Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  And so by the fourth day, the two men, so different in philosophy, had been forced by prejudice onto common ground. Stern had maintained his fierce mask of cynicism, but McConnell soon sensed the somber, reflective intelligence behind it. Stern’s reappraisal of McConnell occurred more slowly — until something quite unexpected taught him that first impressions can be far from accurate.

  At the toggle bridge — a long net of intertwined toggle ropes that spanned a wide stretch of the river Arkaig — Sergeant McShane was taking great pleasure in pointing out to Stern this ingenious use for his favorite tool. Stern retorted that the bridge suspended above the rushing waters had required at least fifty toggle ropes to construct, whereas he and McConnell would have only two.

  While they traded barbs on the castle bank, a group of French commandos were being instructed on how to properly negotiate the flexible bridge under fire. The Arkaig was still in flood, concealing rocks that could snap bones like twigs if a man fell the twenty feet from the bridge to the river. A concealed sniper fired near-miss shots with a rifle, and to further enhance the realism of the exercise, explosive charges had been laid in the riverbed. Consequently, several furious commandos found themselves bunched at the middle of the sagging bridge while an instructor with a clipboard shouted cockney epithets from the bank, maligning their ancestors back to William the Conqueror. Every time a bomb exploded in the river, the Frenchmen screamed at each other with redoubled fury.

  Between bouts of laughter, Sergeant McShane explained to Stern and McConnell what the Frenchmen were doing wrong. His laughter died when, after a particularly violent explosion, one of the young commandos lost his footing and slipped down through the spiderweb of toggle ropes, somehow catching his throat in the tangle. His body jerked taut like that of a man being hanged — then his head snapped up and he plunged into the river.

  Only the observers on the bank realized what had happened, and of them only McShane and the other instructor knew that two men had recently lost their lives under identical circumstances. In that case an explosion had shaken two men off the bridge. The flooded stream quickly swept them past all chance of aid, and their drowned bodies were later recovered at the mouth of Loch Lochy. A grappling net had since been suspended from the iron footbridge downstream, but Sergeant McShane was taking no chances. By the time the Frenchman’s absence had been noticed by his comrades, the Highlander had already dived into the flooded river and begun swimming after the floating body.

  McShane swam strongly and, urged on by the shouts of the men on the bridge, managed to overtake the Frenchman in time. The commandos on the bridge fought their way over the toggle ropes while McShane dragged their fallen comrade up the far bank.

  Even from where McConnell and Stern stood, it was plain that the young commando was badly hurt. Sergeant McShane had all he could do to keep the man’s friends far enough back to let him breathe. It was the Highlander’s cry for a medical officer that broke the spell on the near bank. McConnell splashed into the shallows, then dived into the rushing water and fought his way across. Stern raced up the bank and scampered across the toggle bridge.

  When McConnell broke through the circle of men on the far bank, he saw a young man gasping like a landed fish, but getting no air into his lungs. The commando’s lips were already turning a deathly gray.

  Cyanosis, he thought. Not much time.

  The French commandos shouted wildly in their own language that someone should pump the water from their comrade’s lungs. The young man’s eyes bulged with terror as he tried vainly to suck air into his chest. McConnell elbowed two commandos aside, saying sharply, “Je suis un medecin! Le Docteur!” This parted the clamoring mass of Frenchmen. He knelt beside Sergeant McShane and palpated the Frenchman’s throat. The larynx had been fractured.

  “I need a penknife,” he said. “J’ai besoin d’un couteau!”

  “What are you doing?” McShane asked. “The man’s got water in his lungs!”

  “No, he doesn’t. He just can’t breathe. Un Couteau!”

  “We’ve got to lay him on his stomach!” McShane insisted. “Push the water out. Help me turn him.”

  McConnell knocked the sergeant’s arm aside, then grabbed the young Frenchman’s hand and held it to McShane’s face. “Look at his nails, Sergeant! He’s suffocating!”

