Pointing to the door on the left, Kostyshakov said, “Please go through that door and wait until our business is finished here. Don’t wander; there is a German guard and, to me, he looked a little trigger happy.”
After Dragomirov had left, Kostyshakov called for the next interviewee. The German at the door bellowed out, “Mokrenko? Rostislav Alexandrovich Mokrenko, report! Podkhorunzhy Rostislav Alexandrovich Mokrenko, report!”
Mokrenko entered, then stopped short as he took in the red walls and redder slogans. Drawing himself to his full height of five feet, eleven inches, Mokrenko cast a disgusted eye in the direction of Kaledin and spat, then demanded, “What is this shit?” he asked. “I’ll have nothing to do with it!”
Kostyshakov pointed to the other door and said, “Get out, then, Tsarist swine, and wait.”
“He was one of the ones mentioned by Dragomirov as being an incorrigible Tsarist,” said Sergeant Berens, after the door had slammed behind Mokrenko. Berens was the one who had been detailed to act as secretary.
“I wish they would all be as easy as these two but, of course, they won’t.”
“I know Mokrenko,” said Kaledin, wearing the good-natured grin that rarely left his face. “Good man. I can hardly wait until we tell him the truth.”
“He looks rather thin,” said Basanets, himself half emaciated.
“We’ll put some meat on their bones with a better diet and some exercise,” Kostyshakov answered.
Corporal Vasenkov, young, slender, and prematurely balding, was by no means an idiot. He knew one of the officers of the supposed Soviet, Captain Cherimisov, and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no possible universe in which the captain could ever be anything but a fanatical Tsarist.
As he walked to report to the “Soviet,” Vasenkov also thought, And Cherimisov is also not sneaky enough to infiltrate anything like this supposed “soviet.” That means this is all bullshit; they’re looking only to separate out revolutionaries from reactionaries. So where would a good communist like myself belong? In with the reactionaries, to sabotage them. Therefore:
“Corporal Vasenkov reports, Sir. But save your breath; I want nothing to do with you stinking communist scum.”
It was a weary group of Russians, Cossacks, and Finns who finally repaired themselves to the quarters the Germans had set aside for them. Of the sixty-seven interviews they’d conducted they’d had to reject forty-six. The twenty-one they’d accepted—Mokrenko plus all those sent after him through the door on the right—had identified between them another forty-one reliable enlisted men, and all of those were, even now, on their way to a tented holding camp before being moved, en masse, to their penultimate destination, a camp—code named “Budapest”—being put together in the hills about seven miles west-northwest of Jambol, Bulgaria.
And, thought Kostyshakov, with something analogous to weary despair, we’ve still got to hit the camps at Doeberitz, Skalmierschustz, Stalkovo, Hammerstein, Muenster, Tuchel, Koenigstein, and Czersk. There’s no way to do this with one board. I’m going to have to split the board into three and trust Basanets, Cherimisov, and Dratvin. They can hit three each over the next four or five days. But I’ve got to get to Camp Budapest and come up with a table of organization and a doctrine. I can only hope that my quartermaster and his German escort are taking everything that isn’t nailed down.
Railroad, between Ingolstadt and Munich
In a happier time, in a higher-class carriage, it would have been called “The Orient Express.” As it was, it was just another second-class carriage on overworked rail lines. Brinkmann, having left Kostyshakov’s rat-faced quartermaster, Romeyko, in the care of an experienced Feldwebel of supply, along with half a dozen armed guards and a corporal to oversee them, was travelling with Kostyshakov to Camp Budapest. It was about a sixty-hour journey, normally, but closer to seventy-two or even ninety-six, now, what with the exigencies of war. The steady clacking of the wheels might have put either man to sleep, but they had both resisted that siren’s call, so far.
Kostyshakov noticed that Brinkmann had a cane trapped between one leg and the wall of the carriage they rode in. He considered asking about it, but some people were sensitive to reminders that they’d lost something with their wounds, so Daniil decided to let it be.
While fighting off that call to sleep, Daniil still closed his eyes, tightly, picturing a group of soldiers bursting in with single shot, bolt action rifles, bayonets fixed, having their one shot at something—Ah, but it’s probably too dark even to tell—and then going forward with cold steel, even while the enemy shot down their prisoners whom they knew the positions of better than did the rescuers.
All right, we need a way to both temporarily blind the guards, while not blinding ourselves, then a way to light up the scene for ourselves, after they’re blinded.
“It’s never been done before, you know,” Brinkmann said to Kostyshakov. “Everyone by now knows how to go into a tight space and kill everything that moves, but I can’t recall any serious instance where anyone went into a tight space and tried to avoid killing the bulk of the people that were in there, unarmed, while killing a few of those who were armed.”
“I know,” Daniil agreed, looking up from a notepad on which he’d been scribbling intermittently but furiously. “And I’m trying to puzzle through it from the perspective of organization, doctrine, training to execute the doctrine, weapons, communications…
“And I don’t really know what I’m doing, just as you suggest.
“I don’t even know how I’m getting there.”
“All will be made clear soon,” Brinkmann assured him. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got? I may be of use.”
Kostyshakov agreed, “Indeed, why not?”
With a sigh, he began to lay out what he’d figured out of the problem, so far. “In the first place, while they could be on a boat, or a train, or a tent, or in a series of caves, the odds are overwhelming that, when we find them, they will be in a guarded building.”
The German nodded sagely. “Correct, so far, I think. A guarded building—or maybe a compound—would be the way I would bet it.”
Daniil continued, “Okay… good… the building, it will be either lit or it will be dark. If at all possible, we’d probably prefer it to be dark, or, at least, we would if we could see and the guards could not.
“I think I have a way to do that. We can use photographer’s flash powder and replace most of the explosive in hand grenades with it. Might even want to use our army’s tear gas grenades, as being better for dispensing powder. We’ll know the grenades are going to go off—at least after it’s announced, we will—and can shield our eyes. That however…”
“Still leaves the problem,” Brinkmann said, “of how you see to shoot after the flash is gone. Even if you’ve flash-blinded their eyes, you are just as blind as they are. I may have a way.”
“Really?”
“Yes. We make a kind of electric torch—it’s a flattened cylinder with a dynamo in it—that you wear on your chest. It has a ring on a chain that you pull and get, oh, maybe five seconds of fair directional light. Five seconds in combat is a long time.”
“Can we…?”
“I’ll wire my Feldwebel escorting your Captain Romeyko to lay in a supply. But how many do you need?”