Kuznetsky was not meditating; he was simply bored. It was too dark to continue with his task of memorizing the poem; he thought he had it all now but he couldn’t see to check. Like a pile of hewn timber, he silently mouthed, the world lies heaped up on itself, one thing presses and squeezes and interlocks with the other, so each is determined. And here we sit, he thought, waiting to shake the pile. By day a moon rises in me and when it’s night outside — a sun shines here within. It was more than a poem, more like a poem full of poems. He’d never read anything like it, never anything that seemed to speak to him so directly, as if he were already living out its lines. Your wound is the world — it burns and rages, and you feel your soul, the fever. Amen.
He folded the dog-eared sheets and replaced them in his tunic pocket, looked at his watch but couldn’t make out the hands. It didn’t matter; he’d always been able to judge the passage of time. Ten to eight, he reckoned, ten minutes more to the halfway point between sunset and moonrise. They had no idea what they would find up top; all five German vehicles had rumbled across that morning, making the girders creak alarmingly, but the occasional footfalls on the planks above told him that at least some men had been left behind. He thought he’d recognized six different voices but that didn’t mean much. There could be fifty men up there.
His head said eight o’clock. “Okay,” he whispered. The partisans stretched their limbs to the limits allowed by the confined space and precarious footholds, then climbed quietly along the inside edge of the lateral girders, four on each side of the bridge. At a hand signal from Kuznetsky, he and Morisov led the others up the abutments in a rush, firing from the hip before any target was visible, the noise of the machine guns shattering the peace of the evening.
Breasting the rise, Kuznetsky saw three Germans already falling in the hail of bullets. Fifty yards away, the rest were sitting around a fire eating their evening meal. He ran for the emplacement the Germans had set up to cover the bridge but the gun wouldn’t turn far enough. Morisov zigzagged down the road still firing while the Germans scrambled for their weapons. “Down,” he screamed, at the same time pulling Yakovenko with him off into the trees. The two men crashed blindly through the undergrowth for a hundred yards or so, the road invisible to their left, their passage rendered inaudible by the continuous gunfire.
Nadezhda had followed them, and Kuznetsky led his two companions to the left, moving more quietly now. They reached the road, concealed from the Germans by trees on a bend. “Grenades,” he whispered, and they advanced stealthily toward the enemy’s rear, Yakovenko and Nadezhda on one side of the road, Kuznetsky on the other.
The Germans had lacked the time or the sense to put their fire out, and their backs were lit by the flames. The grenades weren’t very well aimed. Two overshot and one exploded in the pail of food, but the surprise was enough. The Germans leaped to their feet, their hands stabbing skyward in surrender.
Yakovenko looked at Kuznetsky, who nodded and resisted the urge to turn away as the machine gun cut them down.
There had been nine altogether, and only the sergeant looked a day over seventeen. All were spattered with blood and what looked like vegetable stew. Farther up the road, Morisov lay dead in a pool of his own blood. The only other casualty was one of Sukhanova’s fingers.
“Pity about the food,” Yakovenko muttered. “I could do with a change of diet.”
Kuznetsky waited impatiently while Tolyshkin put a tourniquet on Sukhanova’s hand, and then led the group off into the forest. They still had ten miles to walk.
The moon was high in the sky when the seaplane glided across the tops of the trees and gracefully splashed down on the surface of the lake. Nadezhda let go of Kuznetsky’s arm to help douse the signal fire as the pilot brought the plane in toward the shore. He had expected more tears from her but there hadn’t been any. She had asked him, simply, “Shall I look for you after the war is over?” And he, suddenly decided, had replied just as simply, “I’ll be looking for you, my love.”
Now he stood on the rocks by the lakeshore, waiting for the plane to come nearer, the group gathered above him on the outcrop. Yakovenko was in command now, and to Kuznetsky’s astonishment he’d felt tears on his own cheeks as they’d hugged farewell. It was like leaving family, except that he’d not felt anything like that when he’d left his own back in Minnesota.
He waded out into the lake, feeling the icy water numbing his legs, and clambered aboard the two-seater. Christ, he was tired. The pilot grunted a welcome, revved the engine, and turned the plane back toward the middle of the lake. Kuznetsky thought he had a last glimpse of the group disappearing into the shadows as the craft gathered speed across the water and headed up into the moon. Now the tops of the trees were thirty feet below. He fastened the goggles, felt the bitter wind on his cheeks. The pilot shouted something about the German lines — Kuznetsky supposed they’d be passing over them in a short time. He didn’t really care. What could he do about Germans four hundred feet below? Piss on them, that was all.
Amy put the book back into her bag and got to her feet. She felt too restless to read, too full of suppressed excitement. The train was due in a few minutes, and she began to walk slowly up the platform, wondering again whether there could be any other explanation for the new instructions.
She couldn’t think of one. Moscow was going to order her to “sell” Wim Doesburg something that Berlin would buy. Moscow’s interest in the uranium train had been rekindled with a vengeance. Put the two together and it could add up to only one thing. She still didn’t see how it could be done, but the idea itself was brilliant. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without her because she was the only link with the Germans. This was real action at long last.
The train arrived, its locomotive belching black smoke into the clear blue sky. She took a seat in the front car, listened to the conductor’s cries of “Manassas” reverberating down the platform, and checked her watch as they began to pull out of the station. Exactly nine minutes later she left her seat and walked back two cars, stopped for a minute to make sure she wasn’t being followed, then continued toward the rear of the train. Another two cars down, she and Matson went through their fortnightly ritual, knocking into each other and exchanging dropped copies of The Saturday Evening Post. She had her usual glimpse of highly polished brown shoes, uniform, weather-beaten face, heard the Tennessee drawl intone “So sorry, ma’am” and her own voice say “It’s nothing — really.”
In the club car she took a seat at the bar and ordered a Coca-Cola. No problem, there never was, but still her pulse insisted on racing. She forced herself to sit there until the thumping had subsided, then locked herself in the washroom to examine the contents of the envelope left inside the magazine.
It was all there. A complete timetable, obviously copied from an internal railroad document, annotated with crew changeover points and watering stops. An explanation of the Friday timing — “an optimilization of clear paths,” whatever that meant. A list headed “Locomotives Rostered for This Duty.” And four photographs of the train itself, from different distances and angles, marked May 5 on the backs. That clinched it. Faulkner hadn’t mentioned photographs, but Moscow must have asked for them, and there could be only one reason.