  While McShane stared transfixed at the blue skin beneath the nails, someone thrust a small Swiss-made pocketknife into McConnell’s hand. He flicked open its two blades and chose the smaller for its sharpness. The young Frenchman’s face was turning bluer by the second. Using his left index finger, McConnell probed carefully for his primary landmark — the cricothyroid membrane at the center of the Adam’s apple — then brought the point of the knife blade in contact with the skin.

  “Dinna try that!” Sergeant McShane said. “He’ll choke on his own blood! I’ve seen it happen in the field. If his throat’s crushed, we’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

  “He’s dying!” McConnell snapped. “Hold him down!” He raised the knife, blade turned horizontally so as to pass cleanly between the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. “Hold him, Sergeant!”

  Stunned by the American’s sudden assumption of authority, McShane restrained the Frenchman with his left forearm, but grabbed McConnell’s arm with his right. “Wait, damn you!”

  “I’m a doctor!” McConnell shouted, turning on the big Scotsman. Then he shouted in French, “Mets-le deahors! Get this man away!”

  A dozen hands jerked the astonished Highlander clear. Three French commandos took his place and pinned their young friend’s head and body to the cold ground. With one clean stroke McConnell punched the knifepoint through skin and membrane.

  The Frenchman’s chest heaved.

  “Mon Dieu!” gasped a dozen commandos in unison.

  “I need something hollow!” McConnell told them. “J’ai . . . shit! J’ai besoin de quelque chose de creux. A reed, a straw, a pen . . . un stilo? Anything, quickly!”

  As blood trickled from the small incision, he rotated the knife blade caudally to widen it. Then he slid his right index finger down the side of the blade and into the hole, drew out the blade, and left his finger in place to preserve the integrity of his incision. He was about to shout again when Jonas Stern knelt beside him and slapped a dismantled pen into his hand.

  “The toggle-bridge instructor was using it to mark his charts!”

  Stern had already snapped off the end of the pen’s barrel, creating a hollow tube. McConnell took the fat end and slowly fed it down the inside of his finger and into the incision, exactly as he had slid his finger down the knife blade. The moment the barrel entered the trachea, the young Frenchman’s chest heaved again, then slowly began to fill with air.

  “Regardez!” shouted a soldier.

  McConnell ordered two commandos to hold their man’s legs higher than his head while he squatted beside the man’s neck and held the tube in place. In less than a minute the Frenchman’s face lightened a shade. In three minutes he had regained some pink and his pulse was strong.

  “How is he, then?”

  Sergeant McShane had squatted just behind McConnell.

  “His larynx is in bad shape, but he’s stable. He needs a good surgeon now.”

  “There’s an ambulance on the way from Fort William. Should be here in a few minutes.”

  “Good.”

  A French medic appeared and knelt beside the patient. He nodded in silent admiration of McConnell’s work, then began taping the pen barrel to the skin so that it would remain in place during transport. Mark stood up and shook out his hands. Only now did he realize they were quivering.

  “Been a while since I’ve done anything like that,” he said. “Nothing but lab work for the last five years.”

  Sergeant McShane’s voice carried open respect. “That wasna a bad show, Mr. Wilkes. Bloody good.”

  McConnell extended his right hand. “It’s McConnell, Sergeant. Doctor Mark McConnell.”

  �
�I’m pleased to know you, Doctor,” McShane said, firmly shaking it. “I thought you were some kind of chemist, man.”

  McConnell smiled. “You were right about not trying a tracheotomy. It’s a dangerous procedure, even for a surgeon in a hospital. I performed a cricothyroidotomy. Almost no danger of nicking an artery that way.”

  “Whatever you did, it was the right thing.” The sergeant’s blue eyes held McConnell’s. “Doing the right thing at the right time . . . that’s a talent.”

  McConnell shrugged off the compliment. “Where did Stern get off to?”

  “You mean Butler?”

  “Uh . . . right.”

  “Right here,” said Stern, rising from the crowd of Frenchmen.

  “Thanks for that pen.”

  To McConnell’s surprise, the young Jew leaned forward and offered his hand.

