Black Cross

9

In Oxford it was raining. McConnell stood inside a bewildering maze of metal pipes, pressurized storage tanks, rubber hosing and racks of gas masks — a maze of his own construction. There were enough skull-and-crossbones POISON signs tacked around the lab to scare off a German regiment. Two elderly white-coated assistants worked quietly at the far end of the lab, preparing for the afternoon’s experiment.

McConnell leaned against a window and looked down into the sandstone courtyard three floors below. Cold rain pooled in the cracks between the stones, running through channels carved over the past six centuries. He wondered if his brother was flying today. Did weather like this ground B-17s? Or was David navigating the sunny ether above the clouds, humming a swing tune while he pressed on toward Germany with death stowed under him?

Hardly a day had passed since their last meeting that Mark had not gone over his brother’s words again. His determination not to participate in the race for a doomsday gas remained as strong as it had been that night, yet something within him would not let the issue rest. How many scientists had faced similar dilemmas during the war? Certainly those on the Tube Alloys project, men who labored in the shadowy, Faustian field of atomic physics. They had much in common with the men working in the sealed chemical laboratories at Porton Down. Good men living in bad times. Good men making compromises, or being compromised. How could he explain why he couldn’t help them?

He watched the raindrops spatter on the window glass, wiggle like bacteria on a slide, then coalesce and run down, seemingly without direction, to join the water collecting in the gutter pipe, a liquid momentum with force enough to wear away the stone below. He thought of what David had said in the Welsh Pony, about the American boys gathering for the invasion. A rain of young men falling on England, out of airplanes, spilling out of the holds of ships, coalescing into groups that formed the cells of a colossal human wave. An incipient wave that grew each day, leaning eastward, that would soon be poised for a great leap across the Channel. It would leap as a whole, but it would break on the opposite shore and shatter into its component parts, individuals, young men who would water the ground with their blood.

That cataclysmic event, though still in the future, was already as unstoppable as the setting of the sun. The men behind it had come together in England, and around themselves were drawing young lives by the millions. They breathed the scent of history, and across the Channel perceived nothing less than the Armies of Darkness, Festung Europa, the fortress of the Antichrist, waiting to receive their mighty thrust.

But something else awaited them there. McConnell had seen it for himself, and heard it. He had traveled across the Channel to Belgium, and to France, and walked the fields that had once been crisscrossed with trenches and mud. He had stood awhile above the intermingled regiments of bones resting fitfully in shallow graves beneath the soil. And there, in whispers just beneath the wind that howled across the stark terrain, he had heard the puzzled voices of boys who had never known the inside of a woman, who never had children, who had never grown old. Seven million voices asking in unison the unanswered question that was an answer in itself:

Why?

Very soon those boys would have company.

“You okay, Doctor Mac?”

Startled, Mark turned from the window and saw his assistants holding four small white rats beside the hermetically sealed glass chamber he called the Bubble.

“Fine, Bill,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

The Bubble stood nearly five feet high, not tall enough for a man to stand in, but plenty of room for a small primate. Rubber hoses of various gauges snaked across the floor from storage cylinders to fittings in the Bubble’s base. Inside the chamber lay four round, variously colored objects about the size of English footballs. One by one, the assistants picked up the containers, opened small hatches in their sides, and stuffed the rats inside. One rat per football. When the containers were sealed, the assistants rolled them back into the Bubble and secured its main hatch. McConnell was reaching for the valve on a gas cylinder when someone knocked on the lab door.

“Come,” he said.

Brigadier Duff Smith strode into the lab, an enthusiastic smile on his face. He carried a few extra pounds around his middle, the inevitable toll of middle-age, but the muscle beneath was fit and hard. The second man through the door stood over six feet tall, and his skin had the burnished tan of a desert dweller. His dark eyes focused on McConnell and stayed there.

The brigadier surveyed the array of equipment. “How goes it, Doctor? What are we up to today? Bringing the dead back to life?”

“Quite probably the reverse,” McConnell said sourly. He reached down and opened the valve. The muffled hiss of gas released under pressure sounded in the room.

