“Tatiannnaaaa…”
We all turned towards the source of the sound. From underneath a pile of too-big clothes, Maria rose to glare at us, her hands on her plump hips. Anastasia was likewise decked out in one of Papa’s shirts and hats. His wide, leather belt looped around her waist.
“We’re rehearsing,” Anastasia piped in.
Ah, the play. My sisters were putting on another play.
“French or English?” I asked.
Kolya pushed himself up from the floor and straightened his coat.
“English, of course,” Maria said. “It’s our room for ten more minutes.”
Alexei and Kolya shrugged. They resumed their battle over the girls’ protests and eventually yielded the room back to them when the shrieking got too loud.
That image of Alexei standing over Kolya with his mock-gun stayed with me the rest of the day. It morphed from a boy at play to a man at war, a man that I feared we would never see. Either a fall or a cut would get him. And no matter how much he played at being a real boy, he wasn’t and could never be.
His world was so unfair, so foul, so unkind. It denied this brave, bright boy even the simplest pleasures by making the hemophilia hang over everything he did, no matter how small, how normal.
My brother deserved better. I had seen him put on a brave front so many times. How, for Mama’s sake, he’d let Rasputin pray over him. Yet there had been a keen intellect in Alexei’s feverish eyes. One that told me that he wasn’t taken in by the starets, one that told me that even in the throes of pain and fever, he still cared about Mama enough to pretend.
One that told me that my brother, whatever his faults, would have made a great tsar.
Chapter Seven
Range A (Rifle), Near Camp Budapest
First and Third Companies were still hard at work putting in a range for the heavy and light machine guns, as well as the 37mm cannon. Their little spades could be heard, faintly, chink-chink-chinking away, from off in the distance.
Today was expected to be a great day. Today was Number Two Company’s first day on the rifle range.
There were firing points numbered One through Forty, running left to right. From the deep trench and berm, in and behind which the target handlers sheltered, toward the camp, there were roughly one- by two-meter raised dirt beds, at one hundred and fifty, three hundred, four hundred and fifty, and six hundred arshini[3] from the target line. At seven hundred and fifty arshini, instead of raised beds, the battalion had dug down to create positions for firing in a standing supported mode.
As with most rifles of the era, the Model 1891 was capable of engaging mass targets—columns of men moving in the open, for example—at greater than five hundred meters. Indeed, the sights of the models scrounged by Romeyko were marked for as far away as thirty-two hundred arshini, or roughly two thousand, two hundred meters.
Again, though, that was for mass targets, not individual ones. More practically, in the hands of a reasonably well-trained soldier, effective engagement of a man-sized target at five hundred meters was probably worth the effort… if the target were standing still and approximately upright. Engagement of a moving target was, for any rifleman, extremely problematic and kinetic success in such engagement largely a matter of luck.
Though every man in the battalion was literate and numerate, mistakes still happened with this kind of thing. Thus, rather than putting up just numbers at the target line, successive relays of men had tramped down the grass in straight lines to mark each firing lane.
Even so, thought Sergeant Major Blagov, some idiot is going to fire at his neighbor’s target. Always happens. I suppose it always will.
The weather was actually not bad, for Russians, hovering at about forty-three degrees, Fahrenheit, or about six degrees, Celsius. For someone from, say, Saint Peterburg, this was equal to a balmy, early April morn.
The field telephones and communications wire hadn’t yet shown up; they probably never would. Still, the noncoms had worked out a system of whistle, trumpet, and visual signals. Following the somewhat superfluous command of, “Set your sights for lowest possible range,” superfluous because, below thirteen hundred arshini, there was no setting, a whistle blast caused forty men in the long, deep shelter of the trench and the berm to raise forty targets on high.
The next command, by voice, came from the firing line. “Load one clip of five rounds!”
That was easy enough; all the ammunition broken down, so far, came in five round clips. These the troops inserted into a slot above the magazine and, with a single push, forced all five rounds down. The clips were then tossed, with bolts slammed and twisted home to chamber the first round.
There was no need to order the men to take the weapons off safe; their rifles hadn’t been on safe to begin with. Indeed, the Model 1891 could not be loaded with the weapon on safe.
“Commence firing!”
Camp Budapest
“‘The market here in fill-in-the-space is good’ will mean all the Romanovs are in one place, whichever one we put in. But what if they’ve been split up?” asked Lieutenant Turgenev. “How do we account for that?”
“Maybe value and sex,” suggested Mokrenko. “We use the most valuable, the sable, as a stand in for the tsar. After that, the fox for the tsarina. After that, the blue fox for the grand duchesses and the polar fox for the tsarevich.”
“I’m not sure that’s the actual relative value,” said Turgenev.
“Maybe better if it isn’t,” Mokrenko admitted. “But there’s a problem; nobody is going to go to the expense of sending a wire to Sweden for one polar fox. It’s inherently suspicious.
“So maybe,” he continued, “we just add zeroes to the actual number, as many as we need to be something besides suspicious. So… one hundred is just one. Four hundred blue fox are just the four grand duchesses. So are four thousand, if we find the market is big enough to justify that.
“That works. Write that down, Goat.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Corporal Koslov, whose surname, in fact, meant goat.
“We need codes for places, too,” said Turgenev. “One for each stop on our itinerary. And then a way to designate different places.”
“Yes,” Mokrenko agreed. “We might, after all, find that they’ve been sent somewhere completely different than we expect.”
“North and south from a known point?” Turgenev suggested. “Also east and west? How about by money? North is rubles; south is kopeks. What for east and west, though?”
That took some thought. Finally Koslov suggested, “America is east; England is west. Murmansk is north. Odessa is south. We make it a two sentence effort—no, three—for each part of the direction. The first establishes a known point, whichever it is. The second, couched as being a place to send furs to, establishes a direction. The third the distance from that point in that direction. Then we do it again for the other cardinal direction.”
“Seems complex,” Turgenev said.
“Yes, sir, but we’re running out of time. We still have to familiarize on the pistols. We still have to get the money. And we still have to leave soon if we’re to get there on time. Besides, at least that way doesn’t obviously look like a coded message, which anything that gave coordinates would, and which anything that used an offset to give coordinates also would.”
3
The