Last Citadel wwi-3

by David L. Robbins

  ‘Please,’ the old man said again. ‘I ask you to let us alone. My people have…’

  So much was on the old man’s tongue. He wanted to tell all to this partisan gang come out of the darkness, all the stories of his village’s sufferings. But Katya knew Plokhoi would not be moved by suffering. And the starosta knew this, too, for all he could say was ‘I beg you, please go away.’

  ‘No, father. That is something I cannot do.’

  Plokhoi pivoted to his waiting horse. He stepped into the stirrup and mounted, rising again above the peasants and their plea.

  ‘Ten of you. Get your horses and come with us. Now.’

  No one moved. Plokhoi sighed and shook his head. He doffed his cloth cap and ran a hand through his hair. A bead of sweat trickled down Katya’s back. Artillery thunder from the north filled the moments until Plokhoi returned his hat to his head and spoke.

  ‘Father.’ The partisan folded both hands over his saddle horn. ‘Which is your home?’

  The starosta pressed his hat closer to his chest. He hung his bare head.

  ‘Go to it,’ Plokhoi told him, ‘and bring me all your food.’

  The elder did not move.

  ‘Old man. I will pick a house.’

  At this, a woman in the crowd bolted up the street with a swish of skirt. She was the elder’s wife, sister, it didn’t matter, she obeyed when her man would not. Nothing moved in the minutes while she was gone but the jittery horizon.

  Katya watched Plokhoi and his band glare down on the villagers. Plokhoi wanted to save these people, and to do this he would hurt them. Three years ago, Plokhoi had chosen Hitler over Stalin, until the one became an even greater monster than the other. Tonight the villagers chose, between the German invaders and these looming, dangerous partisans. None of the choices for Plokhoi or these peasants had come to them with mercy.

  If Leonid had been saved by these partisans instead of her, would he sit here on a horse and watch like she was? Or would Leonid speak up to defend the old village, to ask that they be left alone as they pled? She tried to imagine Leonid blank-faced and grimy, one of Plokhoi’s men, she tried to imagine him cruel, and could not.

  Carrying a woven basket, the old woman ran back up the street. Now, breathing hard, she offered up the basket to the partisan leader. Another partisan rode forward to take the food. Katya saw a few loaves and leafy vegetables, a pittance of victuals to fill the stomachs of a household. Plokhoi did not acknowledge the basket or the woman. She looked surprised, then frightened. Plokhoi rode away from the crowd and his motionless cadre to a nearby barn. He dismounted, took a square bale of straw, then walked along the dark street where the woman had gone.

  Moments later, the windows of a house began to flicker. Plokhoi emerged from it and walked back to his horse. He climbed into the saddle, carrying something. He rode forward. The house behind him glowed brighter until it was clear the lapping light was flame. Plokhoi rode up to the starosta and handed down to him a lantern out of his little house. The lamp was unlit and, Katya knew, drained of fuel.

  The elder and the crowd did not know what to do. Heads turned to the burning house, then crept back to the partisan on the tall horse gazing down on them. The old man slipped his hat back on his head. His role as leader for the village was over. He stepped away from Plokhoi. No one spoke to him or touched him. The woman stood rooted in the street where she had handed up her basket, hiding her face in her hands, sobbing beneath the crackle of burning wood.

  Plokhoi’s demand rose above the fire and the murmuring villagers.

  ‘Ten men! On horses!’

  The elder did not raise his head to select the men. Katya couldn’t tell if his burden was loss or shame. Again, it didn’t matter; neither had come to him mercifully.

  The men from the village chose themselves. More than ten of them assembled in the street on horseback. Three were told by the others to stay behind, with muttered instructions of care for the women and the work to be done in the village with ten fewer backs tomorrow. The burning house collapsed on itself, spewing sparks and smoke high while the men gathered and said goodbye. The new riders hurried, Plokhoi didn’t have to say a word to them. When they were ready and lined up, Katya saw the resolve on their faces. They’ll hate Plokhoi, she thought, but they’ll fight the Nazis. These old men will get the chance to die not as foreign slaves, not strung up as reprisals, but fighting. They have been given the chance to live. That was the choice Katya herself made when she joined the war as a Night Witch, and again when she decided to stay with the partisans.

