Dark Star (47 page)

It was getting harder and harder for Szara to see anything; the pall of smoke thickened until solid objects faded into shapes and shadows. The flashes from the German artillery seemed to change position—there simply, he decided, couldn't be that many of them in the forest. Then a Polish machine gun opened up from one of the pillboxes. Szara moved the binoculars toward the far bank of the river and saw hundreds of gray shapes, men running low, come out of the woods and dive flat on the ground. Polish rifle fire began to rattle from the houses in the village. A Polish ammunition dump was hit by a shell; the sound of the blast was ragged, a huge billowing cloud swirled upward, brilliant white stars trailing smoke arched over the river. Mierczek never stopped reporting, but the Polish counterfire seemed ineffective. Finally Colonel Vyborg spoke up. “I believe, Lieutenant, you're trying to pinpoint a tank battery. It seems they've cut passages into the woods for the tanks to move around.”

“I think you're right, sir,” Mierczek said. In the midst of communicating this information his face tensed, but he carried his report through to the end. Then he unconsciously held his lower lip between his teeth and closed his eyes for an instant. “The battery's
been hit,” he said. Szara traversed the Polish woods but could see little through the smoke. Vyborg was staring out the low, uneven rectangle cut into the logs that served as a window. “Give me the binoculars,” he said to Szara. He watched for a few seconds, then said, “Pioneers,” and handed the binoculars back to Szara. German troops were in the river, shielded by the wooden stanchions where the bridge had stood, firing machine pistols at the portals of the pillboxes. The German Pioneer closest to the Polish side was shirtless, his body pink against the gray water. He swam suddenly from behind a stanchion with a rope held in his teeth. He took long, powerful strokes, then he let go of the rope, which floated away from him when he turned on his back and moved downstream with the current. Behind him, soldiers hauled themselves along the rope as far as the stanchion he'd just left. Some of them floated away also but were replaced by others.

“Hello? Captain? Hello?” Mierczek called into the phone. He cranked the handle and tried again. Szara could no longer hear the static. “I think the line has been severed,” Mierczek said. He took a pair of electrician's pliers from a khaki bag, moved quickly to the low doorway, and disappeared. His job was, Szara knew, to follow the line until he found the break, repair it, and return. Szara saw a flash of the white shirt to his left, toward the battery, then it vanished into the dense smoke hanging amid the trees.

Szara swept his binoculars to the village. Most of the houses were now on fire. He saw a man run from one of them toward the woods, but the man fell on his knees and pitched forward after a few steps. Back on the river, the Pioneers had gained two more stanchions, and crowds of Germans were firing from the ones they held. The fire was returned. White chip marks appeared magically in the old, tarred wood and sometimes a German trooper fell backward, but he was immediately replaced by another man working his way along the line. A little way down the river there were flashes from the front rank of trees and, concentrating hard, Szara could see a long barrel silhouetted against the trunk of a shattered pine tree. He could just make out a curved bulk below the barrel. Yes, he thought, Vyborg had been right, it was a tank. A group of Polish infantrymen
moved out of the forest below him, three of them carrying a machine gun and ammunition belts. They were trying to take up a position with a field of fire that would enfilade the stanchions. They ran bent over, rushing forward, one of them lost his helmet, but then all three made it to a depression in the sand between the edge of the water and a grove of alder trees. He could see the muzzle flash of the machine gun. Swept the binoculars to the stanchion and saw panic as several of the Germans fell away from the pilings. He felt a rush of elation, wanted to shout encouragement to the Polish machine gunners. But by the time he had again located their position, only one man was firing the gun and, as Szara watched, he let it go, covered his face with his hands, and slumped backward. Slowly, he got himself turned over and began to crawl for the edge of the woods.

The field telephone came suddenly to life, static popping from the earpiece. Vyborg grabbed it and said, “This is your observer position.” A voice could be heard yelling on the other end. Then Vyborg said, “I don't know where he is. But he repaired the line and until he returns I will direct your fire. Is there an officer there? ” Szara heard the negative. “Very well, Corporal, you're in charge then. There are tanks in the woods to your north, at the edge of the forest. Can you fire a single round, short? Even in the river will work.” There was a reply, then Vyborg stared at the map Mierczek had left behind. “Very well, Corporal,” he said. “My advice is quadrant M28.” Szara moved the binoculars to see the impact of the ranging fire Vyborg had directed but was distracted by a group of Germans who had reached the west bank of the river and were running into the woods. “They're across,” he said to Vyborg. Vyborg said, “You're too short, come up a couple of degrees.”

