by Greg Iles
“Look!” said one, pointing past the dog kennels toward the woods. “Smoke. They’re bombing us from the air!”
“Don’t be an idiot,” said a strapping soldier named Heinrich Krebs. “The snow must have detonated some of the mines we laid around the perimeter today.”
“I don’t remember putting any mines on this side.”
But Krebs was already walking around the kennels toward the fence.
“What’s wrong with the dogs?” asked a puzzled voice.
“Maybe they were killed by shrapnel,” someone suggested.
Several men stepped up to the kennel fence. “They’re not all down,” said one. “Look.”
“Mein Gott, they’re sick. What . . .?”
The other SS barracks had also emptied at the sound of the explosions. Now more than seventy men were strung out along the narrow alley between the barracks and the dog kennels.
“See anything, Krebs?” called a sergeant.
There was no answer.
“Heini?”
“Shhh!” someone said. “Listen.”
It was a soft sound, like the hissing of a venomous snake. But almost immediately the hissing was drowned out by the sound of men gibbering, defecating, striking each other, and choking on their own tongues. A dozen storm troopers fell to the ground, convulsing like epileptics in seizure.
Heinrich Krebs was already dead.
Six miles north of Totenhausen, ten Mosquitoes of the GENERAL SHERMAN flight assumed a tandem bombing formation. A half mile south of them, Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner reached for his microphone to break radio silence.
“Leader approaching target,” he said in a mechanical voice. “I will mark with flares from one thousand feet, then go to fifteen hundred to act as Master Bomber. Number Two will drop red, repeat red, Target Indicators. I will verify Aiming Point, then give the go-ahead. High explosive followed by incendiaries. Let’s put one down Göring’s bunghole, eh?”
Sumner hung up the mike. “Well, Jacobs?” he said.
The navigator remained bent over the fuzzy image on the screen of his air-to-ground radar. “Eighty percent sure, sir. It would help if we slowed a bit.”
Sumner keyed his mike. “Leader reducing speed. Holding at one thousand. Two, drop Target Indicators on my mark.”
“Out! Out!” Schörner shouted as the troop truck wheeled into the driveway of the power station and stopped behind his car. “Ten men out now!”
He slammed his gloved hand down on the roof of his field car. “Tell Sturm everything I said!”
At that moment a grenade landed just behind the troop truck and exploded with an ear-splitting boom. Shrieks of agony filled the air. Schörner ran around the truck just in time to see the taillights of the Volkswagen flick on at the next curve. Snow kicked up into the air as the car raced away down the hill.
The driver of the troop truck revved his engine and shifted into gear, preparing to turn and pursue the fleeing car, but Schörner leaped up onto the running board and grabbed the wheel.
“Stop, you imbecile! You’re staying here! Let that dog out!”
He jumped down and told the driver of his field car to chase the VW only if it headed toward Totenhausen. The corporal saluted and sped away.
“We’re looking for an American and a bomb detonator!” Schörner yelled to the confused mass of SS troopers. “He’s wearing a Waffen SS uniform! I want four men inside the station. Everyone else into the trees!”
Anna pumped the brakes of the Volkswagen, waiting to be sure Schörner was following. After a few moments, she saw a pair of headlights skid around the curve behind her. The lights were low to the ground. The field car.
She kept pumping the brakes, but no other lights appeared. Why wasn’t the troop truck following? She didn’t think one grenade could have put it out of commission. When the field car closed to within four car lengths, she jammed the accelerator to the floor.
The Volkswagen glanced off a hard snow bank, but she maintained control and fought the car around the next switchback curve. Below her lay Totenhausen. She wondered briefly what was happening inside the camp, but thoughts of McConnell quickly returned. Would he be able to climb the pylon? Would he have the will to release the gas cylinders if he did? How odd it would be never to see him again, the man who had awakened her sleeping heart after so many years. She pumped the brake, preparing to take the next curve, but the car lurched forward, shuddering under the impact of machine gun bullets.
Anna momentarily lost control of the car, then righted it and hit the gas. She looked down on the seat beside her. She had saved the last two grenades for a reason. Major Schörner had once told her a story about a wounded SS officer left behind by his unit during a retreat on the Eastern front. The man had sat calmly against a burning tank as the Russian infantry approached. When they came within five meters of him, he smiled, pulled the pins on the grenades and blew a half dozen Russians to pieces with him.
Anna had endured many nightmares in which she was tortured by Gunther Sturm. She had no intention of enduring the reality. If they managed to stop Greta’s VW with gunfire, she would surrender like the man on the Russian front. With a smile on her face and live grenades in her hands.
“Dark as a bloody coal chute down there!” the navigator complained.
“What about your radar?”
“All I see is the river bend. It looks like the right one.”
Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner expelled air from his cheeks with a sound that betrayed the tripwire tension beneath his calm voice. “How sure are you?”
“Well . . . eighty-five percent?”
