Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  It was this arc that rolled up the wires and over Schörner’s head toward the source of the current. It flashed onto the copper bus bars of the station, ionizing the available air and crackling across the metal struts like something from a Frankenstein picture. Heated far beyond the tolerance they had been built to withstand, the contacts inside the circuit breakers instantly boiled the insulating oil they were submerged in and blasted apart their steel-drum containers like giant shrapnel bombs, spraying oil across the snow.

  The sensors in the station responsible for rerouting the voltage to the auxiliary system did function, but they too failed in the end. The first poison-gas cylinder had already smashed two insulators, putting the auxiliary wire into direct contact with two crossarms. When the rerouted voltage reached the first damaged insulator, the previous event repeated itself almost exactly. As the second explosion reverberated through the hills, McConnell — still blinking his eyes from the passage of the second fireball — looked down toward Totenhausen.

  Every light in the camp had gone out.

  While Schörner’s men stared dumbfounded at the transformer station, the major aimed his flashlight along the boot tracks they had been following, toward the blue-white flash he had seen. Standing squarely in the middle of the tracks was a smooth, thick tree trunk. Schörner had shone his flashlight ten feet up the tree before he realized it was one leg of a power pylon.

  “Bring your torches!” he shouted, running toward the pole. “Hurry!”

  By the time Schörner’s shout echoed up from below, McConnell had righted himself on the crossarm and gotten his hand around the rubber rope. Three flashlights converged on one leg of the pylon. Stern had told him put space between the cylinders, but there was no more time. He yanked the third cotter pin loose, waited two beats, then jerked out the fourth and fifth simultaneously.

  A flashlight flicked over the crossarm.

  The last cylinder hung three feet down the wire from the crossarm, swaying gently in the darkness. As he tightened his grip on the rope to pull the final pin, McConnell realized something that sent spasms of fear along his spine.

  He was going to die.

  In a matter of seconds four torch beams would fix his position like London searchlights pinning a Luftwaffe bomber to the clouds, and machine gun bullets would follow. With this certainty came something unexpected — something quite different from what he had been feeling only moments ago — a flood of pure animal terror.

  He wanted to live.

  “There!” Schörner shouted, holding his beam steady on the top of the pylon. “Do you see something?”

  “Nothing, Sturmbannführer.”

  “The tracks end right here.”

  “Maybe he doubled back.”

  “Look at this!” cried an SS private, who had bent over something in the snow. He screamed suddenly and fell backward.

  Schörner whirled and shone his flashlight onto the snow. A bolt-action Mauser rifle, scorched black and smoking, lay in a shallow well of melting snow. It took him only seconds to put together what had happened. He aimed his flashlight toward the top of the pylon.

  “Lights!” he shouted.

  “Sturmbannführer!” screamed one of the men. “The power station is burning!”

  Schörner cursed as three torch beams disappeared. “The pylon, you stupid swine! Put your lights on the pole!”

  McConnell stretched out his legs, hooked both feet around the four-foot suspension bar that held up the last cylinder and yanked out the cotter pin. The rubber rope fell sixty feet onto the snow. Only his butt and his hands on the crossarm resisted the downhill tug of the cylinder hanging beneath him.

  Twice already a flashlight beam had played over his black oilskin suit, but he forced himself to look down.

  Wire netting covered the dark cylinder, and from the netting protruded six pressure-triggers, any one of which could blow the cap out of the cylinder head and release the gas within. There was no time for caution. If the triggers tripped and the British gas worked, he would have to rely on the gas suit and mask he had modified in Oxford. He would live or die by his own hands. Three torch beams stabbed the darkness around him.

  With fire in his stomach he leaped off the crossarm.

  “There!” Schörner shouted. “There’s someone up there!”

  “Where, Sturmbannführer?”

  Schörner threw down his flashlight and snatched a submachine gun from the startled SS man, then turned it skyward and fired a long burst up along the length of the support pole.

