Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  McConnell heard the sound of running feet behind him. He glanced over his shoulder in time to see Stern shatter the nose of the SOE man with his right hand and flatten the first officer with his left elbow. The first officer tried to use his machine pistol, but he was no match for Stern in close quarters. A burst of gunfire ricocheted though the passage, ringing the steel hull like a mammoth bell. Then Stern was holding the weapon over two dazed and bleeding men.

  “Did you shoot them?” McConnell asked in a shaky voice.

  “No. Watch the captain!”

  McConnell whirled, brandishing the cylinder. Tickell had already covered half the distance to him. “Don’t let this go any further, Captain!” he shouted. He felt his control over the situation disintegrating fast. “If I release this gas in this submarine, every man on board will be dead within five minutes. Either close the hatch and dive, or preside over the death of your ship.” His eyes bore into the British officer’s. “So help me God, Captain, I will do it.”

  “He’s bluffing,” groaned the SOE man from the floor.

  The captain stared wide-eyed at the cylinder.

  “How long will it take us to get to Sweden, Stern?”

  “Submerged . . . about six hours.”

  McConnell shook the cylinder again. “Six hours, Captain! I could keep my hand on this valve for twice that long if I had to. You have two choices. You know which is right. Which will it be?”

  Captain Tickell gazed into McConnell’s eyes with the cold-blooded assessment of a man accustomed to balancing lethal risks. As he did, McConnell felt a strange calm settle in his soul. He was not bluffing. That realization gave him a sense of power he had never known in his life.

  Tickell’s eyes narrowed slightly, then widened like those of a hunter who has followed a wounded lion too far into the bush. “Let my first officer up,” he said. “Deevers, close the bloody hatch. Duff Smith can sort out his own mess.”

  A dizzying wave of relief washed over McConnell.

  “Prepare to dive!” Tickell shouted to the control room. “We’ll torpedo the patrol boat before we go.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” McConnell said. “You did the right thing.”

  Tickell’s jaw muscles clenched with cold fury. “I’ll see you both hanged for this,” he said.

  “You’ll probably have to watch them pin medals on us first,” Stern said over McConnell’s shoulder. “Let’s get this stinking tub to Sweden.”

  Six hours later, HMS Sword surfaced one mile off the southern Swedish coast. The voyage had been a test of nerves, with McConnell treating Anna’s wound while Stern stood guard with the revolver and the canister of Soman. They’d shut the door long enough for McConnell to set and splint Stern’s broken finger, but the lacerations on his chest had had to wait. Hannah Jansen had drunk some powdered milk and vomited it up immediately. By the time they crawled out of the submarine’s conning tower to be taken ashore, they were near to exhaustion.

  Airman Bottomley had rented a motor launch to meet the sub. The sleek wooden craft rose and fell gently on the swell beside the sub’s sail. When Bottomley refused to take Anna and the child aboard, Captain Tickell told him he would take them or be blown out of the water.

  Bottomley took them.

  The SOE man remained on the Sword; apparently there was other “dirty business” still to be done in the Baltic. The launch reached the Swedish coast after a ten-minute run, homing on a blinking green signal lantern.

  When Bottomley cut the engine and drifted into the small dock, McConnell spied the two silhouettes waiting for them. One was Duff Smith. The other was a little taller, but bundled in a heavy coat and muffler. For a wild moment he thought Winston Churchill himself might reach down out of the gloom to pull them onto the dock. In the event, he was even more stunned. The face at the other end of the assisting arm belonged to his brother.

  McConnell froze for a moment, watched Stern hand the child up to David. Before he had time to think, Stern had helped Anna out of the launch. Like a sleepwalker he climbed out of the boat and faced them all on the jetty.

  David broke into a huge grin and said, “Goddamn it, boy, you made it!”

  McConnell could not speak. Despite the evidence before him, his mind tried to deny the reality. Then David passed Hannah Jansen to Stern, reached into his flight jacket and brought out a pewter flask.

  “How about a shot of Kentucky’s finest, Mac?” he asked. “It’s cold as a welldigger’s ass up here.”

