The Katyn Order

by Douglas W. Jacobson

  The scene inside was overwhelming. Natalia’s head pounded as she glanced around: Kerosene lanterns cast a gloomy, yellow glow. Cots lined every inch of the floor with barely enough room for the nurses to squeeze through to groaning patients. The stifling air reeked of disinfectant, blood and urine.

  A priest looked up from beside one of the cots. He held a blood-soaked bandage against a small boy’s head with his right hand. With his left, he pointed toward the back of the room.

  Natalia led the way as they carefully navigated the stretcher between the rows of cots to the farthest alcove where a stout, elderly nun wiped blood off her hands with a sliver of cloth obviously torn from her habit. The nun tossed the soiled rag into a bucket of red water and plodded over to the stretcher. She shot a cursory glance at Berta’s bandaged leg, placed a pudgy hand on her forehead and shrugged. “Not much of a fever yet, so that’s a good sign.” She motioned wearily toward a staircase that led to the cellar. “Take her downstairs. There are a few empty cots at the back. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “What about antibiotics?” Natalia asked. “There’s seepage from the wound. We’ve got to prevent infection.”

  The nun glared at her as if she’d asked for gold bars. “Young lady, we barely have clean bandages and water.” Her brow furled. “Do you have any medical training? If you do we could use some help here.”

  Zeeka glanced at her watch and shook her head. “We have to meet Colonel Stag, and we’re already late.”

  “Maybe later,” Natalia said to the nun. “Later I could—”

  The nun waved her hand dismissively and turned her attention to a sobbing young girl, no more than ten years old, with ragged shrapnel wounds in her neck and chest. “We’ll keep an eye on her and check the wound,” she snapped. “A doctor should be around a bit later. Take her down and find a spot for her. I’ll check on her later.”

  Zeeka put a hand on Natalia’s shoulder. “It’s the best we can do for her. Now we’ve got to go.”

  Natalia came back early the next morning, grimacing at the stench as soon as she stepped through the door. She hadn’t thought it possible to jam any more patients into the tiny, stifling hot schoolhouse, but apparently they had. She scraped her knee trying to wedge between two cots in the narrow aisle, now almost impassable since they’d added another row. Halfway through the room, she stopped and gripped the out-stretched hand of an elderly man. His eyes were bandaged, his withered face pockmarked with shell fragments. When she kissed his grizzled cheek, he wheezed a barely audible “thank you.”

  At the top of the stairway she encountered the elderly nun carrying an armload of soiled sheets. Without breaking stride, the nun motioned with her head toward the stairs. “There’s a young boy down there who came in an hour ago with a head wound. Find a clean bandage and change the dressing. He’s over in the corner near your friend. You can check on some of the others while you’re down there.”

  Natalia nodded and descended the stairs to the cellar. She made her way carefully through the jam-packed room, smiling at patients who were awake, touching a few hands, patting a few shoulders. In the middle of the room, another nun, younger and harried-looking, knelt next to a man and cut away his blood-soaked trouser leg. The man gripped the sides of his cot, eyes closed, jaw clenched.

  Natalia bent down and took a closer look, then whispered to the young nun, “It’s a bad break, but the bone isn’t exposed. We can probably splint it to make him more comfortable. I’ll be back to help you in a few minutes.”

  Natalia found the boy with the head wound, curled up in the fetal position, sucking his thumb. He appeared to be about seven or eight years old, stick-thin and pale as a ghost. She knelt next to the boy’s cot and put her hand on his forehead. “Are you awake?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded, but didn’t lift his head.

  “I’m here to help you. May I look at your wound?”

  He nodded again, then whimpered, “It hurts.”

  “I’ll be very gentle,” she said. She slid her right hand under his skinny shoulder and gently rolled him onto his back. The boy groaned. His eyes were shut tight.

  Carefully, Natalia unraveled the bloody bandage and examined the wound. It was a jagged laceration that extended from just above his left eyebrow, across his forehead, ending just above the hairline. It wasn’t deep, and the blood had coagulated, but the wound was filled with dust and grit.

