Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

“iC -38 and seven K-class tugs-out of Bratislava.”

“Where bound?”

“Vac prison.”

“Say again, iC -38 .”

“Vac prison.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“Long ago.”

“The Russians are up there. Are you under orders?”

“Yes, sir. To remove special prisoners to the rear.”

“Written orders?”

“Verbal orders. From the SS. A German colonel accompanies us, would you like to hear it from him? I can wake him up for you.”

“Proceed, K-38.”

“Thank you.”

“God help you.”

“One hopes.”

The searchlight blinked out, and the running lights of the patrol boat faded away as it returned to station in midstream.

The convoy steamed on into the darkness, its slow progress taking them toward the steady beat of artillery exchanges in the hills above Vac. They could now see yellow muzzle flashes on the ridge-lines, and a piece of burning debris arced gracefully above them and hissed into the water. At first, the bass thudding of the gunnery was a massive rumble, low and continuous, that rolled and echoed above the river. But as they drew closer, the sound resolved into separate parts: the low thump of field mortars, the whistle of Wehrmacht 88 s and the sigh of Russian field-gun rounds, the rhythmic crackle of machine-gun fire and the muffled impacts of exploding shells.

As they steamed around a bend in the river, the horizon glowed brighter and brighter and the sound swelled in volume. Then they were in the middle of it.

It was like a nightmare, he thought, because he wanted to run but could not move. His eyes streamed with tears from the billowing smoke-suddenly every object was blurred and misshapen. The prison on the far bank was burning, towers of flame from the roof and cell windows rolling into the sky as though sucked upward by an immense wind. The air around him buzzed and sang, and he thought he could hear voices from the near bank, calling out in a strange language, and a huge shower of sparks rained down on the boat. Then the water exploded, a white wall, and the river rocked backward. The window glass trembled and water sprayed across it, a prism refracting clouds of tracer, the fiery prison, the shore ahead stuttering from white light to blind darkness and back again. He went deaf. Braced himself against the pilothouse wall and felt the Tisza taking fire, like an animal kicking the hull.

The stern of iC -38 began to move away from them and Khristo tore himself from the wall and ran crouched along the deck, throwing the hatch back and jumping six feet into the hold. He opened the boiler door with a bare hand-saw the red stripe across his palm but felt nothing. He piled armloads of brushwood through the opening, kicking it into the roaring furnace as it snagged on the rim, bowed and resisted as though it did not want to burn. The Tisza rocked again. He slammed the door with his boot and leaped up the ladder onto the deck. An enormous yellow flare went off above him and a wind knocked him flat on his face. He scrambled to his knees, ready to swim, then saw that it was the boat behind them. Its pilothouse was gone, stack bent over to the deck with white steam spraying from one side. As he watched, the boat yawed out toward midriver, a line of little flames licking along the bow. He scurried toward the pilothouse, like a rat in a burning barn, he thought, and saw human shapes onshore, running with the boat, their arms raised in supplication. One of them tried to swim out, then vanished.

What they did in Budapest, two days later, seemed entirely ingenuous. That was necessary. Had the tracks of planning and calculation showed through, it would have raised questions . But what he contrived was just simple enough, naive, to have about it a taste of the peasant’s innocence, and Khristo well understood what the Russians thought about that-especially those Russians whose job it was to think about things. It made them sentimental, for they saw their former selves in it.

Budapest was eighteen miles downriver from the Vac prison, just far enough behind the front lines to be, by then, choked with apparat of all sorts. The tugboat captains feared that as much as Khristo did, and river gossip confirmed their fears. There would be no sneaking through a web of those proportions-it had to be confronted.

Once the fighting was well behind them, Janos led them into a narrow stream which, at first, did not appear navigable, then widened suddenly and ran four or five miles into the empty countryside. What a dark alley was to a criminal, he thought, this byway to nowhere was to the boats. “When we have no customs stamp, we unload here,” was how Annika put it. “We are all smugglers, of course,” she added offhandedly, “some of the time.” The tugs tied off to trees on the bank, then everyone fell into a sleep of exhaustion.

The following morning, he joined the crews in chopping brush. Annika had applied lubricating grease to the burn and bound it up with an old engine rag, and the right hand slid up and down the ax handle anyhow, so he was able to manage it. He relished the work, laboring under a pallid sun with his jacket and shirt off, the sweat running down his back. Both blades of the double-bit ax were sharp, and he could take a two-inch trunk down with two or three wallops. Softwood was like that, of course, but he fancied himself a great woodsman nonetheless, the darkness of Prague and the terror of the previous night sweating itself out of him as he hacked at the brush.

They made a fire and burned the Hungarian flags, then patched the hulls with canvas and tar, which would have to do until they got to a boatyard. There, he was told, fabled craftsmen could saw out a damaged section of wood and then, almost unbelievably, reproduce the precise curve and size of planking to be tamped back into place with mallets. Then, using a long file called a slick, they would bring the new planking to a perfect harmony with the old hull. And it would never leak.

At sunset, they stood in a circle with caps in hand and Janos spoke a short prayer for the lost crew and tugboat. Many of them had been slightly wounded going past Vac-a steam scald, a broken wrist, two minor shrapnel injuries, Khristo’s burned hand-but they all felt themselves fortunate to see the sun go down that night. They were close to Budapest, there were those who wanted to go on right then and have it over with, but Khristo made a short speech, translated by Annika, and they eventually decided to trust his perception of Soviet bureaucracy-which by nightfall was wobbly at best and sometimes surly, from a full day’s vodka ration, and didn’t much like the darkness in the first place.

The next morning, Annika chose a young, whippy birch and Khristo felled it and trimmed the branches. About his further preparations she was less than pleased, but admitted glumly that it would be for the best if a strong effect were achieved. “It is hard to know with that sort of army,” he explained. “Maybe they hug you, maybe they squeeze off half a magazine in your belly. They themselves don’t know what they’re going to do until the mood takes them.”

“Ja, ja,” she said, not really convinced he was right. Khristo’s preparations had made a grave dent in her supplies, and she felt she might regret that in the future.

But she was proud of him later on that day, as they steamed downriver through the center of Budapest, he could see that. He was standing forward of the pilothouse with a ten-year-old boy borrowed for the occasion from another boat- Tisza was the leader of this convoy, and everybody, Annika included, knew they had to make an impression. Khristo turned at one point and looked in the pilothouse window and saw a sly and appreciative grin on her face.