  McConnell turned to Brigadier Smith. “Does he know . . . what I thought?”

  Duff Smith shook his head very slightly, then pointed at the wooden crate. “Is that the gas sample, Doctor?”

  McConnell nodded dully. “Soman Four. Fluoromethyl-pinacolyl-oxyphosphine oxide.” He gestured at Stern’s bag. “Brandt’s lab log is in there.” He brought out the cylinder he had used to blackmail the sub captain. “But I’m going to hang onto this one until we reach England, if you don’t mind. Maybe even longer. Think of it as insurance.”

  “Dear boy,” Smith said, “there’s no need for histrionics. You’re the hero of the hour.”

  “When are we going back to England?”

  “Right now. Your brother will fly us in the Junkers. He flew you over from England four nights ago, though neither of you knew it.”

  “I did?” David said. “I’ll be damned.”

  “It was David who fixed the Lysander engine. Made the whole jaunt possible, I daresay.” Smith allowed himself a smile. “A credit to the Eighth Air Force, this lad. I hate to give him back. And he loves my JU-88A6.”

  “That’s a fact,” David chimed in, but by now he had sensed the tension between his brother and the brigadier.

  All McConnell could think of was the transatlantic call he had made to his mother three weeks before.

  “I wasn’t counting on any refugees, Doctor,” Smith said tetchily. “I’m afraid you’ve caused a spot of bother there.”

  McConnell looked at David again. Then he handed the cylinder to Stern and, before anyone could stop him, punched the brigadier in the belly with all his strength.

  Smith doubled over, gasping for air.

  Airman Bottomley leaped for McConnell, but he didn’t get past David. Seconds later he was hanging by his throat from the crook of the pilot’s elbow.

  “Take it easy now, pardner,” David drawled.

  Duff Smith straightened up with some difficulty. “It’s all right, Bottomley,” he croaked. “I suppose I deserved that one.”

  “Damn right you did,” said McConnell. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here. All of us.”

  Brigadier Smith waved his agreement.

  McConnell saw Stern staring at him in astonishment. He slipped under Anna’s good arm and braced her for a walk. “Can you make it?” he asked quietly.

  Her eyes were only half open, but she nodded.

  As they moved along the jetty, David leaned over and said, “What did you punch that old coot for? He’s okay, once you get to know him.”

  Mark hugged Anna to his side and shook his head. “Ask me in twenty years,” he said. “It’s a hell of a war story.”

  EPILOGUE

  “A hell of a story?” I said. “That’s not the end of it!” Rabbi Leibovitz looked at me a little strangely. Dawn was creeping around the edges of the drapes. We’d moved into the kitchen sometime during the night, where he told his tale over a pot of coffee. Later we’d come back to the study.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Well . . . everything. But first my Uncle David. I thought he was killed in the war, but according to you . . .”

  “He was killed, Mark. Five months after Mac’s mission he was shot down over Germany. It happened to a lot of good boys. Too many, I’m afraid. They had a little time together, though. Brigadier Smith managed to keep David four extra days before returning him to the Eighth Air Force. He’d used Churchill’s note and some valuable SOE intelligence to get David’s superiors to go alo
ng with the deception. Anyway, Mac and David spent the four days following the mission in London. Mac remembered them as some of the best days of his life.”

  I shook my head. “What about the others? Who got out alive? You left me hanging at the camp. Did the shoemaker and Rachel get to Rostock with Jan? Did they reach Sweden?”

  “Miraculously enough, they did. They hid in the house of Avram’s old employee for three weeks. It took that long to arrange passage on a smuggler’s boat. It cost them all three diamonds, but they reached Sweden alive. They were interned there for the duration of the war.”

  “What did Rachel do after the war?”

  “She went to Palestine to find her daughter.”

  “Palestine? I figured Hannah wound up in some British orphanage.”

