Night Soldiers

“And so?”

“Some of us are going to try to sneak through tonight. Maybe they stop fighting and have a snooze.”

“I doubt it.”

“So do I. How far east are you going?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he said.

“So I guessed.”

“Have you got anything black? Like paint?”

“Paint! You are crazed. Some tar, maybe.”

“It will do,” he said.

They chugged slowly out of Szony harbor just after midnight, eight tugboats moving in single file along the dark river. Since they could expect to be under observation by Hungarian and Wehrmacht rearguard units, each flew the flag of the collapsed Hungarian regime on the short pole astern. The best navigator of the group, a stooped old man called Janos, took the lead in his boat, followed by Tisza and the others. The moon was fully risen, but the spring westerly had increased its force and a low scud of cloud obscured the light, leaving the river in drifting shadows. Difficulty of navigation was increased by a drop in temperature that brought a heavy mist off the water, swirling in the wind as it blew downstream. This made Janos’s job harder, but turned the boats into ghostly, uncertain outlines from the perspective of the shore.

Of Janos, Annika said, “He is half blind, so the darkness will not bother him. He navigates with his feet, he says. By the run of the water under the keel he knows his way.”

“Is that possible?” Khristo asked.

“He is on the river since childhood. Thus he is a good navigator, also a good liar. Take your pick.”

Standing in the pilothouse, Khristo could feel only the rapid pulse of Tisza’s engines. Yet the boat ahead of them moved slowly back and forth from the center to the starboard bank of the river, as though it were avoiding hazards, and the rush of water passing over a sandbar shoal could be heard to one side of the boat as they moved around it.

“A sandbar,” Khristo said. “He has taken us away from it.”

“Ja, ja,” Annika said, unimpressed. “A famous sandbar, one that everybody knows. What you and I must worry about are the new ones. Danubio-the god of this river-stirs his mud up every winter and leaves it in different places, so that we may find it with our propellers.” She made a small correction with the wheel, apparently following some motion of the lead boat’s stern that was invisible to him. “A way down from here, there are granite blocks under the water, quarried by the Romans as piers for a bridge. The emperor Trajan desired to build a military road, from Spain to the Euphrates River, but he died. He left us his granite to remember him by and, when the water is low and there is sand on both sides of the river, it will peel the bottom of a boat clean off. I have seen it.”

They were silent for a time, staring ahead of them through the drifting fog. “Do you want me down below?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Stay up here with me and keep the pepecha handy. We are going full slow as it is, and if something happens you don’t want to be belowdecks.”

He thought of steam under pressure and what it could do and was thankful for the dispensation. “What use will the pepecha be against field guns?”

She shrugged. “Not much.”

The river meandered north and south at Esztergom, then swung around in a sharp bend by the Vac prison and headed due south, toward Budapest and eventually into Serbian Yugoslavia. They could hear the fighting well enough, like an approaching thunderstorm, and the sky flickered a dull orange with artillery and tank barrages, but most of the action seemed to be centered north of the river.

Moving along the northward curve toward Esztergom, a searchlight cut through the fog and raced forward from the last boat to the first, then pinned Janos’s tug in its beam. A loudhailer, sounding eerily close over the water, called out a command in Hungarian. As Janos, shouting in a cracked voice, answered the unseen officer, Annika translated into Russian:

“Convoy leader, identify yourself.”

“iC-38 and seven K-class tugs-out of Bratislava.”

“Where bound?”

“Vac prison.”

“Say again, iC-38.”

“Vac prison.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“Long ago.”

“The Russians are up there. Are you under orders?”

“Yes, sir. To remove special prisoners to the rear.”

“Written orders?”

“Verbal orders. From the SS. A German colonel accompanies us, would you like to hear it from him? I can wake him up for you.”

“Proceed, K-38.”

“Thank you.”

“God help you.”

“One hopes.”

The searchlight blinked out, and the running lights of the patrol boat faded away as it returned to station in midstream.

The convoy steamed on into the darkness, its slow progress taking them toward the steady beat of artillery exchanges in the hills above Vac. They could now see yellow muzzle flashes on the ridge-lines, and a piece of burning debris arced gracefully above them and hissed into the water. At first, the bass thudding of the gunnery was a massive rumble, low and continuous, that rolled and echoed above the river. But as they drew closer, the sound resolved into separate parts: the low thump of field mortars, the whistle of Wehrmacht 88 s and the sigh of Russian field-gun rounds, the rhythmic crackle of machine-gun fire and the muffled impacts of exploding shells.

As they steamed around a bend in the river, the horizon glowed brighter and brighter and the sound swelled in volume. Then they were in the middle of it.

It was like a nightmare, he thought, because he wanted to run but could not move. His eyes streamed with tears from the billowing smoke-suddenly every object was blurred and misshapen. The prison on the far bank was burning, towers of flame from the roof and cell windows rolling into the sky as though sucked upward by an immense wind. The air around him buzzed and sang, and he thought he could hear voices from the near bank, calling out in a strange language, and a huge shower of sparks rained down on the boat. Then the water exploded, a white wall, and the river rocked backward. The window glass trembled and water sprayed across it, a prism refracting clouds of tracer, the fiery prison, the shore ahead stuttering from white light to blind darkness and back again. He went deaf. Braced himself against the pilothouse wall and felt the Tisza taking fire, like an animal kicking the hull.

The stern of iC-38 began to move away from them and Khristo tore himself from the wall and ran crouched along the deck, throwing the hatch back and jumping six feet into the hold. He opened the boiler door with a bare hand-saw the red stripe across his palm but felt nothing. He piled armloads of brushwood through the opening, kicking it into the roaring furnace as it snagged on the rim, bowed and resisted as though it did not want to burn. The Tisza rocked again. He slammed the door with his boot and leaped up the ladder onto the deck. An enormous yellow flare went off above him and a wind knocked him flat on his face. He scrambled to his knees, ready to swim, then saw that it was the boat behind them. Its pilothouse was gone, stack bent over to the deck with white steam spraying from one side. As he watched, the boat yawed out toward midriver, a line of little flames licking along the bow. He scurried toward the pilothouse, like a rat in a burning barn, he thought, and saw human shapes onshore, running with the boat, their arms raised in supplication. One of them tried to swim out, then vanished.

What they did in Budapest, two days later, seemed entirely ingenuous. That was necessary. Had the tracks of planning and calculation showed through, it would have raised questions. But what he contrived was just simple enough, naive, to have about it a taste of the peasant’s innocence, and Khristo well