Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  “Major, Jonas Stern could probably tell you every key man in the Haganah’s ranks. Probably in the Irgun, too. But he wouldn’t tell you. He’d die first.”

  “A lot of men say that,” Dickson said. “In the beginning. That attitude doesn’t last long.”

  Owen shook his head. “Stern’s different.”

  Dickson smirked. “How’s that?”

  “Didn’t you see the scars? He’s been there before. Tortured, I mean. And nothing like our methods, believe me. He was running from a raid near Al Sabah one night when his horse broke its leg. He was only seventeen. The Arabs were hot behind the raiding party. They ran him down almost immediately.”

  “What the hell did they do to him?” asked General Little.

  “I’m not sure, sir. He doesn’t talk about it. They only had him for a night and a day, but they were real tribesmen, the ones that got him. Murderous brutes. Stern somehow managed to escape on the second night. He never told them a thing. I heard some of his mates whispering about it during the North African campaign. He’s a legend to the Zionists. I never saw him with his shirt off before today.”

  “Good God,” Little muttered. “I saw the results of some Arab interrogations in the Great War, near Gallipoli. It’s a miracle the fellow survived.”

  “Like I said, sir. Not much use in questioning him, to my mind. He won’t talk unless he wants to.”

  “I see what you mean,” Little agreed. “We’ll sort out this mess tomorrow. You’ve got four hours to bring him in of his own volition, Owen. After that, Major Dickson’s men will have a free hand.”

  “I’ll find him, sir.”

  Little nodded. “That’s all, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The Welshman darted through the door.

  Brigadier Duff Smith rose slowly, nodded to Little, and followed Owen outside.

  7

  Jonas Stern stood alone in a coal-dark doorway, his shivering body pressed against cold stone, and watched the broad avenue of Whitehall. He had nowhere to run. He had come so far to get here. All the way from Germany at age fourteen, with his mother in tow and his father left behind. Thousands of miles overland in a refugee caravan where smugglers robbed them of all they had before taking them farther down the illegal route to Palestine. Weeks in a battered freighter that bled salt water through its rusting hull while people belowdecks died of thirst. Years of struggle in Palestine, fighting the Arabs and the British, then in North Africa fighting the Nazis. Then finally from Palestine to London, to the room with the British staff officers with their trimmed mustaches and haughty blue eyes. Major Dickson had at least told the truth: the only reason they’d let him come at all was to interrogate him about the Haganah.

  Stern tensed at the sound of running feet. Peering around the brickwork, he breathed a sigh of relief. The feet belonged to Peter Owen, and the Welshman was alone. Stern reached out and caught him by the jacket.

  “Jonas!” cried Owen.

  Stern let go of the jacket.

  The young Welshman rolled his shoulders angrily. “What the hell was that back there?”

  “You tell me, Peter. Are Major Dickson’s men after me?”

  “They will be if you don’t turn yourself in within four hours.” Owen struggled to light a cigarette in the frigid wind. Stern finally did it for him. “Thanks, old man,” he said. “Christ, I’ll take the desert over this any time.”

  “Those smug bastards,” Stern muttered.

  “I told you you were being unrealistic. It’s a matter of scale as much as anything. Compared to the amphibious landing of a million men in Occupied Europe, a few thousand civilians — particularly Jews — don’t garner much attention in military circles.”

  Stern held up his cuffed hands. “Get these off, Peter.”

  A pained look crossed Owen’s face. “Dickson will have me up on charges.”

  “Peter—”

  “Oh, hell.” Owen fumbled in his pocket and brought out a key.

  Stern snatched it away and began walking toward Trafalgar Square. The opened handcuffs tinkled on the cement like change thrown to a street urchin. He put the key in his pocket and kept walking. With blackout regulations still in force, the stars over London shone like distant spotlights, illuminating a sign advertising bomb-shelter space in the Charing Cross tube station.

  “You’ve got to turn yourself in, Jonas,” Owen said, struggling to stay abreast of him. “You’ve no alternative.”

