The Romanov Succession

1.

At seven thousand feet Felix watched a thick layer of stratus coming up beneath the wings; then he was inside it and flying blind, concentrating on instruments.

The chart was printed in mauve ink for easy reading under the cockpit lights. Ulyanov said, “We must be in range of their tower radio by now.”

“Whistle them up then.”

Felix was sweating. Suppose the weather was socked in right down to the ground?

“…Tower. We understand you clearly. Conditions for landing are as follows. Cloud ceiling is at two thousand five hundred meters. Ground visibility is five kilometers or better. We are illuminating both sides of the runway with fire tins. We have a heavy snow lie but the runway has been plowed. Nevertheless ground temperature is minus four degrees centigrade and you must be on guard against thin patches of ice on the runway. This is understood?”

Concentrating on his instruments Felix only nodded and Ulyanov said into the radio, “Visitor flight understands, Kuvola Tower.”

Felix dimmed the cockpit lights to a minimum glow and switched on his landing lights. Snowflakes flashed past thickly in horizontal lines like tracer bullets. The high-wattage beams sliced forward through the snow and a grey tunnel formed behind each whirling propellor. He rubbed misty condensation from the glass and asked Ulyanov if he would care to predict how far off course they would be when they came out under the clouds. Ulyanov said, “I would be guessing, Highness.”

“Guess, then.”

They were out of the snow then but still in cloud and still descending on steady rails through three thousand feet, twenty-five hundred, two thousand. “I think we’re right on the mark, Highness.”

“We’d better be. You’ve been doing the navigating.”

“Yes Highness.”

The altimeter was a dial with a long hand and a short hand like the face of a clock: one for thousands, one for hundreds. The long hand was winding steadily around the dial: nine, eight, seven. The cone beams stabbed ahead and down and were absorbed in the murk. Six, five, and still in clouds. “High air pressure,” Felix said. “The altimeter’s off—keep your eyes open. Gear down—flaps twenty.”

“Kuvola Tower to Visitor flight. We can hear you. You should have us in sight momentarily. Over.”

The altimeter read 1,350 when she broke through under the dark cloud bellies. Ahead and a tack to the right he saw the twin rows of fires stretching toward a single point in perspective. He threw the bomber into a bank and sideslid across the sky to lose altitude. “Flaps forty.”

“Forty?”

“You heard me.” He wanted to hit low and slow; he wanted to touch down right at the near edge of the strip because if there was patch-ice on the tarmac he’d need every foot of space. “Flaps fifty.”

Five hundred feet and the lights were less than a mile ahead. He pushed the nose down and cut power back. “Maximum flaps now, Ulyanov.”

“Yes sir.”

“Tower to Visitor One. You’re coming in low.”

“Visitor to Tower. Any ground obstacles in my way?”

“Tower to Visitor. You are flying over a forest. Tallest trees fifteen to eighteen meters to within forty meters of runway.”

He leveled off when the altimeter read 250; he had to assume it gave him at least a hundred feet of ground clearance. The trees were quite clear under the landing lights now and he could distinguish the individual lights on the landing field—five-gallon drums full of sand soaked with gasoline and afire.

Ninety-five knots. She barely had airway. Pull the nose up even a fraction now and she’d stall dead. But he didn’t want to have to use his brakes any more than he had to. The last tree flashed underneath and he shoved the nose down and held it there for an agonizing eternity and cut the power and hauled the yoke back into his lap and she stalled out just where she was supposed to: came down very hard on her wheels and bounced ten feet in the air and settled down on three points. Felix put his concentration into steering her down the tarmac. She was still making eighty knots and he touched the brakes experimentally: felt them take purchase and stood lightly on them, slowing smoothly.

When she was down to taxi-maneuver speed he still had a quarter of the runway ahead of him and it pleased him. He turned toward the verge and followed the escort van toward the hardstands. Ulyanov said, “My congratulations, Highness.”

“Thank you.”

“You did that exactly as if she were a light craft.”

Ulyanov switched off and they untangled themselves from their equipment and climbed down through the belly hatch.

Bomber Two was making its run at the strip and they stood under the wing watching it come in. There was no wind but the air was sharp and fiercely cold. Felix waved the escort van away; it could pick them up later.

Young Ilya Rostov was flying Bomber Two. He brought her in a little too fast but there was room enough; he hit a little patch-ice and slewed around midway down the field and Felix thought he might ground-loop but Rostov brought the Fort under control and stopped her at the far corner of the strip. The van led Rostov into his parking space behind Felix’s craft and then turned and waited for Bomber Three.

That was Vinsky’s and Vinsky was a cautious pilot: he came in low and slow on full flaps and followed Felix’s example—deliberately stalling out over the end of the runway and dropping hard on his main gear. Bomber Three wasn’t making ninety knots when she landed but the force of the drop burst the great balloon tire on her starboard oleo. The wing tipped down and the portside tires slid on a millimeter of ice and that was the end of Bomber Three: she crashed through the fire-pots and slammed into the bordering trees at seventy miles an hour and burst into a pyre of flames.

2.

“It changes nothing,” Alex said.

“The odds are longer now,” Baron Oleg said, and looked to Prince Leon for confirmation.

Count Anatol Markov said, “For once I agree with Oleg. We should have had more planes.”

“I asked the Americans for six. They said it was out of the question. We were lucky to get three. Actually I was prepared to accept two—the third bomber was always a backup plane. The operational plan calls for two aircraft—one to interdict the railway tracks and halt the train, the second to hit the troop carriages and gun cars before anyone can get out of them.”

“Then we had better not lose either of the remaining bombers, had we,” Anatol said drily.

Their accommodations in the Finnish encampment were primitive: the troops were billeted in field tents with portable coal stoves; there was a mess kitchen but the men had to eat outdoors or carry their meals back to their tents, by which time the food had gone cold. The command echelon was billeted barrack-style in what were ordinarily the pilots’ quarters of a Finnish air squadron. For a full week the temperature did not rise more than two degrees above freezing and most of the time it was well below. Alex and his men were used to it but some of the politicals had become too accustomed to their Mediterranean habitats; Anatol and General Savinov were forever complaining of the cold.

On the crisp nights they could hear the guns from the front thirty miles away. Alex and Corporal Cooper used the air-tower radio equipment to maintain contact with Vlasov in Moscow. There were brief nightly exchanges that could not settle Alex’s unease. He was ready for it—they all were—and the waiting ate away at him like acid even though they kept up a punishing training regimen. His nerves twanged with vibration and he was snappish with Irina, brusque with the politicals, authoritarian with the members of his command, noncommunicative with Cosgrove and Buckner. John Spaight chewed him out for it but he barked right back at his American friend and Spaight went away fuming: they were all on edge—all except ground-crew chief Calhoun who fussed maternally over his remaining airplanes and kept working on them when it seemed clear there was no work left to do. Then on Wednesday Calhoun came to Alex and said, “You’ve got a bad propeller on one of those C-47S, General.”

“What do you mean a bad propeller?”

“Metal fatigue. There’s a hairline crack in one of the blades. It could bust off any time.”

“Can you do anything about it?” Sudden alarm: they’d already lost one aircraft; they couldn’t do without one of the precious transports.

“Sure,” Calhoun drawled. “That’s essentially the same Wright Cyclone engine they’ve got on the B-17S. I already told my boys to take a prop off that one that wrecked in the trees. We’ll have it bolted on by this afternoon. But I thought I’d better tell you about it.”

“Next time see if you can give me the news without inducing cardiac arrest, will you Calhoun?”

On December fourth a daring Russian counterattack broke through the German lines to Shimki and halted the Wehrmacht’s advance on Moscow.

That night it snowed more heavily than before. The Germans were still falling back under attack by fresh Siberian regiments. Radio news broadcasts from Moscow were hearty with gusto: the announcers could not keep the excitement from their voices and there was no doubt this victory was more than mere propaganda.

But the signal that came from Vlasov at half-past eleven that night—when Alex’s transports were filling with troops—was to say that the tank trials had been put off.

A major storm was tracking northeast across Europe at twenty-five knots. It was expected to blow for the next three days in the Moscow area.

The tank trials had been postponed to Monday morning.

3.

Vlasov’s last signal came late Saturday night.

It was strange to see them in these surroundings. They belonged against the luxurious backgrounds of villas, gaming rooms, lofty tapestried chambers, works of art of millennia. In the stark Suomi flying-officers’ dayroom they were uncomfortable strangers. They had endured twenty years’ exile and months of recent tension but now the time that you measured in minutes was attacking their composure. General Savinov had drunk himself to the point of glazed paralysis. Anatol and Oleg occupied opposite corners of the room and at intervals their white-hot glances locked across it. Old Prince Michael had gone very vague and loquacious: most of what he said made no sense to Alex in the snatches he overheard. Baron Yuri Ivanov sat bolt upright on a wooden chair with his straight-armed hands perched on his knees, staring at nothing. Leon sat with his cane hooked over the arm of his chair and a glass of vodka which by now had gone warm with neglect; he was talking in earnest low tones to Prince Felix who kept shoving a lock of hair back from his forehead. And Irina said in a voice calculated to reach no farther than Alex’s ears, “Do you think any of them will make it through the next twenty-four hours?” Then she made an impatient gesture. “I mustn’t laugh at them—it’s so unkind.”

“They wouldn’t notice.”

“Are you rattled too?”

“I suppose I am. I keep craving a thick American steak with all the trimmings.” But abruptly and unaccountably he had an image of Carol Ann’s melancholy frown in a flyspecked El Paso café; and he said, “Or maybe a big plate of chili and beans.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. When this was over he would write to her. Just a polite note: how are things?—the sort of thing that couldn’t do her harm if her husband happened to see it. It was something he owed her: acknowledgment that she hadn’t been forgotten. She’d seen him through the worst of it, the months he’d thought he wasn’t going to see Irina again. Suddenly he brought her into the semicircle of his arm and gripped her shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said, very gentle. “Do you want to come to bed?”

“In a little while.”

In the beginning the challenge had stirred him and made his juices run; he had formulated the plan in quick broad strokes with brilliant speed and then he had filled in the fine touches with careful foresight; he’d been confident he’d got the composition right, drawn every line and every dot where it had to be. Wherever there had been a conflict between methods or means he’d chosen the alternative that had the best odds of success. It was a plan worthy of the masters but now he began to believe in all the things that could go wrong and he knew he had to shake that off. It was the delay that did it. They’d keyed themselves up for a specific hour; it had been put back seventy-two hours and that was more than enough time to ruin the edge.

