The Thin Wall: A POW/MIA Truth Novel

by R. Cyril West

  Was Milan hiding?

  He stuffed a smashed pack of cigarettes into his pocket and climbed from the sedan. He was acutely aware of his surroundings: the meadow with its speckled yellow flowers, the tufts of trees and an outcropping of rocks. He slipped the Makarov out from the boot holster and cautiously walked to the Škoda’s passenger door.

  This could be a trap

  Johnston was leaned back against the seat, staring into the upholstery. He seemed to be in a drugged-induced state of mind. There was a bloody hand towel on his thigh and a hypodermic needle in the footwell.

  “You don’t look good, comrade.” Dal nudged the barrel of the rifle away from his face. “If you do not mind me saying so, you look like hell.”

  Dal’s eyes scanned the muddy road, which curved around a distant hill. He sensed Milan had marched on, seeking help in the next village.

  “. . . scumbag.” Johnston was speaking to him. “In the end you lose. Taken down. A failure.” He closed his eyes, breathing slow and even.

  Dal lit a cigarette, the last in the pack. “To think. I had spared your life. And this is how you thank me? By calling me names?”

  “Get lost.”

  Dal placed a hand on the roof of the car and leaned into the window. “Russell Johnston . . . all along, you have reminded me of my sarcastic brother. He was a good-humored man with an unusual outlook on life. However I am starting to rethink things. You seem more like my old army comrade named Yuri. Yuri was a man whom I admired for his loyalty to the Soviet Union. After the war, he was captured while taking photographs of B-52s at the Royal Air Force Station in Warrington. He was strong when it came time to face his interrogators in London. He never opened his mouth to make a confession to British intelligence. I understand he died a very painful and gruesome death keeping secrets for Stalin. Lucky you, I don’t have time for torture.”

  “You’re too late,” Johnston said. “He has already reached the border with proof of your crimes.”

  “Proof?”

  “The doctor has the documents.”

  “Lies.”

  “You showed them to me, remember? You’re fucked. It’s all in that briefcase . . .”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “Fucked,” Johnston said again, this time with a grin.

  PEDDLING IN the mud and up a hill, most men would have succumbed to exhaustion. Not Milan. He leaned into the handlebars and breathed in short gasps. Focused. Determined. Driven. His legs burned as they propelled the bicycle onward. He was fortunate to have made it this far. And yet he cursed his survival. It was torturous to go on while Johnston bled. If anyone deserved to die, it was him, not the Marine.

  In the army he had been trained to understand the bigger picture: that on the way to winning a war many battles might be lost, including the loss of good men. This sort of thinking was a page right out of Sun-Tzu’s treatise on the Art of War. He understood the logic. That the war was more important than the battle. But leaving the Marine to die was an option he refused to accept. Johnston’s life was a battle worth winning. He could save him, plus deliver the documents to the Austrians. He would have it no other way.

  He kept his eyes on the front tire spinning on the road and peddled vigorously. You. Can. Do. This. Moments later he heard a gunshot blast in the distance and told himself it was the sudden backfiring of a car or perhaps a hunter’s rifle. He wanted to believe anything but the cold truth: that GySgt Russell E. Johnston was dead.

  DAL SPREAD his bloody hands over the Škoda’s hood and felt the engine heat. The car, he estimated, had broken down less than an hour ago. There was still time to find the physician. He could not have gotten far on foot. He placed the automatic rifle in the back seat of the sedan and sped off down the road.

  Having left the concert-goers in a frenzy, with black smoke on the streets, he was relieved the documents had not burned in the fire. After all, recovering them had been a state priority. Failure to return the secrets to Moscow would destroy his reputation; worse, it would launch an investigation.

  Thing was, he could survive the death of the POW. There had been an exit plan, orders from his fellow conspirators to execute the prisoner at the first sign of trouble. This was just done. But the Devil Dog dossier? No. He must find it. The KGB investigators were fierce. They would become suspicious and ask questions about its unexpected disappearance. With little effort, they would learn about the plot to smuggle Johnston to Cuba, and arrest everyone involved. Such things were not easy to hide once there was smoke.

