Last Citadel

‘It’s not going to blow up, girl.’

Ivan smacked a fist into the lump. Katya jerked. Nothing happened.

‘It takes an explosion to make it go off. That’s what the caps are for.

Here.’

Still, Katya hesitated. He stuffed the clay in her hands. Under the cast of a slim moon dicing through the leaves overhead, Katya noted Ivan’s palms were stained. Kneading the C-3, her own hands began to turn gray.

‘It makes your skin yellow,’ Ivan said, grinning, showing teeth that were gray, too, under the moon and branches.

While Katya and Ivan molded the explosive, Daniel and surly Josef re-wrapped the long coil of electric detonation cord out of Ivan’s knapsack.

The starosta knelt, peering through the bushes where they hid. The village elder’s name was Filip Filipovich Platonov. He had a son - also Filip -

fighting somewhere with the Red Army. The boy’s letters had stopped a year ago, and the elder knew nothing more. Katya guessed how old the man was, probably more than sixty. His face had collapsed around his hawk nose, he had high cheekbones and a brow like a white awning to make his face sharp, years of hunger and labor had rooted in his flesh. Many of the men from his village who’d joined that night carried the same lean look, the same predator’s nose.

A hundred meters away, the Borisovka rail line ran over flat ground.

To make the tracks easier to protect from partisan sabotage, the Germans had mowed down a wide swath of trees beside the tracks for miles in every direction. Tonight, two-man patrols walked the rails with flashlights. The guards ambled past every four to five minutes, shining their lights down at the rail ties. Filip watched them without blinking, with a bird-of-prey focus.

Ivan wiped his hands on his jacket. The C-3 became malleable in Katya’s grasp, she was excited by the danger, the peril of rolling a powerful explosive in her fingers. She imagined them all going up in a red burst out of her hands.

Ivan breathed, ‘Daniel?’

The thin one came close. He and Ivan had both been regular army soldiers, privates. Each had been captured by the Germans and escaped, and both had been found separately wandering behind enemy lines by the partisans. Daniel had been born in this part of the steppe; he told Katya that Plokhoi had stopped him from going home. With the partisan band they risked their lives just as much as they had fighting on the front lines, but now in civilian clothes they enjoyed more status - now they were considered even more as military men. Plokhoi had made them leaders.

Daniel brought out from his jacket pocket two small wooden cartons.

He handed them down to Ivan, who took the boxes with uncharacteristic gingerness. The big man set one aside and opened the other for Katya, as though showing her a gem. Inside, on a bed of cotton, lay something that resembled a copper bullet casing with antennae.

‘Blasting cap,’ she said.

‘Definitely.’ Ivan raised his grin to Daniel, squatting next to them. ‘They say I’m the dumb one, but I’m smart enough not to carry these damn things around.’

Daniel didn’t mind the gibe. He brought down a slender finger to the cap, such a clean and comfortable thing, in bed in its little wooden home.

‘These babies have a bad temper. Ivan’s too clumsy to carry them.

He falls down a lot. You do that with one of these in your pants, you don’t get up the same man.’

Katya snickered at this, drawing a shush from Josef. The older man kept himself apart while spooling the long detonation wire around his arm.

Daniel continued, unchastened. ‘Here’s how it works. The C-3

explodes at a rate of about twenty-five thousand feet per second. To detonate it, you need to make a faster explosion. That’s why C-3 won’t blow up if you just burn it or hit it. That’s where the blasting cap comes in. You push the cap into the plastique, hook these two wires up to the electric firing cord, send a current down the wire, and the cap goes off just a little faster than the C-3.’ He raised both hands. ‘Boom.’

‘Boom,’ repeated Ivan, savoring the word and the concept.

Daniel lifted the little cap off its cotton pillows. He fingered the twin slender wires sticking out of one end. The wires were crimped together in the middle by a tiny round tab.

‘They’re very sensitive, these bastards. Anything can set them off. So once you got the C-3 stuck to whatever it is you’re going to blow, and you got the wires attached, you make sure you take off this little piece. This keeps the two wires touching, see? To short them out. Once this is gone, the cap is live.’

Daniel returned the copper detonator to its case and closed the lid.

He reached down to scoop up both boxes. Ivan took the doughy C-3 from Katya’s oily and stained hands. She wiped them on her pants, like Ivan.

When they were clean, Daniel handed her the two boxes.

‘You and me, Witch.’

Katya hefted the twin cartons, almost weightless in her palms. She waited for Daniel to tell her he was kidding. ‘Me?’

‘Why not? At this point you know everything the rest of us know about this stuff.’

Josef stalked forward. ‘You and Daniel are the smallest and quickest.

You’ll go.’

The urge pulsed in Katya to mount an argument, that she’d never done anything like this before. But she looked around at ox-like Ivan, crotchety Josef, and ancient Filip - the elder gazed at her with a ‘you want me to go?’ shrug - and clamped her lips. Suddenly she missed her U-2 and the thousands of feet she used to have between her and the Germans.

‘Fine,’ she whispered. Josef finished with the firing cord and checked his watch. He laid the wire on the ground and crept to the edge of the bushes to join Filip. Daniel grabbed up the long black loops and hoisted them over his shoulder, they hung almost to his boots. He found one loose end and handed it to Ivan. The large man dug