Black Cross

by Greg Iles

  “Studying electricity. What about you?”

  McConnell dropped the textbook on the floor. “Colloquial German. SS protocols and orders. Plus a little organic chemistry.

  “Say something in German.”

  “Wie geht es Ihnen?”

  “Ach, your accent is terrible!”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Stern said in an exhausted voice. “I’ll do any talking that needs to be done. I doubt we’ll have to do much.”

  “I suppose we’re going in dressed as Germans?”

  Stern turned his head and looked across the narrow space that divided them. “Why do you say that?”

  “Christ, they’re fitting us up with German weapons, they’ve got me studying SS orders. . . What else could it be?”

  Stern said nothing.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lying here,” McConnell said. “And I’ve got to tell you, this mission doesn’t make sense.”

  Stern’s voice was suddenly wary. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean how the hell are two men going to disable a nerve gas plant? One man, really. As far as I can tell, I’ve got nothing to do with the sabotage. There must be other men going on this mission. Men we have yet to meet.”

  “Is that all you’re worried about?”

  “No, frankly. It’s the whole concept. Look, Stern, whether you believe it or not, I am committed to this mission. But I don’t like problems that don’t add up. It’s the logic—or rather the absence of it—that bothers me. I just don’t see how Brigadier Smith can be telling us the truth. At least he isn’t telling me the truth.”

  Stern tried to sound unconcerned. “Why do you say that?”

  “Think about it. If the Allies possess no nerve gases, as Smith claims, this mission of ours isn’t going to solve the problem. So we disable one plant. Big deal. I know for a fact that the Germans already possess massive stockpiles of Tabun, and probably Sarin as well. My seeing the inside of the plant that produces Soman would help Allied research, granted, as would photographs. But is that worth letting Hitler know how much we fear his nerve gases? That’s what this raid is going to do.

  “Also, Smith claims he’s sending us in there to steal a sample of Soman. He doesn’t need us for that. SOE already managed to smuggle out a sample of Sarin without our help. I analyzed the damned thing myself.”

  Stern watched McConnell closely.

  “But if the Allies do possess nerve agents, this mission is completely unnecessary. We could simply send a sample of our gas to the Reich Chancellery. ‘Sorry, Adolf, we’ve got it too.’ ”

  “The British wouldn’t do that,” Stern said.

  “Why not? We know the Germans already have the stuff. And by doing that we would avoid any chance of a massive retaliatory gas strike. If we cause a large release of Soman in the process of disabling this plant, Hitler might well hit London with every ounce of nerve gas he’s got.”

  Stern forced himself to keep silent. The American’s questions were disturbing—unless you possessed the missing pieces of the puzzle. Unless you knew that the British did possess their own nerve gas, but only a minuscule amount. And that in ten days, Heinrich Himmler was going to convince an uneasy Adolf Hitler that the super-weapon best suited to destroying the Allied invasion on French sand was nerve gas. And that the only chance of stopping Himmler was to convince him that Hitler’s fears were true: that the Allies not only had nerve gas of their own, but would not hesitate to use it.

  Stern knew McConnell would instantly grasp the logic of that. But he also knew the American would never willingly take part in the ruthless attack required to do the convincing. Yet one question McConnell had raised stuck in Stern’s mind. If the British possessed a limited amount of their own nerve gas—as Brigadier Smith claimed—why didn’t they simply send a sample to the Reich Chancellery as McConnell had suggested? Or at least leak evidence of their capability to Himmler? Why risk massive chemical retaliation by wiping out everyone in Totenhausen?

  As he tried to fall asleep, Stern could not suppress a suspicion that even he was not being told the whole truth about the mission. And only then did he realize that the first worm of doubt had entered his mind long ago, probably the moment he realized Brigadier Smith intended to lie to McConnell. Because if the SOE chief was willing to lie to an American to manipulate him, he would not hesitate to lie to a Jew he considered a terrorist.

  The question was, what could he be lying about?

