Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  What did they mean? Had some emergency signal been triggered? If so, it was a hell of a show. He tore his eyes away from the flares and forced himself to think. He was moving too fast to catch hold of a crossarm, and he was too high to hope to drop into the snow and survive. He did not realize he had the means to save his life until he caught sight of the cylinder ahead of him. The image of it hurtling down the power line tripped a memory in his mind. The Death-Ride at Achnacarry, when he and Stern had been ordered to leap from a tree and slide across the Arkaig River on a taut wire using only their toggle ropes. . .

  Toggle ropes . . .

  Anna felt a sense of peace when she saw the lights of Totenhausen wink out. Alarmed tower-gunners began firing on the Volkswagen when they realized it was not going to stop, but they were too late. She steamrollered the gate at sixty miles per hour and roared across the parade ground. Bullets shredded her rear tires, but she drove on.

  A lone SS man caught in her high-beams fired at her.

  She ran him down.

  She swerved around the headquarters and headed toward the inmate blocks. Had the Jewish women and children reached the E-Block? Had Stern even reached the block to warn them about the attack? And what of the Christian children? They had nowhere to go. Perhaps she could lead them to safety somewhere.

  She gasped and hit the brakes as her headlights revealed the block area. A frantic mob of ghostly figures was milling around like patients set free from a lunatic asylum. Some clung to the fence wires, others writhed in the snow, their backs arched in spasm like human bows. Anna saw children among them. Unconsciously she touched her air hose to make sure it was secured to her mask.

  As the VW slowed, a group of men noticed the car and charged with suicidal recklessness. She yanked the wheel to the right and gunned the motor. To get out of the car here would be like leaping into the sea to save a hundred drowning people. Better to go to the E-Block by running through the hospital corridor.

  She skidded to a stop beside the hospital steps. There were corpses here too. Her gas suit had no pockets, so she left the keys in the car. With shredded tires the Volkswagen was useless anyway. She reloaded her pistol, then hoisted the heavy air tank onto her back and struggled up the hospital steps.

  “Looks like someone already had a go at the power station, sir,” said the navigator. “It’s burning.”

  Squadron Leader Harry Sumner started the climb to fifteen hundred feet. From there he would act as Master Bomber, using his radio to guide and correct the delivery of bombs by the other aircraft.

  “We’re going to hit it anyway, Jacobs. Following orders, right down the line. They must want the whole hill flattened, to send the two cookies with us.”

  Jacobs nodded. His squadron leader was referring to the two 4,000 lb. high explosive bombs carried in the bays of two Mosquitos which had been specially modified to carry the huge concrete-busting bombs to Berlin. Dropping those on the tiny power station and camp below would be like squashing ants with a mace.

  Nothing would remain but holes in the ground.

  But just in case it did, the additional 14,000 pounds of incendiaries carried by the remaining Mosquitoes would burn off anything left above ground.

  “Overdoing it a bit, wouldn’t you say, sir?” commented the navigator.

  “We’ll never know,” Sumner replied. “God only knows what’s down there. Could be the devil’s own furnace, buried where we can’t see it.”

  “Could be, sir.”

  “Verify placement of Target Indicators. I only want to do this once. And pray Jerry doesn’t have any decoys down there.”

  “Ready, sir.”

  The Squadron Leader keyed his mike twice, then began transmitting orders to one of the ten bombers wheeling in the sky below him.

  McConnell watched in mute terror as the cylinder ahead of him rocketed off the tenth pylon like a skier from a cliff and smashed into the rear of a huge barnlike structure, then fell the remaining distance to the ground. Looking down, he saw that the power lines dropped almost perpendicularly from the tenth pylon to a distribution shed at the base of the factory. There would be no gradual descent.

  He had to stop now.

  He gripped the loop-end of his toggle rope in his left hand and focused on the roller-wheel above him. If he tangled the rope in that wheel, he would probably die. There was only one way to make the throw. He slipped his right wrist through the loop-end of the short rope, and with the same hand gripped the wooden handle at the other end — a throwing weight.

