Nadia worked the clutch and held in the throttle. The tires slipped for a second before catching on the snow. She aimed for Orlov and Tanya. The Cheka agent and the traitor. They dashed away. She could have followed Orlov and had the satisfaction of running down the man who had shot her parents and her aunt, but keeping the gold out of Bolshevik hands was more important than revenge.
Gunshots and shouts flew all around her, but she aimed for the back corner of the boxcar. Smashing into it head-on might not push it into the river, but knocking the end off the tracks, that just might work.
Her brother called her name. She couldn’t tell if he was telling her to stop or telling her to keep going.
The automobile rammed into the back corner of the boxcar, smashing into it with a crash of glass and buckling metal. Nadia’s body jerked forward, into the steering wheel, but she kept a steady pressure on the accelerator. Boxcar and automobile seemed to converge, but she didn’t let up until the automobile twisted past the train car.
She was headed straight for the river. She stomped on the brake pedal and the automobile spun. When it finally came to a stop, she was on the ice.
Something warm and wet ran down her face. Pieces of the windshield had left their mark in her skin. Her chest and neck ached. The thud of a bullet plowing into the upholstery knocked her back into action.
She scrambled from the automobile. The ice groaned and cracked.
The boxcar containing part of the imperial treasury sat eight meters away. She’d pushed it off the track, and now it, too, sat on the ice.
But the ice held.
The wind whipped her short hair into her face, and even in the dark, the Cheka men aimed their pistols at her, trying to strike her down.
She dropped to her knees and took out the only weapon she had. She pulled the pin. Then she tossed the grenade so it rolled underneath the boxcar.
One.
She had a tremendous headache.
Two.
The ice looked as though it were spinning.
Three.
The blood on her face grew cold.
Four.
The grenade exploded underneath the boxcar. The boom echoed across the ice, and the blast slammed Nadia into the uneven surface of the frozen river. After the initial sound, another crack split the air, followed by a series of groans, screeches, and sharp splinters.
Dizziness kept her on the cold, hard ice, but she fought against it, raising her head in time to see the boxcar slide through a hole in the ice and into the Angara River.
***
Nadia remembered little of her arrest. She’d been in too much pain. Her body had been slammed around the car, then smashed into the ice. But she heard one of the guards refer to her as a dangerous counterrevolutionary, and she felt a strange sense of pride as she was locked into a cell with Nikolai, Sokolov, and Fedorov.
Sokolov had been shot in the thigh while trying to escape during the scuffle in the train yard. Nikolai had been shot in the arm. She tore her skirt to make bandages and did what she could for them, but they were given no medical supplies. Then they slept.
She woke to the sound of a distant gunshot. Then another. Then another. In a nearby cell, a woman sobbed.
Nikolai stared out the window.
“What was it?”
“Admiral Kolchak, his prime minister, and their chief interrogator. They were taken onto the ice and executed.”
The supreme ruler of Siberia, executed on the ice. She shouldn’t have been surprised. If the former tsar hadn’t been safe, who was?
“And our fate?”
Nikolai frowned. “I imagine it will be the same.” He sat next to her on the cold stone floor. “Their revolution promised so much, but it hasn’t brought justice or hope. It’s just created monsters.”
Nadia checked her brother’s bandages as she thought of his words. The Bolsheviks had torn apart the old regime. And along with the darkness of the autocracy, they’d taken apart the beauty of the culture. They’d replaced it with a new form of oppression, something that made all miserable and hungry and fearful, without the faith or elegance of the old Russian spirit. They’d promised change, and they’d brought it. But they hadn’t created progress.
Nikolai smiled his thanks when she finished with his wound. “I wonder if this is what it felt like when Constantinople fell or when Napoleon marched into Moscow.”
It felt like a final defeat for her, for her country. Maybe it was. She and her family lived in dark times. Her parents and Alexander had died in a merciless set of wars, and it seemed that she and Nikolai would soon follow them. But they weren’t the first people to experience hardship and despair. They wouldn’t be the last. Since finding Nikolai again, Nadia had learned to trust in God. He was there. He was real. And somehow, He would make everything right in the end. In a world torn by war, He offered peace, and in a conflict fought with cruelty, He offered mercy. “Maybe all the darkness makes it easier to recognize the light.”
“Maybe. Do you remember what Mama used to say?”