  Deep inside the Porton Down chemical research complex, a frustrated chemist stared through a heavy glass window at the hairy face of a Rhesus monkey. The monkey was strapped to a metal chair inside a chamber not very different from the E-Block at Totenhausen Camp, though much smaller. The chemist knew it must be his imagination, but he had the distinct feeling that the monkey was grinning at him in mockery.

  “Increase the dose,” he said.

  The hiss of gas released under pressure sounded in the lab.

  The monkey bobbed its head several times, but continued to breathe. And yes, it was very definitely grinning now.

  The chemist slammed a hand down on his knee, then went to his desk, picked up the telephone and asked to be connected to a telephone number he had been given early that morning. There was a bit of a muddle at the other end, but soon an authoritative voice said, “Brigadier Smith here.”

  “This is Lifton, sir. Porton Down. We’ve established a new limit, but I’m afraid the news isn’t quite what we’d expected.”

  “Well?”

  “Nonlethal after forty-two hours.”

  “Bugger all!” Smith bellowed. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s stability, sir. We’ve got lethality, and if I may say so, we’re lucky to have that. The Germans have had their best people on this for years. Given time, I’m sure—”

  “Doctor, you have exactly five days to give me a gas that will remain lethal for one hundred hours. Keep me posted.”

  The chemist jumped at the sound of the disconnecting line.

  “Oh, Richards?” he said to his assistant.

  “Yes?”

  “Do we have a pistol near to hand?”

  “Not that I know of, Doctor Lifton. One of the guards outside might lend us one, I suppose. Why?”

  The chemist stared furiously into the gas chamber. “Because I’d like to shoot that damned monkey.”

  19

  Rachel’s plan to gain Frau Hagan’s confidence had worked. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the fanatical vigilance with which she guarded the door each night during the Circle. Or perhaps the detailed answers she gave when Frau Hagan asked about war news she’d heard on the BBC in Amsterdam before being captured. Once she had even sensed a vague sexual interest on the Block Leader’s part. In the end she did not care why Frau Hagan had taken her under her wing—only that she had.

  For the last two days, the big Pole had invited Rachel to come on what she called her “morning patrol” of the camp. Rachel felt terribly nervous without Jan and Hannah beside her, but Frau Hagan assured her that the children were safe. The “patrol” was really more of a morning constitutional, though the Block Leader did notice many things Rachel missed. She noted which sentries were posted where, which of the three SS doctors under Brandt had slept late, the volume of black market traffic in clothing and utensils and sexual favors exchanged behind the showers, and a dozen other things.

  Rachel noticed the prisoners more than the guards. They traveled in small groups, most often with those who shared the same badge color. Asocial with asocial, political with political, criminal with criminal, Jew with Jew. Above all she watched the children. Many clung to their mothers’ shifts, as Jan and Hannah did whenever possible, but others seemed to have free run of the camp. Like a grimy-faced army of midget partisans, they darted in and out of alleys, crouched under steps, squabbled in the barracks, spied on everyone and stole anything that wasn’t guarded or nailed down, including food fr
om those too old or weak to protect themselves.

  Rachel found it all bewildering. For four years she had heard that the camps in the East were labor camps. Totenhausen was more like a sanitarium, except that its staff was homicidally insane and armed to the teeth. There was little to do but idly pass the time and hope to avoid random death—unless of course you counted Frau Hagan as your friend.

  This morning the Block Leader had ordered Rachel to memorize the layout of the camp, pointing out which buildings were to be avoided and which areas were safe from the view of the tower gunners. The task did not take long. Totenhausen was surprisingly small, and laid out with the usual German precision. In a perfect square of electrified barbed wire, the inmate blocks occupied the west side and the SS barracks the east, these alternate universes separated by the Appellplatz, where roll was taken twice each day, once in the morning and once at night. The administration building and officers’ quarters stood at the front of the camp and faced south, towards the river, which flowed less than forty meters from the main gate. And backed against the wooded hills at the rear of the camp was Brandt’s “hospital,” with the half-buried E-Block squatting in its shadow like a vicious dog in uneasy sleep. The only building which compared to the hospital in size was a large wooden barn which occupied the entire northeast corner of the camp, and was surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence.