  He groaned. His demise would come quickly, regardless of his many personal triumphs in the Balkans, in Czechoslovakia, and the numerous medals earned over his career. In all likelihood government agents would move quickly to close the loop and murder him before the first question was even asked──poisoned, shot in his sleep, hung from a belt. They would make it look like a suicide.

  He shuddered. For the first time since he had put on his KGB uniform some decades ago he felt the dread of impending failure.

  The road lifted, cut through a mat of forest, and then flattened onto a barren shoulder of a hill. Dal was beginning to think the doctor was no longer fleeing on foot. Had he hitched a ride with someone?

  Soon he came upon a pasture and a series of hedgerows. Feeling hopeless, his thoughts turned to Olga and his children, how much he would miss them: the picnics in the country, the hunting trips with the boys, telling embellished, larger-than-life stories about the many adventures he had had during the course of his career. He flashed to his young mistress in the Georgian SSR. Delicate. Beautiful. Exciting. He felt responsible for her wellbeing and worried she would return to a life of prostitution. So much human tragedy. And all because of him. For greed. For selfishness. For ego. Many lives would pay the price for his decision to turn against the Motherland. Too many lives.

  He looked into the rearview mirror without pride, shaken by his own downfall. What had happened to the man who once stood unquestionably loyal to the Soviet Union? He did not have an answer. That face, tense, anxious. Who was he now? A stranger. A fallen comrade. Someone he no longer recognized. He knew only one thing: that he would surrender to KGB authorities with dignity, rather than seek political asylum or attempt to claw his way out of trouble. Dal had made his bed, he would lie down in it. Being forthcoming with his crimes──telling the truth exactly as he knew it──might save his family from a life of humiliation and harassment. The Dal’s were patriotic citizens. His oldest son, Marc, was enlisting in the army that winter.

  He slumped into the steering wheel. He had heard the heartbreaking stories of other officers who had fallen from grace, their careers torn apart, their families ostracized from society. He never believed it could happen to him. Until now.

  He was looking for a place to turn the car around when in the distance a bicyclist appeared on the road.

  . . . his last chance?

  . . . maybe.

  With luck, the cyclist had seen Dr. Husak wandering along the road. It was a long shot, and desperate of him to think this way, but entirely possible. But would the cyclist cooperate? Would he answer questions truthfully? He realized the man would likely be unhelpful, lying for the sake of pride. Czechs did not rat on their brothers and sisters. They were loyal to each other. He was considering how best to pose the questions, when he realized it was unnecessary. The man on the bicycle was Milan. He was a full hedgerow ahead of the sedan, hunched over the handlebars like a cyclist on the final leg of a race.

  Dal braced himself, his mind devoid of all rational thought, of the past, the present, for the future. He was simply reacting: he had identified his target and was moving in.

  He pressed his foot on the accelerator.

  Faster.

  Closing the gap.

  In his haste to run Milan down, he did not recognize the T in the road and hit the brake at the last second.

  Milan bolted right, onto a paved road that led toward a wooden bridge.

  With the skill of
a racecar driver, Dal downshifted into the turn, the tires screeching on the asphalt while he accelerated the nose of the sedan toward the bicycle. Trouble was, he had not seen the cow standing in the road.

  . . . the collision was equal to that of a head-on impact with a small car.

  MILAN HAD no idea a car was roaring down on him. When he heard the crash, he shot a glance over his shoulder and watched the yellow sedan flip onto its hood, sparks shooting up against the pavement. He could not believe his eyes. Of all times. Of all places. Of all things. Why an accident now?

  The car slid to a stop in the long grass at the edge of the road. His immediate feeling was that of inner conflict. What was the right thing to do? He felt tugged between moving on to find medical assistance for Johnston or helping the injured driver. He had an obligation, he thought rapidly. To Johnston──a victim of his own government’s cowardice to live up to a promise to bring him home. And to the servicemen who had been abducted from Indochina. Their horrible fate in Vietnam, Laos, the Soviet Union, wherever they ended up, must be exposed. Yet leaving someone in pain, possibly to die in the overturned car, was not an option either. He finally made up his mind and spun the bike around to help.

