Winter Sky Read online

  Coat of arms: © SimeonVD/shutterstock.com

  © 2016 Stewart Jenson Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Visit us at ShadowMountain.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stewart, Chris, 1960– author.

  Title: Winter sky / Chris Stewart.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016021339 | ISBN 9781629722290 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Poland—Fiction. | Amnesiacs—Fiction. | War and families—Poland—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.T4593 W56 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021339

  Printed in the United States of America

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design © 2016 Shadow Mountain

  Art direction by Richard Erickson

  Cover design by Sheryl Dickert Smith

  Cover photo coat of arms © SimeonVD/Shutterstock

  Cover photo church and town © Kichigin/Shutterstock

  Smoke and clouds © Tarapong Srichaiyos/Shutterstock

  Other books by Chris Stewart

  A Christmas Bell for Anya

  The Fourth War

  The God of War

  The Kill Box

  The Miracle of Freedom: 7 Tipping Points That Saved the World

  Seven Miracles That Saved America

  Shattered Bone

  The Third Consequence

  Wrath and Righteousness, episodes 1–9

  To those who know that life is full of surprises,

  and that sometimes those surprises are good.

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

  the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

  What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

  and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

  —Psalm 8:3–4

  The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,

  that we are the children of God.

  —Romans 8:16

  By December 1944, World War II was coming to a violent and chaotic end. Seventy million people had already died in the greatest upheaval of nations that the world had ever seen. No continent was untouched, no nation unaffected. But the dying was not yet over, for the Nazis did not intend to fade quietly into the night. Hitler was determined to fight to the very last man, seemingly convinced that, in the end, the sheer power of his will would prevail, that miracles of darkness were coming, that the gods were on his side. So his defeated army warred on like a deflating lung inside a dying body, slowly collapsing under the weight of the mighty Allied forces that were crushing it from all sides.

  From Stalingrad to London, from Jerusalem to Tokyo, and every spot in between, nations collided in the final stages of war. In the wake, armies were left abandoned, rebels rose, and cities were destroyed, leaving chaos everywhere.

  As the Third Reich collapsed, Stalin moved to fill the void. And he was just getting started, having twenty million of his fellow men yet to kill. He controlled more than two million battle-hardened men, twenty-five hundred tanks, and more artillery than anyone could even count. It was, perhaps, the largest army ever assembled. And the Russians were not a docile lot. Quite the opposite. They swept in from the east with many reasons to be furious: the death of millions of their countrymen, the rape of their motherland, the pain they had endured, and the hunger and deprivation they had suffered. Indignant with rage, they were determined to destroy more than just the fleeing German army. Ukraine. Hungary. Latvia. The Czechs. Many were in Stalin’s determined path. And the Russians claimed no friends; their world was only potential enemies—nations to be occupied and people to be destroyed.

  Out of all the nations that lay in Russia’s path, none but the Nazis were more hated than the Poles.

  Ironically, none had suffered as much as the Polish people had. Six million men, women, and children had been lost in the war, almost 20 percent of the country’s entire population. And the Poles knew that, as bad as the Nazi occupation had been, the approaching Russians were no better.

  For years, a small cadre of Polish rebels had proven themselves effective in harassing the mighty Nazi army from the protection of the hills and thick forests of the rural regions. As the Nazis fell back, this small group of determined men turned their expertise in guerrilla tactics toward the coming Russian army, hoping against all odds to claim a free Poland for themselves.

  They knew that it was a nearly hopeless endeavor, but still they fought on.

  The Russians did not take kindly to this.

  As the winter of 1944 settled in, it became obvious that the rebels were doomed to fail. The brutal Russian IV Corps was too effective and battle tested. It took only a few months for their forces to bring the rebels to their knees. Soon the Polish fighters were running out of ammunition, food, and supplies. By the time the first snow settled on the mountains, they were nearly out of men.

  SOUTHERN POLAND

  DECEMBER 16, 1944

  The heavy shelling suddenly stopped, the horrific bursts of black powder and steel no longer raining metal and death upon the ground. Terrible moments of silence followed, black and still as the crystal winter sky.

  The stillness continued for several gut-wrenching moments.

  The German medic understood what this meant. He stared in terror at the sky. The enemy was getting ready to send its army in. It was standard practice: soften the target with artillery—or, much more likely with the Russians, beat it into merciless devastation—then stop the shelling and send in the troops to finish the job.

  The corpsman stood without moving, his heartbeat surging in his ears, his eyes unfocused, his weary arms hanging loosely at his sides. He was utterly exhausted. It seemed too much effort even to breathe. He closed his eyes as he stood, but felt himself wobble into sleep and forced himself to open them again.

