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.
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Now, though, all that dreary waiting was going to pay off.
The door creaked open behind him. Olga, her blue eyes aglow with excitement, stepped onto the back porch. Yermilov relished the split-second transition of her lovely face from anticipation to confusion to terror as he turned to face her. Before she could scream Yermilov stepped into her, pulling her body to his with his left arm and pressing the knife to her ivory skinned throat with his right hand. He propelled her back into the house. Keeping the knife to her throat, he used his left hand to pull the door quietly shut behind him.
“Don’t worry, Your Highness,” Yermilov whispered, grinning. “You’re going to get what you came for all the same, scream or struggle, though, and I’m afraid I’ll have to cut it short; then maybe I’ll go looking upstairs to finish. Nod if you understand.”
Olga, lips quivering, tears streaming down her face, nodded jerkily.
“Good girl, now into that bathroom,” he said. “And lock the door behind us, I’d hate to be interrupted.”
Ignoring the threat of falling on his ass, Chekov sprinted up the icy steps to the front door of Freedom House and into the mansion. Inside, he heard nothing at first, then faint sobbing from down the hall. Treading as lightly as possible, Chekov strode down the hall to the dining room where once he’d caught Dostovalov with Olga.
Rounding the corner, he found not his friend and Olga en flagrante delicto, but Tatiana, standing with her arms around Olga. Olga sat in an upholstered chair, her face in her hands, shoulders shakings, the small, quiet noises of a wounded animal issuing from her throat at irregular intervals.
“What happened?” Chekov said, his eyes wide. “My God, Anton didn’t—”
“No,” Olga choked out. “Anton wasn’t here. It was the ugly one, with the beard and the crooked teeth.”
“Yermilov,” Chekov said.
“He’s still outside,” Olga said. “He said his friends are coming back for theirs, and if I don’t let them, he said they’ll do the same to all of us and kill Papa, Alexei, and the rest.”
Olga took a deep breath, and curled into herself, her teeth clenched, holding back a wail.
Tatiana let go of her sister, and with quick, decisive movements opened a drawer in a nearby cabinet and withdrew a large carving knife. Chekov stepped in front of her and grabbed her wrist.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Tatiana regarded him with eyes that might have been chips of gray ice for all the warmth they held.
“I’m going to kill him,” she said. “Or he’s going to kill me.”
With a deft move, Chekov wrenched the knife from Tatiana’s hand and put it on the table. She reached for it again, but he put a restraining hand on her shoulder and shook her once firmly.
“No, you’re not going to kill anyone,” Chekov said, drawing his bayonet. “I am. Listen carefully; all either of you know is that you heard a crash and someone yelling. Yermilov shouting drunkenly, and then I came in and fought him off. Unfortunately, I had to kill him because he wouldn’t stop.”
“What if he kills you?” Tatiana asked.
“Then do the best you can,” Chekov said, already on his way to the door.
Chekov flung the door open and dove out into the frosty night, leaving the door swinging wildly behind him. Yermilov turned at the sound, his face twisted with contempt.
“Cunt, I told you to wait in—”
The rapist’s eyes widened at the sight of Chekov, bayonet in hand, death in his eyes, charging him. He tried to bring his rifle to bear, but the small, wiry veteran was far too quick, the distance between them too short. The steel tip of Chekov’s bayonet penetrated through uniform cloth, flesh, and sinew into Yermilov’s very bowels.
Yermilov’s hands clenched reflexively and the air rang with the crack-thwit-shhing report of his rifle as he fired, the bullet ricocheting uselessly off the stone steps of Freedom House. Chekov bore the bigger man to the ground, throwing all his weight behind the seventeen inches of steel lodged in Yermilov’s belly.
“Drop your rifle, Yermilov!” Chekov shouted into the still night air as he dragged the bayonet around inside the wound, then pulled it out and stabbed again. Warm, dark, almost black blood coated his hand and spurted up onto his uniform, it instantly began to congeal into a gory slush.
“Don’t make me do this, Yermilov!” Chekov said, and he withdrew and plunged the blade into Yermilov’s guts a third time, angling up, under his rib cage. The man’s eyes rolled back in his skull, he gave a gurgling gasp, jerked spasmodically three times, then lay still.
Chekov stood, his bayonet coming free of Yermilov’s destroyed abdomen with a slurping noise. He looked around as he took several ragged breaths. In the doorway of Freedom House Tatiana stood, looking upon the scene, her eyes calm and clear, her back straight. Her face might have been carved from marble.
As his heart rate declined, something occurred to Chekov he hadn’t thought about since finding out that Yermilov had raped Olga.
If Anton isn’t here, where the hell is he?
As the question spiked his heart rate once again, he noted a splash of blood on the snow on the steps, too high up to have been Yermilov’s. Scanning about rapidly it took mere seconds for him to recognize two sets of foot-prints and a large drag mark leading west, toward the waterfront.
Fuck, no, no, no.
Chekov wiped his bayonet clean on the skirt of his coat, sheathed it, slung his rifle and picked up Yermilov’s. He worked the bolt of the Model 1891, ejected the spent case and chambered a live round, then handed it to Tatiana, who took it with a quizzical look.
“I think they dragged off Dostovalov when he came to see Olga,” Chekov said, pointing to the wide trench in the snow flanked by two sets of boot prints. “I have to go after them. Wake everyone. The rifle is just in case Yermilov’s cronies get back before Kobylinsky gets more guards here.”
Tatiana nodded. Behind her light spilled into the hall, and Pierre Gilliard’s disheveled form emerged from the bedroom closest the dining room, followed shortly thereafter by other forms, male and female in their dressing gowns.
“Thank you, Sergei Arkadyevich,” Tatiana said, gravely.
Chekov shook his head, took his rifle in both hands and sprinted west as fast as his legs would carry him, praying he wasn’t too late.
Chilk-chilk-chilk
A cloud of relentless pain filled Dostovalov’s head as consciousness returned. The throbbing in his skull was quickly accompanied by sharper jets of agony radiating from his ruined nose and upper gums. His nerves inundated his foggy mind with further reports of damage and discomfort; he was lying on his face in the freezing snow and tightly bound with twine around his wrists and ankles that had cut off circulation to his hands and feet.
Chilk-chilk-chilk
“This ice is too fucking thick,” a dull voice complained from Dostovalov’s left. “Yermilov will have bored the girl out like a howitzer by the time we’re done here.”
Olga!
Dostovalov opened his eyes and rolled onto his side. He was lying on the riverbank in thick snow turned red and pink by his own blood and melted into slush by his body heat. Yermilov’s two cronies were poking away at the river ice with their bayonets. Dostovalov struggled against his bonds, pulling so mightily that the twine cut into his wrists, and blood fell in rivulets over his clenched fists. He coughed involuntarily, spewing out a sludge of his own blood, snot and snow that had invaded his mouth and misshapen nostrils.