Buckner and Cosgrove entered the room: an odd pair—the gaunt one-armed brigadier, professionally reserved; the blunt cheerful American with his foolish facade of amiable buffoonery. They’d hit it off without any of the competitive rivalry he’d half expected to see.

Irina said, “Our two referees seem to be fast friends. Last night I caught them talking with feverish excitement about murder mysteries. Can you believe that? They’re both fanatical admirers of Dashiell Hammett. It’s incredible. They’re like two small boys who’ve just met and discovered they’ve got the same passion for backgammon and toy airplanes.”

Felix came toward them arching an eyebrow. “You two look disgustingly cozy and domestic together. Under the circumstances it’s hardly sporting.”

Alex smiled a little. “You’re nervous.”

“It’s probably a good thing. When I didn’t begin to get nervous the day before a race I knew I wasn’t going to win.”

“Keep it under control,” Alex said. “You’ve got nearly thirty-six hours before you take off.”

“You’ve got only twenty-four. How do you feel?”

Alex shook his head. “That’s a military secret.”

“You’re scared half to death like the rest of us.”

“Of course he is,” Irina murmured.

Alex dropped his voice. “I don’t like losing that third bomber. It doesn’t leave you much margin for error.”

“We’ll manage,” Felix said. “We’d manage with one if we had to.” His teeth flashed. “It’s only one train, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be cocky,” Irina said.

“Still trying to change my character, aren’t you.”

“Felix, I adore your character.”

Felix drifted away and Irina said in her soft way, “Did you know he was up half the night composing letters to the families of the men who died in that bomber crash—Vinsky and the others?”

“No—”

“Compassion is a quality Russia’s not used to in her leaders. Felix will be something new to all of them. I wonder how they’ll take to him.”

“I wonder how he’ll take to them,” Alex answered. “I hope he doesn’t get bored with it.”

“He’ll find ways to make it interesting. Trust him.”

“I do,” he said. “In the beginning I wasn’t sure they’d made the right decision. There was no way to see what he was like under the bravado. He might have been a smaller man you know—he might have let it go to his head. It’s the small ones who turn greedy and arrogant when you put power in their hands.”

“Like Vassily.”

“Yes…”

“Do you still dream about him?”

“No. Not since that night we talked about it.”

“Sometimes the answer’s that simple—talking it out. It gets the poison out of your system so that it can’t stay and fester.”

The room was a sea in which animate islands floated, each of them absorbed in its own storms and troubles. He turned and a trick of acoustics carried to his ears a soft exchange between Anatol and Baron Ivanov; Anatol was saying, “… unprecedented to say the very least. We are not a society that is accustomed to having its opposing views aired in public forums.”

“It will be an interesting experiment,” the little Baron answered, “to find out whether men of our persuasion can live and work in the same halls with men like Oleg. I am rather eager to see what comes of it.”

Anatol grumbled a reply. Irina was laughing very softly in her throat. “I’ve made a fine discovery,” she whispered. “My awesome brilliant father is in fact an old grouch.”

He was able to laugh and the ability pleased him more than the amusement itself. He began to steer her toward the door but they’d only crossed half the room when Oleg intercepted them. “A word with you?” Oleg gave Irina his brusque nod of apology. “Only for a moment.”

Oleg took him away into the corner and spoke as conspiratorially as a pimp in a third-class hotel. “The moment of truth is upon us.”

Alex had to fight down the impulse to laugh.

Oleg kneaded the pipe in his fingers; the veins stood out along the backs of his blunt square hands. “It has been torture for me these past weeks—not knowing whether I had done the right thing. You have kept faith with Vlasov. I owe you my apologies and my deepest thanks. His safety was my responsibility—it would have been my fault, my guilt if he had been exposed.”

“I didn’t do it for you.” He was harsh because he didn’t want Oleg misplacing his loyalty.

“I realize that, Alex. Quite fully. Nevertheless I must apologize again for my lack of faith in your discretion and your talent. Indeed I might say your genius. I’m quite prepared now to believe that neither Vassily Devenko nor any other man alive could have brought us this far, let alone made success possible. The debt we all owe you is incalculable.”

“We’d better wait and see how it turns out before we start parceling out the glory, Oleg.”

“I have no more doubts of our success. None at all.”

He wondered what it was that had brought the always skeptical Oleg around to such an extreme position of faith. Perhaps it was the panic of these last hours: needing an anchor Oleg had pounced on Belief and was clinging to it with the grip of hysteria.

Alex said, “In any case we’ll know soon enough, won’t we,” and managed to break away.

He reached Irina at the door; Felix was there, sparkling. “Just one thing before I let you both go.” He hesitated and his glance whipped from Alex’s face to Irina’s and back. Then with a sudden shy tip of his head: “Alex, I’d very much like to be your best man.”

Over the top of Felix’s head his eyes met Irina’s; they had gone very wide and he thought she wasn’t breathing. She gave him no helpful signals. In the end he gripped Felix’s shoulder.

“Done.”

The bedroom was tiny, spartan, stark: a flying officer’s cell, the place where a knight hung his armor and broadsword between jousts. Bare wooden walls and a single shelf nailed along one wall; a steel-frame cot with a green wool blanket; a row of wooden pegs for hanging clothes; a single lamp suspended from the ceiling with a conical metal shade.

“It’s a little narrow,” she said, “but we’ll ignore the crowd. Alex darling—if we’re really to go into the tiresome business of marriage there’s one thing you must promise me.”

“I’ll promise you the stars and the moon. With parsley.”

“Promise me that we’ll always share the same bedroom and sleep in the same bed.” She was watching him with genuine anxiety: poise had deserted her.

He faced her across the length of the little cubicle; very gravely he said to her, “I promise that.”

Only then did she stir. She took a slow step forward and then another and then she came into his arms, ravenously greedy.

When they slept finally they were pressed together on the narrow mattress like two spoons. But at some hour of the morning he came awake and was startled by the vividness of the image: every line and hair of Vassily Devenko’s high contemptuous face.

4.

Apart from the others she stood on the runway hugging her breasts; her long hair blew across her face. The soldiers were drawn up in formations beside their transports, bulky in their Red Army winter uniforms, heavily laden with combat field packs and parachutes. There were no lights; the guns snapped fitfully on the distant border. The sky had cleared during the day but it was still bitter cold. The moonlight was enough to see by; from inside the airplanes came the faint glow of the red lights inside their cabin spaces.

Prince Felix and his air crews stood off to one side at attention, in formation; and Leon’s group had a semblance of military order to it when Alex came across the tarmac to say his good-byes. She was too far away to hear the words they spoke. The soldiers began to climb into the airplanes. She saw Oleg reach out and grasp Alex in a bear hug—a ritual the Baron hardly ever practiced—and then her father shook Alex’s hand. General Savinov gravely drew himself to attention with a faint click of his heels; he lifted his thick right arm in a salute which Alex answered in kind. Then Alex returned to Prince Leon and the old man’s hand, a withered claw, sketched the Orthodox cross against Alex’s forehead and coat. Then Leon drew Alex to him and kissed him on both cheeks. The old Prince was visibly weeping when Alex turned away.

Alex said his good-byes to Cosgrove and the Americans and then walked to the pilots’ formation and spoke briefly to Prince Felix. She saw the flash of Felix’s grin once. The two men exchanged salutes and bear hugs and then Alex was coming toward her.

She was numb. He touched her under the chin with his forefinger, lifting her face. She heard the cough and wheeze of the aircraft engines starting up; beyond Alex’s shoulder she saw old Sergei waiting by the open airplane door in his combat uniform, beaming with incandescent eagerness.

Alex lifted his hands to her shoulders. He said, “I love you,” very quietly so that she hardly heard him against the racket of the airplane engines and then he was striding away from her and she wasn’t sure whether he had kissed her or not. She realized her arms were still folded. She watched the planes swing out onto the field and roll down to the far end of it. A single light came on at the opposite end of the runway to mark their way. She stood without moving anything except her head and eyes while the airplanes gathered speed down the runway and launched themselves upward into the night.

They were running without lights and she lost them very quickly in the sky. Then the drumming of the engines faded and she turned away.

Felix took her arm and guided her inside.

5.

Sunrise: a dreary winter gloom and beneath them the birch and fir forests that lay between Leningrad and Moscow, the snow-buried marshes along the Volkhov. They flew at two thousand feet, not hurrying, the aircraft painted with Red Army markings—indistinguishable from dozens of American aircraft supplied to Moscow by Lend-Lease.

Alex moved through the crowded fuselage talking to his men. Most of them sat with their gloved hands wrapped around cups of coffee. They were nervous and trying to hide it but they were uplifted by eagerness.

Off to starboard he could see a great deal of smoke hanging low. Moscow; whether from combat or furnaces he couldn’t tell. The forests ran underneath at a steady clip, here and there a dacha with snow on its roof and an unplowed driveway. There wasn’t much movement on the roads except for the occasional battalion of soldiers on the march. Most of the main roads had been plowed.

The amber light came on and Alex stood up near the rear cargo door. “Hook up.”

They reached up and snapped the ripcord hooks to the twin taut wires that ran the length of the fuselage on either side at shoulder height. “Jump order,” Alex said and the twenty-four men stood up in two columns, turning to face the doorway. Alex nodded to Sergei and the old sergeant spun the wheel valve of the welded cargo door. There was a hiss and then a rush of air; it took both of them to get it open and then the wind was a howling racket in the plane. Alex braced at the door watching the signal light over his shoulder; he caught the brilliance of Sergei’s stare and he nodded gently.

The amber light went out; the green flashed. Solov tapped Alex’s shoulder and he jumped.

He was falling at 125 miles an hour and the wind buffeted his ears with a tremendous noise. The pilot chute popped open above him and he braced for the big jerk when the main chute came out. The harness slammed him around for a bit and then he was floating down toward the drop zone, hanging from the chute, thinking about those live high-tension wires forty yards beyond the drop zone: land in those and you could fry. But there wasn’t much wind; the chute was easy to steer by hauling down on this shroud line or that and he hit the DZ dead center, pitching over on his shoulder in the compacted snow. The rest of them were pouring down in a steady stream as if they’d been spilled carefully out of a pitcher; the precision of it was a pleasure to watch.

