The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 51: The Organ-Grinder

Petr didn't wait long to search for the radio. Jillian had warned him not to wait too long when she told him where to find it. So Karen, Jillian and Bobby hadn't even been gone an hour before Petr snuck up onto the roof and began to search for the hiding place.

It was a difficult search. It was a dark night, the stars and moon hiding behind black clouds. Petr was crawling on his belly, trying to make as little noise as possible. The roof seemed to creak with his every move and, on two occasions, crack. Petr froze when he heard that sound, fearing that a weak beam would give way and the slate and tar that supported him would collapse.

But the ruined roof held and Petr continued to search. He could only see a few feet in front of him, and even at that distance not very well. He probed with his hands as he inched forward, pressing his fingers into any crevice he found, probing and lifting to see if it would open to a secret space.

He was interrupted by the sound of gunshots across the river. The staccato reports yanked his head in their direction and he saw the strobe of muzzle flashes. Then darkness and silence returned for an instant before being broken once more by two sharp cracks – this time with no accompanying flashes.

Petr had become a connoisseur of gunshots. He knew the difference between a German MG-42 seeming to tear through the fabric of reality and the rattle of a Russian DT machinegun. He could detect the subtle distinction between a Wehrmacht Mauser Kar98 and a Red Army Mosin-Nagant. And he recognized that the first blast he had just heard had come from a Ppsh Russian tommy gun – the weapon Karen was armed with – and the final two cracks were from a Tokarev pistol.

That worried Petr. Karen had shot first, but she hadn't shot last. NKVD Officers carried Tokarev pistols. He yearned to run out after her, to grab his own weapons, descend to the river, rush out across the ice and try to save her. But that was impossible and irrational. She was hours away in the darkness: he couldn't help her now. So he kept crawling, and he kept searching.

Petr found Jillian's hiding place an hour and forty-five minutes later. He hauled her suitcase-sized radio up from beneath the rafters out onto the roof, grunting quietly with the effort. Then he probed the space beneath the roof with his fingers, and found a codebook and a journal. He couldn't read anything in the dark, so he continued to probe, making sure he wasn't leaving anything behind, and then pocketed the books and began dragging the radio back to the stairwell.

He was halfway there when he heard a roar of airplanes. His heart leapt as he searched the sky for them, but even in the graying of pre-dawn he couldn't spot anything. They must be flying above the cloud cover. Did that mean Karen escaped? Or was it just a flight of Night Witches heading out for a pre-dawn bombing run? Petr could never know.

He descended the stairs and worked his way toward Ilan Hait's radio room. "Where's Sgt. Pavlov?" Petr asked. "It's an emergency."

* * *

Sgt. Pavlov stared in horror at the radio and the journals. "You're sure they are the reporter's?" he asked.

"Whose else could they be?" Petr replied grimly.

"And you think the pilot, and Angel, you suspect they were all working together?"

Petr shrugged. "It makes sense. They were all Americans." This was the story Jillian told him to tell. They would all be burned eventually anyway; if they didn't ecape it wouldn't matter what Petr said. Better that Petr burn them, instead, she reasoned. Then maybe they wouldn't suspect Petr of helping them.

Pavlov sighed and leaned his head against the wall. "So we were sheltering an American spy ring."

"Not just American spies," Petr reminded him, "German double-agents." He held up the journal. "There are reports of multiple contacts with German intelligence officers about an upcoming offensive near Kursk."