The Romanov Rescue
- Автор: Кратман Том, Watson Justin
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Baen
- ISBN: 978-1-9821-2570-7
- Жанр: Альтернативная история
Электронная книга - «The Romanov Rescue». Краткое содержание книги:
As WWI comes to a close a German general, an escaped prisoner of war, and the crew of an airship converge to effect THE ROMANOV RESCUE. Can there be a world without communism?
Mankind’s history is bound up in the fabric of fate, a strong cloth, tough and closely woven.
It is the beginning of 1918, the last year of the greatest war in human history, to date. All the belligerents stagger on their feet. Starvation is an ever present reality, while disease waits in the wings. In Russia, no longer a belligerent but, instead, rapidly descending into civil war and chaos, a lone family—Father, Mother, four beautiful young girls, and a brave but sickly boy—await their own fate, shivering and hungry in the dark, hoping and praying for salvation.
Their relatives in England have turned their backs. The guards set over them do little but torment them. They look Heavenward, but God doesn’t answer. They know they’re a threat to the new regime, a threat that will, in time, be eliminated.
But even the strongest fabric has flaws. An escaped prisoner of war, caught, injured, and punished, but still highly capable, might be one. An airship, returned and at loose ends after a failed mission to Africa might be another. A German general, taking a wrong turn on his nightly walk and suddenly coming face to face with the reality of the monster rising in the east, would be a third.
Follow, then, as the general gives the orders, the prisoner of war raises the men from among his fellows, and the airship launches itself forward, to contest fate, to tear the fabric of time, and to effect The Romanov Rescue.
About the Carrera series:
Tom Kratman
Justin Watson
Kacey Ezell
THE ROMANOV RESCUE
For: OTMAA
Map
The Governor’s House
PART I
Chapter One
Fort IX, Ingolstadt, Bavaria
Guards Captain Daniil Edvardovich Kostyshakov, late of His Imperial Majesty’s Kexholm Guards Regiment, shivered uncontrollably in a slight depression on Fort IX’s forward glacis. It was a fine thing that the depression was slight, because Kostyshakov, himself, was fairly short.
And this is one of those rare occasions when I wish I were shorter still.
The walls of the cells were wet and slimy, with mold growing in the corners. As with many places where large numbers of men are held against their will, the place had an aura of misery and despair about it, greater than the mold and the slime, alone, could account for.
Fort IX was the prison camp for the hardest of cases, the worst of the repeat escapees. As such, since determination and courage know no nationality, it was at the moment, or had been in recent memory, stuffed with Brits and French, Russians and Italians, the odd Belgian from time to time, and whosoever else had found themselves the unwilling guests of the Kaiser and had tried repeatedly to remedy that situation.
Sitting south of the city of Ingolstadt, and just about five hundred meters southwest of the small town of Oberstimm, Fort IX, a polygonal fort, was an old outwork of the defenses of the town, which were also, in practice, the defenses of the Bavarian capital of Munich. It was built of a mix of concrete and granite, with no small amount or wood and iron where called for, the whole overladen with about ten meters of damp earth and surrounded by a massive, water-filled moat to the south, east, and west, and a much narrower one to the north.
It wasn’t the sort of place anyone would want to spend the holidays. That said, if it was hell for a Briton or Frenchman or Russian, in 1917, it had been home to generations of German soldiers in the decades before that.
The cells for the prisoners were tunnel-shaped, with curved roofs, and measuring about twenty-six feet by fifteen. The tunnel shape, an almost perfect half circle, made it impossible for anyone of normal height to stand upright except toward the center where the roof was highest. The normal complement of a room was six officers, and normally it would contain six beds, a table, plus a few chairs. Sometimes numbers within a cell fluctuated. In these cases, the guards were careful to remove the wooden beds, or any chairs excess to need. Failure to do so was a guarantee of the excess furniture being turned into firewood to warm the otherwise damp and miserable cells.
