Fort Number 7 was the last in a series of bastions designed to defend Russia’s Far Eastern port city of Vladivostok against an attack by Imperial Japan that never came. Built on Mount Toropov to defend the city’s northern approaches, each fort was named after a member of the imperial family: Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra and the Tsarevna’s Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, with the last named after Tsar’s only son, the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei. All dead now, shot by order of the Ural Regional Soviet of the Communist Party of Russia in the grim Siberian town of Yekaterinburg inside the basement of a two-storey, cream-colored mansion with white trimming expropriated by the local Bolshevik revolutionaries from an ex-army engineer named Ipatiev and which the new owners chillingly renamed “the House of Special Purpose”.
That was eighteen months ago. Over the past three, the fortunes of the anti-Communist or “White” cause in Siberia led by an admiral, Supreme Leader of All Russia Alexander Kolchak had collapsed, as much the victim of a venality in the areas it controlled so voracious it dumbfounded every foreign observer who encountered it was by the prowess of the Red Army.
The Czechoslovak Legion, some 50,000 Czech and Slovak deserters from the moribund army of Austro-Hungary, were perhaps the best troops Admiral Kolchak. The Legionnaires took Vladivostok for the Whites in July of 1918 but had grown weary of fighting and dying in Russia and now only wished to do that in Central Europe to secure the survival of their new-born state of Czechoslovakia. The Legion would need to leave Russia via Vladivostok, from where they could take ship to Europe but the waning of the White cause brought large swarths of the Trans-Siberian railway under Bolshevik control. The Legion’s commanders finessed this problem by arresting Admiral Kolchak in his command train at the station in Nizhneudinsk, traded him to the Bolsheviks for safe passage to Vladivostok and commandeered the trains of their dispirited and effectively leaderless former allies to get them there. They also appropriated a sizable portion of the 490 tons of bullion from Imperial Russia’s gold reserve Kolchak had used to finance the war against the Bolsheviks.
When the Czechoslovak Legion took Vladivostok in 1918, Britain, France, the United States, and other Allied Powers fighting Germany and Austro-Hungary sent troops to ensure it remained out of the hands of Lenin’s Bolsheviks whom they believed were collaborating with Berlin and Vienna. Two years later, out of the thousands of British, American, French, Canadian, Italian, Serbian, Polish, Romanian, Greek. Chinese and Japanese troops dispatched to the city, only the latter remained. Tokyo had not decided whether to seize Vladivostok for Japan or, like everyone else, wash their hands of Russia and just leave. Thus, the city named “Ruler of the East” by General Count Nikolay Nikolayevich Muravyov-Amurskiy in 1860 to honor Tsar Alexander III found itself a lifetime later about to fall either into the hands of his son’s murderers or become a frontier outpost of the Japanese Empire. Contemplation of either possibility drove most of the city’s population to celebrate New Year’s Eve 1919 (though in Moscow it was already January 14th, the Bolsheviks having mandated use of the Gregorian calendar in the parts of Russian they controlled) by drinking, fornicating and drinking as if there were no tomorrow, which for many was the case. The Japanese troops having been confined to barracks, order was maintained by a few squadrons of White Cossacks and mostly consisted of robbing anyone too weak or too drunk to resist of everything they had.
The near chaos in the city made the evening an ideal one for bribery, allowing a heavily armed caravan of eight sleighs to glide through the streets of Vladivostok for Mount Toropov and Fort No. 7 without comment. The first seven were empty save for an armed sailor from a freighter named the Orlik seated next to the driver. The eighth carried a seven-year-old girl in the back bundled up against the cold seated next to a man wearing a heavy naval frock coat nursing a SteyrM1912 semi-automatic pistol in his lap.
