Siberian Red

fell with a splat on to the floor.
    At the same time, Lavrenov produced a leather cord from his sleeve, looped it around Melekov’s neck and began to strangle him.
    Melekov’s face turned purple. His eyes bulged. Feebly, he clawed at the leather cord which had sunk into the soft flesh of his throat.
    ‘Enough!’ Pekkala shouted.
    Lavrenov, his teeth bared with the effort of strangling Melekov, glanced first at Pekkala and then towards Tarnowski.
    Tarnowski jerked his chin.
    Lavrenov let go of the cord.
    With a gasp, Melekov collapsed on to the floor.
    ‘We weren’t going to kill him,’ explained Sedov.
    ‘Just teach him a lesson is all,’ said Lavrenov.
    Tarnowski went to Melekov and rolled the man over with his boot. ‘I told you to leave him alone.’
    Melekov nodded weakly, his hands pressed to his throat.
    ‘Now get out,’ Tarnowski ordered the cook. ‘Come back in half an hour.’
    Crawling on his hands and knees, Melekov departed from the kitchen.
    ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ Pekkala told them. ‘We had already made our peace.’
    ‘With him, perhaps,’ replied Tarnowski, ‘but what about the next one? And the one after that? Because, believe me, there will be more, which is why I have come here to make you an offer.’
    ‘What kind of offer?’
    ‘The chance to save your life.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘By getting out of here‚’ said Taranowski.
    ‘You mean escape? What makes you think I’d stand a better chance than anybody else who’s tried to leave this place?’
    ‘Because we are coming with you,’ replied Sedov.
    Lavrenov nodded in agreement. ‘We have a plan. If it works, we’ll soon be living like kings.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound like a plan,’ answered Pekkala. ‘It sounds more like a fantasy.’
    ‘It is indeed a fantasy, but one a man can bring to life with pockets filled with gold‚ agreed.’
    ‘What gold?’ demanded Pekkala.
    ‘The last of the Imperial Reserves,’ whispered Lavrenov.
    Pekkala stared at the men with a look of pity on his face. ‘I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the Imperial Reserves are gone. The Czechs handed them over to the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk, in exchange for being allowed to pass through the Lake Baikal tunnels, which the Reds would have destroyed otherwise. By the time this occurred, you were already in prison. Perhaps nobody ever told you.’
    ‘We know about the Czechs,’ Sedov interrupted. ‘We know how they betrayed us and that they gave everything they had to the Bolsheviks.’
    ‘The thing is,’ said Lavrenov, ‘they didn’t have it all.’
    ‘That is a secret we have kept for many years,’ continued Tarnowski, ‘but the time has come for you to know the truth.’
    It was Sedov who spoke first. ‘Colonel Kolchak had told us that the safest place for the gold was in the hands of his uncle, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who had gathered together an army of anti-Bolshevik forces. Getting to them meant crossing the entire length of Russia, but if we could do it, not only would the gold be safe, but we would also be out of danger. You see, we made that journey as much for ourselves as for the Tsar. By the time we reached the city of Kazan, we had crossed almost half the country, but the Red Cavalry were catching up with us. We knew we’d never make it if we tried to hold on to the gold.’
    Lavrenov picked up the story. ‘We made the decision to hide the Imperial Reserves in Kazan. The Czech Legion was behind us, but moving along the same route and heading in the same direction. They were a much stronger force than our own, over 30,000 men. If only we could have linked up with them, we would have been safe from the Reds, but the Reds had positioned themselves between our two forces. If we had stayed where we were and waited for the Czechs to catch up with us, the Reds would have finished us off long before the Czechs arrived to help. We managed to get word through to the Czechs about where the gold was hidden and they picked it up when they passed through Kazan.’
    ‘You say they didn’t have it all. What happened? Did you spend it along the way?’
    ‘Some of it,’ admitted Tarnowski. ‘At almost every town we came to, the locals demanded bribes or tried to overcharge us for food or feed for our horses. We had used up three crates of gold by the time Colonel Kolchak declared that from then on, we would simply take what we wanted. But those three cases were only a fraction of what was missing from the