Highlander - Donna Lettow [54]
MacLeod watched them start to go—Miriam, her head bent low with shame but her eyes defiant, searching for any avenue of escape; the Polish police officer, impatient and flushed with his own power; and his two eager lackeys, their rifles ready and trained on Miriam. “Gesiowska,” he said, invoking the name of the hated prison less than half a mile to the east, the direction Miriam was being led.
“I think you’re right. Plenty of private little rooms. Very cozy. Damn them.” All of a sudden, Avram was a flurry of motion, checking his pistol, grabbing two grenades from a small cache near their lookout position.
“So, what’s Plan B?” MacLeod demanded.
“You stay with them. Keep an eye on her—make sure they don’t get her inside. Be ready to ride in like John Wayne and get her out of there.”
Avram started toward the stairs leading down from the roof. “What’s the signal?” MacLeod called after him.
“You’ll know it when you see it,” MacLeod heard him say as he disappeared down the stairwell.
“Avram!” he called down after him, but there was no response. Damn him and his complicated plans. “Just great,” MacLeod grumbled under his breath, but one thing he’d learned in three hard months in Warsaw was he could trust Avram’s instincts when it came to the Ghetto. He quickly checked over his rifle. Fully loaded, the old German Mauser took five rounds, but he knew there was precious little ammunition left for it. The fact the ZOB had entrusted it, one of less than a dozen they’d managed to procure, to him was proof of how highly they valued his marksmanship. He’d have to make every shot count.
He ran to the far edge of the roof, climbed a short ladder onto the roof of the adjoining apartment building. Racing across the rooftop, he vaulted over the side of the building and landed with a tuck and a roll on another building two floors below. Almost before he landed, he was running again.
In the months since MacLeod had helped Rabbi Mendelsohn escape Warsaw and had seen him on his way to rendezvous with his son, the ZOB had tried as best they could to prepare for the inevitable day the Germans would return to finish clearing out the Ghetto. No one deluded themselves that the brief show of resistance MacLeod had witnessed at the Umschlagplatz and in the streets of the Ghetto back in January had caused the Germans to retreat for good. When MacLeod had surprised Avram by keeping his promise and returning to the Ghetto, he found the survivors of the Germans’ aborted January Aktsia working feverishly, digging a complex series of underground bunkers, called malinas, throughout the Ghetto, bunkers in which the noncombatants could hide to ride out the coming fury for as long as they could. For the fighters of the resistance, a web of ladders and bridges and chutes was constructed between the closely packed buildings to give the ZOB a stronghold to fight from cover. They all knew if forced to fight the Germans openly in the streets again, the battle was doomed before it began. Their skirmishes with the Germans during the three-day January uprising had routed the Germans from the Ghetto and stopped the expulsions. But the cost in Jewish lives had been high, and they knew the Germans would not be surprised a second time.
Reaching the end of the next building at a run, MacLeod climbed carefully out onto the narrow wooden bridge across Smocza Street. He kept low so as not to be spotted against the blue sky. He kept moving parallel to Miriam’s captors three stories below. Miriam was walking as slowly as she dared, buying herself time, but MacLeod could tell the guards were dangerously close to running out of patience with her.
“No more little Jewish half-men for you,” the Polish officer taunted Miriam. “Soon you’ll know what a real man feels like.” He grabbed her from behind and wrapped his beefy arm across her naked breasts. “I’m going to fill you up until you scream for more, little doll,” he whispered in her ear, and pulled her