He took a few random turns and switchbacks to make sure that they were not being followed, and, once he was sure they were clean, he pressed on towards the old part of town. ‘To the Alfama district,’ she grunted and Anatoly set off, driving quickly and efficiently through the streets of Lisbon. Her driver, Anatoly, opened the door for her and she climbed in and settled back in her seat, breathing in the scents of wood and leather.
#BY ROYAL COMMAND E BOOK HOW TO#
The French may be enemies of the mother country, but they certainly knew how to build automobiles. It was a brand-new black unmarked Citroën Traction Avant. She muttered something to her secretary, Alexa, stepped backwards into the shadow of a warehouse, then slipped away down an alley to where her car was waiting. The Portuguese would want to talk to the engineers about tedious things like engine sizes and power output and haulage capabilities. Most of her time was spent being bored to death. The life of a spy was not as romantic as it was presented in popular novels. So Colonel Sedova and her team travelled the world pretending to be part of a Soviet trade delegation selling Russian tractors. A group of Russian secret agents would attract a great deal of attention in a foreign country unless they pretended to be something else. Her job now was to run spies and secret agents throughout Europe, with the aim of undermining foreign governments and eliminating anyone who might be working to harm the new communist regime.Īt last, she had thought, I can get away from tractors. Later on she had joined the Obedinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, the Russian secret police.
#BY ROYAL COMMAND E BOOK SERIES#
Having fought bravely, and fiercely, in both the war and the revolution, Colonel Sedova had joined the Ministry of Propaganda and one of her first jobs had been to make a series of films in which the hero was a Russian tractor. It would drive slowly into town at the head of a long procession, followed by men and women and children waving flags and singing patriotic songs. When the new tractor arrived in a village there would be celebrations. They would revolutionise agriculture just as Lenin had revolutionised everything else.
They were the symbol of the new Russia, of a fabulous modern world. It was only after the revolution that they had started to appear in Russia, or the Soviet Union as it was now called. Farm work was done by horse and ox and peasant. Back then, at the end of the last century, there had been no tractors. They were noisy, they were dirty and they were ugly.Ĭolonel Sedova had grown up on a farm in the Ukraine.
The twenty tractors, from the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, were of varying designs but they shared several things in common. She had survived the purges of the last ten years, and three assassination attempts, but she would gladly have lived through it all again rather than spend another minute with one of these infernal, god-forsaken machines.īut here she was, on a cold March morning, watching a parade of them drive around a square in an ugly industrial quarter of Lisbon for the benefit of a group of bored Portuguese businessmen and local officials. She had lived through the terrible famine of 1921, where, in the frozen, impoverished countryside, people had been reduced to eating anything they could – weeds, grass, rats, leather shoes, even each other. She had endured the Great War, the revolution and the civil war that followed it. She had built tractors, she had driven tractors, she had unveiled statues of tractors, she had made countless speeches in foreign towns singing the praises of tractors… Russian tractors, communist tractors, the greatest tractors in the world! She would be happy if she never saw a tractor again as long as she lived. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaserĬolonel Irena Sedova of the OGPU hated tractors. The moral right of the copyright holder has been asserted Young Bond and By Royal Command are trademarks of Danjaq, LLC, used under licence by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, Registered Offices: 10-11 Lower John Street Londonįirst published by the Penguin Group 2008Ĭopyright © Ian Fleming Publications, 2008 All rights reserved
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, Englandĭisney-Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690 E-book published by Ian Fleming Publications
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