Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  “Thanks just the same, Charles.” Smith stepped out from behind the desk and patted the colonel’s upper arm. “I need to get back to Baker Street.”

  Vaughan frowned in disappointment. “All right, then. Cloaks and daggers. Did your special cargo come through all right?”

  “Fine. I appreciate your lending me McShane and the others. A tough job wants tough men.”

  “They’re my best, no mistake. And no one will ever know they were gone, Duff. Rest assured of that.”

  “Thanks, old man.”

  Smith stepped through the door, then turned back, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “You know, Charles, it’s frightening how committed some of these Jews are. Cold-blooded as Gurkhas when it comes to the killing. We’d better look to our guns in Palestine after the war’s over.”

  Vaughan rubbed his square chin. “I wouldn’t lose sleep over that, Duff. I don’t think Adolf’s going to leave enough of them alive to start a riot, much less a war.”

  25

  SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss peered through the trees into darkness. Then he turned back and looked deeper into the forest, at the house he had left behind. Through the pouring rain he could see that Frau Kleist had already switched off the lamps. With a satisfied sigh he stepped out of the trees and began following the narrow footpath that led around the wooded hills and back to Totenhausen.

  It would take him forty minutes of trudging through wind and rain to reach the camp, but he didn’t really care. His trips to Frau Kleist’s engendered an entirely different sort of fatigue than that produced by close-order drill. Frau Kleist’s husband was captain of U-238, stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. But the “old man” hadn’t been home for eighteen months, and his wife was not the type to martyr her sexuality for the German Navy. Willi thought the situation funny. Sybille Kleist hated the sea, but she’d married a submarine captain because she loved his dashing uniform. So typically German! Claiming that her husband didn’t get home frequently enough to warrant living in a seaport, she had chosen to live alone in a very comfortable house outside her home village of Dornow.

  The captain’s misfortune was Willi Gauss’s salvation. Sybille Kleist was insatiable in bed. Willi was twenty-three years old, she forty. Yet Sybille drained him to exhaustion twice a week, sometimes three times. Some nights she would not even let him step outside the house to have a pee. She waited for this need to make him hard, then used him again. And Willi wasn’t complaining. Only lately had she begun to talk nonsense. She claimed she loved him. Even at twenty-three Willi knew that was dangerous. When the war was over, Captain Johann Kleist would return. U-boat captains were notoriously proud and tough men. Willi planned to have broken off the affair long before that day. Still, one or two more trips to Sybille’s bed wouldn’t make the ending any more difficult.

  As he approached a dogleg on the dark path, he heard a muted thump somewhere ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar, but in the rain he couldn’t place the sound. As he rounded the turn, he heard a swish in the trees to his left. Then another thump. Had Sergeant Sturm finally decided to follow him and see what he was up to in the forest at night?

  Seconds later Willi stopped dead in the slushy path. Ten meters away stood a giant of a man wearing a dark uniform. Only the whites of two eyes flickered in the space where the face should have been. When Willi saw the parachute and shroud lines flap in the wind, a small voice in his brain said Kommando. He discounted it. After all, he was standing on German soil, far from any battlefront. Perhaps Major Schörner had laid on some type of exercise to test the Totenhausen guards. This thought stayed Willi’s hand for a moment. Then he grabbed for the holster on his belt.

  A bright flash bloomed in front of the parachutist.

  Willi felt a tremendous blow in the stomach. Then he was looking up into the stormy sky over Mecklenburg. The parachutist bent over him. Willi felt more puzzled than afraid. And tired. Unbelievably tired. As he stared upward, the blacked-out face above him swirled, disappeared, then coalesced into the soft features of Sybille Kleist. She looked different somehow. She looked . . . beautiful. As he lost consciousness, Willi realized that perhaps he loved her after all.

  “He’s dead, Ian,” said a voice in English.

  Sergeant McShane kicked the body. It didn’t move. “Make sure,” he ordered.

  A dark figure dropped to the ground and drove a dagger into the fallen German’s heart.

  “Papers,” McShane said.

