1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 75

“Wake up! Wake up!”

Bernie was never at his best when shaken out of sleep. “Wha… Who…?”

“Bernie, wake up,” Natasha said. “We have to go.”

“Go where?”

“Anywhere away from here.”

That last comment woke Bernie up fully. “Natasha, what happened?”

“Quickly, Bernie. Quickly. I’ll tell you on the way.” He was half out of his room before his mind caught up with his body. “All right, everyone stop. What’s going on?”

“We don’t have time for this!” Natasha said exasperated.

“We don’t have time to skip this part,” Bernie said. After four years of the enthusiasms of geniuses he knew well how easy it was for them to get excited and forget minor details like, say, shoes in a snow storm. “What are we trying to accomplish? What can we do that will make it safer and more likely to work? What must we do that will prevent it from working?”

“We’re trying to escape!” We can move quic-”

Bernie held up a hand. “Escape to where? For how long? From who?”

And that brought everyone up short.

Father Kiril quickly and concisely filled Bernie in on what had happened.

“Anya,” Natasha added, “had been working on just-in-case plans to escape to the east.”

“Good thinking, kid,” Bernie said. “I figured on running west myself, but all the forces that would be hunting us are in that direction and that’s the direction they would expect. So we escape to the east long enough to get away and figure out what to do next?”

There were nods.

“We’re escaping from the present government of Russia, not just Sheremetev and his goons since he’s running things now. Which means we need to be as far and as long gone as we can before he realizes we’ve left. What about the radio?”

“What about it?” Sofia asked. But Natasha was nodding.

“We’ll have to break it and in a way that will be hard to fix quickly,” Natasha said, cringing a bit at the thought of destroying the best radio in Russia. “Otherwise they will be able to tell Moscow what has happened in seconds instead of hours.”

“But Moscow has its own radio,” Anya said. “We can’t break that one.”

They continued to talk as Bernie grabbed up two guns, a spare pair of pants and shirt, and a heavy jacket. “I’ll get the cash. All the money in the Dacha safe. Paper and coins both,” Sofia said. “Money is money.”

Bernie went to check on the car while Sofia headed back to Natasha’s rooms and the Dacha safe. Anya and Natasha went to get Filip and Gregorii and they all met back at Natasha’s office, which had been soundproofed two years ago to keep the occasional booms, bangs and clangs of experiments from aggravating the boss. And which, just incidentally, had kept the rest of the Dacha from hearing Anya shoot holes in Cass and two of Sheremetev’s guardsmen.

“So how do we take the radio shack?” Filip asked. It was more than a shack, though not much more. It had two rooms-the radio room and a toilet. And there was someone always on duty in case there was a message from Moscow. There were six radio men at the Dacha, but only one was on duty at this time of night.

“Keep it simple!” Anya said. “Walk in, point a gun at him, tie him up and gag him, then bust the radio and leave.”

Which is what they did. The guard didn’t resist and they tied him up as much for his protection as theirs. They told him what had happened in Natasha’s rooms and mentioned making a run for Poland and the USE. Between Filip and Bernie, they knew which bits to break that would take the longest time to fix. There were a couple of pieces from up-time that Vladimir had sent from Grantville; those they took with them. For the rest they took pieces and spares and hid them under junk in Bernie’s garage. They really didn’t want to break the stuff, just take it out of commission for a little while.

Sofia elected to stay behind. The final tally of those going were Natasha, Bernie, Anya, Filip, Father Kiril and Gregorii. They would take the car. After they left Sofia would tell a list of people to run if they wanted to and to go to Natasha’s estates, not to try to follow them to the USE. That way, if their judgment was wrong and some of the people were working for Sheremetev, they would lead the search west.

They hoped, anyway. Bernie was skeptical, since no matter what anyone told Sheremetev’s people, the car was bound to leave tracks in the road at least in places. But maybe seventeenth-century Russian secret policemen were just as prone as the authorities he’d known back up-time to believe what they were told instead of their own lying eyes.

The first graying of dawn was in the sky when Bernie turned the key and the old Dodge started up. When they drove out the gate of the Dacha, the trunk was filled with money, weapons, ammunition and bits of irreplaceable tech. Bernie had also taken the time to hitch up a small trailer on which they were towing as many five-gallon cans of gasoline as they’d been able to fill.

He could only hope the jury-rigged hitch would hold, but he thought they’d probably need that extra gasoline. Bernie was more worried about the condition of the roads. The rasputitsa was over, the notorious muddy season that made travel extremely difficult or even impossible on Russian roads for weeks during the spring and fall. But “over” didn’t preclude running into some still-bad stretches if their luck turned sour. If they did run into such a muddy stretch, they’d lose the fuel trailer for sure and might get bogged down altogether.

On a more positive note, any pursuers would have the same problem. Mud wasn’t any friendlier to horses than it was to wheeled vehicles.

