‘No.’
‘Well – Grand Duke?’
The captain said, ‘Could’ve sworn you were a Russki, anyhow.’ Lilting intonation – Welsh… ‘That get-up – Navy, is it?’
‘Right.’
‘Royal, or Merchant?’
‘Royal. My name’s Cowan – Lieutenant-Commander. Levels with major, in case you didn’t know. But far be it from me to break your silly bloody rules, so—’
‘Shouldn’t take any notice of ’em, sir, if I were you. I’m Davies. This Canuck here’s Sam Scott. Welcome aboard, sir.’
‘What are rules for, I ask you.’ The major looked sad as he shook his hand. ‘No standards left, that’s the trouble.’
‘Canadian?’
A nod… ‘One of those damned Colonials, don’t you know… What’s the Navy doing on a train to God knows where?’
‘Kharkov – taking two days, I’m told.’
‘Wouldn’t count on it. Odds aren’t all that favourable. Time’ll tell, that’s about the one thing you can be sure of… Come on in, sit down. The other Grand Dukes got out here, that’s how it happens we have all this space.’ He looked at the small, dark captain. ‘Never know, Jim, he may have something to drink in that bag.’
‘Navy drinks rum – right?’
‘Well.’ Bob dumped his bag on the wooden seat, as the Welshman swung his booted legs down to make room. The tiers of planks that made berths above this one had been removed, as had those on the opposite side above the major, but on the third side, across from the doorless entrance, they were still in place. Three top bunks, anyway: there’d be a stove at each end of the carriage, the custom being that male passengers kept them stoked and burning – they could be cooked on as well – and since heat rises, to be trapped under the wood-lined ceiling, the top bunks would be warm while passengers in the bottom ones stood a good chance of freezing solid. So three in here – if there were no others coming – would be perfectly all right… Sitting, he removed his cap, blew melted sleet off its peak and badge, and confirmed, ‘Rum – yes. Sailors get a daily issue. Hellish strong stuff, comes from the West Indies in barrels. If I’d thought, I’d have brought one with me.’
‘You mean you didn’t?’
‘Always forget something when you pack.’
‘It’s unforgivable, you know. I mean, what the hell are we fighting for?’
He shrugged. ‘Two days should be about long enough to debate that question.’
‘Two minutes is all I need.’ Scott, the major, shook his head. ‘Open and shut case, see, far as I’m concerned.’
‘So what’s—’
‘Please.’ Davies begged him, ‘Don’t ask. You get a different answer every time and on a bad day it can take bloody hours, man.’
‘I’ll tell you anyway.’ The brown eyes held Bob’s. ‘I enjoy it – that’s why. So much so that when they tell me to stop I don’t know what the hell I’ll do.’
‘He’s not talking about women, either.’
‘I did wonder.’
‘But that’s the short answer he’s given you. You’re lucky. Scary thing is it’s the true one too, he means it. Scary for me, see, I fly with him, often as not. Puts my life on the line… Well, it’s a fact he knows his business maybe better than any man alive – certainly better than a lot who are not alive—’
‘Be a pal and shut up, Jim?’
‘I’m merely trying to explain—’
‘Glad to have you with us, Cowan. Two more days in this train, a little variety in the company won’t come amiss.’
‘Been on it some time, have you?’
‘Well – let’s see… We entrained at Kotluban – if you know where that is?’
‘Tsarytsin area.’
‘Flying range of Tsarytsin, sure… But we were operating way up from there, you know. Kamyshin—’
‘I know. We heard you did great things up there.’
‘Had our moments. Well, don’t we all… But from Kotluban, seven whole days down to Rostov. Seven days – imagine it? Cooped up with this damn Welshman? Believe me, Cowan, it’s going to be a pleasure to have your company. Incidentally, were you about to tell us how come you are here?’
‘I suppose I’d better get it over with.’
‘Bad as that?’
‘Only that I seem to be answering the same question all the time.’ He took a breath. ‘Would you believe I’m looking for two girls?’
Davies muttered, ‘Two girls.’ He looked at Scott, and shrugged. ‘They do spend long periods at sea, of course.’
