The Romanov Succession

He heard glass shatter musically and the confined roaring of a gun in the back of the ambulance-Voroshnikov or one of the others firing at the spotter shack through the rear windows of the ambulance. It was still spi

He shifted up into top and put his foot on the floor. Some one in the litter bed cried out, hit. Sergei had his big shoulders all the way out the open window, shooting the tommygun empty; then he sagged back inside and slumped down in the seat. Alex flashed a glance at him to see if he’d been hit. He hadn’t; he was just using as much cover as he could find. Wind whipped around Alex’s face, freezing his ears and cheeks. She was up to seventy-five kph on the ice now and he completed the steady turn and straightened the steering: due north onto the lake with five hundred meters of it behind them. The shore machine guns gave it up. Ninety kph, a hundred-sixty miles an hour on surface ice and it was shaking the ambulance to pieces; the surface wasn’t all that smooth. Everything rattled: the noise was so intense he didn’t hear it when the shore batteries opened up. The first he knew of it was when a fifty-five punched a tremendous hole in the ice. Another shell impacted behind him and that one was close enough to rain slivers of ice on the ambulance-like hailstones on a corrugated metal roof; the noise was as terrible as the machine-gun hits had been.

A fifty-five burst well ahead of him and quite a distance to the right. He steered a course toward it because they’d be correcting their aim and moving left with the next ones. He heard Sergei’s grunt when one fluttered overhead. It blew up a quarter acre of ice to the left and now he had to guide the speeding ambulance between the two holes before the ramifying cracks broke up the surface between them. He could see the fissures spreading: they moved that fast.

When the ambulance skittered across the frozen isthmus the ice was breaking up underneath and it wobbled badly, one rear wheel sinking into stuff that had gone soft as pablum. But the momentum carried it over the slush. Two fifty-five-millimeter salvos smashed up the lake behind them and he crabbed the ambulance to the left as quickly as he could without losing traction., They had two field guns in play as far as he could tell; both had an open field of fire as long as he remained within range. They didn’t have to hit him. All they had to do was punch a hole in the ice ahead of him-close enough so he couldn’t evade without skidding. The only answer to it was to keep doglegging-chasing salvos, trying to outwit the spotters.

Speed was his advantage and his hazard at the same time. On the ice every notch of speed meant that much less maneuverability. He was putting nearly a mile behind them with every full minute that elapsed but those guns could reach out six or seven miles and they still had plenty of time to stop him. Four minutes was an eternity in a race like this.

Ice lies thi

Too many of those and she could break an axle but they had a chance now. The guns were elevating steadily: the next one hit well out ahead of him and slightly to the right. He bent his course to veer around the far-right-hand side of the crater while the next salvo of HEs blew geysers in the ice considerably to the left. He steered straight this time because they’d expect him to chase back to the left and they’d be waiting for that. The next two drilled holes to his left again but still he didn’t change course. He waited until the next salvo-a neat bracket, one on either side and a bit behind him-and then he jinked to the left: a random move on impulse. It threw them off again and now the shells were falling behind. going wide; six miles and the spotters couldn’t see him very well. The ambulance was a small white object moving very fast against a blinding white background: at best they only had him in sight intermittently.

One at a time the two field guns gave it up. Sergei sat up and mischievously poked a finger through a hole torn in his coat sleeve by a Bolshevik bullet. “Magnificently done, my general.”

Maybe thirty miles in an arc across the ice now: they’d be at the Finland shore. He began to let himself relax. Another mile to be sure they were out of range and he’d stop and check the back for casualties.

It came without warning. He hadn’t thought to check the sky. He didn’t know the plane was there until the strafing tracers rattled a stitched line across the ice, walking the bullets right up to the speeding ambulance. He tried to take evasive action but it was much too late. He heard the diving whine of the aircraft. He felt it when the fifty-calibers shredded a rear tire; the ambulance dropped down on the rim and began to circle blindly like a half-crushed beetle. The jacketed bulletstore into the body of the ambulance and they were screaming in the back compartment and then the other tire blew and something broke apart and she was skidding to a stop, mangled and dead on the ice.

Sergei had taken a bullet and there was blood all over his coat-it looked like an arm wound; he showed his teeth. Alex heard the plane whining and when he looked up through the windscreen it was at the top of its turn, coming back for another pass: diving for the kill.

12

She stood on the tarmac watching the main gate. The wind was cruel-dry and frigid; puffs of powder snow blew across the runway. The only sounds were the footfalls of the Fi

Prince Leon came to her from the building behind her. He leaned heavily on his cane; his face was deeply trenched by exhaustion and the emptiness of defeat. “We shall have to go soon.”

“Go where?”

“I do not know, Irina. Back to Spain I suppose, where else can we go? You will catch a chill out here, you must come inside.”

She could see out past the main gate, past the sentries and their rifles-a long way down the ribbon of road that ran straight between the trees. No one was on the road. She put her back to it reluctantly and put her hand on the old prince’s arm and helped him back into the building; he had trouble with the step.