At such an age most children, finding themselves atop a mountain in the dead of winter would either be very cross or too terrified to move. Abrienda de Soza was neither. She looked with excitement at the black-green trees heavy with snow, the sharp grey rocks, the clear night sky full of stars, the heavy pistol in the lap of the man in the dark blue coat seated next to her as they went ever higher up the mountain. Every so often he gave the child a reassuring smile and adjusted her blankets, and Abrienda loved to see the thick gold lace on the sleeve of his coat. She had no idea why she and her father in the lead sleigh were travelling up a snowy mountain when their luggage was already aboard the ship that would take them away from this gloomy, icy place, yet when told they were going on some adventure, or “safari” as he liked to call them, Abrienda was always only too willing to go.
The sleighs pulled up to the tunnel entrance of the abandoned fort and Karol de Soza dismounted and ran back to check on his daughter. He covered Abrienda with another blanket and warned her not to leave the sleigh. “If you do, one of the giants who live in this terrible place will eat you for his breakfast!” “Papa, that is so silly,” Abrienda replied as he tucked the extra blanket around her. “There is no such thing as giants. You really must, must stop treating me like a little girl. I am the woman of the house now. If there are bad giants here, then you should give me a gun to shoot them.”
“Forgive me,” her father said. “You are the woman of the house now. I can’t give you a gun, but stay in the sleigh anyway.” He kissed her and she watched as he and the man with the golden sleeves motioned to the sailors to wait outside, light two lamps and disappear into the tunnel.
The tunnel was nearly a mile long, connecting the fort to the six others guarding the city and to both men the temperature inside the tunnel felt distinctly colder than out. “This fort was never finished,” Orlik’s Captain Ignác Andrasko explained as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. “The Whites used it to store munitions and after the murder of the Romanovs the locals said it was haunted. That made it a perfect hiding place.”
Karol de Soza nodded grimly.
“You know, Ignác, the Imperial family was shot in a house owned by a man named Ipatiev. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?” Captain Andrasko replied, then stopped suddenly and shuddered, though not from the cold. “Good God, Karol! That’s the name of the monastery where the first Romanov was proclaimed Tsar of all the Russias!”
“The Ipatievsky Monastery, yes…” de Soza confirmed. “And this Fort, stopped, uncompleted, just like the life of the boy it was named after.”
Captain Andrasko shook his head. “Too many coincidences for my taste, Karol.”
“What makes you think they’re coincidences?” he replied.
The two men continued to push on through the darkness until de Soza took hold of Andrasko’s arm, raised his lamp higher and pointed straight ahead. “Mary and Joseph!” Andrasko said at the sight of the crates with the double-headed eagle of Imperial Russia stenciled upon them. He saw Karol’s feral smile illuminated in the lamp glow.
“Call your men, captain.”
Abrienda girl patiently settled herself under the blankets, looked up into the black sky and wondered where the place they were going to live was exactly, if it was like here and hoping it was not. She then saw her father appear at the tunnel’s entrance and the other men quickly followed him inside, leaving behind a single man, rifle at the ready. He noticed Abrienda watching him, lowered his gun and waved. “Don’t worry, we’ll be going to the boat soon!” he called to her in Czech, not Russian. Abrienda stood up in the sleigh, saluted, and dropped back down again, pulling the blankets tightly around her. “I need my own gun,” she muttered petulantly. “Then I could help.” She heard sounds of scraping and grunting and saw her father and the sailors coming out of the tunnel dragging or carrying large wooden crates. They heaved the crates into the sleighs and Abrienda watched the sailor she had saluted run down the path. He stood motionless for a moment, turned and ran back waving his arm and Captain Andrasko signaled for the sleighs to head for the harbor.
As midnight and the new year approached, Vladivostok slide into anarchy. Drunkards sang and staggered through the streets where many would be found frozen to death next morning. An Orlik sailor shot a solider from a disbanded artillery regiment as he tried to strike at the driver with his short, curved Bebut sword. A Cossack, half-filled bottle of vodka in his hand, stumbled in front of Karol’s sleigh. He shouted something but Karol urged the horses on and the Cossack leapt aside seconds before he was trampled.