The Dacha had started four years earlier as a largish house with a hunting park behind it and a tiny village in front. That had changed. Fencing and walls had been added, a canal had been dug that connected the Dacha to the Moskva River. The Moskva fed into the Oka, which fed into the Volga; which allowed goods to travel to the Dacha from all of Russia by river and canal. More buildings to house researchers and research had been added. The gate going from the Dacha proper to the villages was manned but not closed. As the Dodge approached, the guards waved for it to stop but Bernie didn’t slow down at all. The car kept right on going and the guard who had been blocking its path was a bit slow in jumping aside. He was used to the speed of horses, not of cars.

Bernie winced as he felt the thump of car striking flesh. The guard was knocked aside and slid into the canal that flowed past the gate where he came to rest, his lower body in the water. Hopefully he was just injured. Bernie didn’t have anything against the man personally. He was just doing his job.

Then they were speeding through the village that provided support for the Dacha. The peasant inhabitants were just starting to wake up. Once through the village they were on one of the roads built by the scrapers over the last three years. Roads that led to Moscow to the west, to Murom and the Gorchakov estates to the east, to Ivanovo to the north and many other places. The road they were taking, as it happened, was the road to Murom and the Gorchakov estates. They could have carried more if they had taken a steam barge, but a steam barge would have had to travel either to Moscow or to Murom, which would have told Sheremetev where they were simply by knowing where they weren’t.

Bernie, of course, was in the driver’s seat, Natasha in the front passenger seat. Father Kiril and Gregorii were squeezed into the back seat along with Filip, and Anya was seated on Filip’s lap. Given Natasha’s slenderness, that probably wasn’t the most efficient placement. But even in the Dacha community, squeezing the princess into the back seat just because Father Kiril had a fatter ass wasn’t going to happen.

By four hours later, they’d gotten a hundred miles away. So the speedometer said, anyway. That was far enough to stop and rest for a bit, while they considered their plans. Up till now, their “plan” could pretty much be summed up as get the hell out of Dodge.

In a Dodge. Bernie started laughing.

“What is so funny?” Natasha demanded, a bit crossly. There were disadvantages to having a slim build while riding in a car crossing bumpy roads and driven by a lunatic up-timer. Less padding.

Bernie shook his head. “Ah… never mind.” Even for Natasha, the cultural references were too complicated to explain under the circumstances. “What do we do now? You realize we can’t pass any guard checks.”

While their artist, Gregorii, had made himself a set of papers for travel when Anya requested a set for herself and Natasha, none of them had considered that Bernie, Filip, or especially Father Kiril, would have to run.

“Where do we ditch the car?” Bernie asked. “It’s the only one in Russia, so there’s no way it’s not going to get noticed.”

“The car will get us to my estates faster than any other possibility,” Natasha said. “Certainly faster than any pursuit. We’ll pick up armsmen and decide where to go and what to do from there.”

“You know what I’d really like?” Bernie asked.

“No. What?”

“I’d like to break out the czar.”

“Impossible!”

“We can’t!”

“Are you mad?”

The uproar that caused just about caved Bernie’s head in.

“Stop and think. Why is it impossible?”

“It is.”

“Too many armsmen.”

“We don’t even know where they are.”

“ Stop! ” Bernie shouted. “Think, dammit. One at a time.”

Natasha, being the person who outranked everyone else, said, “We don’t know where they are.”

“How many places can they be?” Bernie asked.

“Hm. Not all that many,” Father Kiril said.

“So we get to your place,” Bernie said, “we call around on the radio and try to figure out where the czar is likely to be.”

“Are we sure the czar wants to be rescued?” Father Kiril asked. “At the very least, he and his family are safe where they are.”

“Are they really?” Anya asked. “Does Sheremetev really need them? Remember the Time of Troubles. No one worried about the various czars then, did they?”

They spent the rest of the trip talking about how and whether they should attempt to rescue the czar.

Bernie had been to Natasha’s home before. It was more a palace than a castle, though some of the older parts had a significant castle influence. It was a large, walled compound on the south side of Murom. And it was quite improved over the last four years. It had indoor plumbing of a sort, at least in a few places. It had a water-wheel generator that kept charged a fairly large room full of lead-acid batteries. There were a few light bulbs, though they were neither all that bright nor all that long-lasting. Mostly the electricity was used for heating elements. Heating elements that could be turned off and on quickly and efficiently, for cooking and the heating of rooms while using little wood and producing less smoke. Still, it was an example of conspicuous consumption but about the least that a princess who was also the head of the Dacha could get away with.

Even the Dodge had been there before. Once. To show off its existence to the citizens of Murom, with weeks of preparation and hoopla leading up to the visit. Now, about two-thirty in the late fall afternoon, the Dodge came roaring up the road, raising enough dust for a company of horse. If a company of horse could possibly move that fast, which it couldn’t.