The Romanov succession

He’d done eating and got into his second cup of coffee when Spaight stumbled groggily into the kitchen, suffering badly from the change in time. “Christ I feel like a quart hangover. I woke up trying to scrape the moss off my tongue. How you making it this morning?”

“Feeling no pain,” Alex lied. “Sit down and revive yourself on some of Sergei’s coffee.”

The cup was almost engulfed by Sergei’s huge hand when he set it down. Then he put his grave eyes on Alex. “Will there be soldierly duties for me as well, my general?”

Sergei was overage and overweight but he had lived his entire life for the single purpose of soldiering for Russia. Alex said, “You’ll fight with us, Sergei. We couldn’t do it without you.”

Sergei went back to the frypan beaming.

“John, I’m going to handpick you a parachute company. You’re going to have to equip them and train them for jumping.”

Spaight shot a quick warning glance to his left.

Alex said, “I’ve trusted Sergei many times with my life and he’s trusted me with his. You might listen when Sergei speaks-the British Expeditionary Force awarded him a DSM in the Ukraine.”

The Distinguished Service Medal was a citation the English didn’t take lightly. Spaight showed his surprise and then nodded. Sergei happily served up his eggs and ham-sliced bacon.

Alex said, “The heavier things are coming by convoy. Transports have a way of ending up in the Atlantic trench. It’s going to be another of your jobs to keep leaning on Glenn Buckner to deliver the goods we need-regardless of U-boats.”

“Tall order,” Spaight remarked. “What else?”

“You’ll be in overall command of training.”

Spaight pushed his empty plate away and swallowed the last mouthful. “Okay. Now you can tell me what I’m training them for.”

“Paratroop commando tactics. The same drill we had at Bliss.”

“Uh-huh. With the two of us trading places. I’ve already said that’s all right with me-but I’d still like to know what kind of operation I’m preparing them for.”

“Just teach them to jump out of those Dakotas. The men have seen their share of combat in Finland-you won’t have to teach them a damned thing about handling rifles or digging holes or maintaining battle discipline.”

“That’ll speed things up. My God the times at Bliss I’d have given my left nut for a training cadre that had any kind of combat experience at all. Do you have any idea how much of a godsend you were to my command, Alex?”

“You’ve seen combat,” Alex pointed out.

“Twenty-three years ago in French mud. That wasn’t combat, that was a screwed-up slaughterhouse in the trenches.”

“I’ve seen your combat record.”

“Where the hell did you turn that rock over?”

Alex said, “You took a patrol a hundred miles inside German-occupied territory on an armed reconnaissance. You came back through the lines with four German colonels and one of the Kaiser’s major-generals for prisoner interrogation-and you didn’t lose a single man. That’s what I want you to train these paratroops for. That mission all over again. To get to the objective without being seen or shot at. To attain the objective without fuss and without noise.”

“Son-if I can call a major general son-that was a nice quiet little farmhouse in the Rhine country that the Boche were using for a rear-echelon officers’ billet. Like this house here. We had to put knives in half a dozen sentries just before dawn and that was all there was to it-we caught the brass hats with their pants down standing in line waiting for the latrine. That ain’t exactly the same idea as walking into the Russian goddamned Kremlin.”

“We’re not going into the Kremlin,” Alex said.

Spaight grinned. “Aha. That’s piece number one of the puzzle.”

At seven he finished reading over the document he had spent odd moments of the past week writing. It consisted of nineteen pages of neat Cyrillic script. He folded it in thirds and sealed it in a buff-colored envelope and went in search of Sergei.

He found the old soldier cleaning a Mannlicher rifle. The tiny bedroom stank of solvent and oil. The square of newspaper on the floor was a repository for cloth patches that had come off the ramrod with star-shaped stains of tawny oil; the weapon hadn’t been dirty but Sergei had carried it around the world with him for twenty-six years and the reason he could still rely on it was that he hadn’t taken it for granted. It looked like a venerable antique but by now it was part of Sergei’s arm and he could put a bullet from it into a moving head at five hundred meters.

Sergei’s big face was the texture of old rubber that had dried and gone cracked-grey in a desert sun. Tension made him flick his tongue across his lips. “I shall be the eyes in the back of your head then.”

“You understand how it must be done.”

“I must not kill him. If he tries to assassinate you…”

“When, not if. They won’t give it up now.”

“When he tries to assassinate you I am to shoot him where it will not kill him.”

“You understand why, Sergei?”

“Of course. We must find out from him who has employed him.”