The Romanov Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

the winter would claim more fatalities than the German shells. The bloody war that raged all over Europe had already claimed seventeen million lives and was being made even more brutal by the freezing climate.
    A newspaper reported that on the Western front, ravaged by battles and snowdrifts, a squad of German artillery cut off for three weeks without rations roasted their horses to survive. When the horse meat was devoured, the soldiers boiled and ate their leather saddles.
    In Siberia, where the temperature was twenty-five below, Uri Andrev was fighting a different battle as his hunters closed in for the kill.
    Shouts and cracks of rifle fire echoed as shots ripped through the trees left and right of him. They smacked into the birch trees and kicked up tiny exploding puffs in the snow, but Andrev kept moving, his body racked by exhaustion, his weary legs like rubber in the bone-numbing snow.
    He struggled through the woods, fighting for his life, the sound of dogs growing louder, yelps and barks as the animals picked up his scent.
    He sucked in frozen lungfuls of air, his chest ablaze, and with every agonizing step he prayed that he would reach the train track. His coarseprison uniform and boots, his only protection from the freezing cold, rubbed like sandpaper against his skin.
    A rifle cracked, then another, and shots zinged inches from his head. Gasping for breath, Andrev glanced back. At least two dozen armed guards zigzagged through the woods behind him.
    Up ahead he saw the rail tracks curve through a bend in the woods. The shrill whistle blast of a train sounded. Andrev focused on the tracks as the whistle screamed louder. He was less than a hundred yards from the line. He knew that the train was his only hope of freedom. If he could only clamber aboard when the engine slowed rounding the bend.
    Eighty yards.
    Seventy.
    Shots buzzed past him like crazed bees.
    Sixty.
    Fifty.
    Andrev kept moving, each footstep an agony in the heavy snow, his body on fire with so many pains that it felt as if a thousand daggers slashed at his flesh.
    Another volley of shots slammed into the trees to his right.
    And then it happened.
    One moment Andrev was running, the next his legs threaded air as the ground disappeared beneath his feet and a vast hole appeared in the earth. He let out a cry, lost his balance, and sank into the abyss like a rock.
    He landed hard on his shoulder in an open pit and heard the crack of bone. Andrev’s shoulder was on fire with raw pain. He struggled to untangle himself from what felt like branches of deadwood.
    To his horror Andrev saw that the tangle of branches was a mass of frozen human corpses.
    He was lying in a huge pit where the camp guards disposed of the dead—hundreds of rotting bodies, their limbs meshed in an obscene tapestry. He struggled to haul himself out of the pit as the forest again thundered with gunfire and barking dogs. As he climbed out, agony in his shoulder, Andrev again heard the shrill whistle.
    A black train with a huge red star on its front belched steam as it thundered round a bend in the woods, like a massive steel snake on tracks. His heart lifted and he started toward the tracks.
    Behind him in the woods he never saw the guard kneel and take aim.
    A rifle exploded and the bullet punched Andrev like a hammer blow, sending him flying forward into the gruesome pit, and then there was only darkness, silent, empty, painless darkness.

    The black train with a red star painted on the front and red flags fluttering from its carriages screeched to a halt with a squeal of brakes.
    Steam billowed from its engine as one of the carriage doors snapped open. A stern-faced man with hard blue eyes and blond hair jumped down, brandishing a Nagant revolver. He wore an ankle-length leather trench coat, scarf, gloves, and an officer’s leather peaked cap.
    He saw the guards run forward out of the woods, readying their rifles as they approached the pit. One was a brutal-looking sergeant with a