  Somehow he would have to make this quick.

  Somehow.

  Halfway to the wreckage, his back stiffened and his hands locked onto the handlebars. He had made a mistake. The man crawling from the car was Colonel Dal.

  Milan took another half-peddle forward and stopped.

  DAL UNBUCKLED his seatbelt and pulled himself through the window of the overturned vehicle. Damn cow, he was thinking. There were shards of glass stuck in his arm and a small piece of glass embedded in the skin near his eye.

  He stood on the pavement. Everything was occurring in slow motion. Gasoline spilling onto the road. The fallen cow moaning with a broken leg.

  . . . and the physician peddling toward the bridge.

  “Going somewhere?” he whispered. “Not so fast, doc. I want my fucking documents.”

  He reached into the car and grabbed the AK.

  Milan was already halfway across the bridge when he put the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger──but missed.

  Dal took a step. There was gasoline spilling onto the pavement. It had reached the lit cigarette he had been smoking prior to the collision with the cow and now the overturned car burst into flames. He moved away from the burning sedan, taking up position in the middle of the road. Everything about him was executed in a methodical, overtly professional manner. The way he flexed his shoulders. How he drew in a deep breath prior to pulling the trigger again.

  This time the ack of bullets struck Milan and sent him headfirst over the front tire.

  . . . the bicycle tumbling.

  . . . the briefcase toppling onto the bridge’s deck.

  Dal lowered the rifle and watched Milan struggle to his feet.

  The physician’s will to survive was impressive. Then again, likely it was the body reacting to fear, pushing him on, in the way a headless chicken runs amuck in the moments after decapitation. He felt no empathy and fired off another burst of gunfire, 7, 8, 9 bullets. The projectiles hit their mark and Milan fell face down onto the wood planks.

  “Spokoinoi nochi,” he said in Russian. It is over for you, comrade.

  He shouldered the rifle and started walking toward the bridge, into a freshening breeze. He felt his wet shirt, probably blood in the area of his ribcage. There was a memory that came to him, that week of hunting in the Siberian mountains with the boys, the day they had shot a Bull Moose, and afterward when he had given them instructions on how to field dress the animal.

  He walked under a line of trees, unaware the side of his face was bloodied. With the death of the physician, he would save Brezhnev from global humiliation. Earn another medal? Absolutely. However medals meant little to him these days. Medals were for the young and those seeking validation.

  He approached the bridge.

  . . . there was a gust of wind.

  . . . and another.

  At first, the cool air was a welcome gift on his face. He needed this. It momentarily soothed his headache and the stinging in his eye sockets. But the briefcase, he discovered with sudden horror, had landed next to the bicycle tire and broken open──the dossier papers spilled.

  He mumbled something in disbelief when the wind kicked up and the papers began to flutter across the planks.

  Was he seeing things?

  He dropped the rifle and broke into a sprint, his knees kicking up high, his arms pumping. If the papers blew over the bridge, it would be impossible to recover them. He ran, showing no emotion. He ran, reaching for a lifeline. He ran, feeling like the slowest human being on earth.

  . . . but he was too late.

  A flurry of wind blew most of the documents between the horizontal rails, hundreds of pages, one by one, gone. When he arrived out of breath, he leaned over the rail and saw the papers floating on the river beneath the bridge, swept away in the gentle rapids.

  He stood motionless with the wind shrieking in his ears and with his eye swelled up and his lungs heaving. A document or two was stuck to the wet planks near his shoes. He bent over and picked them up, then stared numbly at the secrets printed on the papers, before crumbling them into a fist.

  He hung his head.

  He was no longer angry, rather was flooded with guilt and shame.

  Several minutes passed before Dal turned his attention on Milan, who was lying face down on the bridge, his glasses fallen from his face. “I have heard of many incredible prison breaks in my lifetime,” Dal said, finding a kind of consolation in speaking to the bleeding man. “Prisoners escaping barefoot across the frozen tundra. East Germans tunneling to the West. But this escape? Even in failure, it must be the most impressive of all. Mmm. How did you do it?”

