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J r
It rolled up to the passenger entrance chute, then stopped. Above her head, she could hear passengers walking from the plane, through the enclosed canvas rampway, back to the terminal. The back door of the plane opened, and a folding ladder was dropped down to the tarmac. In the doorway, she saw Mr. Gordons, resplendent in a pilot's uniform.
"Hurry, Mom," he said.
She ran up the steps, and Mr. Gordons retracted the ladder and closed the door behind her. Almost all the passengers were off the plane now. A few looked at Mr. Gordons quizzically.
"Had a little problem with one of them there red lights on the control panel," he drawled.
"Why are you talking like that?" the professor asked.
"All pilots are Southern," Gordons said. "Don't you watch TV?" He turned back to the mike. "Y'all be back on just soon as Ah check out that there light," he said.
In the cockpit, Dr. Payton-Holmes was shocked to see the bodies of the pilot and copilot stuffed unceremoniously in a corner. The pilot was unclothed. It was his uniform that Mr. Gordons wore.
"They resisted," he said. "They did not understand how important it was for me to follow this Remo Williams now."
He put the professor in the copilot's seat, then sat alongside her. He used his pilot's voice again to call the tower.
"Tower," he drawled, "this is Laker One-Niner. Sorry, a little slow getting into that takeoff pat-
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tern, but let's try it again, fellas." He nodded to a voice that crackled back into earphones he was wearing, powered up his engines, and began to back the plane away from the passenger ramp.
As he moved smoothly toward the runway, the professor said, "You ever fly one of these before?"
"No," Mr. Gordons said.
"You know how?"
"It is a machine. I am a machine. I understand it."
"You know everything about it?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where they keep those little bottles of liquor?" Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes asked, just as, with a squeal of burning rubber, the plane sped down the runway for takeoff.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Major Grigori Seminov walked past the twenty-four armed guards outside the imposing white marble building that was Moscow Center. His breath puffed out in clouds in the cold October air as he polished his monocle on the lapel of his army overcoat.
The monocle had been a present from his uncle, one of the hordes of peasant revolutionaries whose claim to fame in the blossoming People's Party of 1917 consisted of assisting in the raid on the mansion of Count Yevgeny Vladishenko, after murdering the count, his family, their servants, and all their dogs and horses. And two canaries.
To show the unenlightened skeptics of the region that the revolution represented a new era for the common man, the newly assembled Bolshevik brigade left the dismembered bodies of the slain aristocrats on the open road to rot. To demonstrate that the new order did not need the
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decadent wealth of landowners like the count, they burned his fields and storehouses. As a result, disease and famine swept the conquered grounds, and the victors faced deaths far worse than their victims had.
For his part in the bloody battle, the elder Sem-inov received a new home, comprised of one room in the Vladishenko mansion, which he and his wife shared with twelve other families who sang songs to the glory of Lenin.and the conquering Bolsheviks while their children succumbed to starvation and typhus.
Before he himself died of tuberculosis in the squalid room, Seminov dispatched his wife to warn his brother's family in Moscow to leave Russia.
"We have made a great mistake," were his dying words.
It took Maria Seminov several weeks to reach Moscow. October turned to November, and all the horses had either been butchered for meat or confiscated by the new Red Army. Her feet blistered with the cold.
When finally she reached the small house of her husband's brother, his wife, and their son, Grigori, she wept tears of joy. They welcomed her proudly. The news of the takeover of the Vladishenko estate had already spread as far as Moscow, although the gruesome fate of the diseased and dying families now occupying the mansion was never mentioned in the reports.
"My brother died a hero," Grigori's father said, swollen with pride and Russian grief on hearing of Seminov's death.
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"No, no. You've got it wrong. There is nothing heroic about dying from filth and stupidity." Maria Seminov told them of the rampant disease in the mansion, about the lack of doctors or medicine or food or horses.
"Not in front of the boy," Grigori's mother said.
"He should know," Maria said stubbornly. "This revolution in the name of the people is just another military game. Common folk like us are dying everywhere, without even our own beds to die in. They will take everything, these Bolsheviks . . . make slaves of us all. We must leave Russia before it is too late."
"Excuse me," Grigori said. "I have to go to sleep now."
"Yes, of course." Maria kissed the child and gave him the monocle his uncle had looted during his misguided moment of military fervor. "He wanted you to have this," she said. "It once belonged to a great man, a man who fed and cared for all the people who worked his lands. Perhaps one day you will be a great man, too."
"I'd like that," the boy said. In his room, Grigori climbed out the window and slid silently to the drifted snow beneath. It was night. The streets were nearly empty of civilians. Only the-soldiers clomp-clomped back and forth across the snow-packed streets, their rifles at
the ready.
Grigori approached one cautiously.
"What do you want?" the soldier demanded.
"There is a traitor to the revolution in my house," Grigori Seminov said.
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After his aunt had been dragged away screaming, Grigori stood before a small mirror in his bedroom and placed the monocle in his eye for the first time. And in the enlarged, fisheye view of himself he saw with satisfaction a cruelty that would make him among the most feared men of the Party.
Seminov breathed deeply as he took in the view of Red Square from the top of the steps leading to Moscow Center. The great revolution must have begun on a day just like this one, he mused. Cold, clear, still except for a distant buzzing in the square. A buzzing that was growing louder.
He squinted through his monocle at the widening cluster of people. He sprinted down the steps. The officials at Moscow Center would not tolerate sudden outbursts of the populace. They knew well what happened the last time the masses were permitted to express discontent with those in power.