Black Cross

by Greg Iles

  Before Stern could follow and finish her, McConnell dove through the door and leaped onto the woman’s back as she tore at the door handle. Sabine whirled, clawing and screeching like a wildcat.

  “Stop it!” Anna screamed. “Sabine, be quiet!”

  McConnell threw himself backward and whirled, crushing Sabine against the foyer wall and stunning her enough that she fell to the floor.

  Anna threw herself over her sister to keep Stern from shooting her. “Lie still, Sabine! Don’t say anything!”

  Stern was trying to push his way into the foyer, but McConnell shoved him back into the kitchen. “You don’t have to shoot her!”

  “You heard her!” Stern shouted. “She’s planning to stay here tonight. We can’t risk her ruining everything. She’s got to be eliminated.”

  “She’s my sister, for God’s sake!” Anna screamed from the foyer.

  “She’s a Nazi!” Stern yelled back.

  McConnell held up his hands to keep Stern from charging the foyer door. “You can’t kill her sister, Jonas!”

  “I can’t?”

  McConnell pushed him back. “Look, the attack is only three hours away. We can tie her in the basement. She won’t get out.”

  Stern looked past him. “Too much depends on this, Doctor.”

  McConnell spoke very low. “If you kill her, there’s no telling how Anna might react.”

  “We don’t need Anna anymore either,” Stern said, his eyes cold. “All we need is this cottage.”

  McConnell lowered his hands but leaned close to Stern. “If you hurt Anna,” he said, “I will kill you. And if you manage to kill me first, and I don’t see that gas factory, Brigadier Smith will have your balls for breakfast. You understand? There’s no need for more bloodshed. Let’s just tie her in the basement.”

  “You can’t hide here anymore anyway, you bastard!” Anna shouted at Stern. “Brandt ordered a house-to-house search of Dornow!”

  McConnell and Stern looked at each other, their mouths open.

  “How long do we have?” Stern asked.

  When Anna didn’t respond, McConnell said, “Anna, please, how long?”

  “Sturm’s men could be in the village already.”

  A knock on the door silenced them all.

  All but Sabine. She screamed at the pounding. “Help me! Help!”

  McConnell jerked Anna off of her sister and dragged Sabine into the kitchen.

  “A Kubelwagen!” Stern said from the window. “They must have coasted up the lane! Get your rifle, Doctor!”

  Stern pushed Anna up to the front door and motioned for her to reply. He stood behind her with the Schmeisser, ready to spray the entire foyer with bullets if necessary.

  “Who’s there?” Anna called, her voice near to breaking.

  “Weitz,” came the muffled reply.

  Anna sagged against the door in relief. She motioned Stern back into the kitchen, then opened the door.

  Ariel Weitz pushed past her and closed the door behind him. “What the hell goes on here?” he asked. “Who screamed? Whose Mercedes is that?”

  “My sister’s. What are you doing here? Are you crazy? Sturm and his men could be here any minute.”

  “You’re the one who’s crazy,” Weitz snapped. “Taking Greta’s car? Now, take me to them.”

  “Who?”

  “Them. The commandos, or whoever is going to make the attack. I’ve got to speak to them.”

  Anna looked anxiously over her shoulder.

  Stern stepped up to the door of the small foyer with his Schmeisser leveled. “Who are you?”

  Weitz looked at the SD uniform in shock. “I am Ariel Weitz, Standartenführer. I apologize, I’ve obviously come to the wrong house by mistake.”

  “He’s no SD officer!” Sabine screamed. “Help me!”

  Weitz forced himself not to look beyond the Nazi specter before him.

  “You’re Scarlett, aren’t you?” Stern said. “Smith’s other agent in Totenhausen. It’s you who calls the Poles.”

  Weitz looked to Anna with petrified eyes, then back at Stern.

  “You’ve come to the right house,” Stern assured him. “What have you to tell me? Hurry!”

  “It’s all right,” Anna said.

  “Well . . . Brandt has postponed the house-to-house search. He pulled in all the patrols.”

  Stern’s eyes narrowed. “Why would he do that?”