  He leaned back as far as he could.

  The roller-wheel above him whirred like a fishing reel spinning under a shark’s pull. Cocking his right arm, he threw the handle-end of the rope up and over the power line, aiming just behind the pulley-roller, and grabbed for the falling handle with his left hand.

  He caught it!

  Glancing down, he saw the crossarm of the tenth pylon rushing up to meet him. Thirty yards, twenty — had the British Sarin killed even a single SS man? — fifteen yards . . .

  He twisted one end of the rope around each wrist and heaved himself up off the cylinder. The heavy tank shot out from under him like a wild bronco that had finally thrown its rider.

  The horsehair toggle rope sang as it raked against the power line, slowing his descent. Was the friction enough? With all his strength he clenched the rope in his vibrating hands.

  The toggle rope hit the crossarm with enough speed to snap McConnell’s whole body out ahead of the pylon, parallel to the wires. Momentum tore at his air tank, the harness on his back, his shoulders and wrists — but everything held. Rope, tank, harness, bones, and ligaments. Two seconds after the impact he was hanging suspended from the tenth pylon like a parachutist caught in a tree.

  His arms felt as if they had been yanked from their sockets, so he swung his legs up over the crossarm and, in the upside-down position so common to twelve year old tree-climbers, worked his way along to the nearest support leg of the pylon.

  Then he looked down.

  Sixty feet below, six gas cylinders lay on the snow beside the factory wall. They looked harmless, used up, like scrap metal fallen off a junk truck. For all he knew, they might be harmless.

  But they might not.

  He looked to his right, down into the camp proper. Black stick figures of varying sizes sprawled on the snow at crazy angles, many concentrated in the area of the inmate blocks.

  “God in Heaven,” he said, his voice alien inside the vinyl mask. “It works.”

  He struggled to hold down the wave of nausea rising from his stomach. Vomiting in the mask might be fatal, since he could not risk removing it. Had any of the women and children reached the E-Block? Had he released the gas too early? Where was Anna? Stern? Stern had no gas suit. He looked down at his waist. Christ. He’d left his safety belt clipped to the top pylon.

  The goddamn thing was useless anyway.

  He took two massive breaths from his air tank, then jammed his spikes into wood, bear-hugged the pole and started down.

  47

  “Did you get the oxygen bottle?” Stern shouted, running toward the flashlight beam at the opposite end of the hospital corridor.

  The beam moved down and illuminated a green bottle lying on a dark, reflective sheet. Stern set the kicking bundle that was Hannah Jansen on the sheet.

  “Took it from a pneumonia case,” came Weitz’s muffled reply. “You’d better put on that suit.”

  Stern lost no time doing that. But as he tried to work the recessed zipper, he realized something was wrong. Weitz could not be holding the flashlight to help him see and at the same time be taping the little girl into the vinyl sheet — which the sounds Stern had been hearing indicated he was doing.

  “Who else is here?” Stern cried, throwing himself out of the beam of the flashlight.

  “It’s all right!” Weitz said, shining the torch onto another black-suited figure wearing an air tank on its back. The figure looked up from its work. In the glow of t
he flashlight Stern first saw only a reflection. Then, through the clear vinyl mask McConnell had brought from Oxford, he saw the blond hair and dark eyes of Anna Kaas. She stared back at him for a moment, obviously stunned by the blood and bruising on his face, then pointed at his gas suit and went back to her work.

  Stern lost no time zipping up the Raubhammer suit. Suddenly, the hospital lights blinked on, faded, then stayed on.

  The bright light paralyzed Stern.

  “The emergency generator,” said Weitz. “There’s someone in the basement!” He jabbed Stern on the shoulder. “What did you do with my gun?”

  “I gave it to someone.”

  Weitz cursed and raced around the corner toward Brandt’s office. Anna held up her revolver and called out, but the buzz produced by the speech diaphragm of her mask died after a few feet. She put down her gun and with Stern’s help sealed the vinyl sheet as completely as possible with the roll of tape Weitz had provided. Stern picked up the bundle — much heavier now with the oxygen bottle added to the child’s weight — and turned toward the hospital door.

