Black Cross

45

Ariel Weitz stepped out of the front door of the hospital and hurried down the steps wearing Herr Doktor Brandt’s SS greatcoat, which he had pilfered from a closet. Brandt’s bulky coat was the only garment that minimized the odd hump at the small of Weitz’s back caused by the breathing bag of the Raubhammer gas suit. In his left hand he carried the accompanying gas mask, in his right a machine pistol.

He moved across the Appellplatz at a fast walk, his eyes on the headquarters building. Personally, he didn’t care much what happened to the shoemaker’s son. But the shoemaker had said that without him the gas attack would not take place. And having met the young commando, Weitz believed this might be true. He brought out a key to the back door of the headquarters, unlocked it, and walked inside.

He heard muffled screaming from the front of the building. Mentally he ran through the possibilities. Quartermaster’s office. Wireless officer’s room. Brandt’s administrative office. Schörner’s office. Down the corridor to his right — from the direction of the cinema — he heard a low buzz of voices. The factory technicians and their guards. He pulled the greatcoat close around him and moved quickly up the hallway.

He saw the brown-jacketed back of the wireless operator at his console. The quartermaster’s office was empty. He kept moving. Brandt’s administrative office. Empty. The screams grew louder now. He heard the sound of a blow. Men laughing. He heard Gunther Sturm’s voice braying something about losing a bet.

He laid the Raubhammer gas mask on the floor and held the machine pistol in both hands.

Jonas Stern strained against the ropes that held him to the chair, his eyes bulging from pain. His face and torso were covered with blood. Sergeant Sturm had opened several long, shallow cuts on his chest. One of Sturm’s assistants had brought salt from the mess and the sergeant had rubbed it into the wounds. He had also broken one of the fingers on Stern’s left hand, not by bending it backward, but by snapping it at a right angle like a dry twig. For a man of Sturm’s strength, the effort expended was minimal compared to the expected return.

Yet he’d gotten no return. The Jew masquerading as an SD officer had done nothing but scream, and he’d done damn little of that, considering. Sturm was beginning to worry that he might indeed lose his twenty marks.

For Stern’s part, the searing fire of the dagger blade and the caustic burning of the salt had finally merged into a general agony. His head and neck throbbed mightily from the blows, and his left eye was swollen almost shut.

But he was conscious.

It would all be over soon. They had taken away his watch, but he’d stolen a glance at the sergeant’s only a moment ago. It read 7:59. He hoped he would survive the gas long enough to see Sturm shitting his pants as he danced across the floor like a spastic and choked on his own vomit. He thought he could hold his breath long enough to see that.

“What are you thinking, you smug bastard?” Sturm bellowed. “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.” He glanced at his two comrades, who leaned against the wall smoking cigarettes. “I’m thinking it’s time to boil some water. It’s not a pretty sight, seeing a man scalded. A little splash from the soup pot is enough to make a man yell. I wonder how you’ll sound when we dump a steaming kettlefull down the front of your pants?”

One of the SS men dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with his boot. “I’ll get it from the mess.”

Stern craned his neck to see if the private was really going to get the water.

What he saw was the brown back of the man’s tunic explode into scarlet and he was lifted off his feet to the accompaniment of gunfire. A smallish man wearing an SS greatcoat walked through the doorway. A second later Stern recognized the man from Anna’s cottage. It was Brigadier Smith’s agent: Scarlett.

Things seemed to happen very slowly after that. The other SS private fumbled for his gun. Sergeant Sturm shouted, “Put down that gun, Weitz! Have you gone mad?” But the little man just kept walking forward until the barrel of his machine pistol touched the private’s belly and he pulled the trigger. The muffled burst eviscerated the private and chewed a hole in the wall behind him.

Sergeant Sturm reached for the latch on Schörner’s office window, but Weitz fired a burst into the wall beside him. Sturm looked up, his face white with panic and confusion.

“Weitz!” he screamed. “What madness is this?”

