t want to look into another soldier’s face with the knowledge that he’s a better and braver human being than I am.

“Besides, I’m going to go with the mortars. We’ll be out of the line of fire.” Mostly. “And besides, I’m not nearly the first Russian woman to pick up a gun.”

“Have it your own way then!” shouted Maria, throwing her hands up in despair. “I’m going to go pack for my escape after you’re killed!”


In the semi-darkness nobody noticed a soldier of average height slip out of the old mansion and begin walking up Great Friday Street. The streetlamps cast a shadow longer than the soldier was tall.

The soldier went northward, with a freezing breeze assaulting from the left, in the general direction of the Kremlin, where the Guards Brigade was forming to march out to confront the Reds. True, the soldier was apparently unarmed, but there were a few men for whom rifles had not been available, and everyone who mattered knew it. True, too, the soldier walked a bit oddly, but that was also fairly common, what with recent injuries from training and older injuries from the war. Also, true, that the soldier’s face was mostly covered. Even so, while the days had begun to warm the nights remained bitterly cold, so what did that matter? And the civilian blankets that were rolled and draped over one shoulder? Many of the men of the brigade, both old and new, carried such blankets.

Reaching the long stairway that led into the Kremlin itself, the soldier began the climb. It was long and tedious, but bearable. Others were walking up the same staircase, to the same end. Mostly, they kept quiet and to themselves, saving their breath. Arriving at the flat open area at the top of the stairs, the soldier looked around for a familiar face, then headed in that direction once it was found.

Falling in ranks with the rest, Tatiana Nicholaevna Romanova tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Near her, newly minted starshiy unter-ofitser Leonid Panfil counted heads.

“Who are you?” he demanded of the unfamiliar silhouette. Instead of answering, the Tsarina of all the Russias uncovered just her face and gave a sweet and pleading smile.

“Oh, no,” muttered Panfil. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Kostyshakov will have my head. Blagov will slice off my testicles before that. With a spoon. No.”

Tatiana’s smile disappeared. Let’s try the hard approach; it will make the softer one more effective in a few seconds.

“Keep it to yourself,” she said, “or your head will be on a pike but by my order.”

Panfil shook his head. “I know you better than that, Your Majesty. You would never do such a thing.”

“Yes, well, maybe that’s true,” she conceded, “but Kostyshakov doesn’t know that you know that, so you have an excuse. Besides,” she smiled sweetly as she joked, “is it fair of you to take advantage of my sweet nature?”

“What excuse do I have that I can give myself if you are killed?”

“I promise; I’ll be very careful. And besides, you might be killed. I know these things as well as you do now. Maybe better. And I need to be there for this. I must be.”

Now give him the pleading eyes, Tatiana.

Panfil half melted. “I see no end of trouble from this. Well . . . do you promise, too, to do exactly as you’re told?”

Crossing her heart, she answered, “I am no more than Private Romanov, T. I will obey my sergeant with my life!”

“Fine; you drive the sleigh. And do you have a rifle?”

Tatiana lifted her smock to show her MP-18 machine pistol, hanging from its sling. A bag full of the odd drum magazines hung down as well. “Will this do?”

“Can you use it?”

“Yes, Kostyshakov showed me and took me out to fire it. Quite a bit, actually.”

Panfil gave out the kind of fatalistic sigh one might expect from a French aristocrat, upon looking up and catching his first sight of Madame Guillotine. “I suppose it will be good enough, then. But if something happens to you and I get stood against a wall . . .”



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