Smith glanced at the glass chamber. “What’s in the Bubble today? Rhesus monkeys?” He craned his neck. “I don’t see anything.”

“Look closer.”

“Those four footballs?”

“That’s exactly what we call them. Inside each of those footballs is a rat. The surfaces are made of mask filter material.”

“For what class of gases?”

“Blue Cross. That’s hydrocyanic acid going in now. If you feel the slightest irritation in your nasal passages, hold your breath and run like hell. The gas is odorless and nonirritant, so I’ve added a small amount of cyanogen chloride to let us know we’re about to die.”

“How long do we have to get clear after we smell it?”

“About six seconds.”

Brigadier Smith’s dark companion stiffened. Smith grinned and said, “Plenty of time, eh, Stern?”

McConnell shut off the valve. “That should be enough to tell. Go ahead and clear it.”

An assistant started a noisy vacuum pump.

“Your friends at Porton Down think the Germans have given up on this gas, Brigadier,” McConnell said over the rattle. “I don’t. It’s difficult to build up a lethal concentration on the battlefield, but that’s just the kind of challenge the Germans love. Hydrocyanic acid can kill you in fifteen seconds if it saturates your mask filter. We call that ‘breaking’ the filter. Our current filters are easily broken by hydrocyanic acid, and I think the Germans know that. I’m trying to develop virtually unbreakable filter inserts for the M-2 through M-5 series canisters.”

“Any success so far?”

“Let’s take a look.” McConnell signaled an assistant to shut off the pump, then donned a heavy black gas mask and motioned for Smith and his companion to move back against the wall. The Bubble gave off a sucking sound as he opened its door. He lifted one of the footballs, held it at arm’s length, opened its hatch and stuck two fingers through the aperture. Brigadier Smith watched, fascinated, as McConnell drew the white rat from the football by its pink tail.

The rodent hung motionless in space.

“Damn!” McConnell said, pulling off his mask. He turned and watched his assistants pull dead rats from the other three footballs. He shook his head in frustration. “Dead rats. That’s my life for the last three months.”

“I don’t see any obvious signs of suffocation,” Brigadier Smith observed.

McConnell took a scalpel from a soapstone table and neatly sliced the rat’s throat. Then he squeezed its body to express arterial blood. “See that? The blood is cherry red, as if it were fully oxygenated. Cyanide attaches to the hemoglobin molecule in place of oxygen. A soldier will look like he’s in the bloom of health while he’s suffocating.”

While the assistants disposed of the rodents, Smith leaned closer. “I’d like to speak to you in private, Doctor. How about the Mitre Inn? We could take a room.”

“I’d prefer to talk here.” McConnell glanced over Smith’s shoulder at the silent stranger, then called to his assistants, “We’ll start back up after dinner.”

When the assistants had gone, Smith pulled up a chair and straddled it, resting his right arm on its back. The gesture emphasized his missing limb. “We’ve had some more disturbing news,” he said. “Out of Germany.”

“I’m all ears.”

“First, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to bring Mr. Stern here up to speed on the chemical warfare situation. He’s a Jew, originally from Germany. Fresh in from Palestine, if you can believe it. Gas isn’t his line. Just a brief overview. German nomenclature, if you please.”

“You’ve read the classification manual.”

“But you helped write it,” Smith said patiently. “I like my information from the horse’s mouth.”

McConnell directed his answer to Stern. “Four classes, designated by colored crosses. You just saw Blue Cross in action. White Cross is tear gas. Green Cross denotes chlorine, phosgene, di-phosgene, et cetera. They’re the oldest chemical weapons, but still first-rank battlefield choices. They kill by causing pulmonary edema — internal drowning. The last is Yellow Cross, which also dates back to World War One.” McConnell wiped his brow and spoke in a mechanical voice. “Yellow Cross denotes the ‘blister’ gases, or vesicants. Mustard . . . Lewisite. Highly persistent gases. Wherever they touch the body, they produce burns, blisters, and deep ulcers of the most painful kind. The body’s ability to heal is impaired, making the effects of Yellow Cross especially long lasting.”

