A Man Without Breath

A strong smell of damp and decay filled our nostrils, as if we were going so deep into the dark bowels of the earth that we might find the river Styx itself; but as Schlachter informed us, the crypt and the church were really not all that old:

‘The story goes that during the great siege of Smolensk in 1611 the city’s defenders locked themselves down here and then set fire to the ammunition depot to stop it from falling into Polish hands. There was an explosion and everything in the crypt – including the Ivans themselves – was destroyed or killed. That’s probably true. Anyway, the place fell into complete disrepair and had to be demolished in 1674; but it was 1772 before the rebuilding was finished, because the first attempt fell down, and so when Napoleon turned up and told everyone how marvellous he thought the cathedral was it could only have been about thirty or forty years old. Down here is damp only because they didn’t build proper drainage for the foundations – it’s right next to an underground spring, see? Which is why those original defenders thought it a good place to barricade in the first place – because of the access to fresh water. But it’s not so damp that an explosive charge won’t go off.

‘We removed the main explosive charges when we captured the cathedral,’ he explained. ‘At least the ordnance that was meant to blow the place right up to heaven when the Ivans cleared out of Smolensk. Now that’s what I call a bloody assumption. The Red Army had filled the whole fucking crypt with explosive, just like they did in 1611, and they thought to detonate it with radio-controlled fuses from several hundred kilometres away, the same as in Kiev; only this time they forgot that the signal couldn’t travel underground, so the charges didn’t go off. We were walking around upstairs for days before we found the stuff down here. It could have blown us up at any time.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I asked Von Gersdorff. ‘I don’t see any point in us both risking our lives. This was my crazy idea, not yours.’

‘You forget,’ said Von Gersdorff, ‘I’ve armed and disarmed anti-personnel mines before. Or had you forgotten the Arsenal? Besides, I speak much better Russian than you, and more to the point, I read it too. Even if you do manage to open one of the NKVD’s filing cabinets without getting your head blown off, you don’t really know what the hell it is you’re looking for.’

‘You have a point there,’ I admitted. ‘Although I’m not even sure that what we’re looking for is down here.’

‘No, of course not. But like you I think it’s certainly worth a shot. I’ve been longing to get a chance to come down here and now you’ve given me a good reason. Anyway, two of us can get the job done much more quickly than one.’

At the foot of the stairs Schlachter unlocked a heavy oak door and switched on a light to illuminate a long and windowless basement that was full of filing cabinets and bookshelves and religious paraphernalia, including some precious-looking silver icons, and a couple of spare chandeliers. A large marker sign of a yellow skull and crossbones hung on a length of wire that extended across the width of the room and here and there – on walls and cupboards – were some red chalk marks.

‘Right gentlemen,’ said Schlachter. ‘Pay attention please. I’m going to tell you what I would tell anyone who joins the panzer engineers. I apologize if any of this sounds like basic training but it’s the basics that will help to keep you alive.

‘What we have down here is the handiwork of a real joker of an Ivan. He must have had days down here setting up practical jokes for us. Funny for the enemy no doubt, but not I can assure you for us. You pull something open and find that whatever it is you’re pulling – a drawer, a cabinet door, a box-file off a shelf – is linked by a short length of detcord to a half-kilo of plastic explosive that goes off before your arm has stopped moving. I’ve had one man lose his face and another lose his hand, and frankly I just don’t have the men to spare for a job like this right now – not when there’s still so much to clear up top. The SS have offered me some Russian POWs to clear this room, but I’m the old-fashioned type; I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Besides, it would defeat the object if the hidden bomb clearance resulted in the destruction of the very thing that makes hand clearance of this kind of ordnance necessary in the first place.