  There was not any sunshine now, only overcast skies and steady wind.

  Dal huffed, stepped away from the rail, and then crushed Milan’s glasses with his boot.

  “Listen . . .” Dal’s voice was gloomy and downcast. “I want to tell you what happened. About that moment in my life when I first recognized the disparity between the people with power and those who are powerless.” He searched his pockets unsuccessfully for cigarettes. “During the war,” he began with a sigh, “my unit had been reassigned to the assault on Berlin. It was during the final weeks of the fighting, in what had become Germany’s darkest hour. There, in the heat of battle, we came upon German troops embedded in the city’s rubble. They weren’t real soldiers, of course. The typical German man of fighting age had already been killed or taken prisoner. What was left to defend Berlin was nothing more than a ragtag citizen army. Teenagers. Grandfathers. The wounded. Nevertheless they had weapons. And their intent was to kill us.

  “After a brief gunfight, white flags were raised, one after the other, rising from the shattered brick and mortar debris of a once spectacular city. ‘Nicht schiessen,’ the Germans shouted, their arms high above their heads in surrender, ‘don’t shoot.’ It was odd, for we had not expected them to give up so easily.

  “I remember thinking, where is the honor? You have come this far, why not fight to the death? Oh, looking back, I suppose they were too exhausted to fight on; like most soldiers, they were eager to return to their loved ones and rebuild their lives. And why not? Europe had been decimated. Enough was enough.

  “But it was an accounting problem for us. I have often wondered the exact number of men who surrendered that day. One hundred? Could there have been more? Possibly. On the other hand, there were only ten men standing in my squad. And with shellfire screaming overhead, we were pissing our pants as they streamed forth from the rubble.”

  A thick, purple blood oozed from the corner of Milan’s mouth.

  Dal was certain the physician was listening, and pressed on, his words bringing the past to life. “A few blocks away there was a burst of machine gun fire and the crushing steel sound of tank treads rollin
g along the ruined cobble. Our comrades were caught up in a bad crossfire and needed reinforcing. In some ways, this mass surrender was an act of aggression──a diversion. Because while we amassed the Germans at gunpoint, good Russian soldiers were being shot at on nearby streets. No doubt some of them were killed.

  “And yet I sensed it was a test for me. As a result of bravery in battle, I had recently been promoted to squad leader. And so I asked myself, what next? What must be done? We could not possibly take these Germans prisoner. At the same time we could not let them go free.”

  Dal looked into the sky and closed his eyes. It felt good to speak of the fighting in Berlin. He had never spoken so intimately of the final days of the war.

  “I made the decision to have them lined up in single-file rows against the remnants of a library wall,” Dal pressed on. “I ordered them to keep their hands high above their heads. ‘Eyes closed,’ I yelled above the shellfire.

  “Now before I say more, you must understand, my men, including myself, we were frightened out of our wits. Any soldier, as I am sure you are fully aware, who tells you he is brave in battle is lying to you. Really, we were just men. Ordinary men. Like the Germans. Wanting nothing more than for the war to end and go home to our families. But there was no cease fire in effect and my soldiers looked to me for strength in a time of bloodshed.

  I gave the orders.

  It was clear what had to be done.

  ‘Fire,’ I shouted.

  And they fell.

  “We quickly pulled together a new line of them. And shot them, too. We repeated this over and over again. I had not expected them to be so submissive, without raising a voice in protest. Had we attempted to shoot them as an entire group, which was the impulsive thing to do, chaos would have ensued. Human instinct, the need to breathe air, would have pushed them to fight for their lives. In sheer numbers alone they had the advantage and could have easily overwhelmed us with their bare hands. But it was the order, the systematic way in which I carried out the executions before their downcast eyes, in concert with how I instilled terror into their exhausted minds, which enabled ten Russian soldiers to overcome more than one hundred Germans.”