Kostyshakov considered a number, cut that in half, and then cut it in half again and yet again. “Sixty? Eighty? I wouldn’t refuse two or three times that number.”
“Sixty should be possible,” Brinkmann agreed. “Maybe more but with the war on…”
“And the grenades and flash powder?”
Brinkmann waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, those are easy.”
“Wonderful. But then we have the problem of getting through doors. Some, of course, can be broken down by main effort, but some are going to be stout enough that a steel lock is weaker.”
“I cannot help you there,” the German replied. “I have no idea how to do it myself. Explosives?”
Daniil frowned, then said, “Would be fine except for the possibility of the odd tsar, grand duchess or crown prince on the other side.” He didn’t mention the tsarina because in both his opinion and the opinion of most Russians, putting her on the other side of an explosion could only be to the good. Okay, that was both unkind and unfair. Based on what I saw of her at the hospital, she’s mostly just out of place and shy.
“I can see that,” agreed Brinkmann. “And even if you had trained lockpicks, it would be very slow.”
“Too slow. And then we have the problem,” Kostyshakov continued, “of needing more and handier firepower in very close quarters.”
“Shotguns to simply blow locks apart and… well, I make no promise that I can get any, let alone many, but we have a new machine gun… a machine pistol, really… that’s very nice. It’s not light, mind you, and the range is quite limited, but it is handy and is excellent for taking someone down in a hurry at close range.”
“Limited range, for our purposes, would be fine,” Kostyshakov said.
“I’ll tell my man escorting Captain Romeyko about those then, too; that, and to order some.”
“There’s one other thing,” Kostyshakov asked, “Do we know for a certainty where the royal family is being held?”
“They were moved,” Brinkmann said, “from Tsarskoe Selo to possibly Tobolsk, arriving sometime in August of last year. The last we’ve heard, they’re still there. But we have also heard of other Romanovs being held in Yekaterinburg. It is possible that they’ve been moved. It is possible they will be moved.
“Have you thought about organization?” Brinkmann asked.
“Yes,” Kostyshakov nodded, “at least tentatively. Wherever they are, there’s going to have to be a super elite force to go in and rescue them. I am thinking somewhere between seventy and ninety men. Wherever that is, the odds are good there will be a substantial guard force or relief force nearby. For that I am thinking two companies, but heavily reinforced with all the firepower we can come up with. Any force needs an organization for support, both combat and more mundane matters like medical, mess, and transport.”
“Can you do all that with the limits General Hoffmann set you?”
“I think so. I hope so, anyway.”
Citadel, Warsaw, Poland
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Warsaw’s central location not only meant it was a key rail center, it also meant it was the location for one of the German Army’s salvage companies,[1] of which there were thirty-nine, that took enemy equipment, secured it, repaired it, organized it, and re-issued it when called to do so.
Those supplies and equipment could be anything from medical supplies to mess kits, artillery to rifles and machine guns, uniforms to Gulaschkanonen, to whatever the mind can imagine an army using. Some of it could even be one’s own equipment, captured by an enemy and then recaptured by one’s own forces. The Germans, being both tidy by nature and also having to fight most of the civilized world on a relative shoestring, were more thorough about combing a battlefield for Beute, loot, than most.
This particular dump was staggeringly large.
“Rifles, seven hundred,” said Captain Romeyko, Kostyshakov’s ugly quartermaster. He was accompanied by a tall German noncom, Feldwebel Weber, dark blond, mustached, and slightly stooped.
“What kind?” asked the supply clerk through Weber. “We’ve got thousands of standard rifles, plus some of our own sniper rifles, plus a modest number of shorter carbines in your caliber.”
“Four sniper,” Romeyko replied. “Are those Model 1907s over there? Yes? I’ll take twenty. Can we have those over and above the seven hundred? I’d hate to run short, you know?”
“No problem,” Weber said.
“Water-cooled machine guns, six. Uniforms, large, three hundred and eighty. Also four hundred and eighty, each, uniforms medium and small. Rank insignia; I’ll write down a list. One thousand, four hundred blankets. Packs and load carrying equipment, ammo pouches and canteens, seven hundred sets. Hats, oh, seventy-five each of every size, up to nine hundred. Gloves, same. Boots… boots are harder to guess at… let’s say, one hundred and eighty pair each, from sizes thirty-eight through forty-two. Woolen footwraps… one thousand, four hundred pair.”
The Feldwebel translated, got an answer from the clerk behind the counter, laughed, and conveyed the answer to Romeyko.
“‘Rifles are easy,’ he says, though he may have to send to the depot at Kuestrin for that many. Machine guns have been mostly taken already; he has four of your own Model 1910. Ammunition is plentiful, too. The uniforms and hats are easy. Insignia and field gear are easy. He says you can have a hundred times that many if you want them. But German soldiers like your boots for the winter, and your gloves as well. Same for your blankets. Also, we use the same general kind of footwraps, when we can’t get socks.”
“But Feldwebel Weber…”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Weber. “We can get all those from German stocks. May not be what you want. May not be the highest quality, not what you might have expected of us three or four years ago, but they’ll do.”
The clerk at the counter said something else which definitely piqued Weber’s attention. The Feldwebel said something to the clerk, which sent the latter scampering off into one of the back bins.
He came back bearing something that nearly made Romeyko’s beady eyes water.
“A Lewis gun? Here? My God…”
“He tells me,” said Weber, “that he’s got twenty-seven of them. He thinks they all work. But they’re in your caliber and not worth converting to ours, while supplying your ammunition to them would be such a confusing pain that nobody wants them. With as many magazines as… no, ‘four hundred and eighty-one magazines,’ he says.”
“If I can have them, I’ll take them all. And, shall we say, two million rounds of ammunition.”
“He says the ammo is no problem, either,” Weber said, “though he doesn’t have that much here. Three or four million rounds if you want it. But we might have a problem shipping it.”
“How about two thousand hand grenades? And, yes, four million rounds would be very nice.”
“He says he has that some of your kind of grenade, but if you want our kind…”
“Both? Both would be good. As many of both?”
“We can get ours, yes.”
“Cots? Mattresses?”
Weber asked. “No,” he translated, “but I am sure we can find some straw ticks, lumber, and nails.”
“Well… at least the tents should be set up by then,” said Romeyko. “Pistols?”
Weber checked. “Yes, he has a great many of your pistols. ‘All you could possibly want,’ he says. But he adds, ‘But why would you want them?’”
“Because it’s on my list,” Romeyko replied. “Strikes me as a pretty good reason.”
1
We’re guessing here. There were, in fact, thirty-nine salvage companies that operated along the main lines of communication of the German Army, east and west. Where they were at any given time is a mystery. Warsaw seems a likely spot for some kind of huge dump of captured material, following the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive in 1915. Nor is it likely that the Polish Legion would have used any of the Russian uniforms; theirs seem to have been closely based on German, with the addition of red piping to the collars and pockets, for example.