Transylvania's Most Wanted (27 page)

Mr. Slang stared at Inspector Meriwether as
he thought over this new information. “You kept what you knew from
Inspector Flynn didn’t you?”

Inspector Meriwether smiled oh so subtly
then. “That’s right.”

“You realized he would make a perfect
candidate for truth serum didn’t you?”

“Count Vasili did. I’d never heard of the
stuff before then.”

Mr. Slang turned to Dino then. “Did you
actually see Inspector Flynn fall to his death?”

Dino hesitated. “Uh, no. Stone was dangling
him on the end of a rope in front of the wolves, but then I saw we
were coming to the river, so I grabbed the rope and let it go so
the wolves would get him, but I was too late and the detective fell
into the river.”

“I glad to hear it,” Mr. Slang said. “Since
it doesn’t matter now.” He turned to Dino then. “You and Trunk take
a golem gun and fire it at Stone. Put him in chains and place him
in the cargo hold for now.”

“Stone ain’t with us?”

“I imagine that changes minute by minute,”
Mr. Slang said, “but we can no longer trust him. Go on.” Mr. Slang
turned back to Inspector Meriwether as Dino and Trunk went out the
room. He held Inspector’s Meriwether’s gun on him as he looked at
Inspector Flynn’s wife.

“I’m glad your husband is not dead, but
let’s hope he doesn’t freeze to death,” Mr. Slang told her. “Or
worse yet, another pack of ice wolves hunt him down the other side
of the river, but I imagine Count Vasili is looking out for both of
them.”

Inspector Meriwether said nothing.

“Stone must have snapped the cable rudder
too,” Mr. Slang told King Havel.

“What are we going to do?” King Havel
asked.

“We don’t want the
Tempest
docking at the
Vladivostok station. You need to order Colonel Popov to radio ahead
there and tell them not to let the
Tempest
dock there. The
Tempest
will just have
to go on to Royal City without refueling. They should make it there
if they slow their airspeed.”

Chapter
5
5

By the time they arrived
at the outskirts of Vladivostok, their group had grown in force to
a dozen. Some of them vampires, some human and one goblin even.
They headed for a small farm. A few more men on horseback awaited
them there. One of them pointed up at the sky and Tom and Count
Vasili looked there. He was pointing at the
Tempest
approaching the Vladivostok
Zeppelin station, but it seemed not to be descending
lower.

“The
Tempest
is not stopping there,”
Count Vasili determined.

“Does that matter?”

“It is unexpected, but I
don’t see that it matters. As long as the
Dauntless
does.”

“
How are we going to take
control of it?”

“We will have to storm the base and then the
zeppelin when it docks.”

“Just the twelve of us?”

Count Vasili smiled as he put his arm around
Tom. He led him toward a very large barn. As soon as they came
inside, they were met with cheers as men and vampires swarmed
around Count Vasili.

A company of the Red Faction, the partisans
fighting for the overthrow of the monarchy, was gathered there,
nearly a hundred of them. Most of them were men, but about a
quarter were vampires, a few were women, a few more were vampiress,
and there was even a pair of goblins and a couple of golems. They
were all carrying rifles and long knives. At the back of the barn
were their horses.

Count Vasili began shaking hands and
embracing others. This went on for a minute and then he asked that
they listen to him.

They gathered around him as Count Vasili
began addressing them. He spoke eloquently, elegantly and
forcefully, several times pounding his fist into the palm of his
hand. It was the most stirring call to arms Tom ever heard even if
he didn’t understand one word he said. It was all in Russian.

Tom looked through the faces of the soldiers
there, they all bore the marks of experienced fighters, scars and
old wounds were in abundance, but it was the look in their eyes,
the way they carried themselves that told him none feared the
thought of going into battle against a much larger, entrenched
enemy.

When Count Vasili was done speaking, several
bottles of vodka appeared, glasses were filled, toasts were made
and then the shots quickly downed. Then, abruptly, the soldiers
turned and mounted their horses. The doors to the barn were thrown
open and they slowly began filing out as some stirring Russian song
was sung by everyone there, except Tom of course.