“Thank you,” Smith said. “But you left out a class, I believe.”

McConnell’s eyes narrowed. “The last class has no cross classification,” he said carefully.

“As of yesterday it does. Black Cross.”

“Schwarzes Kreuz,” McConnell said softly. “A fitting name for a tool of the devil.”

“Come now, Doctor. If I didn’t know you were a scientist, I’d swear you were superstitious.”

“Get to the point, Brigadier. You didn’t drive up here from London to chat about gas classifications.”

Smith smiled gamely. “Quite right, Doctor. I drove up here to enlist you body and soul in the war effort.”

“What are you talking about?”

“As of last week, Sarin took second place in the Nazi arsenal. An even deadlier nerve agent is now being tested on human subjects inside Germany. It is called Soman. According to reports, Soman is exponentially more toxic than Sarin, and far more persistent.”

“I can hardly imagine anything more lethal than Sarin.”

“Oh, it exists. The Porton lads are going over the report now. To be frank, the threat posed by Soman has been deemed so dire that I’ve been authorized to send a team into Germany to disable the production plant and bring back a large sample.”

Stern cut his eyes at the brigadier.

“Into Germany?” said McConnell. “But . . . why tell me?”

The Scotsman wove his lie into the cloth of the truth. “Because I want you to go in with them, Doctor. I’ve finally found the ideal job for you: a mission that is entirely defensive in nature. It’s the equivalent of preventive medicine.”

“There’s nothing defensive about sabotaging a nerve gas factory. You could send a cloud of death rolling right through the heart of Germany. You might as well call your mission a nerve gas attack.”

“That’s all the more reason for you to take part in the mission, Doctor. Having your expertise on the ground might prevent just such a disaster.”

“Frankly, Brigadier, I don’t believe you would perceive such an event as a disaster.”

Smith started to reply, but McConnell held up his hand. “This discussion is pointless,” he said. “I’ll do everything in my power to develop a defense against this new gas, but that’s all. I’m sorry, Mr. Stern. The brigadier could have saved you the drive from London. He knows my position on this.”

“And a damned infuriating one it is, too!” Smith said with surprising force. “You call yourself a bloody pacifist, yet you’ve been in this war longer than practically any other American!”

“I refuse to have this argument again,” McConnell said evenly. “There must be other scientists who could take this on.”

“None who is fluent in German.”

McConnell’s eyes widened. “You consider me a fluent German speaker?”

“Three years of German in high school, three more in college.”

“That hardly qualifies me as a spy.”

“I’ve seen men with half your linguistic skills go into situations twice as dangerous as the one I’m asking you to take on.”

“Did they come back?”

“Some did.”

McConnell shook his head in amazement.

“Ten words of German could get you past a border post, Doctor, and you’re better than that. There’s no degree in espionage, you know. Every moment in the field is part of your final examination. Besides, Stern here is a native German. He can polish your delivery while the preparatory work is being done.”

McConnell took a step toward Smith. “I’m not going, Brigadier. And you can’t order me to. I’m an American civilian and a registered conscientious objector.”

“You think I don’t know that? Have you forgotten who ensured that you were granted that classification? It’s bloody odd when you think about it. You call yourself a conscientious objector, but you’re not hiding back in the States with the Quakers and Mennonites. You’re nothing like the other pacifists I’ve seen. No, Doctor, to me” — Smith hesitated — “to me you look more like a man who’s afraid of getting killed.”

McConnell laughed outright. “I am afraid of getting killed. I assume every soldier is, if he’s not mad. You won’t shame me into helping you, Brigadier. This isn’t a grammar school playground.”

“You’re damn right it isn’t, laddie! If Jerry hits us with Soman, we’ve got to be ready to hit back twice as hard!”

McConnell smiled icily. “Why don’t you spray the countryside with anthrax? That would render the whole of Germany uninhabitable for fifty years. Maybe even a hundred.”

