Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  Schörner blinked in disbelief. He backed blindly toward the troop truck, then turned and scrambled up into the cab. “Back up!” he screamed, rolling up the window as fast as he could. “Get us out of here!”

  The driver stared at him as if he were mad.

  Schörner drew his pistol and put it against the driver’s head. “There’s been a gas release! I want this truck two hundred meters back up the road!”

  The panicked driver jammed the transmission into reverse and spun the tires for ten seconds before they finally caught on the icy gravel.

  “Target Indicators down, sir,” the navigator said. “Aiming Point verified.”

  “This is the Master Bomber,” Squadron Leader Sumner said into the radio mike. “If there was any ack-ack down there, they’d be coning us now. Take your time and do it properly. The power station first, then the camp. Bomb on red indicators. Bomb at will.”

  Sumner’s Mosquito continued to circle at fifteen hundred feet while the lead bomber went in. The modified aircraft made its run south to north, aiming for the red markers at the power station. It dropped its load one half second too late, causing the single 4,000 pound high-explosive bomb it carried to drift just past the hilltop.

  Moments later, the village of Dornow ceased to exist.

  McConnell was halfway out of the Mercedes when a shuddering blast wave shook the earth beneath his feet. He looked back toward the hospital and saw a mushroom-shaped fireball boiling into the night sky beyond the hills. As he stared, the crown of the highest hill disappeared in a daisy chain of star-white explosions. The flash arced over Totenhausen, freeze-framing a field of corpses.

  Now he understood the red fires.

  Now he understood what Stern had figured out the moment he saw the Target Indicators laid out like a grid over the camp. But what the hell did Stern think he could do about it? He couldn’t call 8th Air Force HQ in England and ask them to cancel a bombing raid.

  The roar of the fleeing Mercedes brought him back to his senses. He kicked open the door to the building he had seen Stern disappear into and stopped dead. Yellow light was pouring into an empty corridor from a doorway up the hall. Where was the electricity coming from? He stared in wonder at the empty corridor. Why were there no dead Germans here? Had the gas not yet penetrated this building? He closed the door behind him and concentrated on sounds.

  It was difficult to hear through the vinyl mask, but there was no mistaking the sound of the diesel generator. He moved quickly up the hall toward the source of the light, which turned out to be the wireless operator’s room. Stern was already seated at the console, searching for a frequency on the dial.

  Another chain of explosions rattled the floorboards.

  Stern pounded the desk in fury. McConnell immediately saw his problem. Stern wanted to use the radio, but couldn’t risk removing his air hose to speak. He had no idea who Stern wanted to talk to, but the scientist in him knew instantly that there was only one solution. He grabbed a pen by the radio console and scrawled three words on a codebook beside Stern’s hand.

  COAL MINE CANARY!

  Stern looked up through the bulging eyepieces of his gas mask. Then he grabbed the infantry rifle he had taken from Sergeant Sturm and bolted from the room.

  McConnell heard another drumfire of explosions, much nearer this time. The blast waves jolted the radio sets on the shelf. Shit! How bad could their luck be? To be on the verge of success and have it all blown to hell because of poor organization? Duff Smith should have known Bomber Command or the 8th Air Force might unilaterally decide to wipe out a power station like the one on the hill above Dornow. He should have taken steps.

  McConnell jumped as Stern shoved a young SS man into the room and slammed the door. The brown-clad soldier was not wearing a gas mask, but he was alive. Stern handed his rifle to McConnell and shoved the SS man down until his mouth and nose were at the crack between door and floor.

  “There’s our canary,” Stern said. “Stand on his back, and if he tries to run, shoot him.”

  He jumped into the radio-operator’s chair and yelled into the mike. “Atlanta! Atlanta! This is Butler and Wilkes, repeat, Butler and Wilkes, calling Atlanta!”

  McConnell planted a boot between the German’s shoulder blades and rested the muzzle of the rifle on his kidneys. “What the hell are you doing, Stern?”

  “Butler, repeat, Butler, calling Atlanta!” Stern said again, waving at McConnell to shut up. “May Day, May Day!”

  McConnell expected at any moment to hear the deafening blast of bombs landing inside the camp perimeter. “Try to raise the planes themselves!” he shouted. “Brigadier Smith can’t stop the damn things!”

  Stern whirled around and screamed, “Smith sent those planes, you idiot! He’s the only one who can stop them!”

  McConnell felt suddenly dizzy. He was an idiot. Brigadier Smith had taken steps. And those steps demonstrated a degree of ruthless professionalism that left McConnell dazed. He could only watch speechless as Stern bent back over the console.

  “This is Butler, repeat, Butler, calling Atlanta. . . ”

  “Ach du lieber, Sturmbannführer! What was that?”

  Wolfgang Schörner watched with businesslike appreciation as the first incendiaries obliterated the Dornow power station. He shook his head in wonder. “I believe that last stick was phosphorous bombs, Koerber. Perhaps some thermite as well. Be glad you’re not under them.”

  “But what are they doing?”

  Schörner rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “They are preparing to flatten Totenhausen with their own agents inside. The question is why?”

  The incendiary bombs were what Anna Kaas had been waiting for. Not them specifically, but something like them. Something that would draw the attention of Major Schörner and his men long enough for her to drive the black Mercedes out of Totenhausen’s front gate without being seen. She had watched the troop truck race up to the gate, even recognized Schörner’s movements as he climbed down from the running board, turned, and jumped back into the truck. She thanked God she’d had the sense to keep her headlights off as she drove across the camp.

