The Polish Officer

slitted against the snow, watching the approaches to the hilltop.

“Do you like the life in the forest?” de Milja asked him, tired of listening to the wind.

Frantek thought it over. “I miss my dog,” he said. “Her name was Chaya.”

The Russians came thirty minutes later, four scouts riding single file. One of them dismounted, squatted, determined that the horse droppings were fresh, and climbed back on his horse. They moved slowly, at wagon speed, waiting for the band to leave the steppe and enter the forest.

“Do not fire,” de Milja said to Frantek as they flattened out behind the pine trees. “That is an order,” he added.

Frantek acknowledged it—barely. To him, de Milja seemed cautious, even hesitant, and he’d killed enough to know how attentive it made people. But he’d also come across many inexplicable things in his short life and he’d decided that de Milja was just one more.

De Milja sighted down the Simonov at four hundred yards. Ping. That animated the Russians and drew an appreciative chuckle from Frantek. They leaped off their horses and went flat on the ground. Disciplined, they did not fire their rifles. They waited. Ten long minutes.

“Mine is on the far left,” Frantek said, squinting through his gun-sight.

“Not yet,” de Milja said.

One of the Russian scouts rose to one knee, rifle at his hip swinging back and forth across the axis of the road. Then he stood.

“Now?” said Frantek.

“No.”

The scout retrieved his horse. Climbed up in the saddle. Ping.

At first, de Milja was afraid he’d miscalculated and killed him, because he seemed to fly off the horse, which shied and galloped a few yards. And the other three scouts returned fire, including a long staccato rattle, at least half a drum of pepecha rounds. Some of it in their direction—a white mark chipped in a tree trunk, the sound of canvas ripping overhead—but not the sort of enthusiastic concentration that would mean the scouts knew where they were. Then the man de Milja had fired at moved, changed positions, scuttling along low to the ground and throwing himself flat.

De Milja’s greatest worry was Frantek, an excellent shot with young eyes. But discipline held. De Milja extended his left hand, palm flat, fingers slightly spread: hold on, do nothing. Frantek pressed himself against the earth, outraged he had to endure this insulting gunfire but, for the moment, under control.

The wind rose, snowflakes spun through the air, swirling like dust and whitening the dirt road. It saved their lives, Razakavia said later. “Russians read snow like priests read Bibles.” Or, perhaps, that day, nobody wanted to die.

The Russians mounted their horses, slow and deliberate under the eyes of the unseen riflemen, and rode back the way they came.

De Milja had been ice inside for a long time—there wasn’t any other way for him to do what he had to do— but Rovno scared him. The Germans had it all their own way in Rovno. The SS were everywhere, death’s-head insignia and lightning flashes, a certain walk, a certain smile. The Einsatzgruppen came through, on the way to murder Jews in another ghetto somewhere, there were Ukrainian SS, Latvian SS, and German criminals, alley killers the Nazi recruiters had quarried from the prisons since 1927. As well as those ordinary Germans, always liked by their neighbors, who, given the opportunity, turned out to be not so very mild-mannered after all. They were the worst, and one taste of blood was all it took.

De Milja met their eyes in Rovno. He dared not be furtive. So he returned the stares, trudged along in the snow, cold and absentminded and absorbed in his business. And armed. It went against the current wisdom—one street search and you were finished. But he would not be taken alive. The cyanide capsule sewn in the point of his shirt collar was the last resort, but the VIS snugged against the small of his back gave him at least the illusion of survival.

The ZWZ secret mail system operated all over Poland, mostly out of dress shops, with couriers carrying letters from city to city. De Milja had used it to report the Russian contact and that had produced a request— delivered in a park in Brest Litovsk—for a meeting in Rovno. With Major Olenik, his former superior in Warsaw and, now that he was no longer under the direct orders of the Sixth Bureau in London, his superior once again.

Rovno had always been a border city—a Polish possession, claimed by Russia, populated by Ukrainians. Narrow streets, brick buildings darkened by factory smoke, November ice, November fog, Gestapo cars with chains on the tires.

“They will yet take Moscow,” Olenik said. “Or maybe not. The Russians have introduced a weapon they call the Katyusha rocket, also known as the Stalin Organ—multiple rockets fired simultaneously from a launcher that can be towed by a truck. The Germans don’t like it. They are afraid of it—they ran away from it up in Smolensk. And the Russians have a new tank, the T-34. German shells bounce off. If they can produce enough of them, they’ll shut the panzer divisions down. There’s that, and the fact that our weather people predict December temperatures outside Moscow of sixty-five degrees below zero. We’ll see what that does to their Wehrwille.”

The word meant war will, a cherished German idea: who wants most to win, wins.

De Milja and Olenik sat in the parlor of a safe house in Rovno, a small apartment, old-fashioned, as though a couple had grown old there and never changed anything. It was all curtains and doilies and clocks with loud ticks—a certain musty smell, a certain silence. De Milja wondered what it would be like in the forest at sixty-five degrees below zero. Olenik apparently read his mind. “We expect you’ll finish up before then,” he said.

Olenik hadn’t changed. Narrow shoulders, tousled gray hair and mustache, pockmarked skin—triumphantly seedy in a worn gray cardigan, you’d walk past him and never see him on any street in the world. He rummaged in a briefcase, found a pipe, fussed with it until he got it lit, then searched again until he found a single sheet of yellowish newsprint. “Have a look,” he said.

The newspaper was called Miecz i Mlot—Sword and Hammer. It was published in Polish by the League of Friends of the Soviet Union and the PPR, the Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.

“It comes from Bialystok,” Olenik said. “From Stryj and Brody and Wilno. From Brest and Rovno. All over the eastern districts. Curious, with a hundred and sixty-five newspapers issued by underground presses in Poland, including every prewar party, socialist, and peasant and all the rest of it, we now see this. Reference to a communist underground in Poland. If it exists, we don’t know about it. If it exists, it does nothing but exist, but that may be just precisely to the point. Its existence will make it easier for them to say, later on, that the communist state of Poland was preceded by a communist underground.”

De Milja handed the newspaper back and Olenik returned it to his briefcase. “Of course,” Olenik said, “we’re not spending life and money to find out what the Russians think about us. They enslaved us for a hundred and twenty years. Attacked in 1920. Attacked again in 1939. And they’ll be coming back this way, pushing a wave of Wehrmacht gray in front of them. We have to decide what to do then.

“If they go all the way to the Oder, to the Rhine, we’re done for— they’ll occupy the country. It’s that simple. So what we may have to do is, at the right moment, throw the Germans out by ourselves and declare a free Polish state, recognition by the British and the Americans to follow. That means a rising, and a terrible price to pay in blood.

“The alternative: reveal Soviet intentions—stick a knife in Stalin before he can get to the conference table. Britain won’t give him Poland, but the Americans are blind to life beyond their oceans.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to drift, then spoke again in a softer voice. “If you’re a small country and you have a bully for a neighbor, God help you, because nobody else will. You’re alone. You’ll cry out in the night, but nobody will come.”

He stopped abruptly, had said more of what was in his heart than he’d meant to. He cleared his throat. “What matters now,” he went on, “are the particular and demonstrable intentions of the Soviet state.

If their partisan units take food without paying for it—and they do. If those partisan units have political officers—and they do. If they are forcing Poles to fight in those units and burning down villages that resist, and we