  McConnell’s breath went out of his lungs when his crotch crashed onto the cylinder head. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the balls by a mule. It was all he could do to hang onto the suspension bar, but the cylinder was rolling.

  It was rolling fast.

  He was already twenty feet from the pylon when Schörner’s fusillade of bullets ripped into the crossarm behind him. He looked down frantically to see if his legs had tripped any of the triggers. He couldn’t tell. More shouts and gunfire sounded behind him, but suddenly it was all meaningless. No one below understood yet what had happened.

  McConnell did. And he knew his problems had only just begun. Somewhere out ahead of him, five cylinders of nerve gas were shunting along a length of steel winch cable toward Totenhausen, and he was almost certainly overtaking them. He was trying to work out just how quickly when the roller-wheel above his head jumped the shattered insulator on the second pylon.

  He closed his eyes in terror until the wheel settled back onto the wire on the other side. It was a lot like riding a cable car, he thought, a very fast cable car with no operator. He would almost certainly reach Totenhausen alive. The problem was how to get off of the cylinder before it dropped sixty feet to the ground. He was squinting down the wire trying to answer that question when the whole night sky burst into flame like the Fourth of July.

  46

  Stern was right behind Ariel Weitz as the rubber-suited figure burst out of the back corridor of the headquarters building and into the Appellplatz. Weitz ran straight toward the hospital, but Stern swung out to his left. He had no intention of running unprotected through the invisible cloud of nerve gas that might be drifting across the yard from the SS barracks and dog kennels on his right. As he ran, he saw a white flash burst above the hills behind the camp.

  A flare.

  Was Schörner signaling for assistance? Had he trapped McConnell on the road?

  “Herr Stern! Please stop!”

  Stern looked left. A woman was running toward him with a child in her arms. Rachel Jansen. He could scarcely believe it, but she was there, with a crowd of confused prisoners streaming out of the inmate blocks behind her.

  “It’s after eight!” he shouted. “Get to the E-Block!”

  “My son is already there! You promised to take Hannah!”

  Stern heard a distant peal of thunder like artillery in the hills. The entire camp seemed to freeze and listen. A second explosion followed. Then every light in the camp went out.

  Transformers, thought Stern, remembering the sound from his guerrilla days in Palestine. “My God, he’s done it,” he said. He grabbed Rachel’s shoulders. “The gas is coming! Come on!”

  Rachel held out the bundled blanket. “For God’s sake, take her with you!”

  Stern took the little girl like a sack under his right arm and seized Rachel’s hand with his left. Paralyzing pain shot up from his broken finger as he sprinted toward the hospital with Hannah screaming for her mother and Rachel following behind.

  “Where is my father?” he asked.

  “Taking children to the E-Block!”

  He raced up the front steps of the hospital and crashed through the front door into the darkness of the main corridor.

  “Weitz!” he screamed.

  No answer.

  Rachel slammed into his back. “Where is Hannah? Did you put her down?”

  “I have her! Now, go to the E-Block! Go to your son! Straight through this corridor
!”

  While Stern pointed down the hall toward the back door, the window in the door lit up like a cinema screen. White light poured over his shoulders from the window in the door behind him.

  “My God, what’s happening?” Rachel asked. “What is that?”

  Spotlights? Stern thought, though why anyone would be shining spotlights on the hospital doors made no sense to him.

  “Weitz! Where are you?”

  He heard a crash off to his right, then a bloodcurdling scream. He handed the child to Rachel and stumbled down the hall to his right, into darkness, feeling his way along, his finger burning at the slightest contact. He heard more crashes, another scream. Someone was begging in German, but the words were slurred, confused. A beam of light sliced across the corridor. In its brief flash he caught sight of at least two dead SS men outside the doorway. He moved cautiously forward. He heard a sound like a rotten melon dropped onto concrete, then the shuffle of feet on tile.

  “Weitz?” he whispered.

  A blast of gunfire poured out of a doorway.

  “SCARLETT! I’m the man you just saved!”

  A pause. “In here,” said a muffled voice.

