Lenins roller coaster, p.15
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 15
A second boat had carried him from Kerch to Sevastopol. The telegraph had been operational when he arrived, but only for a couple of hours, and he hadn’t received any fresh instructions. What should he do? According to that morning’s paper, the Germans were less than sixty miles away and would be in Sevastopol by Wednesday. The only ships he could take were bound for Odessa or Romania, the first already in German hands, the second a country currently lacking an exit. And since staying in the city was out of the question, his only real option was to head northward, somehow evade the Germans, and try to make contact with those colleagues already in Russia. He supposed he could whistle “Rule, Britannia!” Or wave a Union Jack.
Next morning he woke with a hangover—Sevastopol was running out of many things, but alcohol wasn’t one of them. He had done most of his drinking in the relative safety of his hotel room, staring at the bay and its silhouetted warships until night had swallowed them up. Before passing out on the surprisingly comfortable bed, he had written another letter to Caitlin, which he now tore up.
He should destroy Cheselden’s as well, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. God willing, he would see Caitlin again, but his dead partner’s letters were the only thing left for Soph.
At least the sun was shining—the spring weather in this part of the world was uncommonly pleasant. After washing in the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor, he went downstairs to the restaurant, which was virtually empty. The only other patrons—a middle-class family and a group of angry-looking sailors—were sitting at opposite ends of the long room; McColl, not wishing to suggest an allegiance, took a table halfway between them. The usual plate of bread and jam appeared, and for the second morning running, a jagged lump of sugar accompanied the tea. More surprising still, the waiter soon returned with a single chunk of what had to be meat. It tasted like nothing McColl had tasted before, but he ate it anyway, remembering the long-gone days when his mother had called him a fussy eater.
Once outside, he stood on the Count’s Quay steps for several minutes, enjoying the warmth of the morning sun and the deep blue stillness of the bay. The obvious upsurge of activity on two of the anchored warships was probably a sign of imminent departure; if so, and if they were heading east to Novorossiysk, the Allied command would be pleased. McColl didn’t see how the Germans could make much use of the Russian ships, but why give them the opportunity?
It was past ten. Reluctantly tearing himself away, he walked back across the square and onto Yekaterinskaya. The mood here was febrile—even the gulls wheeling above the street seemed unusually raucous. Sevastopol was in the last throes of something, but no one knew quite what.
The British consulate was on a side street behind the Church of St. Nicholas, two rooms on the first floor of a yellow limestone mansion. Acting consul Torovsky was an English-speaking Russian who dreamed of owning a cottage close to Shakespeare’s birthplace. He greeted McColl with the usual downturned mouth—no, there was nothing new to report.
Nor did he think there would be. The telegraph line to the west ran through Ukraine and was now effectively blocked by the Germans. The Bolsheviks were still allowing ordinary traffic on the roundabout route via Moscow but had forbidden the sending of coded messages since “our troops” landed at Murmansk early in April. If Cumming had new instructions for McColl, he had no way of passing them on.
“But I do have something to tell you,” Torovsky told him, reaching for his cigarette box. “The consuls from Kiev and Kherson both arrived last night, and I’m sure they will have all the latest information.” After examining the inside of the box, he gently closed it again. “They are staying at the Grand Hotel. But I wouldn’t call on them just yet—I expect they’ll still be sleeping. It was three o’clock this morning when they woke me up to announce their arrival.”
“Where do they mean to go from here?” McColl asked.
Torovsky shrugged. “They didn’t say.”
McColl took his leave and resisted the temptation to double back and catch the consul lighting up one of his precious cigarettes. He bought a local paper and took it to the Streltsky Café, where the clientele looked much the same and the coffee still flowed from its precious unknown source. The war news was suspiciously good—the second German offensive of the spring had slowed to a halt after more impressive gains. How much more did they have? McColl wondered. And what was keeping the Americans?
