that sometimes the doctor had to be fetched from the mainland.
One night, when the poor child was only ten or eleven, Dr. Lundvig had come out of Anastasia’s room with sadness in his eyes and softly closed the door. Waiting for him in the darkened hallway, he had found Katerina Arnborg, the head housekeeper. He confided that he’d seen evidence of other kinds of abuse. He whispered to her that it was so vile that perhaps the police should be notified.
But Katerina had been terrified of the count’s wrath, and so she had never told a living soul. The old doctor had never come back to Morto Island. He’d died a month or so later, drowned in a boating accident out on the fjord in the middle of the night. An unsolved mystery to this day.
The next doctor they’d had was a Russian from Stalingrad, and he never said anything to anyone when he emerged from the child’s room.
Katerina now stood on the stairway landing below Anastasia’s bedroom, listening to the two of them up there as he caned her mercilessly. She still hated herself for her cowardice, not saying anything all these years, and now it was far, far too late for that.
She’d never seen the count so drunk as when he’d arrived home from the Nobel ceremony. He was raging at his daughter as he dragged her up the stairs behind him. Suddenly, the screams coming from the child’s bedroom were even louder.
And inside the bedroom, “Get away from me, you bastard! No more. I’m a grown woman! Not your little whipping girl who cowers before the great-”
“Traitor! You think I don’t know what’s going on? I told you to rid yourself of that bastard child growing inside you. And did you listen? No! No! And…no!”
“I
“Silence! You knew what he was going to do tonight. You planned it together, didn’t you? Humiliate me before the whole world. You are a traitor, Anastasia. To me, and to all of Russia. You don’t deserve to live.”
“It’s not true. As much as I’ve learned to loathe you, I’d never conspire against you. I love Russia too much, God help me.”
“Get up! Get on the bed. And then-”
“Never! If you think that is ever,
“In hell, perhaps.”
“You should see yourself now, standing there. The mighty Tsar. Beating his pregnant daughter. How majestic! How brave and noble he is! How-”
From outside, the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Heavy automatic weapons. The Tsar smiled as he looked toward the window, Anastasia’s small bedroom repeatedly lit with bright flashes from the rooftop above. He dropped the cane and moved to the window.
“Silence, daughter! You think he’s coming for you? Your great hero arrived to save you, is he? Come here and have a look!”
“Please. Just go. Leave me alone.”
“The spy is dead, Anastasia. Do you hear me? Dead.”
“What are you saying?”
“I knew he was coming here for me. Following me, this arrogant British spy. And I was ready for him. Don’t you want to see him? Your dead lover? Get up and see for yourself!”
He seized her arm and dragged her bodily over to the window, took her face in his violently shaking hand and pressed it against the windowpane, forcing her to look down into the snow-covered gardens.
He lay faceup in the snow, his arms flung wide. There was blood everywhere, on his body, on the snow around him, spreading black in the moonlight. He was still, and the snow was falling on his face. It was true. Alex was gone.
“Oh. Oh, my God, you’ve murdered him, you madman, the only human being I’ve ever loved!”
“Get some clothes on. We’re leaving for St. Petersburg. The doctor will come for you in two minutes. He’ll give you something to calm you down. I have some important business to attend to during the crossing. Soon the people who humiliated me tonight will feel the pain. Tonight begins the end of the West and the glorious triumph of Mother Russia. And you, my little traitor, will be a witness to history.”
The door slammed, and the monster, too, was gone.
69
Halter burst out of the woods at a full run. He had the automatic rifle at his shoulder and was firing up at the clearly silhouetted snipers on the roof. He had the element of surprise and, with his weapon on full auto and at this range, even moving, his fire suppression was instantly effective and deadly. He saw two snipers pitch forward and plummet four floors to the snowy ground below. The deaths of two comrades caused a sudden, if momentary, cessation of fire from above. Heads disappeared beneath the parapet.
His wholly unexpected appearance and the Bizon’s vicious firepower gave him a few precious seconds to reach his fallen comrade. Hawke lay on his back in a spreading pool of blood-soaked snow. He was conscious and breathing, Halter saw, quick shallow breaths, but he was grievously wounded in any number of places and losing a lot of blood. Another second or two out here, and they’d both be dead.
“Give me a hand here, will you, old sport?” Hawke gasped, his voice hoarse with pain.
Halter couldn’t carry him, but he got an arm under him, and Hawke made use of his one good leg, getting to his feet with a rush of pure adrenaline. The two men moved surprisingly swiftly toward the woods. Halter was deceptively strong, and Hawke was hobbling but determinedly keeping up with him as best he could. They were totally exposed, and both men fully expected to die before they reached the tree line.
Suddenly, more sporadic fire erupted from the roof, rounds thunking into the ground all around them as they struggled toward the safety of the tree line barely twenty yards away.
Halter paused, turned, and unleashed another lethal burst of heavy fire with the Bizon on full auto, great thumping rounds that blasted chunks of cement from the parapet and either killed or wounded at least some of those still trying to bring them down. Hawke was still on his feet, using Halter for support, and he emptied the Walther’s magazine at the remaining guards visible on the rooftop. Two more pitched forward into space, and under this final bit of covering fire, the two men were able to dive into the relative safety of the thick woods.
THEY QUICKLY FOUND the bearskin in the small clearing, and Halter gently lowered Hawke to the ground. Rounds were still striking the trees around and above them, whistling and cracking in the branches, sending showers of freshly fallen snow down on the two men. Halter took a moment to examine the worst of Hawke’s wounds.
“You’ll live if you’re lucky,” Stefan told Hawke. He’d ripped his own shirt into strips and was applying tourniquets to the gravest injuries, pressing a folded piece of his white shirt into the very worst of them, the shoulder. The thigh and the rest of his injuries were flesh wounds, superficial. “That should do it. You’ll be all right, at least until we can get you to a doctor.”
“Goes without saying,” Hawke murmured. He knew it was standard procedure to tell a dying man he was going to be perfectly all right.
“Just hold this compress on with your left hand, press it deeply into the shoulder wound. Now, where’s that damn Zeiss scope of yours?” Hawke managed to pat the outside of his jacket, and Halter pulled the thing from the inside pocket.
“Time?” Hawke asked weakly.
“Three minutes. A bloody eternity, eh?”
Halter held the scope to his eye and peered up at the rooftop. The lights had been extinguished. But in the moonlight, he saw the Tsar running at a low crouch for the airship’s bow entry stairway, surrounded by his cordon
