Romanov Succession Part 31

That was when she saw the faintest movement in the mists far out along the road.

It was a Finnish ambulance. The breath caught in her sucking throat like a handsaw jamming in wet wood.

The ambulance halted at the gate and there was the tedious ritual of idents and clearances and then the gate swung open and the white van rolled forward. She tried to see through the winds.h.i.+eld.

Then it stopped forty feet away and the door opened and Alex stepped out.

He waved and turned to help Sergei down; Sergei had a bulky white bandage about his shoulder. The stretcher bearers carried a third man out of the ambulance on a litter.

Alex said something to Sergei and then came away from him.

Irina walked blindly into his arms. Her fingers raked the back of his coat and the tears burst from her beyond control.

"Are you hurt...."

"I'm all right." There wasn't much life in his voice but he hadn't been injured.

Spaight and Buckner crowded around. "What happened?" Faintly she was aware of Prince Leon hurrying forward, hobbling.

"We had to fight our way out. Most of us didn't make it. We were strafed on the lake-we had to lie low under the dashboard until the pilot was convinced we were all dead. If he'd blown the fuel tank we'd all have gone up. We couldn't move until after dark."

Spaight said, "Someone's got a lot to answer for."

Prince Leon reached them; pressed past her and pulled Spaight out of the way and embraced Alex. Tears were frozen on Leon's face.

But Alex's face was changing. Muscles stood ridged at his jaw hinges and the bones at brow and cheek became harder, more prominent. With gentle pressure he thrust Leon aside.

"We heard it on the radio in the Finnish border camp," he said. "The news from Pearl Harbor. The j.a.panese attack on Hawaii. The broadcast must have come just when Felix was taking off."

John Spaight's head rocked back. "What?"

Glenn Buckner's face had closed up abruptly-like a blind pulled down over a window. "Is that right? The j.a.ps attacked Pearl?"

Prince Leon said, "I don't-"

Buckner was still talking very fast. "It means you'll have a job to go back to, Alex. With your combat experience they'll need you bad. You've got a h.e.l.l of a future with...."

"You bloodless b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Alex whispered.

Buckner showed his alarm: wild white rings showed around his eyes. "Look-I'm in the war now.... My country is.... I had to make the decision, don't you see that? Maybe if the Reds hadn't counterattacked last week it would have been different.... But Stalin's going to hold them now, anybody can see that-he'll be able to buy us the time we need. We couldn't risk rocking the boat. You can see that. For G.o.d's sake I had my orders, Alex...."

Alex's arm shot forward, palm up. He hooked his fingers deep into the American's flared nostrils and pulled him forward. He didn't hit at Buckner's face. He hit through and beyond it and it crushed the nose flat against the bones and all but snapped Buckner's head off his neck and then Alex was hammering Buckner's mouth b.l.o.o.d.y with his fists until Buckner fell down and rolled away and came up with a revolver in his fist; but the blood was in Buckner's eyes, he couldn't see his opponent and Alex jumped him. The two men wrestled for the gun and she heard it when Alex broke the American's finger in the trigger guard. Then the revolver came spinning away because Alex had no use for it-a gun was the wrong thing now; it had to be flesh on flesh for this. There was no damming the flood of it. When Buckner tried to get up Alex grasped the back of his head and hammered it down into the tarmac. Then he locked his fists together and she heard his inhuman roar when he struck the American at the base of the neck.

Alex stood up and waited for him to rise. Buckner came out of his wreckage crawling mindlessly, dragging himself in a blind circle, breathing in broken gasps, spitting teeth.

A throbbing vein stood out in Alex's forehead. He braced himself to kick Buckner's face.

John Spaight grasped him from behind-pinned his arms, locked a grip around Alex's chest. "Stop it, Alex. It's enough."

The bullet slammed into Buckner with an awful deliberate precision of aim: dead center between the eyes.

She turned and saw Prince Leon drop the gun back to the frozen ground from which he'd picked it up.

She heard Spaight talking softly-it was Pappy Johnson he was talking to. Pappy was out of breath from his run. "Wrap him up," Spaight said, "and put him with the Baron."

She felt herself sag and suddenly Alex was there, holding her. She half-heard Spaight: "He had to keep it secret from the rest of us-his own twisted reasons but they make a horrible kind of sense. If you people had known it was the Americans who'd blown you, you'd have told the world."

Alex turned; he almost lost his balance. "Were you in on this, John?"

"No. For G.o.d's sake-what do you think of me?"

"He's telling the truth," she said.

Alex dipped his head groggily. "Buckner must have had Va.s.sily killed. I guess he wanted to work with an Americanized Russian-someone he thought he could control. Me. Then he had somebody shoot at me in Boston-shoot to miss. That was to throw suspicion off but the next one wasn't. The one in Scotland. That was to scare me, make me think my life was in danger-he thought I'd tell him the plan then." He looked at Spaight then. "There's something worse than any of that. We don't know if it was his own initiative-or if he had orders to do it the way he did it."

Spaight's face went wide and then crumpled when the impact reached him. "Sweet sweet Jesus."

Under the thin noon sun she watched the airplanes lift off into the cold sky. The guns murmured on the Russian front. She felt the pressure of Alex's hands on her shoulders. They stood utterly alone on the runway. She leaned back against him and let him take her weight.

"What are we going to do?"

He said, "I don't know."

A HISTORICAL NOTE.

During the battle for Moscow very early in 1942, Major General Andrei A. Vlasov, charged with the defense of the city, was captured by the Wehrmacht-perhaps by his own design-and became a prisoner of war.

While in the camps Vlasov was approached by officers of German Intelligence to raise a Russian liberation army from among Russian prisoners-of-war to fight alongside the Wehrmacht against the Red Army. They were trained at a special camp, set up late in 1942, at Dabendorf near Berlin.

Vlasov fell into American hands at the end of the war in 1945. He was turned over to the Soviets and was executed.

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