  After gathering a bowl of water, a few clean rags and tweezers, Natalia painstakingly extracted the bits of dirt and gravel, and cleaned the boy’s wound. Tears trickled down his cheeks and he gritted his teeth the whole time, but he didn’t cry. She wrapped his forehead with the last clean scrap of cloth she could find, wishing again for antibiotics. She stayed with him for a while, telling a few stories, until he seemed to fall asleep.

  She checked on Berta, but her friend was also asleep. Her face was flushed, her brow furled with pain. Natalia decided to let her rest, and spent the next three hours doing what she could to help the priest and two nuns in what was clearly a futile effort.

  Dozens of people—many of them no older than Rabbit—lay semiconscious on blood-soaked cots, with mangled hands or feet, chest wounds, burns or shrapnel wounds. They groaned and twitched. Sweat dripped from their ravaged, soiled bodies. Natalia knew most of them wouldn’t survive more than a few days without real medical attention.

  Finally, Natalia wiped blood from her hands and sweat from her forehead, and went back to see Berta. She edged her way through the line of cots, carrying a tin cup half full of precious, scarce water.

  Berta’s eyes were open now, and she managed a smile when Natalia knelt down and took her hand. “How do you feel?”

  “Awful,” Berta croaked. “It’s so damn hot . . . I can barely . . . breathe.” Her face glistened with perspiration, and Natalia put a hand on her forehead. The cellar was sweltering. Natalia was so hot herself it was impossible to tell if Berta’s fever had worsened. And even if it had, there was nothing they could do about it.

  Natalia held the cup of water to Berta’s lips. She took a sip and laid her head back on the stained, wafer-thin pillow. “When can I get out of here?” she asked. Her voice was little more than a croaky whisper, her eyes glazed and distant.

  Natalia smiled at her. “As soon as you can put some weight on that leg, I’ll get you out of here. Maybe a day or two.”

  “Yeah, sure. Nice try.” She pointed at Natalia’s face. “What happened to you?”

  Natalia had to think for a second, then remembered how she must look. “Oh, it’s nothing. I bumped into a post.”

  “Looks like someone . . . took a poke . . .” Berta’s eyes closed. “It’s . . . so hot in here . . .”

  Natalia glanced around. The elderly nun was on the other side of the room changing the dressings of a severely burned young girl, who was mercifully unconscious. Natalia cursed under her breath. She had to get back to her unit. But she didn’t want to leave Berta. One patient with an infection wasn’t going to get any special treatment in this makeshift hospital with virtually no staff and no medications. Berta couldn’t walk, and even if she could, where could she take her? Now that they’d abandoned the apartment on Trebacka Street, Natalia and the rest of the commandos in her unit hunkered down wherever they happened to be, like the rest of the AK now trapped in Old Town. As crappy as this place was, at least Berta was off the streets.

  “Do you remember . . . when we first met?” Berta had opened her eyes again.

  “Yes, I doubt I could ever forget it,” Natalia said, remembering the gruesome incident on the train. “You were the strong one that day. I’m not sure if I could have continued on if you hadn’t been there for me.”

  Berta reached over and took her hand with a surprisingly strong grip. “You’ll survive this.”

  Natalia’s eyes clouded up. “So will you, Berta. We’ll survive it together. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Like you said . .
. in a day or two.”

  Twelve

  26 AUGUST

  ADAM KNELT with his elbow resting on the sill of the second-floor window and squinted into the late afternoon sun. His body was heavy with fatigue, and sweat dripped down the back of his neck as he silently cursed the Weaver scope on his Springfield sniper rifle. It was fogged up again. He’d had it specially mounted by an AK gunsmith so he could top-load five cartridges, but the damned thing still fogged up in humid weather.

