Black Cross

43

Ariel Weitz stood motionless at the window of Klaus Brandt’s office door. Brandt’s back was to the door. He was reading some medical charts, but Weitz knew he was actually waiting for a telephone call. An hour earlier, the commandant had placed a long-distance call to Reichsführer Himmler in Berlin. Even the mighty waited like servants on the whim of the former chicken farmer who ruled the SS.

Weitz’s hands tingled as he stared at Brandt’s white-jacketed back. Every gray hair sprouting from the thick Prussian neck made him want to scream with hatred and disgust. He saw the shining dome of Brandt’s balding head as a perfect spot in which to drive a dozen roofing nails. A hundred times he had thought of slamming the famous hands in the steel door of the isolation ward. A thousand times of injecting the meningococcus bacillus into his spine, as Brandt had done so many times to “his children.” But tonight. . .

Tonight would pay for all.

At the sound of boots in the main corridor, Weitz moved away from the door. Two SS men hurried past him and took up station on either side of Brandt’s door.

A complication.

Weitz walked up the hall to a small examining room off the main corridor. Here he had cached the remainder of his weapons, and also his prize. Hanging in a narrow closet was one of the Raubhammer gas suits tested in the afternoon, now thoroughly decontaminated. Weighing less than half of what previous models did, it utilized a filter canister and a breathing bag which contained a small cylinder of pure oxygen. One of the other Raubhammer suits was hanging in Brandt’s office, but Weitz didn’t care about that. He would only need the one.

He wondered what the two SS guards would think when they saw Brandt’s pet Jew rounding the corner with a submachine gun in his hand. Whatever it was would be the last thoughts they ever had. But why had they so suddenly appeared? Had Schörner finally comprehended the danger facing the camp? A minute ago Weitz had noticed Sergeant Sturm rushing a long line of factory technicians across the Appellplatz toward the cinema, but he saw no real problem in that. No matter what Schörner might have learned, he was way behind the game at this point. Too far behind to catch up.

Weitz was reaching for the Raubhammer suit when he heard the roar of a troop truck.

Avram Stern had taken three steps toward Totenhausen’s back gate when shouted orders and the rumble of motors stopped him in his tracks. He turned to see Major Schörner’s gray field car speeding out of Totenhausen’s front gate, followed closely by an open truck full of SS troops, all armed to the teeth.

Avram felt his last hope wither away.

He closed his hand around the Schmeisser and started back toward the sentry, only to be stopped again by the sound of a slamming door. Ariel Weitz was standing on the front steps of the hospital, staring after the disappearing vehicles with a puzzled look on his face. Weitz cocked his head back, almost as if he sensed a human gaze upon him. When he finally looked toward the inmate blocks, the shoemaker made the fastest and riskiest decision of his life. He would never know why he did it. If someone had asked him at the time, he might have said something about the tears he had seen on Weitz’s face on the night of the big selection. He had thought about Weitz many times since that night. How the hated informer had free run of the camp. How he was so trusted by the SS that they occasionally let him go into Dornow alone to run errands for them. And how to mount an operation like the one Jonas was involved in, the British would need a good source of information inside Totenhausen. And the conclusion Avram had come to was that no Jew could be so thoroughly corrupted by the Nazis as Ariel Weitz seemed to be. And so, when Weitz looked from the hospital steps toward the blocks, Avram motioned for him to come over to the block gate.

Weitz hesitated when he saw the sentry beckoning from the inmate blocks. He did not want to cross the Appellplatz. But the man signaling to him was SS; even so close to his moment of triumph, he could not very well refuse. He hurried across the snow and stopped before the sentry, looking up with his usual obsequious mask.

“You!” he blurted. “What are you doing in that uniform?”

Avram reached out and closed his left hand around the back of Weitz’s neck. With his right he drew the SS dagger from his belt and held its point under Weitz’s chin. “If you cry out,” he whispered, “I’ll cut your throat like a piece of scrap leather.”

Weitz shook his head violently. “No! You don’t understand!” He stared at the SS uniform. “I don’t understand either.”

Avram pricked the knifepoint into Weitz’s skin. “Tell me one thing. Are you involved in what is about to happen?”

The little man’s eyes grew wide. “I know what is going to happen. But I have my own plans.”

“I knew it! You little bootlicker! You’ve been pretending all the time. Listen to me. My son has been taken by the SS. Unless he is freed, the attack will not take place.”

“Your son . . .? Your son is the Jewish Standartenführer?”

“Yes.”

