Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

The airspeed of the Halifax was 150 miles an hour, thus a trip of 2,000 miles was going to take thirteen hours-discounting the wind as a factor. Those thirteen hours had to be hours of darkness, from 5:00 P.M. in London to 6:00 A.M. the following morning. And that was cutting it close. The flight could only be made when there was enough of a moon to see the confluence of rivers that would mark the drop zone. This period, the second and third phases of the moon, was code-named Tercet. So the first Tercet with sufficient darkness was 7 October-in fact it was 10 October before he actually took off. That was the moment when there was just enough autumn darkness and just enough moonlight to give the operation a chance of success.

They’d taken him by car to Newmarket racecourse, where the special services had built a secret airfield to house the 138th Squadron-British and Polish aircrews. A final check of his pockets: no London bus tickets, no matchboxes with English words. He was now Roman Brzeski, a horse breeder from Chelm. As he waited to board the plane, a jeep drove across the tarmac and stopped by his side. Vyborg climbed out, holding on to his uniform cap in the backwash from the Halifax’s propellers. The engines were very loud, and Vyborg had to shout as he shook hands. “You’ll be careful?”

“I will.”

“Need anything?”

“No.”

“Well. . No end to it, is there?”

De Milja gave him a mock salute.

“Good luck,” Vyborg said. “Good luck.”

De Milja nodded that he understood.

One of the partisans came into the hut well before dawn, nudging de Milja and the others with his boot. “Work today. Work today,” he said. De Milja got one eye open. “Move your bones, dear friends. Prove you’re not dead.” He gave de Milja, the honored guest, an extra little kick in the ankle and left the hut.

De Milja shuddered in the cold as he worked himself free of the blanket. Through the open door he could see black night, a slice of moon. There would be a skim of ice on the water barrel, white mist hanging in the birch trees. Beside him, Kotior rolled over and sat up slowly, held his face in his hands, cursed the cold, the Russians, the Germans, what women had between their legs, the guard, the forest, and life itself. De Milja forced his swollen feet into his boots, sat up, touched his face-two weeks’ growth of beard, chapped skin-and scratched his ankles where he’d been bitten the night before.

There was a small iron stove in a hut where food was cooked. A young woman handed him a metal cup of powerful, scalding tea; it warmed him and woke him up when he drank it. The woman was dark, muffled in kerchiefs and layers of clothing. “Another cup, sir?”

Educated, he thought, from the pitch of the voice. Perhaps a Jew. “Please,” de Milja said. He held the cup in both hands and let the steam warm his face. Razakavia’s band, about forty men and fifteen women, came from everywhere: a few Russian soldiers, escaped from Wehrmacht encirclement; a few Jews, escaped from the German roundups; a few criminals, escaped from Ukrainian and Byelorussian jails; a few Poles, who’d fled from the Russian deportations of 1939; a few Byelorussians-army deserters, nationalists-who’d fled Polish administration before the Russian occupation. To de Milja it seemed as though half the world had nowhere to go but the forest. He finished the tea and handed the cup back to the young woman. “Thank you,” he said. “It was very good.”

Later he rode beside Razakavia-as always, Kotior somewhere behind them. They had given him, as the honored guest, a Russian panje horse to ride. She was small, with a thick mane and shaggy coat. When the band stopped for a moment, she grazed on whatever weeds happened to be there, apparently she could eat anything at all. They had also given him, as the honored guest who brought explosives and gold coins, one of the better weapons in their armory: a Simonov automatic rifle with a ten-shot magazine box forward of the trigger guard, and two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition.

As they rode two by two on a forest trail, Razakavia explained that a courier had reached them with intelligence from local railwaymen: a small train was due, late in the day, carrying soldiers being rotated back for leave in Germany, some of them walking wounded. There would also be flatcars of damaged equipment, scheduled for repair at the Pruszkow Tank Works outside Warsaw. The train was from the Sixth Panzer Division, fighting 400 miles east at Smolensk.

“We watched them brought up to the line in late summer,” Razakavia told him. “A hundred and sixty trains, we counted. About fifty cars each. Tanks and armored cars and ammunition and horses-and the men. Very splendid, the Germans. Nothing they don’t have, makes you wonder what they want from us.”

At noon they left the forest, and rode for a time along the open steppe. It was cold and gray and wet; they rode past smashed Russian tanks and trucks abandoned during the June retreat, then moved back into the forest for an hour, watered the horses at a stream, and emerged at a point where the railroad line passed about a hundred yards from the birch groves. The line was a single track that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere, disappearing into the distance on either end. “This goes northwest to Baranovici,” Razakavia told him. “Then to Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk, and Viazma. Eventually to Mozhaisk, and Moscow. It is the lifeline of the Wehrmacht Army Group Center. Our Russians tell us that a German force cannot survive more than sixty miles from a railhead.”

A man called Bronstein assembled the bomb for the rails. A Soviet army ammunition box, made of zinc, was filled with cheddite. British, in this case, from the honored guest, though the ZWZ in Poland also manufactured the product. A compression fuse, made of a sulfuric-acid vial and paper impregnated with potassium chloride, was inserted beneath the lid of the box.

De Milja sat by Bronstein as the bomb was put together. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I was a teacher of science,” Bronstein said, “in Brest Litovsk.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it on a stone while he packed cheddite into the box. “And this is science.”

They dug a hole beneath the rail and inserted the mine, the weight of the locomotive would do the rest. A scout-Frantek-came galloping up to Razakavia just as it began to get dark. “It comes now,” he said.

The band settled into positions at the edge of the forest. De Milja lay on his stomach, using a rotten log for cover, feeling the cold from the earth seeping up into his body. The train came slowly, ten miles an hour, in case the track was sabotaged. It was. Bronstein’s device worked-a dull bang, a cloud of dirt blown sideways from beneath the creeping locomotive, wheels ripping up the ties, then the locomotive heeling over slowly as a jet of white steam hissed from its boiler. A man screamed. A German machine-gun crew on a platform mounted toward the rear of the train began to traverse the forest.

De Milja sighted down the barrel of the Simonov. From the slats of a cattle car he could see pinpricks of rifle fire. He returned it, squeezing off ten rounds, then changing magazines as bullets rattled in the branches above his head. One of Razakavia’s men leaped from a depression in the earth on the other side of the track and threw a bomb into the last car on the train. The walls blew out and the wooden frame started to burn. German riflemen, some wearing white bandages, jumped out of the train on the side away from the gunfire and began to shoot from behind the wheels of the cars. De Milja heard a cry from his left, a bullet smacked into his log. He aimed carefully and fired off his magazine, then looked up. A figure in field gray had slumped beneath the train, the wind flapping a bandage that had come loose from his head. De Milja changed magazines again. Some of the German soldiers were shooting from behind a tank chained to a flatcar, de Milja could hear the ricochet as gunfire from the forest hit the iron armor.