  As McConnell shook it, Stern turned to McShane and said, “I think he might do after all, eh, Sergeant?”

  McShane nodded once. “Aye. He might at that.”

  Walking back to the castle, McConnell realized that he had not enjoyed praise so much in quite some time.

  That night, lying on the cots in the cold Nissen hut, Stern and McConnell spoke for the first time about something other than their impending mission.

  “I’ve often wished I was a doctor,” Stern said quietly. “Not really for the day to day life, you know, but since I got to Palestine. In North Africa, as well. I’ve seen a lot of men die.”

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, “The funny thing is, I remember them all. Not their names especially, but their faces. Their last seconds. It’s struck me a dozen times how alike we all are at the end. They never get it right in the pictures. Most men want their mothers. If they can talk at all. Isn’t that something? I’ll bet they haven’t written their mothers in a year, but at the end it’s the only thing that could ease their fear. Some call out to their wives or children. I’ve stood and watched them die like that, miles from any kind of hospital. No first aid kit. Nothing.”

  McConnell lay in the dark and said nothing. Stern was only twenty-five years old, yet he had seen more death than most men would in their entire lives. He slid up onto one elbow.

  “Have you ever helped anybody in that position, Stern?”

  “What do you mean?”

  McConnell could just make out Stern’s silhouette in the darkness, a prone body with arms crossed over its chest. “You know what I mean. Stopped their pain. When I was an intern, I saw a few patients I thought would have been better off dead. But my hands were tied, of course. I just wondered what a man would do if there were no constraints.”

  Stern waited a long time to answer. McConnell had closed his eyes and turned on his side when he heard a soft voice say, “Once.”

  “What?”

  “I did that once. In the desert. Some friends and I had raided an Arab settlement. Horseback. One man — a boy, really — got hit in the back as we rode away. Half his insides were blown out through his stomach. He couldn’t ride any farther. The Arabs were behind us. If we’d doubled up, we never would have got away. Not with him dripping blood all over. Arabs are madmen for tracking you over sand. There wasn’t much choice, it was death or torture for him. Still, nobody wanted to do it. We kept hoping he would die on his own. But he didn’t. We waited as long as we could, but he just lay there, gurgling and crying and begging for water.” Stern paused. “He didn’t tell us to leave him, either.”

  “So?”

  “So I did it. Nobody ordered me to. But if we’d waited any longer we would all have been taken.”

  “You did it while he wasn’t looking?”

  Stern chuckled bitterly in the darkness. “You watch too many films, Doctor. He knew what was coming. He put his hand over his eyes and whimpered. Bang. We rode away.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not a good thing for a Jew to do.”

  “Somebody had to, I guess.”

  “I just wish I could have helped him. Really helped him, like you did today.”

  McConnell pulled the blankets up against the chill. What could he say? As the minutes passed, he wondered whether Stern was sleeping. If he was, what was he dreaming of? What peace had he ever known? His childhood was back in Germany, in the decade of despair and dementia that spawned Adolf Hitler. Could his brain still conjure images of a Rhineland lost forever?

  McConnell closed his eyes. Without setting foot on a battlefield, the fear, the shame, the raw intensity of human beings purposefully killing each other had already entered into him. What lay behind all this? What had brought a Georgia-bred pacifist to a drafty Nissen hut behind a castle in the remote Scottish Highlands? His brother’s murder? It was absurd. The entire Western world stood poised to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

  What could he and Stern possibly accomplish there?

  The next afternoon, McConnell was summoned to the castle by Sergeant McShane. When he arrived, he found Brigadier Smith waiting by the main entrance in his tweed jacket and stalker’s cap, obviously in a state. Smith tossed his head sideways, indicating that McConnell should follow him, and led the way to a spot behind the castle where the rush of the Arkaig over the rocks would cover his voice. He faced the river as he spoke.

  “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Doctor?”

  McConnell stared at the brigadier’s back without comprehension. “What are you talking about?”

