Up until this point, pretending to be Inna had been easy. It was simply lying. All she’d had to do was use Inna’s name. Inna’s sister was stuck on the siege lines, so Karen had lived alone in Inna’s apartment. She hadn’t even had to pretend to be a young Communist ideologue. But with this man, it would be different. He was an NKVD security officer, surely trained in interrogation psychology. Karen wondered whether she’d be tortured. Whatever happened, she could admit nothing. Her only salvation, however remote, lay in somehow convincing this man that she was innocent.
She had to consider running. Fight or flight was the natural reaction of a cornered animal. But Karen was a fighter. And she knew that to run away would be to give in to panic. Fleeing into the cold, empty streets of Leningrad would make her guilty. And this man would easily run her down. He knew the streets of Leningrad far better than she did.
After a few minutes, the NKVD man stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. By the direction she knew he was taking her to the Smolny, the city headquarters, for interrogation. She had seen the Smolny before the war but hadn’t noticed it since. It surprised her now—it had been so effectively camouflaged that it took her a long moment to recognize the building across the street. Not only had it been covered with special nets and tarpaulins; it had also been painted by theatrical scenic artists to disguise its shape. It looked like an entirely different building. Of course the Russians would disguise it, Karen realized. They would have to. The city headquarters would be a top priority for German bombing. And yet here it stood, unscathed. It wasn’t the act of camouflage that was so impressive, but the degree of skill with which it was accomplished.
Working this out in her head had helped keep Karen calm, but now her heart sank. Russians were so good at hiding, at pretending. They could make a whole building disappear. What chance did she, a mere American girl, have of fooling Soviet State security?
CHAPTER 13
THE ORGAN-GRINDER
Petr woke from the stomach-turning sensation of falling. What had happened? Had he rolled off his bed? No, it was worse than that. He had almost rolled off the second-story loft. For a moment he was confused. Where was he? Then he felt an abrasive, wet tongue on his face, and it all came back to him. Duck, the dog’s name was Duck. He was in the middle of a battle. That was the sound of crackling and booming outside the door. The Germans must still hold the center of the village, must still be resisting. How had he fallen asleep in the middle of a battle?
Petr suddenly recognized that he was a combat veteran. Veterans slept whenever they could, whenever they weren’t needed. He, only twenty years old, was already a hardened warhorse and hero of the Soviet Union. The thought was more absurd than it was comforting. There was nothing special about being a veteran, Petr realized. All it meant was that somehow you had survived. You had been lucky.
A machine gun purred. It wasn’t the tinny rattle of a Russian gun but the threatening growl of a German MG-34. The sound made Petr realize that perhaps one thing was special about being a veteran, after all. Veterans were hard to kill. Blondie and his Siberian unit had been veterans of the war in Mongolia. And the Germans still holding the center of this village were undoubtedly veterans of Poland and France. Look how hard they were to kill. How long had they been holding out?
Petr wasn’t sure. He’d lost track of time while he slept… hours, at least.
The raspy tongue swept across Petr’s face a second time, prompting him to sit up and push away the Alsatian wolf dog’s snout. Petr noted with satisfaction that he had already set up his big PTRD rifle before he’d fallen asleep. It was pointing west on its bipod, a big bullet already cocked in its chamber. But it wasn’t pointing out of one of the log house’s windows. Petr had taken a tip from the Germans. He’d carved a hole in the plaster where the logs joined, and the barrel of his rifle was sticking through it. It wasn’t invisible—not exactly. Someone in the frozen field outside could spot it if they knew exactly where to look. But they’d be looking at the windows first. This way Petr could surprise the Germans the way the Germans had surprised the Russians during their assault on the village. That was another sign of being a veteran, Petr realized with even more satisfaction—learning from your enemy.
Petr rolled over and lifted the PTRD stock to his shoulder, wrapped his finger around its trigger, and peered out through his peephole at a beautiful winter scene. Snow had fallen. It coated the fallow beet field and the straight road beyond, a pleasant landscape with white rolling hills. The distant forest had been dusted as well, the glistening flakes and icicles making the spruce look like Christmas trees. But climbing up above the trees was another color: black. It was the inky smoke of gasoline engines, the dark exhaust of German tanks.
The panzers were still too distant to hear over the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire, but the smoke was approaching fast. The German cavalry was on its way.
Petr was not the only one to notice the tanks. A series of shrill whistles blew over the gunfire. This was the tank killer’s signal—time to ready their weapons. Petr’s gun was ready. So was his other weapon. It sat on its haunches and panted, a smile stretched across its snout, its red tongue lolling out and wagging with every breath.
Petr stared into the dog’s brown eyes. It was his duty to arm the explosives. Duck was trained for this, to blow himself up against German tanks, a canine suicide bomber. Petr knew that all over the village, other dogs were being prepared, their packs unbuttoned, electronic batteries charged, wires connecting primers to the wooden antennas. But Petr couldn’t do it. Duck had saved his life. Now it was Petr’s chance to return the favor.
The German panzers began to emerge from the woods, and Petr’s heart sank. The tanks were buttoned up, the hatches locked tight. The commanders and crew were leaving nothing to chance, relying on viewports and periscopes instead of the naked eye. “Shoot the commanders,” Fyodor had advised, but now Fyodor was dead, and there were no commanders to shoot.
As the lead tanks churned through the virgin snow of the beet field, more emerged from the woods behind, dozens of them. It must have been an entire company, at least.
Another series of whistles blew. This time it wasn’t a signal to the soldiers, but to the dogs. Duck recognized the cadence immediately and leaped from the loft. Petr tried to call him back, but the dog’s training was too ingrained. He raced like a shot out of the log-house door so he could circle back around to the tanks crossing the field.
Petr returned his finger to the trigger and his eye to the peephole. He heard the bang of first one and then another antitank rifle. The bullets sparked on a panzer’s armor but had no other obvious effect. Suddenly the lead panzers halted. Their turrets swiveled, and their howitzers roared. A cottage disintegrated under the impact of high-explosive shells.
The Russian antitank rifle team there would have already evacuated out the back door; they knew better than to stay in one place. But the howitzers were again swiveling on their turrets. The guns roared, and timber flew from the next cottage in line. Soon the riflemen would have nowhere left to hide. Those howitzers would flush them out of their holes and right into the fangs of German machine guns.