The Katyn Order by Douglas W. Jacobson Page B

wounded commandos, his jacket and trouser legs dripping with blood, managed to light a Molotov cocktail and hurl it before collapsing. The bottle hit the side of the tank, and it burst into flames with no effect.
    For a moment the tank just sat there. Then the turret rotated toward a schoolhouse with boarded up windows and a bright red cross painted on the door.
    A second later Adam was knocked flat as a thunderous blast roared from the Panther’s 75mm cannon. In a deafening concussion, the first and second stories of the school building collapsed, belching a cloud of dust fifty meters in all directions. Frantic commandos raced toward the demolished building as the lethal machine turned away and rumbled back across the smashed barricade, its brief mission of retribution complete.
    It was well after dark by the time Adam and a dozen other grim commandos finally gave up digging through the ruins of the collapsed school building. They’d recovered twenty-one bodies, and carried them onto the grassy area between the street and the old city wall, but many more lay buried deep beneath the rubble.
    A priest who’d been helping them slumped to the ground, his thick, black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and dust. “I just stepped out to try and locate some bandages,” he croaked, “and when I returned the building was . . .” He looked up at Adam, tears streaming down his dirt-caked face. “There were forty-three patients in there. Nineteen were just children!” Adam extended his hand to help him to his feet, but the priest waved him off, his head drooping to his chest.
    Adam stood there for a moment. In the brief flashes of light from artillery bursts he could make out a beaded rosary in the priest’s hands. When he was a young boy in Krakow his aunt and uncle had taken him to church regularly while his father was off fighting with the legions. His aunt taught him to pray the rosary, which he did to please her. He remembered questioning, in those long ago days, whether it did any good. Now he was certain that it didn’t.
    Adam wandered away and plodded along Podwale Street, dead tired, every bone in his body aching. He finally stopped and slumped down on the steps of a three-story building with black shutters and a red tile roof that was still mostly intact except for a ragged hole about a meter in diameter near the chimney. He thought wearily that an unexploded shell was probably lying somewhere inside the house.
    The enemy Panzers and infantry units had pulled back for the night, and—except for scattered artillery fire—the area was quiet, at least for the moment. He pulled his last cigarette from the soggy, crumpled pack and lit it, staring at the purple sky, illuminated on and off by exploding shells like flashbulbs from a thousand cameras. A haze hung over the area, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and ammonia. How much longer? he wondered.
    He had killed thirteen German soldiers today, at least eight of them officers as far as he could tell. How many did that make in all since he was dropped into Poland by parachute on a bitterly cold night in the winter of 1940? He’d kept track at first, but lost count somewhere over a hundred. Maybe it was two hundred by now, all of them easily justified in his law student’s mind as a
casus belli
—justification for acts of war—a principle upheld for centuries in most civilized societies.
    He took a long drag on the cigarette thinking of the insanity of civilized societies clinging to some legal principle as an argument for the slaughter of millions of people. And it was equally insane, he knew, to have devoted years of his life to the study of law, the guiding principles of humanity in an enlightened world—then to become an assassin. The more he thought about it, sitting on the steps of a house with a hole in the roof, in a city about to be destroyed by a ruthless enemy, he decided that justification