The little man began to laugh. Switching the gun from hand to hand, he slipped off the greatcoat and let it fall to the floor. Stern saw then that he was wearing a rubber suit very much like the ones McConnell had brought from Oxford.

“What the hell is that?” Sturm asked. “Why are you wearing that?”

A brief flash lit the window, followed instantly by a muffled explosion that rattled the window in its frame.

“What?” Sturm grunted.

A second explosion followed the first.

Now Weitz looked puzzled as well.

“That’s the gas!” Stern shouted from the chair. “British Sarin! I buried two cylinders by the dog kennels!”

Weitz smiled with sudden understanding. “You wanted to go outside, Hauptscharführer? Go ahead. Right through the window, where I can watch you.”

Sergeant Sturm conjured a conspiratorial smile. “How about a deal, Weitz? We’ve done business before, eh? What do you want?”

“I want to see your eyes popping out of your head while you breathe Sarin.”

Men were yelling in another part of the building. Sturm bent over and flipped the latch and jerked up the window. When he hesitated, Weitz shot out the panes over his head.

“Wait!” Stern shouted from the chair. “He has my keys!”

Sergeant Sturm cut his eyes at Jonas, then turned and jumped through the window.

“Stop him!” Stern shouted. “Hurry!”

Weitz went to the window. Sturm was running toward the hospital, and he didn’t seem to be suffering the effects of any gas. Weitz knelt and fired at the retreating figure until the chamber of his gun clicked empty. He saw Sturm fall, but the sergeant picked himself up and continued on toward the hospital.

“There’s no gas out there,” Weitz said. “Not Sarin, anyway.”

“Untie me!” Stern screamed. “Did you hit him?”

“Yes.” Weitz picked up the SS dagger and slashed the ropes binding Stern to the chair. “Can you walk?”

Stern jumped to his feet. “We’ve got to get away from here! I have a car but no keys!”

Weitz picked up the Raubhammer gas mask from the hall floor and put it on. Just before he snapped the air hose into place, he shouted through the hole in his face mask: “There’s another suit in the hospital! In Brandt’s office. Follow me!”

Stern had tried to shape the plastic explosive so that it would blow the cylinder heads straight off of the buried tanks. When the first pencil fuse fired, the charge blasted the cylinder head outward like an artillery shell, straight through the wall of one of the SS barracks. The six-pound piece of metal decapitated Private Otto Huth, and before his stunned friends could even take in what had happened, the second cylinder head tore through the wall, shattered the hip of a lance corporal and lodged in the opposite wall.

Fifty SS men at once scrambled for their weapons and charged the barracks door. The bottleneck created there forced them to regain some semblance of discipline. Twenty seconds later, three dozen nervous storm troopers were crouching outside, trying to pinpoint a threat that seemed to have vanished.

“Look!” said one, pointing past the dog kennels toward the woods. “Smoke. They’re bombing us from the air!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said a strapping soldier named Heinrich Krebs. “The snow must have detonated some of the mines we laid around the perimeter today.”

“I don’t remember putting any mines on this side.”

But Krebs was already walking around the kennels toward the fence.

“What’s wrong with the dogs?” asked a puzzled voice.

“Maybe they were killed by shrapnel,” someone suggested.

Several men stepped up to the kennel fence. “They’re not all down,” said one. “Look.”

“Mein Gott, they’re sick. What . . .?”

The other SS barracks had also emptied at the sound of the explosions. Now more than seventy men were strung out along the narrow alley between the barracks and the dog kennels.

“See anything, Krebs?” called a sergeant.

There was no answer.

“Heini?”

“Shhh!” someone said. “Listen.”

It was a soft sound, like the hissing of a venomous snake. But almost immediately the hissing was drowned out by the sound of men gibbering, defecating, striking each other, and choking on their own tongues. A dozen storm troopers fell to the ground, convulsing like epileptics in seizure.

Heinrich Krebs was already dead.

