The Katyn Order

by Douglas W. Jacobson

  Adam licked the edge of the paper, stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it, inhaling deeply. It had been a brutal day. He’d been in the tower of Holy Cross Church covering a squad of AK commandos who were engaged in a furious firefight with a band of SS and Ukrainians at the barricade on Avenue Krakowskie. When two Panther tanks arrived and bashed through the concrete and sheet steel fortifications, the commandos beat a hasty retreat into the church building.

  Adam had held his ground in the tower, firing round after round and dropping more than a dozen Ukrainians. Then one of the tanks stopped, its turret and 88mm cannon slowly arcing upward toward the tower. Adam made it down the stairs just before a deafening blast sheared off the top of the tower, sending down an avalanche of bricks, wooden beams and copper cladding.

  Another troop of AK commandos arrived with two PIAT anti-tank guns, and the battle continued around the church until nightfall when the Panther tanks retreated behind the lines. The AK lost sixteen commandos. But the barricade was rebuilt, reinforcements arrived and Adam staggered away wondering how, and why, he’d survived another day in this seemingly endless war.

  That was more than two hours ago, and he was still wondering what the hell he should do about Natalia. Just through the breach in the wall and around the corner, he knew, she was waiting for him in the ammunition cellar. Perhaps he should go to her. After all, what was the harm? She just wanted a friend. Certainly he could do that, be a friend, couldn’t he?

  No, what am I thinking? Of course he couldn’t be her friend. It wasn’t possible; he wasn’t anyone’s friend. He was an assassin. He’d murdered more men—and women—than he could count. And it didn’t bother him, not for a moment. He’d shut the door on emotions long ago. If she needed a friend, she’d have to look elsewhere.

  So, he should just leave. Go back to his room, if it was still there, and get some sleep. She was a bright girl; she’d figure it out, and that would be the end of it. That’s what he wanted . . . wasn’t it?

  He tossed the cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot. Then he stepped through the breach and headed for the ammunition cellar.

  He was almost there when someone called out, “Captain Wolf!”

  It was Rabbit.

  The boy ran up to him, dripping with sweat, breathing hard. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He bent over, taking deep breaths. “Colonel Stag sent me to find you.”

  Adam knew what that meant. The meeting with the Russians was on. “When do we have to leave?”

  “Right now,” Rabbit said, glancing at his watch. “It took me a while to find you.”

  Adam turned toward Piekarska Street and the archway leading to the ammunition cellar. It would only take a minute to go and tell her. He hesitated, then turned back to Rabbit. “Let’s go; you lead the way.”

  “We’ll take my special route.”

  Adam nodded grimly. He also knew what that meant.

  • • •

  They entered the sewer through a manhole on Avenue Krakowskie just beyond Holy Cross Church. Adam held his breath as he descended the climbing irons and stepped gingerly into the greasy muck. When he finally let out the breath and inhaled, he gagged at the sulfurous stench and his eyes began to water.

  Rabbit met his eyes in the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp and laughed. “You’ll get used to it after a while, Captain. But it’s slippery, so be careful or you’ll fall on your ass.”

  Adam reached out and touched the wet brick walls for support. “How far is it?”

  Rabbit glanced back over his shoulder. “Only about two kilometers, but it may take awhile. Depends on how many detours we have to make. The fuckin’ Krauts keep tossin’ grenades down the manholes.”

  Storm clouds had been moving in, and Adam wondered if they would be crossing the river yet tonight. But he knew there was no point in asking Rabbit. It was the usual drill, and he’d been through it a hundred times during the war. Rabbit would only know about his part in the mission—getting Adam to a pick-up point and handing him off to someone else, whoever that may be, and eventually, if they weren’t captured along the way, Adam would wind up confronting some Russians.

  It was almost three o’clock in the morning when Rabbit slid back a manhole cover, and a wave of fresh air blew into the sewer along with a torrent of rain. The boy motioned for Adam to stay back as he slowly poked his head through the opening. Then he quickly slid the cover all the way back, scrambled up the last three climbing irons and waved for Adam to follow.

