Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

The Germans had suspected this all along, and Karen played into those suspicions. She told them she had been sent there to determine German troop strength and location. The Americans didn’t trust their Russian allies, she explained, and they considered all Soviet military reports propaganda. So they’d sent a number of American spies into Russia to see with their own eyes.

That sounded believable to the Germans, for they didn’t trust Communists, either. But they wanted to know where her equipment was—her radio and her codebook. Karen claimed to have lost both while trying to cross a river. But she offered to write down what little she remembered of the cipher she and the other spies were using.

This was a major intelligence coup for the Germans. With even bits and pieces of the code, cryptanalysts in Berlin could crack it and use it to entrap other American spies. They could also eavesdrop on American transmissions and intercept military orders and dispatches.

The cipher Karen wrote down was nonsense, of course. She made it up on the spot—a simple system of substituting numbers for letters. By the time her notes were sent to Berlin, the Germans would know she’d invented it. But by then it would be too late. Karen would be dead. That was what happened to spies: they were shot. But the Germans didn’t want to waste bullets on a firing squad. They’d decided to hang her instead.

Karen was proud of her deception. She hadn’t saved her own life, but she might have saved Petr’s. The Germans never suspected she was traveling in the company of a Russian soldier, and she’d been able to avoid divulging the existence of the abandoned hunting shack. She was pleased with herself, she told herself, and she should be at peace—ready to die. And yet she couldn’t help what she really felt. What she experienced inside that storage closet was terror.

Suddenly Karen heard a dog howling. It confused her for a moment. Then a new fear kicked in. She knew the Germans were looking for Duck. She’d overheard them, and they’d even asked her about the dog during her interrogation. The howling dog had to be Duck; the Germans had found him. And if they’d found Duck, that meant they’d probably found Petr.

Karen knew she should be overcome with despair. If Petr were captured, that meant her carefully constructed story had failed to protect him. To make matters worse, the Germans would soon discover from him that everything she’d told them was a lie. She’d be interrogated again, and this time she wouldn’t just be beaten, she’d be tortured. That made her all the more terrified now, but she wasn’t sad. Illogically, unreasonably, she actually felt happy. Because for some reason even she couldn’t quite understand, she couldn’t wait to see Petr again.

Unteroffizier Oster suspected it was a trap. The safest thing to do would be to put a bullet in the dog’s head. But Leutnant Schaefer wanted the creature alive, so the Unteroffizier had to obey.

A report had come in that someone had tied the Alsatian wolf dog to a tree near the village, causing the hound great despair. By the time they found it, the dumb beast’s attempts to break free had only succeeded in tangling it more. The canine didn’t stop howling when the German soldiers neared, but it did gaze at them with its big brown eyes and a mournful expression that begged them to set it free.

Oster had his men keep their distance. Unfortunately for the hound, Oster first had to make sure there wasn’t a partisan sniper waiting in ambush. So he ordered Krause to go forward alone and see whether the dog was injured.

Oster was using Krause as bait. Fortunately, Krause didn’t realize that. If he had, he might have figured out some way to refuse the order and shirk the dangerous duty. Instead, he moved carefully toward the dog, holding his hand out in greeting. The big dog stopped howling, pawed at the ground, wagged his tail, and even licked the palm of Krause’s hand.

Oster was impressed. Maybe he’d finally found something Krause was good at.

Krause glanced back over his shoulder at the squad leader. “Shall I cut him loose, Herr Unteroffizier?”

“Not yet,” Oster replied. If there had been a sniper, he would have killed Krause. And there probably was no booby trap, or the dog would have set if off by jerking on the line. But it still had to be an ambush. Why else was the dog left here like that, helplessly tied to a tree?

