The Katyn Order (2 page)

SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Brandt stopped and turned toward the street, a bewildered look in his eyes.
“Ja, was ist—”

The assassin drew the Walther P-38 from the holster and in one smooth motion fired a single shot into Brandt's forehead, then a second into the chest of the driver. He stepped over Brandt's body and fired two quick shots at the SS troopers, who stood staring at him in frozen astonishment. One of them went down instantly. The other required another round.

The striped-uniformed prisoners dropped the crates and stood ramrod stiff, arms in the air, their faces white with fear. An instant later, a group of men wearing red-and-white armbands bolted from the shadows of a building across the street. Brandishing an assortment of weapons, they charged past the stunned prisoners and barged into the warehouse.

From inside, shouts in Polish and German—

Gunshots—

Then it was quiet.

The assassin calmly approached the quivering prisoners and holstered his gun. From his pocket he withdrew a red-and-white armband, emblazoned with the Polish eagle, and slipped it on. “We're AK,” he said. “Armia Krajowa, the Home Army. Get inside.”

He followed the prisoners into the building and down to the cellar, glancing around in satisfied amazement. It was better than he had thought. Jammed into the damp, earthen-floored room, stacked floor to ceiling, were hundreds of wooden crates, their contents clearly identified with stencils in typical German thoroughness: Gew-43 rifles, MP-38 submachine guns, 7.92mm anti-tank rifles, Mausers, Lugers and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It was a cache of weapons the AK desperately needed. It would keep them going for another week, perhaps longer.

Two of the AK commandos dragged Brandt's body and those of the SS troopers into the building, stripped off the troopers' uniforms and put them on. They took the automatic rifles and went back outside. The assassin dispatched a runner to the City Center AK commander, who would send in reinforcements and move up the barricades. The AK had gained another kilometer of territory.

Then he motioned to one of the other commandos, who tossed him a canvas bag. The assassin untied the drawstring, withdrew a handful of red-and-white armbands and held them out to the prisoners. “You're free men now. You can join us or not. It's your choice.”

The prisoners stood immobilized, their dark, sunken eyes wide with astonishment. They were a scrawny lot—dirty and unshaven, lice crawling through their hair—and they were wary, accustomed to expecting the worst at any moment. Finally one of them, a tall emaciated Jew with a yellow star sewn on his uniform, stepped forward and whispered, “Thank you.” He took an armband, slipped it on and saluted with a trembling hand. One-by-one the rest followed.

When the unloading activity resumed, the assassin sat down on one of the crates, removed his eyeglasses and carefully cleaned them with a handkerchief. He put them back on and lit a cigarette. His name was Adam Nowak, or it
had
been, back in another life. It was a name he hadn't used in five years, a name almost forgotten, like the life that had at one time existed for a reason other than murder and mayhem. To his comrades in the AK he was known by a code name, as they all were. His was Wolf. An appropriate name he'd always thought, a night stalker, an
assassin.

Adam glanced at the beamed ceiling as the building shook, sending dust and bits of plaster drifting downward. The shelling was getting closer every night. He brushed the dust off his jacket. The AK had taken the Germans by surprise when they launched the Rising a week ago and had managed to take control of Warsaw's City Center, Old Town and a few other areas. But the victory was short-lived. Now they would pay the price under a barrage of German artillery.

Adam stood up, dropped the cigarette butt on the earthen floor and ground it out under his heel. He walked to the back of the cellar where an enormous, broad-shouldered man with a shaved head stood guard over two other SS troopers captured by the AK commandos when they stormed the cellar. The big man's code name was Hammer. He stood with beefy arms folded, glowering at the SS troopers, who sat on the dirt floor with their hands tied behind them.

Adam was short and slender, though deceptively strong. With his thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, many would expect that he was a banker or an accountant—or a student in law school which, in fact, he had been in his previous life. Standing next to Hammer, he seemed to take up hardly any space at all.

“What do we do with these two?” Hammer asked.