  The kneeling figure rifled the dead man’s pockets and came up with a brown leather wallet. “He’s a sergeant. SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss. Here’s a ration card with the word Totenhausen.”

  McShane nodded. “I dinna think a lone sergeant with a pistol constitutes a patrol, Colin. Still, someone might be expecting him back at camp.”

  The Achnacarry weapons instructor looked up from Willi Gauss’s corpse. “I smell liquor on him, Ian.”

  McShane watched the path while he freed himself from his parachute harness. Within seconds two more shadows raced up and stopped beside him. Both men instructors from Achnacarry. One was Alick Cochrane — another Highlander built on the McShane model — the other John Lewis, the judo instructor Stern had embarrassed on the first day of training. By taping his knee, exercising it furiously each day and packing it in ice each night, Lewis had made good his promise to be fit enough for the mission.

  “Do you know where we are, Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked.

  “Between the two main groups of hills. West of the village and the camp, as planned, but we’re too far south. Bloody storm. Still, it could have been worse, jumping blind like that.”

  “Aye,” Cochrane agreed. “I dinna think I could have done it if you hadn’t jumped first.”

  “Where are the cylinders and the other gear?” asked Lewis.

  McShane looked up at the dark hills and shielded his eyes from the driving rain. “Should be north of us, on the plain. Where we’re supposed to be. The electrical station should be at the top of these hills to our left. Due east.”

  Colin Munro wiped his dagger clean and rose to his feet. “How do you want to play it, Ian?”

  McShane looked down at the dead man in the path and forced himself to think clearly. From the moment they entered German airspace things had begun going wrong. They’d flown out of Wick airbase in Scotland, in the most secret aircraft of the Special Duties Squadron, a Luftwaffe JU-88A6 that had forced-landed in Cornwall and then been refitted by SOE for high-priority missions into Europe. The Junkers and a German-speaking RAF pilot had carried the team unchallenged over the occupied Low Countries, but the weather soon intervened. A Baltic storm had unexpectedly veered south and settled like a wall over the old German border. The pilot wanted to turn back, but McShane had forced him to fly straight into the storm. Using the Recknitz River as a landmark, he was able to bring the commandos almost directly over their target.

  They had jumped blind, without flares or radio to guide them, and miraculously landed without injury. However, their cargo chutes and gas cylinders had been dropped too long after them. McShane knew he could eventually locate the cargo chutes; he’d watched them falling as long as he could. The dead man at his feet was the problem. Oberscharführer Willi Gauss could wreck the entire mission before McConnell and Stern even reached Germany, simply by having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. McShane glanced around the dark forest. Someone could easily have heard the fatal shots fired. The silencers on the Stens were far from silent.

  “Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked gently.

  “We bury him in the woods,” McShane barked. “Right here. Bury our chutes in the same hole. No time for anything else. Then we’ll retrieve the cylinders, bury the cargo chutes and move up the hill.”

  “Those cylinders,” said Colin Munro. “I’ll bet if we ditched the carrying poles, and each of us took a cylinder on his shoulder, we could cut the transport time in half. Especially through these woods.”

  “Those bloody tanks are heavy,” Lewis re
minded them.

  “No tougher than the logs at Achnacarry,” said McShane. “Will your knee take the weight then, John?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Right. This is where we live up to all that blarney we give the recruits about—”

  “Everybody down!”

  McShane hit the wet snow beside Willi Gauss’s corpse. “What is it, Alick?”

  Cochrane grabbed his arm and pointed toward the woods.

  Forty yards to the north, a yellow light had appeared in the trees. After thirty seconds of absolute concentration, McShane decided the light was stationary.

  “What do we do?” Lewis asked.

  “Keep your bloody mouth shut and pray it goes away.”

  Sybille Kleist stood at the front window of her cottage and peered into the darkness. She knew the sounds of her forest, and the brief Brrat! that had punctuated the night after her lovely Willi left was not part of the normal Mecklenburg nocturne. She wondered if her paramour might be returning for one more round of lovemaking — she hoped so — but Willi did not reappear.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and wished again for a telephone. Not that she could call anyone about her fears. They might stumble onto Willi, and that would be that. Life was becoming far too complicated. What would she do when her husband returned? Divorcing a heroic U-boat captain would brand her as a faithless, unpatriotic slut, no matter how boring the man was.

