Black Cross

44

The Cameron tartan flew like a bright flag from the strap of McConnell’s air tank harness as he carried it through the cottage door, Anna close on his heels.

“Wait!” he said. “It’s Stern!”

A half mile away a pair of headlights was moving across the flat stretch of road that led from the hills to Dornow. A second pair appeared out of the darkness at the foot of the hills, following the first.

“Are they chasing him?” McConnell asked anxiously.

“It’s not Stern,” Anna said in a flat voice. “It’s ten till eight now. If he was free, he’d be on the pylon. Look at the difference in those lights. That’s a field car out front with a troop truck behind. My God. They’re coming. Schörner must have caught Stern and broken him.”

She jerked the air cylinder off of McConnell’s shoulder and pulled him toward Greta’s Volkswagen. There, she dropped the cylinder in the rear seat and took four grenades from Stern’s leather bag.

“Get into the car!” she cried. “Get down on the floor! Hurry!”

“What the hell are you going to do?” McConnell asked.

“There’s only one road to the power station, and they’re on it. We can’t drive past them. I’m going to have to stand in the cottage door so that when they get here they’ll come straight for me. When they do, you—”

He grabbed her arms and shook her. “I’m not leaving you here to be killed!”

“Then we’ll both die for nothing.”

He could feel the rumble of the approaching vehicles. “There’s got to be another way!”

Anna glanced back at the oncoming headlights. “All right,” she said. She dropped the grenades back into the front seat. “Follow me!”

She raced into the cottage and switched on every light, then pulled open the cellar door and shouted, “Keep quiet, Sabine! There’s going to be shooting! You could be killed by mistake!”

While McConnell stared in bewilderment, she slammed the cellar door and pulled open a kitchen drawer, from which she took a revolver he had never seen.

“Stan Wojik gave it to me,” she said, pulling him into the bedroom.

A small door led onto the empty field behind the cottage. Anna went first, racing around the side of the building and dropping to her knees at the corner. McConnell followed more slowly under the weight of his suit and the Mauser rifle. As he reached the corner, she made a dash for the Volkswagen. He went after her, and was surprised to see her go for the driver’s seat.

Before she could open the door, he pushed her aside, smashed the window with his rifle butt and shattered the interior light. Then he opened the door and shoved her all the way across the front seat.

“Get down!” he said. “All the way on the floor!”

Anna obeyed. McConnell stretched flat on his back on the seat, his head just beneath the passenger window, inches from her face, his feet angled down beneath the steering wheel. He held the rifle tight along his body, right forefinger on the trigger.

“Why the lights?” he asked.

“They’ll assume anyone breaking blackout regulations so flagrantly must be inside. But if they do check the cars first . . .” She held up her revolver.

The squeal of automobile brakes mingled with the groan of a heavy truck gearing down. McConnell tensed and tried to decipher the sounds. The truck stopped between the car and the cottage, but kept its engine idling. Four doors opened and closed. Heavy boots crunched on the snow. McConnell raised his head to peek out, but his and Anna’s breath had already fogged the window glass. He heard a loud rapping on the cottage door.

“Fräulein Kaas!” shouted a male voice. “Fräulein Kaas, open the door!”

“Schörner,” Anna hissed.

The sound of the submachine gun hit McConnell like an electric shock. Schörner had shot the lock off the door.

A muffled female voice shouted: “Help me! In the name of the Führer help me!”

“Christ, Sabine got loose!” McConnell heard boots clattering on the floorboards of the cottage.

Anna gripped his arm. “What can you see?” she asked.

He sat up slowly and rubbed a small clear circle in the fogged window on the driver’s side. “A half dozen soldiers by the cottage door. Maybe a dozen more in the troop truck.”

“Get ready. When you hear me shout, start the car.”

McConnell had barely got his feet on the pedals when he saw Anna pull the pins out of two grenades. She opened the Volkswagen’s door and stepped out as casually as if she were getting out at a restaurant, then turned toward the troop truck and tossed the grenades. She was firing her pistol into the knot of soldiers by the door even before the grenades exploded.

“For God’s sake move!” she screamed, with only one foot in the car.

The Volkswagen’s engine roared to life. McConnell floored the accelerator, but the tires spun in vain on the ice.

Two grenades detonated a split second apart in blinding white flashes. Anna kept shooting. McConnell saw an SS man charge through the cottage door, then fly backward like a dog jerked on a leash. Anna dove back into the car and pulled the door shut, and he eased up on the gas and the tires caught.

The Volkswagen fishtailed onto the road. He thanked God for the winters he had spent in England; most Georgia natives couldn’t drive a car half a mile on ice like this. Anna reloaded her pistol and aimed it back over the seat toward the cottage as they sped away.