  Stern noticed that he had begun leaning into the wind with his head turned slightly away as he walked. He hadn’t walked with that gait since his childhood in northern Germany. Some habits never died.

  Owen grabbed his sleeve and stopped him in the road. “Jonas, I won’t blame you for anything you do at this point. But I can’t be responsible for you, either. No matter what happens now, I consider the Tobruk debt paid.”

  Stern stared at the young Welshman with eyes that said many things, but he did not speak.

  “I said Tobruk is wiped clean,” Owen repeated, but the tone of his voice was uncertain.

  “Sure, Peter.” Stern started to add something, but his words were drowned by the sudden growl of an engine. A long silver Bentley floated over to the curb and stopped beside the two men, engine running.

  Stern shoved Owen against the passenger door and began to run. He heard the Welshman’s voice calling him back. He turned. Owen had snapped to attention beside the Bentley. Focusing on the car’s interior, Stern saw only a driver and a single passenger. He walked cautiously back. Someone had rolled down the rear window. Framed in its dark square Stern saw a weathered face lit by bright eyes, and the shoulder boards of a brigadier general.

  “Recognize me?” asked a deep voice with a Scottish accent.

  Stern stared at the face. “You were at the meeting.”

  “I’m Brigadier Duff Smith, Mr. Stern. I’d like to have a word with you.”

  Stern looked at Peter Owen, silently asking if this could be a trap. The Welshman shrugged.

  Brigadier Smith held up a silver flask. “Have a dram? Beastly cold out.”

  Stern did not accept the flask. As he stared at Brigadier Duff Smith, he felt a sudden certainty that he should run like hell. Get clear of this man and all his works. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was walking away from the Bentley.

  The car kept pace, coasting along beside him. “Come on, lad,” Smith called. “Where’s the harm in a little chat?”

  “What kind of chat?”

  “A chat about killing Germans.”

  “I’m German,” Stern said, still marching into the wind. He glanced up at the dark face of Admiralty House. “According to Major Dickson, anyway.”

  “Nazis, I should have said.”

  “I killed plenty of Nazis in North Africa. That’s not what I’m after.”

  Smith’s reply was barely audible above the rumble of the Bentley’s motor, but it stopped Stern in his tracks. “I’m talking about killing Nazis inside Germany.”

  The Bentley rolled to a standstill beside Stern. The brigadier’s eyes glinted with black humor. “That sound like your line of country, lad?”

  The Bentley’s driver got out and opened the rear door opposite Smith, but Stern still hesitated.

  “You speak good English,” Smith said, to fill the silence.

  “Don’t take it as flattery. Know your enemy, that’s my motto.” Stern pointed at the brigadier. “Can you get Major Dickson off my back?”

  “My dear fellow,” Smith said expansively, “I can make you disappear off the face of the earth, if I so choose.”

  Stern was vaguely aware of Peter Owen shouting something as he climbed into the Bentley, but all he remembered was Brigadier Smith’s final exchange with the Welshman before he rolled up the rear window. Owen was protesting that General Little wanted Stern in custody, and that Major Dickson would be hunting him with a vengeance if he was not. Smith did not seem at all perturbed. He said something to Owen in a language Stern would lat
er learn was Welsh. The gist of the translation was, “You don’t have a problem, laddie. You never found him, you never saw me, and that’s the end of the story. Find yourself a pub and stop worrying. Nobody ever found anything Duff Smith hid, and nobody ever will.”

  During the next two hours, as the Bentley rolled through the bleak winter streets of the blacked-out city, Stern learned more about the reality of the coming European war than he had dreamed in his most cynical fits of depression. In the beginning he pressed the brigadier about the mission he’d hinted at, but the Scotsman had his own way of coming to the meat of things. The first thing he did was deflate any hopes Stern had of the Allies saving the Jews still trapped in Europe. Several phrases would come back to Stern much later, and he would marvel at how frankly Smith had laid it all out.

