The Katyn Order (11 page)

“Do you remember . . . when we first met?” Berta had opened her eyes again.

“Yes, I doubt I could ever forget it,” Natalia said, remembering the gruesome incident on the train. “You were the strong one that day. I'm not sure if I could have continued on if you hadn't been there for me.”

Berta reached over and took her hand with a surprisingly strong grip. “You'll survive this.”

Natalia's eyes clouded up. “So will you, Berta. We'll survive it together. I'll come back tomorrow.”

“Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Like you said . . . in a day or two.”

26 A
UGUST

A
DAM KNELT
with his elbow resting on the sill of the second-floor window and squinted into the late afternoon sun. His body was heavy with fatigue, and sweat dripped down the back of his neck as he silently cursed the Weaver scope on his Springfield sniper rifle. It was fogged up again. He'd had it specially mounted by an AK gunsmith so he could top-load five cartridges, but the damned thing still fogged up in humid weather.

He had been at it for three straight days, working with AK commando units that dashed from barricade to barricade, desperately trying to keep the enemy Panzers out of Old Town. In the days following the destruction of the PAST building, the Germans had brought in thousands of reinforcements, including battalions of battle-hardened Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the Ukrainian and Russian conscripts. Stukas bombarded the city with aerial assaults, while Panzer units and infantry battalions hammered one neighborhood after another from dawn to dusk. Artillery fire continued nonstop through the night, bringing the last feeble remnants of civilian life to a grinding halt. The AK still hung on to Old Town, but the noose was tightening.

Adam wiped the moisture off the scope's lens with a handkerchief, then peered through it again, adjusting the focus knob. A Panther tank came into view and, a moment later, the tank commander's head poking up through the open hatch. Adam shifted an inch to the left, bringing the target directly into the center of the crosshairs. He exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger.

The tank commander's head exploded as Adam moved the rifle a few degrees farther left and located a second target: an SS officer standing next to the Panther tank. The officer reacted to the gunshot and turned his head toward the tank as Adam smoothly chambered a second round, squeezed the trigger and shot him in the neck.

He found two additional targets. One went down cleanly with a shot to the forehead. The other doubled over, howling, his hands clawing at the entry hole in his stomach. Adam got to his feet and bolted from the room, taking the stairs two at a time.

He knew the drill well. They had been repeating it for days. The AK was desperately short of PIAT anti-tank guns, so when the Panzer units approached, the commandos waited behind the barricades while Adam picked off as many of the tank crew as he could. Then the commandos charged forward with rifles and Molotov cocktails, attempting to capture or disable the tank. But if they didn't make it before the tank gunner rotated the turret and sighted in, the building Adam was about to vacate would be reduced to a pile of rubble.

He emerged from the building and sprinted down Podwale Street, away from the barricade. He continued for another fifty meters, then ducked into a partially demolished building at the intersection with Senatorska Street. The front façade had been blown away in an aerial bombardment two days earlier, and a broken water main had flooded the cellar, drowning more than a dozen people who had taken refuge down there. There hadn't been time to recover the bodies, and Adam held his breath against the stench as he carefully negotiated the rickety staircase.

He'd selected the building because what was left of the first floor gave him a clear view down Senatorska where a second group of AK commandos had encountered an older Panzer II tank. Adam got into position, reloaded the Springfield and sighted in on his targets. Thirty seconds later he descended the stairs and exited the building.

The Panzer II was captured by the AK, but the Panther tank was not. As Adam looked back down Podwale Street, he saw the massive machine bash through the barricade. AK commandos scattered to get out of the way, but the tank's machine guns mowed them down. The Panther tank crunched over the debris, then stopped in the middle of the street.

Adam dropped to one knee and raised his rifle, but the tank hatch was closed with no targets in sight. One of the badly wounded commandos, his jacket and trouser legs dripping with blood, managed to light a Molotov cocktail and hurl it before collapsing. The bottle hit the side of the tank, and it burst into flames with no effect.

For a moment the tank just sat there. Then the turret rotated toward a schoolhouse with boarded up windows and a bright red cross painted on the door.

