Beyond the Call

by Lee Trimble

  This looked bad; Józef had visions of the Brygidki prison, and of himself lying dead in some backstreet.

  The officer ordered him to open the door. He obeyed instantly, and all four men came into the office. ‘Where is the coat the American officer left here?’ the Russian officer snapped. Józef indicated the parka, still hanging on the chair where he had left it. The officer seized it and searched it, turning out all the pockets, feeling inside the sleeves and the lining, under the fur collar.

  Nothing. The officer directed a short burst of angry Russian at the civilian informer, who shrugged and muttered something about having seen what he had seen and come as quickly as he could. No, he didn’t know where the American had gone. He only had one pair of legs.

  Throwing down the coat, the officer turned to the terrified Józef and uttered the words every Pole most dreaded to hear: ‘You are coming with us.’

  THE WORD SPREAD from farm to farm, from village to remote homestead – wherever the Frenchwomen had found refuge, the news came. Deliverance was at hand.

  In ones and twos, in small groups and large bands, the women gathered their few belongings and, saying farewell to the kind Polish families who had sheltered them, took to the roads in the fading light of dusk. They passed unseen across fields, through isolated copses and along country lanes.

  Arriving first at the woodland rendezvous, Isabelle and her friends watched their countrywomen congregate, chattering excitedly in lowered voices. There were greetings and snatches of song and laughter.

  Would it all be worthwhile? Would the American honor his word? Those few who had met him were confident he would, and others just had faith that their fortunes must change. But they all knew that the American’s word and his honor might not be enough. There was also skill and cunning to reckon up, not to mention luck. The NKVD was a dangerous opponent.

  The women settled down to wait through the long, cold night.

  ROBERT WOKE WITH a sense of dread. I’m crazy, he thought, wondering, not for the first time, what he’d got himself into. How had he ever imagined he could pull off a stunt like this? Four hundred women? Crazy, completely insane.

  He went over the plan again and again in his mind. Was there anything he could have done differently? Countless things, probably, but he couldn’t think of them, other than to tell Isabelle No right at the start. Well, that had been out of the question. Beneath the anxiety, Robert was conscious of a sense of joy at the thought of setting all those women free. The same feeling he had about all his missions, but this was an extra-large slice of it.

  When he looked at it cold, he knew he’d done the best he could in the time available – much like all his activities since coming to this country. If it wasn’t enough – why, he’d told them all along that he was an airman and a soldier, not a spy. He’d said those very words to Colonel Hampton, back at Poltava on the day he arrived, when they sprung their big surprise on him. (Had that really been less than two months ago?)

  Robert went down to the dining room for breakfast. He was determined to resist the urge to go out to the train station. There was no need. He’d set his plan in motion; it was out of his hands now. He absolutely didn’t need to go there, no matter how much his curiosity urged him to.

  He kept this up for about an hour. Then he put on his hat and jacket (regretting the parka he’d sacrificed the day before) and set out on foot for the station. He had to know whether any problems had arisen, or if there was any news of the outcome.

  When he was still making his way along the station avenue, he began to get a sense that something wasn’t right. Drawing closer, he noticed that there seemed to be a few more Russian soldiers in front of the station than was normal. They also looked more alert than usual. Robert was already feeling the sinking weight in his stomach when he walked into the station concourse and saw even more soldiers – there must have been a full platoon of them – guarding the ticket office, the waiting room, the dining hall, and the platform entrances, detaining people and questioning them.

  Before he’d even had a chance to take in the scene, Robert was confronted by a Soviet captain. He reeked of NKVD and seemed to recognize Robert on sight.

  ‘You are Captain Robert Trimble, of the American Eastern Command from Poltava?’ he said in English.

  Fighting down the sick sensation, Robert acknowledged that he was and produced his passport. While the Russian studied it, Robert glanced at the ticket office; there was a different face behind the glass, no sign of Józef. Gathering up his indignation, Robert demanded to know the meaning of this inconvenience. ‘I am an authorized representative of the United States Military Mission and Eastern Command. You have no right to—’

  ‘I have every right,’ the Russian captain interrupted, ‘to detain and question foreign persons who are suspected of giving aid to possible anti-Soviet spies in the territories governed by the forces of the Soviet Union. I have evidence that you are assisting four hundred such persons to leave Poland, without submitting them to the relevant authorities for screening.’

