Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

Khristo bore the winter cold as best he could and found ways to bear the other kind of chill as well. Would they, he reasoned, teach you French and English unless they intended to send you someplace where such languages were spoken? They would not. So he bent his back to it. It did not come easily, it did not come quickly, but he simply would not let go until he had a deathgrip understanding of it.

“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev. How is the weather today?”

“Good is the weather. Maybe snows little.”

“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”

“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”

“Not leetle , little, lit-tul.”

“Lit-tul.”

“Faster!”

“Little.”

By the hour, by the day, by the week. In February he was twenty years old. Goldman and Voluta and Semmers chipped in and bought him a cream cake. The cream was off. He ate it anyway and showed pleasure, licking his lips enthusiastically and humming with pleasure. Later, in bed, he curled around his stomach and fell into a sleep of exhaustion despite the cramps.

It was comradeship, he came to realize, that brought them through the winter agonies of 1934 and 1935. While the blizzards and the system swirled around them and the purges beat like a drum in the background, they held on to each other and rode out the storms. Perhaps , Khristo thought privately, we are the truest communists in Moscow this winter. We share our pain. We share our food .

The idea had been simple enough: send out an army of Antipins across the mountains and river valleys of Eastern Europe, recruit-never mind how-the young and vigorous. Look for stealth, raw courage, a gift for lies or seduction-you know what we want. Bring them back here. Teach them what they need to know. Make them-one way will work as well as the next-our own. Marxists, patriots, criminals, outcasts, adventurers. Mix it up, boys, you never know what you’ll need. They will be ours . Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croats-our brothers and sisters to the west. War is surely coming, and these seeds will make a harvest in future famines.

It was equally logical to run them through in batches, keep them in a group, for one always wanted to be sure where everyone was . In a country of two hundred million souls that covered eleven time zones, you could misplace the damnedest things: entire trains, whole battalions. Sometimes you never did find them. The country had a way of swallowing up what most normal persons would hold to be entirely indigestible objects, it drove some technicians quite literally mad.

Thus convenience for the accountants of the system made for the salvation of its inventory-survival could only be managed if they took care of each other. They learned that everyone in the group had something to offer. They learned who the stool pigeons were and fed them on small sins to maintain their credibility so that new, and unknown, informers would not be introduced. Thus together they learned their lessons.

March, no sign of a thaw, winter giving every sign of an encore, it was their turn to occupy the village of Belov on the river Oka.

An outing! A half-day ride in a rattly wooden railcar, chugging past bare birch groves and black-green forests of fir with snow-weighted boughs. Real countryside: woodcutters’ huts, the occasional farm field in a peculiar shape. The Russians, to everyone’s amazement, farmed in oddly configured patches of land, nothing square, perhaps the result of endless divisions of the versts among sons over the centuries. But all they saw was new, and that was what mattered. It made their blood run fast after the shut-in winter months in claustrophobic Moscow. They yelled and capered and carried on like kids. Kerenyi managed to free the upper half of one of the windows. Painted-a horrid Soviet institutional green-shut for years, it shrieked as it opened, borne down by Kerenyi’s great strength. At last, delicious cold air seasoned with railroad soot came rushing into the car. Hooray! Reaching up through the window, Kerenyi returned with a handful of snow from the roof. A rapid shaping in red hands, then a fat snowball sailed out the open window toward a hut. A near miss! They threw themselves on the other windows, and soon enough they were shelling the scenery amid shouts of triumph and exasperation. Well, you know how it is. It would have to be Iovescu, that appalling snitch, who would get it in the back of the head. Fat-faced goody-goody from the Banat. With vengeful eye he searched the crowd who, as one, raised their shoulders in shrugs of angelic innocence. Finally-wouldn’t you know it-he picked on Ilya Goldman, one of the smallest, and chucked a fistful of loose snow at him. There was only one answer to that. The ensuing volley hit Iovescu and everybody else, producing squeals of fury as snow worked under the odd collar. Mayhem followed. In the melee, Karina Olowa, a little blond thing from Wilno, journeyed stealthily to the platform between cars and returned with a colossal snowbomb which, launched upward, splattered against the ceiling and rained down on various heads. A huge cry arose and that, at last, brought Lieutenant Akhimova and the other officers on the run. Order was restored. They’d used up most of the roof snow anyhow.

In the little village of Belov they took over various thatch-roofed huts-where the Belovians themselves had got to, nobody could say-with wood bunks covered by mothholed blankets. They built coal fires in the stoves, trooped down to the church for dinner, where iron pots of soup were boiling and misshapen loaves of rye-flour bread were set out on long tables. After a winter of potatoes and cabbage and fish-bone soup, the smell of food was thrilling. There may even have been a few private thoughts of home. They built a bonfire that night and sang songs, then trooped off to their respective houses-just like real townspeople-and slept the sleep of city dwellers on their first night in the country.

The next morning, after tea and bread, they went to work.

They were divided into fourteen teams of four-each team designated by a number and given numbered strips of material to pin to their collars. Khristo, Goldman and Voluta were a team, joined by a tall Yugoslavian named Drazen Kulic who, in his late twenties, was rather older than most of the others. Kulic seemed to have lived his life away from the sun-his hair, eyes and skin were almost without color. Yet he did not fade into the background; his presence was physical, hard, and there was something in the set of his face that was watchful and unforgiving.

The four were designated Unit Eight.

In the first exercise of the day, half the units entered Belov as security police, the other half were given blank-loaded Tokarev pistols, wooden boxes supposedly containing explosives, a notebook labeled List of Partisan Units , and signaling flares-contraband to hide in their huts. As counterinsurgency officers, Unit Eight was assigned to search houses at the southern end of the village.

On the edge of town, waiting for the whistle that would begin the exercise, Unit Eight held a meeting. Khristo would be the captain, would have final say in all things, though all would participate in planning and executing operations. Ilya Goldman was appointed intelligence officer and freed from all other obligations. He immediately undertook to make lists of the units they would oppose and cooperate with during the exercises. Goldman, a lover of detail, set himself to annotate these lists-in his own code-with observations on personalities, strengths and weaknesses in each unit.

The first argument began right there. Now that Goldman was intelligence officer, he wanted a staff. Typical! Give him an inch and he took a mile! Goldman waited for the other three to calm down, then explained patiently. Lists took time, and observation. Operational efficiency could be sacrificed, for a day or two, in favor of acquiring data that (A) would be useful in defeating opposing units and (B) could be marketed to other units in exchange for cooperation-thereby increasing the data files and making the potential for trading even more productive.