  He listened. The winter night was cold and clear. He cocked his head, ignoring the moaning all around him, filtering the sound of the human suffering as he strained to hear the enemy’s approach. He heard the whoo
sh of the gas lanterns that were hanging on the walls. He heard the soft breeze that brushed across the sides of the canvas tent. In the distance, he heard the sound of heavy engines, the last of his German comrades as they began their retreat. The rumble of their transport and tank engines quickly faded in the cold wind.

  He glanced at his surroundings. The military field hospital was utter chaos: gear, tattered cloth, dirty bandages, and bodies, a few dead, a few who were barely living. There were no longer any doctors, only he, a single corpsman, and a couple of aides remained, all of them surrounded by far more wounded than they could ever hope to help.

  The muddy earth beneath the creamy canvas of the tent was slippery-red from the blood of the dead and dying men who had been placed there over the past twenty hours. Along one wall of the tent, four bodies had been laid side by side, their faces covered with their own jackets. Who was going to bury them? The corpsman didn’t know. Russian soldiers were the only option, but they weren’t any good at such things, not even for their own men, and certainly not for the hated enemy. These four would likely be pushed into a shallow trench and covered with a thin layer of dirt. To his left was a makeshift operating table, bare pine and crossed beams with rusty nails. A dead man lay upon the table, his left leg entirely blown off.

  One of the aides, an enlisted boy who had been trained to shoot a rifle, dig a trench, and very little else, lay in a heap of exhaustion on the floor. Two other aides started to lift the dead man off the table.

  “Ein…zwie,” one of them counted as they prepared to lift.

  The other one looked up with wild eyes. “Sie kommen. Wir haben zu gehen!” (They’re coming. We have to go!)

  “Nein! Wir können sie nicht verlassen!” (No! We can’t leave them.)

  They froze, holding the limp body in midair.

  Silence. The terrifying silence.

  “If we leave them, they will die!”

  “If we stay here, we die as well!”

  The lead corpsman motioned for them to get back to work. “One more man,” he commanded.

  Not more than twenty years of age, the corpsman was the oldest soldier in the room. His face was covered in dirt and blood and a wisp of unshaved beard. He nodded to his aides. “Him. Up on the table.” They dropped the dead man beside the others, then plopped another wounded soldier up on the blood-soaked table. The injured man was unconscious from all of the morphine he’d been given before being dragged into the field hospital. A hospital! the corpsman snorted, as if a single tent with no doctor, equipment, or medicine could be called such a thing.

  Behind him, a young German soldier lay unconscious in the mud. The corpsman glanced at him. Blond hair. Mud on his face. Blood oozing from both ears. He walked to him and leaned over, lifted an eyelid to examine the dilated pupil, then straightened up and listened once again.

  Far off in the distance, a heavy burst of machine-gun fire shattered the eerie silence.

  He cocked his head, trying to pinpoint the location of the shooting while knowing that it had to have come from the top of the ridge, two or three hundred meters to the east. As if on cue, the canvas above his head suddenly split as the first rounds of machine-gun fire tore through the fabric. He hesitated. Another burst of 20-caliber cut through the tattered canvas. A gas lantern exploded, the fuel spilling across the ground. A cold wind blew, smoky and rich with the smell of gunpowder and wet earth.

  Two German soldiers suddenly appeared at the flap in the tent. Dark uniforms. Short machine guns. Arrogant. Determined. Special Security patches on their uniforms.

  “What are you doing?” the medic demanded.

  They ignored him, taking in the death and blood with fearless eyes.

  The first German spotted the blond soldier and moved toward him. The second followed. The first one knelt and put his cheek next to the wounded man’s face, feeling for his breath.

  “He’s alive,” he said.

  “Who are you?” the medic cried. “Get out of here!”

  A sudden burst of artillery fire exploded in the dark. Dirt and metal blew against the canvas tent. The corpsmen fell to the mud, one of them screaming in fear. The German soldiers didn’t seem to notice.

  The second German stepped over the wounded soldier and knelt beside him too. He felt his chest, prodded his stomach, then rolled him to his side and felt along his spine.

  He nodded to his comrade. “Together,” he said as he placed both hands along the wounded man’s back. “Try to keep his neck straight.”

  His partner reached down, and they lifted him together.

  “Leave him!” the medic screamed in fury. “He will die if you . . .”

  Gunfire tore through the fabric once again. The medic fell silent. The soldiers carried the wounded man toward the tent flap that was snapping in the wind. The first soldier glanced back. “You don’t have much time,” he said. “Do what you can for the others, then get out of here.”

