*
Just before sunrise that morning, a wild dog had picked up the scent of a man moving through the woods east of the village of Misovichi. Most wild animals would have steered clear of a human, but this dog had not always been wild.
It had once belonged to a farmer named Wolsky, who raised goats and sheep and some pigs, whose wool and meat his family had sold at the market square in Tynno for generations.
Wolsky had named the dog Choma, after a local man who once cheated him in a business deal. He would bring the dog to the market place and make the dog catch scraps of meat and bone for the amusement of his customers, and all the while the farmer would call out the name of Choma, scratching his ears and slapping the dog’s shaggy fur.
One day back in the summer of 1941, not long after the invasion had taken place, a truck filled with Ukrainian Nationalist partisans rolled into Wolsky’s farmyard. Among the partisans was Choma‚ the man who had once cheated Wolsky, and who had heard about the naming of the dog.
When Wolsky came out of his house to see what was going on, Choma shot him in the chest and left him lying face-down in the mud. Then he went looking for the dog, intent on killing it as well.
Choma found the dog asleep beside the barn. His first shot missed, gouging a fist-sized chunk of wood from the wooden boards above the dog’s head. By the time Choma had steadied his hand to take a second shot, the dog had already vanished.
It had been living in the woods ever since. In that time, the dog had forgotten its name, and almost everything about its former life, until the day it picked up the man’s scent. More out of curiosity than hunger, it followed the stranger, keeping always at a safe distance, until they arrived at the cabin.
The man went inside the building.
The dog hung back among the trees, sniffing the air for some clue as to what might be happening.
A short while later, the dog heard the muffled thump of an explosion inside the cabin. In a flash of light, the glass window sprayed out of its frame as if it had transformed into water. This was followed by a wave of concussion which sent the dog skittering away, but it soon doubled back, sniffing at the shards of glass which littered the ground, until it came upon the arm of a man, smouldering and severed at the elbow. It remembered the way the old farmer used to throw it pieces of food and how the other people used to clap and cheer when it leaped into the air to catch the scrap of meat. For a second, he remembered his name.
Then the dog picked up the arm and carried it away, deep into the perpetual twilight of the forest.
*
Outside the safe house, the sound of armoured vehicles was growing louder.
‘We must get back to the garrison,’ said Kirov. ‘It’s the only fortified location in town. If we run flat out, we can be there in five minutes.’
Pekkala paused to check that his Webley revolver was loaded. He had forgotten to test-fire the weapon and now it was too late. He would just have to hope that Lazarev had worked one of the miracles for which he was already famous, or else this weapon might blow up in his hands the second he pulled the trigger.
Suddenly, the sound of an approaching vehicle filled the air. The floorboards shuddered beneath their feet. Seconds later, a German half-track rumbled past.
The half-track was followed by a squad of infantry. Some were members of the Flemish SS, identifiable by the three-branched swastika ‘trifos’ on their collar tabs, a yellow shield emblazoned with a black lion on their left forearms and, just beneath it, a black and white cuff title with the word ‘Langemarck’ etched out in silver thread. These were the troops which had been given the task of breaking through to Rovno, although by the time the skeletal rooftops of the town at last came into view so few were left that they had now been reinforced by other soldiers pulled from decimated units in the area, turfed out of their beds at field hospitals or hauled off trains by members of the German Military Police, the Feldgendarmerie, as they made their way home on the only leave some of them had seen in more than three years. Among these Belgians walked men from Croatia, from Spain, from Norway and from Hungary, all of them communicating in some bastard Esperanto, cobbled from their native tongues and the snippets of German they had picked up in their service to the Reich.
With bayonets fixed upon their Mauser rifles, they moved at a slow trot to keep up with the machine. Their clothing was a threadbare collage of the battles they had seen. Some still wore the bottle-green collared tunics in which they had marched into Poland in the autumn of 1939. There were jackboots that had marched down the Champs-Elysées in the summer of 1940, and ankle boots looted from Dutch army warehouses, with laces made from scraps of radio wire and loose heel irons that jangled like spurs as they grazed over stones in the road. Slung from belts, some carried canvas bread bags bleached by the African sun out in the Sand Sea of Calanscio. Their sharply angled helmets hid beneath tattered strips of camouflage cut from old shelter capes, or covers fashioned out of rusty chicken wire, on which could still be seen the traces of white paint daubed upon them when their owners huddled freezing in the ruins of Borodino in the winter of ’41.The faces of these men appeared primordial, their smoke-clogged pores and blistered lips like scraps of leather thrown out by a tanning yard. Their bodies were those of young men, but shrunk to bony scaffolding beneath the patched and filthy grey of Wehrmacht uniforms. Although the shape of them was human, in the hollow darkness of their eyes, and with frost-bitten ears worn down like chips of sea glass, they were no longer recognisable as men. They bore no resemblance to the postered images which had propelled them on this journey, whose only outcome, they now realised, would be annihilation. They were all that remained of their generation; restless husks of who they’d been before they went away, unknowable now to those they left behind and in the ice-filmed puddles where they glimpsed their sad reflections, unfamiliar even to themselves.
Somewhere up the street, just beyond Pekkala’s field of view, the half-track came to a squeaking halt.
‘There are more of them out back,’ whispered Kirov. ‘They’re moving through the alleyways.’
At that moment, Pekkala spotted two soldiers walking directly towards the house. ‘Go!’ he whispered to Kirov.
The two men dashed across the room, slid down the ladder into the root cellar and closed the trap door on top of them, just as the front door blew open, splintered by a rifle butt.
The soldiers searched the house, floorboards groaning under the cautious tread of their hobnailed boots.
Huddled in the darkness, only a hand’s breadth below, Kirov and Pekkala knew that it was only a matter of time before the soldiers discovered the narrow trench which led directly to the root cellar. And when they did, there would be no way out.
*
The first thing Vasko saw when he came in sight of the cabin was sunlight glinting off the shards of broken window. The door to the cabin was wide open, with one of its hinges torn off. Vasko realised immediately that one of the explosive devices with which he had booby trapped the cabin must have detonated.
Probably that fool Malashenko, he thought, nosing around to see what he could steal. I warned him not to touch things that didn’t belong to him. But, to be certain, Vasko drew his gun and circled around through the trees, searching for any sign of movement as he approached the cabin door.
Picking a stone from the ground, he rolled it into the dark, knowing that anyone still alive inside would mistake it for a grenade. Then he waited, ready to shoot whoever came running out.
But there was no cry of surprise. No sound of footsteps or the chambering of weapons. Only the dull clatter of the rock as it skipped across the wooden floor.