  Nothing ever worked out as it should.

  After another anxious minute of watching and listening, Sybille reluctantly went back to bed and lit a second cigarette. The sheets were still damp from Willi’s enthusiastic attentions. Thinking of him, she remembered the sharp sound from the path. It was probably only a stag, she told herself, scraping his antlers on a tree. But she would be glad when she saw Willi again, all the same.

  “Everybody up,” McShane ordered softly. “We’ve only got seven hours till dawn. After we’ve hung the cylinders and stowed the radio, we’ve still got to make it to the beach.”

  Colin Munro pulled a folding spade out of his pack. “Let’s haul this bastard into the trees and get him buried.”

  It took ninety-six minutes to bury Willi Gauss, find all eight cylinders, attach the roller mechanisms and suspension arms to the cylinder heads and bury the cotton cargo chutes that had brought them all down. It required a further two hours to lug the eight cylinders — plus one box that was to be cached for Stern and McConnell — to the top of the highest hill.

  They set up their base at the foot of the first pylon beyond the transformer station fence. The station itself was blacked out to keep it from the eyes of Allied bomber formations. A deep humming in the forest told the commandos that it was functioning, but a quick recon by Cochrane confirmed that it was deserted.

  Lewis grumbled that to climb the pylon and work around the high-voltage wires in the rain was suicide. Ignoring him completely, McShane donned spikes and harness, tied a long coiled rope to his belt, and quickly climbed one of the sixty-foot support poles. Colin Munro was right on his heels. At the top, buffeted by wind and icy rain, McShane tied his toggle rope around the crossarm as a safety measure, then uncoiled the long rope and used it to haul up the block and tackle necessary to hoist the gas cylinders to the top of the pylon.

  The commandos worked mostly in silence, albeit at a frantic pace. They had rehearsed the operation a dozen times at Achnacarry. Cochrane and Lewis attached the cylinder/roller wheel combinations at ground level, then used the block and tackle to haul the apparatus to the top of the pylon. McShane and Colin Munro handled the transfer to the auxiliary conductor wires.

  At Achnacarry, Munro had likened the transfer process to hanging a 130-pound Christmas ornament on a tightrope. The cylinder was the ornament, and the roller wheel and suspension bar formed the hook. The analogy was apt, and it stuck. Hanging the ornament required perfect balance and enormous strength, as it had to be lifted off of the tackle hook that had brought it up to the crossarm, then raised still higher and set down on the outermost auxiliary wire — all without man or metal touching the live wire that ran just inches away.

  McShane provided the strength, Munro the balance. Once the roller wheel had been fitted onto the wire, Munro would climb from the crossarm onto the cylinder itself, while McShane held both man and machine in place with a rubber rope attached to a hook on the cylinder’s bottom. Then McShane would let the cylinder — with Munro astride it — roll down a predetermined distance from the crossarm. When it stopped, Munro would remove a lubricated cotter pin from a pouch on his belt and fit it through a hole in the roller wheel. Then he would simultaneously arm the six pressure triggers that protruded from the hard wire netting covering each cylinder. The final step was to attach clips on a heavy gauge rubber rope to the oversized ring at the end of the cotter pin. It was this rope — attached in reverse sequence, so that the cylinder farthest from the pylon would be freed first — that Jonas Stern would use to initiate the gas attack.

  Everything went according to plan until the last cylinder. McShane and Munro had decided to rest for sixty seconds before fitting the last tank into place. It hung just beneath them, still suspended from the block and tackle controlled by Cochrane and Lewis below. The two men were resting side by side on the crossbeam — McShane sitting, and Munro squatting with uncanny balance — when they heard a loud boom from the power station behind them.

  Whether it was a lightning strike or a limb that had fallen across a live wire, neither man knew, but Ian McShane grunted explosively as the auxiliary wire energized and the rubber rope came alive in his hands. The Highlander did not know he had made a sound; he knew only that his arm had been yanked by a gorilla, so he tried to yank back. Then suddenly the current was gone and he toppled off the crossarm.