“We can’t risk that, and you know it. They could do the same to us. It’s tit-for-tat, and the enemy always has the prerogative to strike first. That’s the hell of being a democracy.”

“Our unwillingness to use such weapons is what separates us from the Nazis, Brigadier.”

“Bring out the bloody violins,” Smith growled.

Jonas Stern was the first to hear the footsteps in the corridor. He touched Smith, who moved quickly to the door and opened it a crack. McConnell watched him step outside, heard the hum of low voices. Then Smith walked slowly back into the room, followed by a young captain wearing the dark blouse and pinks of an 8th Air Force officer. The captain had an envelope in his hand.

“Doctor,” the brigadier said in a soft voice, “this chap needs a word with you.”

Mark felt a strange tingling in his fingertips. “What is it? Has something happened to David?”

The captain glanced at Brigadier Smith. “I’m not supposed to say anything until you’ve opened the letter. But . . . Doctor, your brother was shot down last night. I’m sorry, sir.”

The captain extended the envelope. McConnell took it and tore open the seal. Inside was a sheet of paper, the words on it typewritten in the manner of a telegram.

REGRET TO INFORM CAPTAIN DAVID MCCONNELL KILLED IN ACTION 19 JANUARY STOP CAPTAIN MCCONNELL’S ACTIONS ALWAYS REFLECTED THE HIGHEST HONOR UPON HIMSELF THE USAAF AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA STOP I EXTEND MY PERSONAL CONDOLENCES STOP

COLONEL WILLIAM T. HARRIGILL

401ST BOMB GROUP, 94TH COMBAT WING

U.S. 8TH AIR FORCE. DEENETHORPE, ENGLAND

“Doctor?” Brigadier Smith said softly. “Mac?”

McConnell held up his hand. “Please don’t say anything, Brigadier.” He had imagined this moment many times. Daylight bomber crews suffered horrifying rates of attrition. And yet something about this seemed wrong. It was the timing, he realized. Two minutes after refusing Brigadier Smith’s biggest sales pitch ever, a messenger shows up to tell him his brother has been killed by the Germans? McConnell looked up from the paper and into the Scotsman’s pale blue eyes.

“Brigadier?” His voice was barely a whisper. “Is this your doing?”

Smith looked at McConnell in astonishment. “I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

McConnell took a step toward him. “It is, isn’t it? This is some damned SOE trick. You’re trying to push me into your mission, aren’t you? The end justifies the means in your business, right? If the pacifist won’t go, we’ll make him go.” McConnell’s face was white. “Right, Brigadier?”

The Scotsman straightened his back and raised his chin. It was the British equivalent of a cobra puffing out its hood. “Doctor, as much as I resent your insinuation, I am going to ignore it. I realize that in moments like this the mind grasps for any straw, however thin. But you are absolutely wrong.”

McConnell felt his face growing hot. The captain was staring at him as if he were a dangerous mental patient. He looked down at the telegram. Killed in action. So goddamn vague. He cleared his throat.

“Can you tell me any more than this, Captain?”

The young officer pulled at the tails of his dress jacket. “The colonel said you had a top secret clearance, and that I could tell you what we knew. David’s plane sustained catastrophic damage returning from a raid over Regensburg. It was hit by flak, probably fighter cannon as well. Nobody saw the aircraft hit the ground, but no chutes were sighted.”

McConnell’s eyes and throat were stinging. “Did — did you know my brother, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Hell of a pilot. Always a joke for the ground crew. He even made the colonel crack a smile a few times. The colonel would have come himself, but we had — well, he was busy.”

Mark blinked away tears. “Does our mother know yet?”

“No, sir. That’s a draft of her telegram there.”

“Jesus. Ask the colonel not to send this, please. I’d like to be the one to tell her.”

“No problem, sir. It’ll eventually have to be sent, but I think the colonel can hold off a few days.”

McConnell looked from the brigadier’s ruddy face to Jonas Stern’s dark one, then at the captain. The messenger shifted uncertainly. “Sorry again, Doc,” he said. He saluted Brigadier Smith and backed out of the lab.