  “Sturm’s dogs dug up more British parachutes near the Dornow road. Cargo chutes this time. The rains uncovered them. Sturm came back with the parachutes right after Anna left. Schörner wanted to cordon off the whole village, but Brandt overruled him. Brandt thinks that by searching for commandos, Schörner would be leaving him and his lab open to attack. So they’re sealing off the camp.”

  Stern closed his eyes for an instant, the only sign that this news had disturbed him. “How did you get out?”

  “Brandt sent me to Dornow to get the only four technicians who are not on duty at the factory. I heard him and Schörner discussing plans to dismantle the lab tonight.”

  “Dismantle the lab? Tonight? Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know, but. . . ”

  “But what?”

  Weitz scratched his chin. “Well, if taking apart the lab means they are moving tomorrow, and the Raubhammer test is tomorrow, what can they be planning to do with the prisoners?”

  Stern nodded. “Anything else?”

  “No, Standartenführer.”

  “Stop calling me that. You are Jewish?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you come out of the war alive, you should come to Palestine. We could use you there.”

  Weitz’s hand went to his mouth. “You . . . you are a Jew?”

  “Yes. And I want you to do something for me, if you can.”

  “Anything.”

  “When the attack comes, some of the SS will probably run for their bomb shelter. And that shelter might well protect them. Unless of course some enterprising soul found a way to booby-trap it.”

  A slow smile crept over Weitz’s face. “It would be my pleasure, Standartenführer.”

  “Good man. Now go. Get back to your work. And think of a reason why you stopped here, in case anyone saw you.”

  Weitz bowed his head and hurried away from the door.

  Stern turned back to the kitchen. McConnell was restraining Sabine from behind in a wrestling hold.

  Before Stern could speak, Anna said, “Brandt gassed your father.”

  Stern’s face went white. “What are you telling me?” he whispered. “My father is dead?”

  Anna held up a forefinger. “Give me your word that you will not kill my sister, or I tell you nothing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I saw him walk into the E-Block with my own eyes,” Anna said.

  McConnell heard the truth of it in her voice.

  “All right,” said Stern. “You can take her to the basement and tie her. Now—tell me what you know.”

  “Your father survived. It was a chemical-suit test. Your father wore one. I saw him walk out alive.”

  Without even waiting for a response, Anna grabbed Sabine by the arm and pulled her to the cellar door. Sabine fought no more. It was plain even to her that Stern would shoot on the slightest provocation.

  “You’d better gag her,” Stern called after them. “If I have to listen to any more mewling about Nazi high society, I’ll kill her just to shut her up.”

  McConnell collapsed into a kitchen chair. “You heard that guy. They’ve sealed the camp. Schörner’s expecting something. You’ll never get in there tonight. You won’t be able to warn the prisoners to go into the E-Block.”

  “I’ll get in,” Stern said with absolute conviction.

  “How?”

  Stern’s boot heels fired together with the crack of a small caliber pistol. His voice took on a saber edge. “It appears that Standartenführer Ritter Stern from Berlin is going to have to make a s
ecurity inspection.”

  40

  At 6:00 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time, twelve RAF Mosquito bombers lifted off from Skitten field, a division of Wick air base in Scotland, and headed across the North Sea toward Occupied Europe. Their code name was GENERAL SHERMAN. The Mosquitoes took off just behind an RAF Pathfinder force which was leading a wave of Lancasters to the oil plants at Magdeburg, Germany. Each specially modified Mosquito carried 4,000 pounds of bombs in its belly.

  GENERAL SHERMAN would remain with the Pathfinder force across the Netherlands, but when the Pathfinders turned south near Cuxhaven, the Mosquitoes would continue east, past Rostock, to the mouth of the Recknitz River. Flying by dead reckoning, they would follow the river south, ticking off the villages as they went. When they passed Bad Sülze, they would follow the line of the river with their H2S blind bombing radars until they sighted Dornow village. There, the leading aircraft would drop parachute flares to bathe the area in light. Then the second plane would mark the Aiming Point with brilliant-burning red Target Indicators.

