The Polish Officer by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page A

help her. No longer young, he could barely run fast enough to keep up with the injured girl. “For God’s sake don’t leave us!” he yelled.
    The bandits, on horseback and in the woods, saw what was happening. De Milja pinpointed the muzzle flashes in the half-light. The range was absurd but he aimed with both hands, changed the action to single-shot, and squeezed off round after round from his automatic. Herschensohn muttered angrily under his breath, talking to the target, as he fired his rifle. A young woman in a sweater and skirt jumped from a window, stumbled, came up running, took the girl around the waist from the other side. De Milja heard footsteps pounding above him as Nowak ran down the roof of the car, firing into the trees. Somebody yelled “Save her, save her, save her,” like a chant, and others took up the cry. De Milja thrust his empty pistol into his pocket and stood on the lowest step as the three people gained on the car. Herschensohn was firing over his shoulder and Nowak was shouting something from the roof. The three faces were distorted with exhaustion, with tears of effort, mouths gasping for breath, hands clawing frantically at the railings beside the door. But as the last log rolled away, the locomotive accelerated, the three runners flailing and staggering as the platform moved away from them.
    Then the train quivered—the shock slammed de Milja against the wall—and suddenly the runners were close. He reached out and grabbed handfuls of shirt, coat, hair, whatever he could get, and hung on desperately. Someone caught the back of his coat just as he started to fall onto the tracks, other hands reached over his shoulders, people yelled, shoes scraped on the boards as somebody fought for traction, and the two rescuers and the girl were hauled aboard with a cry of triumph.
    De Milja ended up on hands and knees as the train—something wrong with the way it ran now—slowly ground through a long, gentle curve. At the bottom of the embankment lay what was left of a truck: cab torn in half, gasoline flames flickering over the radiator, a tire spinning, a mounted machine gun aimed at the sky, and a man, arms flung wide, half-buried in a pile of broken brick.
    When de Milja worked his way forward to the cab of the locomotive, he found bullet marks everywhere—the Ukrainian gunners had had their moment—and a very pale engineer. They’d mounted a machine gun on a brick truck and parked it on the tracks behind the log barrier. Just in case.
    For the last hundred miles they were well up in the Carpathians, some of the passes at seven thousand feet, and the train switched back over ridges and granite outcrops, through sparse grass and forests of stunted pine where hawks floated on the mountain thermals. The train barely went now, maybe ten miles an hour, crawled along a trestle over a thousand-foot gorge as the passengers prayed silently and not-so-silently, oil trickling from beneath the engine. The sun didn’t reach them until ten in the morning; they were cold, there was nothing to eat, and very little water.
    They crossed the Tisza River; there’d been a fire on the bridge, but it still held. De Milja walked along in front of the engine, watching the track bow under the weight, trying not to hear the sounds the wooden girders made. They traveled for a time beside a deeply rutted dirt track, where stone mileposts gave the distance to Romania. A burned-out Polish army car had been shoved into a ditch, a wagon and a pair of horses hit by a dive bomber, a truck lay on its side in the middle of a mountain stream.
    They worked at it all day, Nowak and de Milja taking turns standing with the engineer in the locomotive, sometimes running the train themselves since he was long past exhaustion. Slow as their progress was, there were no other trains. The stationmaster at Mukachevo told them the Germans had bombed the lines running south—the Polish railway system didn’t really exist any longer.
    They