He had another task that morning, one that required him to take the short ferry ride across Southern Bay. He hadn’t needed a gun in Baku, and being caught with one on his journey across the Caucasus might have proved fatal, but now, with Nakoryakov’s death and the prospect of venturing behind German lines in Ukraine, he was eager to replace the one he’d lost in Ashkhabad. And according to his favorite waiter at the Kist Hotel, there was a healthy market for firearms in Sailor Town.
The bar the waiter had suggested was a fifteen-minute walk from the Pavlovsky Point landing stage, on a corner of the crossroads just beyond the naval hospital. It was closed when McColl arrived, which might have been a blessing—and a knock called forth a boy of not much more than ten, who gave him another address in exchange for a ruble. He walked on through the gridlike streets, seeing only women and children—the sailors were doubtless on their ships, still arguing over where to take them.
It was a young woman who answered the door and an older one who showed him four guns, each complete with ammunition. Officers’ pistols, he guessed, taken from those about to be drowned.
“Who do you want to shoot?” the old woman asked as he examined them.
“No one,” he said shortly. “I’m traveling to Moscow, and the country’s not safe.”
“Nowhere is,” she said, with evident satisfaction.
He chose the Mauser C96, partly because he’d handled one before but mostly because he knew that its widespread use in Russia would make ammunition easy to find. And it was a good gun. Winston Churchill had carried one in the Sudan, and rumor had it that T. E. Lawrence was currently tucking one into his belt.
It was the most expensive of the four, but still a bargain. Walking back to the landing stage, McColl felt comforted by its physical presence in the small of his back.
He spent the long wait for the ferry watching the myriad boats scooting this way and that across the waters. Hills rose on all sides, basking in the sunshine under a pure blue sky, reminding McColl of one of those rare days when the weather gods smiled on his Scottish homeland.
By the time he reached Count’s Quay, it seemed reasonable to assume that the fugitive consuls would be up and about. He took the short walk to the Grand, where the diplomatic duo had taken the Governor’s Suite, presumably at the British taxpayers’ expense. The two fortyish men were indeed awake, if not yet dressed for the outside world. Breakfast and lunch had apparently been eschewed in favor of early pre-dinner drinks, taken in resplendent silk dressing gowns on a balcony overlooking the confluence of Sevastopol’s two bays.
McColl suspected the effusive welcome had little to do with himself, and thought about coming back later. But with nothing to suggest that later would be better, he took the proffered drink and tried to get what information he could from the two diplomats. It was hard work. Both were intent on reaching Romania—“There are worse places to sit out the war,” as the man from Kherson put it. “Try Kherson,” he added with a giggle that swiftly turned into a snort.
Kiev had apparently been better, particularly before the revolution went and spoiled it all for the consul and his Russian friends. But the latter’s fate paled into insignificance when compared with the love of the consul’s life. “A dark blue twelve-cylinder Pathfinder two-seater,” the man enunciated carefully, actually drooling as he did so. It was locked away at his dacha, and he hoped to God it would still be there when the Bolshevik scum had all been taken out and shot. If McColl were ever near Bucha, the consul begged him to check that the car was all right.
When asked about British-organized sabotage units in their area, both disclaimed any knowledge of such activities.
“Skulking around in alleys,” as the man from Kherson put it. “Complete waste of time.”
“Worse than that,” his colleague boomed. “We should be letting the Germans get on with clearing up the mess.”
If he’d needed advice on having a suit pressed in Kherson or a billiard cue mended in Kiev, then these would have been the men to ask. McColl took his leave without regret. It wasn’t often he met Englishmen who made the prospect of losing the war seem almost attractive.
He was no nearer a firm decision on what to do when he woke up the following morning. According to his restaurant waiter, three full trains and two empty boats had arrived during the night, leaving a sizable surplus of would-be émigrés with no chance of an onward ticket. As McColl moodily dunked the harder-than-usual bread into his tea—there was no fresh fruit that morning—he wondered whether he should simply cut his losses and pull whatever strings he could to get a berth. A German POW camp held no attractions, particularly one in Russia.
