Butler was surprised. But yes. Yes in fact, he had seen them. Figures with no particular features, yet as insistently present as the people in a dream.
So: there you are. It's no great difficulty to grab a tongue. The trick is picking the right one. You want a tongue with something to flap about.
Advancing at a crouch through the German-held woods, Seryoshka pulled the cover off his sniper rifle. If such a thing could be an object of beauty, then this Czech-made Moisan Nagant with its big-eyed scope, its oiled ashwood stock and burnished barrel was beautiful. Gently he loosened the sling and looped it around his neck. He unclasped the bayonet and handed this, hilt first, to Butler. One edge of its blade was a row of shiny teeth.
The Chechen moved silently into the darkness. Lyubov followed, not so silently. Butler's limbs began to tremble and his breath took on a rattling sound; he prayed it wasn't as loud as it seemed to be. A minute passed, and another. He lost all sense of direction; stars glimmered through the leafless canopy. While Butler was looking up, one of his feet got tangled in something, a vine maybe. He bent to work it loose. A muffled sound came from not far away, as though someone were trying to speak. This was followed a few moments later by a soft thump and some crunching of undergrowth. Then it was quiet.
Breaking free, his heart pounding, Butler moved to where he thought the sound had come from. He found his three companions kneeling around something. He didn't want to look. No, he needed to—it was, as Seryoshka had said, material. The man lying in a gray uniform jacket, bulked out with layers beneath, was obviously dead. The Chechen wiped his knife clean on the man's sleeve.
“The CP is over there,” he whispered. “Maybe three, four hundred meters. That's what he said.”
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” said Lyubov. There was a look of childish amazement in his dark little eyes.
“It's a little late to ask now.” The Chechen shrugged. “Anyway, he was trying to call out. I didn't have any choice.”
What followed seemed endless. They crept from one tree to the next, kept still for a while, moved again. Twice, they came upon sentry posts. Each time they retraced their steps, moved sideways for a distance, then forward again in a new direction, orienting themselves by compass. Butler got the feeling the night was slipping away from them, any minute the sun would start to rise. At last they came in sight of their goal: a dugout with a slanting roof, camouflaged with leaves and netting, whose lower purlin ran flush with the forest floor. There was light enough, by a waning moon, to make out a thin stream of smoke curling from a pipe bored through the timbers.
There was no need for talking; this was what they had planned for, everyone's role was already assigned. Butler's was to stay put and keep watch. Lyubov likewise, a distance away. The two of them, at this crucial stage, were extra bodies; the delicate work was best left to experts. Seryoshka pressed his rifle into Butler's hands, trading it for the bayonet. Then he was gone, one shadow among many. Butler peered around. Keep your eyes moving and your body still.
Experimentally, he raised the rifle to his shoulders, admiring the way its mass was balanced. He swept it in an arc, sighting through the scope. At high magnification, the woods looked brighter. He caught a glimpse, he thought, of Lyubov, half hidden behind a tree.
No. Not Lyubov. The uniform was wrong. The figure, approaching Butler at an oblique angle, seemed very close, but that was an illusion, an artifact of sniper's optics. He lowered the weapon and now could see both men, Lyubov and the other one. Lyubov was looking in the wrong direction; the enemy was coming up behind him.
Butler felt something he took for panic. Only it couldn't be panic because at its center was an unnatural calm. What it was, he realized, was simple confusion.
This very situation had been covered in their plans. Butler knew exactly what was expected of him: he must do nothing—and that was an order— except stay where he was and keep quiet. If Lyubov were sniffed out, that was for Lyubov alone to deal with. Let him kill the enemy soldier, if he could, or be killed himself. Even let the enemy soldier sound an alarm. The vital thing was, let the problem stay where it was; do not spread it any further, do not involve other members of the team, do not get involved yourself. We will each have to manage as best we can, if anything goes wrong—our only advantage, and it is little enough, will be the enemy's uncertainty. The plans were explicit; there was no questioning their terrible logic.