Szara glanced at the doorway, wondering where Mierczek was, then realized he was not going to return. Szara could now see muzzle flashes from positions in and above the village as Polish troopers fired at the Germans who had established a flank attack in the woods. Five Panzer tanks moved out of the woods onto the sandy shore of the river, rumbling forward to the edge of the water and forming an angle that allowed them to fire directly into the Polish
forces in the village. Szara's binoculars found the Polish machine gunner who'd tried to crawl away from the beach. He lay still in the sand. “Corporal?” Vyborg said into the phone.

By late afternoon, they were near the town of Laskowa, not far from the river Tososina—uncertain where to go next, possibly cut off by Wehrmacht encirclement, but, narrowly, alive.

They had escaped from the scene of the German bridgehead over the Dunajec—a matter of minutes. Colonel Vyborg had taken the precaution of leaving the staff car, with the sergeant to guard it, up the road from the village. Had it been in the village itself they would now be captured or, more likely, dead. As Polish resistance had worn down, the German infantry had negotiated the river on wooden rafts, isolated the remaining Poles in a few positions at the far end of the village, and demanded surrender. The Poles, from the look of it, had refused. Vyborg had watched the beginning of the final attack through his binoculars, then, unwilling to witness the end, had carefully restored them to their leather case and deliberately pressed both snaps shut. Working their way through the hillside brush they had come under fire several times, German rounds singing away through the branches, but the forest itself had protected them from the German marksmen.

For a time, the road crossing the Carpathian foothills was clear, then they came upon the remnants of a retreating Polish regiment driven back from the border: exhausted soldiers, faces and uniforms gray with dust, wagonloads of bandaged, silent men, walking wounded leaning on their rifles or helped by friends, officers who gave no orders. It was, for Szara and evidently for Vyborg as well, worse than the battle at the Dunajec. There they had seen courage in the face of superior force; this was the defeat of a nation's army. A group of peasants harvesting wheat in a field stopped working, took their caps off, and watched silently as the troops walked past.

For a time, the sergeant drove slowly, at the pace of the regiment. Then, around noon, the forward units were engaged. According to a lieutenant questioned by Vyborg, a German corps that had fought
its way across one of the Carpathian passes from northern Slovakia had now turned east—with extraordinary, unheard-of speed; a completely motorized force that moved in trucks and tanks—to close the pocket and cut off Polish forces attempting to retreat along the road. When the mortar and machine gun exchanges started up and the regiment began to organize its resistance, Vyborg directed the sergeant to take a tiny cart track—two wagon ruts in the dirt— that cut through a wheat field.

Thus they spent the day. “We will get you to a telegraph or a telephone somewhere,” Vyborg said, his mind very much on Szara's presumptive dispatch to
Pravda.
But the tiny path wound its way among the hills, in no hurry to get anywhere, over numberless little streams that watered farm cattle, past the occasional peasant settlement deep in the Polish countryside, far, far away from telegraph wires or much of anything. Deeper and deeper, Szara thought, into the fourteenth century—a land of high-sided hay carts with enormous wooden wheels hewed by axes, farm women in aprons, the rooty smells of dry September earth flavored with pig manure, sweet hay, and woodsmoke. “See what we have lost,” Vyborg said.

They stopped in midafternoon at a dusty farmyard and bought bread and sausage and freshly brewed beer from a frightened peasant who called them
“pan,”
sir, with every other breath. A man with the fear of armies running in his very blood—getting him to take money almost required force.
Just go,
said his eyes while he smiled obsequiously.
Just go.
Leave me my wife and daughters— you already have my sons—spare my life, we've always given you whatever you asked. Take it. Note that I'm a humble, stupid man of no interest. Then go away.

