The Margin of Evil! (48 page)

Chapter Fifty

Georgii didn't immediately notice the silence, nor did he notice the emptiness. Whereas before, the forest had been crawling, for days, with refugees, deserters and rogues, all with their differing agendas, now, it was fair to say that he had more important things on his mind, so he didn't cotton on immediately to the silence.

He looked at Yul
ia, and then at Pyotr and Anna.  They were obediently following him. They trusted him implicitly. Every now and then they would stop and the pregnant Yulia would rest; then Pyotr and Anna would be sent on to scout ahead. When he returned they would move on. Midday moved on to middle afternoon, and mid afternoon moved into late afternoon, and the light would start to fade. After one such break, Pyotr returned with some interesting news. Up ahead there were some Red Guards crawling through the ferns and, later on, Anna returned to report that the man, who had dogged them unrelentingly for the past few weeks, was still following them.

'
Pissed Off', with this ever-present stranger, Georgii was in two minds whether he should not let Yulia lead the group on, whilst he went back and challenged this 'One Man' posse. He sat and thought for a moment. Yulia urged him that, despite her delicate condition, they should all make haste and, by this time tomorrow, they would all be safely in Poland.

Georgii thought for a moment and then said,
'Yulia, I don't like this quiet, and I don't like the fact that we find ourselves stuck in the thick of war, on a front line, that is now apparently free of combatants and non combatants.  It simply doesn't add up and it doesn't make any sense! Yulia, I have to go back and find out what's going on! As soon as I've found the answers to my questions, I will rejoin you!'

There was
this one quality that Georgii had always liked about Yulia and that was she always understood him. He had noticed it when they had worked on the checkpoint the previous summer and again he noticed it now. Other woman would have got down on their knees and begged him not to do such a foolhardy thing, but she understood and raised no objections. She did however try and point out that there was an alternative and that was, if they all made speed now, for the safety of Poland, they would all soon be freed from this 'Slow burn' of a forest nightmare. But again Georgii resolutely argued out the point that, yes, it was unnatural to be in a situation, on a front line in the middle of an internecine conflict, and for there to be no combatants of any kind, no noise, just bird song. Yulia again agreed that this was very strange, but Georgii had managed to impress upon her the fact, that the whole scenario of no people and no noise was wholly surreal. To her way of thinking; in a war zone, if something was going to happen, then he needed, at the very least, to be able to buy time for them so they could get away. He could do this by finding out who this person was that was following them. And if anything, God forbid, happened to him; they, as a party, could press on for the safety of 'The Vistula' and on to Poland.

So it was on this note that they all parted company.
As Georgii watched them walk off for a second time, he thought to himself, that this time there had already been too many partings along the way. This time he would keep his distance. It wasn't fair of him to put them, or even himself, through the mill, time and time again. Once everything was sorted out with this mysterious shadow, he too would keep his distance, until he could be certain that there were no more dangers facing them.

After several minutes of staring at the empty patch of forest that Yulia and the two
children had wandered off into, Georgii turned around and walked back in the opposite direction.

He had not walked fa
r, the place he was looking for must be ideal for a rendezvous. Twenty minutes later he arrived at the spot. Quickly he reconnoitred the area and then Georgii set to work. Once he had finished his task, Georgii shinned up a steep bank and then carefully buried himself in the dense undergrowth. The light was beginning to fade; not long now he thought before this mysterious pursuer showed themselves. Getting himself into a comfortable position, Georgii pulled out the 'Broomstick Mauser' and readied it for action.

In the distance he could hear the thump and crump of distant artillery as it thumped and crumped away.
Momentarily distracted, by all of this 'Thumping' and 'Crumping'; Georgii, was taken completely unawares, when a bird suddenly took off from nowhere. The creature manically fluttered its wings as it tore up into the upper reaches of the forest. Georgii's senses sharpened in an instant and he firmly gripped the stock of the Mauser. He waited; infact he didn't have to wait all that long. It couldn't have been no longer than a minute, but it felt like an eternity. Whatever had startled the bird was about to make its presence known. He waited.

Then Yulia walked into view, but Georgii resisting the urge to jump out from his hiding place, watched her head back in the direction that they had all
come from, only an hour before. Fortunately for him, she had not seen his little trap. Georgii carried on his lonely vigil.

After
another one of those short eternities, he saw a shape move out of the twilight. The shape was followed by another and then another, the silhouettes made their way towards the Trench coat.

Chapter Fifty One

Now that Georgii Radetzky was firmly out of sight, Yulia did not even bother to look back, in fact she'd only managed to steal one look; she now kept her eyes and senses pealed. The fact was that Yulia hated 'Goodbyes' and, on their bid for freedom, there had been far too many. In many ways the romantic in her half expected Georgii to come running around the next bend. But fantasy was all it was, it was just a momentary flight, that's all it was ...

They wa
lked for what seemed like hours but, in reality, it was only forty five minutes. Her back was giving out a little pain. It was time that they took a break. The kids, Pyotr and Anna, were fantastic as always, they were so kind to her. She thought back to what Georgii had said; yes it made sense in Georgii Radetzky's logic to go back and see who this unexplained personage was, but, as this person had not made a move against them, why should they now? Let's face it, she thought, this shadow, had plenty of opportunities and had plenty of time to make their move. Why challenge them now, when freedom was just over the brow of the hill, and a little bit further on ... Why?

Besides, Yulia knew who
he was, she had known all along, but Georgii was never going to find that out. She leant back and manoeuvred her body into a comfortable position and thought about the long journey that had brought her to this forest clearing ...

There was no question
of doubt here. Her parents had been, and still were as far as she knew English. They`d never said much about their respective families. Her childhood had been spent travelling around the world. One minute, the family was sweating it out in India, the next, they endured frozen winters in Vladivostok. Father was a junior consular official.

