Underground (9 page)

Vincentas and Lukas were in a small band of six men led by Lakstingala. Their job was to destroy the stone and stucco house that served as the main office of the slayers, and to make sure they could complete the task, they had been issued a
panzerfaust
, a rocket launcher to be fired by Ungurys. Lakstingala saw the prayer-obsessed Vincentas as the weak link in the group, and assigned him the job of runner, whose responsibility it was to get news to Flint's group, which was going to take the police station across town and destroy the records there.

The six men in Lakstingala's group stood behind a grove of pines on the edge of town, the first houses visible fifty metres away. It had been snowing, and there were already ten centimetres on the ground, which would make running hard, but if the snow kept up, at least it would mask their footprints when they retreated.

Lakstingala and Ungurys each wore white camouflage, but there had not been enough to go around for the others. The men had been standing in their positions since before dawn, waiting for the firing on the other side of town that would be their signal to attack. Lukas's feet and fingers were cold. He kept his hands tucked under his armpits, but he could do nothing about his feet.

A few shots came from the other side of town. These were followed by sporadic automatic fire. Finally the rate of fire picked up and a couple of grenades went off in the distance. Three hundred metres to the right, Flint and a dozen men began to run across the open ground toward the edge of town, hunched over and with their rifles and light machine guns in their hands.

“This is it. Forward!” said Lakstingala.

They were barely out of cover when the flash of gunfire from the window of a wooden house started up, and snow flew as the bullets struck about their feet. They were expected.

“Down,” shouted Lakstingala.

The men were each a few metres apart and fell into the snow, and then began to crawl forward, returning fire.

In his grey woollen coat, Lukas felt all too visible against the snow. Some of it had flown up his nose, and the snow beneath him was so wet that he would be soaked if he lay there long. At this rate it would take many minutes before the others were close enough to throw a hand grenade into the open window, and even lying flat they would be all too easy for the sniper to pick off.

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.

They went back to the crossroads where the first partisan had fallen, and then they dragged the bodies of their two dead comrades to the town square. The three men killed days earlier were lying there too, their bodies sheathed in snow. Lakstingala tried to wipe down their faces to look at them, but the faces were just masses of ruined, unrecognizable flesh. One had a rosary draped around his neck, a form of mockery.

Intense gunfire came from two other quarters of the town.

“What do we do next?” asked Lukas.

“Flint was supposed to rendezvous with us here,” Lakstingala said. “We were going to retreat with the bodies on a cart, but now I don't know if he'll make it. Lukas, go and see if you can find a sled or Flint. Come back with whichever one you find first. Vincentas, leave the extra rifles and go in the direction of the gunfire and see what you can scout. If you don't see anything, come back in ten minutes and we'll retreat with the bodies.”

Each man did as he was told.

Vincentas did not know the town at all, and the smoke and snow made it very hard to see anything. He tried to keep closest to the walls of houses that came between him and the church steeple, but the town was not densely built and there were yards and other gaps that he had to run across.

He checked his ammunition and saw that he had not fired a single shot. And yet he remembered pressing the trigger. He examined his rifle and saw that he had never even taken off the safety. Some soldier he was turning out to be.

Vincentas wanted to pray as he walked into the obscurity, but it seemed obscene to pray with a rifle in his hands. And the intermittent sound of the sniper in the steeple enervated him, even though the gunfire was muffled by the falling snow.

He shivered. His boots, for all their good repair, were soaked right through and his fingertips were so cold he was not sure he would be able to pull the trigger even if he had to.

A burst of machine gun bullets hit the house behind him, and unsure of their origin he turned around the corner of the house, ran into a yard and then ducked around a couple more buildings. He listened for firing from the church steeple, but it had fallen silent.

Now he could not orient himself. The gunfire at the opposite end of town was diminishing and moving. He was lost, unsure how long he had been gone, unsure of which way to go back. He stumbled against a low fence and just managed to keep himself from falling into the unshuttered window of a house. Before he pushed himself away, he saw inside. Their shoemaker was there, sitting in the corner by a candle with his wife. They both looked up at him through the glass, fear on their faces.

They should have left town, as Flint had told them to do. Flint would have been suspicious of their presence, and all the more so because the partisan attack had seemed anticipated. The old couple were lucky Vincentas was the one who stumbled upon them. He waved through the glass, but they did not recognize him.

Vincentas walked on, found a road and followed it, but the snow was thicker, the visibility diminishing. He was afraid he might come across the Reds, but he came instead to the high school, a two-storey red-brick building. He was very tired and cold. He would step inside for just a moment. Two of the three classrooms on the ground floor were empty, but not the third. He found a senior class of high school students and their teacher, all lying on the floor. One of the young men jumped to his feet when he saw him.

“You're a partisan!” he said. “Have you come to liberate us?”

“Get back on the floor,” said the teacher.

But the young man was not to be stopped. He wore thick glasses and a homespun suit, and was therefore from a poor farm. Vincentas smiled a little to see a younger version of himself.

“The boys in this room are ready to join you,” he said. “We'll kill the Komsomol girl here and help save the country.”

Poor boy. He would come to regret his words after the partisans withdrew and the Komsomol girl carried home news of what he had said. A harder man, someone like Lakstingala, might shoot the girl to save the boy's life. Vincentas could not do that, but he tried to do something.