The rubber boat was very heavy, so they cut it up at the water’s edge and then pulled the pieces a hundred metres up the beach, where they hid them in the underbrush. Then they shouldered their fifty-kilo packs and, taking a compass reading, headed inland due east, avoiding farmhouses and crossing meadows where the grass stood bristling with frost. Three kilometres inland they found a forest with a cutline, as marked on their map, and they were deeply into it when dawn began to come up. They went in among some bushes to hide themselves during daylight.
Shimkus and Rudis fell asleep with their heads on their packs and Lukas took first watch. Even though it was November and the air was damp and cold, it felt good to be back. For all the freedom of France and Sweden, he had been a foreigner there. Now he was home.
Working in the Swedish summer house with Zoly, Lukas had analyzed Lozorius’s messages out of Lithuania again and again. Why had the man called for Lukas in particular to return to Lithuania? Why not any agents the English could find? There were several possibilities, some better than others. Maybe Lozorius trusted Lukas the way he trusted no one else. Maybe, on the other hand, he wanted to entrap the most prominent representative of the Lithuanian partisans abroad. Some of the Ukrainian partisan spokesmen in Western Europe had already gone missing, and the same was true of the Estonian and Latvian partisans.
“What else has he been telling you in his radio broadcasts?” Lukas had asked Zoly.
“He writes that the underground has got weaker. The central control structure has collapsed and the local units barely have any contact with one another anymore. The senior partisans are mostly dead and the new ones aren’t educated. They can’t run the propaganda newspapers that they used to.”
This information was troubling to Lukas. He was relying on old ties to help him once he got back in. “How did the English like to hear that?”
“I keep telling you, they’re Brits, not English.”
“They can’t tell us apart. Why should I bother?”
“Anyway, the Brits didn’t like Lozorius’s news at all, and they’re not the only ones. The Americans believe Lozorius may have been captured and turned.”
“On what grounds?”
“First, because you and others told them there was a whole, solid underground network in place in the Baltics and his news sounds pessimistic, the kind of thing the Reds might want us to believe. The Americans hate pessimism. Next, they believe that the Reds, having developed an atomic bomb, are more confident and beginning to mass troops for an offensive against Western Europe in the spring. But Lozorius says nothing about massed troops or materiel transports heading west. Therefore, he sounds suspicious.”
Lukas was sitting with Zoly at a table at a window that overlooked the front yard of the house and the sea beyond it. Shimkus and Rudis were being trained for hand-to-hand combat by an Asian Swede. The three looked like sportsmen practising wrestling. The whole session had an air of unreality to it, as if they were playing a game.
“Maybe Lozorius is pinned down in his bunker and doesn’t know anything,” said Lukas.
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s sending disinformation.” Zoly said it dispassionately enough, as if he had never known the man in all his charisma. He stood up and took the full ashtray from the table and tossed it on the cinders in the cold fireplace. When he returned to the table, he lit up again.
“If what you say is true, they’re asking me to walk into a trap,” said Lukas.
Zoly shrugged. “You have to be prepared for whatever reality you find there.”
“Or maybe what Lozorius is saying is true, he has not been turned, and the Americans just don’t want to hear it.”
“That’s also possible.”
“If they don’t want to hear it from him, they won’t want to hear it from me. I wouldn’t want to be stranded in the country because they doubted me.”
“I’ve promised to get you out of there once you’ve contacted Lozorius and collected some information.”
“You’ll have to do better than promise. I have no intention of dying. I’m going in there to get my wife out, and you have to help me.”
“I said I would.”
“If it means rowing a dinghy yourself to pick us up, I expect you to do it.”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
“You have to do the impossible, Zoly. And if I don’t make it out, you have to watch over Monika and watch over Elena. Get Monika a pension or something.”
“What am I supposed to do for Elena from here?”
“I don’t know. Send Elena Red Cross packages, if they’re permitted.”
“I promise I’ll do the best I can!” said Zoly, throwing up his hands. “Just remember this: the Brits, Americans and Swedes are going to a lot of trouble putting you in there. Remember that you owe something to them. Get some intelligence. Set up a conduit for information. They want to know about troop movements and missile bases. Don’t be quite the high-minded soul you were when you first came out. Help them and you’ll make it easier for me to help you.”
“All right. There is just one more possibility I’d like to explore.”
“What’s that?”
“The possibility that Dunlop has made it all up.”
Zoly stood and walked into the kitchen to put a kettle on the stove. He came back to lean on the door jamb as he waited for the kettle to boil. “I thought of that too. So I asked to listen in on a recording of Lozorius’s transmission. Dunlop didn’t let me do that. He said there was no recording. But there was a transcript. I looked at that.”
“Well?”
“Lozorius does say that your wife is alive, but not much more than that. Maybe he doesn’t want to betray her accidentally.”
“So you’re satisfied what he said is true?”
“True?” Zoly laughed. “I saw the transcript, but I can’t prove that he sent it, or that he was telling the truth if he did. The Brits or the Americans might be luring you in to go and test whether Lozorius has been turned. On the other hand, he might be intending to lure you in so the Cheka can take you as a prize. Or it could all be true. Even if it is true, Elena might be under some kind of pressure of her own, something we’re unaware of. We can’t be sure of anything.”
Too restless to sit still as the other men slept, Lukas walked cautiously along the forest cutline to the point where it ended a kilometre farther along, and there he looked out to where a few farmhouses stood among the autumn fields. The first one, a thatched-roof wooden home, belonged to a man named Martinkus, supposedly a friend and contact. Lukas watched from the distance but did not see anything out of the ordinary about the house or the surroundings.
When he made his way back, he found Shimkus poised in a crouch with his rifle at the ready. So much for his easygoing attitude. He had been boiling water over a small fire.
“Where did you go?” Shimkus asked accusingly.
“I wanted to look around.”
“Never walk off like that without leaving word.”
“Why not?”
“I thought you’d abandoned us.”
“I didn’t think you were the nervous type.”
“I’m not from this part of the country. I’d be lost on my own.”
“Is Rudis still asleep?”
“I tried to wake him, but he told me to go to hell.”
Shimkus had an aggrieved air, like someone who nurtured his insults. Lukas resolved to keep an eye on this tendency. You could never tell what a man was like until you were with him in the field. Some became better and some became worse.
Of the two radios they had brought, only one worked because the other’s batteries had got wet. Rudis was finally woken and came up sullen, but after a cup of tea and a cigarette he was prevailed upon to transmit a signal back to Sweden. They waited for a response but received none.