  Plokhoi wheeled his horse, forty-two others turned with him. Katya guided Anna to the rear of the partisans riding off into the starry fields. The yellow light of flames from the burning house flickered across their backs.

  July 8

  0130 hours

  the village of Vorskla

  Five miles away in a neighbor village, Plokhoi collected fifteen more fighters. He did not have to burn any homes there, he left the place dim and intact. The village starosta himself stepped forward and joined the partisan band. Standing beside Plokhoi, the elder announced it was time to rise. His followers, most of them family, brought along rifles they’d cached from the battles of the past year or stolen from careless German garrisons in the area. These men mounted good horses and rode away from their wives and peasant lives with a flair that struck Katya as both brave and comic. The new recruits raised the spirits of the ten farmers Plokhoi had commandeered from the other village an hour before. Katya rode in the middle of the expanded pack. These newest men surrounded her, the only woman in the cell; it seemed natural for these farmers who were riding off to be heroes to protect a woman, even a partisan woman who rode away with them.

  Plokhoi led the cell into the center of a vast bean field, away from any village or road. Far off, on the edges of the field, the lights of a vehicle or two bumped over dirt trails. These were German security patrols making a half-hearted effort, none of them wanted to encounter a partisan group in the dark. None of the riders made a sound or lit a cigarette, the new men picked up the clandestine ways quickly. Plokhoi dismounted, carrying his box radio.

  Colonel Bad squatted in their middle, hidden by the many haunches and hooves. The radio came to life and Plokhoi’s features glowed lime by the dials. He held a receiver to his ear, a microphone to his lips, and muttered, talking with partisan headquarters somewhere. She could not hear him, she only caught him saying one thing: ‘I have a druzhiny again.’

  Plokhoi finished with his radio and took his seat in the saddle.

  ‘We have orders,’ he said. ‘North of us, the Germans have broken through between Syrtsev and Alekseyevka. They’re stepping up their rail traffic to keep supplied. We’re to move to the Borisovka line and break the tracks in as many places as we can.’ He checked his watch. ‘We need to move if we’re going to get it done tonight. Ivan, how much wire have we got?’

  The heavy-set partisan reached behind him to pat his saddlebags. ‘One,’ he said. Two others in the crowd did the same and counted off.

  ‘Three reels, Colonel,’ Ivan concluded. ‘Who’s got the C-3?’

  Five men sounded off.

  ‘Caps?’

  Another five said yes.

  ‘Alright,’ Plokhoi said. Without another word, he urged his horse out of the center of the riders. The partisans fell in behind him. Plokhoi did not break into a canter, he kept his band at a brisk walk across the bean field. They moved with eerie quiet for fifty-seven riders, like a moon shadow. Katya had no idea that for days she’d been riding with men carrying explosives, blasting wire, and caps. She didn’t know much about such things, but she guessed these were dangerous things to gallop with in your saddlebags. This partisan cadre wasn’t just stolid men with rifles roving the countryside: They were a bunch of disassembled bombs waiting to be put together, aimed, and exploded. Riding in their dark core, with them spread out on both sides of her like wings, she felt a little like a pilot again, part of a da
rk shape gliding through the night, loaded with bombs, heading for the target.

  Skinny Daniel, big Ivan, and glum Josef were never far from her. Plokhoi must have assigned her to them, since they’d rescued her instead of Leonid. A punishment, perhaps. That would explain Josef’s instant dislike. She pushed Anna through the crowded partisans, to pull alongside Plokhoi.

  ‘Witch,’ he said.

  ‘Colonel. Has there been any information about Lieutenant Lumanov? On your radio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you asked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Colonel…’

  ‘I take orders. When I’m told to pick up a downed pilot, I send men to do it. When he disappears, I send men to do something else. Watch the sky tomorrow, Witch. There’s a downed pilot every two minutes. What do you expect?’

  There was no coldness in the man’s voice. He expressed what all of them knew and feared most, that each was expendable in the higher goal of defending Russia. So what did Katya want more? To search for Leonid or to stop German supply trains from feeding the enemy’s armies? She wanted to say Leonid; Katya thought, Couldn’t it be that way, just once?

  Plokhoi watched her with an intent expression.

