“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sofia said sharply. “You and Anya are leaving, yes. But not on horses.”
“But, but…”
“I’ve heard Bernie’s car roaring around this place for weeks,” Sofia said. “You’ll take it.”
“But, but…”
“Neither of us know how to drive,” Anya pointed out.
“So we wake up Bernie!”
“We can’t take Bernie!” Natasha insisted. “He’ll be safe, if we can get away. Sheremetev won’t hurt him. He needs an up-timer.” She pointed at Cass on the floor.
“Bernie would follow you anyway,” Sofia snapped. “So stop being silly.”
Kiril’s mind was racing. “And Filip. You’ll want Filip.”
“Why Filip?” Anya said, then almost dragging the words out. “He has a secure position here. It would be better if he stayed here where it’s safe.”
Father Kiril smiled. “For the same reason that we’re going to send Bernie. He would follow you anyway. Besides, who do you think has been writing the Flying Squirrel pamphlets? Filip isn’t safe here, not with the heat that will be coming down.”
Anya nodded, accepting Father Kiril’s logic “And Gregorii,” Anya said. “He’s been working on our papers, just in case.”
“And you, Father,” Sofia said. “All these children need an adult around.”
Chapter 75
“Wake up! Wake up!”
Bernie was never at his best when shaken out of sleep. “Wha… Who…?”
“Bernie, wake up,” Natasha said. “We have to go.”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere away from here.”
That last comment woke Bernie up fully. “Natasha, what happened?”
“Quickly, Bernie. Quickly. I’ll tell you on the way.” He was half out of his room before his mind caught up with his body. “All right, everyone stop. What’s going on?”
“We don’t have time for this!” Natasha said exasperated.
“We don’t have time to skip this part,” Bernie said. After four years of the enthusiasms of geniuses he knew well how easy it was for them to get excited and forget minor details like, say, shoes in a snow storm. “What are we trying to accomplish? What can we do that will make it safer and more likely to work? What must we do that will prevent it from working?”
“We’re trying to escape!” We can move quic-”
Bernie held up a hand. “Escape to where? For how long? From who?”
And that brought everyone up short.
Father Kiril quickly and concisely filled Bernie in on what had happened.
“Anya,” Natasha added, “had been working on just-in-case plans to escape to the east.”
“Good thinking, kid,” Bernie said. “I figured on running west myself, but all the forces that would be hunting us are in that direction and that’s the direction they would expect. So we escape to the east long enough to get away and figure out what to do next?”
There were nods.
“We’re escaping from the present government of Russia, not just Sheremetev and his goons since he’s running things now. Which means we need to be as far and as long gone as we can before he realizes we’ve left. What about the radio?”
“What about it?” Sofia asked. But Natasha was nodding.
“We’ll have to break it and in a way that will be hard to fix quickly,” Natasha said, cringing a bit at the thought of destroying the best radio in Russia. “Otherwise they will be able to tell Moscow what has happened in seconds instead of hours.”
“But Moscow has its own radio,” Anya said. “We can’t break that one.”
They continued to talk as Bernie grabbed up two guns, a spare pair of pants and shirt, and a heavy jacket. “I’ll get the cash. All the money in the Dacha safe. Paper and coins both,” Sofia said. “Money is money.”
Bernie went to check on the car while Sofia headed back to Natasha’s rooms and the Dacha safe. Anya and Natasha went to get Filip and Gregorii and they all met back at Natasha’s office, which had been soundproofed two years ago to keep the occasional booms, bangs and clangs of experiments from aggravating the boss. And which, just incidentally, had kept the rest of the Dacha from hearing Anya shoot holes in Cass and two of Sheremetev’s guardsmen.
“So how do we take the radio shack?” Filip asked. It was more than a shack, though not much more. It had two rooms-the radio room and a toilet. And there was someone always on duty in case there was a message from Moscow. There were six radio men at the Dacha, but only one was on duty at this time of night.
“Keep it simple!” Anya said. “Walk in, point a gun at him, tie him up and gag him, then bust the radio and leave.”
Which is what they did. The guard didn’t resist and they tied him up as much for his protection as theirs. They told him what had happened in Natasha’s rooms and mentioned making a run for Poland and the USE. Between Filip and Bernie, they knew which bits to break that would take the longest time to fix. There were a couple of pieces from up-time that Vladimir had sent from Grantville; those they took with them. For the rest they took pieces and spares and hid them under junk in Bernie’s garage. They really didn’t want to break the stuff, just take it out of commission for a little while.
Sofia elected to stay behind. The final tally of those going were Natasha, Bernie, Anya, Filip, Father Kiril and Gregorii. They would take the car. After they left Sofia would tell a list of people to run if they wanted to and to go to Natasha’s estates, not to try to follow them to the USE. That way, if their judgment was wrong and some of the people were working for Sheremetev, they would lead the search west.
They hoped, anyway. Bernie was skeptical, since no matter what anyone told Sheremetev’s people, the car was bound to leave tracks in the road at least in places. But maybe seventeenth-century Russian secret policemen were just as prone as the authorities he’d known back up-time to believe what they were told instead of their own lying eyes.
The first graying of dawn was in the sky when Bernie turned the key and the old Dodge started up. When they drove out the gate of the Dacha, the trunk was filled with money, weapons, ammunition and bits of irreplaceable tech. Bernie had also taken the time to hitch up a small trailer on which they were towing as many five-gallon cans of gasoline as they’d been able to fill.
He could only hope the jury-rigged hitch would hold, but he thought they’d probably need that extra gasoline. Bernie was more worried about the condition of the roads. The rasputitsa was over, the notorious muddy season that made travel extremely difficult or even impossible on Russian roads for weeks during the spring and fall. But “over” didn’t preclude running into some still-bad stretches if their luck turned sour. If they did run into such a muddy stretch, they’d lose the fuel trailer for sure and might get bogged down altogether.
On a more positive note, any pursuers would have the same problem. Mud wasn’t any friendlier to horses than it was to wheeled vehicles.
The Dacha had started four years earlier as a largish house with a hunting park behind it and a tiny village in front. That had changed. Fencing and walls had been added, a canal had been dug that connected the Dacha to the Moskva River. The Moskva fed into the Oka, which fed into the Volga; which allowed goods to travel to the Dacha from all of Russia by river and canal. More buildings to house researchers and research had been added. The gate going from the Dacha proper to the villages was manned but not closed. As the Dodge approached, the guards waved for it to stop but Bernie didn’t slow down at all. The car kept right on going and the guard who had been blocking its path was a bit slow in jumping aside. He was used to the speed of horses, not of cars.