“They’re not following,” she cried. “What are they doing?”

“Questioning your sister!” McConnell kept his eyes focused on the road. “Put on Stern’s gas suit. Put it on!”

Wolfgang Schörner picked himself up off the cottage floor and walked calmly to the door. He watched the taillights of the Volkswagen racing back up the hill road. The SS corporal who had been driving the troop truck stumbled up to him, his face white with horror.

“Five men dead, Sturmbannführer! Eight wounded! What do we do?”

“First you calm down.” Schörner took a deep, satisfied breath. “The war has finally come to Totenhausen, Rottenführer. People die in wars.”

“Do we go after them?”

“Not yet. The fools are running straight toward the camp.” He turned and looked back into the kitchen. Sabine Hoffman was being helped off of the floor by an SS private. “I apologize for the interruption, Madam. As I was saying, I met you several months ago in Berlin. Your husband is Gauleiter Hoffman?”

“Yes, Sturmbannführer!”

“Can you tell me who left in that car?”

“My sister! She’s gone mad! There were two men with her most of the day. One American, the other a Jew. He was dressed as an SD officer!”

“We have that man in custody,” Schörner said in a reassuring voice. “Do you know what your sister and this American planned to do tonight?”

“I heard the Jew saying something about an electrical station.”

Schörner felt a prick of anxiety. “Anything else?”

“Anna was asking the American something about poison gas. He seemed to know quite a lot about it.”

The color drained from Schörner’s face. “Is there a telephone here?”

Sabine shook her head.

“Rottenführer, I want four men in my car! The rest follow in the truck.”

“What about the wounded, Sturmbannführer? Some of them can’t walk.”

“Leave them in the road!”

Twenty-two miles north of Totenhausen, the navigator in the lead bomber of GENERAL SHERMAN sighted the mouth of the Recknitz River below him.

“That’s it, sir. Time to turn.”

Squadron Leader Harry Sumner banked the Mosquito to the south. “Everyone with us, Jacobs?”

“Right on our tail.”

Sumner checked his fuel gauge. A headwind had put them slightly behind schedule, but they would benefit by the same wind on the ride home. They had lost one plane already, forced to turn back due to mechanical failure. That was the way of it. But they still had more than enough bombload and Target Indicators to carry out the mission.

“Think you can find this place, Jacobs? It’s supposed to be almost covered with trees.”

The navigator was holding a pen-sized torch in his teeth and studying a map. “Just stay over the river,” he said in a garbled voice. “The H₂S will show me the bends. If this map is accurate, we can use Dornow village and the river as brackets. Flares will give us a visual on the power station and the camp.”

Sumner peered through the dark windscreen. The silver line of the river led them southward like a magic road. A rum mission, this, even by Special Duties Squadron standards. All the way into Germany to bomb a tiny prison camp for SOE? The Air Marshals constantly fought Duff Smith tooth and nail to keep their precious planes out of his clutches. How had he managed to divert a Mosquito squadron for this? Sumner had mentioned it to his superior at Wick, but all he’d got in reply was a sour look and a mumbled, “If we want to fight this one, we’ll have to go all the way to Downing Street.”

He hadn’t known what to make of that. But he did know one thing. From one thousand feet without ack-ack, his squadron could hit an outdoor privy dead center and leave nothing but a crater for a square mile around.

“Eight minutes out,” the navigator said.

“They’re still not following!” McConnell said, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror and pushing the Volkswagen as fast as he dared.

“They will.” Anna thrust her arms into the sleeves of the oilskin jumpsuit and started to zip up its front.

He caught her hand. “You have to put on the mask first, then zip the suit over the part that drapes over your shoulders. It’s the only way to get an airtight seal.”

Anna reached back for both masks.

“Put yours on now,” he said. “I’ll be able to hear you if you need to talk.”

The road climbed sharply. McConnell reduced speed. Just ahead he saw the first curve of the switchback road that wound across the hills. As he took the turn, he caught sight of lights in the distance behind them.

“There they are,” he said. “You know anything about compressed air bottles?”

“I’ve administered oxygen a hundred times.”

“Same principle. Open the valve, attach the air hose to your mask and breathe normally.” He wrenched the wheel to avoid colliding with a bank of birch trees. “Jesus! This is like a logging road!”

Anna had her mask on now. It blurred her facial features and dulled her eyes. She looked like an extra in a Flash Gordon feature. “The boots are too big,” she said, her voice buzzing through the speech transmission diaphragm near her mouthpiece.

“Put them on anyway. And zip the legs down around them.” He braked for another curve. “How far to the power station?”

“Not far.”