  Sergeant Gunther Sturm stood beside the stairwell, unsteady on his feet but holding an infantry rifle in his hands. The left side of his tunic was soaked in blood.

  As Stern bent to set down the child, Sturm fired.

  He missed.

  The SS man jerked back the bolt for a second shot.

  Though years of conditioned reflexes told Stern to attack the man, something stronger surged through him. He threw himself over Hannah Jansen’s body, shielding her from the bullets even as the inner voice told him he would die for it.

  He heard gunshots, but too many too quickly to be the bolt-action rifle in Sturm’s hands. He looked up to see Ariel Weitz barreling out of the side corridor firing Klaus Brandt’s Luger.

  Sergeant Sturm returned fire at point-blank range.

  The boom of the rifle in the wide hallway had not even died when Weitz hit the tile floor. The sergeant staggered over to the fallen man, pulling back the rifle bolt as he walked. Weitz struggled on the floor, but could not rise or even crawl away. Sturm’s bullet had broken his back.

  Jonas started to lunge toward the SS man — then a heavy caliber revolver exploded beside his right ear. He threw up his hand to protect his eardrum, watching in astonishment as Anna Kaas fired three more bullets, spiking Sturm to the hospital wall. The sergeant hung there a moment, his arms flung wide, then dropped like a sack of sausage filling, leaving scarlet streaks behind him.

  Anna knelt beside Weitz. The little man was fighting just to breathe. She gently pulled off his mask and airhose.

  Weitz was unshaven as usual. A faint smile lit his eyes. “Remember what you said?” he whispered.

  The lights in the corridor dimmed again, but stayed on.

  Anna squeezed the rubber that covered his right hand. “I’m sorry, Herr Weitz?”

  “You said . . . God . . . sees how it really is.” He tried unsuccessfully to swallow. “I hope that’s true,” he gasped, and died.

  Anna bowed her head.

  Stern touched her shoulder. “Do you have a car, Fräulein Kaas?”

  As Anna turned to answer, the hospital lights went out and stayed out. Stern pulled her to her feet in the darkness.

  “Greta’s car won’t take us far,” she said. “They shot the tires to pieces. What about Sabine’s Mercedes?”

  “No.” Stern heard the muffled screaming of the child in the sealed sheet. “Wait!”

  He dropped to his knees and felt his way across Gunther Sturm’s bloody corpse, searching for pockets. He almost shouted with relief when he felt his right hand close over car keys. “We’ve got it!” he said, sliding his palms over the cold tiles in search of the SS man’s rifle. “We’ll pick up McConnell at the pylon.”

  He found the rifle, stood up, and slung it over his shoulder. At first he thought the frantic buzzing was some type of insect beside his ear. Then Anna punched him and he realized it was the nurse screaming inside her gas mask. He snapped straight and followed her pointing arm.

  At the rear door of the hospital, backlit by the dying white light of a parachute flare, stood a tall, black-suited figure. When it lifted an arm toward them, Stern’s mind shouted Gun! so loudly that he had Sturm’s rifle off his shoulder and aimed in an instant.

  Anna fired her pistol but missed. Twenty meters was well beyond her effective range.

  Stern pulled the rifle’s trigger.

  Nothing happened. Sergeant Sturm had failed to fully chamber another round. As he worked the bolt, a brilliant red light bloomed in the window behind the silhouette.

  It was the flash of multicolored cloth against the black suit that made Stern pull his aim. His bullet smashed the window of the door behind the figure. He knocked Anna’s arm wide, then waved both arms wildly. He had no idea how McConnell had gotten down the hill so fast, but he knew no German would be wearing a piece of Scottish tartan in the heat of battle.

  When McConnell reached them, he leaned in close and said, “We’ve got to get out of here! The gas works! The alley is full of dead!”

  Stern’s gas mask had no speech diaphragm, so he took the risk of unclipping his air hose. “How the hell did you get here?” he asked, immediately sealing the hole with his palm.

