for his gun, he pounced on him, straddling and punching him in the face. Sarah backed away, winded, but ready to thrust again if Carter moved away. She screamed for him to move, but Carter wasn’t listening anymore. All the hatred hidden since his father was taken away by this man was coming out. Even as the smaller person, his rage gave him strength. Cass finally threw the boy off and rose awkwardly to one knee, loosening the safety strap on his gun. Carter jumped back onto the man, wrenching the gun away as Sarah attacked again with the fork. She gouged him in the chest and he cried, trying to stand, but his bulk and conditioning hindered him. She stuck him four more times before the sheriff pulled the fork away. He grasped it and was going to stab her; one thrust from him would kill her.
Carter fired. He didn’t aim and didn’t realize how many times he fired the .38 Police Special; he just continuing pulling the trigger, even after all the bullets were gone. At some point, Sarah wrapped her arms around him and took the gun, “Move away Carter, get out of here!” He started to run, then stopped. He wasn’t going to run; instead, he went to his mother who stood over the Sheriff with an empty gun. He was moaning and pleading, trying to lift a hand. They had no way to tell how many times he was hit, at least once and maybe more. She started screaming and kicking at his head as Carter watched. Then she took the fork, and stood over the man who tried to move a hand to defend himself. She batted his hand away and thrust the tines into his throat, one piercing his larynx and spine. They backed away and watched. At some point, the man stopped moving and she pushed back her hair. They had protected each other, but also killed a Sheriff. Carter went to his mother; like he had when his father was arrested and told her it would be all right. She answered, “We have to get rid of the body and hide the car.”
Together, they struggled to put the limp fat man into the back seat of the Dodge sedan. He was like moving a dead hog. Sarah then drove the car up the tractor path with Carter beside her. They passed the ridge at the top and went down to the bottom row of trees, which ended along the edge of a deep ravine. They pushed the car easily over the edge, teetering for only a second before crashing down on its nose, turning on its side. There was no fire. For the rest of the afternoon, mother and son worked together with the plow horses and Model-T truck dropping debris on the wreck; mostly stones from the pile accumulated over the years from clearing the farmland. By dusk, there was no trace that the Sheriff had ever been there. Even his gun was buried below tons of stone. Over the years that followed, dirt, underbrush and native trees filled the ravine from erosion and clearing of more land to enlarge the orchard.
Competition
Days passed, without any word from Karina. Evan never left his flat. He was worried sick, but felt she might be safe if he stayed away. Peter called, declaring that it was time for Evan to begin working for him or risk being killed or getting Karina killed.
“I don’t know Peter, but I’m not going to risk her life again. So, forget about me tracking her work with Jelavich.”
“Now, Evan, calm down. What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, but it has something to do with the threats he made to her about me. I’m sure of that much.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am!”
“Okay, so what do you want to do? You wanna quit?”
“Hell, no! I need to get out in front on this thing. I’m a great researcher on my own, and I know what trail she’s on now. I just can’t be around her.”
Peter knew it was useless to talk about protection. They hadn’t done it at Karina’s, and he knew it. “What do you suggest, Evan?”
“I want you to get me somewhere safe, out of this flea trap. I want to come back to the States.”
“Do you think that’s where the gold went?”
“There’s a good chance it came back with the Army from Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, sometime in early 1921.”
“Okay, how will you know?”
“I need to get into the Army records for the American Expeditionary Force-Siberia. The AEF was in Russia from 1918 to 1920 to protect the Trans-Siberia Railroad.”
That evening, unannounced, Uri and two large men came to Evan’s apartment and within less than five minutes, they were rushing him and his meager belongings out a rear entrance of his building into waiting vehicles. They drove a small dark van followed by a security car in circuitous patterns around the city to assure they were not followed. Evan’s personal mobile phone had been disabled to avoid electronic tracking. After an hour of deceptive maneuvering, he was taken to a train station on the outskirts of Moscow where he was instructed to take his important belongings and leave the rest. He was given a first-class ticket to St. Petersburg, where he again had first-class reservations for a flight to London, Heathrow airport, then on to New York via British Airways. Uri was to accompany him to Pulkovo International Airport at St. Petersburg, until he had passed through security.
Evan needed no further evidence that Peter Mikhailovich had the means to keep his word. Sitting on the tarmac at Pulkovo, the plane began rolling as the huge engines raced forward. He felt safe for the first time in several days. For the next few hours, he slept soundly in the oversized seat until asked to prepare for landing. By the time he reached New York the next morning, he was fully rested. At his office in Moscow, Gregor Jelavich was raging while listening to the caller, “What do you mean, he’s gone!”
At JFK, Evan realized that he hadn’t thought much about where to go next. His ATM balance showed twenty thousand dollars as Peter had promised as an advance for expenses. He went to the American Airlines counter and booked a flight to Harrisburg, PA. Once there, he rented a car with GPS, driving to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center located in Carlisle. It was the largest repository of Army history in existence.
At the center, he showed his BU identification and worked with a helpful archivist to locate information about the American Expeditionary Force – Siberia. There was an amazing amount of information, including original documents with unit deployments, personnel rosters, equipment lists and even personal diaries. There was even an old Army documentary film on the AEF.
The American Expeditionary Force-Siberia had been engaged in a forgotten war few Americans ever knew about. The AEF - Siberia was an awkward, ill-conceived, intervention in the Russian civil war from 1918 through 1920. Ten thousand U.S. soldiers were re-deployed with the AEF from several regiments and brigades at the end of the First World War while other doughboys in France went home. Morale was deplorable, and living conditions in Siberia were worse than in France. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops there during a civil war, plagued with lawlessness, and murderous pillaging by Cossacks and their Japanese allies. The Japanese had over seventy thousand troops in eastern Russia. They were technically neutral, but allied loosely with the Bolshevik’s who threatened American business interests in the East. An even larger concern was almost a million tons of war materials stored at Vladivostok. These materials had been shipped by allied nations to Russia to bolster its military efforts against the Germans and Austrians on the eastern front during the World War, but remained largely unused when the Russians withdrew to fight their own internal war. The mission of the AEF was to protect American interests and the Trans-Siberian railway. There were several instructions prepared by the President in a confidential order to MGEN William Graves, Commanding Officer of the AEF. In 1920, as the Russian Provisional Government with its “White Army” lost the civil war, the American Army had to withdraw to save itself from overwhelming opposition from the Red Army, Cossack bandits and Japanese.
Evan spent two days at the Heritage Museum and became friendly with the archivist. As she learned more about his research, she was able to help him distill down to the most relevant information. It didn’t take long for her to understand his intent to locate evidence of illegal contraband smuggled back with the AEF as they retreated. The Army history tended to
avoid highlighting it. This required digging behind the public records, back into whatever source documentation existed, including private correspondence. Evan began centering on the 31st Infantry Regiment and some of the units comprising it from around the country. As he drilled deeper into a box of old unsorted documents from the unit the archivist gave him, she said, “You know, Dr. Evanoff, this might be purely coincidental but, a young Russian woman was here last week looking through this same material.”
Karina, who else would it be? He described her and the woman nodded that it was probably the same woman. He asked, “Can you tell me anything about what she found? It might help my research.”
“Well, the last material she wanted was about the 7th Quartermasters Brigade, which was in charge of transportation and logistics support in the AEF.”
“What was she looking at?”
“Well, it was some letters and some manifests; then she just spent a couple hours on the internet using her laptop and then left. That was the day before you got here.”
He took the box to a large table, thanking her for her help. When he sorted through it, there were several letters. Some were hard to read due to poor handwriting, age and poor writing