  “You underestimate Jonas Stern,” said Leibovitz. “With the diamonds Rachel and his father had given him, Stern arranged to have Hannah cared for by a Jewish family in London. He fought with the British in France, then with the Jewish Brigade later. He won a hatful of medals, then went back to Palestine to drive out the British and the Arabs. He took Hannah with him.”

  “I’ll be damned. And Rachel found them?”

  “With Avram’s help. The two of them traveled from Sweden to Palestine in the winter of 1945. Hannah was living with Jonas and his mother in Tel Aviv.”

  “My God. Were Rachel and Stern lovers, then?”

  Leibovitz smiled. “I don’t know. The two of them raised Hannah under the same roof for some years. They never married, though. From what I gathered, Stern’s work kept him traveling around the world for longer and longer periods. He was a born fighter. He spent his whole life in one branch or another of Israeli intelligence. Eventually Rachel married another man. Hannah is a grown woman now. Well into middle age. Jan is a lawyer, like his father was. In Tel Aviv.”

  I shook my head. “And Avram?”

  “Avram died twenty years ago. He was eighty-six.”

  I felt a disturbing dislocation of time. In my mind, Avram Stern was a man of fifty-five, Hannah Jansen a child of two. “How do you know all this?” I asked. “My grandfather kept up with everyone?”

  “A little. Not so often, but enough to know the big things. Every two or three years he got a letter from Stern. Postmarked from the ends of the earth, usually.”

  I sat quietly, trying to take it all in. The man who raised me — the grandfather I thought I had known all my life — was really someone entirely different. Leibovitz was right. I felt different for hearing the story. How many gray heads had I passed in the street or spoken to in the emergency room, never imagining they had once hunched over the controls of a shattered bomber in the darkness over Germany or lain in an icy ditch while SS troops combed a forest for them.

  “The rest of the story is not so happy,” Leibovitz said. “Fewer than half of the women and children who got away on the truck survived the war. I’ve spent several years trying to track them down. Life in the forests of occupied Poland was hard. Some ran into the wrong kind of resistance groups. Others died of sickness, even hunger. That’s the way it was. The most dramatic escape from a death camp in World War Two was from Sobibor. Three hundred escaped through the fence, yet only a handful survived the mines and the machine guns of the SS.”

  “Christ.” I could see now why my grandfather felt confused about what he had done. “Was it worth it, Rabbi? How much of what my grandfather guessed was true? How much of what Brigadier Smith told them was the truth?”

  Leibovitz straightened in the chair. “As costly as that mission was, I believe it was worth every life lost. Heinrich Himmler had been trying to persuade Hitler to utilize nerve gas to stave off the invasion. But after the raid on Totenhausen, he had little choice but to buy Brigadier Smith’s bluff. The evidence was before his eyes. The Allies possessed nerve gas and they had used it. They had used it to destroy Himmler’s pet project one day before his demonstration for the Führer. That left him two choices. Tell Hitler about the devastating raid and accept the shame of being proved wrong — not to mention admitting that Allied saboteurs had penetrated a top-secret SS facility — or—”

  “Cover it up.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “He simply exaggerated the effects of the bombs delivered by the Mosquito flight. Who would argue with him? What had been the village of Dornow was hardly more than a crater in the snow. The power station was obliterated. The day after your grandfather left Totenhausen, Himmler ordered the camp demolished and the debris plowed under the ground.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I went there, Mark. Four years ago. I was on a trip with some other rabbis, to see the concentration camps. I took a side trip to Dornow. I went down to the spot between the hills and the river.”

  “And?”

  “There was nothing there. Just a rough, uneven field with the river flowing past it. I said kaddish and drove away.”

  Leibovitz touched a finger to his chin. “Some justice did come out of it. Anna’s diary was used as evidence in the infamous Nazi medical trials. One of Brandt’s assistant physicians had been away from Totenhausen at the time of the attack. He was hanged, largely on the evidence of the diary.”

  “What about the record kept by the Jewish women? Did Rachel take that out?”

  Leibovitz smiled sadly. “How symmetrical it would be to think she did. But when that last night of horror came, no one thought of it. They thought only of survival.”

