“She’s going to have to be carried out of the house,” said Turgenev. “She’s alleged to be weak, sickly, and is generally bed ridden. She is usually in a wheelchair when she’s not in bed.”
“Crap,” said Daniil. “That means we can’t take her out one of the upper story windows, so we’re going to have to secure the main floor, as well. How many guard did you say were in the building?”
“We think about a hundred in each of the basements of the two buildings, sir. You would think we could be more accurate than that but we can’t. They’re not disciplined enough to be able to count those on duty and multiply for the number off duty. The town is full of discharged soldiers, half of them or more armed and still wearing uniforms and we can’t be sure which is which. They’re as poor on insignia as on discipline. We can’t count the number of squatting holes and multiply by eight because they have a little problem of shitting anywhere. Same with urinals. They tend to eat down in their basements, too, so we can’t count them at meals.”
“I’m beginning to think I should have listened to that soldier about poison gas,” Daniil muttered.
“What was that, sir?” asked Turgenev.
“Nothing important; never mind.”
“We did bring something that might be useful, sir,” Mokrenko said.
“What’s that?”
Turgenev smiled. “With the information from our little spy we were able to assemble floor plans, very accurate for the Governor’s House, maybe a little less so for the Kornilov House, for all the above ground floors. She was willing to go to the basements but I told her not to, too dangerous for a young lady and ours has already had problems enough.”
“Good,” said Daniil, “very good. We can use them to lay out a rehearsal…”
“No need, sir,” Turgenev said. “In the sleigh? All that rope and cord? Roll it out. Wherever there’s a loop drive in a stake and make it a ninety degree angle. That’s the layout of both floors of both houses. There is one important exception, accuracy-wise. The walls are about two arshini thick, to include the interior walls, except where there are windows and doors. Nobody will be shooting through those with anything smaller than a cannon.”
The lieutenant reached into his coat and extracted a small sheaf of papers and photographs. Handing them over, he said, “These are the codes for the cord diagrams, plus a layout of the town, and pictures of everything important in it. Also a scale of how long to get to what seemed to me the obvious target areas from the safe house and warehouses we’ve rented.”
Daniil immediately started thumbing through them. “You know, Maxim, I’d had my doubts about sending you, a mainly Military Intelligence type, to lead this mission. I was wrong.”
“Thank you, sir. The sergeant deserves as much or more credit. One other thing, sir?”
“Yes?”
“I think you and the company commanders, as well as the Fourth Company platoon leaders, ought look at the town, personally.”
“I don’t disagree. But we’d probably stand out a bit.”
“No, you won’t, sir,” said Mokrenko. “Wear army uniforms without insignia. Dirty them. Don’t bathe for a while or go roll in pig shit. Put some dirt on your faces. Address each other as comrade or first name and patronymic and no one will look twice. Like the lieutenant said, we have a safe house you can use, though I think the warehouse by the river docks would be better.”
“I can take Fourth Company’s officers with me now plus the commander of Second Company. Will the sleigh take us all?”
“Sure, sir,” Mokrenko replied. “These little Yakut horses are plenty strong enough for that.”
“Then let me round them up. We’ll leave within the hour.”
Tobolsk
It was brightly moonlit when Turgenev and Mokrenko returned to the safe house, with their five passengers, Kostyshakov, Dratvin, short, dark, and stocky, plus Cherimisov, Collan, and Molchalin, the latter of whom rarely spoke much. Back at the landing zone for the zeppelin, the rest of the force went through clearing drills under their senior noncoms.
For the five of them, Kostyshakov had decided, the safe house would invite less commentary from the neighbors than the five of them, alone, would, in an otherwise empty warehouse. With the passengers covered by a tarp, just before they entered the city proper, Mokrenko drove up Ulitsa Slesarnaya, then turned left on Yershova, and left again to enter the frozen way leading to the back yard of the safe house.
They found Natalya waiting for them. After bowing and curtseying for the presumptively august personage of their commander, she launched into what amounted to a panic-driven tirade, though the object of the tirade were the Bolsheviks.
“Since you’ve been gone,” she exclaimed, “another two hundred and fifty Bolsheviks have shown up from Omsk!” She pointed, frantically. “Right over there; across the intersection! Another group of fifty red fanatics has come from Tyumen! Supposedly another four hundred and fifty are coming from Yekaterinburg! And there’s rumor that another group is coming all the way from Moscow or, at least, at Moscow’s direction, to take the royal family elsewhere!”
Kostyshakov spoke, first taking the girl’s hand, “That’s fine. Natalya, isn’t it? The lieutenant and the sergeant have told me of your good work. We can deal with these, though it may be a little harder and bloodier than we hoped. Do you know where these new troops are staying? Do you know when the other four hundred and fifty are coming?”
“I don’t know about that four hundred and fifty,” she said. “As for the Omsk men, they’re at the Girls’ School.” Again, she pointed, “Right. Over. There. I don’t know about the other two groups. I do know that the Omsk men and the royal family’s guards are talking about cooperating to get rid of the Tyumen lot.”
“Where do rumors come from,” Kostyshakov asked, “in a place cut off by snow and ice?”
“Telegraph office,” was Turgenev’s immediate reply.
“Right. Now can we bribe or threaten them into revealing who is coming, when?”
“Bribe, I think,” said Sarnof. “Maybe a couple of hundred gold rubles to the head of the office to get the information. Although, it might, you know, be less suspicious if I took him to lunch again, one telegrapher to another.”
“Right,” agreed Daniil, again. “We’ll go with Option B. But bring enough gold with you if that doesn’t work.”
“Yes, sir. First thing in the morning… well, I’ll make the offer first thing in the morning. I trust the chief of the station, to a degree, but am far less sure of his underlings.”
“Now, the objectives. Tentatively, I want to send one company to take care of the Omsk detachment, less than one to secure a perimeter around both houses, one platoon to take care of the Tyumen lot, and one platoon from Fourth Company for each of the two houses.”
Turning to Turgenev, he asked, “Anything sound inherently unworkable to that?”
“No, sir, on the face of it it sounds workable.”
“Sir,” asked Shukhov, the engineer, “if there’s a small target I could conceivably rig a bomb to take the whole building out. Assuming, of course, you brought enough explosive in the zeppelin. For myself, all I’ve got left is enough to do a thorough job on the telegraph line.”
Mokrenko interjected, “Sir, while we’ve maybe enough to take on Omsk and Tyumen, plus rescue the family, we don’t have enough to take on the Yekaterinburg mob, too. What if they’re here tomorrow? What if they’re here tomorrow along with those sods sent by Moscow?”