by Bonnie Toews
Ketmann struggled to subdue Grace.
“The children! The children! I have to save the children!”
He muffled her mouth and yanked her around to face him.
“Never!” he spat.
Hypnotic hate galvanized his actions, but as he raised his fist to strike her, there was a crack second when his chin was vulnerable. Grace rammed the heel of her free hand upward and smashed his jaw. Caught off guard, he reeled backwards. His grip loosened. She broke free and ran towards the children in the garden. He staggered after her.
As she ran from him, she flashed a quick glance over her shoulder to see if he was following, and her eyes widened in horror. She yelled at the girls. “TAKE COVER!”
He looked behind to see a plane chasing them with its starboard wing clipped like a broken bird. When the girls didn’t react to Grace’s scream, she hoisted her habit and burst into manic speed, racing to reach them. Her black robes billowed behind her. Overhead the busted bird screeched and nosed directly toward the convent.
“NOOOooo..! NOT the children!” she screamed.
Her agonized cry fell on deafened silence as the wounded Mosquito plowed into the abbey. One second of stillness preceded the monstrous explosion that ripped the morning sky.
In the garden, the blast whipped Grace and the girls up like rag dolls in a whirlwind and, when the force was spent, threw their bodies over the courtyard like freshly scattered seeds. Their last vision of the convent was a brilliant flash of light before darkness consumed them.
As Ketmann raced to escape the impact, he tripped and fell. A blast uprooted the tree nearest him and hurled it across his path. As it came crashing down in front of him, one of its snapped-off twigs snagged his Death Head’s cap and ripped his face. Blood spurted, blinding him. He tried to raise his hand to stop the flow, but it was pinned under him. As his blood pooled in the crevices of his lips, he licked its metallic taste while blinking to clear his eyes. In the blur of forces battering the earth beneath him, he could see his cap waving playfully back and forth from the twig rammed into the ground beside him. He stared at it in a stupid daze.
Inside Shell House, Lee reclined on her cot. To escape thoughts of her execution, she made up silly ditties, senseless verses, which subconsciously rose up from her relentless core of survival that refused to give in. Earlier, when she was standing before her tormentor, she had wished for death. Now she wanted to live.
LEON… LEON… LEON… she repeated over and over again, training her mind on the sheer idiocy of words she could shape into something that rhymed, no matter how inane their meaning.
Leon… Leon … Leon…
Is an imbecile and a poop is.
He cuts off your leg and says,
“What a bag!”
Leon
The poop is
A gag.
“There, that’s more like it,” she decided, when the building mysteriously shook, and an ear splitting SWOOSH swept over the rooftop. Fully alert, she raised herself up on one elbow.
THUD… SWOOSH! Lee counted ten seconds until the next one. THUD… SWOOSH!
“We’re being bombed!” she cried and broke into an incredible grin. The coded message tapped on her wall was true! She hooted and hollered.
“Yippy! Go to it, guys! Roast the bastards!”
All at once the floor tilted and heaved. The walls shook, and tiny cracks zigzagged across the concrete. Outside the only window too high to reach, she saw trails of black smoke trickling upward before greater puffs spurted into the sky. Grey wisps began seeping under her door just as acrid smoke clogged her nose and throat, and a raging heat invaded her cell. She gagged.
Good God! She was going to be trapped inside this blistering oven. To be eaten alive by the spreading fire before the Black Death overcame her filled Lee with terror. As more smoke filled the small room, she choked and shrieked hysterically.
Another THUD, and the room listed to one side, like a sinking ship in the last throes of death. Her bed skidded across the stone floor, pinning her against the door. All at once it flung open. Max filled the doorway. She stared at his bruised face and lips chewed to raw meat. He unlocked her handcuffs and lifted her. One more terrific BANG and the walls of her room began to crumble. Lee latched on to the big German guard and wildly clung to him.
THUD… THUD… THUD … One after the other.