He had the chute gathered into a bundle before the last man touched down. They gathered without talk—it was a forest clearing eighty yards in diameter with an unoccupied summer dacha somewhere out of sight in the woods to the north. The routine had been drilled into them and they didn’t need spoken orders. When the silk had been folded they carried their parachutes into the woods and left them there weighted down with broken branches and stones; they inspected their combat equipment and moved out along the dacha’s, driveway, marching out to the main road in neat military formation—a Red Army infantry platoon moving under orders.

The cold was characteristically and uniquely Russian: it cut through any kind of clothing and attacked bone-deep.

They came out to the road and executed a column-right maneuver. It was a fourteen-mile march from here to the track; they’d had to drop that far away to avoid being seen in the air by any of the sentry positions in the area. The road had been cleared within the past twenty-four hours and there were only thin patches of snow that had drifted across the gravel surface; it made for easy walking and they would be ahead of time at the objective but that was fine. They had six hours to get there; they would make it in half that.

Two miles along the road Solov took his eight men down a fork to the left and Alex gave the remainder of the company a five-minute breather until Solov’s unit was out of sight. Then he led Sergei and his fifteen-man commando due west along the high road.

After an hour they halted for another ten-minute breather. There was no hurry now and he didn’t want the men half exhausted; they’d had to go without most of a night’s sleep in any case. They sat down at the side of the road and in the silence that ensued they could hear the plop of snow falling off the trees in the deep forest that lined both sides of the road; and when Alex listened with more care he heard the very distant pound of artillery—a big-gun duel talking place somewhere many miles to the southwest, perhaps on the far side of Moscow. It brought back all the old campaigns at once and the knowledge he’d learned in the field—how to listen to the guns, how to tell which were outgoing and which incoming, how to anticipate how close a seventy-five would come.

Then there was another sound: much nearer, and Alex lifted his men to their feet with a quick upswipe of his arm.

The squadron of Cossack cavalry came swinging along the snowy road, riders bundled in fur, rifles across their saddlebows; the horses steamed and the hoofs thudded with a quick rhythm. Alex’s men formed up along the verge with the dry-cold snow squeaking under their boots.

Ice particles clung in the squat Cossack leader’s beard. He lifted his right hand and halted his squadron. His men looked on, wearing the intransigent grim faces of blooded veterans. The leader’s eyes puckered up with weariness or with suspicion—it was hard to tell which. “Seventh Army,” he growled, “which way?”

Alex shook his head; he didn’t know. “But that way’s the front.”

“I can hear the guns—I know where the front is.” The Cossack grunted and turned a dubious face toward the west. “What are you people doing here? You look fit for battle.”

The Cossack was a very stupid man with nothing but his military pride: the way to handle him was to stare him down and bark at him.

“Obey your orders, Cossack, and I’ll obey mine. Move your men along.”

The Cossack brooded upon him and then swept his arm up and forward and led his bloodthirsty troop away. Clots of snow kicked into the air struck the earth explosively.

Alex spoke to Sergei and the commando moved on.

The line was double-tracked; it ran up toward the crest along a steady gradient in a hundred-meter-wide cut between the trees. This was all forest country and they hadn’t mowed the right-of-way since before the beginning of the war: saplings had begun to dot the cut, sprouting twigs through the snow; and there were mounded lumps of snow that had to be weedy bushes.

He had memorized the contour map in long weeks of study but the habit of thoroughness made him unfold it and confirm his bearings. There was no one within earshot or sight—most likely there was no one within miles of this place—but their discipline was ingrained and he gave all his orders with hand signals. No one spoke. Sergei made a tour of their positions—at the edge of the trees on both sides of the cut—but there were only four men on the opposite side and they were not to act unless anyone tried to escape the train on that side.

When Sergei returned across the tracks he came slowly and swept his footprints with a clustered branch; he settled down beside Alex, his face very ruddy and his eyes agleam.

Alex peeled back a fur-lined cuff to check the time; he looked both ways along the silent empty rails and then there was nothing to do but wait for Stalin’s train.

6.

Felix’s casualness had been deliberate and studied at takeoff. He knew an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, a taste like brass on his tongue, a dry feeling of heat on the surface of his cheeks that had nothing to do with the coldness of the air in the cockpit. He had to blink away dryness from his eyes. All his life he had gone through the same ritual each time he rolled down the flight line, gathering air pressure under the cambered wings; at the moment of takeoff, no matter how many thousands of times he had completed this lift from the ground, he knew fear.

The late-morning sunrise caught him already in the air. Drops of blood seemed to form on the frosty canopy-glass in that strange light. Above them coasted the high wraiths of cirrus clouds. The false horizon moved with the plane. He glanced at the ASI—155 knots—and the outside temperature gauge: its thin needle stood at 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Altitude 800 feet—low enough to let the Reds count the rivets in the airborne leviathan’s belly. The unique throaty song of the B-17’s thrashing Wright engines was heavy in his bones and he was acutely conscious of the tons of sudden death that squatted like a brood embryo in the airplane’s abdomen.

Rostov’s bomber floated free a few yards beyond his port wingtip and fifty feet behind him. When they got closer to the target Rostov would pull ahead: they had rehearsed it and timed it until it was engraved into habit. Felix would hang back at cruising speed while Ilya Rostov boosted to combat power and put a distance of exactly three and one-half miles between the two B-17s. Rostov would attack, putting his first stick of bombs on the track a quarter of a mile ahead of the train. He would then fly straight over the train and make his turn behind it. The train would have its brakes on by then, trying to stop short of the destroyed roadbed. The debris of the first explosions had ample time to settle down—a little better than seventy seconds—before Felix’s bomber would pass over that point and attack the cars on either end of the one with a hospital cross painted on its roof. Felix’s one-hundred-pound armor-piercing bombs were filled with incendiary and high explosive charges; they would be dropped in sticks of twenty—a full ton at a shot. They were fused for a time delay of six seconds—sufficient to allow the bomber to pass beyond the danger zone; otherwise at deck level the B-17 would be hit by its own bomb blast. There were eight tons of bombs aboard: enough for four passes at the train.

Over the water of Lake Ladoga he pressed the intercommike button. “Test-fire your guns.”

In the machine-gun positions—spine, dorsal and belly turrets; nose and tail—the gunners exerted hand and foot pressures to swing their turrets around. The motors set up a grind ing like electric hand drills. The guns cleared their throats with short bursts and tracers arced toward the water.

“Report.”

“Nose gunner—all in order, Highness.”

“Waist one. All in order….”

Beneath the thrumming plane the broad cleats of tank treads had crushed the snow. They droned over a lambchop-shaped lake. Ulyanov had the chart in his lap. “On course, on time. Eight minutes to I.P.”

Felix waggled his wings in signal to Ilya Rostov and throttled back while Rostov’s bomber moved ahead, shooting away at full power. The earth was white and endless, the forests covered with snow. The sun struck Felix’s left shoulder. “We’re going to do it.” He turned and stared at Ulyanov. “Do you know that?”

“Yes sir,” Ulyanov said quietly. “We are.”

“Pilot to bombardier. Seven minutes to I.P.”

“Acknowledge, Highness. Ready to open bomb-bay doors.”

“Good bombing weather,” Ulyanov observed. He looked out at the sky. Felix glanced to his left through the perspex—and froze in every muscle.

Then he stabbed the intercom button. “Bandits. Coming out of the sun. Gunners….”

The sky was full of them. Against the sun it was hard to count them but there seemed to be dozens—possibly as many as a hundred of them—peeling off in streams and diving: specks that grew rapidly into the distinctive stubby shapes of Red Air Force I-16 fighters.

“Maybe they’re not after us.” Ulyanov said.

Felix had the microphone open; he did not take his eyes off the diving squadrons. “Bomber Six-Four to pursuit leader—Bomber Six-Four to pursuit leader…. My recognition code is Red-Green-Blue, do you copy? Recognition code Red-Green-Blue. Over.”

But there was no reply and now out ahead of him the first wave of them was diving against Ilya Rostov. Ahead of Rostov he could see the snow-cleared rails amid the trees. Rostov’s guns opened up abruptly: tracers arced upward from eight of his fifty-calibers and the plane began to dodge.

Then they were coming in at Felix with guns chugging. “Pilot to blister guns—open fire. Prepare for evasive action.”

He flung the yoke hard over and sideslid to the left; the only option was to lose the rest of his altitude and sit on the deck so that they couldn’t dive straight at him without crashing.

Not more than twenty feet above the trees he zigzagged the heavy bomber in little jerks across the snowscape and the seat shuddered from the pounding recoil of the bomber’s own guns; the cockpit filled with the stink of burnt cordite and he had a kaleidoscopic impression of the Red fighters wheeling about the bomber. He yanked the big plane to starboard, almost snagging a wingtip in the treetops.

The fighters were shooting from maximum range because they had to pull out of their power dives before the ground came up at them. He said, “Navigate us, in God’s name!”

But Ulyanov was staring straight ahead and his face went white. “They’ve got Ilya.”

It was as if Rostov had flown into a wall. The tail of the huge airplane whipped into the air and there was a burst of blinding flame when it hit the trees and he saw dark bits wheeling through the air.

Felix broke left; rammed all throttles to climb power but kept his elevator surfaces level: he closed his cowl flaps and the bomber went into its screaming acceleration. The burst of speed took the pursuit by surprise and left the fighters behind—their tracers fell into the forest—and then he was flying into the black ball of smoke from Rostov’s crash and the heat bounced Felix’s craft as if it were a toy kite. His stomach hit his throat and he almost lost his vision and when he came out of it he was in a roiling confusion of crisscrossing Red fighters and juddering impacts—impressions too rapid to be registered. The airframe staggered and pulled to the right and he had to use muscle to correct the drag; a pair of Red planes collided in midair almost dead ahead of him with no flame, no explosion, merely an odd entanglement of metal that dropped out of the sky like a safe. Ulyanov said with utter dispassion, “We’ve lost a chunk of the wing. Leading edge.”

“There’s the train,” Felix said. “I see the train.”

It was coming up the grade at the end of the plateau of forests—from here it seemed motionless but the mane of smoke from the locomotive’s stack bent straight back over the cars. “Bombardier—one minute to I.P. We’re going to finish it. It’s moving directly toward us at twenty-five.”

He saw them coming at him from the port side—three of them in a vee—and he jerked the plane toward them and it threw them off; they swept overhead but there was another one coming dead-level at him across the treetops and he heard the guns chattering behind him—the dorsal gunner’s voice: “Look at that! I got him—I got him!” And the I-16 plunged into the trees in a black burst of smoke.

