chair and reached for the ornate silver salver with a central crystal bowl containing a healthy dollop of Beluga caviar, surrounded by mounds of small warm buttered pancakes called blinis.
Grabbing a fistful of blinis, he stuffed them into his mouth, polishing them all off in little more than a minute.
Then he scooped up a small handful of caviar, tried it, gurgled with delight, and messily downed the remainder. “More! More!” he cried.
So. Caviar. The apple had not fallen far from the tree.
Hawke called to the waiter who had all the extraneous food removed and quickly summoned another waiter bearing more caviar and pancakes. It was at that moment that Hawke saw the two heavyset men who had climbed aboard the train at Tvas, the two men in the long black overcoats, enter the dining car at the far end.
They made their way toward Hawke and took an empty table on the opposite side of the car about three tables away. Neither man made eye contact with Alex, but he knew that meant nothing. Once they were seated and had ordered a bottle of vodka, the one facing Hawke looked up, caught his eye, and smiled. Hawke, sipping a small flute of Krug champagne, raised his glass and smiled back. He also signaled for his check.
As he was signing it, he noticed one of the men approach, clearly headed his way. The man stopped at their table, smiled at Hawke, and said in heavily accented English, “I am just admiring your handsome boy. Is he your son?”
“No. I am his bodyguard,” Hawke said in a low voice. “You’ll excuse us. We’re leaving.”
As Hawke gathered his son into his arms, the man leaned across the table and reached out to ruffle Alexei’s hair. His jacket fell open. The assassin had a Vostok Margolin. 22LR pistol with a built-in silencer holstered under his arm. The standard concealed weapon of the KGB officer. Hawke shot his right hand out and grasped the man’s thick wrist in midair before he could touch a hair on Alexei’s head. He then leaned forward and whispered fiercely into the man’s ear.
“I said I’m his bodyguard. That includes his hair. Understand me?”
Hawke applied increasingly severe pressure to the base of the man’s thumb until he grimaced in pain and nodded his head. The Russian rose to his full height, rubbed his wrist vigorously, smiled down at Hawke, and said, “It’s a long trip, you know, here to St. Petersburg. I’m sure we shall all meet again.” Then he turned on his heel and returned to his table.
Hawke rose with Alexei in his arms and quickly but somewhat discreetly left the dining car. He needed to return the child safely to their locked compartment. Given the presence of two KGB assassins aboard the Red Arrow, it promised to be a very long night. Two killers on a train. Like an Agatha Christie novel, except you already knew who the true villains were.
But who was the intended victim?
Surely there were many inside Russia, the so-called Tsarists, who wanted Hawke dead.
But both Anastasia and Kuragin had said there was a price on Alexei’s head. People in power who didn’t like the idea of a tsar’s descendant waiting in the wings to take the throne at some future moment.
It hit him like a lightning strike to the heart.
These two thugs weren’t aboard the Red Arrow to kill him.
They meant to murder the heir to the crown. The child of the Tsarina.
They meant to kill his son.
Eight
Hawke sat in the darkened compartment, smoking incessantly to stay alert. He’d bought a few packs of Sobranie Black Russians in the rail station at St. Petersburg. Despite the black wrapper with its fancy gold tip, they were foul, but effective. The rhythmic click-clack on the tracks threatened to hypnotize him, and he fought it with nicotine. He was seated on one of the small, upholstered chairs in the center of the compartment’s sitting room.
In the adjoining room, mercifully, Alexei was sleeping peacefully on the lower berth, his teddy bear clutched tightly. Hawke had rocked him to sleep and kissed his warm cheek before tucking him in. He’d then propped a sturdy wooden chair against the bedroom door to the train’s corridor, feeling only slightly more secure. He’d left the sliding door between their two rooms open and could hear the reassuring sound of his son snoring softly. It was a sound like no other he’d ever heard.
The only light in Hawke’s tiny room came from a dim violet-blue nightlight, a spiritlike apparition near the floor that gave the small sitting room a rather eerie, stage-set feeling. Like a bad horror film, Hawke thought, some kind of Hammer Films vampire movie.
In his right hand, Hawke held his SIG. 45 pistol, a hollow-point round already in the chamber. He’d positioned his chair to one side and in the shadows, so as to be out of the line of fire of someone forcefully entering the room. But he would have a clear shot at anyone coming through that door without an invitation.
He would shoot to kill if, indeed, circumstances warranted it.
For a man expecting a pair of KGB or criminal thugs to burst through his door with guns blazing, Alex Hawke was surprisingly relaxed. He was not the type of man who could be prodded into deciding what he might or might not do under any possible circumstances. And this was certainly not due to bravery, or coolness, or any especially sublime confidence in his own physical prowess or power. It was a powerful instinct to go with his gut and it hadn’t failed him yet.
And, he was, as one of his superior officers in the Royal Navy had said, “Simply good at war.”
From time to time he’d rise and stretch, the long hours of sitting starting to wear on him. He looked at the large face of his black Royal Navy dive watch, the luminous numbers clearly legible. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. He’d been in (or, rather, on) this bloody chair for six full hours.
He could feel himself losing his edge.
Inaction is the enemy of action, he reminded himself. It was time to move.
He rose from the chair and went to check on his son, understanding for the very first time the expression “sleeping like a baby.” He then went to his travel bag and pulled out a loose-fitting black turtlenecked jumper, pulling it over his head. The black trousers he was already wearing would suit his purposes nicely in the darkness of the train’s corridors. He checked his weapon once more and slapped the mag back into the gun.
Slipping the pistol into the nylon holster in the small of his back, he reached up to the shelf and grasped Peter the Great’s battle sword, the gift from Kuragin. The red leather scabbard had a loop that he ran his belt through, the ivory-handled sword now hanging down his right side. His black gabardine greatcoat was swaying on the door hook. He shouldered himself into it and saw in the mirror that only the razor-edged tip of the sword was visible beneath the hem.
If you’re going to a gunfight, best to bring a gun and a knife, even a sword if there’s one handy.
He listened a long moment to Alexei’s soft breathing, then he stepped out into the corridor. He turned and pulled the door closed, locked it from the outside, tried it twice, and turned to his left, headed toward the front of the train.
Before he moved to the rear, he wanted to clear any cars up ahead. At the end of the narrow passageway the door was locked, and Hawke could see his first-class carriage was located just behind the locomotive. He saw the door to the concierge’s compartment, slightly ajar.
For a moment, he considered waking her to ask her to keep an eye out for anyone entering this car. About to rap, he withdrew his hand. Bad things might happen aboard this train tonight, and he wanted no suspicion to fall on him.
He began to move toward the rear of the train.
He’d caught a glimpse of the passenger manifest while the concierge was off making sure all the first-class passengers had what they needed before turning in. Quickly scanning it, he’d identified his foes. The two men who’d joined the train at Tvas were sharing a single compartment in the last second-class sleeping car, just before the club car at the train’s rear. Compartment number 211.
The Red Arrow, racing through the night under a star-spangled black sky, was eleven cars long. Upon reaching the tenth and final sleeping car, he withdrew his pistol and made his way down the darkened corridor until
