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:
“Would you? I’d feel terrible to die in this miserable place”—de Gaulle let his eyes roam over the damp walls for a bit—“with my promise unfulfilled.”
“You’ll be wanting your medals, too, I suppose, and your other personal things?”
“Please.”
“I’ll get them, along with a satchel for Tukhachevsky’s manuscript.”
Asked Hoffmann, “So what, my good Captains, is Tukhachevsky’s vision?”
“He sees a maelstrom,” said de Gaulle, “with columns of armored cavalry ignoring their flanks, their own rear, everything, to get at and destroy the enemy’s rear… or at least to force them to keep displacing.”
“Do you agree?”
“Not really,” Kostyshakov answered. “He’s never read your Clausewitz, so never grasped the idea of the culminating point. Unlike the cavalry of Tukhachevky’s vision, cavalry reliant on its sabers and able to feed its horses off the land, modern mechanized cavalry, as Tukhachevsky sees it, needs a mass of everything from ammunition to spare parts to fuel to replacement personnel if they’re to keep going. That’s the part he refuses to see. You can take some risks with your flanks, yes, but you ignore your enemy, and his independent will, at your peril.”
“So where do you see the future heading?”
“From what I’ve read in your journals, Herr General, I see the future being the infantry squad or platoon, built around the light machine gun, supported by masses of artillery with which it maintains continuous contact, via radio, with tanks leading, and led by a man full of willpower and determination.”
“Hmmm… interesting,” said Hoffmann.
It’s almost worth it, thought Daniil, as he passed out of the camp under the glaring eyes of Abel and Blue Boy, to have taken a stab to the buttocks to see the faces of those two as I leave, accompanied by one of their generals, with my medals on my chest. Almost worth it…
Zittau POW Camp, Zittau, Germany
The walls of the office were painted revolutionary red. From them hung banners proclaiming, “Death to the Tsar,” “Long live the rule of the Soviets,” “Lenin, Lead us into the Future,” and “Down with the Opiate of the Masses.”
Kostyshakov, now sans medals, likewise epaulettes, who had come up with the slogans and arranged for the room to be painted red, sat at a long table, flanked by six other pro-Tsarist officers and a like number of noncommissioned officers he’d hand selected and personally interviewed the day before. There were a few others, but they were off with Brinkmann and his assistants rounding up materiel.
The day promised to be a long and exhausting one. The Soviet, for thus they chose to call themselves for the nonce, had to interview, after all, some sixty-seven noncommissioned and enlisted candidates, today, and more in a different camp, on the morrow. These had been chosen by the commandant of the camp, working with one of Brinkmann’s underlings.
“Bring in the first one,” Kostyshakov ordered. Immediately the German Unteroffizier at the door called out, “Dragomirov; report to the Committee.”
From left to right, as they faced, the officers of the board consisted of Lieutenant Boris Baluyev, sporting a remarkably fierce moustache, Lieutenant Georgy Lesh, Captain Mikhail Basanets, Captain Daniil Kostyshakov, Captain Ivan Dratvin, Captain Pyotr Cherimisov, and Lieutenant Vilho Collan, a monarchist Finn, and thoroughly pale and blond as Finns are wont to be. Each man wore a clean Russian uniform with no rank insignia and no indicator of regiment, though all but the Finnish officer had come from the Guards. Only one had been known to Kostyshakov from his own regiment, Basanets. But Basanets had known Collan and Dratvin, Collan had known and vouched for Cherimisov, while Dratvin stood for Baluyev and Lesh. After personal interviews with Daniil, they’d been accepted, “with reservations.”
To the right of the Finn were one sergeant and two Zauryad-Praporshchiki, those being Sergeants Major Nenonen, another Finn, much taller than Collan but otherwise much alike, and Sergeant Major Pavel Blagov, who was missing a piece of his right ear, plus Podpraporshchik Mayevsky, wearing a piratical eyepatch. To the left of Lieutenant Baluyev sat Podpraporshchik Gorbachyov, as well as Sergeants Berens and Kaledin. The latter was a Don Cossack, dark of hair and eye, answering to “Filip,” and the only Cossack present on the board.
None of them wore any rank. They all looked terribly serious, too, enough so to make Dragomirov pause and stutter in his reporting. And then there were the slogans on the banners hung on the walls. Dragomirov almost missed that there was a chair awaiting him.
Well, what the fuck do I care about the tsar, after all? Dragomirov asked himself. If it gets me out of here, I’ll kiss Lenin’s figurative ass.
The interviewee saluted more or less properly, which the others ignored, announcing, “Mladshy unter-ofitser Dragomirov, reporting as ordered.” Mladshy unter-ofitser was a rank somewhere in the range of corporal or junior sergeant.
Kostyshakov said, “Saluting is a relic of the oppressive past, Comrade. We don’t indulge in it.” He then ordered Dragomirov to take the chair to his own right.
“Tell us, Comrade,” Daniil began, “How do you feel about the glorious workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ revolution now underway in the Motherland?”
“I’m all for it, Comrade,” Dragomirov answered. “Down with the blood-sucking tsar and all his evil brood.”
Kostyshakov pursed his lips and gave a serious and approving nod. Then he turned his head to his left, asking, “Comrade Basanets?”
Captain Mikhail Mikhailovich Basanets, easily the tallest man on the board, with dirty-blond hair and bright blue eyes, said, “Who was the greatest enemy of the people in your village, Comrade?”
That was a toughie for Dragomirov, since it was his family that owned most of the land and most exploited the peasants. But, needs must and all.
“My father, the swine. He squeezes the peasants like they were sponges!”
Basanets twisted his head to the left even as he nodded in approval. “Very good, Comrade. I have no other questions, Commissar Kostyshakov.”
Daniil looked to his right, inviting Captain Ivan Mikhailovich Dratvin to speak.
“Tell me, Comrade,” asked Dratvin, short, and dark, and built like a fireplug, “who here in the camp is most likely to support the revolution, and who remains a puppet of the tsar? Think hard, now, for this is important.”
After Dragomirov had given a dozen names of people he considered reliable to the revolution, and a couple who he claimed were “Tsarist hyenas,” Kostyshakov let two more of the board question him, which questioning went to his military record. Then he said, “I think we’ve all heard enough,” and asked for a consensus. Everyone on the board gave a literal thumbs up.
“Very good, Comrade Dragomirov,” Kostyshakov said. “It will be some time before all is in readiness—peace is being negotiated between the Germans and ourselves, even as we speak—so keep your health, don’t try to escape and risk being killed, and wait for the call to come to the defense of the revolution. Why, in a gesture of internationalist good spirits, the Germans are even segregating the Tsarists, the better to keep them from hindering the revolution.”