  Smith whirled. “I’m talking about you wagging your bloody tongue around that empty skull of yours!”

  “Are you drunk, Brigadier?”

  “Listen, Doctor. Whatever your opinion of this mission, you have no business infecting Stern with your bloody pessimism, do you hear?”

  Suddenly McConnell understood. For the last few days, while he had tried to reason his way through the logic of their mission, Stern had confidently deflected all questions by claiming that his objections could be explained away by simple facts that were being witheld from him for reasons of security. But perhaps the truth was different. Perhaps Stern had become worried enough to voice his own concerns to Brigadier Smith.

  “Did he speak to you?” he asked.

  Smith reddened. “Speak to me? After that Lazarus act of yours by the river yesterday, he sneaked into Charlie Vaughan’s office and used the telephone to track me down in London. Had a bloody grocer’s list of questions.”

  McConnell couldn’t help but smile. “Did you answer them?”

  “I did nothing of the kind. And I’ll answer none for you, either. What I will tell you is this: You’re not half as smart as you think you are. There’s more to this mission than you will ever know, and you had better leave it to the professionals.”

  “Like you?”

  “Right. Unless you plan to back out now. Is that it?”

  McConnell squatted beside the river and said nothing for some time. The great manipulator deserved to sweat a little.

  “I’m tempted,” he said finally. “I know you’re lying to me about the mission, Brigadier. And I think you’re lying to Stern as well. You never planned on the two of us becoming friends, did you?”

  Smith laughed harshly. “If you think Jonas Stern is your friend, you’re more naive than I thought. Believe it or not, Doctor, I’m the only friend you have in this business.”

  McConnell stood up and faced him. “If we’re such asshole buddies, like you say, maybe you should be going into Germany with me. Since this is going to be such a bloodless mission and all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Smith said. “But I will be only a hundred miles away. On the Swedish coast.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Smith clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Well? Are you pulling out or staying in?”

  McConnell skipped a flat stone across the river. “I’m in. I just want you to know I know you’re lying. I don’t know exactly how or why, but I know.” He wiped his hands on his pants and smiled at the SOE chief. “I wouldn’t miss this
insanity for the world.”

  He left Smith standing beside the river with his mouth open.

  22

  Four days had passed since Schörner spoke to Rachel. Three days left before she had to go to him. Of course she did not have to go to him. She could run into the wire like the suicides at Auschwitz. But then Jan and Hannah would be left alone. In a particularly black mood Rachel had considered running to the wire with both children in her arms, thinking it better that they die with her than have Brandt take them for his ghastly experiments.

  But she was not ready to do this. The instinct to live was strong inside her. She could feel it like a separate will, motivating her actions without hindrance of thought. In some prisoners, she saw, this instinct was not so strong. Several of the new widows had been steadily descending into terminal melancholia since the night of the big selection. Soon they would be musselmen. The new voice inside Rachel told her to ignore those women. It was an echo of Frau Hagan: Despair is contagious. This new voice also suggested a plan to save Jan and Hannah, and Rachel heeded it.

  The plan centered around food.

  Her nightly trips to the alley for Major Schörner’s special rations did not escape the notice of the other inmates, but she endured the glares and epithets in silence. Because what she was doing in the alley was not what the other prisoners thought she was doing. When Ariel Weitz met her with the food each night — good vegetables and real sausage — Rachel let Jan and Hannah eat their fill, but did not touch her own portion. While Weitz stood watching from the end of the alley, she would sit hunched over with her face in her hands, seemingly despondent while her children ate. Sooner or later, the new voice told her, he will tell Schörner you are not eating. And the major wants you fat and soft for his bed, not bony and dry like the other women. In order to get what he wants from you, perhaps he will grant you what you want from him.

  It was really a small thing Schörner wanted, she told herself. It was what every man had wanted from her since she was thirteen. On the day he first spoke to her, his proposition had horrified her. But now — though Rachel would admit this to no one — the prospect no longer seemed so repugnant, especially in light of the other fates possible in Totenhausen.