When she was eight years old, she had been packed off to live with an aunt in Lymington in Hampshire.
Lymington was fine, the aunt was not. Soon after her arrival Julia, and Julia was her real name, had been sent to study at the prestigious Wentworth school in Bournemouth.

Her studies had gone well, in
fact, in another time and place, she would have been singled out by the Head Teacher for greater things. But this was the England of Edward the Seventh and in society a woman had to know her place. Progressive ideas were for others, at Wentworth she was being steadily groomed in her role, as her mother liked to say, 'Marriage fodder'.

But Julia Kilduff had other ideas,
'Marriage fodder' she might be, but she was going to do it on her own terms. As a young child, on her travels with her family, she had seen there was a great big world that lay beyond the horizon of Poole bay. It was a world that contained a thousand different cultures, languages and peoples. Travel had given her a taste for exploration and, on their stays in one place or another, she had developed and, indeed, built upon a natural gift for picking up the 'Mother tongues' of whichever country she happened to be staying in at any one particular time.

So summer holidays were either spent in New Street
, Lymington, or, as previously mentioned, in the darkest parts of Africa, or trekking through the Hindu Kush, or making friends with Chinese looking street urchins in the shanty towns in and around Port Arthur and Vladivostok.  Whereas 'Pa, pa's' labours had, by and large, gone unnoticed in the Consular service, his daughter's had not. By her teens, she had grown into a tall, willowy adolescent.  When on holiday, she had brightened up her parent's life no end in many of the out of the way, fly and flea ridden corners of that rapidly fading imperialistic world.

All those that came to dine at the Kilduff
's table were mightily impressed by their daughter and her special 'Gift', at short notice, for picking up languages. Whilst they forgot the 'Crusty' parents, they tended to remember the Kilduff's charming daughter. One such visitor to the Kilduff table was so overawed by Julia's intellect, that he made a mental note of her abilities. By his reckoning, the world was changing so fast, most people had not cottoned onto this fact yet, but the Kilduff's daughter had.

Her words, and these caught the visitor by
'The shirt tail', were, Emperor Franz Joseph might not endorse change, but the 'Bolshevik' Lenin does. You mark my words! If there is a war in the future, as the pundits are always saying ... that man Lenin will hold all of the cards!'

'
Why do you say that,' the visitor enquired.

Julia replied.
'Talleyrand, during the French revolution said, 'It's not kings or queens that you need to worry about; it is the idle ignorant masses. Because, if they knew the value of the power in their hands and actually had the audacity to use it', then Sir, the world would be quite a different place! I have read their writings on capitalism. It is clear to me that the leader of the Bolshevik faction understands this also! Given the opportunity, for example, to initiate the collapse of the 'Ancien Regime', he would not hesitate to mobilise the people and wake up the sleeping tiger!'

'
And what would precipitate this change,' the dinner guest said.

'
A war,' she replied. Yulia paused as she helped her mother collect up the crockery and then carried on, 'A war with such horrific consequences, it will leave those of the 'Old Order that manage to survive it, on the very edge of a steep precipice!'

The dinner guest was shocked
and yet could not deny that he was also, at the same time, very impressed by Julia's reasoning and her words stayed with him for a long time after. He felt it was always good to converse with someone bright young and intelligent, whom, like himself had also recognised the shift away from 'The Old', towards the world of, the 'New Order'. Whilst there would always be a need for 'Swash-buckling', young 'Bravos'; there was also a growing need for resourceful young operatives like Yulia, especially, when it came to working 'In the Field'. No doubt about it, the visitor thought, the world was changing and changing fast and, unlike Franz Joseph, you had to change with it or get left behind, the visitor thought.

By the summer of nineteen fourteen, Julia Kilduff was up at Newnham College reading
'Ancient History'. She could also speak fluent Mandarin; Russian; French; Italian; Spanish and German. No mean achievement for a young girl of twenty deemed by her elders to be only 'Marriage fodder'.

With her uncanny knack of picking up languages, at
'the drop of a hat', the dinner guest dusted off his notebook and decided to take a little trip up to Cambridge. That was on the twenty seventh of June nineteen fourteen. The next day an event in the Balkans would set a chain of events in motion that would shock the European World out of its 'Post Victorian' slumbers!

Julia could see that this colonel was not like the others.
In fact she could see that this man was not offering her his hand in marriage, he was offering her a 'Way out'. It was still, no matter what 'The Suffragettes' said, there was not much of a future for a girl like her in academia. So Julia Kilduff signed on the dotted line and took it, then she went the following week, to work for 'The Ministry'. She could not have arrived at a better time, for war with Germany was literally just around the corner.

So Agent Number
3 she became, Julia never found out who the other two were, was sent to Gosport for three weeks training and then returned to London to await further instructions. They were not long in coming.

In early September she was dispatched to Rome.
En-route she had passed through Paris and had been there during the panic that preceded the first battle of the Marne. From there, Julia Kilduff had travelled on to Marseille and by ship to Naples. From there she went directly to Rome.

Her brief was quite simply this.
Gauge the feeling of the Italian nation. Were they in a mood to fight on the side of 'The Central Powers', or, was there a chance that they might come over and fight for 'The Allies'? If they did, what was going to be the asking price?  It was well known in diplomatic circles, indeed it was an open secret, that the Italian government was playing both sides off against each other. It was also known by 'Strategic Planners' in Whitehall, which indicated in those early days of the war, that the Austro Hungarian Empire was by no means in a strong position to strike up a bargain. If they were seen to give in over Trieste then the other minorities, within that multi faceted empire, might start flexing their muscles.