‘Any particular two girls?’
‘You won’t believe this.’
‘Try us.’
‘Governesses?’
‘Oh, my God…’
‘Hold it, Jim. Go on now, Cowan. Say, you’re not Irish, are you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Just your talk seems a little – wild. Governesses… What sort of naval man are you, anyway?’
‘Off the subject, rather, but – all right. I was Merchant Navy until ’14, then in small ships. Mostly destroyers. But I talk Russian – my mother was Russian. I was born here – St Petersburg, Petrograd – so when this Intervention business started, and they needed interpreters and suchlike – here I am.’
‘In pursuit of governesses.’
‘I was with the Caspian Flotilla until a few months ago.’
‘Were you, now. We were based at Petrovsk, for a while.
Shooting up Bolshy convoys on Old Mother Volga.’
Davies slapped his knee: ‘Talk about turkey-shoots. Golly, did those ammo barges burn!’
‘I’ll bet.’ Thinking for a moment of mentioning his own experiences on the Volga. But – better not. Much better let them tell their stories… ‘Look – I’m starving, and I’ve some sandwiches here – plenty, if you’d like to join me?’
‘Kind of you, but – thanks all the same.’ Davies shook his head too. ‘So happens we’re well fixed for rations. Leading Airman Pickerell – next door here – knocks up a damn good breakfast, I can tell you.’
‘You’ve a team with you, then?’
‘One leading airman, one airman, two mechanics. Anyway, you can mess with us, Cowan, and welcome.’
‘Very good of you. And all the more reason you should try one of these sandwiches. Courtesy of the wardroom mess of HMS Terrapin – destroyer, I landed from her by seaboat a couple of hours ago.’ He was unbuckling the holdall: thinking how extraordinarily abrupt – and total – the transition had been. Terrapin, then the whaler, then the well-meaning but slightly ridiculous Tinsdale, and now—
Thoughts checked abruptly… ‘Hey – tell you what—’
Instead of the flask they’d agreed on, Harriman had put in a full bottle of malt whisky. Bob held it up. ‘This is better than rum, now…’
* * *
Scott handed Bob’s tobacco-pouch back to him. ‘Thanks. Navy ’baccy, eh?’
‘Ship’s stores.’ He nodded towards his holdall. ‘Large tin of it in there. But – you were saying?’
‘Yeah. Well – with the reorganization, I was looking after C Flight, the crowd that’s being shipped home now. That’s done with, and now I’m to command A Flight, which is to follow B up this way. Jim and I constitute the advance party, the rest of ’em join us after B Flight’s established some kind of a base for us all – wherever. Kharkov, say.’
‘Let’s say wherever.’ Davies asked Bob, ‘Would you believe there are eight brand-new DH9s still in their crates on that quay at Novorossisk? Just bloody sitting there?’
‘DH9s being – bombers?’
‘Right.’
‘But you fly Sopwith Camels – fighters.’
‘Fly either. These are Camels we have with us, yes.’
‘Can’t General Holman get anything done about those others?’
‘Oh, he’s been trying. So has our mission there. But it’s not our affair, technically, those machines are intended for Deniken’s people, not for us. We’re still onl
y instructors, you know, officially. Believe that or not… And if Denikin’s crowd choose to leave the British taxpayers’ gift lying idle – not only planes, either, field guns, ammunition, even a tank or two—’
‘Spilt milk, Jim. None of it’ll ever get off that dockside, now. Unless of course the Reds get to it.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Davies scowled at him over the tin mug from which he’d been sipping his tot of malt. They’d agreed to ration it, try to make the bottle last two days. ‘If you believe that – hell, what are we on this train for? I mean, why should we even go through the bloody motions?’
‘Holman’s offering our services to Mai-Maievsky on the off-chance we might stop the rot. It’s touch-and-go, he knows that, he’ll make a fast appraisal and either we’ll get stuck in or we’ll come right out.’ Scott looked at Bob, shook his head. ‘Should’ve been there last week. Last month.’