  “That is where they make the gas?” Rachel asked, pointing to the tops of two brick smokestacks that jutted from openings in the high barn roof.

  Frau Hagan quickly crossed herself. “The furnace of the devil,” she said softly. “Don’t point.”

  “I thought you were a Communist,” said Rachel. “Communists don’t believe in God, do they?”

  Frau Hagan pulled her gray coat around her. “God may be dead, Dutch girl, but the devil is alive and well. I’m getting cold. Let’s walk.”

  They skirted the factory fence until they reached the SS barracks, then cut between the barracks and the dog kennels. Rachel felt a prickle on her skin as she passed the watchful shepherds.

  A sudden wild shouting from the direction of the Appellplatz made her cringe.

  “Football,” Frau Hagan said without breaking stride.

  Rachel squeezed her nails into her palms and walked on. “What happened early this morning?” she asked. “I heard screaming and shouting in the yard.”

  Frau Hagan sighed wearily and kicked a mound of snow. “The Gypsy woman tried to run to the wire. Someone stopped her. They should have let her go.”

  Rachel was horrified. “To the electric fence?”

  “Of course. It happened all the time at Auschwitz. It’s the most popular method of suicide there. The wire could have ended it for the Gypsy. Now something worse will happen. Maybe for all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hagan turned her flat face to Rachel as she walked. “If they took your child from you, Dutch girl, what would you do?”

  “I would go mad.”

  “Just so. And a madwoman is capable of anything. Very dangerous for the rest of us.”

  Hagan stopped, stretched her thick arms, then methodically bent and touched her toes several times. “Exercise,” she puffed. “I know how shocking it is. You heard the talk. Yes, the distinguished Doctor Brandt is the pederast. There are some among the prisoners too, but Brandt is the worst. That mongrel Weitz brings them to him. One, sometimes two little boys in a month since the family camp ruse started. So, you see? The world is turned upside down. It would have been better for the Gypsy and her son to have been gassed at Chelmno than to have been saved and brought here.”

  “Can’t we do anything to help the boy?” Rachel asked, thinking of her hidden diamonds. “Couldn’t we bribe someone?”

  Frau Hagan looked puzzled. “Bribe them to do what? Kill the boy? That is his only escape from here. And if something happens to that boy, Brandt will merely send Weitz for another. Perhaps your Jan.”

  Rachel shuddered. “What about that nurse? Anna Kaas. Can’t she do something?”

  Frau Hagan grabbed Rachel by the shoulders and shook her violently. “Are you a fool after all? Never again mention that name in the yard! Never! Do you understand?”

  “I—yes. I mean, I won’t.”

  “Since this whole insanity began, she is the only German I have seen do anything to help prisoners. The only one.” The Pole shook Rachel again. “Her life cannot be risked in a useless attempt to save a doomed child. Put that out of your stupid head!”

  Rachel jerked away, but before she had gone five steps Frau Hagan caught her by the arm. “Not so fast, Dutch girl. You talk of bribes. What have you got to bribe with?”

  “Nothing.” Rachel’s face grew hot. “Only my food, like everyone else.”

  “Sergeant Sturm has been questioning people, you know. He’s asking about some diamonds he says were lost in the yard the night of the last selection.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.” Rachel immediately regretted her lie. Frau Hagan could order her searched anytime, and she knew every trick of concealment. She would search Rachel’s inner body first.

  “Someone said it was your idiot father-in-law who had the diamonds. You still don’t know about it?”

  “No. I mean I didn’t know he had the diamonds, not until that night. Major Schörner made Sturm throw them into the yard.”

  Frau Hagan considered this. “That night, after the selection . . . you went to the toilet. You stayed a long time.”

  “My children were sick.”

  Frau Hagan’s gaze didn’t waver.

