Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland Page A

the beam into the darkness, and realized he was standing right beside them.
    They lay as they had fallen, piled in a grotesque heap of bones and cloth and shoes and hair. There were multiple corpses. In such a jumble of decay, he could not tell how many.
    He had come down on one side of the mine opening. The bodies must have landed on the other side.
    As the flashlight’s beam wavered, like a candle flame boxed by the wind, Pekkala’s instincts screamed at him to get out of this place. But he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet, even with fear sucking the breath out of his lungs.
    Pekkala forced himself to hold his ground, reminding himself that he had seen many bodies in the past, plenty of them in worse condition than these. But those corpses had been anonymous to him, in death as they had been in life. If this sad tangle of limbs did indeed belong to the Romanovs, then this was unlike anything he’d witnessed before.
    A sound startled him, echoing off the stone walls. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that it was his brother’s voice, calling down from above.
    “Did you find anything?”
    “Yes,” he called up.
    There was a long pause.
    “And?” his brother’s voice came down.
    “I don’t know yet.”
    Silence from above.
    Pekkala turned back to the bodies. Down here in the mine, the process of decomposition had been slowed. The clothing was largely intact and there were no flies or other insects, whose larvae would have eaten the corpses down to the bone if the bodies had been left above ground. Neither was there any evidence of rats or mice having gnawed upon the dead. The depth of the mine and the vertical entrance had prevented them from reaching the bodies. He did not know what had been mined here. Whatever it was might also have had a preserving effect.
    The victims appeared to be partially mummified. Their skin had turned a greenish brown, nearly translucent, drawn tight over the bones and filmed with mold. He had seen corpses like this before—people frozen in ice or buried in soil with a high acid content, like peat bogs. Pekkala also recalled a case in which a killer stuffed a body up a factory chimney. Over the years in which the victim remained hidden, the body became smoked to the consistency of shoe leather. It was remarkably well preserved, but as soon as police removed it, the corpse decayed at an astonishing rate.
    While these bodies remained intact in their present state, he knew that they would also deteriorate very quickly if any attempt was made to move them above ground. He was glad that the decision had been made to leave them here until a properly equipped removal team could be brought in.
    At first, Pekkala touched nothing.
    On the top of the pile was a woman, lying on her back with her arms thrown out to the sides. From the way she had landed, Pekkala judged that the fall would probably have killed her, but he could see clearly that she’d been dead before she fell. Her skull had been shattered by a bullet between the eyes and the base of the nose, penetrating that part of the brain known as the dura oblongata. The woman would have died instantly. Whoever did this, Pekkala realized, had known exactly what they were doing. But there was more to it than simply knowing how to kill a person. As Vassileyev had drilled into him, the way a murder was committed told a great deal about the killer. Even in cases in which bodies were horribly mutilated, usually with knives, most murderers avoided harming the faces of their victims. Those who used guns to kill their victims usually shot them several times, and most often aimed at the chest. In cases where a pistol was used by someone inexperienced with firearms, the bodies often showed multiple and random impact wounds, the shooters having underestimated how inaccurate those weapons were. Pekkala knew of people who had escaped from shots unleashed at almost point-blank range by untrained marksmen.
    Killings carried out by skilled gunmen were