The Romanov succession

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.