by Tom DeLonge
Another shout, and now the sounds of men running her way. She burrowed a little into the leaf litter, trying to blot out any of her clothing’s bright colors that might give her away. She forced herself to keep very still.
A guard came down the cart path at a full run, his jacket open so she could see how his pistol holster swung at his hip. He was white, thirty something, athletic. He wore an earpiece, and his eyes surveyed the woods as he ran. He was also closer than she’d realized. Before his gaze could fall on her, she turned her face down and held her breath, conscious of how her heart was hammering. Her right leg was twisted. What had been merely awkward was getting painful, but she did not dare adjust her position.
“No,” said the man.
For a split second, she thought he was talking to her, and nearly looked up, but then he added, “I’m going to track round to the third hole and cut east.”
He was talking to a colleague through the wireless mike he wore on his ear.
She tried to remember if she had seen a hole number on the fairway, in the hope that she could figure out which way he was heading, but her memory was blank. Hole one? Wouldn’t it make sense to have the first hole by the house? She thought so, but she knew nothing about golf, so that could be wrong.
“Yes.”
After a long silence, he was running again, and Timika could breathe.
She waited, still forcing herself not to move, counting in silence until she reached fifty before, with agonizing slowness, she looked up. The path was clear.
But coming silently across the dewy grass of the golf course, looking directly at her, was another man, also suited, his right hand pressed to his ear, mouth moving. He had seen her.
18
JERZY
Poland, January 1945
MRS. HABERNICHT DID NOT REFER TO MY PROPOSED sabotage for two whole days, so that I began to think she had forgotten about it. The village was full of the evidence of the Nazi retreat, a chaos of men and machines and ransacked shops. You could hear the vehicle engines running all night, and the normally rigid blackout got a little more relaxed. I don’t know how much of a factor that was, but on the third night, the bombers found us.
The village had been largely spared by the allied air raids, except for a few planes that, for whatever reason, released their bombs on the south side of the mountains, perhaps to lighten their load as the German fighters closed in. It took us a moment to realize what was happening when we heard the drone of the Lancasters overhead, just distinguishable above the noise of hasty loading of trucks and halftracks on the ground. Then the bombs started, producing great roaring flashes that lit the night.
“Will they destroy the mines?” I whispered to Mrs. Habernicht as we crouched in the dusty, damp space under the stairs, which passed for a cellar.
The old woman listened and shook her head.
“Too deep,” she said. “Too many layers of rock. But I don’t think they are trying to hit the underground factory. They probably don’t even know for certain that it’s there.”
“Then what?”
“The railway lines and the bridge,” she said.
And so it proved. There was enough confusion that I could risk a walk into the village proper, just as the sun came up. A few houses had been hit, and a concrete bunker housing an anti-tank gun, but most of the damage was clustered around the railway station. Several warehouses had burned and collapsed, but the biggest problem for the Germans would be the railroad tracks, which had suffered at least two direct hits close to the station. The tracks just stopped on either side of the craters, their rails blackened and twisted. In one place, a hopper wagon had been lifted clean off the rails by the blast and lay in splinters and mangled strips of metal twenty yards away.
Whatever was being hauled from the mine would not be going back to Berlin that way, and if the Nazis repaired the tracks, they would only be bombed again. I remembered the concrete strip where the woods had been cleared, the place where I had seen Ungerleider. I had often thought about the work detail I had seen there, and was sure they had been building a rudimentary airfield. The Luftwaffe might be bringing in fighters, but I had seen very few German planes in the last few months, and Mrs. Habernicht said that according to Mr. Starek, who ran the corner shop and who had friends in Warsaw, the allies could fly wherever they wanted now. That meant that the airstrip—which seemed far longer than anything fighters would need—was for cargo planes. Big ones.
I wondered if the Polish army or the resistance knew about it.
That evening over supper, I told Mrs. Habernicht what I had seen, and she watched me with that shrewd, thoughtful way of hers, so that I fell silent, self-conscious, while I waited for her to speak.
“Two new tanks came to the village two days ago,” she said. “I don’t know where they came from. Maybe they have been hidden away for a long time, waiting to be used. They are not usual tanks with a single big gun on top. These have a kind of box with four guns all firing the same direction. Bigger than machine guns. Anti-aircraft guns.”
She said it conversationally, dipping her bread in her soup.
“People saw them,” she added. “But by morning, they had gone. Mr. Starek says they are no good for shooting at the bombers because they fly too high.”
I thought furiously. Ishmael and I had once been enthusiastic readers about military hardware, in the first weeks of the war. That was a long time ago now, a former life, but I had always paid attention to the equipment I had seen and heard of, and I knew that the British had taken to sending single fighters to patrol over German airfields. They would swoop in and attack aircraft during takeoff and landing, when they were most vulnerable. If the Germans were positioning flakpanzers—which is surely what Mrs. Habernicht had described—then they were looking to protect cargo planes from air attack.
“When will the Polish army be here?” I asked. I seemed to be asking that question every day.
“Soon,” said Mrs. Habernicht, which is what she always said. “And the Russians.”
