The Katyn Order (4 page)

The turret stopped.

The hatch popped open, and black smoke billowed out. A tank crewman frantically clawed his way out the open hatch, face blackened with soot, his shirt on fire. He was halfway out when he collapsed and slid back into the burning tank.

Natalia stood ramrod stiff. Her ears rang so badly she couldn't hear, but she caught a sudden flash of movement from the corner of her eye.

On the other side of the square, a German Army truck barreled onto the lawn and skidded to a halt. Waffen-SS troopers leaped from the back of the truck and charged across the lawn toward the PIAT crew. An instant later a horde of screaming AK commandos poured out of the buildings surrounding the square.

Gunfire erupted from every direction—

SS troopers fell—

Commandos fell—

Bodies clashed in a melee of hand-to-hand combat—

Then it was over.

In a haze of gun smoke, a small group of breathless commandos stood motionless in the center of the square, surrounded by dozens of dead bodies.

Natalia leaned back against the building and wrapped her arms around her chest, staring at the carnage in the square. Overwhelmed by the madness and the senseless, brutal slaughter, her mind went blank. She felt . . . numb.

In the street, the woman who had struggled to lift her head was now still.

The boy crouched next to her. Blood trickled from a cut on his cheek, and his blond hair was matted with dust. He was called “Rabbit” by the AK commandos because he could run like the wind, and he knew where the stockpiles of Molotov cocktails were hidden in the cellars, trash bins and sewers throughout Warsaw's City Center.

Natalia slowly slid down and put a hand on the boy's knee. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

Rabbit shook his head. “I didn't do anything. We'd both be dead now if it hadn't been for Wolf.”

“Wolf?”

“The commando wearing the glasses, the one they call ‘the assassin.' Damn, I wish I could shoot like that.”

Natalia searched the square for the slender AK commando, but the haze was too thick and dozens of people were milling around. She leaned her head back against the building and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

Rabbit rolled a cigarette. He licked the edge of the paper, stuck the limp cylinder in the corner of his mouth and struck a match. He inhaled deeply then handed it to her.

Natalia took a drag from the flimsy cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for a moment before exhaling slowly. It helped. She took a second drag and handed it back. “Where is your home?” she asked.

“Anywhere I happen to be,” the boy said with a shrug. “Fuckin' Krauts bombed our house in '39. But I'm still here. They aren't gonna haul
me
away like they did my brother.”

“Your brother?”

Rabbit picked a bit of tobacco off his lip and spit in the street. “He was two years older than me. We were the only ones who made it to the cellar that night. But six months later a couple of SS bastards stopped him on the street . . .” He took a drag on the cigarette and stared at the ground.

“You've haven't seen him again?”

Rabbit shook his head. “I stayed with my aunt for a while, but she got sick and died. AK's my family, been that way for most of the war.”

The boy looked up, staring silently into the street and the square beyond, holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. After a few minutes he flicked an ash and said, “He was bigger than me, but I could beat his ass in football anytime.” His eyes widened, and he smiled broadly as though he were seeing the game being played out in front of them. “He'd always line up on the opposite side, and he'd try like hell to give me a shoulder or take a swipe at my ankle, but I was too fast, way too fast. He'd curse at me, call me every name in the book and try to run me down, but I'd just laugh and pound the ball into the goal.”

“What was his name?”

The smile slowly slid off his face. Then he carefully stubbed out what was left of the cigarette and put it in his shirt pocket. “We don't have names, remember?”

They sat quietly for awhile, watching the square as the last of the hospital patients were carried off. Another group of AK operatives appeared, riding in a battered truck filled with concrete paving blocks and railroad ties. Barricades went up and flags were raised. Territory was gained, perhaps to be lost again the next day.

15 A
UGUST

C
OLONEL
S
TAG RAPPED HIS KNUCKLES
on a table, and the chatter in the room subsided. It was warm, the air heavy with cigarette smoke and body odor as more than fifty AK officers and commandos jammed into the cellar of the Polonia Bank building. Natalia sat next to Falcon on the right side of the room, occasionally glancing up at the ceiling at the sound of German artillery fire, now less than a kilometer to the west.