  With the wounded man in their arms, the Germans pushed the canvas flap aside and disappeared.

  She was young and pretty and suffering from hunger and cold. He was even younger, frail and afraid. With the same dark hair and dark eyes, they were obviously siblings; it was equally obvious that they were alone. They stood beside the horse-drawn wagon and looked up anxiously. The old woman looked down at them, her sizable weight compressing the metal springs as she leaned over the edge of the wooden seat. “You be alone?” she questioned wearily, knowing the answer before she even asked.

  The little girl nodded.

  “How old?” the woman demanded.

  “I’m twelve!” the girl said defiantly.

  Her younger brother kept his eyes down but slowly shook his head. The old woman snorted. She didn’t need the boy to know that his older sister had just lied. The girl was eight, maybe nine at the oldest. But the old woman didn’t care. She had seen so many orphaned children. Hundreds. A thousand. Enough that her heart couldn’t break for their suffering any longer. “Where are you going?” she asked them harshly. The conversation was taking too much time. She glanced nervously around, her eyes darting down the road while her old mare bent back her ears and turned her head anxiously toward a nearby grove of leafless trees.

  “Gorndask,” the girl answered.

  “Why there? Do you have family?”

  The little boy shook his head again. “We’re going to Brzeg, Cela,” he corrected.

  “Aron!” the girl exclaimed in frustration.

  The woman snorted again. The boy seemed to have a fixation on being honest, a fine trait at times, but not in the dying days of war.

  The old woman nodded to the south and frowned. “Brzeg is too far. Too dangerous.” She pointed a meaty finger down the muddy road. “Gorndask. That’s as far as you’re going to make it. Stay there. Don’t even try to get to Brzeg. You will die out on the roads if you try to go that far.”

  She turned forward in the wagon seat and picked up the reins. The horse was instantly alert, ready for her command, but before she snapped the leather straps she reached under the seat. Pulling out a burlap sack, she took out a loaf of braided bread and handed it to the children. They took the bread hungrily, their eyes wide with surprise. It was like a miracle from heaven. “Dziekuje!” the little girl cried with relief as they tore into the loaf.

  The woman nodded at them, then snapped the reins, and the old horse lifted her plodding feet. As the wagon rolled away, the woman glanced back at the orphaned children. She wanted to tell them that someone in Gorndask would help them. She wanted to tell them that they would be safe there.

  But she didn’t tell them anything, for she knew none of that was true.

  OUTSIDE OF GORNDASK, POLAND

  DECEMBER 20, 1944

  The train swayed abruptly as it lurched along the poorly repaired tracks. Rail lines were the lifeblood of the war effort, and for six years the
line, like every other in the war zone, had fallen under relentless bombing attack. Indeed, the track had been bombed and rebuilt so many times it was a miracle that it could carry any rail traffic at all. So the train engineer kept it slow, knowing that every bridge was an adventure, every crossing a potential derailing point. At one junction he looked briefly for oncoming traffic, though he suspected his was the only train running within two hundred miles. Who else would have the courage, or desperation, or defiance, or whatever combination of such things it might take to put another train upon the track?

  The railroad track was a thread of black weaving through a white and green landscape of rolling hills, thick forests, farming cottages, and small towns. Black smoke billowed from the engine and floated back to coat the train in gray soot. The countryside was white with fresh snow. The storm had started out as rain a couple of days before and then turned to heavy snow, thick and wet. The train was surrounded by tall pines, their boughs drooping under the snow’s weight, seeming to reach for the ground. The sky was cloudy still, gray with soft wisps of fog drifting over the hills. Winter had come, and it might be weeks before the sun would break through the overcast to sparkle on the snow.

  The train consisted of five troop transport cars. All the seats had long before been ripped out, leaving the desperate passengers to stand chest-to-chest or back-to-back as they swayed together with each lurch of the train. A few of the weakest among them huddled on the floor, too exhausted, sick, or wounded to stand.

  The cars were packed with terrified civilians, mostly women and their scarce belongings: piles of clothing held together with rope, a few bags, an occasional suitcase. One of the women held a small sewing machine, another a wooden cage stuffed with three chickens. In the corner of the compartment, a young mother stood alone. Her long hair framed a beautiful oval face that was so vacant it looked lifeless. In her arms, she held a tiny bundle tightly wrapped from head to toe in a light blue baby blanket. Her child. No longer living. Taking him home. It was a pitiful sight, and the other passengers gave her as much space as they could muster, but no one spoke to her. The death of a child was as common as the falling of the snow, and no one had the ability to offer any comfort anymore.