A second later Adam was knocked flat as a thunderous blast roared from the Panther's 75mm cannon. In a deafening concussion, the first and second stories of the school building collapsed, belching a cloud of dust fifty meters in all directions. Frantic commandos raced toward the demolished building as the lethal machine turned away and rumbled back across the smashed barricade, its brief mission of retribution complete.

It was well after dark by the time Adam and a dozen other grim commandos finally gave up digging through the ruins of the collapsed school building. They'd recovered twenty-one bodies, and carried them onto the grassy area between the street and the old city wall, but many more lay buried deep beneath the rubble.

A priest who'd been helping them slumped to the ground, his thick, black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and dust. “I just stepped out to try and locate some bandages,” he croaked, “and when I returned the building was . . .” He looked up at Adam, tears streaming down his dirt-caked face. “There were forty-three patients in there. Nineteen were just children!” Adam extended his hand to help him to his feet, but the priest waved him off, his head drooping to his chest.

Adam stood there for a moment. In the brief flashes of light from artillery bursts he could make out a beaded rosary in the priest's hands. When he was a young boy in Krakow his aunt and uncle had taken him to church regularly while his father was off fighting with the legions. His aunt taught him to pray the rosary, which he did to please her. He remembered questioning, in those long ago days, whether it did any good. Now he was certain that it didn't.

Adam wandered away and plodded along Podwale Street, dead tired, every bone in his body aching. He finally stopped and slumped down on the steps of a three-story building with black shutters and a red tile roof that was still mostly intact except for a ragged hole about a meter in diameter near the chimney. He thought wearily that an unexploded shell was probably lying somewhere inside the house.

The enemy Panzers and infantry units had pulled back for the night, and—except for scattered artillery fire—the area was quiet, at least for the moment. He pulled his last cigarette from the soggy, crumpled pack and lit it, staring at the purple sky, illuminated on and off by exploding shells like flashbulbs from a thousand cameras. A haze hung over the area, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and ammonia. How much longer? he wondered.

He had killed thirteen German soldiers today, at least eight of them officers as far as he could tell. How many did that make in all since he was dropped into Poland by parachute on a bitterly cold night in the winter of 1940? He'd kept track at first, but lost count somewhere over a hundred. Maybe it was two hundred by now, all of them easily justified in his law student's mind as a
casus belli
—justification for acts of war—a principle upheld for centuries in most civilized societies.

He took a long drag on the cigarette thinking of the insanity of civilized societies clinging to some legal principle as an argument for the slaughter of millions of people. And it was equally insane, he knew, to have devoted years of his life to the study of law, the guiding principles of humanity in an enlightened world—then to become an assassin. The more he thought about it, sitting on the steps of a house with a hole in the roof, in a city about to be destroyed by a ruthless enemy, he decided that justification was irrelevant. Simple revenge might be more to the point.

At least Colonel Whitehall would be pleased, he supposed. He imagined the portly, disheveled officer of the SOE, Britain's covert organization for sabotage behind enemy lines, smiling that complacent smile of his. Adam had been one of Whitehall's first recruits. At the time he had been desperate to exact revenge on those who had taken everything from him: his home, the only family he ever knew, the hard-won freedom of his birth country. And Whitehall had been more than pleased to provide him with the training and means to carry out that revenge.

Adam thought about Natalia—the Conductor, as Rabbit had called her—and the question she'd asked still nagged at the back of his mind.
You came back . . . what on earth for?
It was a simple question from a very straightforward woman. Yet it was a question that resurrected distant memories of another world, in what now seemed like a lifetime ago. Another world when he had reunited with his Polish family: the aunt who'd cared for him and raised him as a child, the uncle who'd been a second father to him, mentored him and taught him the most important values in life. They were memories he'd buried a long time ago, the day when that world was abruptly shattered.

Adam was jerked back to the moment when he heard someone shouting. It was a woman's voice, shrill, panicky—and familiar. He got to his feet, slung the rifle over his shoulder and jogged back down Podwale, following the voice toward the demolished schoolhouse.