The sleighs were met at the Orlik by more armed sailors who helped load the crates onto the ship while Karol took Abrienda to their cabin. It was late and she was very sleepy after their strange journey. Before drifting off to sleep, she asked, “Papa, what did we do tonight?”
“Something very, very good for ourselves and our new country.”
“Was I brave?” she asked sleepily. “Are you proud of me?” Tears stung Karol’s eyes. They were the very words his wife said to him before she died giving birth to their daughter.
“Yes, Abrienda, you were very brave. And I am always proud of you. Now go to sleep.” De Soza waited until she was sound asleep before going to Captain Andrasko’s cabin where the captain and four of his officers were waiting for him around a small round table with a bottle of Crimean champagne and six glasses. “Gentlemen,” the captain said. “I drink to the future of our homeland. I drink to Czechoslovakia. Prost!” The men emptied their glasses faster than good champagne deserved, and Captain Andrasko ordered his officers back to their stations, saying he wanted to be out of the harbor before daybreak. He motioned for Karol to stay behind.”My dear Karol, I wish to express how honored I am you entrusted me and my men to take part in this enterprise on behalf of our new country.” He closed the cabin and switched to French.
“That was public consumption and the benefit of possible eavesdroppers. Now, to business. There is now over two tons of Russian gold in the holds of my ship. As you pointed out to me, this last ‘deposit’ will make no appreciable difference to the future of our new country but very much to our lives in it. I hope you have not changed your mind?” Karol shook his head.
“Excellent!” responded Andrasko and poured more champagne. “Would you kindly oblige me by bringing your daughter on deck tomorrow morning at ten o’clock? I have a little surprise for her. Prost!“
Next morning, Abrienda left the cabin hand in hand with her father. “Why is it, whenever I tell you we need to go somewhere, you never ask why, you just come?” he asked.
“Because I know I will want to go wherever you take me, so don’t need to ask,” she replied. Karol looked straight ahead and nodded.
“I love you very much, Abrienda.”
When they appeared on deck, the ship’s whistle sounded and a line of sailors were ordered by Captain Andrasko in full dress uniform to present arms. He then turned and shouted sternly, “Abrienda de Soza… step forward!” The little girl looked up at her father in amazement.
“It’s alright,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Straightening her shoulders, Abrienda bravely walked up to Captain Andrasko.
“Abrienda de Soza, for remarkable courage in the service of your country, the officers and men of the Orlik award you this medal.”
He bent down and affixed a small bronze pin to the lapel of her coat. It was a Kappenabzeichen, a small badge made of bronze unique to the Austro-Hungarian army of the Great War. It was awarded to different regiments to commemorate battles or whole campaigns and used as a sort of calling card among those who had shared the same experience. This one depicted the Czech’s Patron Saint Wenceslaus on horseback, sword in hand and the words “Ever Loyal” written in Czech at the bottom.
Captain Andrasko took a step back, drew his ceremonial sword with a flourish (Truly unafraid of anything! he thought when he saw her eyes light up and not flinch). “Squad… salute!” and the sailors stomped their right foot with a shout of “Hurá!”
Abrienda looked at Captain Andrasko, then her father. She turned to face the sailors standing at attention and saluted.
“Thank you, my brave soldiers!” she cried, and the men cheered and broke ranks to shake the little girl’s hand and congratulate her father. The ship photographer captured the scene: Karol de Soza, Captain Andrasko and his men standing behind or kneeling beside Abrienda who again saluted for the camera.
“That was a lovely thing you did for my daughter,” Karol said and shook the captain’s hand. “But she really won’t mind returning the abzeichen if it has special meaning for you.”
“It isn’t mine,” Andrasko replied. “It was given to someone else. It does have special meaning to me, but now I want your daughter to have it. He would have, too.”
The captain leaned down and took Abrienda’s hand. “That little badge makes you an officer in the new Czechoslovak Navy. Please allow me to take you on a tour of my ship.”