Nowak unfolded it. Deblin was a river town, where the Wieprz flowed east into the Vistula. The route south continued into Pulawy, Krasnystaw, Zamosc, Tomaszow. Crossed the river Tanew into the Ukrainian districts of Poland at Rava-Russkaya. Then the major city of Lvov, down to Stryj, a sweep around the eastern tip of German-occupied Czechoslovakia—known as Little Ukraine—into Uzhgorod, and finally across the border into the Romanian town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains.
Four hundred and fifty miles, more or less. With the locomotive making a steady thirty-five miles an hour, about fourteen hours. Nowak heard the airplanes at the same time as he did, and together they looked up into the clouds. A flight of Heinkel bombers, in V formation, headed a little east of due north. That meant they’d been working on one of the industrial cities in the south, maybe Radom or Kielce, and were on their way home, bomb bays hopefully empty, to an airfield in East Prussia, probably Rastenburg.
“Nothing for you down here,” de Milja said quietly.
He’d done the best he could: it was just a little train, yellow coaches with red borders on the windows and a locomotive puffing through the wheat fields. Pastoral, harmless.
The Heinkels droned on. Below and behind them, a fighter escort of ME-109s. The pilots were bored. Sneak attacks on Polish airfields had blown up the opposition on the first day—and stolen their war. Now their job had little to do with skill or daring. They were nursemaids. From the wing position, a fighter plane sideslipped away from the formation, swooped down a sharp angle in a long, steep dive, flattened out in perfect strafing attitude, and fired its 20 mm cannon into the annoying little train chugging along below as though it hadn’t a care in the world. The pilot had just broken off the attack, soaring up through the smoke of the locomotive’s stack, when the radio crackled furiously and the flight leader gave a short, sharp order. The plane slipped back into formation, maintaining rigid spacing and perfect airspeed discipline all the way home to East Prussia.
The engineer remembered his orders and followed them: slowed down, rolled to a stop. Flight excites hunting dogs and fighter pilots, nothing standing still interests them for very long.
De Milja called out to Nowak as he swung off the platform: “Go through the cars, get the dead and wounded out, see if there’s anybody who can help.”
He ran along the track, then climbed into the cab of the locomotive. A column of steam was hissing from a hole in the firebox, the engineer was kneeling by the side of the fireman, who was lying on his back, his face the color of wood ash, a pale green shadow like a bruise already settled on his cheekbones. De Milja cursed to himself when he saw it.
The engineer was breathing hard; de Milja saw his chest rise and fall in the old cardigan. He went down on one knee and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was done well,” he said. Then: “You’re all right.” More an order than a question, the of course unvoiced but clear.
The engineer pressed his lips together and shook his head—very close to tears. “My sister-in-law’s husband,” he said. “My wife said not to ask him.”
De Milja nodded in sympathy. He understood, patted the man’s shoulder twice, hard, before he took his hand away. The engineer said, “She—,” but there was nothing more. It was quiet in the fields, the only sound the slow beat of the locomotive’s pistons running with the engine at rest. A bird sang somewhere in the distance. The fireman raised his hands, palms up, like a shrug, then made a face. “Shit,” he said. As de Milja leaned over him, he died.
Nowak had the casualties laid out in a beet field; a dark woman with hair braided and pinned worked over them. When de Milja arrived, she put him to work tearing cotton underdrawers into strips for bandages and sent Nowak running up to the locomotive for hot water.
“This man has been shot through the foot,” she said, carefully removing the shoe. “Went in above the heel, came out the sole just here, behind the second toe.” She put the bloody shoe aside. “Foot scares me, I’m unfamiliar with it.”
“You’re a nurse?”
“Veterinarian. A paw or a hoof, there I can help. Grab his hand.” De Milja held the man’s hand as the veterinarian swabbed on antiseptic from a big brown-glass bottle.
“A little girl is dead,” she said. “She was about ten years old. And a man in his forties, over there. We looked and looked—there’s not a mark on him. An old woman jumped out a window and broke her ankle. And a few others—cuts and bruises. But the angle of the gunfire was lucky for us—no glass, no fire. It’s fire I hate.” She worked in silence a moment. “It hurts?” she asked the patient.
“Go ahead, Miss. Do whatever you have to. Did I understand you to say that you were a veterinarian?”
“That’s right.”
“Hah! My friends will certainly get a laugh when they hear that!” De Milja’s fingers throbbed from the pressure of the wounded man squeezing his hand.
A grave-digging crew was organized, which took turns using the fireman’s shovel, and a priest said prayers as the earth was piled on. The little girl had been alone on the train, and nobody could find her papers. A woman who’d talked to her said her name was Tana, so that name was carved on the wooden board that served as a gravestone.
De Milja ordered the train stopped at a village station between Pulawy and Lublin, then used the phone in the stationmaster’s office—he could barely hear through the static—to report the attack to Vyborg, and to revise the estimated time of arrival “in the southern city.”
“The Russian divisions have crossed the border,” Vyborg said. “They may not reach your area for a day or so, but it’s hard to predict. The Germans are headed west—giving up territory. We believe there’s a line of demarcation between Hitler and Stalin, and the Russians will move up to occupy the new border.”
“Does that change anything for us?”
“No. But German aircraft have been attacking the line south of you. The railroad people say they can keep it open another twenty-four hours, but that’s about it. Still, we think you ought to find cover, then continue after dark. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All the roads out of Warsaw are now cut. This office is closing down, so you’re on your own from now on. Consider that to have the status of a written order.”
“Understood, sir.”
“So, best of luck to you. To all of us.”
The connection was broken.
A corporal in the Geographical Section had made a specialty of hiding trains. Using his hand-drawn map, de Milja directed the engineer to a branch line south of Pulawy that wound up into the hills above the Vistula. There, twenty miles west of Lublin, a gypsum mining operation had gone bankrupt and been shut down some time in the 1920s. But the railroad spur that ran to the site, though wildly overgrown, was still usable, and a roofed shed built for loading open railcars was still standing. Under the shed, with the engine turned off, they were very close to invisible.
17 September, 8:25 p.m. Over the years, the abandoned quarry had filled with water, and after dark de Milja could see the reflection of the rising moon on the still surface.
The engineer had patched the hole in the firebox, using tin snips, a tea tray, and wire. A big kid, about fifteen, from a farm village volunteered to work as the fireman—what he lacked in skill he’d make up with raw strength. Nowak took the opportunity to sight-in four rifles, which, with a few boxes of ammunition, had been hidden behind a panel in the last coach. He chose four men: a mechanic, a retired policeman, a student, and a man who didn’t exactly want to say what he did, to be armed in case of emergency.
There wasn’t much else they could do. The engine moved cautiously over the old track, heading east for the ancient city of Lublin, the countryside dark and deserted. The passengers were quiet, some doubtless having second thoughts about being cast adrift in a country at war. Maybe they would have been better off staying in Warsaw.