  The “Mossies” would be near the limit of their range, but with no known antiaircraft guns to worry about, they could afford to make a slow, accurate bomb run. Their primary target was a prison camp sheltered between the hills and the river, known to them only as TARA. In tandem formation, they would pound the southern face of those hills with high-explosive and incendiary bombs until nothing remained but a fire burning hot enough to boil the nearby Recknitz River.

  Jonas Stern walked into Anna’s bedroom and checked his SD uniform in the mirror. He had forgotten to remove the creosote stain he’d gotten while climbing the pylon, but that was a small thing now. He straightened his collar, checked the Iron Cross on his breast, felt the pocket that held his papers.

  Staring at his reflection, Stern found it easy to believe that his father had not recognized him. Even though he had shaved in the afternoon, the face and eyes under the peaked SD cap seemed to belong to a man he did not know.

  Perhaps they did. So much had happened in the past three days. The visit to Rostock had hit him hardest. Finding his father alive had been a miracle, and yet some part of him had not been surprised by it. Such miracles were not outside his experience of war. But the trip into Rostock, into the neighborhood where he had lived until age fourteen, had overwhelmed him. Even though he and his mother had fled Germany in fear, even though he knew as well as anyone the outrages perpetrated against the Jews who remained behind, some inaccessible part of him had clung to that small neighborhood, those few streets and buildings that had nurtured him. That part, that repository of memory, had remained German.

  When he entered his street, expecting to find his old apartment building smashed to rubble, and then saw it standing as tall and proud as it ever had, hope welled in him. He climbed the stairs to the second floor with the unreasoning faith of a fool, shedding years with each step, his cynicism left at the curb with the stolen car. But when he knocked at the door he had once been unable to open because he could not reach the handle, it was answered not by his mother or father or his uncle or anyone else he remembered, but by a bespectacled man of sixty with white hair and soup stains on his shirt.

  Stern stood mute, staring past the stranger. The furniture in the apartment was the furniture he had grown up with. His mother’s sofa and end tables, his father’s bookcase and wall clock. He swayed on his feet, his sense of time in free fall. The stranger asked if the Standartenführer was all right. Finally focusing on the face before him, Stern realized that the old man was trembling in fear. The SD uniform had worked its spell.

  Even as he mumbled his apologies, Stern caught sight of the two blond children beyond the old man. The boy was only half-dressed, but the tunic hanging open on his shoulders, exposing his white chest, was the familiar black of the Hitler Youth. He wore it as naturally as a British boy would have worn a Boy Scout uniform.

  Stern almost stumbled down the stairs in his haste to get back to the car. He would rather have found the whole street leveled by Allied bombs and his relatives dead under the wreckage. The sight of that apartment, filled by the furniture of his memory but empty of the people he had known, had punched like a stake into that hidden part of him that remained what he had been as a child, that remained German. As he turned the car out of the familiar street, he truly understood something for the first time. He was not German. He was a Jew. A man without a country, without even a home. A man who was only what he could make of himself, who could call home only that land he could take and hold by force of arms.

  Anna’s voice rising in the kitchen brought Stern back to the present. He cocked the SD cap on his head, picked up his Schmeisser and walked into the kitchen. McConnell and the nurse were sitting at the table. They had spoken little to him since his attempt to shoot Sabine—who now lay trussed like a turkey in the basement—but he had no regrets. Leaving the woman alive was a mistake. If they couldn’t see that, so be it.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Just like one of them,” said Anna. “Except for the suntan. Maybe you are one of them.”

  Stern ignored her. He set his Schmeisser on the table and folded his arms as he stood over them. “The whole thing is timing now,” he said. “It’s seven oh-five. I’m taking Sabine’s Mercedes to the camp, and I plan to be at the gate in ten minutes. I’m going to leave the climbing spikes at the foot of the pylon on my way. I don’t plan to be inside the camp longer than fifteen minutes.”

  “What are you going to tell the prisoners?” asked McConnell. “You think you can explain the situation and get them to decide who will live or die in fifteen minutes?”