  “Don’t you see, man?” Smith had said. “If we offer sanctuary to the Jews still alive in Europe, Hitler might say yes. And the truth is, we don’t want them. Neither do the Americans. You Jews are a highly educated race. Consequently, you take away jobs faster than any other immigrant group. There are military reasons, as well. Little wasn’t joking in there. The Nazis already laid down the law to the Red Cross. ‘Touch the concentration camps, and we will no longer keep the Geneva Convention regarding military POWs.’ That’s no empty threat.”

  The Bentley rolled past the Royal Hospital. “You’re ahead of your time, Stern. Though not by much, I’ll wager. It won’t be long before Chaim Weizmann goes to Churchill with the same request you made this afternoon. Bomb the camps. But it won’t make any difference. Bomber Command is practically a law unto itself. There are a hundred ways to bury a request like that in committees and feasibility studies. You’d lost the battle before you even went in there today. To men like Little you’re nothing but a meddling civilian. That’s enough reason to deny your request, no matter how much sense it might make.” Smith chuckled. “I don’t know what you thought you were playing at. The bloody Archbishop of Canterbury lobbied for sanctuary in England for European Jews, and he failed. And you a wanted terrorist!”

  “I had to try,” Stern said. “If you knew the sheer numbers of innocent people dying, you would—”

  “Numbers aren’t the half of it.” Duff Smith shook his head.

  “I’ve seen eyewitness transcripts myself. Polish girls raped and tortured and thrown into the street with blood streaming from their bodies. Entire families stripped naked and made to stand on metal plates to be electrocuted. Jewish women being sterilized and sent to military brothels. Children wrenched from their mothers’ teats. The whole hellish circus. What you don’t understand is that none of that matters. War is supposed to be hell, Stern. That kind of thing has lost its shock value, especially to soldiers like Little, who watched their friends slaughtered by the thousands in the Great War. To men like that, civilian deaths are regrettable but irrelevant. They have no direct relation to the prosecution or outcome of the war.”

  “You can’t all be like Little,” Stern said. “I can’t conceive of that.”

  “You’re right. There are a lot more like Major Dickson.”

  The brigadier paused to pack and light a hand-carved pipe.

  “There must be some decent men in England.”

  “Of course there are, lad,” said Smith, puffing gently. “Churchill is one of your strongest advocates. He’s all for establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine after the war. Not that that means anything. Those bastards in Parliament will drop Winston like a hot brick just as soon as he’s won the war for them.”

  After convincing Stern of the utter futility of his journey to England, Duff Smith finally got around to his proposition. “What I said back there,” he drawled, “about killing Germans inside Germany. I wasn’t joking.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Stern asked suspiciously.

  Smith’s face grew very hard, very quickly. “I’m not going to lie to you, lad. I’m not trying to save the pathetic remnants of European Jewry. Frankly, it’s not my bailiwick.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  Smith’s eyes flickered. “Not much, except alter the course of the war.”

  Stern sat back against the plush seat. “Brigadier . . . who are you? Who do you work for?”

  “Ah. Officially, we’re known as SOE — Special Operations Executive. We raise mischief in the occupied countries, France mostly. Sabotage and the like. But with the invasion round the corner, that’s rather tapered off. We’re mostly dropping supplies now.”

  “How can you alter the course of the war?”

  Smith gave him an enigmatic grin. “Know anything about chemical warfare?”

  “Hold your breath and put on your gas mask. That’s all.”

  “Well, your former countrymen know quite a bit. The Nazis, I mean.”

  “I know they’re using poison gas to murder Jews.”

  Brigadier Smith waved his pipe in scorn. “Zyklon B is a common insecticide. Oh, it’s deadly enough in a closed room, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m talking about.”

  In two minutes, Smith gave Stern a thumbnail sketch of the Nazi nerve gas program, including Heinrich Himmler’s private patronage. He leaned heavily on two points: Allied helplessness in the face of Sarin, and the Nazis’ predilection for testing their war gases on Jewish prisoners.

  “We’ve pinpointed parts of their testing program to three prison camps,” Smith concluded. “Natzweiler in Alsace, Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and Totenhausen near Rostock.”