He had the altitude of the jump from Rostov’s explosion; he used it to take violent action—a feint to the right, a sudden dive to the left with the four Cyclone engines shrieking at full power. He had gone rock-steady. “There will be no evasive action once we turn onto the bomb run. Brace yourselves—and God bless you all….”

“Bombardier to pilot. PBI centered.”

“Bombardier—eight seconds.”

“Ready Highness-”

“They’re not going to stop us. Not now….” He jammed the mike button. “Two seconds—one—it’s your airplane….”

And then there was nothing he could do but sit in the juddering pool of his terror. Fifty feet above the roadbed the B-17 roared straight down the railway and for a moment he had the utter fright of knowing that the smokestack of the engine was going to smash right into the nose of the plane. Then they were over it, past it, running down the back of the train with the jerk and slam that meant the bay doors were open. It was as if he could drop down through the greenhouse and land safely on his feet on the catwalk of the train.

All around him the I-16s were snarling and wheeling: jabbing at him with their guns; dodging like mosquitoes. Something stitched a line of half-inch holes through the ceiling of the cockpit and the bullets lanced forward at an angle, breaking the windscreens outward: slivers of glass spun about the cockpit and one of them cut the back of his right hand. He was cool enough to make a rough count of the planes he could see in the air and he had to estimate their number at more than thirty; it was a miracle he was still in the air and it was a miracle that was needed: he needed it and history needed it…. The lurch of the airframe pasted him down into the seat and he saw the nose writhe wildly into the sky and for a moment he thought they’d been shot to pieces but then he realized what it was: two tons of bombs had left the airplane and the sudden loss of weight had thrown them upward fifty feet in the air.

“Bombs away!”

He hauled everything to climb power and angled his flaps and sent the big plane into a narrow skidding turn that might easily wrench the wings off but it was worth the risk, anything was. “I’m making a three-sixty.”

“What?”

“I said a three-sixty. We’re making the bomb run again—we’ve got to be sure.”

He was far enough into the turn to be able to see out when the delay-fused bombs went off and he was close enough to it to be rocked by the explosion, deafened by the earsplitting thunders of it.

He saw it crystal clear when the roofs lifted right off both cars. He saw the red-painted cross on the roof between them before they disintegrated into hurtling missiles of shattered armor-plate. He saw the two carriages go up with a force of violence that lifted half the train off the rails by its couplings and sent the forward locomotive spinning across the snow as if it were on skates. In the midst of the boiling smoke there was nothing left of the troop cars—nothing bigger than a matchstick; nothing at all; and he yanked the controls far over to the right and bellowed at the top of his voice:

“Cancel that last order. We’ve done it! Russia—you are free!”

The B-17 staggered; it threw him forward against his harness straps and an incredible roar burst into the cockpit—a cry of wind that fluttered the cuffs against his ankles and ripped the chart from Ulyanov’s lap. The Plexiglas nose section had been blown through by I-16 cannon and the plane was a stovepipe and he had time to yank the control yoke back between his knees but no time for anything else. Cannon and machine-gun tracer tore the aircraft apart in a fury of concentrated violence and he was reaching to press the Bail-Out bell when the plane pivoted on its tail and there was only time for a white-hot instant of wheeling triumph before the blackness of forever engulfed him.

7.

When the flock of Soviet pursuit craft jumped the leading bomber Alex knew it was finished and he heard Sergei’s anguished cry: “We are betrayed!” but there was nothing for it but to carry it out to the finish because the train was approaching on schedule and there was still a chance at it. But the hope had drained out of him even before Felix’s B-17 made its spectacular bull’s-eye hits on the two armored troop carriages and blew the hospital car completely off the rails intact—askew like a toy that had been the object of a petulant child’s temper. The forward locomotive skidded around on ice and tipped over very slowly with steam exploding from it everywhere. The gallant Flying Fortress wheeled away toward the west and the Soviet fighters swarmed angrily after. Alex was on his feet then: there was still a chance to get to the hospital car before the fighters came back strafing. He yelled and waved them forward and slammed his hand down on the mortarman’s shoulder and when he began his run he heard the tinny rattle of the charge sliding down the pipe and then the whump like the very loud echo of a hard-hit tennis ball. Running in the deep snow with Sergei and the rest strung out in a splashing line he heard the shell flutter overhead and saw it explode beyond the target—a geyser of snow and clotted earth. The mortar dropped its aim and the next one dug a crater just ahead of the hospital car and now the aim was bracketed and the third one—he was still forty yards out, running as fast as he could but the snow nearly sucked the boots off his feet—the third one splashed against the side of the carriage and then the fourth mortar shell exploded right between two windows. It didn’t breach the armored wall but it blew both bulletproof panes out of their housings and buckled the metal. Then the mortar went silent because it had done its job.

In the sudden quiet there was nothing but the ringing in his ears from the explosions and the thrashing crunch of their legs in the clinging snow. He had the nine-millimeter tommy gun braced against the crook of his bicep ready to fire when they appeared in the windows but they kept their heads down inside the car; at intervals one or another of his own men sprayed the face of the car with automatic small-arms fire. The edge of the big drum-clip cannister rubbed against his left wrist and he listened for the rattle of gunfire beyond the train, expecting it because some of them might try to escape the carriage on that side. But no one emerged from the isolated carriage on either side. They must have been battered when the car had been blown off the tracks; perhaps a good many of them inside were dead.

His muscles were in agony and he rushed forward with the nightmare sensation that he couldn’t breathe and wasn’t making any headway: the snow was like quicksand. The breath fogged in front of him in great cloudy gasps and it seemed an inordinate time before he reached the corner of the car and touched his glove to its metal; Sergei ran along beside him slinging his submachine gun and unsnappinga pair of riot grenades from his webbed combat belt. Alex trained the tommy gun on the burst windows to give Sergei cover while Sergei armed the grenades and pitched them inside. Alex heard the muffled whump-whump when the grenades burst and flooded the car with tear gas.

He pulled his mask on over his head before he reached up for the door. The lower step had imbedded itself in the snow; he didn’t have to step up. The door came open: they never locked armored doors because it was armed attack they feared, not burglary.

He wheeled across the vestibule platform and smashed the inner door open with the butt of his tommy gun and curled into the long carriage spraying ammunition with abandon. The tommy gun climbed against his arm and he fought it down, hosing the billowing smoke-gas until the gun went hot through his gloves.

The gas stirred and in the sudden silence he heard someone exclaim behind him—the muffled echo of a voice contained behind a gas mask. It was Sergei. The others crowded past him and he heard the far door snap open.

“Hold your fire.”

Nothing moved, there was only the swirl of tear gas. Not a soul. The car was empty.

8.

He got outside and wrenched off the gas mask. “Radio.” Voroshnikov trotted up and knelt with his back to Alex and Sergei pulled the thin telescoping antenna up, extending it from the pack. Sergei had the switches on. He handed the handset to Alex.

The rest of them clustered around him in slow silence. Their faces were masks of inarticulate fury. When the set was warmed up he spoke into it. “Alexsander to Saracens. Report.”

“Saracen One. Reading you.”

“Saracen Two. Read you clearly.”

“Saracen Four. Reading you.”

He touched the Send button. “Alexsander to Saracen Three. Report.”

Nothing. “Alexsander to Saracen Five. Report.”

Nothing. He didn’t give it another try. “Alexsander to Saracens. Rendezvous. Repeat—rendezvous. Acknowledge.”

Seconds elapsed and in the static he could feel the impact on them as they tried to absorb it. “Saracen One. Acknowledge.”

“Saracen Two”—he heard it when Solov’s voice broke—“Acknowledge rendezvous. Out.”

“Saracen Four. What happened?”

“Alexsander to Saracen Four. Acknowledge my order.”

“… Saracen Four. Acknowledge your message…. Out.’

“Alexsander to Saracen One.”

“Saracen One reading you, Alexsander.” Postsev’s voice was harsh.

“Keep trying to raise Saracens Three and Five. See that they receive rendezvous orders. Acknowledge.”

“Saracen One. Acknowledge.”

“Alexsander out.”

He slapped the handset into Sergei’s palm and then the reaction hit him, the stunning disbelief and a rage beyond anything he had ever experienced: he stood agape in the snow and his muscles vibrated and he was overcome by an actual paralysis.

But the organism continued to accrete the impressions detected by the physical sensors and he was acutely aware of the stolid hissing of the rear locomotive—still there on the tracks behind its derailed tender—and of the wraiths of gas escaping from the two blown windows of the empty hospital car; the shattered debris of the troop carriages that had been bombed to twisted fragments, the explosion and crash his ears had absorbed earlier without conscious recognition then: Felix’s plane going down. And it struck him now that in all this furore he could account for only twenty casualties: the pilots and crews of the two bombers accounted for eighteen dead and he had seen two men catapulted from the skidding front locomotive when it fell over; they had flown from it like rag dolls and must be dead.

Now he heard Sergei talking to someone behind him: “There must be a driver and fireman there. Get them.” He was talking about the rear locomotive, the intact one.

Four men. The train had carried a total of four men: two locomotive engineers and two firemen.

He imagined he heard Vassily’s laughter A short burst of rapid fire. He didn’t turn to look. In a little while Sergei came back to him, walking with an unhealthy lurch along the roadbed as if a deck heaved under him. Sergei hoicked and spat. “Both of them ran for it. They were armed. We had to shoot them down.”

Sergei’s soles gritted on the snow. Alex saw the gloved palm flashing but he didn’t stir to avoid it. The hard slap rocked his head to one side.

He blinked and lifted his free hand to his cheek. Sergei pointed—the crest at the head of the railway grade.

He turned his dazed face that way. Nothing in sight but now he picked up the sound.

“Tanks.”

It shook him loose: galvanized him. He raised the tommy gun overhead. “The locomotive.” And began running toward it because if there were tanks ahead of them there would be tanks behind and perhaps coming in through the forest on either side as well and they wouldn’t send tanks alone without infantry to cover the gaps. It was a complete trap and the Soviets had waited until they were certain everybody was caught in it and now they were moving in for the kill.

But they had counted on the train being disabled and part of it wasn’t and that might provide an edge.

His troops ran forward in little knots, clustering on the tracks and leaping over the debris, homing on the chuffing steam engine. At the crest four T-34S loomed in line abreast and he saw the muzzles of their turret guns swivel and depress.

“Mortar. Shoot to blind them.”

It wouldn’t stop a tank but it could throw up spouts of snow to render the tanks’ spotters temporarily blind. The mortarman lodged the base of his pipe against a steel brace on the side of the locomotive and Alex waved his men forward, counting heads. He hadn’t lost any people. No casualties: no battle. The battle started now.