Davies put his mug down on the bench. ‘So what’s the Royal Navy’s view of the situation?’
‘As far as I know it, when I left Sevastopol not much more than twenty-four hours ago, all anyone knew was it was – well, in the balance. For instance, we reckoned there’d be time for me to come up this way through Taganrog, but not if I’d had to get on a train from Novorossisk.’
‘You could say that again.’ The major sat back. ‘But you see, Jim – writing’s on the wall – huh?’
‘Maybe, but – no, what the Commander just said implies we have a few days’ grace – doesn’t it? At least a few days. So if we get there quick enough – eh?’
Bob nodded. ‘Our people – Naval Intelligence at Constantinople, that is – can’t have known anything about your squadron being moved in. At least I don’t think they did. So it’s an entirely new factor. And – obviously you know more about it than I do, but surely General Holman must believe there’s at least a chance?’ He saw that Scott was looking dubious. ‘What I’m getting at is that putting you in there might be all it’d take. On the Tsarytsin front, for instance, you really won the battle for them, didn’t you?’
‘Won some. At Tsarytsin, to be truthful, it was the tanks that really swung it. Initially, that is. But –’ Scott grimaced – ‘lines of supply so damn stretched, no reinforcement or regrouping, lousy communications – ask me, Denikin’s whole strategy’s been asinine.’ Leaning forward, peering out: ‘Jim, much as I hate to break bad news to you, looks like we’re about to be dragged away from this earthly paradise. How about checking the guys are all aboard?’
6
Breakfast was fried eggs on black bread with corned-beef hash, and they’d about finished it when Sam Scott returned to the subject of the governesses, asking Bob whether he’d remembered yet what their names were. Last night, or rather earlier this morning, when he’d explained the background of his mission he’d had to skip that detail, and the two pilots had amused themselves by speculating on the problems likely to arise from his loss of memory. Scott had suggested he might best approach them with such opening words as ‘Miss Livingstone, I presume?’, the Welshman then pointing out that this wouldn’t wash because he didn’t have a pith helmet.
‘Well – a Grand Duke wouldn’t, would he?’
Bob said now, putting his empty plate aside and reaching for the mug of tea, ‘Tell you in a second. Just have to galvanize the brain. Excellent breakfast, by the way.’
Grim, frozen landscape. It wasn’t sleeting or snowing but that was about as much as you could say in its favour. White, flat, featureless: disorientating, you could imagine, for anyone out there in it, but even from here depressing – if you’d let it be, or dwelt on the thought that a time might well come when you would be out there, in it… Now at least you were being carried through it in comfort and quite fast: although there was a puzzle in that area too – why, when anyone could see and feel that the train was moving at certainly not less than twenty miles an hour and probably nearer thirty, it should take two days to cover the 250 miles between Taganrog and Kharkov.
It was Tinsdale, of course, who’d said it would take two. On the platform, last night – this morning…
‘Well? Brain galvanic yet?’
‘Mary Pilkington, and Katherine Reid.’
‘Good.’ Davies nodded. ‘I’ll take Mary.’
Sam Scott repeated, gazing upward with his eyes half closed, ‘Mary Pilkington and Katherine Reid… Has a nice rhythm to it, don’t you think? So let’s concoct some verse. That’s your first line. What rhymes with Reid?’
Davies began, ‘Need, heed, feed – breed –’ He held up a forefinger: ‘that’s it: Decided it was time to breed. How’s that?’
‘Brilliant.’
Scott agreed: ‘Keep working at it.’
‘Major.’ Bob put his tea-mug down on the plate. ‘If we could talk seriously for a minute—’
‘Might manage that. While junior there galvanizes his brains…’
‘Yes. Well – idea I had, I was thinking about it before I turned out this morning. Something you said last night when I told you these women were nurses in a letuchka and asked you whether you’d ever come across one. You said you’d seen one at close quarters when they took a bullet out of a friend’s back, but several from the air.’
‘Sure.’ The smile was an encouragement. ‘I noticed you blinked when I told you that.’
‘You know what’s in my mind, then.’