But now, confronted by the reality of the thing, Butler wasn't sure he could do what he needed to. It had never been his way to merely watch— perhaps that was why he'd never soared to great heights as a journalist. He pressed his eye to the scope again. With his thumb he found the safety.
Through the lens, he watched the sentry freeze—he must have sighted Lyubov—and then slowly reach for his Mauser. But the rifle was strapped to his back, the sentry had to grope for it, there was a dry sound of leather rubbing against cloth. Lyubov turned. The other man had a grip on his rifle now and was drawing the bolt. A queer noise came from Lyubov's throat, like a scream he almost managed to choke off. The enemy took aim but Lyubov pulled the trigger first—a single shot from the pistol Butler hadn't noticed in his hand. The blast was like thunder in the sleeping forest.
If every second that followed was the frame of a motion picture, then it seemed to Butler he was moving in slow motion through a full-length Hollywood epic. In some frames there were shouts, flashing lights, rapid-fire concussions. In others, the screen filled with a close-up of one of his comrades. There wasn't much dialogue, mostly curses and orders bellowed in Russian, German, Bulgarian or some mongrel soldier's argot. One memorable sequence featured Seryoshka charging like a madman across the mined valley floor with a bundle slung over his shoulder like a sack of laundry, the scene lit by flare bursts overhead and machine-gun tracer rounds. Most of it, though, was a chaotic montage, a Dadaist plunge into the fractured madness of modern war, like Picasso's Guernica reworked as an avant-garde horror show.
It seemed no more realistic, no more believable, when the scene changed to the politruk's yurt, lit now in a blue-gray wash that stood for dawn. Lyubov lay on a cot, bleeding from a gunshot in the upper thigh: the wound of Anfortas, lord of the Waste Land. Seryoshka sat at the table smoking papirosi that were said to come from the ops chief ‘s personal stock. The Chechen was unaccounted for. Dead, if he's fortunate.
Butler was scarcely aware of his own position in the yurt, nor of how long he'd been there. His thoughts were disordered. It was worse than seeing phantoms. For six years now he had been writing the story of this war, starting with the dress rehearsal in Spain. Suddenly he was part of the story himself, a character. From here, every word he'd written seemed untrue. Not a grand Russian lie, like War and Peace. Just off the mark, somehow. Too dry, too weak. Too rational.
Propped beside the stove, a glass of vodka in his trembling hand, sat a young blond man in a Waffen-SS uniform, his collar insignia identifying him as an Untersturmführer. His name tag read Knappe. But for everyone else—Seryoshka, the politruk, Lyubov, or the soft-spoken intelligence officer who sat very close to the prisoner, from time to time refilling his glass—this man's name and rank, all the details of his individual identity, were irrelevant.
To them, this was only a tongue. And it was talking.
DISPUTED TERRITORY
MID-NOVEMBER 1944
The Varian Fry Brigade—its numbers reduced, provisions exhausted, maps destroyed, plans out the window, leadership divided and training irrelevant—nonetheless crossed from Czechoslovakia into Poland in better shape than when it had touched down a week and a half before.
Item. Eddie's Polish had sharpened. He practiced in sporadic, occasionally useful chats with the partisan Petra. What are those small buildings, in that field? That is a peasant's hut with a chicken coop. Say this: Peasant's hut. Chicken coop. We will go there now and ask for food. Say this: Give us eggs, please, or we will shoot you.
Item. Tamara had grown proficient with her wea
pon, a Simonov automatic rifle cribbed from a dead partisan. Once, on the single-fire setting, she shot a rabbit. Then she wept over it.
Item. Martina had gone from shock at Timo's act of unprovoked brutality to a state of chronic, low-level anger. It was progress.
Item. Bloom had recused himself from quarrels over the Brigade's next course of action and settled down to the business of soldiering. Which narrowed the contest to Grabsteen versus Martina.
Item. There were days when Stu would keep his mouth shut for several hours at a stretch.
On the debit side, however: if Martina didn't get a bath soon, she was going to die of bodily self-loathing.
