Aronson tossed the Pravda on to his desk with a grunted, ‘So they’ve patched up their quarrel for the time being. Our new masters are to be Trotsky and Stalin.’ He pulled one of the long paparoki from its box, lit it, and breathed out a stream of blue smoke.
‘What do you think?’ Ilona asked curiously.
‘It won’t last,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘Both of them want to be the sole master of Russia. But for the time being the crisis is over. There’ll be peace.’
It was the beautiful blonde’s turn to frown. ‘Will we never be rid of the rats?’ she asked.
‘One day,’ he answered with a cold smile, telling himself that his colleagues of the Cheka would hit the ceiling if they could hear what she was calling them right in the middle of their own headquarters. ‘Communism won’t – can’t – work. But God only knows when the whole system will fall apart. Perhaps not in our lifetime.’
‘I hope you’re wrong, darling.’
‘I hope so. But our main concern is Russia – how to save our mother country.’ His jaw hardened. ‘Whatever the system, Mother Russia must be our first priority.’
She nodded and said, ‘We have suffered so much, we Russians. We deserve better than this – this corruption, starvation, systematic murder—’
He held up his hand to stop her speaking any more.
‘Yes, I agree. But enough of that kind of talk. It is too hard a burden for me to bear when I think of all those injustices you have named.’
‘All right, darling, what of this man Reilly and the Romanov?’
‘Well, at first the Finn was truculent. He knew we were going to shoot him, so why tell us anything?’ Aronson answered her question. ‘The Finns are, by nature, a damned stubborn race. But we worked on him all right.’ He smiled coldly at the memory of what had happened in the cellars two hours before.
It had been a very simple and indeed primitive form of torture. No pulling out of teeth one by one or electrodes attached to the nipples and genitals for the electric shock treatment. They had simply placed an old tin pail over the bound Finn’s head and whacked it with the slops brush. With each whack, gobs of blood had shot from beneath onto the white-tiled floor. By the time they had finished, the Finn had blood pouring from his nose, ears and mouth and he was so dazed he could hardly focus his eyes.
His speech blurred, voice high-pitched and almost feminine, as if he had been castrated, he had told them what he knew. Aronson had made him go through his statement twice. He wanted to have the descriptions of the two people that the contrabandist had been carrying, exactly. ‘Medium-sized… black… looked like a Yid,’ the Finn had stuttered, coughing up blood all the time. ‘Lots of money… English gold money.’
‘It was Reilly and this supposed Romanov heir all right,’ Aronson told Ilona now. ‘Beyond all doubt. And they got away.’ He stroked his chin thoughtfully.
Outside in the courtyard, the officer commanding the firing squad was bellowing, ‘Firing party – take aim!’
‘Now Reilly and the boy are on the run in the depth of winter. He undoubtedly has plenty of those Horsemen of St George of the English to bribe his way to freedom. But every frontier guard in the province has been warned to be on the lookout for a man and a boy. The boy will be his downfall and Reilly knows that. Alone, he might well escape.’ Aronson shrugged slightly. ‘After all, he has managed to survive as an agent and troublemaker for thirty years. But with the boy I don’t think he has a chance.’
‘What will he do then?’ Ilona asked.
Again Aronson shrugged.
From outside there came the clicking of a dozen rifle bolts being drawn back. ‘Party,’ the officer in charge bellowed, ‘fire!’
There was the crash of musketry. Ilona started. A shriek of pain. Then a long echoing silence.
Aronson looked at his nails. Executions took place at the Cheka HQ all the time, but he still could never get used to them. A man – or woman for that matter – was alive one moment, dead the next.
Ilona licked suddenly dry lips and said, ‘You were saying, darling?’
‘Oh yes, about Reilly,’ he answered. ‘With the boy he doesn’t stand a chance, with all the money in the world to pay bribes, grease palms… Without him, he does.’
‘Do you mean,’ she said in a hushed voice, ‘that he’ll get rid of the boy? Get rid of a Romanov?’ She loomed at him, eyes full of fear.
He nodded.
‘But you can’t let him kill a Romanov – the last of the Romanovs!’ she cried. ‘Haven’t they suffered enough? No,’ she pleaded with him, her beautiful face contorted with shock and horror. ‘You must do something!’
He reached out a hand and took hers in his. ‘Calm yourself, Ilona,’ he said soothingly. ‘But you must realise that I am virtually powerless. Reilly is somewhere out there in the wastes along the Finnish frontier. We’d need an army to patrol that area correctly and you know how feckless our people are, especially in the depth of winter…’ He saw the look in her green eyes and added hastily, ‘I’ll try my best, Ilona. Honestly. If I can I won’t let any harm come to that little boy…’
A hundred miles away on the other side of the Finnish frontier, ‘Finnegan’s’ locomotive had rumbled to a halt. Again they had run out of logs for the boiler. Now the crew of the Swordfish, save for Billy Bennett and Ginger Kerrigan who were on watch, were busy sawing logs in the nearby forest. Both the officers helped, for they knew they had to make the coast before nightfall. On the morrow they’d reassemble the Swordfish, ready for the rescue operation.
The air was so cold that their eyebrows hung heavy with hoarfrost and their breath, as they hacked and sawed at the firs along the track, wreathed up around them in a grey cloud. Still, all of them were happy. Soon they knew they’d be taking the fugitives back to Britain, and as Ginger put it, ‘There’ll be real wallop and tarts – lovely grub,’ to which Billy added, ‘Ay, and egg and chips. Proper scoff. None of this here raw fish stuff these foreigners eat.’