“Get aboard—find a handhold, get aboard.” He was leaping up into the cab then and Sergei was tossing his gun aside and reaching for the shovel but the tender was gone and there was no coal except a few handfuls in the scuttle and when Sergei had poured those into the firebox and slammed it shut he said, “It won’t take us far.”

“As far as it can.” He rammed the lever right over as far as it would go and released the brake.

The mortar went off softly, almost reproachfully. Then before its round landed one of the tanks opened fire.

The wheels spun on the cold rails and the engine moved with gasps and lurches; he ran the lever back down to slow speed in the hope it would get better traction. The T-34’s seventy-millimeter shell erupted somewhere in the snow beyond the boiler; he heard the great roar of it but didn’t see it. The muzzles were traversing now, the tanks grinding forward and starting to shoot in earnest: range about a thousand yards. With long guns they’d have blown the locomotive apart with the first half dozen tries but the T-34 carried a stubby antitank gun and it wasn’t much for accuracy. All these calculations ran unemotionally through his mind in a split instant of time. The wheels had purchase now and he ran the lever through three notches to half speed. The locomotive was moving—very slow but it was a downgrade and there was no load, no train to drag; she picked up speed inexorably. Fifteen White Russian soldiers clung to her—crowded into the cab, hanging on the ladders, perched on footholds. His perception of scene and events was fragmented and a significant part of his mind was in shock but he was taking the right actions, doing things out of instinct and as long as he could function under this intuitive motor power he’d be all right. He had no doubts: he’d got them into this and he’d get them out.

Sergei spoke sharply. He flicked a glance to his left out the square steel opening beside him. He saw them in the trees beyond the cut: vague shapes, fitful movements in the forest. Infantry. He counted three tanks among them, grinding forward, smashing small trees down.

It was the same to the right but he wasn’t concerned about those and he was barely aware of the earsplitting whup and slam of 70mm incomings and the mortar throwing back its pitiful replies. The locomotive had momentum now and it was accruing fast. They had a jump on the infantrymen and they were rolling faster than a man could run in the snow. The Red infantrymen were opening up with small-arms but the range was four hundred yards or more and they were shooting at a moving target through trees; he heard one or two jacketed slugs whine off the steel but most of it was going wide or being deflected by branches.

He had her in reverse and he put full speed on. On the downgrade she’d be capable of doing ninety miles an hour with a fully hot boiler but the last of the coal was burning now and she wasn’t getting up anything like top speed. She was going backward and there was nothing in front of his face but wind and the slow curve of the sloping roadbed and what he was afraid of was what might appear there below them on their line of travel.

Sergei reached for the tommygun slung on Alex’s shoulder. Alex felt it when Sergei rammed a loaded magazine into the weapon. Then Sergei tapped his shoulder and got down in a crouch with the rear half-wall of steel for a parapet. It made a wall of thin armor three feet high across the back of the reversing engine: enough to deflect rifle fire but no proof against a tank’s gun.

Then Alex snapped out of it. The dreamlike state went. He saw everything clearly and with reasoned comprehension. The locomotive ran backward down the rails, bulleting toward a gradual curve beyond which anything might be approaching—very possibly another train or a pack of tanks. Behind him four T-34S were pursuing the locomotive in a losing race, their cannonfire falling behind, lifting great booming divots of snow and soil. On either side of the tracks the tanks and infantry were closing the trap but they were too late, the locomotive had got outside their circle and they were closing an empty fist.

In that period of uncertain semiconsciousness he had got them out of it. They’d escaped even if it was only until the next bend of the track. It wasn’t much but it was a small triumph and he said, “All right, Sergei. I’m all right now.”

Fifty miles an hour or better and they roared into the down hill bend.

It was blocked of course. Tanks—three of them climbing the grade, their treads skittering on the snow.

One of them was coming straight at him. Straddling the rails.

Collision course.

The mortarman’s head rocked back. Fear disfigured his face. His stare pleaded.

Alex roared at him:

“Shoot!”

It was a game of raw courage—the challenge of the ultimate bluff: who would give in first? But Alex had the advantage. It was eight hundred yards—half a mile—and when he didn’t cut power and jam on the brakes instantly it meant there wouldn’t be time to stop anyway and if the tank didn’t get off the tracks that was that.

It took the tank driver a long time to make up his mind and in the meantime the guns of all three T-34S were firing. Alex’s mortar kept splashing snow in their eyes and the two outboard tanks were slithering in deep loose snow and every time their guns fired they were knocked askew by the recoil and the mortar explosions made it hard for them to line up again. It was the tank on the rails that was the threat because it was no good mortaring in front of it: that could rip up a track and derail the locomotive.

Ludicrously it put him in mind of something Carol Ann had said: “Sometimes there’s not a damn thing you can do but act like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm: hunker down and take it.”

The locomotive made a minimal target head-on at six hundred yards; half a degree’s error and the tank gun’s shells exploded harmlessly in the snow. It looked an easy shot but it wasn’t. At fifty miles an hour—possibly more—the solitary 2-6-2 locomotive was cutting the range faster than the tanks’ gunners could crank their elevation gear and there was just enough curve in the long bend of the track to force the guns to keep correcting their traverse aim.

It was absurd to hide behind the thin plate of the engine’s rear armor but they did it out of instinct, five of them crowded into that little space and several more crouching on the plow blade behind the engine. Alex kept his eyes up far enough to see but there was nothing he could do but wait. And if the fire went out under the boiler right now it would be all over.

You could see the shell come out of the muzzle or at least the exploding smoke that propelled it. You could hear them come in: overhead with a roar or to one side with a deafening crash. All three tanks were shooting as fast as they could load but the outboard ones weren’t coming anywhere close. Then a shell that must have been HE blew up a hundred feet in front of him and his breath caught in his throat because it looked as though it had blown the roadbed apart but it must have been off to the side just enough: it had dumped gravel and ice on the rails and the locomotive lurched and rattled under him but it didn’t lose its grip on the steel and they were still speeding down the track with the blown-up snow cascading over their shoulders.

When they came out of it the tank was still astraddle the rails, still shooting. Five hundred yards—at fifty miles an hour that gave them about twenty seconds and then collision.

A shout of alarm: a soldier clinging to the step. He was pointing back along the engine—up toward the crest behind them. Alex wheeled to risk a half-second’s glance.

There was a train—coming down the track in pursuit. Its open flatcars bristled with artillery. A mile or more behind. He had time to see that much and then the locomotive bucked and pitched and he heard a tremendous ringing clang that all but ruptured his eardrums. The impact threw him flat against the armor plate.

He thought for an instant they’d collided with the tank but reasoned second thought quickly discarded that: hit the tank and they’d all have been dead.

They were still rolling.

He had a painful bruise along his left shoulder where he’d slammed into the plating. Above him the armored roof of the driver’s cabin had been buckled by a tremendous blow.

Not a direct hit. A 70mm would have torn right through it and ruptured the boiler.

He leaned quickly outboard. Then he saw it. A shell had taken the smokestack right off. Shrapnel had dented the roof. He saw the sprawled bodies of six of his men back along the railway where the concussion had knocked them off the plow blade. The pursuing gun train was still there—gaining.

And when he wheeled forward there was a point-blank four-hundred-yard stretch between him and that Soviet tank and the cleats were flashing. The tank was making its turn: giving in.

Ponderously the tank clattered across the rails and it didn’t look like there’d be time for it to get clear and he watched bleakly because he couldn’t do anything else. The tankers opened up with their machine guns now because the range was down to that. On the locomotive the mortar kept chugging and its missiles made spouts and sprays in the snow. An armor-piercing round from a tank gun drilled into the ground just ahead and when it blew it shot a fountain of whistling rocks and snow across the tracks; he ducked and heard Sergei’s dry grunt amid the racket of junk raining on the twisted steel roof.

They came out of that into daylight within a hundred yards of the tank and it was still crawling, trying to get off the rails, skidding on the snow. One tread was still on the ties. There was an unrelenting cacaphony of artillery and small arms and the machine-gun bullets clanged along the steel surfaces of the locomotive. One voice cried out and the cry was cut off definitely in its middle. Alex distinguished the separate sound of tommyguns being fired by his own men on the sides of the locomotive—useless angry fusillades at the impassive tanks—and one by one those guns went silent: out of ammunition or shot off the train by the tanks’ wickedly traversing machine guns. About two seconds left now and he braced himself, wedged between Sergei’s big shoulder and a corner of the armored backplate; they would hit the tank or they would not hit it—now.

It was a glancing collision but it tumbled Sergei against him and knocked the air out of him and it tipped the locomotive up on one side with all the wheels of its left side clear off the rail. It came back down onto the tracks with a fifty-ton blow that seemed to shake his teeth loose: he was sure the roadbed couldn’t withstand that punishment but somehow the locomotive was still rolling—speed down to forty now with the boiler cooling—and he crawled to the side of the platform and saw that the tremendous inertial blow had slammed the T-34 right over on its side like a helpless turtle. While he watched the tank skidded and spun across the snow and smashed into its companion tank.

There was one of them left on the far side of the track and its turret was swiveling but the track took him on around the bend before the turret gun had time to home its aim; then there was forest and the tanks were out of sight. One lobbed a shell over the trees but it burst harmlessly in the forest beyond him.

He crawled to his feet on the lurching steel deck and spoke harshly to Sergei:

“Head count.”

The collision had knocked the mortar away and the mortarman with it. There had been seventeen of them in the commando; there were five now. Sergei reported it bitterly.

The locomotive was losing speed and there was a train pursuing and he still had a responsibility to these four as great as it had been to the sixteen: that and a responsibility to survive because they’d been betrayed and vengeance for that must be exacted.

He looked at them: Sergei and the three Russian soldiers: Tukschev, Blucherov, Voroshnikov with blood on the left side of his face because something had taken off his earlobe and left a raw streak down his cheek.

Ahead of them the rails ran straight down a steady incline two miles or more through the forest. The bend was behind them and pursuit out of sight. “Go on,” he said. “Jump.”

He watched them tumble and then he went off last: thirty miles an hour perhaps; if you could put down in a parachute without breaking a leg you could jump off a train at that speed. They carried their tommy guns into the forest and began to run for it.

9.

A heavy brownish sky hung over the horizon. Alex stood up slowly and heavily like a bear breaking water to wade up on shore. He moved his face from left to right.