A giant groan leapt up through the floors followed by a great trembling, before the zigzag crack in the wall split wide open. The floor heaved. Lee screamed as the entire room shifted crazily and sagged. With superhuman strength, Max braced his great hulk inside the doorframe and sheltered her between the doorjambs.
Angry fingers of black smoke licked the ceiling. While watching its progress, sweat studded Max’s brow. Lee seized up with fits of coughing and desperately smothered them against his chest. More black smoke curled up the hallways. He shoved her down into a crouching position and squatted with her, taking a tight hold of her as she shook in his arms. In the midst of hell, he stroked her hair and crooned.
The superstructure gave way. Tremendous thundering like stampeding buffalo rumbling over the crumbling walls roared in her ears. In suspended animation, the top floors collapsed and tumbled downward, crushing the bottom floors and burying them under a cloudburst of suffocating plaster, cement and sand.
FORTY-FOUR
Wednesday, March 21st, 1945
Erich and Quinn desperately searched the smoking ruins for survivors. Sirens wailed and bells clanged as fire trucks and ambulances converged on the bombed out area. With their bare hands, the men frantically pulled away fallen debris and dug through the burnt mess of broken concrete and splintered wood until their hands were bloody from cuts and scratches and their faces were black with soot. They called out and then listened for a human voice to answer.
In St. Joan’s churchyard, Erich found a small girl trapped under a heavy wooden beam. The beam had freakishly blown out from the chapel and landed on her, crushing her leg. At first she looked dead as Erich gently brushed away the clay caking her eyes and nose. But, at his touch, her eyelids fluttered open, and she looked up at him, dazed.
“Everything went black,” she told him. “The planes came, and everything went black.”
“Did it? I’m so sorry,” he said, choking back tears.
He did not want to upset the child, for she was only one of scores of mutilated victims he was seeing in the wake of the bombing. Around him, the Danes stoically gathered up their dead and wounded, wholly convinced the air raid was necessary to prevent worse tragedies in the reprisals the Gestapo had planned against their people. But, for Erich, terrible guilt tore at his heart, especially for the children. They were so young to be sacrificed for the mistakes of war. His guilt only dampened hope of his finding his lovely Grace alive.
He knelt over the little girl with the big brown eyes and fawn-colored curls peeping out between patches of gray ash.
“You’re going to be fine,” he tried to assure her.
“Can you smell it?” she whispered.
“Smell what?”
“Spring.”
He stared at her in amazement. She looked at him so expectantly he sniffed the air to please her. To his astonishment, it was true. Penetrating the smells of gasoline, smoke and death was the fresh scent of new foliage budding on the beech and linden trees.
“Do you smell it?” she asked again.
He nodded. The young girl smiled and groped for his hand.
“Sister Angelique said it was the first day of spring. She took us to the garden to smell…”
“Do you mean you were outside in the garden with Sister Angelique when the planes came?” he interrupted her.
Hope gripped him again.
“Yes,” she said.
Her eyes widened, and she grew anxious.
“Why did everything go black?”
Erich didn’t know what to tell her. A woman near them sobbed. The sound of her crying made the young girl a
ware of other people’s voices. They frightened her.
“Why is everyone crying and praying?”
She tried to move and cried out.
“My leg! Oh, it hurts so much. I want my Mommy.”
Big tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Please, please, you must not move again,” Erich warned her.
“I hurt!” she sobbed.
“I know. I know. But please stay still. You may hurt yourself more.” He tried to soothe her. “Someone is coming to get you out. Can you be very brave for me?”
Her lips quivered in a pout. “I don’t know.”
“I’ve found you.”
He briefly turned away and yelled, “Help! Over here!” and turned back to her.
“There are many nuns and children who need help. I’m looking for Sister Angelique. I must find her. Can you be brave? Can you keep still until someone frees you, while I go look for Sister Angelique?”
He stroked her forehead as she looked up at him with complete trust.
“I can try,” she said.
“That’s a good girl. Thank you,” he said, playfully ruffling the fawn-colored curls bobbing above her forehead. “Sister Angelique will be so proud of you.”