Mark put his hand over his mouth and tried to swallow. All he could see was David, not as he had seen him four days ago, but as a little boy in a muddy Georgia pond, trying to learn to hold his breath.

“I’m sorry, Brigadier,” he said softly. “I apologize.”

The Scotsman held up his hand. “There’s no need, man. I know this is difficult. I lost a brother myself. At Lofoten, in forty-one. But by God, Doctor, if this isn’t the final reason to come on board with us, nothing is. The bastards killed your brother!”

McConnell shook his head hopelessly. “You’ve never understood me at all, have you? You have no idea why I am the way I am.”

Smith bristled. “I understand you, all right. I know about your father. But what would he say now, eh? I’m asking you to go on a mission of mercy. Christ, Doctor, the Nazis are testing the nerve agents on human beings. Why do you think Stern here is going? Most of those human guinea pigs are Jews. The Germans are slaughtering his people while the world stands by and does nothing!”

McConnell studied Stern’s face. He saw no sadness or pleading in the young man’s features. All he saw — or thought he saw — was disgust. “I’m truly sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid I must ask you to leave. I need to be alone.”

To McConnell’s surprise, Brigadier Smith turned on his heel and walked out of the room without further argument. The young Jew, however, remained behind. He had stood silent throughout the meeting, but now he walked slowly forward until he stood only inches from McConnell. Mark had six or seven years on the stranger, but he sensed a fearsome intensity in the young man.

“Smith doesn’t understand you, Doctor,” Stern said softly. “But I do. You’re not a coward. You are a fool. You’re like my father was. You’re like a million Jews across Europe. You believe in reason, in the essential goodness of man. You believe that if you refuse to commit evil yourself, someday you will conquer it.” His voice dripped contempt. “All the fools who believed that are dead now. Fed into poison gas and flames by men who know the true nature of humanity. The only difference between you and those fools is that you’re American.” Stern switched suddenly from English to German, but McConnell caught most of it. “You have yet to taste even a sip of the pain so many have drunk to the bitter dregs in the last ten years.”

McConnell opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came. The weight of Stern’s words seemed incongruous when paired with the young face speaking them. But not with the eyes. The young Jew’s eyes were like David’s had been when he spoke of losing his friends. Ageless, emotionless—

“Stern!” Brigadier Smith stood in the open doorway. “Leave him be.”

The dark young man nodded slowly at McConnell. “I’m sorry about your brother. But he was only a drop in an ocean beyond counting. You should think about that.” He turned and followed the brigadier into the corridor.

Alone at last, McConnell reread the telegram in a daze. Regret to inform . . . killed in action . . . McConnell’s actions always reflected the highest honor . . . my personal condolences . . . condolences. . . . Mark put his left hand behind him and found the edge of a desk. He couldn’t breathe. He stumbled to the nearest window and tried to open it, but the latch was stuck. He raised his right foot and kicked furiously at the ironwork.

In his anger at McConnell’s refusal, Smith was pushing the Bentley beyond the limit of sanity, much less legality. The fact that he was doing it in the dark with only one arm would have terrified Jonas Stern at any other time. But just now his fury burned as hot as the brigadier’s.

“Just find another damned chemist!” he shouted above the roar of the Bentley’s engine.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Smith snapped back. “I can’t use enlisted personnel, American or British. Besides, McConnell’s the best man for the job. Under the age of sixty, anyway.”

Stern slammed his hand against the door. “Then what the hell are we going to do? You can’t let one idealistic fool stop us.”

Brigadier Smith glanced over at the young Zionist. “I haven’t given up on the good doctor yet.”

“No? You’re mad, then. He’ll never do it. You might as well ask Albert Schweitzer to start carrying a bazooka.”

“I think he will,” Smith insisted. “I think he almost agreed today. That telegram nearly pushed him over the edge.”

Stern laughed harshly. “You’re crazy.”

“Mark my words,” Brigadier Smith said, his eyes focused on the dark road. “He’ll come around. Tragedy has a way of changing people’s minds.”

