The Romanov succession

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.