Just across the border, an obstacle—an elevated railbed. The line had been cut through a pine forest, the cleared space perhaps seventy meters wide, the embankment five or six meters above the surrounding ground level.
Getting across was no problem, except that while clambering up one side and down the other you would be clearly visible, even by starlight.
The Germans patrol these tracks constantly, Petra warned. They've built little lean-tos, like hunters' blinds, just inside the tree line, where they have wide, unbroken fields of fire. You never know you're being watched until the shooting starts. “A German machine gun,” she said, her voice that of a tour guide repeating a line that never fails to interest schoolchildren, “makes a sound like ripping canvas.”
So they paused there for a while, on a hill with a partly obstructed view of the railbed, thinking things over.
“We're down to two cans of Spam,” Stu announced. “Shall we have ourselves a little feast? Or save it for the other side?”
“If you wait,” said Timo, “you might not have to split it so many ways.”
Martina stood beside Petra, long past caring about things like dinner. Furtively, she glanced at Harvey Grabsteen, who stood not far away staring down the shadowed hill toward the glimmer of silver iron amid yellow grass. As though sensing her attention, he turned to catch Martina's eye. Here it comes, she thought.
“That's one of them,” he said. “Right down there.”
When she didn't get it, he spelled it out: “A feeder track. They run north and south over the mountains, between the big east–west trunk lines. These are the tracks they bring the Jews on, from Hungary, Macedonia— the few places they haven't cleared out. The junction is up around Ostrava, and from there the main line runs east all the way to Lwów. Birkenau has a feeder of its own, like this one.”
For some reason, she looked down at her feet—the forest litter, the very ground I'm standing on. It was hard to believe she was here, so close, so infinitely powerless. “We wanted to bomb them,” she said. “The Secretary himself signed the memo—the planes could've made it here from Trieste. It got as far as Marshall's office. Then McCloy squashed it.”
“I heard.” Grabsteen's voice was soft, by his standards; his stare lacked its usual antagonism. “What else could you have done? At least you tried.”
“Something, maybe. Talked to Eleanor. Written to the papers.”
“Believe me, there's been no shortage of people writing to the papers. Rabbi Silver has seen to that.”
“You know Rabbi Silver?”
His expression soured. Back to the old Grabsteen. “We've crossed swords with the AJC on many occasions. A bunch of timid old aunts, scared to death of offending anybody. They might as well be Episcopalian.”
“I don't know—I've known some pretty offensive Episcopalians. Did you ever go to one of their weddings? Twenty minutes from the Book of Common Prayer followed by eight hours of heavy drinking. Then the cuff links come off.”
Grabsteen laughed. He seemed to surprise himself by doing so. Martina guessed he hadn't laughed for a while, no more than she had.
“So what now, Miss Panich?” he asked, in a tone that seemed almost a self-parody, ostentatiously goading her. “What do you recommend at this juncture?”
“I'd say the usual. Yell at each other for a while, then shoot ourselves in the foot. Then, a break for processed meat.”
Anyhow, it was obvious enough. They would wait for dark, then go over the tracks. The waning moon wouldn't rise until after midnight. Wisps of cloud were moving swiftly off the Northern European plain. Good Blitzkrieg country, up there: a thousand kilometers of open, sandy ground for panzers to race across. Down here, south of Kraców, the land was better suited to mules, wood grouse, ravens prowling for carcasses, the rarely spotted but persistently rumored lynx. And partisans, of course, and SS Jäger, and other creatures of the night.
It was eerie, stepping out of the black woods into dimensionless half-light. The embankment was very near yet crossing the narrow strip of cleared ground seemed to take forever. It felt like a dream of swimming, the night air as dense as water, as dangerous to fill your lungs with. The slope was unexpectedly steep—out of everything, you hadn't expected that to be a problem. Martina repeatedly lost her footing, gravel came loose and fell with a sound like rain, somebody was saying Shh, shh— annoying, and ineffective—then a rough hand grabbed her by the sleeve, hoisting her up.