Oster had argued against investigating the barking dog when Leutnant Schaefer ordered it, trying to appeal to Schaefer’s own sense of self-preservation. Their bivouac in the village was too poorly defended. Two of the platoon’s squads were away—one on escort duty with a supply caravan, and another sent forward on a combat patrol toward Tikhvin. Only Oster’s squad had been held back to guard the village’s strategic bridge across the Neva River. And now Leutnant Schaefer was risking that important landmark by deploying his last riflemen? With Oster’s squad gone, only the Leutnant’s tiny support staff would be available to defend the village and the bridge from a partisan raid. But Leutnant Schaefer had brushed off Oster’s concern, again citing his belief that there were no partisans. The attacks on their supply caravans had been the work of a young American spy who’d been captured.

“But if there are no partisans,” Oster now muttered to himself as he stared at Krause and the animal, “then who tied up this dog?”

“What was that, Herr Unteroffizier?” Krause said. He already had his knife ready, despite Oster’s order not to free the hound.

“I was wondering who tied up this dog,” Oster admitted loudly, effectively posing the question to the entire rifle squad.

“Perhaps no one tied him up,” proposed Pfeiffer, struggling as always under the weight of his machine gun. “It appears as if the dog tangled itself.”

Oster had to admit that that was possible. “But then how did it get a rope around its neck in the first place?” The convoy that had first encountered the dog had reported neither leash nor collar.

Krause squatted and squinted at where the rope wrapped around a tree branch. “You are correct, Herr Unteroffizier. Someone definitely tied a knot.”

Once again Oster was impressed, this time by Krause’s initiative. Perhaps the troublemaker was finally taking soldiering seriously. He even felt a pang of guilt about having used the man as sniper bait. “Very well, cut him free,” Oster announced. “But hold on to him tightly,” he added. “Don’t let him go!”

Krause’s sharp combat knife made quick work of the rope. The dog didn’t resist as the soldier carefully untangled the line from its legs. Soon the animal was back on all four paws, tugging at the rope like a hunting hound anxious for release. “He’s a handsome creature, isn’t he?” Krause said with admiration.

Oster nodded. “He resembles the Führer’s dogs.” Oster had never met the Führer, let alone his dogs, but he’d seen photographs of Hitler with his pets. Perhaps Leutnant Schaefer had been correct to send them on this mission, after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a fool’s errand.

Right then an explosion went off. It was near, but it wasn’t a particularly loud blast—certainly no louder than a howitzer shell. But the unexpected sound startled Krause, who inadvertently let go of the dog’s rope.

Oster cursed as he watched the dog bound away, disappearing once more into the forest. He was angry with Krause, of course, but he was mostly angry with himself for trusting a worthless soldier. That dog was their mission objective. He should have made Pfeiffer secure it, not Krause. Oster had been right all along. Krause was good for one thing and one thing only: sniper bait.

He was about to order the squad to chase the dog, but then he heard a gunshot. And a moment later he heard a second. Now his brain connected the dots. All three sounds—the explosion and the two gunshots—had come from the village.

The bridge was under attack!

The explosion knocked Karen off her feet. She hit her head against a shelf and blacked out. It was only for an instant, though, because the smoke in her lungs made her cough and immediately brought her back to consciousness.

She opened her eyes and was almost blinded by bright sunlight. A hole had been blown open in the side of the house the Germans had been using for their command post. The same blast had ripped her prison door—that of the storage closet—straight from its hinges.

The slumped body of a German officer lay on the rug outside Karen’s makeshift cell. A big wooden splinter from the wall stuck out of the officer’s neck. It was Leutnant Schaefer, the man in charge of her interrogations. She tried not to focus on the blood gushing from the wound onto the rug.

She heard the stomp of boots, and the front door swung open. Standing there was Feldwebel Krieger, Schaeffer’s right-hand man—the very man who’d beaten her. He held an MP40 submachine gun and pointed it angrily at her, assuming she was somehow responsible for the Leutnant’s death. As he released the weapon’s safety, a flash and a bang pierced the billowing smoke.

Krieger fell, a red splotch spreading on his tunic. Karen watched in wide-eyed shock as a silhouette, backlit by sunlight, emerged from the smoke. It was Petr. The boy soldier reached out and helped Karen back to her feet. “We should go,” he said.

“Look out!” she screamed.