Beneath the tall snow-heavy trees was a compound of buildings: the dacha and its outbuildings. Alex made a survey with his eyes and ears. Nothing stirred. He made a brief hand signal and sculled forward on his elbows. Right at the last row of trees he halted them.

He didn’t see any sign of Solov or Postsev or any of the others. Then he heard something: the distant measured rumor of an engine growling in low gear.

Sergei thrust his lower jaw forward to bite at his upper lip; he unslung his machine pistol. Alex shook his head mutely. They bellied down in the forest and the sun obscured itself behind festering clouds. He went numb with cold. The grinding racket approached steadily. When he looked at Sergei the old man’s lips were cracked and ready to bleed and so were his eyes.

The machine was in the driveway beyond the farther grove. He waved them all down in the shadows; he merged himself with the bole of a pine.

The truck rolled into sight, crunching snow—a cleated halftrack with a general’s star on the fender, canvas hooped over the bed. Alex heard the quick whistling intake of Sergei’s breath through teeth. He crouched frozen against the tree with the tommygun in both hands but his fists didn’t seem to have much grip in them. He stared bleakly as the half-track drew up by the dascha and soldiers dismounted from the truck—a full-strength line squad of Red Army soldiers armed with 7.62-millimeter rifles and grenade belts and automatic weapons.

A very tall officer emerged from the truck and spoke to the men; they marched into the compound while the tall officer turned a full circle on his heels. Bundled in a heavy coat, muffler wrapped around his face, he was a figure of immense size. Recognition grenaded into Alex’s belly until sour liquid flowed up into his mouth.

The giant tramped forward into the trees—moving idly as if seeking a private spot to urinate. While he walked his head turned incessantly—watching everything. He clasped his hands behind his back and stopped once to turn around and look up at the sun; creases made rings in the back of his neck and then he came on ahead into the trees and stopped not ten feet from where Alex stood with a gun trained on his heart. The giant was looking elsewhere but he spoke distinctly in a low baritone:

“Condottieri—I am Kollin. Don’t show yourself but speak if you can hear me.”

“Right here, General.” And his finger curled around the trigger.

Vlasov came around ponderously and his eyes went bright behind the lenses of his heavy eyeglasses—like an animal at night pinned by the beam of headlights.

“We have lost,” he said, very soft.

“I know.”

“You must get out as best you can. Do not wait for the rest of your men—they will not make this rendezvous. Yours was not the only team that went into a trap.”

“But we’re the only team that got out of it. Are you telling me that?”

“Yes.” Vlasov’s face was all rough crags and shadows. “It was not I who betrayed you, General Danilov.”

“Who then?”

“Beria had a signal. I do not know from whom. We all were betrayed. Someone gave Beria the plan—not four hours ago. They only had time to remove the High Command from the train. Sending the empty train on as a decoy to draw you into the trap—that was Beria’s idea.”

A bitter wave of defeat flooded Alex’s chest. He stared ruefully at the huge general.

Vlasov said, “Your bomber crews were superb, I am told.” He swayed toward a tree as if he required its support, then with a violent tremor he sat down with his back to it, hands pinched between his squeezed-together knees. Behind the glasses his eyes went lifeless and turned inward as if in search of a strength that had disintegrated. “So near—so near. But the steel bear is safe in the Kremlin—there is nothing we can salvage. Nothing.”

Momentarily Vlasov’s easy acceptance of defeat outraged him but he made his voice kind: “You had better come out with us.”

“No. Beria’s informant did not know my identity. They know there is a traitor among the generals but Stalin trusts me more than any of them except Zhukov.”

“Can you stay after this?”

“I must. One must continue the illusion that there is always one more chance.” Vlasov struggled to his feet like an old man. “The traitor may have given Beria your intended escape route. You will have to improvise a different escape.” And then he was walking away as calmly as he had arrived, hands clasped in the small of his back, boots squeaking on the snow.

10.

The low sun charged the light with gold. He halted the little column in the woods across the road from the hospital and spoke softly:

“We’ll wait for full darkness.”

The hospital was a massive bleak structure towering over the barracks behind it. In ambulances by the side of the building military drivers dozed at the wheel. Alex studied the lay of it while he still had light; he moved back and forth along the road, staying within the trees, making an end-to-end reconnaissance of the compound. It was the Seventh Red Army Hospital—headquarters for the medical department of the Moscow Military Area—and there was a good deal of activity: ambulances, army trucks, buses, staff cars with medical flags on them to indicate they carried doctors of high rank. Personnel flitted in and out of the compound on bicycles and those on foot queued for the civilian buses which arrived at twelve-minute intervals, turned around, stopped to discharge and collect passengers and went back the way they’d come—on the Moscow road.

It was a monolithic building of Byzantine brick, four stories high and the size of two city blocks in area; it had been built in the days of Peter the Great as a state building for the administration of provincial districts and it had the turreted gingerbread finish of its period. The only thing loftier in sight was the crenellated onion dome of a church a quarter of a mile up the road.

They waited until the sun went down—a bit after four o’clock—but the moon was up by then and it etched the winter branches in serene light and Alex had to decide whether to move anyway or to wait for moonset. The temperature had dropped steadily during the twilight hours and there would be a risk of frostbite in waiting but that would be preferable to capture; he decided they would stay put until they had full darkness.

He walked along close to the wall, fingertips dragging it lightly, trying to focus his flagging concentration. In the intense cold he felt sleepy and knew the dangers of that. He approached the column of ambulances from their rear. Sergei was close on his heels and the three survivors of the commando were strung out along the wall behind, invisible even to Alex. There were no stars; a scudding overcast had pushed the moon away.

He reached the back of the ambulance and moved along the narrow passage between its body and the hospital wall. Reached up for the handle of the passenger door—pulled it open and spoke to the driver and heard Sergei yank the driver’s door open and haul the driver out. There was no sound; Sergei’s knife had gone true. There were no interior lights in the ambulance—they would be disconnected as a matter of routine security. Alex moved on to the second ambulance slowly and without sound while Sergei slipped forward along the opposite side of the ambulance line. They repeated the maneuver with the second ambulance: Alex distracted the driver and Sergei dispatched him.

They took the third ambulance and Alex pushed the remaining three soldiers into its rear compartment. Then he joined Sergei in the cab.

The ambulance drove north at high speed on the freshly plowed Leningrad road. The illumination of its slitted blackout lights was minimal but speed was more important than caution because they had to be past the Leningrad line before daylight. Twice they had to pause for armed convoys and once they nearly ran down a marching battalion of soldiers who flung themselves into the banked snow along the verges as the ambulance shot by in the night. Alex had the wheel; driving gave him occupation, it excused him from brooding on the failure, but he could not keep his mind from the bitterness of it. Felix, he thought. Full of spirit and dash: Felix would have been more than they’d expected of him—he’d had the genius of leadership but it had taken these last weeks to reveal it in him and now it was negated, the absolute waste of early death—Felix and Ilya Rostov and the sixteen men they’d carried aboard their bombers; and Majors Postsev and Solov because Vlasov hadn’t been able to warn them—all the commandos must have walked right into the traps by now. Nearly a hundred men had to be counted dead or worse. In military terms it was a small casualty list but they were not victims of combat, they were the casualties of betrayal and his bile came up with the anger that focused on vengeance. If it takes the rest of my life….

11.

The body of water called Ladoga was a lake in geographer’s terms but it was an oval 300 miles by 200 miles and it might as well have been an ocean. A 50-mile-wide neck of land lay between the western shore of Ladoga and the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Finland; the isthmus connected Europe with Scandinavia and it was here that the opposing armies were drawn up with their flanks anchored against the two shores. The surface of Ladoga was frozen to a depth of two feet or more and would have supported the weight of route-stepping troops but there was no cover on the open ice and the war stayed in the forested hills.

At dawn an artillery duel began and from thirty miles south of the battleground Alex saw the flashes. Fifteen minutes later they began to feel the concussive rumble, transmitted up from the gravel surface of the road through the tires and springs of the Pobeda ambulance,

They had cut wide to the east around the environs of besieged Leningrad and the cleated tires of the ambulance slithered on the unpaved subsidiary track; it had been mashed down by convoys of tanks and heavy lorries moving to and from the Finnish front. The ambulance ran along in second gear bracketed between a field-kitchen supply truck and a half-track troop-carrier; steady streams of traffic moving both ways along the narrow track, skittering on the verges and occasionally colliding.

Sergei had the map open in his lap but it was a chart left over from the 1939 war, something they’d taken off a captured Russian captain in Vassily’s interrogation tent; there was no way to know how much had been changed since those days. “Just ahead—the turning to the right.”

Alex obeyed the old man’s navigational instructions and the ambulance heaved into a narrow rutted track. Tanks had been along here but not in the past twenty-four hours; there was a crust of fresh snow in the ruts. The trees crowded thick against the track and branches kept whipping the ambulance.

The turn had taken them out of the convoy and they were alone in deep woods. The artillery wasn’t more than three or four miles north of them—to the left now. The earth shook steadily and the racket was intense. The guns had been talking for nearly half an hour and that was a little bit encouraging because an extended field-gun barrage at daybreak often presaged an assault and if the Red Army was poised to go into battle then things would be confused along the extended flanks; that sort of confusion might play into their hands.

He had a look at the gauges. The engine was running slightly hot on poor fuel but it wasn’t at the boil-over point; the oil pressure was steady on fifty and the ammeter was centered. There was half a tank of fuel and that would be enough, one way or the other.

The road staggered fitfully. In clearings they passed knots of soldiers and the occasional parked vehicle. Each time he tensed up and saw Sergei lift the tommygun into his lap but no one challenged them and they chugged on into the morning. At half past ten the artillery ceased fire—a dozen miles behind his left shoulder. The track made a turning to the north and Sergei said, “Soon now,” and folded the map neatly away.

It crested a hundred yards ahead. He parked the ambulance in the road before they reached the top. He got out and took the tommygun; as he approached the skyline he went into the trees and jinked from pine to pine until he was on top. Then he slipped out to the edge of the road and looked down the far slope.

The track ran down toward the shore and made a right turn and disappeared beyond the end of the trees. Winds had swept big patches of the lake free of snow and the ice was grey and translucent. At the foot of the road where it made its sharp turning at the shoreline there was a rickety wooden dock and beside it was a ramp used in peacetime by fishermen hauling their boats in and out of the water. The ramp was covered with several inches of powder snow but its outlines were clearly defined. On the dock stood a crude corrugated structure—a sentry post with some sort of wood stove in it; smoke curled from a round metal chimney. There was a loop antenna on the roof of it. Spotters then: posted along the bank of the lake to give warning of any Finnish advance across the open ice. And there were 55mm howitzers stationed along the shore; he only saw two of them—one on either side of the dock—but there’d be a good many more strung out in the trees at the edge of the lake.