She crouched for a few moments at the top, the shining rail an arm's length away, a faint smell of pine tar, staring at Timo's dark eyes. Not into them; they were hard and reflective, obsidian. She would not forgive him. Yet in another part of her mind, a separate filing tray, lay the knowledge that a man like this, who could kill without thinking, pull a trigger as easily as scratch his nose, was useful to have along.
My God, she thought. Look where I am, look what I'm doing.
To prove it to herself, she placed a hand on the cold iron. She expected to feel something like an electric shock—an instant of contact with all the souls that had passed over this spot on their coal-fired passage into hell.
There was nothing. Emptiness, the night, whispers of her comrades, the voice going Shh, shh.
Nothing: a void. Something you fall into. That was the worst thing of all.
Down the opposite slope, west of the tracks now. A different territory, from the feel of it, the ground marshy where it wasn't frozen. They waited inside the tree line for the moon to rise behind them.
Not far into the woods they heard rustling sounds, first in one direction, then another. There was no time even to be frightened. They were already surrounded; they had walked into a trap.
Martina grabbed at her tommy gun, expecting to be shot. But no shots came. Only footsteps, and then faces—swarthy, shadowed by hat brims, wrapped in scarves, too many to count. So close you could hear them breathing. The gun breeches were tiny black holes in your peripheral vision.
One of the dark figures stepped forward. He removed his hat so they could look at him. Fearless, a narrow face with dark hair thrust sideways off the brow. He spoke loudly in Polish, the words terse and formal-sounding. Then he stopped and peered at them, his eyes moving from face to face—trying, Martina guessed, to pick out the leader. Good luck, she thought.
From behind her Eddie murmured, “He says we're trespassing. He says this place is controlled by the AK, whatever that is.”
“Armija Krajowa,” said Petra.
Martina racked her memory. All these Polish factions—London Poles, Lublin Poles, the Committee of Polish National Liberation, she'd read all about them, briefing papers by the dozen, but the names were a blur of strangely placed consonants.
“English?” said the narrow-faced man. His turn to be surprised now. Something about Martina attracted his notice; he addressed her in a heavily accented voice. “By authority of General Bór, I order you to identify yourselves and to state your reason for coming here.”
Armija Krajowa—she had it now. Largest of the non-Communist resistance groups. Ties to the British. Big noise in Warsaw. Probably friendly. “Tell him we're the good guys,” she said to Eddie. “Tell him we're Americans.”
“American?” The man stared at her. “This is a lie. No Americans are here. Also, you do not look like Americans. You look like Zhidy. Like the ZOB, o
nly more…more flesh on you. The Russians must be feeding you good.” He turned to a man standing nearby and said something in Polish.
Eddie translated: “He thought we were all dead.”
“Not quite,” said Martina. “Not yet.”
Apparently a decision was required, but the man's authority, conferred by General Bór, was not so great as to enable him to make it. Martina could empathize.
Please, he said, would the Varianoviks follow in this direction? (For some reason, learning the Brigade's name gave him a certain satisfaction.) Also please, to keep their hands off the weapons, otherwise there will be unhappiness.
Not even Harvey Grabsteen wanted to argue. No more unhappiness, not just now. Martina was tired but traipsed along in reasonably good spirits. She doubted anything really bad was going to happen. Whatever the Armija Krajowa might be, it was not the SS.
They crossed half-frozen swampland where stretches of broken reeds and cattails alternated with stands of river birch. As the moon floated higher it began to pale in the approaching sunrise. At the center of the swamp, the land rose into a stony hillock overgrown with twisted, needled, spiny scrub like a witch's pincushion. If you stepped off the path, a hundred thorns would snag your clothing and hair until you were effectively immobilized. The only way through was a kind of tunnel, low enough to make you crouch, with a machine gun staring back at you from about thirty meters in. Beyond that, the real defenses began.
Martina couldn't make out what kind of fort it was. Certainly the guerrillas hadn't built it; the stonework was too massive, too enduring. It might have stood here for centuries, slowly subsiding into the wetland. Yet it had none of the scale, the towers, the high walls of a traditional fortress.
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