That pleased her and her eyes followed him as he crawled off the pile of rubble and dashed to check every bloodied body lying on the abbey grounds. He found Ketmann curled up in a heap by an uprooted birch tree. Erich rolled him over. A pool of blood pillowed his head. Torn skin peeled back from a ragged cut that severed his face from ear to chin. Blood congealed along the slice. The SS general looked dead. Erich didn’t take time to feel his pulse. Instead, he hollered for help and kept on searching for Grace through the scattered injured.
A stifled groan caught his ear. He paused and listened.
A louder moan sounded. It came from inside the shattered grove of trees.
Crashing through the underbrush looking for the source of the moans, he flung aside mangled twigs and broken branches. To his left, he spotted a black frock. He rushed over and found her pinned under a fallen tree that straddled her pelvis. She lay on her side.
With tearful thankfulness, he sank down beside her.
“Grace,” he whispered hoarsely. He bent his ear down to her mouth. Her lips slightly parted.
“I’m here, darling. You must hold on for me,” he begged. “I’m going to get you to Sweden. We are going to make it. Do you hear me? We are going to make it!”
A desperate sob choked him.
“You must hold on. Please hold on. For me. For us. Oh God, I love you so much!”
He broke down.
“Erich...”
It was the barest whisper, before Grace’s head went limp against the earth under her.
“NO!” he screamed. “GRACE!”
Panic ripped him apart. He yanked at the tree lying on top of her. It didn’t budge.
“Lord, help me!”
Crouching to take the weight off his back, he took slow breaths several times and concentrated. When he felt ready, he strained to lift the fallen tree again. Gradually, with every muscle powered by the sudden surge in his adrenaline, he succeeded in raising the dead weight and heaved it away from Grace’s body. He could see that she was badly hurt and quickly knelt to tuck in the edges of her habit around her body to keep her warm.
“I’m going for help, darling. I’ll be right back.”
And he raced back through the trees to find a stretcher-bearer.
Resistance workers had enlisted Quinn to help them. Scurrying over the mounds of fallen mortar on top of the crumbled Gestapo building, they took advantage of the confusion to pull Danish resistance leaders still alive out of the rubble.
A bloodied hand waving helplessly between two chunks of concrete wedged together caught Quinri’s eye. Scrambling towards it, he hollered, “Over here!”
He tried to jar the collapsed masonry loose. Soon other hands joined his. They freed a hole and looked down inside.
Between the remaining sections of a door frame huddled the bulky shape of a German guard, barely conscious. The hand he waved slipped down from between the cracks and fell listlessly to his side. Sheltered by his body was another body.
Quinn shimmied down into the hole for a closer look.
Dried blood caked the German’s mouth. Barely breathing, he was dying from internal injuries, yet as Quinn passed over him to look at the body he was hiding, the dying man gripped his wrist with amazing strength. For a second they stared at each other. Spit gurgled from the guard’s mouth, and then his eyes stared into nothingness.
Quinn wrenched his wrist free of the dead man’s grip to push his body off of the stooped figure it shielded underneath.
When Quinn touched the other body, it trembled. He gathered his arms around its midsection to hoist it out from under the guard’s dead hulk. He felt breasts!
Shocked, he swore aloud. Without thinking, he told her in English, “I don’t know if you can understand me, but you must trust me. We have to get you out of here before we can help you. Now, at the count of three, we’re going to move slow and easy. Ready?”
“Quinn…”
At the pathetic sound of his name, Quinn’s heart lurched. The woman’s voice. He knew it.
“Lee?”
He heard a weak yes.
Unshed tears built up through the war years welled in his eyes.
“What are you doing here? What have they done to you?”
“Quinn…” came her hoarse whisper. “Get me out of here, but…” she faltered, “promise you won’t look at me …please.”
“Lee, I don’t care what you look like. All that matters is you are alive.”
With gentle tugs, he dragged her towards him, and when she was free of the German’s body, he gathered her up in his arms and cradled her against his chest. She hid her face in his jacket and clung.
