by Alan Furst
Not right.
He went for his rifle.
De Milja readied himself, his fist tight on the door handle. The Opel jerked to a stop, he shoved the back door open and jumped out. All he could see of the Latvian guard was a pale face in the darkness. The face seemed puzzled, and faintly offended. Three paces from the sentry box their eyes locked, and everyone knew everything. The guard reacted, snatched for a rifle in the sentry box. De Milja brought the VIS up and pulled the trigger as he ran. It bent the guard in two, arms folded across his stomach. De Milja moved around him, took a moment to steady his hand, then shot him four times in the side of the head. The man dropped to his knees, then pitched forward on his face.
De Milja ran back to the car and climbed in. “All right, go to the next gate.”
Jan and three of his men climbed over the wall into the administrative courtyard of the prison. A trained commando, Jan had memorized every detail of the guard’s sketch. He looked around the courtyard and saw that each doorway and gate was where the map had said it was. A young clerk coming down the stairway from the prison office dropped an armload of files when he saw the machine pistols and the men in the hats with the brims pulled down. He choked off a yell, threw his hands in the air, stood absolutely still.
Jan opened a door at the top of the stairs. There were three more clerks—the German warden and his German assistant had separate offices at the end of the room. “Raise your hands,” Jan said. The clerks did as they were told. Two of Jan’s men pulled the Germans from their office chairs and stood them against a wall. The warden had been a Nazi streetfighter in the 1930s and the Rovno prison was his reward for faithful service. He’d put on weight since those days, and wore a fine suit, but he met Jan’s stare with defiance. “Are you Herr Kruger? The warden?” Jan asked.
“Yes.”
“Please give me the keys to blocks four and six.”
“I cannot.”
Jan raised the machine pistol so Kruger could look down the barrel. Kruger closed his eyes, pressed his lips closed, and drew himself up to his full height. The Hungarian weapon fired a heavy, high-velocity bullet; the warden was thrown back against the wall so hard the plaster cracked, and he left a long red smear as he slid to the floor.
Jan turned the weapon toward the assistant warden. “Please give me the keys to blocks four and six,” he said. The assistant trembled with fear but he would not give in. “Is that your answer?” Jan asked.
The man made a sound. Resistance? Assent? Jan shrugged and fired a long burst. The man screamed once before he died. One of the clerks yelled, “Here, here are keys. In this drawer. Take them, please.”
In a room down the corridor, a clerk hid behind a bank of filing cabinets. He heard gunfire, heard the assistant warden cry out, heard several minutes of silence, and carefully lifted the receiver off a telephone and held it to his ear, tapping the disconnect bar impatiently with his finger, but the line was dead.
A darkened courtyard bordered by cell blocks, cobblestones worn smooth by half a century of prisoners’ felt slippers. At the center, an iron grating sparkling with frost. De Milja and Vlach ran across the courtyard, bent low to the ground. They reached an entry marked South in Cyrillic and used the arched doorway as cover. Czarny prison was silent, the inmates forbidden to talk, so they could hear the jangle of keys as warders moved along the corridors, the idling truck on the other side of the wall, the high-low sirens of German and Ukrainian police in the streets of Rovno. A voice called, another answered, a third laughed—guards on one of the cell blocks. Then footsteps, three or four running men, and Jan and two others came out of the darkness.
“Everybody all right?” de Milja whispered.
Jan nodded. “We shot the wardens.”
“Keys?”
“Yes.”
Jan was breathing hard, he rummaged through a ring of keys, peering at the stamped markings. He removed two keys and handed them
to de Milja. “Block four,” he said.
“Good. We go out as planned.”
“No change. See you in better times.”
“Yes. See you then,” de Milja said.
De Milja turned the key and opened the grille that led to Block Four. It creaked when it opened, then clanged shut. A warder came around the corner and said, “Tomek?” Vlach had the machine pistol pressed against his chest before he knew what was happening. He gasped with surprise, dropped a wooden club with a clatter that echoed down the corridor. De Milja pulled the man’s arms behind him and wound a piece of wire around his wrists. He’d thought at first that the warder was a fat man, but he wasn’t. The muscles in his shoulders and back were massive, and the smell of him, like stale garlic, cut through the prison odor of open drains and crumbling stone.