“That’s not good enough, Jacobs. If we bomb the wrong target, they’ll just send us back.” Sumner paused. “I’m going to drop a single flare. You’ll have to verify our location visually.”
The navigator looked up from his radar. “One flare, sir? Everyone down there will know we’re here, and we’ll still have to do a full marking run.”
“They’ll know soon enough anyway.” Sumner reached for a lever. “There’s no known ack-ack between here and Rostock, and we’ve got to be sure.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t risk wasting the lot on the wrong bend in the river.”
“No, sir.
“Here we go.”
McConnell perched on the crossarm of the pylon like a man in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship. He blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes and looked around. Above him hung the inverted black bowl of sky and stars, a cold sliver of moon. Below him, to the north, shone the faint lights of Dornow village. To the south curved the silver line of the Recknitz River, sheltering Totenhausen Camp on its near bank. He recognized the spot by the bluish glow of spotlights.
His nerves thrummed. A staggering amount of effort had gone into putting one man on top of this pylon with the gas cylinders under his control. He was not that man, but he was the man who had made it here. And if the British nerve gas worked, he could doom every SS man in Totenhausen as surely as Jonas Stern could have. If the gas worked. If the cylinders stayed on track during their run down to the camp. If, if, if—
He could hear Schörner’s men beating the bushes below him. Flashlight beams ricocheted off the snow in all directions. He heard a dog barking wildly, someone encouraging the dog. They were trying to track his scent over the snow. He didn’t see how they could, as he’d been wearing a rubber suit while he walked, but the torches were getting closer. He didn’t feel particularly nervous. They would capture him eventually, of course, but too late.
Right now he was untouchable.
The drama that caught his attention was closer. On the south face of the hills, two sets of headlights careened down the switchback road through the trees. Anna was in front, the SS car behind. The field car was slowly closing the gap, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Anna would be overtaken and killed within minutes. He tried to focus his mind on the task at hand, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the swerving lights below.
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br /> And then it hit him. In thirty seconds both cars would break out onto the flat stretch that led from the base of the hill around to Totenhausen’s front gate. By road, they might be a third of a mile away, but as the crow flew—or the bullet—the distance was probably more like three hundred meters. With the shouts of Schörner’s men ringing up from the woods below, McConnell swung down off the crossarm and drove his spikes into the support pole beneath it. Clipping his safety belt around the pole, he jerked Stan Wojik’s bolt-action Mauser off his shoulder and laid it over the crossarm, aiming south.
He chambered a round from the magazine and waited.
As he stared, he realized that the shot was damn near impossible. The problem was not the rifle, but the darkness. He was staring across open sights into a wall of night. Even when the cars appeared beneath him, he would have no way to accurately judge distance. It would be like aiming at stars.
Anna’s car burst out of the trees at the foot of the hill, her red taillights accelerating away from him almost directly in line with the descending pylons. She had opened up a lead, but her flight was leading her headlong toward Totenhausen, straight into death. He stuck his gloved forefinger into the trigger guard of the Mauser and began tracking her lights. He almost threw the rifle down in frustration. He would be lucky if his bullet struck within fifty yards of the car.
He heard the dog barking in the trees below him, closer now. A voice in his brain told him to drop the rifle, to climb back onto the crossarm and release the cylinders. He was about to do just that when he heard the rumble of powerful engines.
Had Schörner brought more trucks into the forest?
The SS field car broke out of the trees. McConnell sighted in on the dim taillights and shook the sweat from his eyes, his heart pounding with the futility of his effort. But as his finger touched the trigger, he heard something pop in the sky high above him. The hillside came alive with light as surely as if God had thrown a switch in heaven. He had no idea who had fired the flare, but his eye instantly oriented him to distance by pylons, treetops, the stretch of road. . .
He led the field car high and pulled the trigger.
“Rifle fire!” Major Schörner shouted, his eyes turned skyward in an attempt to locate the flare. “Rifle fire in the trees! Move south!”
Led by the dog, Schörner and his men crashed through the trees toward the sound of the gunfire.
McConnell’s second bullet tore through the canvas roof of the field car and into the neck of an SS man in the backseat. The storm trooper squealed like a dying pig. Blood sprayed over his comrades, who immediately ducked below the windows, assuming they were being fired on from the sides. Four seconds later another slug knocked off the car’s wing mirror. The driver had hardly registered the impact when McConnell’s fifth bullet drilled down through the trunk panel and punctured the fuel tank. Gasoline funneled onto the road behind the car, and the sparks from the overheated exhaust quickly ignited the mixture.
The tank blew with a dull crump like a mortar shot, breaking the rear axle and dropping the back of the car onto the road with a metallic screech. The SS men who were still alive dove through the doors before it stopped, leaving their wounded comrades behind in the burning vehicle.
Anna shut her eyes and swerved, stunned by the flash behind her. She had no idea what could have destroyed the field car. Could it have hit a land mine? She skidded back onto the road and took her foot off the accelerator, realizing that her diversionary sacrifice was no longer required. What should she do? What could she do? Go back to the pylon? It was too late to help McConnell now. What about the camp? If all went as planned, it would soon be saturated with gas. She let the VW coast forward, her mind spinning with confusion.
