Filip nodded. If they lost control of the railroad, troop movements would slow to a crawl, and supplying the men at the front would become nearly impossible. All the weapons and equipment stockpiled in Vladivostok had to move thousands of miles west if it was to be turned against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. If they lost control of the telegraph lines, they would lose their ability to communicate with each other. They held one long, thin section of Russia, and losing any part of it would doom them to failure.
Dalek prodded a tuft of grass with his scuffed boot. “I’m to be stationed at a teeny telegraph office in the middle of Siberia, somewhere to the east of Yekaterinburg. There’s a little village near the station. Uncivilized, isolated other than the rail. Not the best of assignments, but it has a few perks. Privacy, for one.”
“And no need to worry about the Red Army or the Germans. You’ll just have to watch out for partisans and bandits.”
“Yes. I can’t hold it by myself. Wild country, Siberia. Warlords and released prisoners everywhere. Criminals, too, with no one to keep order. I’ll need a group large enough for patrols. It’s not big enough to justify a doctor . . . but a nurse might come in handy. If you and your wife were to join me, you’d have a house of your own. A hut anyway. Or an old boxcar. It won’t be the Winter Palace or the Peter and Paul Cathedral, but for someone seeking a place of worship, it might do nicely.”
Strange how Filip could know a man for so long and still be surprised by him. Dalek was hauling him out of a blizzard and offering him springtime.
A home with Nadia. No matter how shabby, it would be an improvement over the tent they currently shared. And infinitely better than the dark threat of separation that loomed ahead of them. “I’ll talk to Nadia.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Anton kissed his wife and son goodbye and watched their train roll east toward Vladivostok. Veronika still seemed fragile. Did she regret marrying him? He never had regretted marrying her and was certain he never would, and that made it all the harder to watch them go. They’d already been apart more than he wanted, and now she had an infant to care for without his help.
After parting with his family, boarding a westbound train was like being punched in the gut after being shot there. It was the lesser of two pains, but it made the aching of the first more intense.
Petr, too, was sending a wife east while he headed west, and he seemed just as reluctant as Anton. “When we went to the front in 1914, we wrote a poem on our banner. ‘Red-colored handkerchief, wave through the sky. We fight the Russians, though we don’t know why.’ That’s what it feels like again, only it’s worse because it’s not the emperor sending us to war; it’s our own national council.”
“We scribbled ‘Export of Czech meat abroad’ on our boxcar,” Emil said from the bench behind them. The third- and second-class carriages were an improvement over the boxcars they’d traveled in when they’d come east, but better transport didn’t make the assignment any easier.
The train picked up so much speed that the sides shuddered and it felt as though the carriage would break apart. It traveled through the tunnels south of the lake to the rebuilt depot of Baikal Station, still surrounded by downed trees and scorched earth from the massive explosion Anton had detonated. Westward the train flew, past Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novonikolayevsk, Tatarsk, and Omsk. Stretches of Siberia that had taken them months to advance past now sped by in days. At Omsk, their train continued along the northern track rather than the southern track they’d taken on their way east.
When they reached their destination on the Ural Front, their new commander greeted them with joy. The legionnaires already there seemed too exhausted to show any emotion.
Anton helped load a wounded man onto the train they’d just disembarked from. The train would head east now, taking the wounded with it. “Looks like you’ve had a hot time here.”
The wounded man grunted as the angle of his litter shifted. “We’ve been fighting nonstop for five months, with no reserves to fill in our gaps, against an enemy who grows bigger every day. Wish we could have gone east instead of propping up the line here.”
Maybe the man didn’t know how hard the fighting along the railway had been, how many wounded they’d had, and how often the Bolsheviks had seemed close to cutting them off. And yet, as Anton gathered his equipment and followed Kral, he got the impression that the legionnaires along this front had fought a war just as intense.