‘Of course. And why not? That is, in principle why not. How we find the situation when we get where we’re going, where and when we deploy and set up shop and what we have to do – that’s something else.’
Davies nodded. ‘A whole lot of else.’
‘But a letuchka’s easy to spot from the air, is it?’
‘Darned great red crosses on their tents. Sure, the whole idea is the crosses should be clearly visible.’
‘And when they’re on the move?’
‘Oh.’ A shrug. ‘Can’t rightly say. Don’t recall ever seeing one. But if there’s any danger of getting shot-up they’d be damn silly not to make ’emselves recognizable, wouldn’t they? They use horse-drawn carts, and – yeah, you can bet at least the ambulance carts’d have red crosses on ’em.’
‘D’you think you might be able to help me?’
‘Well – as I say—’
‘But—’ he hesitated. Feeling a little diffident about pushing his luck this far, but still having to… ‘Conceivably, whatever missions they’re on, pilots could be asked to keep an eye out, then give me the locations?’
‘It’s – conceivable. But it wouldn’t be my decision, see. CO’s a guy by name Ray Collishaw. Lieutenant-Colonel. Canadian, same as me. Hell of a good man… Point two, if the action’s as hectic as it may be nobody’ll have eyes for farm-carts, not even if they’re smothered in red crosses.’
‘Ah.’ Nodding, fingering the stubble on his jaw. He hadn’t shaved yet, none of them had. Hot water was going to be available when the cooking was all done. ‘Yes, I appreciate that… But – well, forgive me for – you know, pressing the point a bit. Fact is that finding these women isn’t likely to be at all easy – that’s putting it mildly – and that kind of help from you might – well, it could save their lives, apart from making my job a lot less difficult.’
Davies suggested, ‘Try it on the CO, Sam, eh?’
‘Count on it, I will. But you know, Cowan – Jim and I horse around a lot, but the sober truth is this whole deployment’s pretty much a gamble. As I’m sure you realize. We may be a lot too late – may be turned right around, Holman may tell us get the hell out, quick. Or we could be in it up to our necks right from the first minute. In which case—’
‘I know.’
‘Well. Long as you do.’
He nodded. Knowing, in fact, nothing. But thinking about it and trying to visualize the scene as it might be up there, and finding it beyond the reach of his imagination. Having no idea of the terrain, or military operations, battlefield or near-battlefield conditions. Where one might even start…
‘By
the way, Cowan –’ Scott’s quiet voice broke into thoughts that came to only one conclusion – that he had to have the flyers’ help – ‘last night, or more accurately some unseemly hour this morning – was I dreaming, or did you tell me in my sleep there was some kind of ruction on the line?’
‘No, there was. You woke up, and I told you. But precisely what was going on – ask me another…’
At the junction two miles out of Taganrog, where one set of lines continued eastward to Rostov-on-Don and the other, their own route, branched away northward, there’d been a train stopped about a hundred yards on the far side of the points, with a mob around it. He’d been in the act of turning in, having made himself a sort of pallet on the bunk-boards out of blankets supplied by the RAF contingent. The pilots had already got their heads down, having had no such preparations to make and being more practised at it anyway, and hadn’t stirred when the train began to judder as its brakes jammed on, but Bob had hung down to the window to see whatever might be visible. The train had slowed quite a lot by then but it wasn’t stopping – driver having second thoughts, perhaps, but it was continuing around the wide curve of track – circling to the left, the north, at this much reduced speed and with the engine noisily venting surplus steam. It had been too dark and the windows too fogged up as well as dirty and sleet-streaked on the outside to see clearly, but he’d had the impression there were passengers trying to leave that stopped train and others – soldiers, he’d imagined – forcing them back on board. Although where they’d have gone or wanted to go or why, when there was nothing in the entire surrounding snowscape except a signal-box on stilts and as far as he’d been able to make out two other buildings, one with a long spill of light leaking across the snow and the other probably a barn, was hard to guess. It had been gone from sight then anyway – less than a minute, probably, from start to finish – sliding away to the right as this train straightened itself out into the long haul northward.
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