Adam looked down at the German soldiers. They looked young, he thought, just boys. Then he drew the Walther P-38 and shot both of them in the head.

6 A
UGUST

T
HE TRAIN SLOWED
around the last bend, rocking from side-to-side, steel wheels scraping against steel rails as it neared Warsaw's West station. Standing in the passageway between the fifth and sixth cars, Natalia Kowalska held onto a handrail with her right hand and glanced at her watch to check the time. They were three hours late. It was just past five o'clock in the afternoon, but it seemed like the middle of night. She'd seen the fires as the train approached the western suburbs, sliding deeper into the cloud of hazy smoke with every kilometer.

Natalia bent down to see out the window as they crept slowly into the station, passing a line of grim-faced German SS troopers, who stood on the platform clutching submachine guns. When the train finally shuddered to a halt with a blast of venting steam, Natalia jumped to the platform, blinking her eyes against the sting of smoke and ashes. As she pulled out the step to assist the departing passengers, she heard a clatter of hobnail boots pounding down the wooden platform. A guttural voice barked in German,
“Raus! Raus!
Everyone out!”

As the SS officer approached her, Natalia adjusted her blue railway conductor's cap and shouted to be heard over the noise, “This train is continuing on to—”

The officer jabbed his nightstick into her ribs. “Everyone off!
Schnell! Mach schnell!”
Then he marched on ahead, banging against every window, waving his hand,
“Raus! Raus!”

Instantly it was chaos: bewildered people stumbling off the train and scurrying along the platform, dragging luggage and children behind them; SS troopers shouting; dogs barking; the air thick with smoke and haze. Natalia backed up against the brick wall of the station and watched for a moment, keeping her eye on the SS officer, who was trotting farther up the train, banging on windows, jerking people out of the cars and onto the platform. She removed her conductor's cap, stuffed it into the black bag clipped to her belt and stepped into the flow of departing passengers.

Outside, the chaos turned to mass pandemonium. Thousands of panicked and disorientated people clogged the streets, pushing and shoving in all directions. Fires raged while German army trucks plowed through the crowds, running over anyone who couldn't get out of the way. Soldiers leaned over the sides of the trucks, shooting indiscriminately at terrified civilians.

Pulled along with the frenzied crowd like a cork on the ocean, Natalia desperately tried to get her bearings. She was only vaguely familiar with this part of Warsaw, but the rendezvous with her contact was to be at a church in the Wola District, which she knew to be north of this station. The dense smoke and ash made it difficult to see the sun, but Natalia realized the crowd was moving south to escape from the fires. She had to get back across the tracks and head north.

After a few minutes, which seemed like an hour, the stampeding throng crossed a bridge over the railway, and Natalia spotted a breach in the chain-link fence running along the tracks. She shoved and elbowed through the crowd, glancing around to see if any soldiers were nearby, then scrambled down the embankment, dropped to her knees and crawled through the fence.

In the smoke-filled confusion of wailing people, machine-gun bursts and thumping artillery fire, Natalia sprinted across the tracks, then turned and trotted parallel to the fence line until she found another breach—this one caused by the charred remains of a bus that had plowed through the fence—and emerged on the north side.

Keeping to the side streets where there were fewer fires, Natalia made her way north, darting across intersections and ducking between burned-out buildings whenever she heard growling truck engines and clanking tank treads. She rounded a corner and was about to cross over the tram tracks that ran down the center of Avenue Kasprzaka when a crowd of shrieking women and children, running in the opposite direction, knocked her back against a building. As the frantic crowd rushed past, Natalia regained her balance and glanced in the direction they had come from. She froze and stood motionless as her mind tried to comprehend the gruesome scene before her.

Fifty meters away, in the middle of the street, a bulldozer was at work, scooping hundreds of human corpses onto a pile. A gang of SS troopers tossed scraps of wood and paper onto the pile, while another trooper wielding a flamethrower set it ablaze. Beyond the pile, a bus had overturned, and a third gang of SS troopers methodically machine-gunned the passengers crawling out through the windows.

