Black Cross

48

Walking across the dark Appellplatz after the bombs stopped falling, McConnell sensed for the first time the magnitude of what he had done. Sealed from head to toe in black oilskin, breathing air that had been compressed in an Oxford laboratory, he moved through the corpses like a ghost on a battlefield.

The dead lay everywhere, SS and prisoners together, men and women and children with their arms and legs thrown out at haphazard angles, mouths and eyes open to a sky scorched red by the sizzling Target Indicators. As horrifying as it was, McConnell knew this was but a shadow of the devastation that lay in store if twentieth-century science were completely harnessed to the engine of warfare. He looked over at Stern. The eyeholes in the young Zionist’s gas mask were pointed at the factory, not the ground. But even Stern could not ignore the obvious. They had saved some, but they had killed more.

Yet as they approached the factory gate, one thought filled McConnell’s mind. If a mere British copy of Sarin could accomplish this silent, bloodless slaughter, then in Soman the Germans possessed a weapon of truly apocalyptic power. He had understood that intellectually in Oxford. But to see a nerve agent used against human beings brought home to him in a way nothing else could how impossible were the dilemmas men like Duff Smith and Churchill faced.

Their bluff had to work. The alternative was Armageddon.

Stern was molding a charge of plastic explosive around the lock on the factory door. McConnell thought of all that had been done to bring him to this spot, to put him inside this German gas plant for fifteen minutes. Stern backed quickly away from the door and pulled McConnell with him. A moment later the plastic explosive blasted the doorknob into twisted fragments and the door fell gaping to one side.

When McConnell raised the powerful flashlight Stern had found in the wireless operator’s room, and shone it around the interior of the dark factory, he knew that Duff Smith had been right to send him. He was the best man for the job. The production area was smaller than he’d expected, but it contained industrial equipment without equal in the world. The closest thing he had seen to it was a classified DuPont research-and-development lab that one of his professors had walked him through. The production room was two stories high, packed with copper U-tubes and compressors and shallow closed vats. Every few feet along the wall, signs with letters three feet tall read RAUCHEN VERBOTEN! — NO SMOKING! The floor was covered with wooden crates, some open, some sealed. Without electricity for the factory lights, the camera was of little value, but Stern had it out anyway.

McConnell felt like a London tour guide leading Stern through the maze of apparatus, aiming the flashlight here and there while Stern tried long-exposure shots. He found the aerosols vecteurs device chained to a pallet in the center of the room. Using tools taken from a workbench, he tore at the heart of the machine until he found the secret it contained: filter discs. He marveled at the sequence of ten superfine droplet traps arranged in order of decreasing tolerance. By the time a war gas had passed from one end to the other, it would exist only as charged ions in suspension, rendering it not only invisible, but also unstoppable by conventional gas masks.

He slipped five of the filters into Stern’s bag, then moved on. It was only when Stern used up the first roll of film that they realized they could not change the film cartridge without removing their gas suits. Their oilskin gloves provided enough mobility to fire a gun, but not to thread film onto the tiny spool inside a camera. McConnell motioned for Stern to put the camera away. He wanted only two things from the building: a sample of Soman, and Klaus Brandt’s laboratory logs.

He found both in a one-story room in the rear of the factory. The equipment here was made of glass, not metal. This was where the real work was done. One wall of the lab was lined with rubber suits hanging from pegs on the wall. McConnell pointed at a heavy steel door. Stern shot off the lock with a pistol he had taken off a corpse on the way to the factory.

Behind the door they found a treasure trove that would keep the scientists at Porton Down busy for a year. There were small metal gas cylinders marked GA, GB, and with other letters McConnell did not recognize. The cylinders marked GB had strips of adhesive tape fixed to them, with handwritten letters on the tape: Sarin II; Sarin III; Tabun VII; Soman I; Soman IV. At the bottom of the storage closet was an empty wooden box like an ammunition crate, but with vertical slots sized to take the eight-inch-long cylinders. McConnell assumed Brandt had used the box to transport gas samples to other testing facilities.

While he filled the crate with samples, Stern explored a higher shelf, pulling down a variety of paraphernalia including a small metal sphere with a stem at the top. It too was marked with adhesive tape that read Soman IV. It took Stern a moment to realize what it was — an experimental grenade containing nerve gas.

He slipped three into his bag.

McConnell found Brandt’s principal laboratory log lying open on a desk. Sergeant Sturm had apparently evacuated the chemists in the midst of dismantling their equipment for transport. Everything had been left as it was, like a table set for dinner in a burned-out house. McConnell thumbed quickly through the thick notebook. There were passages written in several different hands, many with detailed chemical formulas, most based on organic phosphates. Each entry had been carefully initialed after completion. Several bore the letters K.B. beneath them. McConnell stuffed the log into Stern’s bag, then picked up the cylinder-transport crate and motioned for Stern to follow him. They had got what they came for.