  Stern smelled blood when he passed through the door. Weitz shined the flashlight into his eyes, then moved it away. Stern’s eyes tracked the yellow beam until it came to rest on what once had been a human face. The skull was grossly misshapen now, a mass of gore and blood, the white coat beneath it a riot of scarlet and black. On the desk before this mess lay a short iron bar.

  “Guten Abend, Standartenführer,” Weitz said in a hushed tone. “This isn’t what I wanted, you know.”

  “Who is that?”

  Weitz clicked his heels together and gave the corpse a fascist salute. “The distinguished Herr Doktor Klaus Brandt. I wanted it to take longer.”

  Stern took the torch from Weitz’s hand. The little man made no effort to resist. One sweep of the walls revealed a nauseating mural of blood and tissue. Stern shined the light on the killer’s face.

  “Where is the other gas suit, Herr Weitz?”

  Weitz pointed to the floor behind the desk. “He was trying to put it on. Trying to get away.”

  Stern picked up the suit, mask, and the boots that lay beside them. “Is there a vinyl sheet anywhere close?” he asked.

  “This is a hospital.”

  “Get me one then. In the main corridor you’ll find a little girl. I want you to wrap her in the sheet. Can you do that?”

  “For the gas, you mean? She’ll need oxygen.”

  “Then get me a fucking bottle!”

  A powerful explosion rocked the foundations of the hospital, shattering some kind of glassware in the dark office. Weitz cocked his head to one side, as if listening to a particularly fine piece of music.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Stern.

  “Little rats trying to leave the ship. But they went the wrong way! You told me to booby trap the bomb shelter, remember?”

  Stern turned away from the grisly scene and moved toward the door. The telephone on Brandt’s desk rang. He heard Weitz pick it up and say, “Yes?”

  After a short pause, Weitz began to laugh. The sound chilled Stern’s blood. “Who is that?” he asked, aiming the torch at the desk.

  “Berlin.” Weitz smiled eerily. “Reichsführer Himmler is holding for the Herr Doktor.”

  Weitz held the phone against Klaus Brandt’s shattered skull and looked up at Stern. The flashlight reflected the whites of his eyes and the teeth of his grin.

  Stern leaped forward and snatched the phone away before Weitz could say anything more. He held the receiver to his ear and heard an irritated voice: “Brandt? Brandt! Confounded telephone lines . . . the Allies have knocked them out again.”

  A chill raced across Stern’s arms and shoulders.

  “Brandt!” Himmler said again. “What the devil is going on up there?”

  Stern touched his lips to the bloody mouthpiece. Very slowly and clearly he said, “Listen to me, chicken farmer. You lost the war tonight. Keep your cyanide pill close. We are coming back for you in the spring.”

  He set the phone gently in its cradle, picked up the Raubhammer suit and walked out of the office. Weitz followed with his machine pistol. Before they reached the main hall, the telephone was ringing again.

  Rachel waited in the corridor with Hannah in her arms.

  “For God’s sake, woman!” yelled Stern.

  Rachel shook her head and clung desperately to her daughter. Stern saw in her eyes that she was close to collapse. He had seen it happen to men in the desert, a kind of cumulative shock that could make a man lie down to sleep in the middle of a blazing battlefield. If he took the time to put on the Raubhammer suit, Rachel Jansen would not cross the alley to the E-Block alive. He dropped the suit and the flashlight on the floor, took Weitz’s machine pistol and pulled her toward the back door.

  As he crashed through it he saw the rear of the camp — trees, fence, the roof of the E-Block, the alley — illuminated as if by daylight.

  What was happening?

  Halfway across the alley, he heard a babble of voices to his left. A tall figure wearing a brown SS uniform was running toward him, pulling two children along behind, one by each hand.

  “Father?” Jonas shouted.

  The figure stopped dead. “Jonas? My son?”

  Stern threw his left arm around his father.

  “The blood!” cried Avram. “What have they done to you?”

