Antanas Sileika - Underground

Lakstingala read the situation the same way, and called out Lukas’s name while telling the others to hold their fire and so provoke the sniper to fire more often.

Lukas raised his rifle and aimed at the window. At the next muzzle flash, even before he heard the report, he fired, and then heard the incoming shot and a grunt from inside the house. Hearing the grunt, Lakstingala rose, struggled through the snow up to the house and threw a hand grenade inside.

Lakstingala waved them all over. None of the men had been shot, but Vincentas looked frightened. “They knew we were coming,” said Lakstingala breathlessly, wiping the sweat and melted snow from his face. “Watch all the windows as you go into town. The doorways too. And don’t bunch up. Now come on, Flint is far ahead of us and I don’t want to fall behind.”

By the time they made it onto the street, the inhabitants, both guilty and innocent, had taken shelter and hunkered down. Most of the shutters were closed; there was no movement except for a man in what looked like a uniform running toward the slayer headquarters. Without thinking, Lukas raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed and shot the man in the back.

Vincentas looked at him and shook his head. Amid the tension and confusion, Lukas permitted himself a moment of exasperation for his brother and swore he would do nothing more to protect him. There was no time for other thoughts.

Lakstingala’s group ran up to the dead man and identified him as indeed a dead slayer, his dropped rifle at his side.

“Take the rifle,” Lakstingala said to Vincentas, “and check for grenades. Take those too. You,” he said to Lukas, “hang back last and keep your rifle up. Cover us as we move forward.”

Lukas did as he was told. The men went up to a crossroads with wooden houses on all four corners. The baroque church with its stone wall, iron gate and steeple stood nearby.

Lakstingala looked both ways and made it across, but the second man was hit by a burst of automatic fire. There was a machine gun up in the church steeple. The church was manned as a defensive position.

Lukas could not get a good shot at the steeple without exposing himself, and so stood little chance of hitting the man in there, but he harassed the sniper with short, three-round bursts of fire as often as he dared until the others made it across the open space. There was no one to cover him. He waited a few moments and then ran across, a burst of machine gun fire clipping at his heels until he made it to safety.

Lukas stood leaning against the wooden wall of a house, breathing hard, when the shutter creaked, opened, and a rifle barrel came out. Lakstingala fired two shots from across the road and the rifle clattered onto the cobblestones outside. Without pausing to consider if the man who had stuck out the rifle barrel had hidden himself among women or children, Lukas tossed a hand grenade into the room and waited for the explosion before looking to Lakstingala for further orders.

“Take the fallen rifle too,” said Lakstingala to Vincentas.

“I can’t carry all this.”

“Just sling it over your shoulder.”

There was no time to go back for the fallen partisan at the crossroads. He was not moving anyway, and he lay in the line of fire of the sniper in the church steeple. Intensely aware of not making themselves visible from the steeple, Lakstingala’s men threaded their way to the one-storey stucco headquarters of the slayers in a small square not far from the centre of town. Along the way they came upon an overturned Studebaker, empty, with a leaking gas tank that had spilled fuel across the entire road.

“Be careful not to set the gasoline on fire,” said Lakstingala, and the men walked through it gingerly, though Ungurys slipped and went down on his side before rising again.

By now sounds of rifle shots and machine gun fire came from many different places. The resistance of the Reds was sporadic, most of the local Communists having fled to cellars and pantries. The church steeple needed to be avoided. Whenever Lukas could see it from some new vantage point, he fired upon it in order to make the sniper more frightened, less vigilant in taking opportunistic shots at the partisans.

The slayer headquarters had a heavy wooden door. The building was full of men, with at least two rifles at every window. Lakstingala’s band could not draw closer than the trees at the perimeter of the yard. One of the partisans had a heavier machine gun with a tripod, but even those bullets could not pierce the thick walls, and there was no way to get a good position to fire upon the wooden doors.

Lakstingala studied the building. “Concentrate your fire on the two windows on the east side,” he said. “Don’t waste all your ammunition, but try to shoot out all the glass and take out the crossbar of the window frame. I don’t want any obstructions.”

The five men fired upon the windows furiously, and soon they were only empty openings. They received no return fire while they were shooting, the men inside likely lying on the floor to protect themselves.

The partisans had to keep up sporadic fire to permit Ungurys the time to come to a kneeling position with the panzerfaust on his shoulder. It was a single-shot weapon, and they did not have another. It was essential that he shoot into the window to achieve maximum damage, and to do it quickly before the men inside had time to position a machine gun at that window.

“Remember that the men inside killed our partisans a couple of days ago,” said Lakstingala. “Show them no mercy. Kill anyone who escapes.”

Ungurys braced himself with this left shoulder against a tree and stayed within close coverage of the wall of the house behind him to protect himself from the sniper in the church steeple. Lakstingala had the others spread out to kill any survivors who might escape from the door or windows after the rocket was fired.

The missile entered the window perfectly, struck some obstruction inside, and exploded so strongly that all the remains of the other windows and the door blew out.

There were no survivors.

The partisans would have cheered, but they turned at the screams of Ungurys. None of them had fired a panzerfaust before, and none had been aware that the back flash was murderous if there was any obstruction behind the shooter. By staying close to a wall to keep out of sniper range, Ungurys had permitted the back flash to ignite him, and the gasoline he had trod through now burned as well. Lakstingala moved forward to knock him into the snow, but the church steeple sniper saw Ungurys and shot him.

Lakstingala and the three other men fell back into the cover of a house when Ungurys went down. His clothes continued to burn, but he did not move.

The smouldering hair and flesh smelled bad.

Lukas and the others watched helplessly for a few minutes until the snowfall began to thicken. It mixed with smoke that was rising from fires around the town. Then Lakstingala, masked from the steeple by the falling snow, stepped forward and patted down the flames that still burned on Ungurys’s body. Lukas joined him and together they dragged the body within the protection of the wall.

Though he was tired and frightened, Lukas felt a pang for Elena, who had loved Ungurys so well.

Lukas had been sweating, and now he could feel the sweat cooling on him, making him shake a little. His brother’s face was covered with dirt and soot and he looked stunned. Lukas would have liked to rest a little, but Lakstingala gave them no more than a few minutes.

The snow began to fall more thickly. With nothing in particular to shoot at, the sniper in the church steeple fired in short, random bursts, putting the men on edge. Although the sniper could not see them, they could no longer see him either and could never be precisely sure when they might fall in the line of fire.