  “The less time they have to think, the better. If all goes well, you will hear an explosion at seven-fifty. That will be me blowing out the transformers in the power station on the hill. You will be waiting here. When you hear the explosion, take the Volkswagen and meet me where the road comes closest to the pylon. Have the gas suits with you. We’ll go to the camp together and finish the job. If you haven’t heard the grenade by seven-fifty, I’ve failed. Then you must take the car up the hill, put on the climbing spikes as I showed you, climb the pylon and release the cylinders.”

  “All in ten minutes?” McConnell asked. “Why don’t Anna and I just wait on the hill?”

  “Because the only thing that can stop this attack now is someone discovering those cylinders before the attack. I don’t want either of you anywhere near that pylon until it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “But that’s not enough time.”

  “It is. I’ve seen you run, Doctor. I’ve seen you carry logs on your back. Even if you only climbed six feet per minute, you could climb that pole in ten minutes. You’ll climb it a lot faster than that, if it comes to it.”

  Stern picked up a piece of cloth from the table. It was the swatch of tartan Sir Donald Cameron had given McConnell on the bridge. “The two buried cylinders will detonate automatically at eight,” he said, rubbing the tartan between his fingers. “If you’ve had to send down the cylinders yourself, consider the job done. I’ll be beyond help and there will probably be SS reinforcements on the way.” He dropped the tartan and tilted his head toward Anna. “She knows the area. The two of you might be able to reach the sub. She can take my place.”

  “It won’t come to that,” McConnell said.

  “Sure.” Stern shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Listen, if I don’t get out, and you do . . . well, my mother lives in Tel Aviv. Leah Stern.”

  “It won’t come to that,” McConnell said again.

  “Just promise you’ll do it. I don’t trust Smith. That lying bastard told me my father was dead.” He slung the Schmeisser over his shoulder. “Just tell my mother I was with Father at the end, okay? That I tried to get him out.”

  “Smith told you your father was dead?”

  Stern nodded. “He wanted me angry enough to kill anybody who stood in the way of getting this job done.”

  McConnell shoved his chair back and stood
up. “If the worst happens, I’ll get word to your mother. But you’re going to tell her about it yourself. It’ll be the big family story. The night Jonas saved his old man from the Nazis.”

  Stern took McConnell’s hand and shook it.

  “Shalom,” McConnell said, and smiled. “What do you say?”

  Stern’s mouth split into a grin. He looked unbelievably young then, too young for what he was about to do. “Kiss my ass, Doctor. Is that right?”

  “Close enough.”

  Anna raised her eyes to Stern. He nodded at her, then moved toward the door. As his fingers touched the handle, she said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Stern.”

  He stepped out into the night.

  Anna pulled a strand of hair out of her eyes. “He looked like a boy,” she said. “At the end.”

  “He is a boy,” McConnell replied. “A boy who probably won’t live the night.”

  “He’s also a killer. He’s a match for Sturm or any of them, that one.”

  McConnell nodded. “He has to be.”

  Airman Peter Bottomley watched the small single-engine plane float down through the dark Swedish sky and onto the abandoned airstrip. It taxied right up to the Junkers bomber and stopped, engine running. The side door opened and a one-armed man climbed down to the tarmac wearing a severe black business suit. He waved to the pilot. The light plane taxied away. The passenger hurried over to where Bottomley stood waiting.

  “How was Stockholm, Brigadier?”

  “Same as ever,” said Smith. “Thick with intrigue, damned little of which will ever amount to anything. Any word from Butler and Wilkes?”

  “None, sir. But Bletchley got an unconfirmed report that the Wojiks have gone missing.”

  A shadow of concern crossed the brigadier’s face. “Missing?”

  “Apparently someone from the SHEPHERD network reported that Scarlett called the Wojiks for a crash meeting. The Wojiks left for the meeting, but never returned.”

  Smith tugged at one end of his gray mustache. “Schörner may have tumbled to Weitz and the Kaas woman, then used them to draw the Wojiks in. He might even have bagged Butler and Wilkes.” Smith looked down at his dour suit. “Looks like I’m dressed for the occasion.”