“Prisoner Krewinski,” Vlach whispered.
“Which?”
“Krewinski.”
“Yes, wait. It’s that corridor. Second to the last, on the left. You see, I don’t give you a problem.”
“On the floor,” de Milja said.
The guard gave a nervous laugh, went to one knee, then both. “Like this? You see, sirs, no trouble from me.”
De Milja pushed him over on his side and began wiring his ankles together. “Sirs?” The guard’s voice was very high now. “You’re going to let men out of these cells, don’t leave me tied up here, I beg you.”
De Milja didn’t answer. He ripped the keys off the warder’s belt, held them in front of the man’s eyes, and began going through them. “Yes, there,” the man said. He was fading now—drifting toward death before anyone touched him, de Milja could see it.
The prisoners, in cells lining the twilit corridor, came to their barred doors and watched with curiosity: two men with weapons, moving quickly. No uniforms, no warder. For the moment, de Milja and Vlach ignored them. In the second cell from the end on the left, a man sat on a bed—a wood frame suspended from the wall by two chains. He was tall and wiry, with a mournful face and hair shaved to a colorless stubble—a hard head and soft eyes. He was clean-shaven, but a cavalry mustache would not have been out of place. Sergeant Krewinski, de Milja now saw. The man stared at de Milja and Vlach without much interest, they were only the most recent in a long line of men with guns who’d come for him.
“Are you Sergeant Krewinski?”
“Yes,” the man said—meaning if you like.
As the three left the cell block, the keys were passed to other prisoners. In Block Six, Jan and his group freed the two ZWZ officers, a group of Russian partisans, all the political prisoners, and the women in the adjoining wing. The pandemonium was just getting started when de Milja and Vlach and the sergeant reached the Opel. Ukrainian guards running for their lives, prisoners running out into the streets of Rovno. Some would escape, and police units would be busy for days. At the Zamkova Street intersection, they saw Jan’s truck, rocking from side to side as it sped away from the prison.
The Opel wound through the back alleys of Rovno—there were sirens now, as the attack on Czarny prison began to draw in security elements. They first dropped Kolya at a hideout, a room above a pharmacy. Then Vlach, on the outskirts of the city, at a lumberyard. A few miles down the road, the Opel stopped at the edge of a small village. Bron tapped the horn three times and an ancient farm truck rolled out of a snow-covered lane. The driver of the truck joined Bron in the Opel, they waved good-bye, and drove off in the direction of Rovno. De Milja and the sergeant sat in the cab of the truck, changed into sheepskin jackets, old boots, and new identity papers.
They waited until dawn, then in first light headed for the Razakavia band in the farmhouse at the edge of the forest. De Milja never went more than twenty miles an hour—the tires were old and battered, the road ice over frozen mud, and patches of ground fog turned the windshield white. As they drove along, Krewinski told his story. “The NKVD sergeant, the man whose dog had been sick, he came to the wire one day and told me, ‘You go to Moscow, to the training school, because if you stay here, well .
. .’ I understood what he meant. I never saw him again, but he saved my life. The major who had run my regiment was still in the camp at that time, and he told me how to go about it. He was a reserve officer, a chemist from Lodz, an important man.
“Well, it was just like he said it would be. I asked for a book about communism, and I read it and I discussed it with a guard. A political type called me into his office, and he gave me another book. That went on for a month or two, then they moved me to a separate part of the camp, and they left a gate open.” Krewinski laughed. “I’d been told they would do that, and they did. I ignored it. Then, a week later, the provocateur. A little man that worked around the office. Came to me and said, ‘I know your game. Let’s you and me work together and get ourselves out of here.’”
“What did you do?”