  Sprinting hard to keep up with Rabbit as he bent over against the driving rain and sloshed through ankle-deep puddles, it took Adam a moment to get his bearings. By the gloomy light of a street lamp that had somehow escaped being shot out, he saw what looked like some warehouse buildings and judged that they were in an area south of Jerusalem Avenue and east of Nowy Swiat. It was a district that had been AK territory since the beginning of the Rising, but judging by how fast Rabbit was running, Adam guessed that might now be in jeopardy.

  Rabbit ducked into a narrow walkway alongside a building with boarded up windows and a massive hole in the roof, then glanced back at Adam before disappearing around the back corner.

  Adam rounded the corner just as the boy dropped to his hands and knees and slid backward through a cellar window, beckoning for Adam to follow.

  Adam slid through the window and dropped to a soft earthen floor. The cellar room was lit with a kerosene lantern hanging from a wood-beamed ceiling. A half-dozen chairs, and an upholstered sofa that had seen better days, were arranged in a semicircle in front of a table piled high with maps, books, files, and an array of coffee cups and vodka glasses.

  A man sat at the table, barely visible in the dim light and a haze of cigarette smoke. After a moment, he stood up and plodded across the room. He was thick and beefy, about a head taller than Adam with a scruffy growth of beard and an enormous stomach that protruded from beneath his undershirt. With a cigarette hanging precariously from the corner of his mouth, the man looked Adam up and down, then turned to Rabbit and grunted, “You’re late. I expected you last night.”

  Rabbit stood tall and looked the man in the eye. “You were misinformed.”

  “We expected a woman.”

  “What woman would come here?”

  Dripping wet, Adam listened silently to the exchange, which was obviously a series of codes. Finally the pot-bellied man took a last drag on the cigarette, dropped it to the floor and extended his hand to Adam. “Welcome, I am Bravo. You look like you could use a drink.”

  “Yes . . . I’d love a drink,” Adam said, wincing from Bravo’s viselike grip, “and a towel.”

  The burly man laughed heartily, plucked a grimy towel off the back of a chair and tossed it to Adam. Then he produced a bottle of vodka and filled three glasses. He handed one to each of them, held his glass up and grunted, “Long live the AK!”

  Adam and Rabbit repeated the toast, and they all knocked back the potent drink, Rabbit downing his like it was water.

  A few minutes later Rabbit crawled back through the window and headed for the sewer in the pouring rain. Bravo led Adam to a corner of the cellar where there was a wash basin, soap and clean towels. A neatly folded pair of trousers and a clean shirt rested on a stool next to the wash basin. “You can wash up and change here,” Bravo said. “Then I suggest you get some sleep. I’ll be back later with some food.”

  Eager to get out of his foul-smelling clothing, Adam stripped off his shirt. “When do we leave?”

  “After dark, the rendezvous is set for 2100.”

  Fifteen

  29 AUGUST

  BRAVO RETURNED SHORTLY AFTER SUNSET and prepared a meal of boiled potatoes, cabbage and black bread. Adam had slept until early afternoon and had been pacing anxiously around the damp cellar room ever since, wondering where his pot-bellied host had gone and when, or if, he was returning. But when Adam smelled the warm food, his anxiety abruptly disappeared, and he ate heartily without asking how the ma
n had managed it. Black market dealing was always better left unsaid, and besides, it was the most he’d had to eat in a week.

  Shortly after eight o’clock they climbed the stairs to the ground floor and left the building through the rear door. In the darkness, Adam followed the heavyset man across a gravel drive to a dilapidated wooden shed. Bravo pulled open a sheet-metal door, which creaked loudly on rusty hinges, kicked a rock in front of it to keep it open and struck a match.

  Adam was taken aback at the sight of a long, sleek Mercedes Benz. “Jesus Christ!” he blurted. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  Bravo shook out the match. “It was the staff car of some SS officer prick that got a little careless one night. We spotted it parked down by the river. The officer was in the backseat fuckin’ some woman while his driver, dumb shit that he was, sat in the front reading a magazine with a flashlight. A few quick shots, and we had ourselves a nice vehicle, complete with the appropriate uniforms. We didn’t even get a lot of blood on the seats.”

