Bobby didn't understand the rapid-fire Russian, but he did recognize the soldier who was speaking it. It was Petr, the man who had stolen Karen from him, the man who had ruined his life.
Petr had changed. His gaunt face, narrow with hunger, was blanketed below the nose with a soft, blonde beard. The hollow rims of his eyes contrasted more sharply with his ice blue irises, giving his expression an intoxicating, eye-popping intensity. His uniform was filthy, bloody and torn: the battle scars of surviving three months in Stalingrad.
The first time Bobby and Petr had met, back in Chelyabinsk, they'd gotten into a fist-fight, and Bobby felt the urge to repeat that confrontation. Why? Why did he feel that way? He'd moved past Karen, she meant nothing to him now, so Petr should mean nothing to him, too.
It had to be anger and fear – yes Bobby was man enough to admit when he was afraid – at staring down the barrel of a Russian tommy gun. So Bobby stifled his impulse to fight, raised his hands, and placed his palms in surrender behind his head.
That prompted Petr, and his companion, an olive-skinned young man that Bobby didn't know or recognize, to lower their weapons. Petr evidently realized that Bobby didn't understand him, so he spoke in careful, slow English, stumbling over the words. "How are you here?" he asked.
Bobby kept his hands behind his head, careful not to prompt a violent reaction. "I was shot down," he explained, responding to Petr's broken English with his own slow, careful Russian.
"You are a pilot?" Petr's olive-skinned companion asked, surprise in his voice.
Bobby nodded.
"But you are not Russian?"
Petr's companion had figured that much out. Probably, Bobby realized, because of his poor command of the Russian language. Bobby's lack of fluency was frustrating. He had an almost photographic memory, and yet somehow the intricacies of how foreign languages were constructed baffled him. He wasn't any worse at learning them than the average Joe, but he wasn't any better, either. And for someone like Bobby, who excelled at every other academic exercise, it was frustrating.
"I am American," he said, deciding there was no value in hiding the truth. "But I defected."
"Why?" asked the Russian soldier, genuinely baffled.
Bobby shrugged. "To help you fight," he explained. "Just like Karen," he added, looking Petr in the eyes.
"So you are the one we have been sent to rescue?" asked Petr's companion.
"I hope so," Bobby replied.
"Do you have a weapon?" Petr asked.
Bobby slowly dropped his hand to his survival vest and half-drew his Russian seven-round revolver from its holster.
Petr said something in fast Russian that Bobby couldn't catch and then his companion stepped forward, unslinging one of three guns strapped over his shoulder. He held it out to Bobby.
Bobby secured his revolver back in its holster and accepted the weapon offered by the soldier. It was a German "MP40" assault pistol, a little stamped steel submachine gun. It wasn't as accurate or reliable as the Russian Ppsh tommy gun, but it could still spit a lot of lead in very little time. Bobby briefly wondered where the Russians got it before quickly concluding they must have scavenged it off of a dead German.
"The bolt is the safety," Petr instructed him. "Pull it back and the submachine gun is ready to fire. But be careful," he warned, "it has a hair trigger."
Bobby nodded and pulled back the bolt. He rested his finger on the outside of the trigger guard. "Let's go," he said, anxious to get out of the sewers.
"You know me," Petr said, and then gestured to his companion. "This is Sarayev. Put your hand on his shoulder and follow us." Petr turned off his flashlight and Bobby was blinded by sudden darkness, his eyes swimming with colored circles. He reached out and felt blindly in the black space before him until he felt the rough wool of Sarayev's coat and gripped his fingers tightly on the soldier's shoulder.
"Ready?" Petr asked.
"Ready," Sarayev announced.
"Ready," Bobby acknowledged.
There was a shuffling of feet and Sarayev moved away from Bobby. Bobby stumbled blindly, slipping and regaining his balance with the help of Sarayev's shoulder. And then he followed the two Russians into the gloom.
* * *
The darkness wrapped around Bobby like a cocoon – or a coffin. He'd grown used to the slick ice and shifted his weight with each step in such a way that he marched stiffly, like a tight rope walker, in order to keep his balance. He knew that their footsteps, crunching in the frozen sewage, were quiet, but in the utter silence of the tunnels they sounded to him like drumbeats.
