Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  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.

  49

  Racing southwest on the hard gravel road that followed the river, Stern had left Totenhausen far behind. But McConnell knew the Mercedes had sat inside the camp too long not to have been contaminated. He leaned back over the passenger seat and cranked down the rear window beside Anna’s still-masked head. He wanted to apply pressure to her shoulder wound, but if there was gas residue on his glove, he might kill her by doing it. He reached across the inflated vinyl bundle that held Hannah Jansen and rolled down the other window.

  Cold air blasted through the car.

  After a full minute, he ripped the air hose out of his mask and breathed deeply. He had never tasted air so sweet. He waited thirty seconds more, then removed Stern’s mask. Stern’s face was badly bruised and covered with dried blood, and one of his eyes nearly swollen shut.

  “How far to the coast?” McConnell asked, unzipping his suit and pulling his hands out of the oilskin sleeves.

  “Forty kilometers in a plane. Probably an hour by road.”

  Something jabbed McConnell in the crotch. He reached into his suit for the offending object. It was Anna’s diary, soaked by river water. Churchill’s note hung out of the top like a soggy bookmark. He dropped the diary into Stern’s leather bag, then climbed into the back seat to attend to Anna. After she managed to follow his orders and unzip her own suit, he tore out a section of her blouse and stuffed it into the hole in her shoulder. Being careful to touch only the inner surfaces, he gently lifted the transparent gas mask off her head and threw it out of the window.

  “We’re about to cross the river again,” Stern said over the seat. “This is Tessin. Stay down.”

  McConnell leaned across Anna’s lap as they rolled through the blacked out village.

  “Is the little girl alive?” Stern asked.

  “She’s still moving.”

  Using a British commando knife from Stern’s bag, McConnell carefully cut away the rapidly deflating vinyl sheet that held the little girl and the oxygen bottle. “I doubt this thing was completely airtight,” he said, “but the pressure of the escaping oxygen should have kept the nerve gas from getting inside.”

  A high-pitched shriek announced the re-entry of two-year-old Hannah Jansen into the land of the living. McConnell dropped the sheet out of the window and hugged the dark-haired child close, trying to comfort her as best he could. It would be a long time, he knew, before she purged the horror of this night from her mind.

  “You know where we’re supposed to go?” he asked.

  Stern nodded, his eyes on the dark road.

  “You think anybody knows what happened? I mean, do you think they’ll have troops out looking for us?”

  Stern looked back across the seat, his swollen eye sockets crusted with dried blood.

  “Just take care of the women, Doctor. Leave the rest to Standartenführer Stern.”

  McConnell kept pressure on Anna’s wound as the Mercedes rolled through the night. Whenever they came to a village, Stern would slow down and coast through at moderate speed. McConnell remembered the names for a long time after: Tessin; Sanitz; Gresenhorst; Ribnitz. Not long after Ribnitz, he smelled sea air. Stern didn’t slow down as he expected, but instead accelerated.

  “What are you doing?” McConnell asked.

  Stern leaned forward and stared through the windshield. “Our inflatable dinghy is supposed to be hidden in the rocks beneath a certain jetty near Dierhagen. A two-man job. But I’m not about to take an inflatable out into a shipping channel cut by an icebreaker. Not with a wounded woman and a child. It would probably take us two hours just to find the damned thing and inflate it.”

  McConnell saw they had entered another village. “What are you going to do then?”

  Stern hunched over the wheel. “Be ready to move fast, Doctor. I’ll carry the child, you take the woman. No matter what happens, don’t get separated.”

  McConnell had no intention of doing that. “I’m ready,” he said.

  Stern drove right down the main street of the village. It looked deserted, but at the end of the street McConnell saw the faint silhouette of masts against the night sky. A light burned in a shack at the entrance to the jetty. Stern stopped long enough to wriggle out of his oilskin suit, then pulled up beside the shack and gave a loud blast on the horn.

  “Are you crazy?” McConnell asked.

  Stern pulled his SD cap out of his bag, set it on his head at an angle and got out of the car, leaving the engine running.

  A uniformed officer of the coastal police stumbled out of the shack with a flashlight in his hand. He was about to curse to high heaven whomever had disturbed his sleep when the beam of his torch fell upon the blood-soaked uniform, the Iron Cross First Class, and the rank badge of a colonel in the SD.

  “Get that light out of my face, idiot!” Stern barked. “Stand at attention!”

  The policeman — a fifty-year-old veteran of World War One — snapped instantly erect, his thumbs at the seams of his trousers. “What can I do for you, Standartenführer?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Feldwebel Kurt Voss.”

  “Well, Feldwebel, I need a boat.”

  The policeman’s face was gray with fright, but he was not stupid enough to mention the blood and bruises on the face of the Nazi apparition before him. “There are many boats here, Standartenführer. What type of boat do you require?”

  “A motor launch. A seaworthy vessel, the fastest on the dock.”

  The policeman swallowed. “Most of the boats here are for fishing, Standartenführer. And with the ice this time of year . . . well, few go out at all.”

  “There must be something.”

  “There is the Kriegsmarine patrol
boat. Its crew put in earlier tonight for . . . well—”

  “I understand perfectly, Feldwebel.” Stern smiled coldly. “Lead the way to this craft. I will follow in my car.”

  “But you must speak to the captain first, Standartenführer. He will certainly . . .”

  The policeman fell silent under Stern’s withering glare.

  Stern cocked his chin and enunciated each word separately in the Gestapo fashion, like whiplashes. “The captain will do what, Feldwebel? Report to Berlin that he was unavailable to assist an SD officer on Reich security business because he was lying drunk in a brothel?”

  The policeman shook his head violently. “You are right, Standartenführer! Follow me. I’ll have the boat running before you get aboard.”

  There was some confusion at the boat when Anna and little Hannah appeared. The wide-eyed policeman could not convince himself that a wounded woman and a child were involved in official SD business, but he was trying hard. Stern carried Hannah into the cabin and laid her in a berth. McConnell and Anna sat down opposite her.

  “I’ll be on the bridge,” Stern told them. He squeezed Anna’s good arm. “We’re almost there.”

  He found the policeman standing at the wheel. “How much fuel do we have, Feldwebel?”

  “The tanks are full, Standartenführer. There’s also an extra can in the hold.”

  “Enough to get us to Sweden?”

  “Sweden!” The policeman’s terror of the SD battled with his fear of being charged in some treasonous scheme. “Standartenführer, if your business is that important, I’m sure Captain Leber would be glad to ferry you across. Let me call him for you. I know exactly where he is.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Stern revved the engines of the Schnellboot and was rewarded with a powerful rumble. He motioned the policeman closer. “Feldwebel,” he said softly, “what I am about to say you will repeat on pain of death. The woman and child you just saw are the mistress and child of Reichsführer Himmler. I am their bodyguard. Two hours ago, they were nearly kidnapped by officers disloyal to the Führer. We barely escaped with our lives. The Reichsführer personally instructed me to get them to Sweden by dawn. Now — do I have enough fuel?”