  ‘Tonight I’m sending two teams, five men in each. I can’t risk more than that. You’ll go with…’

  ‘I know. Ivan, Daniel, and Josef.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Witch? You don’t like your bodyguards?’

  ‘I don’t need bodyguards.’

  ‘We’ll see. I’ll send along one new man with each team. You take the starosta. He’s got spunk, that one.’

  Katya knew she could trust the starosta. He could not be the traitor, none of the villagers could, they’d just joined the partisans tonight. But what about Plokhoi himself? Why doesn’t he want her to find Leonid? What is he afraid of? Is Colonel Bad himself the informant? If she finds Leonid, will she find the secret to the spy in their cell?

  Katya nodded. She glanced at the radio, the size of a bread box, strapped to Plokhoi’s back alongside his carbine. The metal box was the only way to find Leonid, to speak into it and beg for whoever was the power behind these murky partisans to send more men to find him. The radio voice, the unseen authority in the air, would ask her, What do you want, Katerina Berkovna? What would she answer?

  Plokhoi said, ‘Go back, Witch. We’ll be splitting up in ten minutes.’

  July 8

  0145 hours

  four kilometers north of Borisovka

  Big Ivan lay in the dirt beside Katya.

  ‘Pour some more,’ he urged in a whisper.

  Katya tipped the little bottle of vegetable oil and dribbled it over the man’s meaty hands.

  ‘See,’ he spoke with the voice of a purring bear, ‘the C-3 is hard like a brick when you take it out of the wrapper. You got to do it like this, like bread dough, to make it soft. That way, you can shape it any way you want. Here. You do it.’

  Katya did not reach for the gray explosive clay. Ivan held it out to her.

  ‘It’s not going to blow up, girl.’

  Ivan smacked a fist into the lump. Katya jerked. Nothing happened.

  ‘It takes an explosion to make it go off. That’s what the caps are for. Here.’

  Still, Katya hesitated. He stuffed the clay in her hands. Under the cast of a slim moon dicing through the leaves overhead, Katya noted Ivan’s palms were stained. Kneading the C-3, her own hands began to turn gray.

  ‘It makes your skin yellow,’ Ivan said, grinning, showing teeth that were gray, too, under the moon and branches.

  While Katya and Ivan molded the explosive, Daniel and surly Josef re-wrapped the long coil of electric detonation cord out of Ivan’s knapsack. The starosta knelt, peering through the bushes where they hid. The village elder’s name was Filip Filipovich Platonov. He had a son – also Filip – fighting somewhere with the Red Army. The boy’s letters had stopped a year ago, and the elder knew nothing more. Katya guessed how old the man was, probably more than sixty. His face had collapsed around his hawk nose, he had high cheekbones and a brow like a white awning to make his face sharp, years of hunger and labor had rooted in his flesh. Many of the men from his village who’d joined that night carried the same lean look, the same predator’s nose.

  A hundred meters away, the Borisovka rail line ran over flat ground. To make the tracks easier to protect from partisan sabotage, the Germans had mowed down a wide swath of trees beside the tracks for miles in every direction. Tonight, two-man patrols walked the rails with flashlights. The guards ambled past every four to five minutes, shining their lights down at the rail ties. Filip watched them without blinking, with a bird-of-prey focus.

  Ivan wiped his hands on his jacket. The C-3 became malleable in Katya’s grasp, she was excited by the danger, the peril of rolling a powerful explosive in her fingers. She imagined them all going up in a red burst out of her hands.

  Ivan breathed, ‘Daniel?’

  The thin one came close. He and Ivan had both been regular army soldiers, privates. Each had been captured by the Germans and escaped, and both had been found separately wandering behind enemy lines by the partisans. Daniel had been born in this part of the steppe; he told Katya that Plokhoi had stopped him from going home. With the partisan band they risked their lives just as much as they had fighting on the front lines, but now in civilian clothes they enjoyed more status – now they were considered even more as military men. Plokhoi had made them leaders.

  Daniel brought out from his jacket pocket two small wooden cartons. He handed them down to Ivan, who took the boxes with uncharacteristic gingerness. The big man set one aside and opened the other for Katya, as though showing her a gem. Inside, on a bed of cotton, lay something that resembled a copper bullet casing with antennae.

