Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

Thus, on the morning of January 17, he made his way to a shattered tenement on the edge of what had once been the Jewish ghetto, where a group of youngsters was busily breaking down-emptying sandbags, tearing apart a wall built of paving stones-a machine-gun emplacement that had somehow survived the destruction of the city. A girl of thirteen greeted him and handed over a small slip of brown paper. They stood together at the edge of an enormous hole that had been blown in the street by a German 88 round. Voluta could see down into a sewer, where black water flowed sluggishly past, sometimes carrying a body in its current. From the distance, the sound of a Russian marching band could be heard, brassy and discordant. Voluta read the slip of paper quickly, then put it in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said to the girl. Then nodded toward the blare of the music and added, “You must be careful now, you know.”

She smiled at him, face gray with soot and ash, hands wound with rags against barrel burns from the machine gun, feet lost in a preposterously large pair of Wehrmacht tanker’s boots. “I shall be, Father,” she said to him, “you may be sure of that.”

“You had no trouble across the river?”

“No, Father, no trouble. They were all snoring like krokodil , and, anyhow, I have learned to be invisible.”

He nodded, said good-bye, then touched her face for a moment. His heart swelled with things to be said but he could say none of them.

At nightfall, he left the city, dressed as a laborer. The following morning, dressed as a priest, he crossed through rearguard elements of the retreating German divisions, giving his blessing to those soldiers who requested it. After that, he headed south and a little west, meaning to deliver the slip of brown paper to the “KS” named by the NOV officers in Rome. The message could have been moved unobtrusively into diplomatic channels-far more efficient than a priest walking by daylight through the battered and frozen countryside-but the NOV officers knew the ways of bureaucrats, knew the fate of paper that sat on desks.

So he walked, sometimes riding a little way with a farmer who still had a horse and cart, day after day, often through snow, moving always southwest, along one of the many escape routes-some so old and well used that they were marked by fugitive’s huts-that led out of Poland.

They had come to Khristo Stoianev in December of 1944 and asked him to undertake the FELDSPAR mission. They had not threatened him-they were the OSS, not the NKVD-but neither had they relieved him of any obligation he might place upon himself. They were all very well dressed, these people, and they spent money like water, taking him to lunch or dinner over a three-week period and sliding Swiss franc notes from leather wallets and dropping them atop the check on its little plate and not waiting for change. “We don’t want you to feel we’re putting pressure on you,” one of them said in the grand dining room of the Hotel Schwarzwald in Bern, putting extraordinary pressure on him at precisely that moment. “It would,” the man said ruefully, knocking cold ash from the bowl of his pipe by smacking it against his palm, “be very dangerous work.”

“Where is it?” he’d asked.

The man put the pipe in his mouth and made a whistling sound by blowing into it a few times, making sure the stem was clear. “Prague,” he said.

“I cannot speak native Czech,” Khristo answered.

“No, you can’t,” the man said, “but you’ll do for a Yugoslav. Perhaps a machinist, forced labor, you know the sort of thing.” He began to pack tobacco into his pipe from a leather pouch as a waiter came gliding to the table like a swan and began the exquisitely laborious process-silver urn, gleaming hotel china, silver cream pitcher, sugar bowl and tongs-of serving coffee.

Who could say no?

Who could bear the subsequent weight of Episcopalian disappointment, unvoiced but not uncommunicated, the dreadful undercurrent of icy sympathy extended to those who have proven themselves, at last, cowards and failures. We don’t blame you, of course, it’s just not in your nature to accept danger , they would say. Or, rather, much worse, they wouldn’t say.

Yet the approach could be resisted and often enough was-by those to whom survival really was paramount-but Khristo was not among them. His dining companion’s eyes twinkled as he sipped his coffee and looked over the rim of his cup. “I’m proud of you. I really am,” he said as he set the cup down. “Once this Nazi business is done with”-he lit the pipe at last, and the table was wreathed with drifts of sweet-smelling smoke-“well, there’s always the future to consider.”

It was said as an afterthought, almost, we know you don’t require an inducement, but here’s one anyhow . The man’s expression, in that moment, had something of the philosopher about it, suggesting he knew all too well that people accepted such missions for reasons of the heart, and that material rewards were of no consequence once the real danger was considered. Thus Khristo found himself bribed and flattered in the same moment. Wily old bastard , he thought, enjoying the performance for the pure virtuosity of it. “Someone has to do it,” the man said, shaking his head in wonder at what the world seemed to demand of both of them.

And the restaurant bills were nothing compared to what they spent on him after the operation got under way. The NKVD, he thought, would have woven an elaborate conspiracy to achieve the same results, using coercion, ideology-whatever human pressure point could be laid bare. The Americans, on the other hand, fought with money and technology, and they were extravagant with both.

They flew Khristo down to OSS headquarters in Bari, Italy, and trained him in the use of the new J-E radio. The Joan-Eleanor communications system had been the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Steve Simpson, an engineer from RCA, who named the invention after a certain Joan, a WAC major he quite liked, and Eleanor, the wife of his associate, DeWitt Goddard. Clandestine communications to that point had depended on the self-descriptive suitcase radio. The J-E radio was six inches long, had an aerial that unfolded to one foot in length, and transmitted to a receiver in a British De Havilland Mosquito-a fast little two-man fighter-bomber with a range of 1800 miles-circling above the transmission point. And the German radio reparage could not locate a J-E radio.

On a quarter-moon night in early January, Khristo Stoianev was parachuted into the Czech countryside south of Prague, the insertion achieved by a B-24 Liberator specially modified for agent drops behind enemy lines. The bomber was painted matte black, making it nearly invisible, even when tracked by German searchlights. The exhaust flame was shielded, the ball turret normally found on the belly of the plane had been removed-altering its silhouette-and a hinged plywood panel installed in its place to serve as exit hatch for the parachutist. The navigator’s compartment in the nose of the airplane was sealed off in such a way as to create the total darkness required for visual navigation at night. On a normal bombing run, great numbers of planes flew over a target at 20,000 feet, protected by fighter squadrons.

Agent insertion technology demanded that the plane fly alone, 500 feet above the ground, at the slowest possible speed-sometimes less than 120 miles per hour-the sort of contour aviation that demanded some moonlight and a cloudfree night. The navigator followed roads, or moonlight reflected from rivers or lakes. Some of the runs used German concentration camps as beacons, since they were lit brightly all night long to discourage escapes.

Khristo landed without difficulty, in the proper location. His papers were excellent forgeries, typed on German typewriters, stamped properly with German inks, and the legend created for him-a fictitious life cycle from birth to present-was indeed as the man with the pipe had suggested it might be. He was a Yugoslav conscript worker of Croatian origin, a machine tool expert and drill-press operator, a valuable asset to the Reich. He carried a thick wad of German Reichsmarks and Czech crowns and an additional sum in gold coins. His map was perfect, guiding him into Prague along the Vltava River in something under six hours once he had stolen a bicycle. He made his way to a safe house, owned by a mathematics teacher, where he was received with cheese dumplings and eggs.