  Adam clapped Bravo on the shoulder, slipped on the SS officer’s coat and hat, and climbed in the backseat.

  Bravo pulled on the driver’s coat, which was a tight fit, squeezed behind the wheel and brought the auto’s powerful engine roaring to life. “You’d better keep down,” he said, as he eased the Mercedes out of the shed. “The first kilometer is the most dangerous, while we’re still in AK territory. Most of the regular commandos in this sector know about the car. But in all the chaos, new ones are coming and going every day, and this thing’s a hell of a target.”

  “Christ, that’s just great,” Adam grumbled as he slumped low in the backseat, contemplating the irony of getting killed by his fellow commandos after managing to survive four years of warfare.

  “Ah, we’ll probably be fine,” Bravo said and stomped on the accelerator, sending a shower of gravel and rocks in all directions as the long, black motorcar bolted forward. “Let’s go find some fuckin’ Russians!”

  Though darkness was on their side, Bravo drove dangerously fast, screeching around corners and dodging piles of debris. The big car sped down the broad thoroughfares of Nowy Swiat and Wazdowskie Avenue, then made a hard left turn and shot past an AK barricade near Lazienki Park. Bravo shouted out the window at the surprised commandos, “Poland fights! Poland fights!”

  A few minutes later they emerged “safely” into a German-held section of the Mokotow District. Bravo slowed down as they continued on, waving occasionally at groups of Wehrmacht soldiers, SS troopers and the ever-present conscripted Ukrainians, who huddled near their own bonfires, drinking schnapps and eating tinned sausage, waiting for dawn and another day of stomping out the Polish insurgency.

  Adam sat up straight, adjusted his cap and looked out the rear window at the enemy soldiers, wondering what they thought. Did they think it was worth it, wasting all this time, ammunition and their own lives to obliterate a city that was already lost? They had to know that every day they stayed here, they came closer to being surrounded and obliterated themselves by the hundreds of thousands of Russian troops camped just a few kilometers away on the other side of the river. Adam knew the Germans were famous for following orders, but this was a death wish, imposed on them by the lunacy of their Fuhrer. He sighed and slumped back in the soft leather seat and rubbed his temples. It all depended on the Russians, and whether or not they would finally decide to enter Warsaw and help the AK end this madness. And that, Adam guessed, he would find out soon enough.

  They drove south along the broad, tree-lined avenues of the Mokotow District. The vast expanse of parks and open areas, stately mansions and modern, upper-class apartments—only a few of which showed any evidence of the conflict raging in other parts of the city—passed like a mirage outside the Mercedes’ windows. It seemed another world from the brutal chaos of the City Center or Old Town, though no one was on the streets save for German soldiers. Most of the windows were dark and there were no lights anywhere. Adam guessed that the civilians in the area, if they hadn’t yet taken to their cellars, were lying low.

  As they continued south from Mokotow through the Wilanow District—the summer residence of Poland’s kings—Adam remembered coming there for the first time as a boy with his uncle. They had toured the section of Wilanow Palace that had been turned into a museum. Though it was too dark to see any of it now, he recalled the Asian artwork hanging in parquet rooms the size of most houses, the vast gardens and marble fountains. He had especially loved the ornately sculpted sundial relief on the palace’s south wall and Uncle Ludwik’s patient explanation of how it worked.

  Eventually the broad streets turned into gravel lanes winding through orchards and farm fields, past wooden barns and thatched-roof cottages. When they drove through the last German checkpoint well south of Wilanow, Bravo waved to the weary-looking Wehrmacht soldiers without even slowing down.

  “Do you have enough petrol?” Adam asked. There was precious little available in Warsaw to anyone except the Germans.

  “The tank was full when we got the car,” Bravo said with a shrug. “We’ve got enough for this trip. After that, who knows? Hell, we’ll probably all be dead in a few weeks anyway.”

  Twenty minutes later they arrived at a dusty crossroads with a thatched-roof farmhouse on one corner and a tidy brick church on the other. Bravo turned left onto a rutted, dirt road, overgrown with grass, and headed east toward the Vistula River. After another few minutes, he rounded a curve, and the auto’s headlight beams illuminated the rendezvous point.

