People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Zlata gather wood for the cook fire when Oskar came crashing through the trees, the grin on his face wide as a clown’s. Over his shoulder he had a German rifle. He was wearing a baggy gray uniform several sizes too large for him, pant legs rolled up and the waist cinched with twine, and carrying a Nazi-issue rucksack bulging with supplies.
    He refused to tell the tale of his triumph until Branko, Isak, and the rest of the odred had gathered. As he handed around slices of German sausage, he told how he had crept into the nearby occupied village and hidden in some roadside bushes. “I had to lie there almost all day, watching the Germans come and go,” he said. “There were always two or three of them together. At last, one comes by, alone. I wait till he passes. I jump out of the bushes, shove a stick between his shoulder blades, and shout, Stoi ! The ass actually believed I was armed. He raised his hands. I got his gun, and then I told him to strip to his underpants.”
    Everyone was convulsed with laughter at this point, except Branko.
    “And then. You shot him.” His voice was flat and cold.
    “No, I…I didn’t see the need…. He was unarmed…I thought…”
    “And tomorrow, he will be armed again, and the next day, he will kill your comrade. Sentimental fool. You will give the gun to Zlata. She at least will know how to use it.” Lola could not see Oskar’s face in the dark. But she felt his silent anger.
    The next night, the odred was required to help secure and clear a drop site. Lola’s job was to keep the mule quiet and calm, ready to carry the arms, radios, or medicines that descended by parachute. While her odred hid just beyond the tree line, Partisans from a different odred, working under the direction of a foreigner—a British spy, someone said—set out brush and tinder for signal fires, laid across a clearing in a prearranged pattern that the Allied pilot would recognize. Lola trembled from fear and cold. She leaned into Rid’s thick pelt, seeking warmth. She had no weapon, aside from the grenade that all Partisans were required to wear on their belts. “If you are about to be captured, you will use it to kill yourself and as many of the enemy as you can take with you,” Branko had said. “On no account be taken alive. Use the grenade, and then there is no way you can be tortured into betrayal.”
    The moon had not yet risen. Lola looked up, searching for starlight. But the thick foliage of the trees denied her even that. Her imagination peopled the dark with Germans, waiting to ambush them. The night crawled on. Just before dawn, the wind rose, threshing the pine boughs. Branko decided that the drop must have been aborted, and signaled Lola to prepare to move off. Wearily, stiff from cold, Lola scrambled to her feet and adjusted Rid’s halter.
    Just then, the faint buzz of an airplane sounded in the distance. Branko shouted orders to get the fires lit. Isak’s fire wouldn’t catch. He swore as he struggled. Lola did not think of herself as brave. She would not have described the feeling that took hold of her as courage. All she knew was that she could not leave Isak out there, exposed, struggling, alone. She crashed through the trees and into the clearing. She threw herself prone, blowing hard on the stubborn kindling. A flame leaped just as the dark bulk of the Dakota came into view overhead. The pilot made one run, for reconnaissance, and then swept back around, spilling a rain of packages, each with its own small parachute. Partisans emerged from the surrounding forest, running to gather the precious cargo. Lola slashed at the parachute cords and wrapped up the silk, which she would use to make bandages.
    The odreds worked fast as the sky began to lighten in the east. By the time dawn broke, Lola was toiling along a narrow ridgeline, a fully laden Rid walking biddably beside her, as they tried to put miles between them and the drop site before the Germans reached the place. Whenever