It had been three days since her encounter with the Panther tanks, and she and Rabbit had been involved in several other firefights since then, but none nearly as bad as the bloodbath at the hospital. She'd been lucky so far: just some scratches and bruises, and her hip still ached from the fall on the first day. But she was tired. She hadn't slept well, seeing images of the women dragged under the tank every time she closed her eyes.

Falcon put his arm around the back of her chair as Colonel Stag started the briefing. His hand brushed against her shoulder. She didn't respond. Sometimes she did but not always. It was a casual thing, their affair. Nice enough at times, but generally . . . tedious.

The building shook again, harder this time, and several of the AK commandos near Natalia glanced around nervously. The Germans were firing massive anti-siege howitzers from railcars that launched projectiles weighing more than two tons, the infamous “screaming cows” that could flatten entire buildings with a single strike.

“We've lost the Wola District,” Colonel Stag said gravely, his hands folded tightly on the table in front of him. A murmur of curses swept through the room. The colonel stood up and stepped over to a map of Warsaw hanging on the back wall. With a red marker he drew a line along the western edge of the City Center. “General Bor has ordered all remaining AK units in Wola to pull back behind this line. The barricades are being reinforced tonight. The last of the weapons have been removed from the warehouse on Stawki Street and relocated to Old Town.” He took another marker and made five
X's
along the red line. “We'll set up machine guns and mortars at these points. Riflemen will be positioned in the windows of the buildings behind them. We expect they'll hit us hard tomorrow. At all costs, we hold this line.”

“What about communications with our units in the Jolibord District?” someone asked from the center of the room.

“We're running telephone lines through the sewer mains,” Stag replied. “The work has already started. We've pulled Rabbit and some of the other boys off ‘cocktail duty' to help out, especially to crawl through some of the smaller tunnels.”

A few good-natured cheers and bursts of laughter broke out as someone shouted, “Rabbit better not carry those cocktails with him. The fumes will set them off!”

Natalia turned to see who made the joke. It was a heavyset, barrel-chested man with a full beard, clenching a cigar between his teeth. Then she noticed someone else, another man, who stood nearby, yet slightly apart from the crowd. He looked like—

Her attention was diverted back to the front of the room as the colonel rapped the table again. “We've received reports from the British that we can expect an RAF airdrop tomorrow night. This time the target area is Place Krasinskich.”

Another murmur rippled through the crowd. A man behind Natalia muttered, “Good Christ, flying right through the city with smoke as black as hell and anti-aircraft guns firin' those fuckin' 88s.”

“What about the Russians?” another commando asked. “When are they coming in?”

Colonel Stag's face tightened. “We've had no direct contact with them, but our intelligence reports say they will be arriving soon.”

Natalia shook her head. She knew it was all lies. Colonel Stag probably did too. She had been raised in a small village in eastern Poland. Her brother had been a cavalry officer, captured by the Russians after their sneak attack in September of '39. Then, two weeks later, when the Red Army entered their village and burned it to the ground, her parents and her uncle and aunt had disappeared along with hundreds of others. None of them had ever been heard from again.

As Colonel Stag was about to adjourn the briefing, an AK officer wearing the uniform of a Polish Army captain stood up and cleared his throat. Natalia recognized him. His code name was Pierre, the commander of AK forces in Wola. He was a friend of Falcon's and about the same age, but tonight he looked much older. His face was drawn, and there were dark pouches under his eyes. His voice cracked as he spoke. “More than thirty thousand civilians in the Wola District were murdered
just last week,
Colonel. Women, children, even priests and nuns, their bodies tossed into heaps and burned like garbage.”

The room fell silent.

Pierre took a long breath before continuing. “It's that monster Heisenberg and his SS Twenty-Ninth Brigade. More than half of those vicious bastards are criminals the Germans released from concentration camps. The rest are conscripted Russians and Ukrainians. They're just wanton killers, slaughtering innocent people! We've been ordered to pull out of Wola, but we've got to
do
something about that son of a bitch!”