Six miles north of Totenhausen, ten Mosquitoes of the GENERAL SHERMAN flight assumed a tandem bombing formation. A half mile south of them, Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner reached for his microphone to break radio silence.

“Leader approaching target,” he said in a mechanical voice. “I will mark with flares from one thousand feet, then go to fifteen hundred to act as Master Bomber. Number Two will drop red, repeat red, Target Indicators. I will verify Aiming Point, then give the go-ahead. High explosive followed by incendiaries. Let’s put one down Göring’s bunghole, eh?”

Sumner hung up the mike. “Well, Jacobs?” he said.

The navigator remained bent over the fuzzy image on the screen of his air-to-ground radar. “Eighty percent sure, sir. It would help if we slowed a bit.”

Sumner keyed his mike. “Leader reducing speed. Holding at one thousand. Two, drop Target Indicators on my mark.”

“Out! Out!” Schörner shouted as the troop truck wheeled into the driveway of the power station and stopped behind his car. “Ten men out now!”

He slammed his gloved hand down on the roof of his field car. “Tell Sturm everything I said!”

At that moment a grenade landed just behind the troop truck and exploded with an ear-splitting boom. Shrieks of agony filled the air. Schörner ran around the truck just in time to see the taillights of the Volkswagen flick on at the next curve. Snow kicked up into the air as the car raced away down the hill.

The driver of the troop truck revved his engine and shifted into gear, preparing to turn and pursue the fleeing car, but Schörner leaped up onto the running board and grabbed the wheel.

“Stop, you imbecile! You’re staying here! Let that dog out!”

He jumped down and told the driver of his field car to chase the VW only if it headed toward Totenhausen. The corporal saluted and sped away.

“We’re looking for an American and a bomb detonator!” Schörner yelled to the confused mass of SS troopers. “He’s wearing a Waffen SS uniform! I want four men inside the station. Everyone else into the trees!”

Anna pumped the brakes of the Volkswagen, waiting to be sure Schörner was following. After a few moments, she saw a pair of headlights skid around the curve behind her. The lights were low to the ground. The field car.

She kept pumping the brakes, but no other lights appeared. Why wasn’t the troop truck following? She didn’t think one grenade could have put it out of commission. When the field car closed to within four car lengths, she jammed the accelerator to the floor.

The Volkswagen glanced off a hard snow bank, but she maintained control and fought the car around the next switchback curve. Below her lay Totenhausen. She wondered briefly what was happening inside the camp, but thoughts of McConnell quickly returned. Would he be able to climb the pylon? Would he have the will to release the gas cylinders if he did? How odd it would be never to see him again, the man who had awakened her sleeping heart after so many years. She pumped the brake, preparing to take the next curve, but the car lurched forward, shuddering under the impact of machine gun bullets.

Anna momentarily lost control of the car, then righted it and hit the gas. She looked down on the seat beside her. She had saved the last two grenades for a reason. Major Schörner had once told her a story about a wounded SS officer left behind by his unit during a retreat on the Eastern front. The man had sat calmly against a burning tank as the Russian infantry approached. When they came within five meters of him, he smiled, pulled the pins on the grenades and blew a half dozen Russians to pieces with him.

Anna had endured many nightmares in which she was tortured by Gunther Sturm. She had no intention of enduring the reality. If they managed to stop Greta’s VW with gunfire, she would surrender like the man on the Russian front. With a smile on her face and live grenades in her hands.

“Dark as a bloody coal chute down there!” the navigator complained.

“What about your radar?”

“All I see is the river bend. It looks like the right one.”

Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner expelled air from his cheeks with a sound that betrayed the tripwire tension beneath his calm voice. “How sure are you?”

“Well . . . eighty-five percent?”

“That’s not good enough, Jacobs. If we bomb the wrong target, they’ll just send us back.” Sumner paused. “I’m going to drop a single flare. You’ll have to verify our location visually.”

The navigator looked up from his radar. “One flare, sir? Everyone down there will know we’re here, and we’ll still have to do a full marking run.”

