"Kaminsky, Stuart M. - Rostinov - A Cold Red Sunrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kaminsky Stuart M)
He was no more than a dozen feet from the door of the house on the square when the first shot was fired. It probably would have torn off the top of his head had he not been stumbling slightly. He had stumbled more than a dozen times coming down the slope. Had he looked up and behind him there was a chance, a slight chance that he would have seen a movement in the shadows near the forest higher up the slope between the wooden houses, but he had no reason to do so.
Even as he rolled to his right and the second shot came tearing up a furrow of snow as if an animal were tunneling madly past his head, Rostnikov was aware of the irony. The leg which he had dragged behind him for more than thirty-five years had finally repaid him by saving his life.
He knew now or sensed where the shots were coming from and before the third bullet was fired he was crouching behind the statue of Ermak. A small chunk of Ermak's hand shattered, sending small shards of stone over Rostnikov's head.
The fourth shot came from further right and Rostnikov looked around knowing that he would have to make a move if someone did not come out to help him quickly. There was no thought of running. Rostnikov could not run.
Stuart M Kaminsky
A Cold Red Sunrise
I stood there and I thought: what a full, intelligent and brave life will some day illuminate these shores.
CHAPTER ONE
Commissar Illya Rutkin tucked his briefcase under his arm, adjusted his goatskin gloves, pulled down his fur hat to cover his ears and tightened the scarf over his mouth before opening the door of the wooden house and stepping out into the Siberian morning.
He had been reluctant to get out of bed, reluctant to dress, reluctant to light the small stove, heat his day-old tea, eat the smoked herring left for him in the cupboard. He was a Commissar. The old woman should have prepared his breakfast, given him some attention, but he had been warned.
Tumsk was not only Siberia but a small weather outpost near the Yensei River between Igarka and Agapitovo well within the arctic circle. Tumsk had barely been touched by the move to modernization which had, since the days of Stalin, been part of the propaganda of a harsh but promising new land beyond the Urals. Siberian towns sprang up to mine copper, diamonds, gold, to develop power from wild rivers, to revive the fur trade with the Evenk natives who have paid little attention to six hundred years of history.
Tumsk had not resisted change. Tumsk had not even been threatened by it. No one had cared. A few dozen people lived in the town just beyond the banks of the river, worked in the weather station, lived out their days as political exiles, made plans or hid. Tumsk was not a town in which to invest one's reputation and future.
Rutkin put out his right foot and tested the snow. It was brittle on top and took his weight reasonably well. In a few minutes or so the plow from the naval weather station on the slope would come to begin its rounds creating temporary paths, but Illya Rutkin did not have time to wait. He took another step out into the frigid, dark morning clutching his briefcase tightly and stood panting. What was the temperature? Sixty below? Ridiculous. Probably more like forty below. He stood with his arms out at his sides like an overbundled child in his fur coat under which he wore another coat and thick underwear.
The Commissar waddled rather than walked toward the People's Hall of Justice across the town square, glanced at the statue of Ermak Timofeyevich who had, with a band of cossacks, conquered most of Siberia in the name of the Czar early in the sixteenth century. Ermak, in full armor, a cap of snow on his head, was pointing east, contemplating the Siberia which he had taken. Ermak was badly in need of repair.
Rutkin took a few more steps, stopped and looked west, toward the Ural mountains more than a thousand miles away that stood like a great wall stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic Ocean and separating Russia from the vastness of Siberia.
There was no one on the square. Something sounded to his left and Rutkin turned awkwardly to look toward the river, but the river was hidden by a low ridge covered, as was the world, with snow. He looked toward the taiga, the massive forest that came within a hundred yards of the town on three sides. Nothing. No one.
The Commissar sighed and started again toward the low stone building where he was to conclude his investigation into the death of the child. Normally, a Commissar would not have been dispatched from Moscow to Siberia for such an investigation, but there were two factors which made it a reasonable action. First, the child was the daughter of Lev Samsonov, a well-known dissident physician and scientist who had been sent by a court tribunal to Tumsk a year earlier. The hope had been that the world would forget Samsonov while he was in exile, but, apparently, the world had not forgotten him. Somehow word of his thoughts, life, efforts to return to Leningrad got to the outside world, even as far as the United States. The decision had been made only a month ago to allow Samsonov, his wife and daughter to leave the country. Arrangements were being made. The date of departure was only days away and so, now, the suspicious death of such a man's child had to be given serious attention, a Commissar at least, and, Rutkin had to admit to himself, he was probably considered one of the least busy of all available Commissars.
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