  He had been at it for three straight days, working with AK commando units that dashed from barricade to barricade, desperately trying to keep the enemy Panzers out of Old Town. In the days following the destruction of the PAST building, the Germans had brought in thousands of reinforcements, including battalions of battle-hardened Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the Ukrainian and Russian conscripts. Stukas bombarded the city with aerial assaults, while Panzer units and infantry battalions hammered one neighborhood after another from dawn to dusk. Artillery fire continued nonstop through the night, bringing the last feeble remnants of civilian life to a grinding halt. The AK still hung on to Old Town, but the noose was tightening.

  Adam wiped the moisture off the scope’s lens with a handkerchief, then peered through it again, adjusting the focus knob. A Panther tank came into view and, a moment later, the tank commander’s head poking up through the open hatch. Adam shifted an inch to the left, bringing the target directly into the center of the crosshairs. He exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger.

  The tank commander’s head exploded as Adam moved the rifle a few degrees farther left and located a second target: an SS officer standing next to the Panther tank. The officer reacted to the gunshot and turned his head toward the tank as Adam smoothly chambered a second round, squeezed the trigger and shot him in the neck.

  He found two additional targets. One went down cleanly with a shot to the forehead. The other doubled over, howling, his hands clawing at the entry hole in his stomach. Adam got to his feet and bolted from the room, taking the stairs two at a time.

  He knew the drill well. They had been repeating it for days. The AK was desperately short of PIAT anti-tank guns, so when the Panzer units approached, the commandos waited behind the barricades while Adam picked off as many of the tank crew as he could. Then the commandos charged forward with rifles and Molotov cocktails, attempting to capture or disable the tank. But if they didn’t make it before the tank gunner rotated the turret and sighted in, the building Adam was about to vacate would be reduced to a pile of rubble.

  He emerged from the building and sprinted down Podwale Street, away from the barricade. He continued for another fifty meters, then ducked into a partially demolished building at the intersection with Senatorska Street. The front façade had been blown away in an aerial bombardment two days earlier, and a broken water main had flooded the cellar, drowning more than a dozen people who had taken refuge down there. There hadn’t been time to recover the bodies, and Adam held his breath against the stench as he carefully negotiated the rickety staircase.

  He’d selected the building because what was left of the first floor gave him a clear view down Senatorska where a second group of AK commandos had encountered an older Panzer II tank. Adam got into position, reloaded the Springfield and sighted in on his targets. Thirty seconds later he descended the stairs and exited the building.

  The Panzer II was captured by the AK, but the Panther tank was not. As Adam looked back down Podwale Street, he saw the massive machine bash through the barricade. AK commandos scattered to get out of the way, but the tank’s machine guns mowed them down. The Panther tank crunched over the debris, then stopped in the middle of the street.

  Adam dropped to one knee and raised his rifle, but the tank hatch was closed with no targets in sight. One of the badly wounded commandos, his jacket and trouser legs dripping with blood, managed to light a Molotov cocktail and hurl it before collapsing. The bottle hit the side of the tank, and it burst into flames with no effect.

  For a moment the tank just sat there. Then the turret rotated toward a schoolhouse with boarded up windows and a bright red cross painted on the door.

  A second later Adam was knocked flat as a thunderous blast roared from the Panther’s 75mm cannon. In a deafening concussion, the first and second stories of the school building collapsed, belching a cloud of dust fifty meters in all directions. Frantic commandos raced toward the demolished building as the lethal machine turned away and rumbled back across the smashed barricade, its brief mission of retribution complete.

  It was well after dark by the time Adam and a dozen other grim commandos finally gave up digging through the ruins of the collapsed school building. They’d recovered twenty-one bodies, and carried them onto the grassy area between the street and the old city wall, but many more lay buried deep beneath the rubble.

  A priest who’d been helping them slumped to the ground, his thick, black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and dust. “I just stepped out to try and locate some bandages,” he croaked, “and when I returned the building was . . .” He looked up at Adam, tears streaming down his dirt-caked face. “There were forty-three patients in there. Nineteen were just children!” Adam extended his hand to help him to his feet, but the priest waved him off, his head drooping to his chest.