  Now Robert knew for certain that they had got to Józef. This possibility had been discussed, and they had agreed that Józef should not attempt to resist interrogation. He should admit to the number of tickets and the arrangements for payment, but claim ignorance of anything else. Robert could only pray that the Russians hadn’t taken the interrogation further, because the thought of Józef resisting torture was as bad as the thought of him spilling the whole plan.

  The captain had no power to arrest Robert, but he detained him at the station while his men conducted their searches. The one thing that gave Robert hope was the fact that they seemed to expect the passengers to arrive here. They must have a low opinion of his intelligence. Sometimes it was good to be thought a fool.

  Hour followed hour. Robert heard the familiar railroad sounds echoing through the halls – arrivals, departures, freight cars being shunted in the huge marshaling yard next to the station. It was impossible to tell which of them was the incoming train from Przemyśl, bound for Odessa. He knew the Soviet captain had men up on the platforms, detaining and boarding every train in the hope of finding illicit passengers in it. If the Russian was smart, he’d detain every train for the next 24 hours, or send them all out filled with NKVD guards.

  Robert looked at his watch, and wondered how Isabelle was.

  FREEDOM HELD ITS breath …

  Outside the city, once it had shaken itself clear of the suburbs, the main rail line cut across the vast, gently rolling farmlands and flat marshes, taking a great sweep eastward before turning south-east toward the Ukraine and Odessa. About ten miles out from Lwów, it passed through a mile-long stretch of woodland. Shallow banks of scrub grass and bushes rose on either side of the track, and met a dense tree line. Hidden among the pines on the slope above the tracks, shivering in the bitter cold, was Isabelle.

  She and her friends had been hiding, keeping their anxious vigil, all through the freezing night, waiting for deliverance or disaster. Isabelle hadn’t conceived the plan, but she shared the weight of responsibility. She had believed she could trust Robert and had led her country-women to believe they could too. If the rendezvous failed, or if it led to incarceration in a Soviet camp for all of them, she would bear part of the blame.

  Morning had come and worn away; midday had passed, and yet there was no sign of the train. If it didn’t come, or if it was filled with Russians, or if any one of a hundred mishaps occurred, all the women could look forward to was more imprisonment, more suffering, quite possibly death. Isabelle, her heart sinking, dug into the dwindling reserves of hope that had kept her going through the past two years. The train had to come; it must.

  Isabelle believed in Robert. He was a good man; perhaps even a hero. But in this world, there were limits to what good men could do.

  Isabelle’s faith was wavering, hope slipping from her fingers, when she heard the faint whistle in the distance. She tensed. There was no mistaking it: the sound of an appro
aching train.

  Would it be the right one; would it be expecting the signal? Would there be agents of the NKVD on board? Those creatures were everywhere. This moment would show whether her American was a hero after all. Isabelle’s heart beat faster. When she saw the steam above the trees beyond the distant bend in the track, she rose from her hiding place and ran down the slope. Slipping on the ice, stumbling over the stones, she clambered onto the rail bed and stood up in the center of the tracks. She raised the sign she had made: a sheet of board bearing a single hopeful word scratched in charcoal: ‘France.’

  The locomotive thundered toward her, shaking the ground under her feet. Holding her sign in the air, Isabelle waited for freedom … or death.

  In the cab, the engineer peered ahead through the rushing smoke and steam. Suddenly he spotted the tiny figure; he swore and yelled a warning to the fireman. The brakes slammed on, the wheels locked, shrieking on the rails, scrubbing off speed as the train bore down on the woman. Isabelle closed her eyes and prayed. The locomotive slid and shuddered, throwing forward a huge billow of steam that embraced her, blanking her from sight.

  As the train came to a halt, the engineer, fearing the worst, jumped down from the cab and ran through the fog to the front of the engine. As he got there, the steam cleared. There was the young woman. She was still standing, her face pale, close enough to reach out and touch the engine in front of her.