It was time to run.

“Rottenführer!” Major Schörner shouted. “By the gate! What do you see?”

The young corporal stared through the windshield. He had idled the truck forward fifty meters in the last minute, but he still saw nothing. “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer.”

“By the gate, fool! Look now! Crossing the road!”

The corporal followed the beam of the truck’s headlights. At last he saw — or thought he saw — a brighter blackness moving against the general darkness. “What is that, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner slapped his knee in frustration. “Commandos,” he said. “They’re wearing chemical suits. Move the truck forward, Rottenführer. Very slowly.”

As the truck edged forward, its headlight beams caught two figures for an instant. They ducked and ran, flashing as if made of black foil.

Schörner slammed his hand down on the dash. “They’re running for the ferry!”

“What should I do, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner thought furiously. When the answer came to him, he felt a moment of doubt. But then a second realization hit him like a spike through the heart. If Allied commandos had just released the Soman stocks inside Totenhausen, Rachel Jansen was dead. The men in the black suits had not only wiped out the installation he had been ordered to protect, but they had also murdered the only woman he had felt anything for since the love of his life was killed by British bombs. With the calm deliberation of a man under sentence of death, he opened the door and climbed down from the cab.

He took one deep breath, then another. “Everyone all right?” he called to the men in the back of the truck.

“Hofer died from a shrapnel wound, Sturmbannführer. But the rest of us are all right.”

“Get down. All of you.”

Ten SS men leaped to the ground and formed a line with their rifles and submachine guns at the ready.

Schörner adjusted the patch over his eye and stood erect. “There are at least two Allied commandos on the riverbank near the ferry, possibly more. The ferry is probably iced in, but there may be poison gas between us and them. Bock, Fischer, remain in the truck in case they try to flee this way in a vehicle. The rest of us will advance to the ferry on foot.”

Schörner moved up the line as he spoke, finding the eye of every man at least once. “I want five men to form a line in front of me, spaced at ten-meter intervals. I want one man on each side of me — twenty meters away — and one man behind, fifteen meters back. Fire on anything that moves. If any of us fall to gas, the rest will move in the opposite direction, but continue firing. Clear?”

Schörner had seen a few faces whiten when he mentioned gas, and the rest when they realized he meant to use them as human gas alarms. But situations like this were what the SS had been created for. Would Sturm’s concentration camp scum live up to the tradition of their corps? They might be scum, but they were German scum. He swept his eyes once more up the line.

“Remember your oath to the Führer, gentlemen. ‘I vow to Thee and to the superiors Whom Thou shalt appoint Obedience unto Death, so help me God.’ Heil Hitler!”

As one, ten pairs of jackboots cracked and ten arms lifted to the cold night sky. “Heil Hitler!” came the answer.

Rifle bolts clicked in the darkness. The troops assumed the exact formation Schörner had ordered and moved quickly toward the ferry.

Anna nearly fired her pistol when the black-suited figure hammered on the window of the Mercedes. She had been watching the headlights of the troop truck and had not seen anyone cross the road. The swatch of tartan wedged into McConnell’s tank harness registered in her brain before she pulled the trigger. She got out of the Mercedes, closed the door, and hugged him tightly.

There was a sudden deep rumbling, and the ferry began to shudder in the water. Anna looked over the roof of the Mercedes. Stern was in the wheelhouse, giving the twin screws all the power they would take. The ferry heaved itself away from the bank and smashed into the sheet of ice covering the ferry channel, throwing Anna and McConnell to the deck. Stern shifted the engines into reverse, backed up and rammed the sheet again.

Nothing.

The third time, he backed the stern of the ferry flush against the dock, shearing off part of the access ramp with a screech of tearing metal. Then he shifted gears, gunned the engine, closed his eyes, and prayed. He heard the deep, shivering crack of ice as the first bullets shattered the windows of the wheelhouse.

“Faster!” Schörner shouted. “They’ve started the ferry!”

The major’s formation had been advancing steadily, parallel to the river, firing as they closed on the dock. While the men shot at the spot they thought the ferry should be, Schörner had kept his eye on the line in front of him, watching for signs of gas. But when the ferry motor roared to life, he knew the time had come to risk all. Eighty meters away, the flat craft nosed out into the river, a clear target now against the white ice sheet. Schörner opened his mouth to order his men to charge the dock at a full run. Then he realized that the man he had posted on his left side was no longer there.