“Went directly to the camp commandant and turned him in. And that really seemed to make a difference, that earned their trust. About two weeks later I went east.
“It was a kind of school. On Arbat Street, in an old mansion. And also at the university. A school for guerrilla fighting. Nothing like that in Poland—oh, maybe for officers, but not for an enlisted man like me. They had all kinds of people there, from everywhere in Europe—we could barely talk to one another. Estonians and Lithuanians and Hungarians, Frenchmen and Belgians. All kinds. They taught us how to blow up a train, how to ambush a column. But they also spent time on political matters—putting out a newspaper, and getting it into people’s hands; by leaving it on trains, or mailing it to addresses in the phone-book. They taught assassination. How to force peasants to fight for you, how to infiltrate organizations. Then, in August, after the German attack on Russia, they dropped me by parachute into the Tsuman forest. I was to search out a certain band, and work to bring them under the control of the Znamensky Street center—the GRU—in Moscow.”
“What happened?”
“I went home,” Krewinski said. “It wasn’t that simple or easy, and it took time and luck, but that’s what I did.”
They reached the farm at dusk, were given something to eat, the sergeant spent some time with his brother, then they were given blankets and taken to a hayloft on the second floor of an old stone stable. There they fell into a dead sleep, awakened at 5:00 a.m. when German antipartisan units and Ukrainian militia, acting on a tip from an informer, attacked the farm.
They got very close, killing the sentries silently as they came. Three hundred of them, Ukrainian militia led by a special SS unit—men imprisoned for poaching game in Germany recruited to hunt humans, partisans, in the forests of Poland.
It was a hand grenade that woke Captain de Milja.
It blew a hole in the corner of the stable and set the beams on fire. By the flickering light he saw militia running across a frozen pond. He kicked himself free of his blanket and ran to a window, Simonov in hand. Down below, on the ground floor of the stable, some of the partisans were shouting to one another, trying to organize a defense. But the guards out in the forest were lying in the leaves with their throats cut, and it was too late to organize much of anything.
The Germans had a heavy machine gun in the woods. They traversed window to window across the outbuildings, the main house, then the stable. Only Frantek’s final cry alerted de Milja to the gunfire and he dove below the sill just as it reached him. He crawled over to help, but Frantek simply stared at him upside down, eyes wide, a look of indignation frozen on his face.
Sergeant Krewinski knew how to do these things. He waited until the machine gun moved to the next building, then fired a long burst at its muzzle flare with a machine pistol. This occasioned a change of gunners—a few moments of reorganization, but nothing more. By then, the fire in the beams had taken hold and it was getting hard to see, and to breathe, on the upper floor. One of the defenders from down below rushed halfway up the stairway, yelled something, then tumbled, dead weight, back down. A moment later a rifle was poked up from the stairs and fired blind. A partisan reached down and pulled it up, a very surprised Ukrainian hanging on the other end. The sergeant shot him. Then Krewinski and de Milja exchanged a certain look—the time we always knew would come has come—and led the others on the second floor in running down the open stairway. Nobody really wanted to burn to death in a stable. Krewinski was shot, but the impulse turned out to have been a good one. There were only five or six militia gathered at the foot of the stairway. Triumphant— blood on the walls, dead militia, dead partisans—but undermanned, a successful attack that had spent its strength en route.
Two Ukrainians leaped on de Milja—partisans taken alive were worth gold to the Germans. He fell over backward under the weight but had had the foresight to jump with a VIS in his hand, so he shot each one in the abdomen and they rolled off him in a hurry. He struggled to his feet, saw Krewinski staggering around with blood on his shirt, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him outside.
Into a cloud of hot, black smoke from the burning farmhouse. They both went flat. The smoke made it hard to breathe, but it gave them a moment’s camouflage, a moment to think. De Milja, VIS in one hand, Krewinski’s collar in the other, decided to crawl into the farmhouse, hoping that Razakavia, or somebody, was holding out there.