  “Perhaps if Frau Hagan had still been alive. . . ”

  “Perhaps. But in any case, they were not the only prisoners who kept records. After the war, similar journals were found buried in jars, cans, under barrack floorboards. Some of them . . .”

  For the first time I saw moisture in the rabbi’s eyes. He leaned his head back and blinked, then fell silent. I picked up the Victoria Cross from the floor. “I think I’m beginning to understand,” I said. “What happened at Totenhausen had nothing to do with glory.”

  “Not in any conventional sense. Winston Churchill thought so, though. He awarded Mac the medal in a private meeting near the end of the war.” The old man squeezed his hands together, then reached out and took a sip of brandy. “I’ve sometimes wondered whether or not that VC is real. As I told you, the only other American ever to receive it was the Unknown Soldier. Technically, it’s not supposed to be awarded to civilians. The highest British medal that can be is the George Cross, and Jonas Stern received that for the Totenhausen mission. I believe the VC is real, though. I believe Churchill liked your grandfather, Mark. I think he deeply respected him, and his ideals. I think Churchill saw in Mac the best part of America. And Mac had given a great deal to England. He’d been working for them since 1940, remember, long before Pearl Harbor.”

  Leibovitz set down his glass. “Mac respected Churchill as well. Churchill asked him as a favor to preserve the secret of BLACK CROSS, and as you know too well, Mac did so until his dying day. He once told me Churchill’s note meant far more to him than the VC.”

  The rabbi got up from the chair and walked over to my grandfather’s bookshelves. “We had a bit of a shock in 1991,” he said, moving slowly along the row of books. “Mac and I were in my home, watching CNN. The Desert Storm deadline was near to expiring. We saw a clip of American soldiers being briefed on how to inject themselves with atropine in response to poison gas attacks. The announcer specifically mentioned Sarin as the most feared weapon in the Iraqi arsenal.”

  “My God.”

  Leibovitz turned from the shelves. “It’s true. To this day, Sarin and Soman remain the deadliest poison gases in the world.”

  The rabbi’s revelations were shocking, but the truth was that my mind was no longer on weapons and military medals. I picked up the old wooden box and took out the black-and-white photograph, the one showing the blond woman’s face against dark wood. She really was beautiful.

  “This woman is Anna Kaas, isn’t she?”

  Leibovitz nodded. �
��That was the real secret of your grandfather’s life, Mark.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She lived in Britain until the end of the war. I don’t know whether she and Mac lived together there or not. But when the war ended, he came back to America alone.”

  “She stayed behind?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he never told my grandmother about her?”

  “Never. Two years after the war, Anna Kaas emigrated to New York. She graduated from the Cornell Medical School in 1952.”

  “Wow. Did my grandfather ever see her after that?”

  The rabbi seemed hesitant to answer. “Two or three times,” he said finally. “Over all those years. Medical meetings in New York, Boston. What does it matter now? He shared something with Anna that no one but Jonas Stern could understand, and probably not even him. Stern was made of different stuff, I think.”

  I stood up, tired from lack of sleep, yet alive with a strange energy. “It’s difficult to take in,” I said. “I don’t really know what to say, or do. I guess there’s nothing I can do.”

  Rabbi Leibovitz gave me a meaningful glance.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Wait a minute. Do these people know my grandfather is dead?”

  He smiled wistfully. “Jonas Stern is dead himself, Mark.”

  “What?”

  “He died in 1987. One day a telegram came to Mac’s office. It was from Hannah Jansen — under her married name, of course. It said that Stern’s will had instructed her to notify Mac of his death. Nothing else, though. We never found out how he died. I contacted some friends in Israel, but Israel is obsessive about security.”

  “What about Rachel? Does she know?”

  “She knows. I called her the day of the crash.”

  I was pacing the room, growing inexplicably more nervous with each passing minute.

  “Anna doesn’t know, however,” said Leibovitz. “And I think you should be the one to tell her.”

  I stopped. “Me? Why me?”

  He cocked his head to one side. “I think it would be fitting.”

  “Where did you say she was? New York?”