“Gas!” he shouted. “Move right! Schnell!”

The line of men broke toward the water, still moving forward, still firing at the ferry. Schörner slammed into the back of the man in front of him, losing his balance. Furious, he got to his feet and shoved the halted trooper forward. The man would not budge. Then Schörner saw why. Two soldiers lay squirming on the ground thirty meters ahead. His five-man frontal screen had been reduced to three, plus the right wingman, who had been forced up to Schörner’s side when the squad pressed against the river. He glanced behind him. The rear guard was still on his feet.

“Hold here and give them everything you’ve got!”

Stern crouched low in the wheelhouse, trying to guide the heavy ferry without standing up inside the glass cube that enclosed the upper wheelhouse. Three sides of the enclosure had already been shattered by bullets.

Anna and McConnell were hunkered down behind the Mercedes, at the edge of the deck. There was no railing, and with Stern pushing the engines to the maximum — plus the give-and-take jolting of the bow smashing the ice — there was a real danger of falling into the river. Anna motioned for McConnell to get the little girl out of the backseat, but he thought the child was safer where she was.

Anna didn’t. Using the door handle to steady herself, she pulled herself into a half crouch and opened the door.

The Mercedes’ interior light clicked on.

One second later a rifle bullet tore through the opposite window and drilled through Anna’s right shoulder.

All McConnell saw was her body flying backward. Then she was gone. Screaming for Stern to stop, he closed the car door and jumped after her into the swirling black water.

“We’ve hit the pilot!” Schörner shouted, seeing the ferry slow three quarters of the way across the river. “Pour it in!”

As the volume of fire increased, he heard a choked cry behind him. He whirled. The man he had posted behind him seemed to be trying to grab his face with his left hand. Then he suddenly bent double, vomited, snapped back up and fired his submachine gun skyward in an uncontrolled burst. Schörner stared in horror as the man fell backward on the snow and ceased all movement. His nostrils filled with the nauseating odor of feces and urine.

The stench of death.

He held his breath and kept firing at the ferry.

McConnell fought his way toward the gas mask he saw bobbing in the black water. The current was pulling Anna toward the shelf of white ice that covered the rest of the river. If she passed under that, she would be lost. His arms seemed suddenly made of lead. Even in the oilskin suit the water chilled him to the bone, and his heavy rubber boots were pulling him down. He drove his gloved hands against the water and reached out . . .

Two fingers hooked under the leather harness of Anna’s air tank. He looked back. The ferry was twenty yards away. He got a firmer grip on Anna’s harness, then began swimming.

He knew he would never reach the ferry under his own power. At some point he had torn his gas suit. Its oilskin legs were filling with freezing water, dragging him toward the bottom. Only the buoyancy of their air tanks was keeping him and Anna from sinking like boulders. He had actually stopped swimming when he saw the ferry moving slowly back toward them.

Wolfgang Schörner had not felt real fear since the retreat from Kursk. But when he saw two of the three rifle-men in front of him begin jerking spasmodically, a film of cold sweat broke out over his whole body. Was he breathing the gas now? Was it entering his skin even as he knelt on the ground? With a last roar of anger and courage he stood erect and charged down the riverbank toward the dock.

McConnell shoved his right arm through a half-submerged tire on the side of the ferry and pulled Anna close to him. “Go! Go!” he shouted, gasping for air. “I’ve got her! Go!”

Stern firewalled the throttles. The ferry’s twin screws lifted the foredeck right out of the water as it closed the last few yards to the far bank, smashing ice as it went. Stern looked back at the dock they’d left behind. A barrel-melting burst of yellow muzzle flashes strobed in the darkness, throwing a hail of bullets across the water. Stern dove out of the wheelhouse as the slugs shattered the remaining glass and riddled the side of the Mercedes.

The ferry would have to land itself.

He prayed that none of the tires on the Mercedes had been punctured.

Wolfgang Schörner was dying on his feet. Even as the bullets poured out of his weapon, a deadly poison was shutting down his central nervous system. The invisible nerve gas had entered his body through every exposed surface, but quickest through the mucus membranes of his mouth and nose, and through the moist sclera of his eyes.

His machine gun clicked empty. He wanted to throw it down, but his hand would not open. He felt a strange embarrassment as his bladder involuntarily voided. Then his bowels let go. He saw the ferry collide with the opposite bank. Almost immediately the taillights of the car clicked on. Schörner was nodding his head violently up and down, but could not understand why. At the last moment he realized that the river itself might afford him protection from the gas. With tremendous concentration he forced his right leg to take a step. Then he lurched forward and fell flat on his face at the end of the pier.

The last thing he felt was the icy water of the river tugging at his right hand.