September 27th, 2000
Ten hours. Ten hours, humping a corpse, a wanna-be corpse, and the walking wounded. In the parlance we extracted. Ten hours dodging the Czarny's men, killing Czarny's men, and keeping my own alive. None of us were unwounded when we reached Sielce.
I turned over Czarny, Rutkowski, and Weasel to the combined command. Gave them my report. Found a corner to collapse.
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"Cap Kat.... Cap Kat" Eddie, urgent and shaking my shoulder.
"Wha," coming around, "What's happening?" I don't hear any gunfire.
He leans in close hissing in my ear, "Czarny's gone."
No, Czarny's dead. He's not gone. The corpse has gone missing. Yes, he could not have gotten gone.
Alphabit and a glassy eyed Leo are in the hall. Together we join Filip and his closest men. They take us deep under the stadium into the dark, cold storage rooms.
Filip spills out what happened while I slept. How they'd showed the body to select members of Sielce. Their plans to display him this evening for the entire community. Memorialize the dead and honor us for our efforts. He's near a panic and all I can do is growl at him to shut up and man up. We'll deal with it.
I have Leo give the room a sweep. He finds bullets, just bullets, marred with impact deformations. We are so fucked.
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Lying through my teeth. Czarny was badly hurt. He'd gone down so deep that we'd just thought he'd died. It's happened before. Dead man sits up in his coffin, the morgue, under Sielce. He'd be slow, weak and easily apprehended. We just had to find him before he found a hole and died in it.
Filip wants to believe me. He really does. I pretend not to hear him muttering about upior. He doesn't, but he gets out of the way. His most trusted men spread out underground, checking other stores and living spaces. They find Czarny's black uniform shirt, complete with bullet holes and caked with blood. Filip looks at that, looks at me, he can't believe. Is he giving me rope?
Topside it is late afternoon. We spread out search the entrances to the underground. One of Filip's men finds blood splatter heading out northwards into the fields. Growing up on a farm I'd had many opportunities to track small game and varmints. This man leaves a bigger trail than a fox, but my skills are rusty. Still, the trail leads north.
People are out working the fields. The women and children harvesting the fields while men guard the walls. Small knots scattered about. They work in teams; several women together for muscle work, one women and two or three children for light detail work. At least Filip has kept it close to the chest. No panic. We're gaining, he is weak and slow.
We find the woman in a drainage ditch. Stab wounds low in the body and angled up into the organs. Small footprints show where a child was caught and another two came close. The three children and our man head east towards the river and uncleared rubble drifts. The trails fresh, very fresh. It goes down a hole.
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Leo breaks out his precious thermal. "Two small, one large. They're in there."
The hole goes down. Leo indicates the heat sources are high. The little tunnel must swing down and then up into a hollow. They're common, and unstable, in the rubble. And Czarny's sitting at the end ready for us.
We try to sketch out a plan of action. I let it get away from me and we degenerate into an argument. I'd like to think I'm just exhausted because I want to drop a handful of grenades into the hole and let the shrapnel and falling stones finish the work. Filip's men are appalled. The protests involve shouts and gun waving. Alphabit and I have them covered quick as can be. The shouts redouble.
"Drop them, drop them right fucking now!" Angry compliance.
"Leo, collect their weapons. Leo. Leo?"
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That's it, all blown. Go now or lose them all. No way that fucker won't take some kids with him. While the shouts rise I drop my rifle, strip out of my LBE, and eel down the hole. Knife in hand.
Quick. Quiet. It's a fight. I hope my progress is covered by the yelling. A child screams ahead. I can feel someone moving up on the exit. I push forward into the hollow.
Collision. My feet dig in, dig forward, and power him into the stone roof. His knife scores a rib. Mine sinks into soft flesh. A hand grips my throat. Mine catches a flailing limb. I have his knife arm. Stab, stab, stab as my head swims. Die, die, die.
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The kids, three of them, crawl out first; screaming, crying, and babbling about the bad man. We hear a scrapping. "Leo?"
"Da, Kapitan. Got him. Got him."
He waves me off. Pulls himself out of the hole before turning and muscling Czarny's corpse onto the surface. Carefully, he tilts the head back to expose the throat.
"Alpha," he asks glumly, "still got that axe?"
Donald puts his back into it.
Come back from that.
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