Back | Next
Contents

decorative image


What has gone before:

Time is a tough fabric, closely woven and very strong.

It was the end of 1917, the beginning of the last full year of the greatest war in human history, to date. All the belligerents were staggering on their feet. Starvation was an ever-present reality, while disease waited expectantly in the wings. In Russia, no longer a belligerent but, instead, rapidly descending into civil war and chaos, a lone family—Father, Mother, four beautiful young girls, and a brave but sickly boy—awaited their own fate, shivering and hungry in the cold and dark, hoping and praying for salvation.

Their relatives in England had turned their backs. The guards set over them did little but torment them. They looked Heavenward, but God gave no answer. The Romanovs knew they were a standing threat to the new regime, a threat that would, in time, be eliminated.

But even the strongest fabric has flaws, weak points. An escaped prisoner of war, caught, injured, and punished, but still highly capable, might become one. An outsized airship, returned and at loose ends after a failed mission to Africa, might be yet another. A German general, taking a wrong turn on his nightly walk and suddenly coming face to face with the reality of the monster rising in the east, would prove to be a third.

Thus:

In late 1917, with the Great War raging in the west, but moribund in the east, German General Max Hoffmann took a different turn from the usual on his nightly walk through the wrecked but rebuilding town of Brest-Litovsk. This was where—as a second hat—he was serving as the military observer to the peace talks between Germany and Russia. Hoffmann’s first hat, contrarily, was as chief of staff to Ober-Ost, the German High Command in the East, and thus he was effectively the director of the three Central Powers armies in the east—German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian—even though a mere major general.

In the course of this new path, Hoffmann and his assistant, Brinkmann, came upon the initial steps in several Bolsheviks’ joint attempt to rape a young girl. Hoffmann and Brinkmann saved the girl, killing all the Bolsheviks in the process. This event was also the spark that set alight in Hoffmann’s brain a plan to save both Russia and the world from the scourge of Bolshevism.

Taking authority over the German airship, L59, recently returned from a failed attempt to resupply German forces in East Africa, Hoffmann, an excellent Russian speaker, then recruited Daniil Kostyshakov, a captive Guards officer with a penchant for escape, to raise from among trustworthy POWs in German hands a force to travel by airship to go and save the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, being held somewhere in the depths of the Russian Empire.

As portrayed by entries from their second daughter’s, Tatiana’s, journal, the Romanovs themselves were in Tobolsk, enduring cold, hardship, humiliation, hunger, and rape at the hands of their radicalized guards.

A small reconnaissance team, Strategic Reconnaissance or “Strat Recon,” under Lieutenant Maxim Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Guards Cavalry officer with intelligence experience, and Sergeant Rostislav Alexandrovich Mokrenko, a hard-bitten Cossack noncom, set out to pinpoint the exact location where the family was being held, as well as to prepare the way for the actual operation. Strat Recon went out of their way not to be spotted. Even so, some of their actions were too noticeable, ranging from the slaughter of a pirate cum smuggling ship’s crew to blowing up a Bolshevik destroyer to the massacre of a gang of train robbers.

These things attracted the attention of some well-placed Bolsheviks. They didn’t know what was up, exactly, only that something was.

Meanwhile, in spurts and starts, Kostyshakov and his men garnered supplies and equipment, built training facilities, developed a doctrine for rescue operations, organized themselves, trained, and prepared. Men, more than a few, were killed and crippled in the course of the training.

The Zeppelin could not have hoped to carry enough men and supplies in one lift. Instead, five were planned initially, later reduced to four as Strat Recon reported they’d acquired enough horses and sleds for the operation.

Of the lifts, however, only three made it, bringing fewer than three hundred men, before a mechanical failure moored the Zeppelin for a time to its base in Bulgaria.

With only two companies and parts of a third, and with that same fewer than three hundred men, Kostyshakov was confronted with the news that the couple of hundred guards he’d expected had been increased to over six hundred, many of them Bolshevik fanatics, and those with orders to take the Romanovs away to God alone knew where.

With a minimum of soul searching, knowing what was at stake, Kostyshakov decided to go in anyway, no matter the odds. His officers, noncoms, and men supported him in this.

In the subsequent attack, after Strat Recon took out the power plant for Tobolsk, while one company held the largest force of Reds in place, a single reinforced platoon, equipped almost entirely with novel automatic weapons and flamethrowers, attacked and burnt out the barracks for the most fanatical group of Bolsheviks, shooting the escapees down in the street.

The final group, meanwhile, assaulted the Romanov family’s quarters, the Governor’s House, killing most of the guards. The tsarevich, Alexei, a brave boy suffering from hemophilia, gave his own life in the rescue, smothering a Bolshevik grenade to save his sisters.

Kostyshakov managed to save, after the self-sacrifice of the tsarevich, only half of the remaining Romanovs, after one of the rescue force’s own members, a secret Bolshevik, turned his submachine gun on the tsar, the tsarina, and the girls. Two of the girls were saved by their own garments, in which they had sewn twenty pounds of gold and jewels, each. The eldest girl was killed. The eldest surviving Romanov, Tatiana, was saved by one of her former guards turned rescuer, Sergei Chekov.

Repaired, the Zeppelin brought in the missing company, then went back to fly in the replacement company and the spare ammunition. It blew up, due to unknown causes, on 7 April 1918, just as it did in our timeline.

With the tsar dead, the tsarina dead, and the tsarevich and Olga both dead, it fell to Tatiana to take up the vacant throne. Duly crowned in the largest cathedral in Tobolsk, with all the ceremony that could be mustered on short notice, her first order to Kostyshakov is to rescue her aunt, the nun and widow Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, from likely murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks.



Back | Next
Framed