Mila 18 - Leon Uris

“Momma ... Daddy ... Momma ... Daddy ...” wailed a woman Fighter. “Momma, I’ll be with you soon.”

Andrei turned abruptly in all directions. Living dead.

He reached down and jerked Wolf Brandel to his feet Wolf slumped at the end of Andrei’s arms like a rag doll. Andrei shook him. Wolf blinked his eyes.

“Fool’s gambit,” he mumbled. “Fool’s gambit ... fool’s gambit.”

Andrei’s hands let Wolf go, and Wolf fell to the ground again and he lolled on the floor, smacking his lips for water. Rachael groveled for her canteen, turned it over. It was empty. Wolf pulled Rachael to him and propped his back against the wall and looked up at Andrei.

“What the hell do you want?” Wolf said. “The canteen is empty. We have no ammunition left.” His hand flopped and hit the accordion beside him. “Even this thing won’t work any more.”

“Get on your feet, you son of a bitch,” Andrei bellowed in a tone that shook the bunker. “Get on your feet! You’re a commander of the Jewish Fighters!”

Wolf Brandel was shocked back to life. He dragged himself up and hung laboriously before Andrei Androfski, swaying back and forth ... back and forth.

“Now, what happened?”

Wolf licked his lips. “Germans ... got close to the bunker ... we all came up. We were committed to fire by a fool who opened up on them. In ten minutes we were out of ammunition ... not a thing left ... so we started throwing stones! Know how well stones stop the German army! Know that, Andrei! Stones! Stones!” Wolf caught his breath and puffed to fill his lungs with air. “They hit us with mortars and flame throwers. I watched ... I watched while they turned my soldiers into torches and I threw stones at them ...”

“Leave him alone, for Christ sake,” Christopher de Monti demanded.

Andrei kept at Wolf. “Is this what is left?”

Wolf blinked like a drunkard and looked at his people. Last night seventy-four of them had sat in the bunker and laughed about wanting to take a bath and how the twenty girls could hardly service the men and if only the men had money what fortunes could be made! And they sang about the Galilee until the accordion broke.

Only a few scraggly scarecrows left ...

“Stop it!” Ana screamed. “Stop it, Andrei!”

Andrei lifted her up and slapped her across the face with a sound that struck everyone in the bunker.

“Stand up, damn you all!” he bellowed unrelentingly. “Stand up, you bastards.”

One by one they struggled to their feet.

“Now hear me. So long as your lungs breathe, you fight. We move back to Mila 18 and we find weapons.”

Christopher de Monti was paralyzed by Andrei’s wrath. Yes, Andrei had the mystic power to take this punch-drunk crowd for yet one more attack.

“Ssshhh ... someone is coming!”

Silence.

Tolek staggered into the bunker. His long hair was caked with innumerable, layers of dirt and muck. He looked like a wild hairy ape from another age. His clothing was torn and his head was bloodied from the reopening of an old wound. He wavered to Andrei and jerked his head toward the commander’s cell.

Andrei and Tolek were alone in Wolf’s room.

“They’ve got Mila 18,” Tolek said.

“Are you sure!”

“Yes. I am sure.”

Simon! Deborah! Rabbi Solomon! Alex! Andrei covered his face in his hands and bit his lip so hard that blood poured from it and he shook so hard that Tolek grabbed his hair and wrenched it. “Hold on, Andrei ... hold on ...”

And then things became very, very clear.

“How many Fighters do you have left, Tolek?” he asked softly.

“A hundred thirty-two.”

“There must be twenty or thirty more on the southern boundary,” Andrei said quickly, his mind calculating and making decision upon decision. He fished around the table top for Wolf’s duplicate map of the sewer system. He marked in a routing. ...

“I’m going back to Mila 18,” he said. “You stay here. At four o’clock I will have rounded up your people and any survivors around Mila 18. We are going to make a diversionary attack on the western side of the ghetto to draw the Germans away long enough for you to take to the sewers. There is only one thing important now. Christopher de Monti must be saved.”

“I’ll go with you to Mila 18,” Tolek said. “Wolf will take them through the sewers.”

“We’ve got no time for this nonsense. You’ll take them through the sewers!”

Tolek clenched his teeth and nodded in obedience.

“At four o’clock when we make our attack you will break radio silence and send a message to the Aryan side that you will be coming out at Prosta Street.”

Tolek’s eyes narrowed.

“Prosta Street! But ... through this course it is over five miles through small connecting pipes! It’s impossible. It will take six or seven hours!”

“Every damned fool who tries the sewers obliges the Germans by walking down main lines. These small laterals are your only chance.”

“The Vistula is running high. Well have to go on our hands and knees in the small pipes. We’ll drown.”

Andrei punched Tolek on the shoulder. “You’ll make it, Tolek. Living Zionism, you know.”

Tolek took the map from Andrei. “I’ll try.”

Andrei stepped out to the main room. He collected the half dozen bulletless guns and pistols and strapped them on his back and tucked them into his waist.

“Well,” he said, “you go to the sewers at four o’clock. Tolek and Wolf will take you through a new route. Have a good trip. See you next year in Jerusalem.”

Wolf and Chris and Rachael stood at the ladder leading out of the Franciskanska bunker, blocking Andrei’s way.

“We heard,” Chris said. “Mila 18 has been attacked. We’re going back with you.”

“Uh-uh,” Andrei answered.

“Don’t try to stop us,” Chris threatened.

In a single motion Andrei jerked Chris’s pistol from his belt and knocked Wolf Brandel flat on his back and shoved his niece sprawling.

“Tolek!” he said, flipping the pistol to him. “If either of these two move, use the pistol. You have my orders to put one through Wolf’s brain. As for Chris, just wing him—but not too seriously, or else he will be a horrible burden dragging through the sewers.”

Chris made an angry pass at Andrei, but Tolek was between them and the cocked pistol was leveled on him. There was no doubt in Chris’s mind that Tolek would follow Andrei’s orders. He snarled, then backed off.

“Chris ...” Andrei said softly. “Don’t forget where those journals are buried ... will you?”

“I won’t forget,” Chris answered hoarsely. “I won’t forget.”

Andrei took two steps up the ladder.

“Uncle Andrei!” Rachael cried.

He stepped down for an instant, and she flung her arms around him and wept.

“It is good,” Andrei said, “that even in this place we still have tears left for each other and broken hearts. It is good that we are still human. Rachael ... you will go from this place and become a fine woman.”

“Good-by, Uncle Andrei.”

Outside, Andrei wrapped the rags on his feet tightly and began darting over the rubble, playing cat-and-mouse with the crisscrossing searchlights, flopping flat ahead of the hurling bombs. A few things left that would burn seared and sizzled. A wall tottered behind him and crashed, sending flying debris about his head. He groped and stumbled and fell and ran in the holocaust.

In an hour he reached Mila 18.

The Germans were gone. As always, they left a bunker after they had poured gas and gunfire and bullets into it, returning in two or three days to send in their dogs before they dared enter themselves. Andrei climbed down the main entrance from the demolished Mila 18. The poison gas had spent its fury.