Because Fort IX had not been designed as a prison, but as a defense, the cells were connected, each to the two to either side of it, by narrow passageways. These the guards had long since boarded up. The board barriers had, too, long since been compromised by the prisoners, with enough boards being made detachable to allow a man to squeeze through, and the job being done precisely enough to allow the boards to be replaced again, quickly, with nothing seeming amiss.
The German guard known to the prisoners as “Blue Boy” quickly counted heads in Room Forty-three. He knew all the prisoners’ faces by sight, in the open air, but in the dim light available at night in the prison cell, the best he could do was by size and shape.
“Blue Boy” called off the names of this cell, “Le Long?” “Here.” “La Croix?” “Here.” “De Robierre?” “Here.” “Moretti?” “Here.” “De Gaulle?” “Here.” “Desseaux?” “Here.”
Then “Blue Boy” reported to his chief, whom the prisoners referred to as “Abel,” “All present, Herr Feldwebel.”
The cell was then locked and the two Germans moved on to the next.
The prisoners had had much time to practice for this. It never took less than six seconds for the Germans to get to the next cell, and never longer than eight.
Thus, in order of event:
Second one: Le Long ripped the coats hanging in front of the wooden block to the passageway and moved them to one of the beds.
Seconds two, three and four, De Robiere, with an expertise born of much rehearsal, pulled off the cut-out section of the wooden barrier. Moretti, who trended rather short, used the first four seconds to position himself while pulling on a dark green coat—it was originally in what was called “horizon blue,” but had been dyed—the next two seconds to launch himself through the gap revealed by the removal of the boards, and the last to get in position with the occupants of the other room, Room Forty-four. There were five men in the room, and six beds. Moretti made the sixth. He just stood to as the door opened.
Again “Blue Boy” made his roll call. “Lustianseff?”
“Here,” answered Lustianseff.
“Kotcheskoff?”
“Here,” answered Kotcheskoff.
“Kostyshakov?”
“Here,” answered Moretti.
“All present, Herr Feldwebel.”
Before crawling out into the glacis, Daniil had waited in a basket full of dirty clothes, sitting in one corner of the fort’s eastern half, waiting to be taken to laundry. It was fortunate he was short, there, too, as, in the first place, the basket was already pretty full, and in the second, six or more hours in a not very large basket can give terrible cramps to the legs.
Indeed, it had been both a blessing and a horrible agony to finally emerge from the basket, with agonizing shooting pains overwhelming his legs as feeling returned to them.
From the basket, once Daniil was able to move his legs without wanting to scream, he’d moved to and then crawled up a ramp and then, after waiting for a sentry to pass, into the battlements atop the fort. Daniil had begun his mental count, once the guard passed, one… two… three… four…. Then he crossed and waited in the lee of the battlements for the guard to return and move off again. Five… six… forty-two… seventy-five… ninety…
At least, though, it had been tolerably warm there in the basket, thought Kostyshakov, with another spasm of shivering. I wish the moon would hurry up and go down, though I’d settle for a large bank of thick clouds.
Daniil didn’t have a huge amount in the way of escape equipment and supplies. He mentally inventoried his small stash. I’ve about three days’ worth of food, most of it anywhere from a little past to well past its prime. Along with the food there is a quantity of pepper. Since home has apparently collapsed, well, thank God for the generosity and largesse of the British and French prisoners, who have little enough of their own at the moment. But however little they’ve had, they’ve been generous, even so. He felt for the compass one of the British prisoners had managed to make him. Yes, it’s a crude compass, but crude is better than nothing.
All the prisoners shared any information they had—thin though it was—about the surrounding area; he also had a crude map derived from that limited information, plus a more general one of the way to Switzerland.
His coat had been modified by one of the French officers—he’d had a background in fashion—for rapid transformation into a German officer’s heavy wool coat. To his boots were glued pieces of cloth, to deaden the sound of walking. He likewise had a hat that might not pass close and careful scrutiny, as well as good, lined gloves of his own. He’d taken a double sewn blanket, light-colored, washed out gray on one side, green on the other. The blanket was now slung across his chest and over his shoulder. With two sides, it was for two purposes.