  The troop truck had retreated two hundred meters up the access road that curved around the camp toward the hills, but Schörner was no fool. The truck still blocked the main route of escape and maintained an oblique view of the front gate. Anna needed to cross the forty meters of downward-sloping open ground between the gate and the river, where the single-truck ferry that led to Totenhausen’s secondary access road waited in the icy water. Without a diversion, she would never reach it unnoticed.

  GENERAL SHERMAN provided that diversion. When she saw the orange flash reflected in her windshield from the enormous blast of flame on the hills behind the camp, she lifted her foot from the brake and idled forward between the smashed gateposts and dead SS men. The rubber bundle in the backseat was still jerking and fighting. Muffled screams pierced the silence. Anna knew the little girl inside must be nearly mad with terror, but she would have to wait. The dead sentries meant the nerve gas had drifted south at least as far as the gate.

  She fed the Mercedes a little gas, all the while watching the twin beams of Schörner’s troop truck and praying his eyes were on the hills. Twenty meters to the river. Ten. She took her eyes off Schörner’s truck long enough to aim the Mercedes at the little ramp that led up onto the ferry. As the car’s nose drifted down, a bolt of terror hit her. Would the brake lights betray her position to Schörner? Yes. With a prayer on her lips she shut off the engine and let the Mercedes coast up the ramp. When she felt the wheels bump onto the wooden deck, she threw the car into low gear, slammed her foot down on the brake pedal and set the parking brake.

  The Mercedes skated across the icy deck with a hiss. If the front bumper had not struck an iron post jutting up from the edge of the deck near the wheelhouse, the car would have slid right off and crashed into the river. When it jolted to a stop, Anna glanced back at the troop truck. It had not moved. She spoke comfortingl
y to the half-inflated vinyl bundle in the backseat and peered through the front windshield. The river was frozen along most of its length this time of year, but the ferry ran frequently enough to keep a narrow channel open during the day. The channel froze again each night, only to be broken open again in the morning. How quickly did it freeze?

  She could not risk opening the door to find out. She squinted into the darkness. Directly ahead of the car’s hood there was ice, but it looked black compared to the white sheet that spread east and west along the river. The black ice ran in a straight line to the opposite bank. That blackness was river water. There was ice there, but it was thin.

  She hoped it was thin enough.

  Brigadier Duff Smith was monitoring the frequency of GENERAL SHERMAN when Airman Bottomley burst through the door of the little hut beside the runway.

  “Switch to three-one-four-zero, sir! Hurry!”

  Duff Smith had been in too many tight places to stand on form when he heard the strain of action in a man’s voice; he obeyed his subordinate without question. Static filled the hut as he spun through the frequencies.

  “I was in the Junkers, sir,” Bottomley panted. “I was switching through the bands when I heard it.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Them, sir! Transmitting in the clear!”

  Suddenly a muffled voice with a German accent very like Jonas Stern’s crackled, “. . . repeat, Butler calling Atlanta! May Day! May Day!”

  Smith blanched. He pressed the transmitter key and barked, “This is Atlanta! Come in, Butler! Come in, Butler! We’d written you off. What is your situation?”

  The radio crackled again. “Mission accomplished! Repeat, mission accomplished! Abort bombers, abort bombers!”

  “Damn me,” Smith gasped, his Highland accent breaking through the English veneer, as it always did in stressful situations. “Say again, Butler? Did you say mission accomplished?”

  “Mission accomplished! Stop those bombers, you one-armed bastard!”

  With shaking fingers, Duff Smith dialed in the emergency frequency of GENERAL SHERMAN.

  Squadron Leader Harry Sumner’s hands jumped on the controls when he heard the Scottish accent blare out of the Mosquito’s high frequency radio. “General Sherman, General Sherman! Attention!”

  Navigator Jacobs’s head popped up from his radar screen with confusion and suspicion clouding his face. “Who the hell is that, Harry?”

  “I’d like to know myself,” Sumner said in a deadpan voice.

  “I order you to abort your mission. I say again, abort your mission.”

  Sumner blinked in puzzlement. “There’s no abort code for this leg of the mission, is there, Jacobs?”

  “Not after we left the Main Force, sir. Strict radio silence.”

  “How does this bleeder know our frequency then? And our code name?”

  Jacobs shrugged and looked out of the cockpit. “It’s too late anyway, sir. The power station is gone. They’re forming up for the run on the camp now.”

  “Attention, General Sherman! You are at fifty-four-point-oh-four degrees north, twelve-point-three-one degrees east. Your target code is Tara. I wrote the order authorizing this raid, and I am now countermanding that order. I know you are observing radio silence. I also know you can hear me. Break off your raid immediately and verify same action by verbal response. Break off raid immediately or face the consequences when you return to Skitten.”

  Harry Sumner’s hands tingled at the controls. “Sounds kosher, Peter. What do you think?”

  “It’s your call, Harry. You’ve got about ten seconds to stop the run.”

  “I never heard a Jerry who could mimic a Highlander like that.” Sumner keyed the mike. “This is General Sherman,” he said tersely. “What year was the Battle of Harlaw fought?”

  There was silence. Then the radio crackled: “Fourteen-eleven. Bless you, laddie, it was fourteen-eleven.”

  Sumner snatched up the VHF mike. “This is the Master Bomber. Abort bomb run, abort bomb run. This is your squadron leader. Return to base. Abort, abort. Return to base.”

  Navigator Jacobs sank back in his seat and sighed heavily. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Harry.”

  “So do I,” Sumner said. “So do I.”

  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?”