  His toggle rope saved him. Tied from his belt to the crossarm, it held him suspended fifty-seven feet above the ground, in a perfect position to watch his mission end in catastrophe. He stared helplessly as the farthest cylinder from the crossarm began to roll down the wire toward Totenhausen.

  Then he saw the most remarkable feat of bravery or madness he had ever witnessed. A black shadow flew through the air above him and caught itself on the four-foot suspension bar between the moving roller wheel and the cylinder head. At first he thought the shadow was an owl or a nighthawk.

  Then he realized it was Colin Munro.

  The weapons instructor had heard McShane’s grunt and seen him try to jerk free, in the process yanking the pin from the cylinder farthest from the crossarm. Without an instant’s reflection Munro had leaped off the crossarm.

  McShane stretched out his hand in a futile attempt to snatch Munro back, but the moment was past. Man and machine trundled away down the wire, quickly gathering speed. Seconds later he lost sight of both in the darkness.

  Forty yards down the auxiliary line, rolling rapidly toward the second pylon, Colin Munro felt electricity crackle in his hair. The knowledge that the wire above him was live — that he himself was “live” — nearly made him lose his stomach. It was a miracle he was not dead already, in that he had landed atop the cylinder without tripping one of the armed triggers. Yet he knew that for the next few seconds, at least, he was safe. Just as a bird can perch on a live conductor wire, so can a man if he is not grounded and if the voltage is not too high. This knowledge calmed him long enough to make some very quick calculations.

  He had perhaps thirty seconds before the roller wheel reached the next pylon, smashed the porcelain insulator there and shorted out the entire system. Then his “Christmas ornament” would roll the remaining distance down to Totenhausen, crash to the ground and detonate with him aboard, filling his lungs with deadly nerve gas — if he had not already been killed by the fall. The mission would be blown, his friends hunted down and killed. All he could hear was his own voice saying something he had told the Achnacarry recruits a thousand times: No matter how well we train you, lads, there will always arise a situation for which you cannot be pr
epared. It is then that the men separate themselves from the boys. . .

  Steeling himself against pain, Munro clutched the suspension bar in his hands and swung both legs up and over the conductor wire to try to slow his descent. The friction of the wrapped steel wire burned right through his woolen trouser legs and his skin. The cylinder slowed, but not enough. When the wire sliced though his calf muscles to the bone, Munro screamed, and he knew then that he did not have the courage to mutilate his hands the same way.

  He was less then forty feet from the second pylon when he remembered his toggle rope. With his left hand he reached behind him and snatched it off his belt. Then he swung the wooden handle over the wire, just ahead of the roller wheel.

  The wheel snapped the handle like a twig, but the toggle rope itself tangled in the aluminum forks and began to foul the roller mechanism. The cylinder skidded for two yards, then began rolling again. This final motion jerked the remainder of the toggle rope up into the mechanism.

  The rope took Colin Munro’s arm with it. His hand went under the wheel and snapped with a louder crack than the wooden handle had made. Roller and cylinder skidded down the last ten feet, dragging the flailing commando behind it.

  Just before it struck the crossarm, the wheel jerked to a stop. Colin Munro did not. His body was flung up over the pulley and onto the crossarm, closing a circuit between the live wire and the earth.

  From two hundred feet up the hill, Ian McShane saw a bright yellow flash with a sizzling blue core. Then he saw the distant lights of Totenhausen dim once, twice . . . and come back on.

  McShane “burned” the pole in his haste to get to the ground. Creosote and splinters raked his arms and face as he slid earthward. When his boots hit the snow, he raced down the hill, leaving Cochrane and Lewis to tie off the rope holding the final cylinder in place.

  At the foot of the next pylon, McShane found his friend’s body. Munro was lying on his stomach. His right hand was mangled, the arm torn and broken, and his tattered trouser legs were soaked in blood. The air smelled of ozone, as if a bolt of lightning had struck here. Munro himself smelled of burnt hair and cooked flesh. McShane dropped to his knees and felt for a carotid pulse, knowing it was useless.