  “Air mail!” McConnell shouted, his voice rendered cartoonish by the buzzing diaphragm.

  “What?”

  “Forget it!”

  “What about the factory?” Stern asked. “Do we run? Or do we finish the job?”

  “Do we have a car?”

  “The Mercedes.”

  “What about the camera and the sample canisters?”

  “In Greta’s Volkswagen,” Anna said.

  McConnell saw something move on the floor. “What the hell is that?”

  “A little girl,” Stern told him. “There’s an oxygen bottle in there with her, but we’ve got to get her away from here.”

  “What about the other children?” Anna asked.

  “The E-Block is full,” said Stern. “The rest. . . ” He shook his head. “This is the one we can still save.”

  “Put your air hose back on!” McConnell yelled. “Anna, take the girl in the Mercedes and wait for us by the river. The wind blowing off the water will make that the safest place. Jonas and I are going to do what we came here to do. We’ll meet you at the river. We’ll use the Mercedes to make a run for the coast.” He turned to Stern. “Good enough?”

  Stern nodded.

  “Any sign of Schörner?” McConnell asked.

  “No,” said Anna.

  Stern shook his head.

  “Find a dark spot to wait,” McConnell told her.

  “There’s a ferry down there,” Anna said. “A one-truck ferry used for bringing supplies from the south. If we used that, we wouldn’t have to risk meeting Schörner on the main road.”

  Stern nodded with an exaggerated motion, then bent down and hoisted Hannah Jansen onto his right shoulder.

  Anna led the way through the front door with her revolver. McConnell suddenly slammed into the air tank on her back. He squeezed past her and stood gaping at the Appellplatz. Two blinding red fires lay burning in the snow like Roman candle flares. He could see two more burning in a straight line beyond the front gate, probably near the river bank. Seeing the ruby flare burst behind him at the rear door of the hospital, he had imagined a flare fired by a dying SS man.

  This was something different.

  There was almost a pattern to the fires, as if they were comets cast down by an angry but methodical god. McConnell might have kept staring had Stern not shoved him forward and run down the steps like a man with the devil at his heels. Anna pulled McConnell down with her and grabbed a leather bag from the backseat of Greta’s car. Together they followed Stern around the hospital to the Mercedes.

  They met him coming back. McConnell called out to ask what the hell was going on, but Stern had already passed him, running across the Appellplatz toward the headquarter
s building.

  They found Hannah on the passenger seat of the idling Mercedes. The oxygen bottle inside the vinyl sheet was slowly inflating it like a balloon. McConnell helped Anna into the driver’s seat. The air tank on her back pressed her chest into the steering wheel, but she managed to shift the car into gear.

  “See you at the river!” he shouted, slamming the door.

  The Mercedes’ wheels began spinning on the ice.

  On impulse McConnell pulled open the back door, jumped across the seat and yelled, “Drop me at the front of the camp!”

  It took Major Schörner five minutes to cover the same distance McConnell had covered in eighty seconds. Where McConnell had crossed it in a straight line, Schörner had had to wrestle the troop truck down the tortuous hill road and around the wreckage of his field car just to get within a quarter mile of the camp. Counting the time it had taken him to regroup his men at the power station, he was running very late. With every red fire he passed, the sense of urgency grew in him. He knew what those fires meant. He had seen them in Russia. As the troop truck roared toward the camp gate, he leaned out of the window to shout at the gate guards.

  He saw none.

  “Slow down!” he shouted at the driver. “Slower, you swine!”

  He opened the door and stood on the truck’s running board. As the driver coasted forward, Schörner felt a sudden and powerful sense of dread. He never knew the source of these intuitions, but in Russia he had learned not to question them.

  “Stop the truck!” he ordered. “Stop!”

  The truck skidded to a halt.

  Schörner jumped down onto the snow and took a couple of steps toward the gate. Peering into the darkness, his eyes were drawn to three dark forms on the ground about five meters inside the twisted gate. He looked up at the nearest watchtower. The upper half of the tower-gunner’s body was hanging over the gun parapet.