Stern turned suddenly to the Scotsman and stared. “Brigadier, you didn’t set up that scene, did you? I mean . . . his brother was really killed?”

Smith glanced at Stern, a look of genuine shock on his face. “Christ, how devious do you think I am? I’d better hire more Jews while I can get them. You’re born conspirators.”

Stern searched the brigadier’s face for a sign of deceit, but the Scotsman gave away nothing. Stern saw no point in questioning him further. But as he withdrew into his own thoughts, he could not help but wonder. How far would Brigadier Smith go to get what he wanted? The answer to that question would be of great importance after the war, in Palestine.

If he lived that long, of course.

McConnell was kicking at the ironwork of the window when the first doubt struck him. Why had he taken Brigadier Smith at his word? If the SOE chief had faked David’s death, would he admit it when confronted?

“That bastard is cold enough to do it,” he said aloud.

Mark knew how improbable the idea was, but a fierce hope overrode every rational objection his mind could conjure. With shaking hands he called the university operator and asked to be connected to the 8th Air Force base at Deenethorpe. He drummed his feet on the floor at the operator’s infuriatingly polite: I’m trying to connect you — then at last he was through.

“I’d like to speak to someone about casualties, please.”

“One moment, sir,” said a young male voice.

McConnell heard several clicks, then a male voice with a Southern drawl came on the line. “Colonel Harrigill here.”

Harrigill. McConnell remembered the name from the telegram. Doesn’t mean anything, he thought. Brigadier Smith could easily get the right names. “Colonel,” he said, surprised by the quaver in his voice, “this is Dr. Mark McConnell. I’m calling from Oxford University. Was there a raid over Regensburg last night?”

“I’m afraid I can’t give out information like that over the phone, Doctor.”

Part of McConnell’s brain placed Harrigill’s accent — the Mississippi Delta — while another made his face flush. The timbre of Colonel Harrigill’s voice held more than official courtesy. The undertone sounded almost like sympathy.

“What information can you give me, Colonel?”

“Well . . . have you received a telegram today, Doctor?”

McConnell shut his eyes. “Yes.”

“I can confirm that your brother’s aircraft was lost in the line of duty over France. Visual reports from other aircrew led us to classify the entire crew as Killed In Action.”

Mark found himself unable to say anything further.

“Is there anything I can do for you, son? I was about to send a telegram to your family Stateside.”

“Don’t! I mean not yet, at least. There’s only our mother, and she’s seen enough — just — I’ll tell her, Colonel.”

“That’s fine with the Army Air Corps, Doctor. I’ll try to slow down Western Union a little bit. And again, let me express my sorrow. Captain McConnell was a fine officer. A credit to his squadron, his country, and to the South.”

Mark felt a strange chill at this archaic expression of respect from a fellow Southerner. Yet somehow it touched him. It seemed to fit David. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“Good night, Doctor. God bless.”

McConnell hung up the phone. Colonel Harrigill had dashed his last hope. David was gone. And to think Brigadier Smith had believed his death would finally wipe away Mark’s hatred for war.

This time the grief washed over him without warning. His brother was dead. His father was dead. In his entire family, he was the last male McConnell left alive. For the first time since returning to England he felt an almost irresistible urge to go home. Back to Georgia. To his mother. His wife. The thought of his mother brought a wave of heat to his scalp. How was he going to tell her? What could he possibly say?

When he kicked the window latch this time, the ironbound panes crashed open and a cutting wind stung his face. Slowly, his throat began to relax. He could breathe. He gazed out over a snowy scene that appeared much as it had four hundred years before. Oxford University. His island of tranquility in a world gone mad. What a pathetic joke. He felt the telegram slip from his hand, watched it brush the window casement and then flutter down to the cobblestones three stories below.

The first sound that escaped his throat was a great racking wail that burst from the depths of his soul. Several windows opened across the quad, revealing white faces alive with curiosity. Somewhere a gramophone was playing Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” By the time the second verse wafted across the quad, the tears were freezing on McConnell’s cheeks.

He was alone.