Antanas Sileika - Underground

She didn’t answer.

OFF PALANGA, LITHUANIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

NOVEMBER 29, 1949

THE WIPERS on the window at the bridge irritably slapped at the constant spray off the Baltic Sea. As the E-boat dipped and then rode up on the swell, Lukas made out on the right the glow from the Lithuanian resort of Palanga. A lighthouse blinked on the left, from the Latvian side.

“Is this the departure point?” Lukas asked.

The German captain pulled the pipe from between his teeth where he had held it for the last hour, long after it had gone out. “Still too far offshore. I’ll come in closer, but you’d better go out to the raft now. And don’t slip off the deck—we haven’t got the time to go looking for you. Check to make sure the raft’s inflated all right. You’ll be on your own as soon as you touch the water.”

Lukas nodded to his two men, but neither one seemed all that enthusiastic now that they were so close. Rudis took a couple more puffs on his cigarette before dropping it at his feet without bothering to butt it. He adjusted his black cap so that each curl of blond hair was tucked beneath the cloth. He did not like to show loose strands. It was the sort of casual insolence that no partisan leader would stand for, but Lukas did not have much choice.

He didn’t like either of his two recruits, but it had been important to get out before the winter in order to make the crossing of the Baltic, and there had been no time for a proper personnel search or training. Lukas had found Rudis waiting on tables in a restaurant. He had deserted from the Wehrmacht in Norway during the war and walked into Sweden. It was not much of a job history, but it did show he knew how to survive. He had been in Stockholm for five years and was still waiting on tables—no ambition to do anything but pick up women with his beautiful hair. To his credit, Rudis was good with a radio and could tap out Morse code at record speed once he had practised for a few days.

The other man, Shimkus, had been a sailor who could not see past his next shore leave. He was lean and agile, happy with a beer and a smoke, and might have been in it for the money—it was hard to tell. Shimkus smiled easily, though it was unclear if he did it from a sunny disposition or a mind free of excess thought.

Everything would be all right if the letter Lukas had sent through an old drop box in Poland made it to its destination.

The Americans were involved in the mission now, along with the Swedes and the British, and as a result Lukas, Rudis and Shimkus were carrying too much materiel: a radio each, MP-44 assault rifles, Walther pistols, ammunition, twenty thousand rubles, a thousand dollars, sleeping pills, cyanide, amphetamines, grenades, penicillin, morphine, aspirin, topographical maps, long folding knives almost as big as bayonets when opened, compasses and secret pencils that wrote in invisible graphite.

Dunlop had needed Lukas to run the mission, but having been spurned by him once, he was not entirely happy to have him back. “The only reason you returned is because of your Lithuanian wife,” he said, as if accusing Lukas of a crime.

They had trained out of a summer house on a fjord south of Stockholm, empty now that the summer was over. Dunlop still drank heavily, but his enthusiasm for it had evaporated. He had lost maybe thirty pounds, not so much that he was thin but enough that his skin looked slack.

“I disapprove of personal motivation,” he continued.

Lukas was practising with the secret pencil, drawing it flat against the sheet one way and then another, and then laying a sheet on top to write the invisible letters. “You’re the one who passed on the message from Lozorius to me. If you didn’t want me, why did you tell me Elena was alive?”

Dunlop had no answer to this. He was very drunk. “Personal motivation is fickle, like love.”

Lukas looked at him closely to see if Dunlop was making a disparaging remark about his two wives. “In the end, personal motivation is all there is. The best causes are the small, personal ones.”

“I wouldn’t call those causes. I’d call them grudges. If everyone thought like you, we never would have defeated the Nazis. If everyone thinks like you, we’ll never defeat the Reds.”

“If everyone thought like me, we wouldn’t have either of those two to begin with.”

By midnight, the E-boat was fifteen-hundred metres from the beach, and the captain gave the order to launch the rubber dinghy. The offshore wind slowed them, but at least it would muffle the noise from the E-boat. Lukas worked the paddle hard, and when he first thought to look back for the E-boat, fifteen minutes had passed and it was already gone. It took two more hours to cover the distance.

The rubber boat was very heavy, so they cut it up at the water’s edge and then pulled the pieces a hundred metres up the beach, where they hid them in the underbrush. Then they shouldered their fifty-kilo packs and, taking a compass reading, headed inland due east, avoiding farmhouses and crossing meadows where the grass stood bristling with frost. Three kilometres inland they found a forest with a cutline, as marked on their map, and they were deeply into it when dawn began to come up. They went in among some bushes to hide themselves during daylight.

Shimkus and Rudis fell asleep with their heads on their packs and Lukas took first watch. Even though it was November and the air was damp and cold, it felt good to be back. For all the freedom of France and Sweden, he had been a foreigner there. Now he was home.

Working in the Swedish summer house with Zoly, Lukas had analyzed Lozorius’s messages out of Lithuania again and again. Why had the man called for Lukas in particular to return to Lithuania? Why not any agents the English could find? There were several possibilities, some better than others. Maybe Lozorius trusted Lukas the way he trusted no one else. Maybe, on the other hand, he wanted to entrap the most prominent representative of the Lithuanian partisans abroad. Some of the Ukrainian partisan spokesmen in Western Europe had already gone missing, and the same was true of the Estonian and Latvian partisans.

“What else has he been telling you in his radio broadcasts?” Lukas had asked Zoly.

“He writes that the underground has got weaker. The central control structure has collapsed and the local units barely have any contact with one another anymore. The senior partisans are mostly dead and the new ones aren’t educated. They can’t run the propaganda newspapers that they used to.”

This information was troubling to Lukas. He was relying on old ties to help him once he got back in. “How did the English like to hear that?”

“I keep telling you, they’re Brits, not English.”

“They can’t tell us apart. Why should I bother?”

“Anyway, the Brits didn’t like Lozorius’s news at all, and they’re not the only ones. The Americans believe Lozorius may have been captured and turned.”

“On what grounds?”

“First, because you and others told them there was a whole, solid underground network in place in the Baltics and his news sounds pessimistic, the kind of thing the Reds might want us to believe. The Americans hate pessimism. Next, they believe that the Reds, having developed an atomic bomb, are more confident and beginning to mass troops for an offensive against Western Europe in the spring. But Lozorius says nothing about massed troops or materiel transports heading west. Therefore, he sounds suspicious.”

Lukas was sitting with Zoly at a table at a window that overlooked the front yard of the house and the sea beyond it. Shimkus and Rudis were being trained for hand-to-hand combat by an Asian Swede. The three looked like sportsmen practising wrestling. The whole session had an air of unreality to it, as if they were playing a game.