They stopped and changed direction twice, first in response to the sound of German voices. They couldn't determine the direction of the voices as the sound echoed off the brick cavern, so they simply turned around and changed their course.
The second time they saw lights dancing in the distance, flashlight beams bouncing like willow-o'-wisps. They couldn't be sure if the flashlights belonged to German or Russian soldiers, so they turned right instead of left, as they had intended, and travelled for another forty minutes. Then they stopped, turned on their own flashlights, and consulted a map.
No, not a map, Bobby realized, a journal. Petr and Sarayev were staring at it, flipping back and forth through its pages, and whispering Russian to each other. Bobby leaned forward and concentrated on what they were saying. He was able to pick out a few words and realized they were trying to figure out how far they had come down this tunnel.
"Two miles," Petr announced with confidence.
Sarayev looked at him with a skeptical expression.
So Bobby explained. "We took 5,336 steps. Normally my steps are two and a half feet long, but on this ice I'm estimating more like two feet. So that's 10,672 feet. At 5,280 feet a mile, we've traveled two miles and about thirty-seven yards."
"In Russia we use metric," Petr replied with a frown.
"Three and a quarter kilometers," Bobby translated, completing the calculation in his head.
Sarayev looked at Petr. Petr nodded. "He's smart, he knows these kinds of things," Petr assured his olive-skinned companion.
Sarayev licked his pencil and wrote something in the journal. Then he folded it into a pocket and pointed down a branching tunnel. "Two more kilometers that way," he announced.
The third time they ran into strangers they had no warning. Like themselves, the strangers were moving quietly and in the pitch darkness. They had reached a section of the sewers that was dry, so there wasn't even a sound of crunching ice under foot to alert them.
Instead Bobby felt a sudden discomfort, an aggravation at a perceived invasion of personal space. It was as if a stranger sat on the seat right beside him in an otherwise empty subway car. How did he even know? Maybe he felt the change in temperature caused by the presence of another warm body, or maybe he smelled the sour scent of human breath over the general stink of the sewers, or maybe his mind noticed a change in the cadence of almost silent footsteps. Whatever the reason, Bobby felt a chill run down his back. He dug his fingers into Sarayev's shoulder.
The Russian soldier halted and Bobby held his breath, listening hard. All he heard was silence, not even the sound of scurrying rats or cracking ice.
Then someone coughed.
Bobby zeroed in on the sound, trying to determine its location in the darkness. He estimated it was only a few feet behind him to the left.
There was another cough, this time right beside Bobby. And then someone else whispered in German.
Bobby spun and yanked the assault pistol's trigger. The weapon kicked in his hand and roared in his ears. The strobe flash of gunfire revealed that they were surrounded by German faces, haggard and bearded and horrifying beneath bloody steel helmets.
Petr and Sarayev were firing now, too, walking their barking submachine guns from face to face. The Germans were screaming, screaming in fear and in pain.
It didn't take long for Bobby and the two Russians to run out of ammunition. The sewers returned to silence and darkness, but Bobby could still hear the echo of gunfire in his inner ear and the after image of the terrified German faces flashed across his eyelids. He smelled the warm scent of gun smoke crawling up into his nostrils.
Bobby didn't have another clip for the assault pistol, so he dropped it, clanging on the concave brick floor, and fumbled to pull the revolver from his survival vest. He heard two more clatters and clicks as Petr and Sarayev replaced the drums on their tommy guns.
Then there was silence. But it was now a different kind of silence. There was a tiny sound, a trickle, like sewage flowing down the dry channel between his feet.
After a full minute Petr dared to switch on his flashlight. He swept its beam around them. About a half dozen dead Germans lay in the brick tunnel, their bodies riddled by the point blank barrage of submachine gun bullets and their blood dripping into the sewage channel.
As Bobby looked at the men he realized they were all unarmed and wearing bandages – deserters perhaps? The walking wounded, trying to escape? But escape from who? The Russians? Or their own Nazi leadership?
Petr clicked off his flashlight. "We should go," he announced.
Bobby could hear the regret in Petr's voice. He felt a sudden kinship with the Russian, because he felt that regret, too. He felt it, but he knew he had to push it out of his mind and his heart in order to survive.
So he reached out, took Sarayev's shoulder, and shuffled forward. They left the German bodies to decay in the sewers, where their bones wouldn't be found for decades.