  ‘Blasting cap,’ she said.

  ‘Definitely.’ Ivan raised his grin to Daniel, squatting next to them. ‘They say I’m the dumb one, but I’m smart enough not to carry these damn things around.’

  Daniel didn’t mind the gibe. He brought down a slender finger to the cap, such a clean and comfortable thing, in bed in its little wooden home.

  ‘These babies have a bad temper. Ivan’s too clumsy to carry them. He falls down a lot. You do that with one of these in your pants, you don’t get up the same man.’

  Katya snickered at this, drawing a shush from Josef. The older man kept himself apart while spooling the long detonation wire around his arm.

  Daniel continued, unchastened. ‘Here’s how it works. The C-3 explodes at a rate of about twenty-five thousand feet per second. To detonate it, you need to make a faster explosion. That’s why C-3 won’t blow up if you just burn it or hit it. That’s where the blasting cap comes in. You push the cap into the plastique, hook these two wires up to the electric firing cord, send a current down the wire, and the cap goes off just a little faster than the C-3.’ He raised both hands. ‘Boom.’

  ‘Boom,’ repeated Ivan, savoring the word and the concept.

  Daniel lifted the little cap off its cotton pillows. He fingered the twin slender wires sticking out of one end. The wires were crimped together in the middle by a tiny round tab.

  ‘They’re very sensitive, these bastards. Anything can set them off. So once you got the C-3 stuck to whatever it is you’re going to blow, and you got the wires attached, you make sure you take off this little piece. This keeps the two wires touching, see? To short them out. Once this is gone, the cap is live.’

  Daniel returned the copper detonator to its case and closed the lid. He reached down to scoop up both boxes. Ivan took the doughy C-3 from Katya’s oily and stained hands. She wiped them on her pants, like Ivan. When they were clean, Daniel handed her the two boxes.

  ‘You and me, Witch.’

  Katya hefted the twin cartons, almost weightless in her palms. She waited for Daniel to tell her he was kidding. ‘Me?’

  ‘Why not? At this point you know everything the rest of us know about this stuff.’<
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  Josef stalked forward. ‘You and Daniel are the smallest and quickest. You’ll go.’

  The urge pulsed in Katya to mount an argument, that she’d never done anything like this before. But she looked around at ox-like Ivan, crotchety Josef, and ancient Filip – the elder gazed at her with a ‘you want me to go?’ shrug – and clamped her lips. Suddenly she missed her U-2 and the thousands of feet she used to have between her and the Germans.

  ‘Fine,’ she whispered. Josef finished with the firing cord and checked his watch. He laid the wire on the ground and crept to the edge of the bushes to join Filip. Daniel grabbed up the long black loops and hoisted them over his shoulder, they hung almost to his boots. He found one loose end and handed it to Ivan. The large man dug in his knapsack for the handheld detonating machine and set about stripping the firing-cord wires. Katya held the blasting-cap boxes one in each hand, very aware of keeping them cozy and still. Her palms began to sweat, and she wondered how sensitive these temperamental caps were to nerves.

  They waited for another five minutes. No one moved, except Josef, who glanced up and down from his watch to the strolling, then disappearing, German guards and their flashlights. Katya knew there was another five-man demolition team waiting a mile south down the track. The plan was simple for each squad: two in the team set the charge; one stays on the detonator; two slither out and try to bag a prisoner for Plokhoi to interrogate. This was the Battle of the Rails, fought throughout the occupied territories, designed to disrupt the flow of German trains to the front. The Russian road system was so primitive the Nazis had no choice but to rely on the railroads to supply their men and weapons. The partisans knew this and carried the fight to the enemy here. But tonight, Katya hoped, there would be no fight, just a quick strike.

  The Germans had lax security at this point in the Borisovka line. At other spots – bridges, bends in the line, downhill runs, all places where the partisans were most likely to hit – the Germans maintained garrisons and watchtowers, and even this was a partisan victory because every enemy soldier safeguarding the railways against the guerillas was one more German soldier not battling on the front. Plokhoi may be a madman, he may even be as bad as his nomme de guerre implied, but he was clever and disciplined. He hewed to the partisan motto: Attack the weak, fly from the strong.