It was about noon when Ginger, perched behind the Lewis gun on the flat car, spotted the riders. About a mile to their front, silent black specks were moving across the frozen snow which glittered like a myriad diamonds in the weak yellow rays of the winter sun. They were heading towards the narrow cutting they would have to pass on their way to the coast.
‘What do you think, Ginger?’ Billy asked in that ponderous manner of his.
‘Get a butcher’s of him,’ Ginger replied. He indicated one of the riders who had dismounted and was approaching the railway cutting, crouched and cautious, ‘Yer don’t move like that if you’ve nuthin to frigging hide.’
‘Ay, yer right there, Ginger.’
‘I’m allus frigging right, matey.’ Ginger replied. ‘Yer better tell Mr Smith – toot sweet.’
Minutes later Bird and Smith were surveying the mysterious riders through their binoculars. ‘They’re armed all right,’ Dickie Bird said, lowering his glasses.
‘And they’re not wearing any kind of uniform either,’ Smith said. ‘So we can conclude from that that they are—’
‘Those damned Red bandits,’ Mrs Reilly cut into their conversation decisively. ‘It’s obvious that they are after us and we know who put them up to it – and the stationmaster.’
‘You mean Moscow?’ Smith said, looking up at her glowing cheeks and fine sparkling dark eyes.
She nodded.
Dickie Bird said, ‘You can see their plan. They must have ridden hell-for-leather across-country when we did a bunk from that station, in an attempt to cut us off up there at the pass.’
‘Not an attempt, Dickie,’ Smith said grimly. ‘They have cut us off, to my way of thinking. I doubt if Finnegan’s old engine could do more than ten miles an hour up that incline. A couple of hand grenades tossed down at us from the top of the cutting and our hash would be settled for good, I’m afraid.’ Suddenly Smith was aware of Mrs Reilly’s hand creeping into his. He turned and stared at her. She was afraid for the first time since he had known her. He guessed what she was thinking. If she fell into the bandits’ hands alive, they’d do more than just rob her. He forced a smile. ‘Come on, you lot, don’t look like a wet weekend in Wigan. We’ll outfox ’em yet, I’ll be bound.’
‘Ay, ye’re right, sir,’ Ferguson snarled, his wrinkled face set in a look of boundless contempt. ‘I mind they’re only a bunch o’ foreigners.’ He spat contemptuously over the side of the cab. ‘They’re nae match for the lads of the old Royal.’
‘Well said, Chiefie,’ Dickie Bird agreed enthusiastically. ‘I bet you told jolly old Nelson the same at Trafalgar.’
Ferguson glowered at the young officer but said nothing.
‘Now, I guess they haven’t seen us yet,’ Smith said thoughtfully. ‘They’ll have heard us, I’m sure, but not seen us, due to the forest on both sides of the line. So they’ll be waiting for us to come up the line and then get on with their dirty business; Now what if we did this…?’
The ancient locomotive started to puff and pant its way up the steep slope. In their hiding places to both sides of the cutting, the Red bandits tensed, weapons at the ready, grenades piled up in front of them on the snow. Belching black smoke, the engine slowed down, its wheels clattering on the icy tracks, sending up flurries of blue-red sparks.
The bandit leader, a great hulking fellow with shifty eyes, surveyed the slow-moving train. Obviously the men on the train suspected nothing. He could see the dark outlines of the passengers in the single coach slumped forwards as if they were asleep, while at the front the engine driver was busily tossing logs into the firebox in order to keep up the steam pressure. He raised his right arm and waited, counting off the distance to himself as the train chugged ever closer. ‘Three hundred metres… two fifty… two hundred metres… one hundred and fifty…’ Crouched in their hiding places at the top of the cutting the bandits started to pull the pins from their hand grenades… ‘One hundred metres…’ The bandit leader began to bring his arm down slowly. Already his mind was full of the reward this attack would bring him from Petrograd and the loot there was bound to be on the train. There was a woman too. He licked his thick cracked lips at the thought. He hadn’t had a woman for a week. It would give him the greatest of pleasure to make her spread her legs. He could visualise it already. Fifty metres…
‘Now!’ the bandit leader cried in the very same instant that the Lewis gun to their rear opened up with a vicious burst of fire.
He screamed with pain as his back was ripped open. The grenade dropped from his suddenly lifeless fingers to explode at his feet. Slowly, his severed head began to trundle down the hill.
Now Ginger and Billy Bennett sprayed the whole area with their slugs. There was no escape from that cruel fire. Men went down everywhere. One of the bandits, wounded in both legs, attempted to crawl towards the machine-gunners, grenade in his right hand. They didn’t give him a chance. ‘Try this one on for size, you bolshy git!’ Ginger snarled and gave him a burst. His upturned face melted downwards like hot red sealing wax. In the end it wasn’t war; it was a massacre…
The survivors fled, followed by that deadly fire, jostling and shouting angrily at each other in their panic-stricken attempt to reach their horses and escape. Only five did so. The rest remained where they lay in the bloody snow, dead or dying, food for the wolves once night fell.
Half an hour later they were on their way again, weary but happy at the way the trick had worked out. Behind them the dead Reds stiffened in the cold.