  “Rostock?” Stern exclaimed. “I was born in Rostock!”

  Smith raised his eyebrows. “Were you now?”

  “What is it you want to do? Disable one of these plants? A commando raid?”

  “No, I’ve something a little more complex in mind. Something with a little flair.” The brigadier cracked his knuckles, beginning with his left little finger. “What I want to do is frighten the Nazis so badly that they won’t dare to use their nerve gas, not even when the Reich is falling down around their ears.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I neglected to tell you one fact about the Allied gas program, Stern. After intensive analysis of the stolen sample of Sarin, a team of British chemists has managed to produce a facsimile nerve agent.”

  Stern breathed faster. “How much do you have?”

  “One-point-six metric tons.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  Smith sighed. “Frankly, no.”

  “How much do the Nazis have?”

  “Our best estimate is five thousand tons.”

  Stern went pale. “Five thousand—? My God. How much would it take to seriously damage a city?”

  “Two hundred fifty tons of Sarin could wipe out the city of Paris.”

  Stern turned away from Brigadier Smith and pressed his cheek to the cold car window. His head was starting to throb. “And you have one metric ton?”

  “One-point-six.”

  “How wonderful for you. What do you plan to do with it?”

  Brigadier Smith’s voice cut the air like a rusty saber. “I plan to kill every man, woman, child, and dog inside one of those three camps. SS men, prisoners, the lot. And I’m going to let Heinrich Himmler know exactly who did it.”

  Stern wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. He took a moment to try and digest the enormity of what he thought the brigadier had suggested. “Why in God’s name are you going to do that?”

  “It’s a bluff. A gamble. Perhaps the biggest gamble of the war. I’m going to use our thimbleful of gas to try to convince Heinrich Himmler that we not only have our own nerve gas, but the will to use it. When he finds one of his precious camps wiped out to the last man, yet with every piece of German equipment in pristine condition, he will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I want him to reach. That if the Nazis were to deploy nerve gas against our invasion force, their cities would be annihilated by the same weapon.”

  “But how do you know Hitler won’t retaliate with his superior stockpiles?
”

  “I don’t. But if I’m right about Himmler running the nerve gas program on his own, Hitler will never even find out about our raid. Himmler will sweep the whole thing under the rug. Even if Hitler were to find out, he wouldn’t have any evidence to hold up to the world as an excuse for a retaliatory strike. Not the way I’ve planned this show.”

  “You’re mad,” said Stern. “Hitler doesn’t need to justify his actions to anyone.”

  “You’re wrong,” Smith said confidently. “Hitler doesn’t hesitate to massacre Jews, but he does try his best to cover up the fact that he’s doing it. He cares about public opinion. Always has.”

  Stern felt a sudden apprehension. “Brigadier, this is a strategic mission. Why have you come to me?”

  “Because my hands are tied by some regrettable political considerations.”

  “Such as?”

  “The Yanks are against it.” Smith grunted. “Bloody schoolboys. They’re content to fight with sticks and pebbles and hope no one gets angry enough to go home for his father’s shotgun. American opposition rules out my using British or American commandos for the operation.”

  “What about your SOE operatives?”

  “The Americans have elbowed their way in there as well. They’ve demanded that we set up two-man parachute teams — one Yank, one of ours — to go into France and prepare the Resistance for D day. It’s pathetic. I haven’t met one Yank who can speak enough French to order Boeuf Bourguignonne, much less fool a German.”

  “So you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Refugees.”

  Smith grinned. “Bloody terrorists, at that.”

  “Do you have the authority to undertake this operation? Brigadier general isn’t exactly Supreme Commander.”

  Duff Smith reached into the pocket of his beribboned tunic and pulled out an envelope. From it he withdrew Churchill’s note, which he handed to Stern. Stern didn’t blink once while he read it.

  “Satisfied?” Smith asked.

  “Mein Gott,” Stern whispered.

  “I want you to lead this mission. Are you my man or not?”

  Stern nodded in the darkness. “Yes.”