“Too risky,” said Vilkas.
Flint should have been leading the discussion, but he hesitated. No one talked about accepting the amnesty, but it was hard not to consider it.
“What are we waiting for?” In one smooth movement Vilkas drew his Walther from his pocket, put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The smoke and the noise made them jump, but even in his shock Lukas noted that the shot blew out the back of Vilkas’s head but not the front. To protect Vilkas’s parents, Lukas reached for the butt of his light machine gun and smashed in the face of his dead comrade. The others looked away, but Flint did not stop him. Elena made a sound of disgust in her throat and moved to the far corner of the bunker.
The slayer formerly known as Ignacas walked up to the lieutenant.
“They’re starting to kill themselves. I suggest we throw a couple of grenades through the hatch and then wait. Some of them will survive and we can take them for questioning.”
“How many did the farmer say they were?”
“He didn’t say. A lot, whatever that means.”
“Once the hotheads have shot themselves, the others might give up. We wait.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
Just before nightfall, the hatch flipped open and a stick came up with a white handkerchief on the end. It seemed unnaturally bright in the last light of day.
“You’ve made the right decision,” called the slayer. He stood behind the three men whose automatics were trained on the opening. They lay on the ground, but he knelt behind to see over them and to speak to the surrendering partisans as they stepped out of the bunker.
“Remember your discipline,” the lieutenant shouted in Russian. He didn’t want anyone getting nervous and firing.
“Show your hands first as you come out of the hole,” said the slayer.
There was some kind of movement he could not make out in the poor light. The slayer heard a thump and looked to his feet, where something had landed. It was a German grenade, the kind with the long handle. In the moment before it blew, he considered that he had always been unlucky. Why should the end of his life be any different?
The explosions of the grenades set all the guns firing, and the greatest danger for the Red soldiers inside the first ring came from their compatriots behind them who might fire right into the backs of their heads.
There was no way to kill the person throwing up the grenades unless someone tossed a grenade into the opening, but before this could happen another lid opened some distance away, grenades came flying from it, and men scrambled out, firing in a circle. Yet another lid opened and the melee was unleashed. Bullets flew in every direction, and many of the Cheka soldiers huddled down to protect themselves from the undisciplined fire. Finally the lieutenant himself threw a grenade into the first opening, the one from which the white flag had appeared, and with one less centre of fire the Cheka soldiers were able to still the other two as well.
When the lieutenant called for a ceasefire, he saw the bodies of half a dozen partisans on the forest floor. Some had probably gotten away, he thought, although it would be hard to tell for sure until the smoke cleared and he questioned the other men.
Out in the weed-filled field, Flint and Lukas huddled down.
“Did you see what happened?” Lukas asked. He had lost Elena in the firefight.
“I saw her fall and then reach for a grenade. I’m not sure where it blew. I’m sorry.”
Without a word, Flint pushed Lukas ahead of him and forced him to escape through the overgrown farm field. Flint would have to get him away from the scene before the terrible fact of his wife’s death sank in, and before the others began to look for them.
PART TWO
ELEVEN
LITHUANIA, PRUSSIA, POLAND
JANUARY 1948
SIX MEN MARCHED in single file through the snow of the winter night, all but the first stepping in the footprints of the man before him; the last one swept the snow behind them with a pine bough. They stayed close to cover whenever they could—copses of trees or bushes, where once a startled owl flew out before them and another time a hare raced out across the snow.
They came to a river at the former border, found a rowboat by a stretch of open water and rowed across. The men made their way onward into the abandoned fields of Prussia, now filled with frozen weeds as thick as fingers and as tall as men, prickly grasses that tore at their clothes and faces as they passed and threatened to pull the grenades from their belt loops. When they approached a particularly dense patch of grass, a troop of feral pigs rose squealing from a flattened place and fled.
Five partisans, Lakstingala among them, had volunteered to take Lukas into Poland through East Prussia, and from there he would get himself to the West. The border with Poland was easier to cross at East Prussia because all of the former inhabitants had been expelled by the Reds to pay for the crimes of the Nazis. Prussians had lived here for hundreds and thousands of years, but now they were gone. The new Red settlers had not arrived yet. There was still a place called Prussia, for the time being, but there were no more Prussians. All of them were dead or gone, and soon the name would be gone too.
The men marched steadily. They had a long way to go.
Although it was very cold, Lukas was sweating, weighed down by his automatic rifle, the grenades on his belt, and the backpack filled with photographs, declarations, summaries of the atrocities by region and a letter to the Pope. He was tired, but grateful both for his fatigue and for the mission.
They found no footprints on the road when they finally reached it. No light shone from the ruined farmhouses they passed, and all the Prussian milestone markers lay fallen at the crossroads. The roads did not follow the direction the men wanted, so they cut cross-country, tiring quickly by trudging through the snow, hoping to find a place to rest. In some places there were canals or broad ditches, which they crossed using logs or fallen trees. One man slipped off one of these and fell into the water up to his chin.
After he extricated himself, he and the others ran awkwardly through the snow in order to keep him warm until they finally found a cellar two kilometres farther on, where they hunkered down for a rest and built a fire to warm themselves, allowing the wet man to change and partially dry his clothes. They made raspberry cane tea, their mothers’ recipe against catching cold, and then they rose again and marched until dawn, when they came upon a ruined manor where they decided to spend the day. The manor and its outbuildings were empty of living souls, some of the various roofs collapsed or burnt, the windows broken, the yard full of empty tins and papers half covered by blown snow. The doors and even their hinges were all gone, packed up and sent to Russia as war reparations.
On the second floor of the main house they found a room with a view on three sides and a fireplace on the fourth. They jammed boards into the window frames to keep down the draft, found a battered tin oven and brought it inside, running a pipe into the fireplace chimney. A nearby tree masked the smoke. They had intended to eat first, but they were too tired to wait for the water to boil and fell asleep in the sudden heat emanating from the thin walls of the tin stove.
Lukas took first watch. When the kettle boiled, he tossed in some raspberry canes and set the kettle on the floor. Then he took the lid and set it upside down on the stove and cut in some pieces of bacon and laid a few small sausages on top. As he had expected, the men woke from the sleep they had so recently fallen into, ate and drank, and were asleep again as soon as their empty cups hit the floor. Lukas sopped up the grease from the lid with a piece of bread, ate it and then set himself up by a window in order to keep watch. It was a little colder at the window, all the better to keep him awake.