“They’ll know soon enough anyway.” Sumner reached for a lever. “There’s no known ack-ack between here and Rostock, and we’ve got to be sure.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can’t risk wasting the lot on the wrong bend in the river.”

“No, sir.

“Here we go.”

McConnell perched on the crossarm of the pylon like a man in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship. He blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes and looked around. Above him hung the inverted black bowl of sky and stars, a cold sliver of moon. Below him, to the north, shone the faint lights of Dornow village. To the south curved the silver line of the Recknitz River, sheltering Totenhausen Camp on its near bank. He recognized the spot by the bluish glow of spotlights.

His nerves thrummed. A staggering amount of effort had gone into putting one man on top of this pylon with the gas cylinders under his control. He was not that man, but he was the man who had made it here. And if the British nerve gas worked, he could doom every SS man in Totenhausen as surely as Jonas Stern could have. If the gas worked. If the cylinders stayed on track during their run down to the camp. If, if, if—

He could hear Schörner’s men beating the bushes below him. Flashlight beams ricocheted off the snow in all directions. He heard a dog barking wildly, someone encouraging the dog. They were trying to track his scent over the snow. He didn’t see how they could, as he’d been wearing a rubber suit while he walked, but the torches were getting closer. He didn’t feel particularly nervous. They would capture him eventually, of course, but too late.

Right now he was untouchable.

The drama that caught his attention was closer. On the south face of the hills, two sets of headlights careened down the switchback road through the trees. Anna was in front, the SS car behind. The field car was slowly closing the gap, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Anna would be overtaken and killed within minutes. He tried to focus his mind on the task at hand, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the swerving lights below.

And then it hit him. In thirty seconds both cars would break out onto the flat stretch that led from the base of the hill around to Totenhausen’s front gate. By road, they might be a third of a mile away, but as the crow flew — or the bullet — the distance was probably more like three hundred meters. With the shouts of Schörner’s men ringing up from the woods below, McConnell swung down off the crossarm and drove his spikes into the support pole beneath it. Clipping his safety belt around the pole, he jerked Stan Wojik’s bolt-action Mauser off his shoulder and laid it over the crossarm, aiming south.

He chambered a round from the magazine and waited.

As he stared, he realized that the shot was damn near impossible. The problem was not the rifle, but the darkness. He was staring across open sights into a wall of night. Even when the cars appeared beneath him, he would have no way to accurately judge distance. It would be like aiming at stars.

Anna’s car burst out of the trees at the foot of the hill, her red taillights accelerating away from him almost directly in line with the descending pylons. She had opened up a lead, but her flight was leading her headlong toward Totenhausen, straight into death. He stuck his gloved forefinger into the trigger guard of the Mauser and began tracking her lights. He almost threw the rifle down in frustration. He would be lucky if his bullet struck within fifty yards of the car.

He heard the dog barking in the trees below him, closer now. A voice in his brain told him to drop the rifle, to climb back onto the crossarm and release the cylinders. He was about to do just that when he heard the rumble of powerful engines.

Had Schörner brought more trucks into the forest?

The SS field car broke out of the trees. McConnell sighted in on the dim taillights and shook the sweat from his eyes, his heart pounding with the futility of his effort. But as his finger touched the trigger, he heard something pop in the sky high above him. The hillside came alive with light as surely as if God had thrown a switch in heaven. He had no idea who had fired the flare, but his eye instantly oriented him to distance by pylons, treetops, the stretch of road. . .

He led the field car high and pulled the trigger.

“Rifle fire!” Major Schörner shouted, his eyes turned skyward in an attempt to locate the flare. “Rifle fire in the trees! Move south!”

Led by the dog, Schörner and his men crashed through the trees toward the sound of the gunfire.

