‘You could be saying put all your money on Shatilov in the two thirty at Doncaster for all I know, Francis,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and I think you should sound a little more guttural, if you know what I mean. But carry on practising. It may turn out useful sooner than we think, if only the bloody Russians would understand what you’re saying to them.’
Maybe it was the mention of Shatilov that brought their problems. To their left they could hear, approaching at a good speed, their train, gusts of smoke almost matching the colour of the surrounding snow. To their right the night air was rent with whistles and the sounds of shouting men on the other side of the platform, hurrying to reach the station before the train could leave. Somehow or other Shatilov’s men must have been alerted to the flight of the English party. Maybe, Powerscourt shuddered as he thought of it, he was leading this revenge mission in person, whip conveniently stuffed into a coat pocket. Powerscourt did not rate his chances very high if he met Shatilov again. The train was drawing to a halt at the little station. There were half a dozen carriages with a guard’s van at the rear. There were more passengers than you might have expected. The sergeant was swearing viciously under his breath.
‘Do we take the train or not, Francis?’ asked Johnny.
‘We go,’ said Powerscourt, ‘last carriage before the guard’s van. If we stay here we’re marooned, miles from anywhere.’
The whistles were very close now. The train driver would have to be deaf not to hear them. The five men bent double so their heads would not protrude above the height of the carriages as they raced into the train. They could hear feet running up the platform. Powerscourt hung briefly out of the window in time to see a party of twelve men marching into the front carriage behind the driver. The last man aboard, his face wreathed in a series of bloodstained bandages, with a pistol in his left hand, was Major Shatilov, with a face, Powerscourt reported to his friends, like thunder.
‘Never mind, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, fiddling with some giant spanner in his stolen bag, ‘you can say to them as they come through the connecting door that you’re from the British Embassy and we all have diplomatic immunity. That should do the trick.’
Everybody laughed. Their compartment had a dozen wooden benches with a party of four middle-aged Russian women at the front. Mikhail placed himself on sentry duty at the connecting door where he would be able to see any soldiers coming on their way down the train. The sergeant kept him company, fingering one of the Russian guard’s pistols in his pocket as he stared up the carriage. ‘Can you get on to the tops of these coaches, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Did you have time to see as the train came in? And could you jump from one to another?’
‘The answer to both of these questions is Yes,’ said Johnny, returning the spanner to his bag, ‘particularly if you come from the British Embassy and have diplomatic immunity.’ Ricky Crabbe was fingering the stones in his David’s pouch, selecting the ones he liked best and putting them in his coat pocket. Powerscourt checked that he had the gun and the bullets from the Shatilov villa. Not for the first time that evening he regretted that they had not been able to bring any weapons with them but Powerscourt was certain that anybody trying to enter the Alexander Palace with a gun would have been in Siberia inside a fortnight if not trussed up and gagged in one of Derzhenov’s basement cells.
‘This is what I think we should do,’ Powerscourt said, looking anxiously at the four middle-aged women. ‘We can’t stay here in this carriage with the ladies. I don’t want to retreat into the guard’s van. Johnny, I think you and Mikhail and the sergeant should get on the roof now and move forward as far as you can, all the way into the first carriage. That way you’ll be behind these soldier people. If things get really rough, you could attack them from behind. Ricky and I are going to be Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae here for a while but I don’t think we’ll hold them very long. Then, unlike Leonidas, we’re going to bolt too. Mikhail,’ Powerscourt recalled the young man from his sentry duty, ‘can you get rid of these ladies here?’ As he pointed to them Mikhail paused briefly, then a look of great seriousness appeared to descend on his young features. He began speaking loudly to the women. After a while he pointed vigorously up towards the front of the train. One of the women appeared to ask a question. Mikhail shouted back and pointed again. Looking with horror at the three Englishmen, the four Russian ladies grabbed their belongings and shot out of the carriage.
‘What on earth did you say to them?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘I told them, I’m afraid, my lord, that the three of you were just about to begin unnatural sexual acts right in the middle of their compartment. I said that these acts of depravity would continue until the end of the journey. I said it was their patriotic duty to go and tell the driver in person, whatever obstacles they might find in their way, that these Satanic practices were happening in his train. For myself, I said, I was going to keep an eye on the situation so I could make a full report to the authorities later on. Even when the four ladies were halfway down the next carriage, they could still be heard complaining of this insult to the Russian railways and their country’s honour.’
‘Well done,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, you and your colleagues had better be off.’
Ricky was now the sentry. As he took up his position, he told Powerscourt that the best place in the carriage for the despatch of his weapons was behind one of the benches, about two thirds of the way down. Powerscourt tried to work out how long they would be able to hold out in this compartment. He worried about how exposed they would be making their way along the roof before the enemy showed up behind them. Gunfights on the roof would be fatal. A lot depended on how effective these soldiers were going to be. If they were well-trained killers, he and his little band were probably finished. But if they were recent recruits, mere rabble in uniform as a colonel in one of Powerscourt’s regiments had once described his opponents, they might lose heart after a few rocks from David’s sling and a couple of well-aimed pistol shots.
‘They’re coming, sir.’ Ricky Crabbe was grinning as he went into his first battle. ‘The women are holding them up. Looks like they’re getting a right lecture, sir.’ Ricky positioned himself behind his bench, eyes peering through the slats. Powerscourt, further back, almost at the door to the roof and the outside world, could hear footsteps overhead as Johnny and Mikhail and the sergeant made their way along the train. Powerscourt hoped the noise wouldn’t travel to the next carriage.
The young man who opened the connecting door couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. He had joined the military as a better alternative to life in his peasant village. It was almost certain that he had never heard of the story of David and Goliath. Ricky’s missile caught him almost in the centre of his right eye. For a moment the Russian soldier blundered about thinking he was blind. Then he whimpered and collapsed on to a bench, holding his face. The soldier behind him gazed in astonishment at his colleague. He hadn’t seen the stone. Then he too received a present from Ricky Crabbe, smack in the centre of his teeth. He reeled backwards and blocked the doorway. ‘Now!’ said Powerscourt, and fled towards the open air. He knew that the next thing likely to come through the doorway was a stream of bullets. He had given his gun to Ricky to give himself one last burst of covering fire before he disappeared upwards. If Ricky was as good a shot with a pistol as he was with a stone or a rock, Powerscourt imagined he would hit the bull’s eye at two hundred yards with a gun in his hand. Now Powerscourt began to climb towards the roof. There were eight rungs to go. Still no sound from down below. Maybe the Russians were demoralized. Maybe the Major was giving them a pep talk.