“I don’t understand what you are doing here. Lee, Lee. My dear Lee. I never wanted you hurt. Never.”
Tears shredded the dust and dirt caking his face.
She was so painfully thin he worried about bruising her when he lifted her out of the hole and handed her to one of the men waiting to pull them out.
“Be careful,” he instructed. “We don’t know how badly hurt she is.”
Lee folded her arms over her face to prevent anyone from looking at her. Once in the sunshine, she buried her face deep inside the stranger’s shoulder.
“I can’t see,” she cried. “The sun’s too bright.”
As Quinn followed, the Resistance worker carried her to an ambulance in a nearby back street. Quinn climbed inside first and reached out to receive Lee in his arms. The two men delicately lowered her onto the stretcher. She continued to hide her face from him.
Her pathetic condition thoroughly shook him. He was unsure of what he could say to help her feel… he stopped himself… to help her feel what? What do you say to someone who has suffered things you’ve never experienced? He hunched down beside her and gently covered her hand with his. Silently, he tried to give her his strength.
The Resistance workers were anxious to leave.
“We’re not going without von Lohren,” Quinn stubbornly insisted.
After a few more jumpy moments, Erich appeared, breathing hard from running.
“I’ve found Grace.”
“Grace?” Lee cried out. Forgetting herself, she turned to Erich’s voice. “She’s still here?” she croaked.
Erich nodded and gulped to catch his breath.
“She’s badly hurt. We’ll have to lay her stretcher across the laps of the people who are sitting.”
“No, you won’t,” Lee said.
And then as she sat up, Erich, Quinn and the Resistance workers saw her face. When she saw their shocked expressions, she quickly turned away.
“I’m not hurt. Use this stretcher.”
She crawled to the back corner where she sat, deep in the shadows, folded up in a fetal position on the jump seat.
Erich recovered first and grabbed the stretcher.
“Let’s get Grace.”
The sound of von Lohren’s voice reached down into Ketmann’s soul. As consciousness toyed with him, English voices broke through the haze. Where was he? He tried to raise his head from the litter to see what was going on. Strips of gauze bound his face. They felt like weights holding him down. He eased his head to the left, on his good cheek, towards the voices. Two attendants stepped up to the ends of his litter and lifted him into an ambulance. For a moment, he could make out von Lohren and a man—vaguely familiar—loading a woman into another ambulance near his. They wrapped her black robes around her like a blanket. The nun. She must be alive. The king’s cousin knew where the atomic formula was hidden.
He struggled to raise himself. The attendants nearly lost their grip as they slid his litter onto the top rack inside the ambulance. They bound a blanket around him so he couldn’t move, but as they stepped down, he tipped his head and found he had a partial view of the other ambulance through the open doors.
Von Lohren started to shut the door. The man with him grabbed his free arm. Ketmann strained to listen.
“Did you know Lee was a prisoner here before Saunders ordered the raid?”
Von Lohren looked at him squarely. “I knew.”
Anger glared in the eyes of the man as his grip hardened on Von Lohren’s arm. “Why wasn’t I told?”
Von Lohren answered with rigid silence.
“When we get back to England, you and I have a score to settle.”
“First we have to get back,” said Von Lohren as he slammed the ambulance door shut with his free hand. “Now let me go.”
Ketmann watched the two men separate and stride up either side of the ambulance to the front cab. He could hear the cab doors bang. In the next instant, the ambulance backed up and pulled out of his view.
So, von Lohren was alive and the traitor he always believed he was. Ketmann let his head roll back to a more comfortable position while he thought. The other man … Quinn Bergin … he recognized Lee’s former bureau chief … Why didn’t he know Lee was his prisoner? If he had known, it didn’t sound as if he agreed with the air strike. Both men seemed to have key positions in British Intelligence. He mused, only the Special Operations Executive risked their control officers on dangerous field missions. He must let Berlin know. There was still time to capture them and find the atomic formula.