McConnell’s second bullet tore through the canvas roof of the field car and into the neck of an SS man in the backseat. The storm trooper squealed like a dying pig. Blood sprayed over his comrades, who immediately ducked below the windows, assuming they were being fired on from the sides. Four seconds later another slug knocked off the car’s wing mirror. The driver had hardly registered the impact when McConnell’s fifth bullet drilled down through the trunk panel and punctured the fuel tank. Gasoline funneled onto the road behind the car, and the sparks from the overheated exhaust quickly ignited the mixture.

The tank blew with a dull crump like a mortar shot, breaking the rear axle and dropping the back of the car onto the road with a metallic screech. The SS men who were still alive dove through the doors before it stopped, leaving their wounded comrades behind in the burning vehicle.

Anna shut her eyes and swerved, stunned by the flash behind her. She had no idea what could have destroyed the field car. Could it have hit a land mine? She skidded back onto the road and took her foot off the accelerator, realizing that her diversionary sacrifice was no longer required. What should she do? What could she do? Go back to the pylon? It was too late to help McConnell now. What about the camp? If all went as planned, it would soon be saturated with gas. She let the VW coast forward, her mind spinning with confusion.

And then she remembered the children.

She had the gas suit. She had the pistol.

And she had a debt to pay.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Harry Sumner asked.

“No idea, sir. Small explosion.”

“Well, damn it? Is this the place?”

The navigator took his eyes off the swirl of flame and scanned the land below. As the lone parachute flare drifted away on the wind, he caught sight of something like a metal cage on a hilltop to the northwest.

“There it is, Harry! The power station! This is it! One hundred percent sure!”

Squadron Leader Sumner pressed his back into the seat and banked the Mosquito.

“Second pass,” he said into his mike. “Leader marking with all flares.”

McConnell pulled himself back up onto the crossarm and turned his attention to the business at hand. In the dying light of the flare, the top of the pylon looked just as Stern had described it. The twenty-foot crossarm spanned two thick support legs and jutted out a few feet on either side. Six wires passed over the crossarm in three pairs, one pair at each end of the arm and one pair in the middle. Three porcelain insulators shaped like upside-down dinner plates kept the wires from coming into direct contact with the crossarm.

According to Stern, one wire in each pair was live and one merely an auxiliary. The gas cylinders themselves had been suspended from the auxiliary wire at the end of the crossarm nearest McConnell, about five feet away. The question-mark-shaped suspension bars curved up and out from the roller-wheels, then back under the wire and down to the cylinders. McConnell saw that Stern had removed the two cylinders nearest the crossarm for use on the SS bomb shelter. But the rubber rope that would pull the cotter pins from the six remaining rollers was just within reach. Stern had wrapped it around the head of the cylinder nearest the pylon.

McConnell shinnied out to the end of the crossarm, trying not to tear the crotch of his gas suit. He stopped just short of the porcelain insulator. Following the rubber rope with his eyes, he realized that when he pulled it, the cotter pins that held the roller-wheels in position would be jerked out in reverse sequence, releasing the cylinder farthest from the pylon first, and so on until the cylinder nearest him had been freed.

The shouts below were getting closer. As darkness settled over the hillside again, McConnell fastened his safety belt around the crossarm, leaned out, took hold of the rubber rope and gave one sharp tug.

The rope stretched, but nothing came loose.

He yanked harder, and almost lost his balance when the cotter pin pulled free. The rubber rope sang like a plucked bass string as the cylinder farthest from him began to roll.

McConnell blinked in disbelief. There were two cylinders rolling down the wire, and they were quickly gathering speed. Keep some space between them, Stern had told him. He had pulled too hard! He began counting slowly — meaning to count to fifteen — but before he even reached five he noticed red taillights nearing the Recknitz River.

Anna.

She was still driving toward Totenhausen. What the hell was she doing? Hadn’t she seen the SS car explode? She must have! What did she think she could do in the camp? Staring down the hill in a panic, McConnell realized that Stern might still be alive somewhere down there. Was that it? Was Anna trying to rescue Stern? If so, she wouldn’t even get past the gate guards unless—

With the courage of despair McConnell dropped the rubber rope and shinnied back toward the support pole he had climbed. Passing it, he continued toward the center of the crossarm and stopped just short of the middle insulator. Five inches from his crotch ran the center auxiliary wire, just beyond that the live one.