“My God. Where is he now? In the cinema with the workers?”

“I don’t know. They’re probably interrogating him somewhere.” Avram shook Weitz’s neck. “You must free him! You know everything about this camp.”

Weitz looked furious at this interruption of his plans, but he nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. What are you going to do? Stand here and wait to die?”

Avram let go. “You just free my son.”

The moment Weitz turned back toward the hospital, Rachel Jansen stepped out of the shadows behind Avram. “Why were you talking to him?” she whispered. “He works for the SS.”

“Never mind. Are all the women in the children’s block?”

“Yes.” She held up the bundle in her arms. “And here is Hannah. Where is your son?”

Avram shook his head. “Taken. You’ll have to carry Hannah to the E-Block with you.”

Rachel moaned softly. Avram heard a tiny frightened voice in the bundled blanket. Rachel comforted the child in Dutch, then switched back to German. “What are we to do, Shoemaker? I cannot move the children with that sentry at the back gate. He will surely see us and raise the alarm.”

“Go back inside.”

“But the gas is coming!”

“Be ready to move quickly. I’ll be back here in one minute to get you. If I’m not, you’re on your own. Do what you think is best.”

Rachel grabbed his arm through the gateposts. “If you see your son anywhere, tell him to come and get Hannah. I beg you, Herr Stern!”

“I’ll tell him.”

Avram jerked back the bolt on the Schmeisser and started toward the back gate.

Jonas Stern tried to keep himself conscious as Sergeant Sturm worked on him. The man showed an aptitude for his job. He had enthusiasm, which was important. Physical torture was tiring work. The blows to the side of the head were the worst. Stern’s ears were ringing so loudly he could hardly think. He wanted to let go, to give in to unconsciousness. But he forced himself to keep awake. Because he had one advantage over his tormentor. He knew exactly what was about to happen to Totenhausen Camp. And perhaps — just perhaps — when the plastic explosive he had molded around the heads of the buried cylinders detonated, he would still be physically able to make a run for the main gate. But to do that he would have to be conscious. Not an easy thing when someone was trying to pound your brain into jelly. When Sergeant Sturm switched to the knife, he was almost grateful.

Avram Stern had not killed a human being since 1918, but he did not pause to debate the issue with himself. As he moved across the snow toward the sentry, he wondered how loud the report of the silenced Schmeisser would be. As a veteran of World War One, he found it difficult to believe anything could completely silence the report of a machine gun.

He decided to use the dagger.

He tried to walk confidently, arrogantly, swaggering the way the SS guards did. He concentrated on the sentry’s back. The man was standing just inside the gate, facing the trees. Avram thought of calling out softly so as not to startle him, but the man seemed oblivious. Avram looked down at the silver dagger in his hand. It would take a powerful stroke to penetrate a greatcoat and winter tunic. Jonas had made a great point of cutting the other sentry’s throat, but Avram had no training in such things. He fleetingly wished for a bayonet like the one he had carried in the Great War, or better yet a trusty sharpened spade, the weapon of choice for trench combat.

But this was a different war.

“Kamerad?” he called in a surprisingly natural voice. “Do you have a match?”

The sentry was startled, but when he saw the brown uniform he relaxed and reached into his greatcoat. “I could use a smoke myself,” he said with a nervous laugh. “That SD bastard scared the life out of me.”

As the match flared, the young sentry’s eyes played over Avram’s face. There was an instant of shared recognition. Avram Stern saw a boy for whom he had crafted a pair of soft slippers as a gift for a girlfriend; the sentry saw the middle-aged face of the shoemaker.

Avram’s arm seemed alive with rage as he drove the dagger straight up into the soft skin beneath the sentry’s chin. He felt a sudden shock in his wrist. The dagger point had driven cleanly through palate, sinuses, and brain and hit the roof of the sentry’s skull, stopping his thrust with the dagger’s hilt still three centimeters below the jaw. Looking straight into the wide blue eyes, Avram yanked the haft of the dagger once to the left, then let the body fall onto the snow.

He tried to dislodge the blade from the sentry’s head, but it was beyond his power. He sat the boy up against the fence, as if he had fallen asleep on guard duty. The haft of the dagger kept the head in a semi-upright position. Avram wiped his bloody hands on the sentry’s coat and started back toward the inmate blocks.

His watch read 7:48.

He almost fired his Schmeisser in panic when a group of silent shadows brushed past him in the darkness. Then he realized what was happening.

Rachel Jansen had started the migration to the E-Block.