“I know about those bastards,” Adam said. “They’re puppets, dancing on strings for Stalin.” He folded his hands on the table, clenching his fingers so tightly his knuckles turned white, thinking about the Russian general, Kovalenko, who lied to him, then watched Warsaw burn. He thought about Natalia and her family in the small village near Lwow, and her brother, the cavalry officer captured and murdered by the Russians.
“I know what the Russians are capable of,” Adam hissed. “They’re worse than the Germans. They proved that back in 1940 when they murdered thousands of Polish officers in cold blood in the Katyn Forest.”
Whitehall grunted and flicked his hand in the air as if dismissing an old myth.
Adam swallowed a gulp of the warm, flat ale and set the glass hard on the table, glaring at Whitehall. “I know the Russians claim the Germans committed the massacre at Katyn, Colonel. And the British and Americans are buying the story. After all, the Russians are our allies. I understand the risk. Now, when do I leave?”
Twenty-Six
THE U.S. ARMY TRANSPORT PLANE banked to the left as it began its final approach into Berlin’s Templehof aerodrome. Adam looked out the window to catch a glimpse of the city, but the view was obscured by a thin veil of fog.
The American Air Corps officer sitting next to him leaned over and tapped the window. “That’s dust,” he said.
“Dust?”
The officer nodded. “I’ll bet you thought it was fog. I thought so, too, when I flew in here last week. It’s dust from all the collapsed buildings. The heat from the fires carries the dust into the air. The whole city’s covered with it—what’s left of it, anyway.”
As they dropped in altitude, snatches of the ground became visible, and Adam turned back to the window. Images emerged through the dust, spreading out in all directions in a brownish-gray monochrome, images that reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the ruins of ancient Rome… images that reminded him of Warsaw.
Adam leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, a jumble of emotions racing through him. For the first time in many years he was back in the company of American soldiers. But these soldiers were different from those he served with in the thirties, during the ambivalence of a peacetime army. In those days he’d worked at his sharpshooting and sniper training with relish because he enjoyed it, but there was always the undercurrent that it really didn’t matter because America was at peace and unconcerned about political tensions half a world away. But the soldiers sitting around him now were different. They had a strong, confident edge, and the battle-hardened swagger of soldiers who had just won a war. He’d fought the same war, though he fought it differently and perhaps for different reasons. All the same, he was pleased to be in their company.
For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, Adam thought back to his arrival in America when he was eleven years old. That first year had been difficult. He hated to leave Krakow, had cried off and on for days, missing his uncle and aunt terribly. When they finally arrived in Chicago, he had felt lost and alone. He had to learn a new language, new customs. Though there were many Poles in their new neighborhood, it was still very strange, very different from Krakow—bigger and noisier, tall buildings, motorcars and elevated street cars.
But gradually, as the months went by, he’d come to feel at home. He had made friends, learned to play baseball and did well in school. Then, seven years later, he had graduated from high school and become an American citizen all in the same day. It was the proudest day of his life. He remembered every detail with complete clarity: writing the test answers, signing the documents, then standing with his father and facing the red-and-white striped flag with the glittering blue field of stars, his right hand over his heart, reciting the pledge of allegiance to his new home. That was the day he decided he would become an American soldier.
Adam looked out the window again, thinking of that simple, carefree time when it seemed as though everything were possible, as though every dream would come true and he could be whatever he wanted to be.
He glanced around at the American soldiers in the transport plane. He felt a kinship with them, but at the same time he was an outsider. They were the first of his countrymen he’d actually been around since the war began.
In all the years Adam had been fighting his own covert war of sabotage and murder behind enemy lines, he’d encountered numerous German soldiers. Most of them had been officers he’d eventually assassinated. And then there were the hundreds of Polish soldiers he’d fought with. They had set aside the sting of defeat and joined the covert warfare of the AK. They had sabotaged German trains and destroyed fuel depots, smuggled information and forged documents. The Americans had fought, and they had suffered hardships and lost friends. But they could never know what it meant to face the enemy on their own home soil, to witness the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their family members—and then to lose that fight. Adam was an American, and he would always be an American. But he was also a Pole, and he knew a part of his heart would forever belong to the country of his birth and the courageous people who faced tragedy again and again without surrendering.
The big four-engine plane bumped hard onto the uneven runway, roaring past wrecked tanks and burned-out trucks. The plane swung to the right, and the terminal building came into view. Adam turned to the air corps officer. “I’m surprised the terminal is intact.”
“We didn’t want to bomb it because we thought we’d need it,” the officer said. “And when the Russians moved in they were in such a rush to get to the Reichstag, they just bypassed it. Hell, Lufthansa was still operating commercial flights out of here until the end of April.”
Adam pointed to the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag flying from the top of the building, just below the enormous stone sculpture of the Nazi eagle.
The officer shrugged. “Yeah, I know. Supposedly, the aerodrome is in our sector, but the Russians are finding every way possible to delay the handover. So far, between us and the Brits, we’ve only been able to get a little over two hundred men into Berlin. More are trickling in every day, but the Russians have twenty divisions here, so they’re calling the shots.”
The plane came to a halt, and a detachment of Russian soldiers marched out of the terminal, forming a corridor between the plane and the building. Their khaki uniforms were accented with grayish-green hats adorned with red bands and a solitary gold star.
The air corps officer nudged Adam’s shoulder. “NKVD,” he said. “A little intimidation as our welcome to Berlin. They’re the Russian equivalent of the German SS.”
No, they’re actually quite a bit worse than the SS. But Adam nodded and peered out the tiny window at the familiar soldiers, the very bastards he’d been evading for months. And now he was going to walk right up to them in broad daylight?
He stood up, put on his new, gray overcoat and fedora, and straightened his tie. His credentials and documents were supposedly solid, identifying him as a Civilian Liaison Officer attached to the U.S. Judge Advocate General—War Crimes Investigation Team. Adam exhaled slowly. He was having a difficult time just remembering the title.
He retrieved his suitcase from the luggage cart and followed the air corps officer into the terminal. They queued up behind a table where two NKVD soldiers, wearing the distinctive blue hats of officers, checked documents. The officers were flanked by a half-dozen NKVD riflemen. Beyond the checkpoint, milling about in a cloud of cigarette smoke punctuated with bursts of laughter and profanity, a group of American and British soldiers awaited the new arrivals.