He felt a strong vibration in the crossarm caused by the current in the live wire. He was too close. He scooted backward until he was two feet from the center pair of wires.

Unslinging the rifle from his shoulder, he took the muzzle of the barrel in his right hand, leaned forward, and extended the stock away from him until it hovered six inches above the pylon’s far support pole. His right arm quivered from the weight of the old rifle. He let the stock down until the breech end of the barrel rested on the crossarm, just a few inches from the far support pole. Very carefully, he lowered the muzzle in his hand to within four inches of the live center wire.

Then he shut his eyes and dropped the metal barrel onto the wire.

“Mein Gott!” screamed one of Schörner’s soldiers. “The bomb!”

Wolfgang Schörner stood motionless in the snow, stunned by the blue-white flash that had strobed in the forest ahead of him. He had heard many bombs in the past, but the explosion he’d just heard was like none he had ever known. The flash had burst high and in front of him, but the sound had come from behind, from the direction of the transformer station. Just after the flash, he had sensed more than seen a blazing white light pass high over his head, moving rapidly toward the transformer station. Then he’d heard a brassy whooom, and then — at least a full second later — the detonation.

Four distinct events.

Then he understood. There was no bomb. Somehow, someone had faulted one of the power lines above them. And they had done it in such a way that the main transformers had exploded. Totenhausen would be without electricity for a few seconds, but the backup transformers and lines would automatically kick on. Schörner waited to hear some telltale sound that this had happened.

What he heard was a sharp crack farther down the hill. Staring high into the darkness of the trees, he saw a blue-white fireball rolling up the hill like a man-made comet. He was marveling at the impossible vision of something rolling uphill when the fireball flashed over his head and hurled itself into the power station.

The second explosion dwarfed the first.

When McConnell dropped the rifle barrel onto the live wire, 8,700 volts of electricity instantly sought the shortest route to earth. The heat of the flash charred the surface of his oilskin suit and knocked him off the crossarm. A sound like a lion’s roar split the night as the current discharged itself into the ground sixty feet below him. Hanging from his safety belt, McConnell thanked God that his basic knowledge of electricity had proved accurate: the shortest route from the live wire to earth had been through the rifle barrel and down through the far support pole, allowing him to remain outside the lethal circuit he had created.

Relays in the station instantly attempted to open the circuit breakers, but the poorly maintained batteries that controlled this function had expended their last energy correcting the mishap of Colin Munro four night earlier. The tremendous electrical load placed on the lines by contact with the earth drew a massive overcurrent from the 100,000-volt transmission lines that fed into the station, allowing thousands of amps to heat the faulted line to an extreme temperature. At the pylon where McConnell hung suspended like a fallen mountain-climber, the current flashed across all three live wires, ionizing the air between them and creating an arc like a welder’s flame.

It was this arc that rolled up the wires and over Schörner’s head toward the source of the current. It flashed onto the copper bus bars of the station, ionizing the available air and crackling across the metal struts like something from a Frankenstein picture. Heated far beyond the tolerance they had been built to withstand, the contacts inside the circuit breakers instantly boiled the insulating oil they were submerged in and blasted apart their steel-drum containers like giant shrapnel bombs, spraying oil across the snow.

The sensors in the station responsible for rerouting the voltage to the auxiliary system did function, but they too failed in the end. The first poison-gas cylinder had already smashed two insulators, putting the auxiliary wire into direct contact with two crossarms. When the rerouted voltage reached the first damaged insulator, the previous event repeated itself almost exactly. As the second explosion reverberated through the hills, McConnell — still blinking his eyes from the passage of the second fireball — looked down toward Totenhausen.

Every light in the camp had gone out.