“It will be too late,” I said. “The mines are full of new weapons. I am sure of it. If the Nazis can move them somewhere else, the war will go on and on. Perhaps it will never end.”
I felt the passion rise in my voice and had to look away. It was the memory of Ishmael. I could not bear to think that all we had gone through was for nothing.
“I will speak to Mr. Starek,” said Mrs. Habernicht.
I stared at her. “What good will that do?” I demanded, angry now.
She said nothing, holding my eyes for a long moment. “Wash your bowl before you get ready for bed,” she said.
And I understood. Starek the shopkeeper worked for the resistance. He knew people.
That night, I was too excited to sleep. I heard the planes as they came in. It was quite different from the allied raid that had been far away until the bombs dropped, when I felt no danger. This night, the sounds of the aircraft engines caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. The planes were big, and close, getting louder and lower in pitch as they descended.
I got up from my bed and dressed hurriedly. I was barely down the stairs before there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Habernicht opened it in her nightgown and shawl, motioning me into the kitchen, and I listened to muffled voices, heard the front door click shut, and then she was back with the shopkeeper from the corner and another man I did not recognize. He carried a Russian-made submachine gun. They all looked at me.
“You want me to lead you to the airfield,” I said.
They looked at each other.
“Can you?” said Mr. Starek.
“This way,” I said.
I HAD ONLY BEEN THERE ONCE. THE NIGHT WAS HEAVILY overcast, so that the darkness in the woods was almost total, but I found my way without undue difficulty. Once we had left the village, the man with the submachine gun made us wait under an oak tree while he went back the way we had come. We spent about ten minutes alone, just me, Mr. Starek and Mrs. Habernicht
, the silence broken only when the shopkeeper remarked that it was starting to rain. Mrs. Habernicht said nothing, but squeezed my shoulder encouragingly. I was not scared. Not yet.
The gunman returned, bringing three others with him, two men and a woman. One had a rifle, the others had pistols, and the two men bore between them a crate with rope handles. They did not speak to me, though the woman—she must have been no more than twenty-two or twenty-three—gave me a long, appraising look, as if she had expected someone older.
“Okay,” said the man with the submachine gun, nodding to me.
I began walking, my feet finding the trails I had paced for days without my having to think about it. We passed the log where I had slept, crossed a shallow stream in which the heavy rain drops were pattering through the leaves above, and eventually climbed a steep escarpment to a fence where the tree canopy opened to the sky. Even in the low light, you could sense the clearing, and as I crawled cautiously up to the lip, just inside the tree line, I felt the soft forest floor grow hard and cluttered with the scree of concrete and stone chippings.
There were lights out there. They were hooded, but you could see them when they moved. Men, walking about, but other things, too. Vehicles. Somewhere among them were those flakpanzers, with four twenty-millimeter cannons that could tear up ground targets better than they could aircraft.
I ducked back into the deep shade of the trees. Two of the resistance men had opened the crate, and one of them was using a hand cranked radio set to send coordinates from a map he was studying with a small hooded flashlight.
“Now what?” said Mr. Starek. We were all speaking in Polish.
“We wait,” said the man with the submachine gun. “Mrs. Habernicht? You should take the boy home.”
“No,” I said. “I’m staying.”
Again, the woman gave me a long look.
“Very well,” he agreed, “but stay out of the way and keep down.”
I peered into the crate. The contents were wrapped in oilcloth, but sitting on the top was a black, heavy-looking revolver.
“Don’t even think about it,” said the younger woman.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said.
“You were about to.”
“I wasn’t!” I protested.
“You want the gun.”
“So? Why shouldn’t I?”
“You are a child,” she said dismissively, fishing a cigarette from the pack in her coat pocket.
“I’m not,” I said, biting down on the fury in my voice so that for a second she stared, then shrugged.
“You need to learn how to use a gun before you get to carry one,” she remarked, striking a match and cupping its flame against the rain with her fingers as she lit the cigarette. “And you need to earn the right to use it.”
There was a momentary pause.
“That he has,” said Mrs. Habernicht. The younger woman gave her a long, level look through the smoke of her cigarette, then shrugged again.
“No skin off my nose,” she said, reaching into the crate. “You don’t shoot until I tell you. Got it?”
I nodded.
“What?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I won’t shoot until you tell me to.”
She hefted the pistol at me and I took it, awed and dismayed by how heavy it was, though I tried not to show it.
“Six shots,” she said. “Make them count.”
I nodded, and she managed a bleak grin.
“What’s your name, little soldier?”
I bridled at her condescension, but said “Jerzy.”
“I am Maxine,” she said. “This is Pierre, Franco, and Roberto.” The last was the submachine gunner, who seemed to be in charge. The others all nodded at me. The names were all fake, of course, so no one minded that she had told them. These people were all Poles. “Maxine” had a Warsaw accent, but I thought “Roberto” sounded more local.
I just nodded and turned away, not looking at the gun, which felt like something strange and magical at my side. It terrified me.