  A pistol shot cracked at the far end of the alley. Jonas turned to his right. Just beyond the alley stood the huge barn that held the laboratory and gas factory. When the second crack sounded, he realized what he was hearing — the detonation of the trigger mechanisms on the gas cylinders.

  “Into the E-Block!” he yelled. “Now! Everyone!”

  He pushed the two children down the concrete steps that led to the gas chamber. Rachel and Hannah already waited by the hatchway.

  “They saw me!” Avram said as they shoved the children through the hatch.

  “Who saw you?”

  “The men. It’s a mob! They know something is happening, Jonas. The E-Block won’t hold another soul! Every Jewish child and some of the Gentile children are inside. The women are holding them on their shoulders, squeezing them into every corner . . . it’s a nightmare!”

  Stern pulled Hannah from her mother’s arms. “You are the last, Rachel! Say farewell!”

  Rachel took her daughter’s face between her hands. “Remember what I told you, little one. Do whatever Herr Stern tells you. Never” — her voice cracked — “never forget me.” She kissed the terrified child hard on the forehead and then backed away.

  “I am going to live,” she told Stern, her black eyes bright with tears. “One day I will come to Palestine. I will want her back. Don’t ever leave her!”

  As Jonas pushed her through the hatch, Rachel reached into her shift and pressed something into his hand. It was too large to be another diamond. He looked down. A dreidl. He stuffed the little top into the trouser pocket of the SD uniform.

  “She won’t remember!” Rachel cried, backing hard against the wall of bodies behind her. “So you must tell her! It is all she will have of her parents!”

  With that she turned and hurled herself into the mass of bodies seeking refuge in the gas chamber.

  Another crack sounded from behind the factory. Jonas wrapped the blanket around Hannah’s head and set her on a step. Then he took his father by the shoulders and shook him.

  “Get your ass through that door! Now!”

  Avram looked confused. “Jonas . . .” His face was working through stages of incomprehension. Things had not turned out as they were supposed to. He should have been dead before now. “I can’t be the only man left alive. Not after—”

  For the first time in his life Jonas Stern struck his father. He hit him so hard that Avram doubled over and fell as surely as if he had taken a bullet in the belly. Jonas dragged him to his
feet and stood him up beside the hatch. He saw only blackness inside. The heat in the chamber was already stifling. A cacophony of wailing women and children filled his ears. He called for Rachel, but she had already been swallowed by the tangle of limbs. He grabbed the nearest arm to the door and pulled.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked in Yiddish.

  “Yes, sir!” answered a shaky male voice.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen, sir.”

  “Help me pull him in. He’s not SS. You know the shoemaker?”

  “Yes.”

  Stern heard the crack of another detonator. When they’d got his father inside, he shoved Weitz’s machine pistol into the boy’s clammy hands. “Hold tight to that! Don’t let anyone take it from you. Stay in here until there’s no more air to breathe. Then shoot out a window, crawl out, and open the hatch. That’s the only way out. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  The voice sounded frightened but resolute. Stern squeezed the boy’s arm, then backed up, took hold of the heavy steel door and forced it shut. As he cranked the great wheel into the closed position, he felt he was sealing people into a tomb, not a lifeboat.

  Only time would tell which.

  Coming up the steps with Hannah in his arms, he saw a group of men enter the alley from the factory end. They wore prison stripes, not SS uniforms. Panic seized him. Even if he’d still had the machine pistol, he could not keep them away from the E-Block for long. Several men began throwing their arms about like puppets controlled by a madman.

  Two fell to their knees, retching in the snow.

  “God forgive me,” Jonas said. He raced across the alley and up the hospital steps without looking back.

  McConnell clung desperately to the suspension bar as the roller-wheel jumped over the shattered transformer on the seventh pylon and raced down the wire. He was three quarters of the way down the hill with no sign of slowing and no idea how to get off of the cylinder alive. The parachute flares floated down through the blackness like white stars, illuminating the landscape from the hillside to the river with a hypnotic light.