While Schörner’s men stared dumbfounded at the transformer station, the major aimed his flashlight along the boot tracks they had been following, toward the blue-white flash he had seen. Standing squarely in the middle of the tracks was a smooth, thick tree trunk. Schörner had shone his flashlight ten feet up the tree before he realized it was one leg of a power pylon.

“Bring your torches!” he shouted, running toward the pole. “Hurry!”

By the time Schörner’s shout echoed up from below, McConnell had righted himself on the crossarm and gotten his hand around the rubber rope. Three flashlights converged on one leg of the pylon. Stern had told him put space between the cylinders, but there was no more time. He yanked the third cotter pin loose, waited two beats, then jerked out the fourth and fifth simultaneously.

A flashlight flicked over the crossarm.

The last cylinder hung three feet down the wire from the crossarm, swaying gently in the darkness. As he tightened his grip on the rope to pull the final pin, McConnell realized something that sent spasms of fear along his spine.

He was going to die.

In a matter of seconds four torch beams would fix his position like London searchlights pinning a Luftwaffe bomber to the clouds, and machine gun bullets would follow. With this certainty came something unexpected — something quite different from what he had been feeling only moments ago — a flood of pure animal terror.

He wanted to live.

“There!” Schörner shouted, holding his beam steady on the top of the pylon. “Do you see something?”

“Nothing, Sturmbannführer.”

“The tracks end right here.”

“Maybe he doubled back.”

“Look at this!” cried an SS private, who had bent over something in the snow. He screamed suddenly and fell backward.

Schörner whirled and shone his flashlight onto the snow. A bolt-action Mauser rifle, scorched black and smoking, lay in a shallow well of melting snow. It took him only seconds to put together what had happened. He aimed his flashlight toward the top of the pylon.

“Lights!” he shouted.

“Sturmbannführer!” screamed one of the men. “The power station is burning!”

Schörner cursed as three torch beams disappeared. “The pylon, you stupid swine! Put your lights on the pole!”

McConnell stretched out his legs, hooked both feet around the four-foot suspension bar that held up the last cylinder and yanked out the cotter pin. The rubber rope fell sixty feet onto the snow. Only his butt and his hands on the crossarm resisted the downhill tug of the cylinder hanging beneath him.

Twice already a flashlight beam had played over his black oilskin suit, but he forced himself to look down.

Wire netting covered the dark cylinder, and from the netting protruded six pressure-triggers, any one of which could blow the cap out of the cylinder head and release the gas within. There was no time for caution. If the triggers tripped and the British gas worked, he would have to rely on the gas suit and mask he had modified in Oxford. He would live or die by his own hands. Three torch beams stabbed the darkness around him.

With fire in his stomach he leaped off the crossarm.

“There!” Schörner shouted. “There’s someone up there!”

“Where, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner threw down his flashlight and snatched a submachine gun from the startled SS man, then turned it skyward and fired a long burst up along the length of the support pole.

McConnell’s breath went out of his lungs when his crotch crashed onto the cylinder head. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the balls by a mule. It was all he could do to hang onto the suspension bar, but the cylinder was rolling.

It was rolling fast.

He was already twenty feet from the pylon when Schörner’s fusillade of bullets ripped into the crossarm behind him. He looked down frantically to see if his legs had tripped any of the triggers. He couldn’t tell. More shouts and gunfire sounded behind him, but suddenly it was all meaningless. No one below understood yet what had happened.

McConnell did. And he knew his problems had only just begun. Somewhere out ahead of him, five cylinders of nerve gas were shunting along a length of steel winch cable toward Totenhausen, and he was almost certainly overtaking them. He was trying to work out just how quickly when the roller-wheel above his head jumped the shattered insulator on the second pylon.

He closed his eyes in terror until the wheel settled back onto the wire on the other side. It was a lot like riding a cable car, he thought, a very fast cable car with no operator. He would almost certainly reach Totenhausen alive. The problem was how to get off of the cylinder before it dropped sixty feet to the ground. He was squinting down the wire trying to answer that question when the whole night sky burst into flame like the Fourth of July.