A man called Bronstein assembled the bomb for the rails. A Soviet army ammunition box, made of zinc, was filled with cheddite. British, in this case, from the honored guest, though the ZWZ in Poland also manufactured the product. A compression fuse, made of a sulfuric-acid vial and paper impregnated with potassium chloride, was inserted beneath the lid of the box.
De Milja sat by Bronstein as the bomb was put together. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.
“I was a teacher of science,” Bronstein said, “in Brest Litovsk.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it on a stone while he packed cheddite into the box. “And this is science.”
They dug a hole beneath the rail and inserted the mine, the weight of the locomotive would do the rest. A scout—Frantek—came galloping up to Razakavia just as it began to get dark. “It comes now,” he said.
The band settled into positions at the edge of the forest. De Milja lay on his stomach, using a rotten log for cover, feeling the cold from the earth seeping up into his body. The train came slowly, ten miles an hour, in case the track was sabotaged. It was. Bronstein’s device worked—a dull bang, a cloud of dirt blown sideways from beneath the creeping locomotive, wheels ripping up the ties, then the locomotive heeling over slowly as a jet of white steam hissed from its boiler. A man screamed. A German machine-gun crew on a platform mounted toward the rear of the train began to traverse the forest.
De Milja sighted down the barrel of the Simonov. From the slats of a cattle car he could see pinpricks of rifle fire. He returned it, squeezing off ten rounds, then changing magazines as bullets rattled in the branches above his head. One of Razakavia’s men leaped from a depression in the earth on the other side of the track and threw a bomb into the last car on the train. The walls blew out and the wooden frame started to burn. German riflemen, some wearing white bandages, jumped out of the train on the side away from the gunfire and began to shoot from behind the wheels of the cars. De Milja heard a cry from his left, a bullet smacked into his log. He aimed carefully and fired off his magazine, then looked up. A figure in field gray had slumped beneath the train, the wind flapping a bandage that had come loose from his head. De Milja changed magazines again. Some of the German soldiers were shooting from behind a tank chained to a flatcar, de Milja could hear the ricochet as gunfire from the forest hit the iron armor.
Another group of Germans began firing from the coal tender, half on, half off the rails where the locomotive had dragged it, and the machine gun came back to life. De Milja heard the sharp whistle that meant it was time to break off the engagement and head back into the forest.
He ran with the others, his breath coming in harsh gasps, up a slight rise to where several young women were guarding the ponies. They left immediately on orders from Kotior, two wounded men slung sideways across the backs of the horses. A third man was shot too badly to move, and Razakavia had to finish him off with a pistol. The rest of the band rode off at a fast trot, vanishing into the forest as the railcar burned brightly in the gray evening.
“The Germans, they always counterattack,” Kotior told him. “Always.” He pointed up at several Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes, little two-seater things that buzzed back and forth above the forest. “This is how partisans die,” Kotior added.
They were up there all night, crisscrossing the dark sky. So there could be no fires, no smoking outside the huts. De Milja pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders and loaded box magazines. The cold made his fingers numb, and the springs, like everything Russian, were too strong, tended to snap the feeder bar back into place, ejecting the bullet two feet in the air and producing a snarl of laughter from Kotior. Four hundred miles to the east, on the line Smolensk/Roslavl/Bryansk, the Wehrmacht was fighting. How the hell did they manage in this kind of cold? he wondered. And it was only October. At night the temperature fell and the puddles froze and huge clouds gathered in the sky, but it did not snow. And in the morning it was blue and sunny: winter isn’t coming this year.
At dawn, an alert. De Milja in position on the camp perimeter, aiming into the forest gloom. Somewhere south, perhaps a mile away, he could hear the faint popping of riflery, then the chatter of a light machine gun. Two scouts arrived at midday—they’d had a brush with a Ukrainian SS unit. “They shot at us,” the scout said. “And we shot back. So they fired the machine gun.” He was about fifteen, grinned like a kid. “Frantek went around and he got one of them, we think. They were screaming and yelling ‘fucking Bolsheviks’ and every kind of thing like that. Calling for God.”
“Where is Frantek?” Razakavia said.
The boy shrugged. “He led them away into the marsh. He’ll be back.”
“Banderovsty.” Razakavia spat the word.
He meant Ukrainian nationalists under the command of the leader Bandera, absorbed into an SS regiment called the Nachtigall. Kotior turned to de Milja and explained. “They do what the SS won’t.”
With Razakavia and Kotior he went to a town on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk. The owner of a bakery sold them milled oats and rye flour for bread. “We pay for this,” Razakavia told him as they knocked at the back door. “Not everyone does.” There was an ancient relationship in these lands, de Milja knew, between groups of armed men and keepers of granaries. Both sides had to survive, together they defined where honor might lie.
The iron door swung open and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of baking bread, swept over de Milja. “Come in,” the baker said. He had a pink face, and a big belly in an undershirt. They sat at a marble-top table, there was flour everywhere. The baker wiped his hands on his shirt and accepted a cigarette from Razakavia. Behind him the brick ovens were at work, with sometimes a lick of flame where the furnace doors didn’t quite meet. A black bread was brought over and cut up with a sawtooth knife.
Razakavia and the baker talked about the weather. The baker shook his head grimly. “All the old babas have been reading the signs.
Caterpillars and geese and bear scat. Probably nonsense, but even if it is, they’re all saying the same thing: it’s going to freeze your balls off.”
Razakavia nodded and chewed on a piece of bread. He reached into a pocket and counted out zlotys he’d bought with the gold rubles. The money lay in stacks on the marble table.
“It’s in the barn in the village of Krymno,” the baker said. “You know where I mean? The same as last spring. In wooden bins.”
“I remember,” Razakavia said.
“You want to take care on the roads, over there.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Somebody goes out and doesn’t come back. Somebody else has to give up a horse. People moving around in the forest.”
“A partisan band?”
“Who knows? These days it could be anything.” He nodded at de Milja. “Who’s your friend?”
“One of us. He’s from down in the Volhynia.”
“Polish?”
“Yes,” de Milja said.