One of the men in Jan’s unit patted de Milja on the shoulder as he went past and said, “Good luck.” A neighbor heard people in the hallway, opened his door a crack, then closed it quickly.
De Milja turned to look back into the dark apartment, then shut the door. On the doorframe was a pen-sized outline with two empty screw holes where something had been removed. De Milja knew that Jews often kept a metal device by their front doors, though he couldn’t remember what it was called. The people who had lived in the apartment had apparently taken it off, thinking perhaps that nobody would notice the outline where it had once been fastened.
With Bron driving, they looked like three Gestapo executives with an SS chauffeur. The Opel turned into Zamkova Street, almost dark at
5:00 p.m., an hour before the Rovno curfew, a few people hurrying home with heads down. The second Opel and the truck, Jan’s unit, continued on, heading for the entrance that led to the prison offices.
The first Opel pulled up to the sentry box. Bron opened the door, stood half in, half out of the front seat so the guard got a good look at the SS uniform. He started yelling orders in very fast German, angry and impatient and dangerous. The guard had seen such behavior before, and hastened to open the gate. The car shot through, then one of the civilians rolled out of the back and headed for the sentry box on the run. The guard was puzzled. The running man, Kolya, put an automatic pistol against his temple. “Hand over your weapon,” he said.
The Latvian guard did as he was told. Kolya emptied the chamber and the magazine and returned the rifle. “Now stand guard, do everything as usual,” he said, sitting down in the sentry box below the level of the window. He pressed the VIS against the base of the man’s spine. “As usual,” he said. The guard nodded.
The second Opel and the truck pulled into the street that ran perpendicular to Zamkova. Two ladders were taken from the truck and placed against the wall. The prison had been built to keep people from getting out—very little thought had been given to keeping them from getting in. As Jan’s unit climbed the ladders, the truck was driven fifty yards farther down the street and parked, its engine idling loud enough to cover the sound of gunfire from behind the prison wall.
The street sentry box was visible from the interior guard station, so Bron drove the Opel at normal speed, then stopped and shouted angrily in German. The guard didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “What’s the matter?” he asked the SS sergeant. Dimly, he could see two men in civilian suits in the car—that meant important security types. Evidently the poor bastard driving the car had been bullied by his superiors—but why take it out on him? The SS sergeant sputtered and turned red. The guard shrugged and opened the gate. The car sped through, one of the men in civilian clothes got out and ran toward him.
Not right.
He went for his rifle.
De Milja readied himself, his fist tight on the door handle. The Opel jerked to a stop, he shoved the back door open and jumped out. All he could see of the Latvian guard was a pale face in the darkness. The face seemed puzzled, and faintly offended. Three paces from the sentry box their eyes locked, and everyone knew everything. The guard reacted, snatched for a rifle in the sentry box. De Milja brought the VIS up and pulled the trigger as he ran. It bent the guard in two, arms folded across his stomach. De Milja moved around him, took a moment to steady his hand, then shot him four times in the side of the head. The man dropped to his knees, then pitched forward on his face.
De Milja ran back to the car and climbed in. “All right, go to the next gate.”
Jan and three of his men climbed over the wall into the administrative courtyard of the prison. A trained commando, Jan had memorized every detail of the guard’s sketch. He looked around the courtyard and saw that each doorway and gate was where the map had said it was. A young clerk coming down the stairway from the prison office dropped an armload of files when he saw the machine pistols and the men in the hats with the brims pulled down. He choked off a yell, threw his hands in the air, stood absolutely still.
Jan opened a door at the top of the stairs. There were three more clerks—the German warden and his German assistant had separate offices at the end of the room. “Raise your hands,” Jan said. The clerks did as they were told. Two of Jan’s men pulled the Germans from their office chairs and stood them against a wall. The warden had been a Nazi streetfighter in the 1930s and the Rovno prison was his reward for faithful service. He’d put on weight since those days, and wore a fine suit, but he met Jan’s stare with defiance. “Are you Herr Kruger? The warden?” Jan asked.
“Yes.”
“Please give me the keys to blocks four and six.”
“I cannot.”
Jan raised the machine pistol so Kruger could look down the barrel. Kruger closed his eyes, pressed his lips closed, and drew himself up to his full height. The Hungarian weapon fired a heavy, high-velocity bullet; the warden was thrown back against the wall so hard the plaster cracked, and he left a long red smear as he slid to the floor.
Jan turned the weapon toward the assistant warden. “Please give me the keys to blocks four and six,” he said. The assistant trembled with fear but he would not give in. “Is that your answer?” Jan asked.
The man made a sound. Resistance? Assent? Jan shrugged and fired a long burst. The man screamed once before he died. One of the clerks yelled, “Here, here are keys. In this drawer. Take them, please.”
In a room down the corridor, a clerk hid behind a bank of filing cabinets. He heard gunfire, heard the assistant warden cry out, heard several minutes of silence, and carefully lifted the receiver off a telephone and held it to his ear, tapping the disconnect bar impatiently with his finger, but the line was dead.
A darkened courtyard bordered by cell blocks, cobblestones worn smooth by half a century of prisoners’ felt slippers. At the center, an iron grating sparkling with frost. De Milja and Vlach ran across the courtyard, bent low to the ground. They reached an entry marked South in Cyrillic and used the arched doorway as cover. Czarny prison was silent, the inmates forbidden to talk, so they could hear the jangle of keys as warders moved along the corridors, the idling truck on the other side of the wall, the high-low sirens of German and Ukrainian police in the streets of Rovno. A voice called, another answered, a third laughed—guards on one of the cell blocks. Then footsteps, three or four running men, and Jan and two others came out of the darkness.
“Everybody all right?” de Milja whispered.
Jan nodded. “We shot the wardens.”
“Keys?”
“Yes.”
Jan was breathing hard, he rummaged through a ring of keys, peering at the stamped markings. He removed two keys and handed them
to de Milja. “Block four,” he said.
“Good. We go out as planned.”
“No change. See you in better times.”
“Yes. See you then,” de Milja said.
De Milja turned the key and opened the grille that led to Block Four. It creaked when it opened, then clanged shut. A warder came around the corner and said, “Tomek?” Vlach had the machine pistol pressed against his chest before he knew what was happening. He gasped with surprise, dropped a wooden club with a clatter that echoed down the corridor. De Milja pulled the man’s arms behind him and wound a piece of wire around his wrists. He’d thought at first that the warder was a fat man, but he wasn’t. The muscles in his shoulders and back were massive, and the smell of him, like stale garlic, cut through the prison odor of open drains and crumbling stone.