“I’ll drive the car into the trees. Schörner and his men should drive right past us.”

Anna nodded and pointed to the left. “Slow down.”

He let the VW drift past the transformer station. He saw a wooden watchman’s hut inside the dark jungle of metal struts, a faint light glowing in its window. Thirty meters past the station, he turned off the road and rolled forward until tree trunks forced him to stop.

He pulled on his mask and zipped his suit, then climbed out. The silence was eerie after the frantic skirmish at the cottage. Anna helped him strap on his air tank. He felt like a draft horse wearing blinders. Before he attached his air hose, he leaned forward and said, “I guess we’d better take the guns with us.”

She shook her head and handed him the Mauser rifle.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m staying here,” she said. “Schörner may stop at the power station. He might even turn in here. We can’t take the chance.”

“But you couldn’t stop them if they did.”

“I’ve got Stern’s grenades,” she said. “And my pistol. You keep your rifle as a last resort.”

“Anna—”

“Go!”

He started to say something else, but she slung the Mauser over his shoulder and pushed him farther into the trees. He turned back and looked at her. She was standing motionless in the dark beside the car, a fine-figured woman wrapped in heavy black oilskin and wearing a clear vinyl bag over her head. Ludicrous. Tragic. He thought of the diary she had labored over so long, that was now wedged into the left leg of his gas suit. He hoped she would be alive to make a final entry when this night was over.

He raised his hand, then turned and trudged across the snow toward the pylon.

Major Schörner raced up the hills at nearly twice the speed McConnell had. The excitable corporal occupied the field car’s passenger seat, while three more SS men were scrunched into the back, each armed with a submachine gun. Somehow the troop truck was managing to keep up, probably because its driver was as angry and bent on revenge as the storm troopers in back. Schörner issued a quick volley of orders to the corporal.

“We’ll split at the transformer station. You take two men and go back to Totenhausen in the car. Tell Sturm to expect a commando attack. The electricity may go off at any time. That means the electric fences will be off. Thank God I ordered those mines laid. Tell Sturm to put half his men around the gas storage tanks and the other half around the factory. Tell him” — the field car nearly skated off the road as Schörner took a dogleg curve, but he held it under control — “tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll use the men from the truck to surround the power station. The American must be trying to detonate explosives laid earlier in the week. The detonator will probably be somewhere in the trees outside the station. Ach, what I would give for Sturm’s dogs.”

The corporal’s face lit up. “But we have a dog, Sturmbannführer! In the cab of the truck!”

“At last, a little luck.” Schörner slung the car around another curve and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The strange thing, he thought, gripping the wheel like a Grand Prix champion, was that as bad as the situation was, he felt better than he had in months.

McConnell stumbled the last few meters to the pylon, his throat stinging from the dry air in the cylinder on his back. The climbing spikes and harness lay at the foot of the nearest support pole, as Stern had promised. He’d never worn anything like them before, but the principle was simple enough: one sharp iron spike for the instep of each foot, affixed to fishhook-shaped pieces of iron that fit beneath the feet and rose along the inner calves, with leather straps to hold them on. The safety harness was basically a broad, heavy belt with a steel ring in front, which clipped to a second belt sized to fit around the pole. McConnell dropped his rifle, sat down and strapped on the spikes.

That done, he slung the Mauser over his shoulder, fastened his safety belt around the support pole and drove his right spike into the wood. He expected it to break loose when he put his weight on it, but the spike held. He bear-hugged the pole and raised himself on the spike, then he slid the belt up, leaned back to steady himself, and drove his left spike into the pole two feet up. In this manner he began to ascend the pole at a surprising speed, although he seemed to be circling it as he went up, like a snake climbing a tree.

He couldn’t see much in the darkness, but he knew from Stern’s quick briefing that the double pylons marched down a narrow swath that had been cleared through the forested hills, their crossarms taller than all but the largest trees. A straight run of two thousand feet descending at a thirty degree angle — or so Stern had told him.

He cried out as his right spike broke free. He slid four feet down the icy pole before managing to hug it tightly enough to stop. The safety belt had done almost nothing to retard his fall. He prayed that no splinters had torn holes in his gas suit.

Three quarters of the way to the top, he saw the lights of the pursuing vehicles racing up the winding hill road. They seemed to flicker on and off as he stared down through the trees. He dug his spikes into the wood and forced himself higher, thinking of Anna waiting in the trees below. He had almost reached the crossarm when he heard an engine roar to life.

At first he thought the watchman from the power station had started a vehicle. But the sound had come from almost directly beneath the pylon. When he realized what was actually happening, he almost started back down the pole.

But of course he would be too late. Anna had planned it that way. There was nothing he could do.

She had decided to die for the mission.