Natalia crept back into the shadows between two buildings and leaned against a brick wall for support, swallowing hard as trucks rumbled past delivering more bodies to the blazing pile. She felt lightheaded and her stomach was churning, so she stayed a few minutes longer until the noxious stench of burning flesh finally forced her to move. Her legs tingled as she crept unsteadily between the buildings, found an alleyway and made a wide circle around the blazing corpses.

An hour later Natalia slipped through the side door of the Church of the Sacred Mother in the center of the Wola District, and was once again assaulted by the scent of death. This time it wasn't an actual smell—though the air was heavy with a pungent sulfurous haze—but more of an aura, an ominous feeling that something dreadful had just happened. She hesitated just inside the door and glanced down the shadowy hallway that led to the sanctuary as the last hazy glimmer of twilight filtered through the transom windows above the door. She took a step into the hallway and—

“Don't!”

She stopped.

“Don't go in there,” whispered a voice from behind her.

The hairs on the back of her neck bristled, and she stood still for a moment, waiting until she could take a breath, then turned slowly toward the voice. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Natalia saw a figure standing in a narrow doorway at the end of the hall opposite the sanctuary. “Falcon?”

“Yes. Come quickly.”

She took a step closer, and the tall, muscular man motioned with his hand. “Follow me. They may come back.”

Natalia followed him through the doorway and down an ancient stone staircase. A lighted kerosene lantern hung from the wall, and Falcon grabbed it and continued on through another doorway. They hurried along a damp corridor with rough stone walls and a beamed ceiling for fifty meters, then entered a small windowless room.

Falcon closed the door behind them and set the lantern on a wooden table. In stark contrast to the madness outside, it was eerily quiet, the air musty, as though they had entered a tomb. “I thought you might not make it,” Falcon said. He turned and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You've seen what they're doing out there?”

Natalia stared at Falcon in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, then shrugged off his hand. “It's barbaric, even for the Nazis. There are bodies everywhere: women, children, piled up in the streets like cordwood. They're setting
fire
to them!” She ran a hand through her short-cropped brown hair and rubbed her irritated eyes. “Who on earth chose
this
location for the rendezvous?”

“Stag, of course. But we held this area until twenty-four hours ago.”

Natalia cursed under her breath. “We got as far as the West Station,” she said. “Then the SS ordered everyone off the train. Everything was on fire, and the area was crawling with storm troopers. I just barely got out of there.”

Falcon hand-rolled a cigarette and lit it. He was a whole head taller than Natalia, with thick black hair and steely dark eyes. The bars of an AK captain were prominent on the collar of his makeshift uniform.

“The church?” she asked.

He shook his head. “They're all dead. The SS herded the whole group into the sanctuary—priests, nuns, a dozen or so children. Gunned them all down. Happened just before you got here. Damned good thing you didn't walk into the middle of it.”

Natalia took the cigarette from him and inhaled deeply.

“What did you see on the way into Warsaw?” he asked. “We've heard they're bringing in reinforcements.”

“That's why it took so long to get here. We were diverted onto sidings three times for German transport trains—tanks, armored cars, artillery, dozens of troop carriers.” She glanced around the small, austere room, suddenly feeling claustrophobic, and took another drag on the cigarette. “The word is that Hitler's furious and he's gone berserk. Imagine a motley bunch of Poles wanting to take back their capital city.”

Falcon managed a grim smile that faded quickly. “They'll step up the artillery barrage again right after dark, so we'd better get the hell out of here.” He pointed at the black bag hanging from her belt. “Anything from Krakow? From the Provider?”

Natalia removed the folded conductor's cap from her bag, thumbed through the railway schedules, ticket vouchers and a variety of other official odds and ends, then carefully lifted up the false bottom. She removed an envelope and handed it to Falcon.

Suddenly, a thundering blast shook the building, and a beam cracked in the ceiling above their heads. Natalia instinctively dropped to her knees as the beam sagged, and a giant chunk of plaster broke loose and shattered on the floor.