Polar Shift Read Free

in from the east aboard ambulance trains. Armed guards stood at each gangway and turned away unauthorized passengers.
    The driver cut in front of a passenger line. The steel-helmeted sentry manning the checkpoint raised his rifle to bar the way. The driver waved a sheet of paper printed in heavy Gothic type under the sentry’s nose. The guard read the document, snapped to attention and pointed along the dock.
    The professor didn’t move. He had been watching someone on board the ship anchored at the dock throw a bundle down to the crowd on the pier. The throw was short and the bundle fell into the water. A wailing went up from the crowd.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” the professor said.
    The guard barely glanced in the direction of the commotion. “Refugees with a baby can get on board. They toss the baby back down and use it as a boarding pass over and over. Sometimes they miss and the baby goes in the water.”
    â€œHow gruesome,” the professor said with a shudder.
    The guard shrugged. “You’d better get moving. Once the snow stops, the Reds will send their planes to bomb and strafe. Good luck.” He raised his rifle to bar the next person in line.
    The magic document got Kovacs and the driver past a pair of tough-looking SS officers who were looking for able-bodied men to press into duty on the front. They eventually reached a ramp leading onto a ferry crammed with wounded soldiers. The driver again showed his documents to a guard, who told them to hurry aboard.

    A S THE overloaded ferry left the dock, it was watched by a man wearing the uniform of the naval medical corps. He had been helping to load the wounded on board, but he slipped through the mob and away from the waterfront to a maritime junkyard.
    He climbed onto a rotting derelict of a fishing boat and went below. He pulled a crank-operated radio from a galley cupboard, fired it up and muttered a few sentences in Russian. He heard the reply against the crackle of static, replaced the radio and headed back to the ferry dock.

    T HE FERRY carrying Kovacs and his tall companion had come around to the seaward side of a vessel. The ship had been drawn several yards from the dock to keep desperate refugees from sneaking aboard. As the ferry passed under the ship’s bow, the professor looked up. Printed in Gothic letters on the navy gray hull was the name Wilhelm Gustloff.
    A gangway was lowered and the wounded were carried aboard the ship. Then the other passengers scrambled up the gangway. They wore smiles of relief on their faces and prayers of thanks on their lips. The German fatherland was only a few days’ cruise away.
    None of the happy passengers could have known that they had just boarded a floating tomb.

    C APTAIN Third Class Sasha Marinesko peered through the periscope of the Submarine S-13, his dark brow furrowed in a deep scowl.
    Nothing.
    Not a German transport in sight. The gray sea was as empty as the pockets of a sailor returning from shore leave. Not even a stinking rowboat to shoot at. The captain thought of the twelve unused torpedoes aboard the Soviet sub and his anger festered like an open sore.
    Soviet naval headquarters had said that the Red Army offensive against Danzig would force a major sea evacuation. The S-13 was one of three Soviet subs ordered to wait for the expected exodus off Memel, a port still held by the Germans.
    When Marinesko learned that Memel had been captured, he called his officers together. He told them he had decided to head toward the Bay of Danzig, where the evacuation convoys were more likely to be found.
    Not one man objected. Officers and crew were well aware that the success of their mission could mean the difference between a hero’s welcome and a one-way ticket to Siberia.
    Days earlier, the captain had run afoul of the secret police, the NKGB. He had left the base without permission. He was out whoring on January 2 when orders had come down from Stalin for the