It was deserted, except for Kotior. He had been wounded. Badly. He was sitting on a couch holding a light machine gun by its tripod, the feeder belt snaked around his shoulders, the barrel pointed at the front door. His face was white, he would not live much longer. “Out the back door,” he said. “They have retreated.”
“Good-bye, Kotior,” de Milja said.
“Good-bye,” Kotior said.
He dragged Krewinski toward the back door, was almost there when a shadow flew at him from behind an overturned table. He swung the VIS, then saw it was the Jewish woman who had given him tea one morning when he’d first arrived in the forest. “I ask you to shoot me,” she said formally.
He had no time to think about it. Krewinski’s weight was beginning to pull hard, not a good sign. The woman put her hands on his forearm. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to be tortured.” She was right, the militia liked the screams of women. He pointed the VIS at her forehead, she looked at him, closed her eyes, then lifted her face.
But he couldn’t. His hand would not kill her. “No,” he said. “Come with me.” He dragged Krewinski forward and she followed, holding on to his shirt in the billowing smoke.
The truck.
De Milja had driven it a little way into the forest the night before, now it saved their lives.
The starter failed, four or five times, then he forced himself to a slow and determined effort, pulled the choke out where it belonged, and babied the truck to life. It sputtered and coughed, but it did not die. It took all his strength to ease the big clutch up slowly enough not to stall the engine, his teeth ground with effort and concentration, but he did it. The truck crawled forward, slow but steady, moving down a narrow path into the forest. Branches broke off against the windshield, the wheels climbed over downed logs and rocky outcrops. Occasionally the tires spun on the ice, de Milja let some air out and that enabled them to grip better, somehow finding traction on the frozen earth.
He saw Razakavia once more.
A few miles west of the farmhouse the forest divided—low hills rising from either bank of a small river. De Milja took the right fork, then, an hour after sunrise, found himself on a section of road where foresters had long ago built a corduroy track of cut logs. He stopped the truck to let the engine cool down and there, three hundred yards away, his horse moving at a brisk walk along the bank of the frozen river, was Razakavia.
A scout, riding well in advance of the main party, disappeared into the trees as de Milja watched. The main body of riders was strung out a long way, some of them riding double, many of them slumped over, perhaps wounded, certainly exhausted. Razakavia rode at the front, his white hair and beard stark against the gray-green forest, a rifle slung across his back.
They stopped at midday. There was
still gasoline in the truck, and the corduroy track had continued without interruption. Perhaps they had happened on one of the vast estates owned by the Polish nobility in the nineteenth century, the road maintained by the count’s foresters for the use of wagons during the hunting season.
The woman he had saved had told him her name was Shura. She had, since they’d fled the burning farmhouse, tried to make Krewinski comfortable as best she could, but at last she said to de Milja, “I think now we must stop for a little time.”
He knew what she meant, and turned off the engine. “Thank you,” Krewinski whispered, grateful for a few moments of peace. The slow, jolting progress of the truck over the log road had been agony for him, though he had never once complained. When the ignition was turned off, the forest was immediately a very different place. Cold and clean, with a small wind; quiet except for the creak of frozen branches. With Shura’s help he settled Krewinski on the matted pine needles beneath a tree and covered him with an old blanket they’d found on the seat of the truck. When Shura tucked the blanket beneath his chin Krewinski closed his eyes and smiled. “Much better,” he said.
He went to sleep, and a half-hour later he was gone. There was no question of burial in the frozen ground, so they folded his hands on his chest and scratched his name on a rock and set it by his head as a gravestone.
Contrary to de Milja’s fears, the truck started, and moved forward along the corduroy road. The loss of Krewinski hurt—a life that should have continued. And de Milja wondered at the cost of the rescue when he considered the result. Nonetheless, in its own terms, the operation had succeeded. Olenik had been specific: they wanted the sergeant, but, if that proved impossible, they wanted the sergeant’s story. Well, that at least they would have, if he managed to get back to Warsaw. He was, he calculated, a hundred miles southeast of the town of Biala, and from there it was another hundred and twenty-five miles to Warsaw.
