The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 41: The Organ-Grinder

Karen had changed. Petr had seen it happen to other people; other soldiers. Her face was expressionless; they called it the thousand yard stare. It was like she didn't care anymore, didn't care about her own life or death, didn't care about anything.

Didn't even care about him.

Petr realized now that he'd been worried about the wrong thing. He'd been worried about her physical safety; that she'd be killed or wounded. He should have been worried about her mind.

She'd been through so much already that he'd assumed nothing bad could ever break her. She'd almost starved in Leningrad, she'd had to bury her own father, she'd seen her friends killed in front of her eyes. Karen was strong, stronger than he was. He'd thought that strength would protect her.

But now he wondered if he had it wrong all the time. Maybe it was the strong people who got broken, broken because they understood the full implications of what they were doing, what they were experiencing.

Petr had often thought there was something wrong with him. Why was it so easy for him to detach from realiy, to imagine the people he killed as inanimate objects? And what about the madness he felt -- that addictive rush of excitement that filled him every time he faced down death? That wasn't right. It was shameful. There was something wrong with him.

He'd put it all on Karen, he realized. If he couldn't feel enough, she felt too much. And when it boiled up inside her, threatening to explode, she could always release it safely through her music. She was strong enough to feel for both of them, and when she played the cello or violin then Petr could feel with her.

But he was wrong. She couldn't handle it. Whatever she'd seen or done out in the snow had pushed her over the limit. And it was Petr's fault.

He held her, and she seemed to welcome his embrace, but she didn't look at him, she just stared out at Lenin's statue: the thousand yard stare.

Nothing much had happened in the days since they secured the supplies. The calendar had changed; it was December now. But the Germans hadn't attacked.

Twice a day they could see planes: Russian planes flying out and back from their airfields across the Volga. Sometimes they came back damaged and smoking. But they never saw German planes. Wherever the Yaks and Airacobras were fighting, it was out of sight far to the west.

Today when the planes flew back they didn't seem to have fought at all. There was no smoke trailing from their engines; just a steady roar of propellers that increased in volume as the planes got closer. Petr felt helpless watching them. He'd heard what had happened to the bell over Stalingrad, she'd become a legend. Whenever he saw the planes now he remembered how she'd saved his life on the rooftop. The planes could do so much for him on the ground, could save him, but he couldn't do a thing to help protect them.

As the warplanes flew closer Petr noticed one of them break formation. It wasn't a Yak, it was one of the lend-lease American planes, an Airacobra flown by a Russian pilot. Then, suddenly, its propeller slowed, stopped, and reversed. The plane's nose dipped and the machine began to plummet to the earth.

A dark figure tumbled out of the plane's cockpit. Then silk blossomed into a parachute and the man began to float while his plane crashed into a ruin below him with an explosion of broken concrete and twisted metal.

Another plane broke formation, another American lend-lease Airacobra. It turned to where the man was floating and circled him, watching him land. Then there was a burp of German machinegun fire and Petr saw tracer bullets lick out toward the plane's wings. The Airacobra straightened out and gunned its throttle, passing with a roar straight over Pavlov's house to the other side of the river.

"Did you see that?" Karen asked. They were the first words she had spoken all day.

"Yes," Petr replied, astounded both by what he had seen and by Karen's interest in it. "We should help him," Petr said, again remembering the bell over Stalingrad.

"No," Karen said forcefully. She grabbed his hand and held it as tightly as possible. "Don't go. I need you."

Petr reassured her by quietly rubbing her shoulder with his free hand. "Don't worry," he said, "I'm not leaving you."

* * *

Petr's reassurance turned out to be a lie. The army wasn't a democracy, and a soldier couldn't do whatever he wanted. Petr had to do what Sergeant Pavlov ordered him to do, and Pavlov ordered him to help rescue that pilot.

Because Pavlov had orders, too, orders from the airfield across the river. They'd radioed Hait and told him the coordinates of the downed pilot. They ordered Pavlov to send out a rescue party.

Pavlov couldn't send men in daylight across the open ground of the park, so that meant using the sewers. And it meant sending the surviving soldiers who had experience in the sewers: Petr, Karen and Sarayev. Karen wasn't fit for combat, Pavlov recognized and understood that, and a man couldn't travel Stalingrad alone. So that meant Petr had to go.

Karen didn't react when Petr explained to her why he had to leave her. She didn't scream or cry or get angry at him. She just moved away and turned her back to him, which was worse.

The sewer channels were slick with ice. Travelling was treacherous; Petr slipped and slid with every other step. He fell twice, banging painfully against the rock-hard surface of ice and frozen brick. But, fortunately, neither he nor Sarayev was seriously injured.

They turned off their electric torches when they reached the enemy lines. The Germans knew about the sewers, now, and the Russians didn't want to advertise their presence with bright beams from their flashlights.

They travelled by feel, one arm holding the shoulder of their companion, the other feeling for the cold surface of the wall or ceiling. They moved even more slowly now, carefully adjusting their weight with every step in an effort not to slip and fall. Not only were they blind, they knew that if they stumbled they might bring the man beside them down with them.

They were invisible in the darkness, but they were loud.

"Who are you?!" a voice suddenly yelled out in the distance. It spoke broken Russian, and it echoed eerily off the walls of the man-made cavern. Was it a German voice?

Petr and Sarayev didn't move. They let go each other's shoulder and slowly, quietly, unslung their submachine guns.

"Don't move!" the voice demanded. "We have you covered!" but Petr sensed the command was a bluff; sensed panic in the man's voice. So he pointed his submachine gun with one hand and clicked on his flashlight with the other.

The beam of electric light landed on the narrow face of a young man wearing a Red Army flight suit and cap.

Petr's heart skipped a beat. "What the fuck are you doing here?" he asked in disbelief.

Because despite the man's clothing he wasn't a Russian pilot. He was American. And he wasn't just any American, he was Karen Hamilton's former fiancé.