“Thank you, Pavel Nadimovich. For all your help,”—and in the supposition that I can pump you for more information—“can I buy you a drink or two?”
“Thanks for the offer, Rostislav Alexandrovich, but I am on duty… for… about another half hour.”
“I thank you, my friend. We’ll be back in half an hour, then. Now to go buy some markers of our show of support for the revolution, until we are placed to actively support it. Comrades, with me.”
With which words Mokrenko led the way out of the station and across the street to purchase one short of a dozen red armbands.
The tavern wasn’t much. The vodka wasn’t anything special, either. A drink turned into two, two into three, and three into a somewhat sodden Red Guard named Khlynin explaining everything he understood about the situation to date.
“In the first place, Rosti”—with a sufficiency of drink went a good deal of formality—“while everyone is picking sides and recruiting furiously, the trains all run as if there were no conflict at all. It’s almost completely inexplicable to an outsider but I think they’ll continue to do so. Food and coal, after all, must still get to the cities, coal to the small villages, and food to the coalfields. It’s in everyone’s interest to let them keep flowing.
“The most I can safely predict is that recruits for the revolution will not be allowed to move by train from White areas and vice versa, while each side will have to make do with whatever arms and equipment they can make or import into their own areas.”
“A strange thought,” said Mokrenko. “It’s as if we had kept up trade with the Germans even while fighting them.”
“It could be so,” Khlynin agreed. “I don’t know. I worked the railways, myself—still do, after a fashion—so I was exempt from conscription. I confess, the guilt of this…”
“Don’t feel guilty,” Mokrenko said. “You didn’t miss a thing. It was years of unending misery, failure, incompetence at the highest levels, bad food, clothing that, when it wore out, was always replaced by something cheaper and worse, and in the end, for nothing at all.
“I will say one thing, though; if you haven’t married yet you should have. So many men killed that even the best-looking women will be there for the choosing.”
Khlynin smiled a little drunkenly. “Now that much I can admit to. But with so many lovely blue- and dark-eyed girls, how can one choose between them.”
“For me,” interjected Timashuk, “there’s one girl. I haven’t had a letter in a while, but the last letter I got she said she’d wait until the gates of hell, itself, froze, if that’s how long it took.”
“If true,” said Khlynin, “she is a pearl of great worth. You must get home to her. Where is she from?”
“Tver,” said Timashuk, “or, rather, a small village not too far from there…”
Instantly, Mokrenko’s foot lashed out under the rough hewn table.
“But she moved to Yekaterinburg with her family, about four years ago,” Timashuk hastily corrected. “So that’s where I’m going.”
“Ah, Tver,” mused Khlynin. “I have heard the women are of surpassing beauty there.”
“It is so,” said Timashuk. “And so many that even a small and none too well-favored boy like me can find a prize among them.”
Mokrenko refilled Khlynin’s glass from a bottle provided by the bartender. “So who, if we need help with the rails, should we talk to in Samara?”
Train to Samara, Russia
The sun was still up, lighting the broad fields of wheat and rye to the west and, past the train’s own shadows, the mighty Volga to the east.
“And it was that easy?” said Turgenev, in wonder, for about the fifteenth time. The paper he’d been scanning for news of the tsar and his family he laid aside for a bit. “You just walk up, get the info, get the armbands, get the train tickets, and nobody says a cross word or suspects a thing?
“You were right, Sergeant Mokrenko; I’d have aroused suspicion, more likely than not, whether by my preparatory school accent or more subtle parts of my manner. Which makes me wonder…”
“Sir?” asked Mokrenko.
“It makes me wonder if I should even be here, if I’m that much of a liability.”
“You’ll earn your keep, sir, once we get where we’re going and have to start figuring things out. Note, too, that I was only able to get us passage as far as Samara. We’re going to have to change trains at Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg to get to Tyumen.
“Speaking, though, sir, of your inability to hide your roots, you need to get back to first class and pump the other passengers for information as well as make sure that none of them try to take advantage of your ‘sister,’ Natalya.”
Train to Tyumen
As it turned out, Khlynin had spoken and predicted truly. There were no official impediments to travel from anybody. There was a day’s wait at Samara, and another two days at Chelyabinsk, but these had to do with scheduling, not inference from Reds or Whites. Moreover, they were days both well fed and comfortable, in good but not lavish hostels and inns.
They’d also spent a little time in Yekaterinburg, just long enough to determine that the prisoners being kept in one guarded house were not the royal family, but a number of lesser members of the nobility, including the tsarina’s sister, the nun, Elizabeth Feodorovna, also known as Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine. They’d also figured out, quite quickly, that Yekaterinburg was solidly red. Finally, a purview of the various mines, banks, and other repositories suggested that a good deal of mineral wealth was sitting there for whoever managed to grab it first.
The word on the street was that the royals were in Tobolsk.
Food was, it was true, a little dear, but then, as Lieutenant Turgenev observed, “We’ve been living mainly off Vraciu’s gold and silver since we landed near Taganrog. Well, that and some paper currency. We’ve hardly touched our own gold or silver.”
The problem, when it arose, wasn’t from any official source or power but from the lack of any official source. In short, bandits did not exist only at sea and along river banks.
Passengers boarded and got off at each of the first ten stops on the line. Some looked well fed and content, others a little lean and hungry. There were men, women, children, and the odd pet among them. None looked exceptionally suspicious, and none seemed to be in groups large enough to pose a threat. Some were armed but, with discharged and deserting soldiers taking their arms with them, as often as not, this was seen as routine.
What was not routine was something that could not be seen: in this case the common purpose of some seventeen of the embarking passengers, split up among the first ten stops, and in no case numbering more than three men at any stop. They boarded, took their seats sometimes near each other and other times not, and proceeded to read, or gamble, or simply look out the windows and at the other passengers.
Mokrenko looked over the two who’d boarded together at one of the stations along the route, then taken widely separate seats in the car. They had the collars of their coats turned up, quite understandably, against the fierce and biting cold. He dismissed them as harmless and unimportant.
The train consisted of a single locomotive, a coal tender, one first class sleeper car, a first class dining and parlor car, a second class dining car, which held the kitchen for both, six second class cars, eleven freight cars, a caboose, and a second locomotive. The caboose looked less like a North American caboose and more like the boxcar from which it had been converted. Turgenev, Babin, and Natalya had gone to first class, while Mokrenko and the other seven men of Strategic Recon took up a good deal of the forwardmost of the second-class cars.