Night Soldiers by Alan Furst

moaned in his throat and then heard hammers clacking on empty chambers.
    There was rather a long interval.
    Akhimova, her face a mask, stood up in the driver's seat for no apparent reason. Petenko lowered his arms, came out of hiding. His voice was high and thin the first time he screamed.
    “Lieutenant!”
    Dropped an octave on the second try.
    “Lieutenant!”
    Khristo heard Akhimova exhale a long breath.
    “Yes, comrade General?”
    “This man …” He pointed. Khristo could see his finger shaking. Petenko blinked, slowly lowered his hand. This man could not be forced to his knees and shot then and there. This man was a student, of a sort, reciting his lesson, of a sort.
    Petenko cleared his throat. Students in the street murmured to each other. The urgent need to return to normalcy was everywhere. Khristo, careful of the paint, slithered cautiously backward until he stood before the car.
    Petenko turned his head a little to one side. “What is your name, young man?”
    “Khristo Stoianev, comrade General.”
    “You are Bulgarian?”
    “Yes, comrade General.”
    “They are proud people,” Petenko said. There was proper admiration in his voice. The working classes needed no national boundaries, they were as one race. The concept had been clearly set down.
    His eyes, of course, told a very different story, but only Khristo could see what burned there and he was meant to see it.
    A different sort of train ride back to Moscow. The wooden benches they'd barely noticed on the way out were now discovered to be of a diabolical hardness. Heads drooped. There was coughing and sniffling. They were exhausted, worn down by the intensity of competition, lost sleep, country air, and cheap, throat-searing vodka knocked back, toast by toast, at the farewell party. One of the officers had brought forth a battered fiddle—he did it every year—and all danced and sang. What the Arbat Street officers called Belovian love affairs were consummated one last time behind, beneath and, in the cases of the truly brave, inside various huts. Farewell, my pretty one. Life back in Moscow was not so free. Oh, one could manage—clandestine training would serve for other than political purposes—but it wasn't the same, hiding out in the boiler room. Better not to be so forthright. Marike had carried on rather openly, and she'd not been seen since. Sent home, most thought.
    Khristo tried sleeping but it wasn't possible. With windows shut tight it was getting close in the train, and he went between cars wanting fresh air and there found Kulic, curled up out of the wind in one corner of the platform. Kulic invited him to sit down and Khristo rested his back against the smooth wooden boards. In the open air, the rail rhythms were amplified and white smoke from the locomotive streamed overhead. There was a strange sky, common for the Russian spring, with clouds and stars and a probing little wind from the south that stirred the birch groves.
    “Well, comrade Captain,” Kulic said after Khristo had settled himself, “it wasn't for lack of trying.”
    “We should have won it,” Khristo said.
    Kulic shrugged. “It is different here.” His voice was without inflection.
    The judging committee's decision had been announced at the farewell party. Unit Two and the smug Iovescu had come in first. They had been placed second, just ahead of Malya and the Hungarian captain and Unit Five. Khristo's unit had been awarded a full score for the assassination of General X—there was no way to deny their success. But the committee had awarded Unit Two the points for capturing Goldman on the roof. Goldman had challenged the decision—it was all a feint, right up to the point when the two bribed security guards had released Khristo's arms—but the challenge was turned aside: a political decision had been made and that was that.
    The brownnoses won. That was always the way of it, Khristo thought, and there was a lesson to be learned there if one wanted to see