“Military math, sir,” said Romeyko. “Shit goes wrong. If you want one to work, you must start with more than one. If we want… what? Eighty-five… no, eighty-four, now, we need more than eighty-four to begin.”
“Try for two hundred,” said Kostyshakov. “And see if the Germans will get us a repair kit with a lot of spare parts of the kind that wear out.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
“Sobchak? Sobchak? SOBCHAK!”
“What? Oh, sorry, sir, I was… thinking about Sotnikov. We were pretty close friends.”
“I understand, but you’re our only eyewitness. We need your attention here. We will have plenty of time to mourn later.” And I think maybe we need to ease you over to becoming a supernumerary and advancing one of the supernumeraries to your position.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“So would the light, these carbide lamps, have been enough that tonight’s accident wouldn’t have happened?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Our uniforms still match the targets’ and will match the Reds’ when we go in.”
“We can’t do much about the enemies’ uniforms. I don’t know what we can do for ours.”
A hand was tentatively raised.
“Yes, Fedin?”
A thin, wiry soldier stood up. “How about if we sew white cloth crucifixes on the backs of the uniforms, sir?”
“Problem there, is that when you boys are clearing a room you’ve mostly got your backs to walls. Don’t see where a crucifix on the back… Sobchak?”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference last night, sir. The target would have covered it up. No matter how big a cross it was, it would have been covered up.”
“How about white smocks?” asked the platoon leader for Assault One, the Finn, short, pale, and blond Lieutenant Vilho Collan.
“Five hundred plus sheets,” wondered Romeyko, aloud. “Or maybe six hundred. I don’t know. Maybe. Oh, and a seamstress, I suppose.”
“A sewing machine, Captain,” said one of the junior noncoms, Corporal Shabalin. “My old man was a tailor. I picked up enough of it, as a boy, for this kind of thing.”
“Sheets, white canvas, whatever our Teutonic hosts can come up with,” said Kostyshakov. “And the important thing will be white color, not the material. And, as Shabalin says, a sewing machine.”
Strelnikov, the spotter for sniper Maxim Nomonkov, said,
“Sir, it’s a long story but two sewing machines.”
“Two it is,” said Romeyko. “If possible.”
First Sergeant Mayevsky stood up and announced himself. “Sir, how do we know a fucking room’s been cleared? It hasn’t happened yet, but it could happen when we go back to the G1 through G4 ranges, and it is very likely to happen in action, that someone infiltrates behind us through stairways we didn’t know about, holes in walls the Bolshevik motherfuckers created themselves, holed ceilings and floors covered by rugs or furniture. And even if not, we’ll waste time we don’t have clearing rooms a second time. And what if the room being cleared a second time is occupied by some of our own people? Imagine a flash grenade going off in a room with one of the assault squads. I see a problem here, and it’s not a small one.”
Kostyshakov shrugged, not with indifference but with cluelessness. “I don’t know, Top. Somehow I can’t see us detailing one man per squad to carry around an open bucket of paint and a brush. Anyone?”
A very tall guardsman stood to his full six feet, four inches. “Lukin, sir. How about something simple, sir, like every man carries a piece of white chalk? No moving parts. It’s pretty obvious and visible, or will be if Ilyukhin’s lights are as good as he claims. Chalk, sir.”
“Sir,” asked one of the men, a Guardsman Poda, “what if there’s no snow. Do we want to be wearing white smocks that will make us stand out like sore thumbs against the ground?”
Kostyshakov shot a look at Shabalin.
“Let me think over that one, sir,” said the corporal.
“Not as much of a problem as all that,” said Mayevsky. “If there’s no snow on the ground on the approach, we take them off—they’ll be thin, right?—and hide them under our uniforms. Then we put them on, a matter of a couple of seconds, before we begin the assault. Once inside, the Bolsheviks will be blinded, while we’ll be able to see, so it won’t matter if we’re all in white.”
“Shabalin,” said Kostyshakov, “can you make these so they’re easy and quick to get on and off, but aren’t so loose they get in the way?”
“Would it be okay, sir, if they just cover down to, say, the crotch? For that matter, if we’re worried about moving quickly without fouling our own legs, those overcoats could use a bit of shortening, like maybe an arshin’s worth. Or… Jesus, I’m a dummy. Take a bit but how about if I take every man’s overcoat, cut it down, and then sew a white lining in it along with making some new button holes and adding some buttons?”
Kostyshakov looked up and to his left, chewing his upper lip and trying to picture it. Finally, he decided, “Romeyko?”
“Sir?”
“Add in about three thousand buttons to the request. But Shabalin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t remove the bottoms of the overcoats. Instead, trim them up so that they can be buttoned out of the way but let down for just standing, lying, or marching in the cold. Can we do that?”
Shabalin thought about it. “I’ll need more people than just me and Strelnikov, sir. For this much work we probably could use a dozen good seamstresses.”
“Romeyko?”
“I’ll ask our hosts, sir.”
“One other thing, sir?” asked Cherimisov.
“Yes?”
“If these miners’ lamps Ilyukhin is talking about are that bright…”
“At night, in a place as dark as a mine, very bright, sir,” said Ilyukhin.
“In that case, other than for a dress rehearsal we can probably do our live fire exercises in the day. Sir, we’d never have lost Sotnikov if I’d been able to see down into the chamber.”
“Not all of them,” Kostyshakov replied, “all these men still have to get used to a rescue under realistic conditions. But, yes, we can cut down the amount of nighttime work by a good bit.
“Anyone else?”
A junior noncom stood up. “Corporal Turbin, sir. We’re probably going to Siberia, right? In the winter? Has anyone considered skis or snowshoes?”
Shit, thought Daniil. “Romeyko?”
“On the list, sir.”
“Anyone else?”
“Poison gas… Big versions of those lights Ilyukhin talked about to blind those shooting at us… ladders that fold so we can carry them and can be fixed to climb… how do we get through windows in Siberia; they don’t open… and how about an Orthodox chaplain? Men going into battle need a chaplain!”
Interlude
Tatiana: To die or not to die?
Almost a year has passed since Papa abdicated the throne of Russia.
We sat in the Southeast room, sipping tea. They—the petty tyrants who run our lives—had declared that butter and coffee were luxuries we were no longer allowed to have. We accepted the restriction without complaint, yet I feared they saw it as defiance, because a few days later the soldiers’ soviet decided to condemn our snow hill.
Its crime: being a source of amusement.
It was then that I realized that they were out to crush our very souls, to take away from us everything and anything that might bring us joy. Yet I knew that I could not convince my parents to act differently, to give in and show them what they wanted to see: suffering and begging.