After the usual visit to Torovsky had proved the usual waste of time, he decamped at the usual café and sat with his coffee, watching that morning’s array of desperate Russian faces. And then—lo and behold—there was an English face, and one he recognized to boot. Miles Pryce-Manley saw McColl at the same moment, his stern, patrician features dissolving into an unlikely grin. Grabbing an unattended chair, he plunked himself down beside McColl. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said in Russian.
“You’ve found me,” McColl responded in the same language. He hadn’t seen Pryce-Manley since the previous spring, when they’d both been stationed in Petrograd. As a fellow agent, he’d seemed intelligent and careful, not inclined, as some of their colleagues were, to see all Russians as either dim but well-meaning aristocrats or wild-eyed nihilists armed with bombs. “And where have you popped up from?” he asked.
“Thataway,” Pryce-Manley said, jerking a thumb toward the north.
“Just arrived?”
“In the middle of the night. I dozed on the station platform until it got light, and then went in search of a boat . . .” He paused to order a coffee from the hovering waiter. “I haven’t had a decent cup in weeks.”
“Did you get a berth?” McColl asked.
“I did. The ship leaves tonight, allegedly for Constanta.”
“You said you were looking for me.”
“Yes. I found your hotel—it was the first one I tried—but you’d just left.” He stopped to admire the cup of coffee that the waiter had just placed in front of him, then took a first sip. “Oh, excellent. Yes, I have things to tell you, but this is a trifle public,” he added in a low voice. “Have you got a few hours to spare?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I always wanted to see the place where the Light Brigade came to grief, and the clerk at your hotel told me there’s a place down here where you can hire a carriage with rubber wheels.”
“I know it. Yes, but—”
“It’s only an hour’s ride.”
“Oh, all right,” McColl agreed. Taking time off from one war to visit another seemed a bit much, but he had nothing better to do.
The carriage company’s owner was pleased to see them—so pleased that he offered to charge them ten times the appropriate fare. Once that misunderstanding had been sorted out, driver and carriage were summoned from the stables, and soon they were heading down past the station and up into the hills that lay to the south of the town.
“Look over there,” Pryce-Manley said loudly in English. “There’s a naked woman in that field.”
The driver’s motionless head suggested he wasn’t a linguist.
“So what do you have to tell me?” McColl asked Manley-Pryce.
“I got orders for you just before I left. They couldn’t get them to Sevastopol, and Cumming’s man in Moscow hoped you’d still be here when I arrived. The old man wants you in Kiev.”
“As your replacement?”
“More or less . . .”
“What made you leave?”
Pryce-Manley grinned. “The Rada police got a photograph from somewhere—not a very kind one, but sadly recognizable—and they passed it on to the Germans. And strange as it may seem, secret work gets a trifle difficult when your face is pinned onto hundreds of lampposts. I was more of a danger to my own people than I was to the enemy.”
“Well, let’s hope they don’t have my picture,” McColl said. Romania suddenly seemed a more enticing destination.
“No reason they should have,” Pryce-Manley said cheerfully. Their carriage was passing the gates of a large cemetery, and he asked the driver whose it was.
“Frantsuzskiy,” the man said, drawing out each syllable before aiming a gob of spit in the cemetery’s general direction. He clearly wasn’t fond of the French. “Vostochnaya Voyna,” he added in explanation. The Eastern War. Which was presumably what the Russians called the Crimean War.
“So tell me about Kiev,” McColl said once they’d left the graveyard behind.
Pryce-Manley did so. He’d run a network of train watchers in the city, gathering information about the movement of German troops and providing the Allied military leaderships with a clearer idea of how many were being shifted westward. But the flow of trains had slowed in recent weeks. In Pryce-Manley’s opinion the Germans had moved all the troops they could, if they weren’t to leave their grain and oil shipments unprotected. “So sabotage is the name of the game now. Stop the traffic. There are three groups in Kiev that we’re involved with—not running them but helping with things like documentation, money, coordination. And with the actual operations—you have experience with explosives, right?”