Without hurry he studied the landscape, deciphering the clues in the snowy hills and the irregular shore. Finally he faded back into the woods and tramped down to the ambulance.

They were all outside stamping their feet. Sergei dragged a glove across his face and spat in the snow. “It’s all right?”

“It’ll have to do. They’ve got fifty-fives at two-hundred-meter intervals along the shore. Probably machine-gun bunkers too.”

Corporal Voroshnikov said, “Perhaps we should go farther east.”

“We haven’t the fuel for that.”

Sergei said, “How does the ice look?”

“Thick enough.” He tossed the tommygun inside and climbed up. “Let’s go.”

By now every shore position would have been alerted by Moscow to stop any vehicle or personnel trying to escape to the north. There was no way to bluff a passage with false papers. They might have his description.

His commando had to break through the Red line somewhere and this was the most thinly defended piece of it. Ram through onto the lake and get out beyond the range of the guns and cut a semicircular route toward the Finland shore: that was the plan now and it was all they had left. He put the ambulance in gear. The rear wheels slipped a little but then the cleats found purchase and it lurched uphill.

At the crest he still had her in low gear. He shifted before feeding fuel to the carburetor and he picked up speed smoothly on the downslope.

The ambulance bucked and wobbled, slithering from side to side in the ruts. Sergei had his window open and his gun in both hands and the cold wind was awful. Now it was two hundred yards to the boat ramp and the ambulance was still picking up speed but not too much because there’d be a hard bump at the top of the ramp: try to hold it down to something between fifty and sixty kilometers.

A man stepped out of the spotter shed—probably alerted by the noise. Shouted to someone inside the shack and lifted a rifle to his shoulder. Alex saw the muzzle zero in. Then his ears were battered by the staccato slamming of Sergei’s automatic nine-millimeter. The bullets knocked the soldier back against the wall of the shack; when he slid down he left a red smear on it. Then Alex was wrenching the wheel left and smashing through the drifts at the head of the boat ramp and Sergei was twisted around in the lurching seat, spraying the doorway of the shack to keep their heads down inside. The ambulance went over the lip of the ramp: the front wheels slammed down with an impact that threw him forward against the steering wheel; it was sideslipping and he fought to correct but it kept turning and went down the ramp with the back tires spinning on the ice at a three-quarter angle: for a moment he was sure they were going to capsize. But the ambulance held upright and he fed a little fuel; the tires made a tentative grab and squirted tangentially onto the lake ice. Now they’d find out if it was thick enough to hold the weight.

He heard glass shatter musically and the confined roaring of a gun in the back of the ambulance—Voroshnikov or one of the others firing at the spotter shack through the rear windows of the ambulance. It was still spinning slowly on the ice; he had to turn the front wheels that way with the skid. The spin took them right back along the shore on the left but when the wheels vectored into the bank they gained enough traction to send the ambulance spurting forward and he turned the wheel with an easy slow motion so that it curved gently away from the shoreline and began to run out onto the frozen open surface. He kept it to a very slow curve because anything more would break them loose again, send them spinning. But it was an angle that held them too close inshore for too long and the trees erupted in machine-gun fire. He saw them chop white smears and dashes in the ice and heard the whine as they ricocheted away and then one or two of the guns had the range and there was lead chugging into the back. If one of them blew the fuel tank or ruptured the tires that was that.

He shifted up into top and put his foot on the floor. Some one in the litter bed cried out, hit. Sergei had his big shoulders all the way out the open window, shooting the tommygun empty; then he sagged back inside and slumped down in the seat. Alex flashed a glance at him to see if he’d been hit. He hadn’t; he was just using as much cover as he could find. Wind whipped around Alex’s face, freezing his ears and cheeks. She was up to seventy-five kph on the ice now and he completed the steady turn and straightened the steering: due north onto the lake with five hundred meters of it behind them. The shore machine guns gave it up. Ninety kph, a hundred—sixty miles an hour on surface ice and it was shaking the ambulance to pieces; the surface wasn’t all that smooth. Everything rattled: the noise was so intense he didn’t hear it when the shore batteries opened up. The first he knew of it was when a fifty-five punched a tremendous hole in the ice. Another shell impacted behind him and that one was close enough to rain slivers of ice on the ambulance—like hailstones on a corrugated metal roof; the noise was as terrible as the machine-gun hits had been.

A fifty-five burst well ahead of him and quite a distance to the right. He steered a course toward it because they’d be correcting their aim and moving left with the next ones. He heard Sergei’s grunt when one fluttered overhead. It blew up a quarter acre of ice to the left and now he had to guide the speeding ambulance between the two holes before the ramifying cracks broke up the surface between them. He could see the fissures spreading: they moved that fast.

When the ambulance skittered across the frozen isthmus the ice was breaking up underneath and it wobbled badly, one rear wheel sinking into stuff that had gone soft as pablum. But the momentum carried it over the slush. Two fifty-five-millimeter salvos smashed up the lake behind them and he crabbed the ambulance to the left as quickly as he could without losing traction.

, They had two field guns in play as far as he could tell; both had an open field of fire as long as he remained within range. They didn’t have to hit him. All they had to do was punch a hole in the ice ahead of him—close enough so he couldn’t evade without skidding. The only answer to it was to keep doglegging—chasing salvos, trying to outwit the spotters.

Speed was his advantage and his hazard at the same time. On the ice every notch of speed meant that much less maneuverability. He was putting nearly a mile behind them with every full minute that elapsed but those guns could reach out six or seven miles and they still had plenty of time to stop him. Four minutes was an eternity in a race like this.

Ice lies thinnest along the bank. Out over deep water it was thickest and could absorb great impacts without shattering. The guns were firing a random mixture of armor-piercings and high explosives but now the armor-piercings simply drilled straight through, leaving holes no bigger than the fist-sized diameter of the shells that punched them; and the HEs dug powdery craters in the surface but no longer broke them through to the water beneath. When a shell exploded dead ahead of him Alex knew he didn’t have time to turn and he trusted to chance and the strength of the ice: he accelerated right into the blinding rain of crystals. The ambulance slammed violently through the crater and bounded up over the far lip of it; came crashing down on all four wheels and kept right on going with slush oiling down the windscreen. Sergei reached up and cranked the wipers back and forth to clear it. Alex caught the old man’s defiant grin.

Too many of those and she could break an axle but they had a chance now. The guns were elevating steadily: the next one hit well out ahead of him and slightly to the right. He bent his course to veer around the far-right-hand side of the crater while the next salvo of HEs blew geysers in the ice considerably to the left. He steered straight this time because they’d expect him to chase back to the left and they’d be waiting for that. The next two drilled holes to his left again but still he didn’t change course. He waited until the next salvo—a neat bracket, one on either side and a bit behind him—and then he jinked to the left: a random move on impulse. It threw them off again and now the shells were falling behind. going wide; six miles and the spotters couldn’t see him very well. The ambulance was a small white object moving very fast against a blinding white background: at best they only had him in sight intermittently.

One at a time the two field guns gave it up. Sergei sat up and mischievously poked a finger through a hole torn in his coat sleeve by a Bolshevik bullet. “Magnificently done, my general.”

Maybe thirty miles in an arc across the ice now: they’d be at the Finland shore. He began to let himself relax. Another mile to be sure they were out of range and he’d stop and check the back for casualties.

It came without warning. He hadn’t thought to check the sky. He didn’t know the plane was there until the strafing tracers rattled a stitched line across the ice, walking the bullets right up to the speeding ambulance. He tried to take evasive action but it was much too late. He heard the diving whine of the aircraft. He felt it when the fifty-calibers shredded a rear tire; the ambulance dropped down on the rim and began to circle blindly like a half-crushed beetle. The jacketed bulletstore into the body of the ambulance and they were screaming in the back compartment and then the other tire blew and something broke apart and she was skidding to a stop, mangled and dead on the ice.

Sergei had taken a bullet and there was blood all over his coat—it looked like an arm wound; he showed his teeth. Alex heard the plane whining and when he looked up through the windscreen it was at the top of its turn, coming back for another pass: diving for the kill.

12.

She stood on the tarmac watching the main gate. The wind was cruel—dry and frigid; puffs of powder snow blew across the runway. The only sounds were the footfalls of the Finnish sentries as they moved back and forth to keep warm and the growl of the diesel generator behind the control tower.

Prince Leon came to her from the building behind her. He leaned heavily on his cane; his face was deeply trenched by exhaustion and the emptiness of defeat. “We shall have to go soon.”

“Go where?”

“I do not know, Irina. Back to Spain I suppose, where else can we go? You will catch a chill out here, you must come inside.”

She could see out past the main gate, past the sentries and their rifles—a long way down the ribbon of road that ran straight between the trees. No one was on the road. She put her back to it reluctantly and put her hand on the old prince’s arm and helped him back into the building; he had trouble with the step.

The rest of them sat in the pilots’ Ready Room, their faces as grey as the sky outside. Her father looked up when she entered the room but his mask of authority had sagged away to nothing and his eyes were lacquered as if with fever. Baron Oleg tried to put life in his face but it was tremble-lipped, white, ghastly. But for one traitor they’d have been in Moscow by now. Colonel Buckner leaned in the far doorway, forehead against the wood, putting some of his weight on his hand which gripped the doorknob—he looked as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. Brigadier Cosgrove raised his one hand a few inches to acknowledge Irina’s presence but then he withdrew into himself to brood. Absurdly, General Savinov and the venerable Prince Michael sat facing each other pushing checkers across a board.

It had been twenty-four hours since they’d heard the news.

Cramps of hunger prevented her from sleeping and finally sometime in the small morning hours she went down in search of food; she hadn’t eaten anything all day. She found General Spaight there; he gave a quick startled smile. “You’ve caught me. Raiding the larder.”

She found cheese and bread and made a meal of that. “What time is it, do you know?”

“After seven I think.”

“I didn’t realize it was that late.”

“The sun won’t be up for two hours yet.”

She sat down to eat; Spaight said, “The water’s boiling for coffee. Would you like a cup?”

“Avidly.”

“He’ll get out, you know. I’ve soldiered with Alex a long time,” he said. “He’s not the sort of man who gets captured.”

“Or killed?”

