The Distinguished Service Medal was a citation the English didn’t take lightly. Spaight showed his surprise and then nodded. Sergei happily served up his eggs and ham-sliced bacon.
Alex said, “The heavier things are coming by convoy. Transports have a way of ending up in the Atlantic trench. It’s going to be another of your jobs to keep leaning on Glenn Buckner to deliver the goods we need-regardless of U-boats.”
“Tall order,” Spaight remarked. “What else?”
“You’ll be in overall command of training.”
Spaight pushed his empty plate away and swallowed the last mouthful. “Okay. Now you can tell me what I’m training them for.”
“Paratroop commando tactics. The same drill we had at Bliss.”
“Uh-huh. With the two of us trading places. I’ve already said that’s all right with me-but I’d still like to know what kind of operation I’m preparing them for.”
“Just teach them to jump out of those Dakotas. The men have seen their share of combat in Finland-you won’t have to teach them a damned thing about handling rifles or digging holes or maintaining battle discipline.”
“That’ll speed things up. My God the times at Bliss I’d have given my left nut for a training cadre that had any kind of combat experience at all. Do you have any idea how much of a godsend you were to my command, Alex?”
“You’ve seen combat,” Alex pointed out.
“Twenty-three years ago in French mud. That wasn’t combat, that was a screwed-up slaughterhouse in the trenches.”
“I’ve seen your combat record.”
“Where the hell did you turn that rock over?”
Alex said, “You took a patrol a hundred miles inside German-occupied territory on an armed reconnaissance. You came back through the lines with four German colonels and one of the Kaiser’s major-generals for prisoner interrogation-and you didn’t lose a single man. That’s what I want you to train these paratroops for. That mission all over again. To get to the objective without being seen or shot at. To attain the objective without fuss and without noise.”
“Son-if I can call a major general son-that was a nice quiet little farmhouse in the Rhine country that the Boche were using for a rear-echelon officers’ billet. Like this house here. We had to put knives in half a dozen sentries just before dawn and that was all there was to it-we caught the brass hats with their pants down standing in line waiting for the latrine. That ain’t exactly the same idea as walking into the Russian goddamned Kremlin.”
“We’re not going into the Kremlin,” Alex said.
Spaight grinned. “Aha. That’s piece number one of the puzzle.”
At seven he finished reading over the document he had spent odd moments of the past week writing. It consisted of nineteen pages of neat Cyrillic script. He folded it in thirds and sealed it in a buff-colored envelope and went in search of Sergei.
He found the old soldier cleaning a Mannlicher rifle. The tiny bedroom stank of solvent and oil. The square of newspaper on the floor was a repository for cloth patches that had come off the ramrod with star-shaped stains of tawny oil; the weapon hadn’t been dirty but Sergei had carried it around the world with him for twenty-six years and the reason he could still rely on it was that he hadn’t taken it for granted. It looked like a venerable antique but by now it was part of Sergei’s arm and he could put a bullet from it into a moving head at five hundred meters.
Sergei’s big face was the texture of old rubber that had dried and gone cracked-grey in a desert sun. Tension made him flick his tongue across his lips. “I shall be the eyes in the back of your head then.”
“You understand how it must be done.”
“I must not kill him. If he tries to assassinate you…”
“When, not if. They won’t give it up now.”
“When he tries to assassinate you I am to shoot him where it will not kill him.”
“You understand why, Sergei?”
“Of course. We must find out from him who has employed him.”
“We’ll try to make it easy for him,” Alex said. “I’ll stagger my routine. I won’t follow any pattern from day to day except for one habit we’ll show him. Every morning at exactly half-past seven I’ll leave this house and walk through the back gate in the base fence and walk straight to the main hangar. He’ll be watching my movements. He’ll try to find a pattern and he’ll learn there’s only one time of day when he can anticipate where I’ll be-half-past seven in the morning, going from here to there on foot. That’s where he’ll try to kill me. It won’t be for two or three days, perhaps a week.”
“You must go armed of course.”
“I’ve got my pistols. I’ll wear them from this morning on.” They were a pair of British Webley. 45 revolvers he’d acquired from a captured Japanese lieutenant general in the mountains of Kansu Province. Once in the Shensi he’d nearly bought the farm when the hammer spring of his Smith amp; Wesson had broken at full cock and since then he’d carried two revolvers-revolvers because he had never trusted automatic pistols, they jammed too easily with a little mud or cold weather. He’d settled on the big. 45s because when you hit an enemy with them he went down and lost interest in fighting.
Sergei was assembling the Mannlicher mechanism and began to thumb cartridges into the Krag box. Alex watched him set the safety. “I’ve got an envelope I want you to keep for me.” He produced it. “Put it where it won’t be found. These are the plans for the operation. If I’m taken out they won’t have time to try to reconstruct my plans or devise new ones. If it happens you must get these plans to Prince Leon immediately.”
“I understand.”
4
Officers’ call was at nine. He was in the hangar by seven-forty, ready to go over the mound of papers that abstracted the regiment’s status: its personnel, its supplies, its readiness.
Tolkachev came strutting out of the office. He didn’t offer a greeting; just stood at attention waiting.
“Let’s go back to your office.” The leg twinged angrily when he strode past the Cossack.
He waited for Tolkachev to follow him into the cubicle. “Shut the door please.” There were enlisted men elsewhere in the hangar; it wasn’t for their ears.
Tolkachev shut them in. Alex stayed on his feet. He felt brittle. “We haven’t got room here for personal antagonisms. Are you prepared to work under my command?”
“I will not resign voluntarily from the regiment.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Finally Tolkachev said, “I have been adjutant here for nearly two years, sir.”
“You’ve been used to having it your own way here. You’ve been the operations man-General Devenko wasn’t to be bothered with the details of running a unit. And in the last few weeks you’ve got accustomed to being in command-there was no one here but you. That’s got to change. Can you accept that?”
“I would be willing to take orders…”
“But not from me, is that it?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“I commend your candor, Tolkachev.”
“I must resign then?”
“No. You’re a first-rate combat soldier. I’ve got a job for you.”
“I see.”
Tolkachev didn’t see-not yet. Alex said, “I’ll want the company rosters now.”
Tolkachev got them from the files. Alex spread the papers on the desk and stood leaning over them on his hands. He studied names: put faces to them from memory and summoned recollections of their talents and excellences. Here and there he checked off a name with the blunt point of a pencil.
When he’d done he had checked fifty-eight names and he withdrew from the desk. “I need forty more than I’ve marked.”
“For what purpose?”
“Combat skills and good minds. Russians only-no Poles.”
Tolkachev bent over the rosters. Alex left him alone until he’d finished and then went over it, the names he knew and the names he didn’t know, and he erased four or five of Tolkachev’s marks. When Tolkachev stiffened he said, “I’ve got to use my own judgment.” He glanced up and surprised a look of white-hot hatred on Tolkachev’s flat face. “Give me half a dozen more. I want the very best of them.”