They stopped in a wood to eat. The sergeant drove the car far enough in so that German spotter aircraft would not see it. When the engine was turned off a deep silence descended, broken only by the low, three-note song of a single bird. The forest reminded Szara of a cathedral; they sat beneath tall oak trees that filtered and darkened the light until it was like the cool shadow of a church. One worshiped simply by being there. But it seemed to do Vyborg more harm than good; his mood grew darker by the moment, and the sergeant finished his bread and sausage and took his canteen of beer
over to the car, folded the hood back, and began to tinker with the engine. “He disapproves,” Vyborg said. “And shows it in his own way.” But for courtesy, Szara would have joined him. He knew this black depth that lived in the Polish soul and feared it—the descent to a private hell where nothing could ever be fixed, or better, or made right often ended badly. He'd seen it. He noticed that the flap on Vyborg's holster was unbuttoned. An innocuous detail, but this was not the sort of officer who would be casual about such things. He knew that if Vyborg determined his honor lay in the single shot fired in a forest there was nothing he could say or do to stop it. “You cannot take this on yourself, Colonel,” Szara finally said to break the silence.

Vyborg was slow to answer. Considered not bothering to say anything at all, finally said, “Who else, then?”

“Politicians. Not least, Adolf Hitler.”

Vyborg stared at him in disbelief, wondering if perhaps he'd adopted the most hopeless fool in the world to tell his nation's story. “Sir,” he said, “do you believe that what you saw forcing the Dunajec was the Nazi party? What have I missed? If there was a lot of drunken singing and pissing on lampposts I somehow didn't see it. What I saw was Deutschland, Poland's eternal enemy. I saw Germans. ‘C'mon fellows, there's a job to be done here and we're the ones to do it, so let's get busy.' I saw the Wehrmacht, and I would have been, any officer worth his salt would have been, proud to command it. Do you believe that a bunch of shitbag little grocers and naughty schoolboys, led by Himmler the chicken farmer and Ribbentrop the wine salesman, would have overcome a Polish battalion? Do you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Well then.”

Vyborg had raised his voice. The sergeant, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, working at the engine of the car, began whistling. “And,” Vyborg went on, now in control of himself, “I do take this on myself. Is there somewhere, in some filing cabinet in Warsaw, a report signed A. S. Vyborg, lieutenant colonel, that says the Stuka dive-bomber may be expected to do such and such? That says the Wehrmacht is able to cover fifteen miles of countryside a day, using
tanks and motorized infantry? There is not. We are going to lose this war, we are going to be subjugated, and the fault lies with diplomacy—you're not entirely wrong—but it also lies with me and my colleagues. When a country is conquered, or subdued by political means, the secret services are always to blame—they, who are supposedly allowed to do
anything,
should have done
something.
In political life it is the cruelest equation there is, but we accept it. If we do not accept it we cannot continue with the work.”

He paused, drank the remaining beer in his canteen, and wiped his lips delicately with his fingers. The sergeant had stopped whistling, and the three-note bird had started to sing again, low and mournful. Vyborg settled his back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes. He was very pale, Szara realized, tired, perhaps exhausted. The strength of his personality was deceptive. The lost light of the forest muted the color of his uniform—now it seemed heavy wool fabric, cut by a tailor, not a uniform at all, and his sidearm became a bulky nuisance on a belt. The colonel forced himself to return from wherever he'd been, leaned forward, searched his breast pocket for a cigar, and showed a brief anger when he couldn't find any. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resolved. “Every profession defines its own failures, my friend. The doctor's patient does not recover, the merchant closes his shop, the politician leaves office, the intelligence officer sees his country dominated. Surely, on the level you've lived in Russia, you know that. You've had, so to speak, at least contacts with your own services.”

“Rarely,” Szara said. “To my knowledge, at any rate. You're referring not to the secret police—of course one sees them every day in some form or another—but to those who concern themselves with international issues.”

“Exactly. Well, I'll tell you something, you've missed a historic era, a phenomenon. We know the Soviet services, we oppose them after all so we had better know them, and what most of us feel, alongside the appropriate patriotic wrath, is perhaps just a little bit of envy. Seen together it is a curious group: Theodor Maly—the former Hungarian army chaplain, Eitingon, Slutsky, Artuzov, Trilisser, General Shtern, Abramov, General Berzin, Ursula Kuczynski— called Sonya, that bastard Bloch, all the Latvians and Poles and
Jews and what have you—they are, or perhaps one ought to say, in most cases,
were,
the very best that ever did this work. I don't speak to their morals, their personal lives, or their devotion to a cause in which I do not believe, no, one really can't see them in that light. But in the business of espionage there have never been any better, possibly won't ever be. I suppose it could be considered a pity; all of them slaughtered to some strange, enigmatic purpose known only to Stalin, at least a pity you never came to experience their particular personalities.”