  “The diamonds were in the Appellplatz!” Rachel blurted. “On the other side of the fence!”

  “You could have climbed the fence.”

  “And left my children behind?” Rachel recalled the wild moment of madness it had taken to let go of Jan and Hannah’s little hands and climb the cold wire. “If I were caught doing that I would never have seen them again!”

  Frau Hagan nodded. “That is true, Dutch girl. I wonder if you have that much courage?”

  “I assure you I don’t.”

  “So if I searched you now I would find no diamonds?”

  “No.”

  The Block Leader cocked her square head to one side. “Did you see anyone else that night, when you went to the toilet?”

  Rachel felt cornered. She hesitated, but then, feeling like a traitor, she said, “The shoemaker. I saw him outside the block fence that night.”

  Frau Hagan’s eyes flashed with satisfaction. “I should have known.”

  “You won’t tell Sturm?”

  More yells sounded from the direction of the main gate.

  “Come on, Dutch girl.” Frau Hagan pulled her along.

  Emerging from behind the headquarters building, Rachel saw a dozen SS men stripped to their brown undershirts charging wildly around the parade ground in their knee boots. Sergeant Sturm was leading one team in a game of soccer in which a couple of large ammunition crates served as goals. A fairly large audience of both prisoners and SS men had gathered to watch the game, as there was no physical barrier separating the SS parade ground from the Appellplatz.

  Rachel saw immediately that Sturm and his men approached sport with all the brutality they brought to their normal duties. Two players on the opposing team were already limping from injuries received at their hands.

  “That’s Willi Gauss leading the team against Sturm,” Frau Hagan said as they moved into a press of ragged spectators. “He’s a technical sergeant—inferior to Sturm in rank. Gave me a piece of cardboard once to mend my shoe.”

  Frau Hagan’s comment made Rachel think of the shoemaker. Scanning the crowd, she spied him by the block fence, a wiry dark-skinned man standing a head taller than the other prisoners. “Who runs the Jewish Men’s Block?” she asked in an offhand tone.

  Frau Hagan gave her a guarded look. “After the last selection, the shoemaker has the lowest number. The survivors will probably elect him. There are only a handfu
l left. He has been at this camp even longer than me.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “He helps the SS.”

  “By making shoes for them?”

  “And boots. And slippers for them to send home to their slutty wives. Why are you so curious, Dutch girl?”

  Rachel was spared having to answer by the unmistakable crack of bone echoing across the yard. On the field, one of Sturm’s men stood laughing and pointing over a prostrate figure. As the fallen man was carried off the field, Sergeant Gauss called out to a lone figure leaning against the headquarters building.

  “Please, Sturmbannführer! My goalie’s out of action. Give us a hand!”

  Rachel had not noticed Schörner beneath the overhang of the roof. The major waved away the sergeant’s entreaty, but more players joined in, pleading that they would have to stop the game unless someone made up the deficiency in numbers. Schörner finally stripped off his gray tunic and the bright Knight’s Cross that hung around his neck, then folded both and laid them carefully on an electrical junction box.

  “Well,” Frau Hagan mused. “This might be interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Schörner against Sturm. Ever since he got here last September, Schörner has been riding Sturm and his men about security. When he’s not drunk, that is. He can’t get them to care. We’re in the middle of Germany. They can’t see any danger.”

  “Is there any danger?”

  Frau Hagan shrugged. “Schörner’s afraid of old ghosts. Russian ghosts, I expect.” She chuckled. “For him the danger might be out on that field.”

  After conferring with Schörner, Sergeant Gauss took over as goalie and allowed the major to take a forward position. Within two minutes it became apparent that Schörner was no amateur. He stole the ball twice and moved it upfield alone, only to be brought to a sudden stop by the rough tactics of Sturm’s men, who were expert at “accidentally” overshooting the ball and smashing head-on into their opponents. To the delight of both teams, however, Schörner did not call a penalty, which he could have used his superior rank to enforce. Instead, he played all the harder.