“Can you ride?” Count Vasili asked leading
him out the barn.

“Yes,” he said.

He led Tom toward two horses. Tom was handed
a rifle as he and Count Vasili mounted their black steeds.

“I have one last thing to say to these
soldiers,” Count Vasili told him.

“What?”

“I’m going to tell them they must only shoot
to wound. If all goes well, this war will end this day, and we must
show mercy to our enemy if they are to become our allies and
friends once again.”

Tom looked down the line of soldiers filing
out of the barn. They were the toughest looking bunch he had ever
seen. Right then they were ready to charge straight across open
ground toward their enemy and destroy them. “Good luck with that,”
he told Count Vasili.

Count Vasili galloped a little ways ahead of
the column and turned his horse, a tall, black, muscular charger,
around. The soldiers pulled their mounts to a halt as Count Vasili
began speaking. Tom did not know exactly what he said, but it was
not met with cheers. He implored them, he pleaded, he stood firm in
his conviction and then he fell silent. No one spoke. The cold wind
blew. They stared at him incredulously,

Then, right at the front of the column, Tom
saw Dante nod his head in agreement. Dante looked at Figaro. Figaro
began nodding and then he turned to man behind him.

“милосердие
,” that man said and then
the men and vampires behind them nodded and repeated this word,
until the whole column had said it. Count Vasili smiled. He rode
down the line encouraging each man or woman and then he rode back
to Tom.

“What is it they are saying?”

“It means mercy. They will show mercy unto
our enemy.”

“милосердие
,” Tom
repeated.

As the column rode through the village, many
children and woman, vampires and humans alike, came out and began
cheering them. Someone began singing the same song as before, and
soon everyone was singing again, that is until the column crested a
small hill right at the end of the village and the Red Army base
came into view. The singing stopped and a more sober mood descended
over the company of soldiers.

Tom was happy then that the U.R.R.K. was
like the year 1900 then, because the guns he was looking at, were
not the high-capacity weapons he’d faced on D-day at Normandy, but
they were frightening still. An even larger gun, stationed on a
platform inside the sandbags that surrounded the base, was pointed
right at them.

As soon as their column came into view, they
were spotted and an alarm was sounded inside the base. As Tom and
his fellow riders rode closer, the Red Army soldiers rushed out
their barracks toward the sandbag wall, which stood about five
high.

“Don’t worry,” Count Vasili leaned over and
told Tom. “We have some surprises for them.

The partisan battalion commander at the head
of their column shouted out an order and the partisans began
forming a line on either side of him, until a single line, facing
the enemy, was formed. It was to be a charge.

“Stay next to me,” Count Vasili said.
“Listen for my instructions. My vampire premonition is particularly
sharp today.”

When the line was formed, the battalion
commander shouted and they began to gallop toward the base. The
soldiers at the base were forming behind the wall, using the sand
bags to steady their rifles as they took aim at the invaders. The
partisan commander shouted again and they spurred their horses a
little faster.

The ranking officer over the soldiers inside
the base brought his sword up and shouted at the men along the
wall. His order was passed down the line and Tom knew as soon as he
dropped his sword, the Red Army soldiers would let loose with a
barrage of fire. Tom didn’t like their odds.

The
Tempest
was just then passing
overhead.

When they were two hundred yards out, the
partisan commander ordered them to spur their horses into a sprint.
It was a magnificent sight, more than a hundred black horses in a
single line charging over a field of white snow.

The officer inside the
base lifted his sword just a little higher then. He was just about
to order his men to open fire when the
Tempest
sounded her foghorn. The
blast filled the air so loudly, Tom could not even hear the sound
of the horses’ hoofs landing upon the frozen snow and then Count
Vasili smiled wryly at him just before there was an explosion not
far out from the base, only fifty yards in front of the wall, but
this was only the beginning, because then a line of explosives,
each fifty feet apart, went off one after the other. Boom, boom,
boom they went one after another. Tom counted five blasts and then
ten, and finally at a dozen different spots along a line, sticks of
dynamite were set off, each shooting a geyser of snow a hundred
feet into the air.

