Highlander - Donna Lettow [83]
“Calm down, Shmuel.” Anielewicz shook him off. “They won’t try to enter the bunker, we know that. They’re afraid of the bunkers. You need to stay calm and stay put.” The underworld prince was twice Anielewicz’s age and nearly three times his size, but he backed away.
Suddenly, there was a rumbling, and they could feel the ground move around them. “Grenades,” MacLeod said. “They’re trying to blow a way in.”
Issachar, panicked, opened his mouth to speak, but Anielewicz silenced him with a look. “I told you, Shmuel,” he said warningly. “Here’s what you have to do. I want you to gather all your noncombatants and get them as far away from the entrances as possible. Now go!” As Issachar scurried away to fulfill his orders, the ZOB leader turned to his people and indicated four of the commanders. “Yossel, Linder, Zaleski, Rabinowitz—gather your fighters, make sure everybody has a rifle. Take every grenade in the place and do whatever you have to to keep the bastards away from the entrances.”
As the commanders raced from the room to gather their troops, Avram turned to Anielewicz. “Now what?”
“We wait.”
“Wait? They’re not going to just go away,” Avram said, frustrated at the inactivity.
Anielewicz gave him a look that said he was just as frustrated. “Look, Tzaddik, you got a better idea, we’re all listening.” Avram was forced to concede that he had no better plan.
Another, more powerful explosion rocked the complex, and the electric lights flickered but held. Close on its heels, a second explosion of equal magnitude. Mortars. MacLeod got up from the table and started for the door. “I’ll see what’s happening.”
He hurried down the corridor. At the base of the steep stair-well leading to the main entrance to the malina, fighters were gathering, tense, afraid, pistols and rifles trained on the door to the world above as if waiting for Satan and the forces of Hell itself to come bursting through. MacLeod pushed his way through the young fighters and up the stairs.
The door was locked and barred with metal rods. Yossel, one of the captains, peered intently through the small peep-hole cut into the door. “Yossel,” MacLeod said, tapping him on the shoulder. The captain stepped back so that MacLeod could look out.
“They haven’t found the basement yet,“ Yossel reported, and MacLeod could see that the basement of the building at Mila 18 was empty. He needed to see what was going on outside. MacLeod began unbarring the door.
“What are you doing?” Yossel tried to stop him. “You can’t go out there.”
“We have to know what’s up there,” MacLeod said, and another mortar shell exploded above them, causing the walls of the bunker to quake.
Yossel looked at him as if MacLeod was a madman. “You’re going to get your crazy head blown off!”
“Then you’ll be in for quite a show,” MacLeod said as he unbolted the final lock. With a last look through the peephole, he threw the door open and darted into the shadows along the walls of the basement. He could hear the sounds of the door being barred behind him.
He crept along the basement wall, one with the shadows, until he reached the stairs leading to the ground floor. In one quick motion, he stuck his head around the corner, then pulled back to safety. There was nothing on the stairs. Nothing alive, that is. He looked again, more slowly this time. At the top of the stairs, he saw the sprawled body of the gorilla who had guarded Issachar’s entrance, riddled with bullets. A white handkerchief was still clutched in his hand. The mobster had tried to surrender to save his own skin. But obviously the Nazis weren’t interested in surrender.
MacLeod dropped to the ground and slithered up the stairs on his belly, using the body of the dead mobster to shield his own from sight. As he reached the top, he peered over the corpse into the back hallway of the apartment building where the basement stairs let out. Empty. Another shell impacted against the building with a deafening blast, and MacLeod ducked back beneath the dead man as plaster