“Roberto” had been peering over the rise, watching the comings and goings at the airstrip. I turned to look at him, just as the blackness behind him shifted suddenly. From where I was, I could see stanchions and tree trunks, pale and hard against the blackness of the night. Floodlights had been turned on.
Everyone but Mrs. Habernicht moved cautiously up the rise and gazed out toward the airstrip.
The lights were dazzling, lighting only a portion of the concrete runway. The rest was marked with green lanterns, arrowing into the darkness, straight and precise. The end to our right, where the lights were hard and bluish, showed clusters of trucks, and people, and equipment. Beyond them, one behind the other, their wings so vast that they almost reached the tree line on either side of the runway, were three of the largest aircraft I had ever seen.
They were vast, boxy planes with wings mounted high atop the fuselage, with six propeller engines, three on each side, which, as I watched, had just begun to turn with a distinctive, rising howl. Their fuselages ran low to the ground, and their front ends were open like the jaws of a hippo. Some kind of truck drove right inside, through the nose of one of the planes, and was swallowed.
“What are they?” I gasped.
“Messerschmitt 323 Gigants,” said Maxine. “They are in short supply. Whatever came out of those mines must be important to the Nazis.”
“And they are loaded to go,” said the man she had called Franco, who spoke Polish but didn’t sound Polish at all. “They are closing their loading ramps. They’re not going to leave the runway lit up like a Christmas tree for long. Not with the allies this close. We need to move—now.”
“We are supposed to wait for armed support,” said Roberto, not happy about it. “They should be here by now.”
“Well they aren’t,” said Franco. “And those planes are ready to go.”
“And what are we supposed to do to stop them?” demanded Maxine. “There are six of us!”
“Seven,” I said.
They ignored me. Suddenly, we heard the roar of a vehicle coming our way along the runway. It was one of the flakpanzers, essentially a tank with a pulpit-like box on the top, bristling with anti-aircraft cannon.
“Wirbelwind,” muttered Roberto as it rumbled by and took up a position in the darkness at the end of the runway. In English, this would be “Whirlwind.”
“The other will be near where the planes are,” said Pierre. “Get caught between them and they’ll cut us to pieces before we fire a shot.”
Roberto seemed to think for a second, then, with an air of decision, flung back a tarp covering the contents of the crate. Beneath it were three metal tubes with bulbous tips, like sink plungers: panzerfaust. Hand-held anti-tank weapons.
“Where did you get those?” I asked.
“One of our cells hit a retreating convoy three nights ago,” said Roberto, lifting one out and handing it to Franco. “Range is about sixty yards. The safety is here. Aim and squeeze here to fire. One shot only. Our priority is the Messerchmitts. We wait as long as we can for the Polish army. I don’t want to lose people now.”
But the army didn’t come. We waited, but the only activity came from the Germans as they finished loading and readying the aircraft. For ten long minutes, we said nothing. Roberto checked his watch six times. Pierre monitored the radio, but no one called. I found myself torn between the desire to do something and the dread of the attempt. Apart from the flakpanzers, there was an armored car, a half-track, and a detachment of about twenty guards armed with rifles and submachine guns. We couldn’t possibly hope to take them on. I began to dread the arrival of the Polish forces, which might force our hand, and I couldn’t help thinking that with only enough firepower to destroy the planes and not the flakpanzers, we couldn’t hope to survive the attack.
After about twenty minutes, the runway was cleared, and a man with colored flashlights motioned the lead aircraft into position. They were abou
t to depart, and there was still no sign of the Polish army. I gave Roberto a sidelong look. He was biting his lip and fiddling with the safety catch on one of the panzerfausts. And then, as the first aircraft began lumbering forward like some great, fat goose laboring to get up enough momentum to launch itself into the air, he handed his submachine gun to Maxine, moved to the lip of the runway, and took aim.
The plane was still idling, though it would be a matter of seconds before it began its acceleration. When it passed us, Roberto would fire, and all manner of hell would let loose. I felt a sudden and violent urge to urinate, to vomit, to run, and the last of these I gave in to.
I moved down the slope and into the woods, ignoring Maxine when she called after me. I ran, but not back toward the village. I ran up through the woods flanking the airstrip, clutching the heavy pistol, and feeling the sweat from my brow mix with the rain running down my face. I didn’t know this part of the forest as well as I knew the trail and had to be careful, but when I heard the pitch of the aircraft engine climb, I knew I didn’t have much time.
I emerged a few hundred yards down the runway, at the point where the slick concrete became gravel, then uneven grass and bracken. I looked down the concrete strip towards the lights where the hulking plane was rocking forward like it was towing something immense. Between me and the plane was the silent bulk of the flakpanzer.
There would be four men inside, but only the one in the AA turret would be likely to hear me in the dark. I stared at the tank, not sure what I hoped to achieve, and I thought I heard a snatch of conversation from inside. For a moment, I tried to hear above the sound of the airplane’s engines. It was all so strange, standing there in the night, a revolver in my hand, and the might of the Nazi army only feet away, oblivious. And then the plane picked up speed, and someone emerged from the darkness of the forest, shooting something squat from the crook of his arm.