“If they’d killed him we’d have heard about it.” He was spooning coffee into the pot. “They were pretty explicit in the broadcast about the ones they’d killed or caught and identified. Alex wasn’t among them and neither was Sergei.”

“But they’re nearly twenty-four hours overdue.”

He brought his plate to the table and sat down facing her. “He’ll get out, Irina.”

“I don’t need false reassurance. Don’t patronize me.”

“It’s myself I’m reassuring. He’s too good a man—too good a friend to lose.”

They ate in silence, watching the coffeepot. When it was ready Spaight poured and brought the cups to the table. “You’re a remarkable woman, Irina. He’s a lucky man.”

“I’d rather not think that far ahead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No—never apologize.”

He said, “It was someone in this camp who betrayed us.”

“What?”

“I found a radio transceiver in the parts room at the back of the repair hangar—shortly after Felix took off. It was still warm. Someone had just got done using it. I turned on the receiver to find out what band he’d set it to. It was the Russian Secret Service frequency. I didn’t understand any of it of course, they broadcast in code. But I know their call signs.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

“No. I’ve spent nearly every hour since then watching the hangar—I thought maybe he’d go back for it. But I gradually came to the conclusion he never would. He’s done with it now, isn’t he—it’s served its purpose.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re the only one I trust on this base right now. You wouldn’t have betrayed Alex.”

“I’m grateful for your trust. It means a great deal just now.”

“Maybe you can explain something to me then. Why would the traitor wait until after the mission was beyond recall? Why not sabotage the mission before? It doesn’t make any sense.”

She shook her head numbly. She tasted the coffee; it was strong and bitter—like the anger rising in her. “I’ve no idea at all. You’re right—it’s senseless.”

The sun was hardly a diameter above the horizon and the clouds writhed with a red conflagration. The window was open a crack to feed the coal fire and her hair was blowing gently in the draft from it; she had kept vigil at the window since the first moment of dawn.

At the hangar she saw Pappy Johnson and Calhoun talking about something with expressive gestures; there had been some trouble with one of the De Havillands yesterday.

Baron Oleg arrived in the Ready Room, nodded to Spaight and crossed the room to peer out over Irina’s shoulder. The gate was still closed, the sentries walked their posts, the road beyond was empty.

Oleg said, “The Finnish government is not prepared to have us camp here for the duration of the war. If Alex is safe he will find his way to us. We cannot wait here forever for him. We are an acute embarrassment to the Finns now.”

She put her back to him and resumed her watch on the road. “I’m not leaving, Oleg.”

“You will have to.”

“He expects us to wait for him. He may be wounded. He can’t come here exhausted and perhaps badly hurt and find this place deserted—no one could be expected to take that much.”

Her father came downstairs; she heard his tread and recognized it. Oleg said to him, “She refuses to come with us. You must talk to her.”

She turned, ready to defy her father; but he only shook his head. “If Irina has made up her mind it is no good my arguing with her.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I only wish the rest of us had as much room for hope as you seem to have, my daughter.”

But it was only the hem of hope to which she clung; reason quarreled with instinct and it was only by force of will that she enabled instinct to prevail. She saw the men carrying the luggage out to the aircraft—the suitcases that contained their preciously preserved Imperial uniforms, the documents of a Liberation that was not to be, the mocking relics of their failure. Still she did not stir from her post by the window.

A eleven o’clock her father came downstairs again, treading heavily; she saw he carried her own valises.

“I packed for you. In case you should change your mind. It is not meant as an inducement.”

He looked strange. It struck her it was the first time in her life she’d ever seen him carrying suitcases. There had always been servants.

He put them down near the door and rammed his hands in his pockets; he looked uncertain. She said, “What now, father?”

“For me? Nothing. Our lives are over. We have had our chance and lost it. We shall go back to our neutral villas and play at our meaningless pastimes. There is nothing else.”

At eleven-fifteen there was a report somewhere in the building—a crash or perhaps a gunshot—and Spaight ran from the room in alarm to seek its source. He returned shortly thereafter.

“It’s Baron Zimovoi. He’s shot himself.”

Prince Leon shot upright in his chair. “My God. Is there a doctor?”

“There’s no need for a doctor,” Spaight said quietly. His puzzled eyes rode around to Irina and she read the question in them: Was it because he was the traitor? Did he kill himself out of guilt?

The takeoff was delayed—fifteen minutes, then a half hour, then more—while they disputed the disposition of Oleg’s body. Finally it was Spaight who decided it:

“We’ll take him with us in the cargo compartment of one of the planes. We’ll have to. The ground is frozen here—he can’t be buried.” Lame inanities and gruesome horrors were the subjects their tongues touched but these were in keeping with the day; Oleg’s suicide seemed fitting.

13.

She watched them trail dispiritedly toward the waiting De Havillands. Her father took his leave of her. Prince Michael hobbled out ahead and some of the others waited to help him into the airplane. Cosgrove went blindly along behind—he seemed even more benumbed than the others by the sudden collapse of the enterprise.

The two Americans were last out of the building. They stopped, flanking her, and Buckner looked out toward the empty road while Spaight put his kind eyes on her face and reached out to squeeze her hand.

Buckner said, “It was a fine dream while it lasted.”

“It was more than a dream for a while,” Spaight said.

“Maybe. But that’s all it’ll be from now on—a badly remembered one.”

That was when she saw the faintest movement in the mists far out along the road.

It was a Finnish ambulance. The breath caught in her sucking throat like a handsaw jamming in wet wood.

The ambulance halted at the gate and there was the tedious ritual of idents and clearances and then the gate swung open and the white van rolled forward. She tried to see through the windshield.

Then it stopped forty feet away and the door opened and Alex stepped out.

He waved and turned to help Sergei down; Sergei had a bulky white bandage about his shoulder. The stretcher bearers carried a third man out of the ambulance on a litter.

Alex said something to Sergei and then came away from him.

Irina walked blindly into his arms. Her fingers raked the back of his coat and the tears burst from her beyond control.

14.

“Are you hurt….”

“I’m all right.” There wasn’t much life in his voice but he hadn’t been injured.

Spaight and Buckner crowded around. “What happened?” Faintly she was aware of Prince Leon hurrying forward, hobbling.

“We had to fight our way out. Most of us didn’t make it. We were strafed on the lake—we had to lie low under the dashboard until the pilot was convinced we were all dead. If he’d blown the fuel tank we’d all have gone up. We couldn’t move until after dark.”

Spaight said, “Someone’s got a lot to answer for.”

Prince Leon reached them; pressed past her and pulled Spaight out of the way and embraced Alex. Tears were frozen on Leon’s face.

But Alex’s face was changing. Muscles stood ridged at his jaw hinges and the bones at brow and cheek became harder, more prominent. With gentle pressure he thrust Leon aside.

“We heard it on the radio in the Finnish border camp,” he said. “The news from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on Hawaii. The broadcast must have come just when Felix was taking off.”

John Spaight’s head rocked back. “What?”

Glenn Buckner’s face had closed up abruptly—like a blind pulled down over a window. “Is that right? The Japs attacked Pearl?”

Prince Leon said, “I don’t—”

Buckner was still talking very fast. “It means you’ll have a job to go back to, Alex. With your combat experience they’ll need you bad. You’ve got a hell of a future with….”

“You bloodless bastard,” Alex whispered.

Buckner showed his alarm: wild white rings showed around his eyes. “Look—I’m in the war now…. My country is…. I had to make the decision, don’t you see that? Maybe if the Reds hadn’t counterattacked last week it would have been different…. But Stalin’s going to hold them now, anybody can see that—he’ll be able to buy us the time we need. We couldn’t risk rocking the boat. You can see that. For God’s sake I had my orders, Alex….”

Alex’s arm shot forward, palm up. He hooked his fingers deep into the American’s flared nostrils and pulled him forward. He didn’t hit at Buckner’s face. He hit through and beyond it and it crushed the nose flat against the bones and all but snapped Buckner’s head off his neck and then Alex was hammering Buckner’s mouth bloody with his fists until Buckner fell down and rolled away and came up with a revolver in his fist; but the blood was in Buckner’s eyes, he couldn’t see his opponent and Alex jumped him. The two men wrestled for the gun and she heard it when Alex broke the American’s finger in the trigger guard. Then the revolver came spinning away because Alex had no use for it—a gun was the wrong thing now; it had to be flesh on flesh for this. There was no damming the flood of it. When Buckner tried to get up Alex grasped the back of his head and hammered it down into the tarmac. Then he locked his fists together and she heard his inhuman roar when he struck the American at the base of the neck.

Alex stood up and waited for him to rise. Buckner came out of his wreckage crawling mindlessly, dragging himself in a blind circle, breathing in broken gasps, spitting teeth.

A throbbing vein stood out in Alex’s forehead. He braced himself to kick Buckner’s face.

John Spaight grasped him from behind—pinned his arms, locked a grip around Alex’s chest. “Stop it, Alex. It’s enough.”

The bullet slammed into Buckner with an awful deliberate precision of aim: dead center between the eyes.

She turned and saw Prince Leon drop the gun back to the frozen ground from which he’d picked it up.

15.

She heard Spaight talking softly—it was Pappy Johnson he was talking to. Pappy was out of breath from his run. “Wrap him up,” Spaight said, “and put him with the Baron.”

She felt herself sag and suddenly Alex was there, holding her. She half-heard Spaight:

“He had to keep it secret from the rest of us—his own twisted reasons but they make a horrible kind of sense. If you people had known it was the Americans who’d blown you, you’d have told the world.”

Alex turned; he almost lost his balance. “Were you in on this, John?”

“No. For God’s sake—what do you think of me?”

“He’s telling the truth,” she said.

Alex dipped his head groggily. “Buckner must have had Vassily killed. I guess he wanted to work with an Americanized Russian—someone he thought he could control. Me. Then he had somebody shoot at me in Boston—shoot to miss. That was to throw suspicion off but the next one wasn’t. The one in Scotland. That was to scare me, make me think my life was in danger—he thought I’d tell him the plan then.” He looked at Spaight then. “There’s something worse than any of that. We don’t know if it was his own initiative—or if he had orders to do it the way he did it.”

Spaight’s face went wide and then crumpled when the impact reached him. “Sweet sweet Jesus.”

Under the thin noon sun she watched the airplanes lift off into the cold sky. The guns murmured on the Russian front. She felt the pressure of Alex’s hands on her shoulders. They stood utterly alone on the runway. She leaned back against him and let him take her weight.

“What are we going to do?”

He said, “I don’t know.”