  Adam stood there for a moment. In the brief flashes of light from artillery bursts he could make out a beaded rosary in the priest’s hands. When he was a young boy in Krakow his aunt and uncle had taken him to church regularly while his father was off fighting with the legions. His aunt taught him to pray the rosary, which he did to please her. He remembered questioning, in those long ago days, whether it did any good. Now he was certain that it didn’t.

  Adam wandered away and plodded along Podwale Street, dead tired, every bone in his body aching. He finally stopped and slumped down on the steps of a three-story building with black shutters and a red tile roof that was still mostly intact except for a ragged hole about a meter in diameter near the chimney. He thought wearily that an unexploded shell was probably lying somewhere inside the house.

  The enemy Panzers and infantry units had pulled back for the night, and—except for scattered artillery fire—the area was quiet, at least for the moment. He pulled his last cigarette from the soggy, crumpled pack and lit it, staring at the purple sky, illuminated on and off by exploding shells like flashbulbs from a thousand cameras. A haze hung over the area, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and ammonia. How much longer? he wondered.

  He had killed thirteen German soldiers today, at least eight of them officers as far as he could tell. How many did that make in all since he was dropped into Poland by parachute on a bitterly cold night in the winter of 1940? He’d kept track at first, but lost count somewhere over a hundred. Maybe it was two hundred by now, all of them easily justified in his law student’s mind as a casus belli—justification for acts of war—a principle upheld for centuries in most civilized societies.

  He took a long drag on the cigarette thinking of the insanity of civilized societies clinging to some legal principle as an argument for the slaughter of millions of people. And it was equally insane, he knew, to have devoted years of his life to the study of law, the guiding principles of humanity in an enlightened world—then to become an assassin. The more he thought about it, sitting on the steps of a house with a hole in the roof, in a city about to be destroyed by a ruthless enemy, he decided that justification was irrelevant. Simple revenge might be more to the point.

  At least Colonel Whitehall would be pleased, he supposed. He imagined the portly, disheveled officer of the SOE, Britain’s covert organization for sabotage behind enemy lines, smiling that complacent smile of his. Adam had been one of Whitehall’s first recruits. At the time he had been desperate to exact revenge on those who had taken everything from him: his home, the only family he ever knew, the hard-won freedom of his birth country. And Whitehall had been more than pleased to provide him with the training and means to ca
rry out that revenge.

  Adam thought about Natalia—the Conductor, as Rabbit had called her—and the question she’d asked still nagged at the back of his mind. You came back . . . what on earth for? It was a simple question from a very straightforward woman. Yet it was a question that resurrected distant memories of another world, in what now seemed like a lifetime ago. Another world when he had reunited with his Polish family: the aunt who’d cared for him and raised him as a child, the uncle who’d been a second father to him, mentored him and taught him the most important values in life. They were memories he’d buried a long time ago, the day when that world was abruptly shattered.

  Adam was jerked back to the moment when he heard someone shouting. It was a woman’s voice, shrill, panicky—and familiar. He got to his feet, slung the rifle over his shoulder and jogged back down Podwale, following the voice toward the demolished schoolhouse.

  Natalia stood on top of the rubble pile shouting at two AK commandos. The commandos slowly backed away, shaking their heads. “Get back here and help me, Goddamn it!” she shrieked. “We’ve got to find her!”

  Adam hesitated for a moment then tossed the cigarette on the ground, climbed over the rubble and touched her shoulder. “Natalia—”

  She spun around like she’d received an electrical shock. “Wolf?” She took a step back and looked around, thrusting her hands in the air. “What the hell happened?”

  “A tank attack, about three hours ago. We—”

  “It was a hospital!”

  “I know. I was—”

  “A hospital . . . with a big red cross painted on the door!”

  “I know, I—”

  “They’re monsters! Goddamn them to hell! They’re nothing but . . .” She ripped off her cap and slapped it hard against the side of her leg, stomping around in a tight circle on top of the debris pile. “We left her here so she’d be safe! We left her and . . . now this.” She stopped and clenched her fists.