Natalia stood on top of the rubble pile shouting at two AK commandos. The commandos slowly backed away, shaking their heads. “Get back here and help me, Goddamn it!” she shrieked. “We've got to find her!”

Adam hesitated for a moment then tossed the cigarette on the ground, climbed over the rubble and touched her shoulder. “Natalia—”

She spun around like she'd received an electrical shock. “Wolf?” She took a step back and looked around, thrusting her hands in the air. “What the hell happened?”

“A tank attack, about three hours ago. We—”

“It was a hospital!”

“I know. I was—”

“A hospital . . . with a big red cross painted on the door!”

“I know, I—”

“They're monsters! Goddamn them to hell! They're nothing but . . .” She ripped off her cap and slapped it hard against the side of her leg, stomping around in a tight circle on top of the debris pile. “We left her here so she'd be safe! We left her and . . . now this.” She stopped and clenched her fists.

Adam put both hands on her shoulders and looked into her contorted face. “Natalia,” he whispered. “Natalia, I know. I was here.”

A tear trickled down her bruised cheek. “But it was a hospital!”

“Yes, I know,” he said, uncertain what more to say. “It was tragic, but we've all seen it before . . . you've seen worse than—”

“Not when it was my
friend!”
she hissed.

“Your friend? I didn't—”

“No, of course not! How could you? Her name was Berta, and . . . Oh Christ, I'm just—”

An artillery shell screeched overhead, and Adam instinctively pulled her close as it exploded with a numbing blast a half block away. He looked around the rubble-strewn area, trying to recall a place where they might escape the line of fire. He took her elbow and led her off the debris pile, across the grassy area and to a breach in the city wall.

She stopped. “No, I've got to go back. I've got to find her.”

He tightened his grip on her elbow. “She's gone.”

She looked at him for a long silent moment, then turned away and ducked through the breach.

On the other side of the wall they rounded a corner onto Piekarska Street, a narrow, cobbled lane of brick and stucco buildings, once populated by a number of bakeries. They jogged down the street, past the only one that managed to stay open a day or two a week, until they came to an arched doorway that led to a staircase.

Feeling his way in the dark, with one hand on damp, moss-covered bricks, Adam led the way down a long flight of wooden steps. At the bottom he spotted a faint light emanating from a deep cellar few people knew existed. He took Natalia's hand and led her silently through a narrow tunnel, following the light.

27 A
UGUST

T
HE CELLAR WAS A SUBTERRANEAN CAVERN
about ten meters square, constructed of rough stone walls that arched upward, forming a domed ceiling. The room was illuminated by a single kerosene lantern nailed to a thick center post that Adam guessed had been added at some point to help support the ceiling. Stacked against one of the brick walls were a dozen wooden crates of ammunition. Adam had been here once before, shortly after the AK transferred the weapons they'd captured at the warehouse on Stawki Street. At that time, the room had been full.

Two commandos, who had entered the room from a second tunnel, looked at them curiously then picked up one of the wooden crates and carried it out.

Natalia leaned back against one of the stone walls. She sighed, then slid down and sat on the dirt floor.

Adam's exhaustion returned with a rush, and he slumped down next to her. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, irritated from the smoke and dust. “We should be safe here for a while, unless they drop one of those screaming cows on us.”

Natalia nodded. She sat for several minutes, barely moving, staring at the dirt floor. Finally, without looking up, she said softly, “Do you have any friends, Wolf?”

The question took him by surprise. He glanced at her then looked away, suddenly wishing he had a cigarette.
Friends?
He could barely remember a time when he had friends. He'd had friends when he was a boy, first in Krakow and then in America. And he had friends—acquaintances, actually—at Jagiellonian University where he'd resumed his study of law after returning to Krakow. But that was before the war started and most of them—and what was left of his family—were arrested by the SS, and he was deported from Poland. It was before Whitehall recruited him in London and arranged for his “training,” then sent him off on his solitary mission of murder. “No, I don't have any friends,” he said quietly.