  They stared at each other.

  The engineer came to his senses first, and shouted at her in Polish: ‘Well, come on, woman!’ he said. ‘Don’t just stand there – we’re late!’ Whipping off his cap, he waved it in the air. Isabelle snapped out of her stupor. At that moment, cheers broke out from every direction: dozens upon dozens of women emerged from their hiding places among the trees and came hurrying down the slope toward the train. With a cry of ‘Allons! Allons en France!’ Isabelle flung her sign aside and joined the other women swarming along the trackside and clambering in through the car doors.

  The American had proven himself. They were on their way to freedom.

  THE SOVIET CAPTAIN glared at Robert as he walked away. He had no further excuse to detain him. When five hours had come and gone, it was obvious that nobody was coming to board a train, let alone four hundred people. ‘Maybe they saw you and your men and changed their minds,’ Robert suggested. The captain knew he’d missed something, but there was nothing he could do. He might even have been wondering if this whole charade was an elaborate bluff to distract the NKVD from something more important going on elsewhere.

  Robert bade the captain a polite farewell and walked out into the cold sunshine, heading back along the well-worn route toward the city center, tired but triumphant.

  IT WAS TIME to go.

  Robert had packed, and was ready to leave. Tucking the empty money vest into the top of his kit bag, Robert turned and looked at himself in the mirror, straightening his tie.

  He was leaving Lwów. Several days had passed since the departure of Isabelle, and his money and store of rations were about used up. What was more, he was being recalled. It seemed his aggravation of the Soviet authorities in Poland had built to the point where Moscow had taken notice. Whether it was bunking in Polish homes rather than official Soviet barracks, holding off senior officers with a pistol, smuggling POWs, or bamboozling suspicious NKVD captains, sooner or later something had to give.

  But he’d be back, he told himself. There was a mission in this country still unfinished. He figured he’d exfiltrated as many as a thousand people out of Poland since the middle of February, but there were still a lot of strays out there: Americans, British, French, and all the nationalities of the Allied nations. The numbers were getting fewer, but the cases were all the more desperate. Those that remained tended to be the ones least able to care for themselves: the sick and the starved. They were likely to be a major challenge for one man on his own. But there had to be hope. Maybe he’d have to return with another salvage team as cover.

  Isabelle and her compatriots had reached Odessa safely. This morning the news had reached him at the hotel, having found its way back along the chain of railroad workers to Lwów: ‘Liberation of France successful,’ said the cryptic note. He’d known it would be okay; once people were on the train for Odessa, they were likely to be let alone.

  Robert put on his parka, thankful to have it back. He’d been to the station the day before to collect it. Józef had been there, back at work in his usual window, a little paler than he’d been before, but still in one piece. As well as his parka, Robert got from him an account of how the rendezvous had worked out.

  A jeep with a Russian driver had been provided to take Robert out to the airfield. He tossed his kit bag and pack in the back, climbed in, and the jeep sped off across Mickiewicz Square and up the grand avenue. The Soviets for once were falling over themselves to be helpful, so long as it meant he was leaving the country. Or maybe they just wanted to be sure he’d go.

  The C-47 took off, and as it circled around to head east, Robert looked out the window. The city was emerging from its winter shell. The snows were thawing slowly, and out in the countryside streaks of green were showing through the white. A fanciful person might have taken it as a symbol of warmth and hope for the future.

  In fact, the opposite would have been truer. The Russian bear was stirring from its winter lethargy, and was about to tighten its claws around its possessions. The Soviets had decided that the time had come to curtail American movement once and for all. Their patience with American interference in their territory had come to an end. As Robert looked down from the C-47 climbing over Lwów, he had no idea that he was seeing the city for the last time. His mission was over, and he was about to be launched on a course that would thrust him right to the sharp end of US–Soviet relations and push the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of war.

  Chapter 17

  BLOOD SACRIFICE

  POLTAVA, UKRAINE

  THE STORM HAD been gathering slowly, over many weeks and months, but when the lightning fell on Poltava it did so with shocking suddenness. Soviet mistrust of American activities in Poland had swollen to a dangerous level.