“I do.” McColl had a mental picture of the Belgian railway bridge collapsing into the Meuse.
“Good. Your main problem will be getting there in one piece. The Germans have taken a real grip on the railways, and there are no roads to speak of. Someone told me there were only twelve automobiles in Odessa—can you believe that?”
“‘There’s about that number in Sevastopol. The commissars drive round in them.”
Pryce-Manley grunted. “How’s your memory for names and addresses?”
“Not bad, but I’ll write them down when we stop and burn the paper before I leave Sevastopol.”
“All right.”
“Now tell me about the situation in Ukraine.”
Pryce-Manley grimaced. “A mess. How much do you know already?”
“Assume nothing.”
“Well, you know that Ukraine declared itself independent soon after the Bolshevik takeover? The new government, the Rada, is a mishmash of nationalists and moderates and socialists, rather like the old Kerensky government. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd said they accepted Ukrainian independence, but a lot of Ukrainian Bolsheviks weren’t at all happy with the Rada, so they’re at war with each other. The Rada people welcomed the Germans as allies, only to find that the Germans had other ideas—so now they’re just set on holding on until the Germans leave. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks never stopped fighting the Germans, even when Lenin told them to, though some people say he egged them on in private. So they’re all at each other’s throats. And I haven’t even got to the Russian nationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the anarchists. There are thousands of anarchists in Ukraine—God knows why. A Russian I met thought it was the flat horizons that drove them to it.”
McColl laughed. “What about the bigger picture? What’s happened since the treaty was signed?”
“Apart from the Germans sending half their troops to France? Well, the Bolsheviks dropped us like a hot potato. No cooperation at all.”
“You don’t think that had anything to do with us landing troops in Murmansk?” McColl asked innocently.
“Oh, you heard about that, then?”
“That was front-page news, even in Batumi.”
“Ah. And yes, I guess it did. Not that they’ve done anything since they arrived. Worst of both worlds, really—we’ve pissed the Bolsheviks off without achieving a damn thing. And more than that—they stopped us using code and forced us back on couriers, who keep getting arrested.”
“Which hardly encourages Lenin and company to trust us,” McColl noted wryly.
“Oh, that ship has sailed. We’re going to have to fight the Germans without any help from the Bolsheviks. The best we can hope for is them staying neutral.”
“And once the Germans are beaten?” McColl asked. “Do we just get out of Russia?”
Pryce-Manley looked surprised by the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “Up to London, I suppose.” He thought a bit more. “If it were up to me, I would. It’s not our country, and I’d have trouble choosing a side. I’ve met decent chaps on all of them. And some right bastards, too.” He hesitated. “But I don’t get the feeling that’s the way things are going. Some of our people in Moscow . . . You’ve met them, you know what their politics are. Their idea of a revolution was killing Rasputin so that the czar and his wife would come to their senses.”
McColl smiled, but only briefly. “There’s something you need to let London know,” he told Pryce-Manley before recounting his gruesome discovery two days earlier.
“And you’ve no idea who killed him?” Pryce-Manley asked.
“None whatsoever.”
“Speaking of killing, I think we’re here.”
The driver had brought the carriage to a halt where the road ran along the crest of a ridge. “There,” he said in Russian, sweeping an arm to embrace the land to their left. “Idiot soldaty,” he added, which didn’t need translating.
It certainly looked like the ideal spot for a suicidal charge—a flat, narrow valley, plugged at one end by a hill and flanked by two long ridges. McColl had no trouble picturing the host of thundering horsemen, drawn sabers glinting above an unrolling carpet of dust. Or the cannons lining the higher ground, gouging holes in their ranks.
