Page 5

Then he spat on him.

That leaves only one round in your Luger, Stan.

Szerynski looked back to the passenger car and pointed at it.

“If you’re finished wasting ammo here,” he said, “get the men to collect everything they find in there. Leave nothing—especially ammo. You’re down to your last shot.”

Polko looked at the pistol, then back at Szerynski. His expression showed he hadn’t been counting.

Szerynski reached down for the black leather wallet.

“This should come in handy, especially if we find another SS uniform in this bastard’s suitcase.”

He gestured with it at the dead SS bodyguards.

“Make sure you get all their papers, too,” he said, then slipped it into his coat pocket.

“And what about bodies?” Polko said.

Szerynski, the flames from the locomotive lighting his face, pointed at the wreckage of the passenger car.

“Drag them back in there and then we burn everything,” he said.

Szerynski then pulled from his coat pocket a wool sock that contained two pounds of malleable Composition C-2 high explosive. The sock looked as if it were stuffed with a fat link of sausage. An eighteen-inch length of Primacord snaked out of the overhand knot at the top of the sock.

“Remember what to do with this?” Szerynski said.

“Mold it around one of the rails at a track tie,” Polko said. “Then cover it with as big a pile of rock as possible to concentrate the explosion on the rail.”

“Right. And don’t set it off till we’re ready to get the hell out of here.”

He held out the plastic explosive to Polko, who suddenly turned his head at the faint sound of another steam locomotive.

“It’s the train carrying the prisoners!” Polko said.

Szerynski strained to hear the sound, then thought for a moment.

“We cannot ambush it now,” he said. “We have lost the surprise element.”

“But . . .”

“No but, Porucznik,” Szerynski said, and thrust the sock of explosive toward Polko. “Hurry, damn it! We cannot stop them from what they’re doing to the prisoners. But blowing the track will slow them down.”

Polko considered that, then grabbed the sock of C-2, made a casual two-finger salute, and trotted toward the train track.

* * *

Not quite ten minutes later, after his men had returned the dead to the passenger car and doused the interior with kerosene from a can used to fuel its heater, Szerynski tossed in a wooden match. The flame caught slowly and began to spread.

He started moving toward the edge of the forest, signaling all to follow.

As he and his men disappeared into the thick of the trees, behind them came a sudden whoosh and they were momentarily brightly illuminated by the flames engulfing the passenger car.

A moment later, the plastic explosive went off, and, a long moment after that, with Szerynski and his men now running toward where the other resistance fighters waited, dirt and small rock rained down.

[TWO]

OSS London Station