  Captain Trimble and Colonel Wilmeth both rode the skirts of the storm into Poltava, landing just before it broke. Both officers had helped to stir up the tempest. Now, as it swept across Eastern Command, both would find themselves maneuvered into positions where they would have to help their comrades weather it. For Captain Trimble the part he would be forced to play would reveal to him the sickening duplicity and dishonor of politics on the grand scale.

  On 28 March, Major General S.K. Kovalev, commanding officer of the Poltava Air Base, on instructions from Moscow, issued an order forbidding all flights by American aircraft.1 All transports belonging to Eastern Command and Air Transport Command were grounded. Salvaged bombers waiting to be ferried back to their units were barred from leaving. More than a dozen rescued combat crews from the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces – more than 180 men – were stranded. The Soviets even refused clearance for the evacuation of six wounded airmen whose injuries were too severe for Eastern Command’s little hospital to treat properly.

  In Poland, ongoing salvage work on downed American aircraft was brought to an immediate halt. The salvage teams were detained by the NKVD, and the planes they had been working on, together with their transports, were sealed.2 From now on, the local Soviets said, all force-landed American aircraft would be regarded as trophies of war and would be repaired and flown out by the Red Army Air Force.

  Tensions escalated.

  On 30 March, General Aleksei I. Antonov, Red Army chief of staff, wrote an indignant letter to General Deane, in which he set forth a list of actions by individual American personnel that had ‘violated the order established by the Command of the Red Army’. Apparently oblivious to the irony, Antonov upbraided the Americans for having breached the code of good behavior that was expected between allies and having perpetrated a ‘rude violation
of the elementary rights of our friendly mutual relationship’.3

  Antonov didn’t mention the unauthorized exfiltration of ex-prisoners of war, because he didn’t know about it; no Soviet officials did (although a few NKVD bird dogs on the ground in Poland clearly suspected that Captain Trimble had been up to something nefarious under cover of aircrew rescue). But Antonov did complain stridently about the behavior of Colonel Wilmeth, who had insisted on staying in Lublin beyond the agreed date of 11 March, for no good reason that the Russians could see (or were willing to recognize).

  But Wilmeth’s misdemeanors were minor compared with the actions of three otherwise obscure individuals. Two were American bomber pilots, and the third was a Russian engineer. Each one had perpetrated deeds which proved in Stalin’s eyes that the Americans were engaging in espionage and giving secret aid to anti-Soviet Polish partisans.4

  The first of these men was Lieutenant Myron King, one of the dozens of B-17 pilots who made forced landings in Poland in early 1945.5 On 3 February, Lieutenant King’s Fortress, Maiden USA, was damaged in a raid on Germany, and he had to make an emergency landing at a Soviet airfield near Warsaw.6 After a two-day stopover, King was ordered by the Russians to fly on to another Soviet base, escorted by a Soviet plane. During the flight, the B-17 crew discovered that a young Polish man had stowed away. They thought little of it, believing him to be an official interpreter working for the Soviets. Unable to pronounce his Polish name, they called him ‘Jack Smith’. He was suffering from the cold, so they allowed him to put on some spare American flight clothes. Jack Smith confided to the Americans that he had an uncle in London, and begged them to let him come with them when they flew back to England.

  When the two planes landed at Szczuczyn airfield, the presence of Jack Smith was quickly discovered by the Soviets. He wasn’t an interpreter. The fact that he was dressed as an American airman caused instant suspicion. It appeared to the Russians that Lieutenant King was attempting to assist a disguised Polish saboteur to escape the country.7 The B-17 was seized and the crew was detained. The Russians kept the Americans in effective custody (although not actually under arrest) for seven weeks, transferring them from Szczuczyn in Poland to Lida in Belarus. Eventually, on the understanding that charges would be brought against Lieutenant King by the American authorities, the crew were cleared to fly on to Poltava, where they arrived on 18 March. It was only when other suspicious incidents occurred that the Russians started believing that King’s actions were all part of a covert American plot.