  Bravo brought the auto to a stop, and Adam leaned forward, looking through the windshield. It was an abandoned barge dock, nothing more than a cracked and buckled concrete pier extending perhaps ten meters into the river. Ancient truck tires hung from chains attached to rotted wood posts, and the rusted-out hulk of what was most likely the last barge sat mired in the muck. The night air was heavy with the odor of dead fish and rotting algae.

  Bravo turned around. “Well, this is as far as I go,” he said quietly. The big man’s good-natured bluster was now replaced with a note of concern. He reached over and clasped Adam’s hand. “I’ll be right here tomorrow night at this same time. I hope you are too.”

  Adam nodded silently and stepped out of the car.

  As the tail lights of the Mercedes disappeared around the bend, Adam started down the rutted road toward the barge dock, his right hand resting on the butt of the Walther P-38 strapped to his waist. Colonel Stag had assured him that the Russians knew he was an American and were prepared to receive him, but when Adam spotted the three figures emerging from the shadows, he tightened his grip on the pistol.

  He stopped and watched carefully as the figures approached, trying to identify their uniforms in the moonlight. A moment later he realized they were Red Army regulars and not NKVD. He breathed a bit easier, but since two of them carried submachine guns leveled directly at his chest, he kept his hand on his pistol.

  The trio stopped three meters away and stood silently for a moment. The one in the middle between two Red Army troopers was an officer. He was tall and very thin with a patch over his left eye. After another moment of silence he finally asked, “Amyerikanyets?”

  Adam nodded. “Yes.”

  “Gavaŕit pa rúski?”

  “No. Do you speak English?”

  The officer took a step forward and asked in perfect English, “Are you looking for the bridge?”

  It was the question he’d been told to expect, and Adam answered, “I’m told the bridge is unsafe. But I require passage to Praga.”

  The officer eyed him carefully, then said something in Russian to one of the submachine-gun-toting troopers, who stepped up, relieved Adam of the Walther and searched him thoroughly. The Russian trooper slipped the pistol into his own pocket, then motioned for Adam to proceed toward the water’s edge where a rowboat was beached.

  Adam climbed into the boat and sat in the prow while the officer took a seat aft with one of the Red Army troopers, who continued
to point the submachine gun at him. The other trooper sat in the middle and took up the oars.

  Without another word they rowed across the Vistula River under a dark sky, illuminated only by a half moon and the glow of fires from Warsaw.

  Toward evening of the following day, General Kovalenko sat at a metal table in his sparsely furnished field command tent. His tank corps commander, Colonel Roskov, was on his left and Captain Andreyev on his right. Across the table sat his visitor, the American emissary from Warsaw. They had kept him isolated and under guard since his arrival the previous night. He was a scrawny man with thin hair and the wire-rimmed spectacles of a schoolteacher. Yet, as Kovalenko studied him, there was a hard look in the man’s eyes and a bearing about him that suggested he was not what he seemed.

  The four of them sat in silence for a few moments, the visitor with his hands folded on the table in front of him, his eyes on Kovalenko. Finally, the general nodded, and Captain Andreyev, who’d brought the visitor across the river, spoke first. “You are an American and an emissary of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London?” he asked, in English.

  “Yes, that is correct,” the visitor replied.

  “You’ve been in Warsaw?”

  “Since the beginning of the Rising.”

  “And what is the situation there?”

  The visitor glanced first at Kovalenko, then looked back at Captain Andreyev. “The AK have thirty thousand armed men and women in the streets of Warsaw. They have seized the City Center and Old Town, and areas of the Jolibord District in the north, as well as several sections of Mokotow in the south.”

  The tank corps commander, Colonel Roskov, leaned forward and spoke tersely in Russian. Kovalenko nudged Andreyev, who then translated into English for the visitor. “Colonel Roskov asks what these men and women are armed with?”

  The visitor replied, “Rifles, pistols, grenades—”

  Andreyev began translating back into Russian, but Roskov broke in.

  Andreyev stopped, smiled at the visitor and said, “The colonel asks if the weapons are all left over from the ’39 campaign?”