The snow spread out across the sky like a
curtain drawn between them and the enemy, so thick Tom could not
see the soldiers the other side of it.

As they charged into the white curtain
blindly, the enemy began firing, but they could neither see the
enemy nor could their enemy see them. A few partisan did fall, but
then, just ahead of him Tom saw the wall of sandbags. His horse
charged straight at it, and he held on tightly as it cleared the
wall and landed inside the base.

Count Vasili grabbed the reins to Tom’s
horse and brought it to a quick halt. They jumped off, but Tom
could only see a few feet any direction as heavy snow fell all
around him, but then a soldier appeared and tried to stick him with
a bayonet. Tom slid to the side of it and knocked the soldier out
with the butt of his rifle. Still he was not able to see but a few
feet around him, but the sounds of hand to hand fighting had
commenced all along the wall. A horse appeared and ran past
him.

“Behind you,” Count Vasili yelled and Tom
turned quickly around and saw nothing, but then a soldier emerged
from the falling snow. Tom swung his rifle around and hit him in
the side of the head, knocking him out, before he’d even known Tom
was there.

He took a few steps forward and came across
a partisan and a Red Army soldier engaged in a knife fight. Tom
knocked the soldier out and then another appeared, but before the
soldier could fire his weapon, a hand appeared out of the whiteness
and knocked it down. Count Vasili then knocked the soldier out.

“I had it,” Tom told him

Count Vasili looked at Tom doubtfully. “I do
not mind saving your life repeatedly,” he told him. “It is my
honor.”

They began moving through the falling snow.
Tom came across another partisan and soldier in a death match and
knocked the soldier out, but Count Vasili knocked out two.

“To your left,” he shouted and pointed and
Tom turned and knocked a pistol away before it could be fired. He
knocked the Red Army Major out then.

Several partisans gathered around Tom and
they began moving through the mist of snow knocking one soldier out
afer another, or in the case of the golems, tossing them high into
the air. The Red Army soldiers began to surrender then, dropping to
their knees and setting their rifles on the ground.

Count Vasili ordered some men to stand guard
over the captured soldiers and then the rest of them began moving
toward the docking station as the air cleared. A few more shots
rang out, but then the soldiers that way began to surrender
also.

Chapter
56

The
Dauntless
, flying only eighty feet
above the ground, emerged out of the fog and came into view a few
miles from the Vladivostok station. Just minutes before the ship
had begun hailing the station, and a partisan had answered them
that everything was fine for their arrival.

Tom, dressed in a Red army uniform now, was
standing atop the docking platform awaiting the zeppelin’s arrival.
Count Vasili was just down the platform from him, similarly
attired, but the count had chosen to wear his scarf still so his
outfit would not look so drab and plain. A number of partisans were
hidden just out of sight in the warehouse just behind them.

As the
Dauntless
approached, it dropped its
mooring lines and other partisans disguised as Red Army soldiers
grabbed them and hooked them on to the giant motorized pulleys that
would drag the ship up against the platform like a harpooned whale
up against the side of a whaling ship.

When the airship was finally secured to the
platform some forty feet above the ground, the partisans would
storm the ship as soon as Rollo threw open the doors to the cargo
hold. Hopefully everything had gone as planned on board and Rollo
had not been discovered.

The cabin door opened first and the gang
plank was lowered. A sergeant said something to Tom as he stepped
off the zeppelin onto the platform and Tom turned his back to him,
acting like he was busy watching the men near the pulleys. The
sergeant said something to him again, but when Tom did not answer
him, he looked around suspiciously, not seeming to recognize anyone
there. He unsnapped his holster and went to draw his pistol, but
then a loud bang came from inside the cargo hold of the ship.
Whatever it was, it had dented the cargo door from inside, a bulge
in the steel door poked outwards. The sergeant looked toward there
as he drew his pistol.