Colonel Stag was silent for a moment, his expression darkening. “SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Heisenberg is under surveillance,” he said finally.

Pierre persisted. “Do we have a plan—?”

“Wolf will take care of it.”

Heads in the group turned to the left. Natalia followed their gaze to the man she had noticed earlier, the one who stood apart from the group. He was slightly built, but in a wiry, rugged sort of way, with thinning hair. He wore glasses—

“Natalia?”

“What?”

Falcon leaned close. “I said we should go.”

She nodded.

The man called Wolf looked directly at her; their eyes met for an instant, then he turned away and headed for the door.

The meeting was breaking up, but Natalia remained in her chair, staring at the doorway.

Falcon put a hand on Natalia's shoulder and squeezed. “Wolf?” he whispered. “You know him?”

Natalia shook her head. “No . . . I don't.” She managed a thin smile. “It's nothing. Let's go.”

Adam sat on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette in his tiny third-floor room overlooking the square in Warsaw's Old Town. The briefing had ended an hour ago, and he was mulling over some details of tomorrow's mission when his thoughts drifted to the young woman wearing a railway conductor's uniform who'd been sitting across the room next to Falcon. The uniform must be a cover, allowing her to travel safely from Krakow to Warsaw. He'd heard that someone was making that run—an AK operative in Krakow, an undercover courier who'd been smuggling Nazi documents for years.

Adam realized he had seen her once before, a few days earlier, in the midst of the battle at the hospital when she had run into the street to rescue one of the women who'd been dragged under the tank. She was petite and rather plain, not remarkable in any way. Yet, there was something . . .

He shook his head to clear away the distraction. What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the mission. That's the way it had been for years, just the mission, no distractions, no connections, nothing—just the killing. And that was fine with him. The killing was what mattered. It pushed everything else into a dark corner of his mind and kept things simple. Just the way he wanted it, one single emotion to keep him focused: revenge . . . simple, uncomplicated revenge.

Adam stared at the glowing end of the cigarette for several long moments. Then he stubbed it out and reached under the bed. He pulled out a leather briefcase, unlocked it and removed the surveillance report on SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Heisenberg.

• • •

Natalia was still wide awake. She rolled over and tilted the brass clock on the nightstand so it caught the moonlight streaming in the window. It was two o'clock. On the cot next to her in the tiny second-floor bedroom, her friend Berta slept soundly. Natalia sat up and stretched. Falcon had wanted her to come home with him last night, but he had started drinking right after the briefing ended and it soon turned ugly. Someone shoved him and he shoved back. There was a fist fight, broken bottles and bleeding noses. He apologized, but she put him off. He was drunk, she was tired, and it wouldn't have meant anything, so why bother?

Frustrated, Natalia got out of bed, grabbed her coat from the back of a chair and slipped quietly from the bedroom, pulling the curtain closed behind her. She tip-toed down the creaky stairs, stepped carefully around a dozen women commandos asleep on cots jammed into the parlor of the vacant apartment. Formerly occupied by a tailor and his family, who had fled the city, the apartment was an unusual affair with a parlor, kitchen and bathroom on one floor, and a small bedroom upstairs. It was situated above the ground-floor tailor shop and was one of only a few residential apartments—now all vacant—in the five-story office building on Trebacka Street in the City Center, north of Pilsudski Square.

Natalia made her way to the cramped, white-tiled kitchen and rummaged through her coat pockets until she found a leftover cigarette. She lit it and sat at the round, wooden table, staring out the dirt-streaked window at a rubble pile—all that remained of the building across the street. In the distance she could hear the dull thump of artillery.

It was only a matter of time—another few weeks, maybe less—before the Germans crushed the Rising. The AK insurgents were fighting valiantly, but less than a third of them had real weapons, and most of those were rebuilt relics left over from '39. Ammunition was scarce, the food and water supplies were running out, and the corpses were piling up. It couldn't last much longer.