And then she remembered the children.
She had the gas suit. She had the pistol.
And she had a debt to pay.
* * *
“What the bloody hell was that?” Harry Sumner asked.
“No idea, sir. Small explosion.”
“Well, damn it? Is this the place?”
The navigator took his eyes off the swirl of flame and scanned the land below. As the lone parachute flare drifted away on the wind, he caught sight of something like a metal cage on a hilltop to the northwest.
“There it is, Harry! The power station! This is it! One hundred percent sure!”
Squadron Leader Sumner pressed his back into the seat and banked the Mosquito.
“Second pass,” he said into his mike. “Leader marking with all flares.”
McConnell pulled himself back up onto the crossarm and turned his attention to the business at hand. In the dying light of the flare, the top of the pylon looked just as Stern had described it. The twenty-foot crossarm spanned two thick support legs and jutted out a few feet on either side. Six wires passed over the crossarm in three pairs, one pair at each end of the arm and one pair in the middle. Three porcelain insulators shaped like upside-down dinner plates kept the wires from coming into direct contact with the crossarm.
According to Stern, one wire in each pair was live and one merely an auxiliary. The gas cylinders themselves had been suspended from the auxiliary wire at the end of the crossarm nearest McConnell, about five feet away. The question-mark-shaped suspension bars curved up and out from the roller-wheels, then back under the wire and down to the cylinders. McConnell saw that Stern had removed the two cylinders nearest the crossarm for use on the SS bomb shelter. But the rubber rope that would pull the cotter pins from the six remaining rollers was just within reach. Stern had wrapped it around the head of the cylinder nearest the pylon.
McConnell shinnied out to the end of the crossarm, trying not to tear the crotch of his gas suit. He stopped just short of the porcelain insulator. Following the rubber rope with his eyes, he realized that when he pulled it, the cotter pins that held the roller-wheels in position would be jerked out in reverse sequence, releasing the cylinder farthest from the pylon first, and so on until the cylinder nearest him had been freed.
The shouts below were getting closer. As darkness settled over the hillside again, McConnell fastened his safety belt around the crossarm, leaned out, took hold of the rubber rope and gave one sharp tug.
The rope stretched, but nothing came loose.
He yanked harder, and almost lost his balance when the cotter pin pulled free. The rubber rope sang like a plucked bass string as the cylinder farthest from him began to roll.
McConnell blinked in disbelief. There were two cylinders rolling down the wire, and they were quickly gathering speed. Keep some space between them, Stern had told him. He had pulled too hard! He began counting slowly—meaning to count to fifteen—but before he even reached five he noticed red taillights nearing the Recknitz River.
Anna.
She was still driving toward Totenhausen. What the hell was she doing? Hadn’t she seen the SS car explode? She must have! What did she think she could do in the camp? Staring down the hill in a panic, McConnell realized that Stern might still be alive somewhere down there. Was that it? Was Anna trying to rescue Stern? If so, she wouldn’t even get past the gate guards unless—
With the courage of despair McConnell dropped the rubber rope and shinnied back toward the support pole he had climbed. Passing it, he continued toward the center of the crossarm and stopped just short of the middle insulator. Five inches from his crotch ran the center auxiliary wire, just beyond that the live one.
He felt a strong vibration in the crossarm caused by the current in the live wire. He was too close. He scooted backward until he was two feet from the center pair of wires.
Unslinging the rifle from his shoulder, he took the muzzle of the barrel in his right hand, leaned forward, and extended the stock away from him until it hovered six inches above the pylon’s far support pole. His right arm quivered from the weight of the old rifle. He let the stock down until the breech end of the barrel rested on the crossarm, just a few inches from the far support pole. Very carefully, he lowered
the muzzle in his hand to within four inches of the live center wire.
Then he shut his eyes and dropped the metal barrel onto the wire.
“Mein Gott!” screamed one of Schörner’s soldiers. “The bomb!”
Wolfgang Schörner stood motionless in the snow, stunned by the blue-white flash that had strobed in the forest ahead of him. He had heard many bombs in the past, but the explosion he’d just heard was like none he had ever known. The flash had burst high and in front of him, but the sound had come from behind, from the direction of the transformer station. Just after the flash, he had sensed more than seen a blazing white light pass high over his head, moving rapidly toward the transformer station. Then he’d heard a brassy whooom, and then—at least a full second later—the detonation.
Four distinct events.
Then he understood. There was no bomb. Somehow, someone had faulted one of the power lines above them. And they had done it in such a way that the main transformers had exploded. Totenhausen would be without electricity for a few seconds, but the backup transformers and lines would automatically kick on. Schörner waited to hear some telltale sound that this had happened.
What he heard was a sharp crack farther down the hill. Staring high into the darkness of the trees, he saw a blue-white fireball rolling up the hill like a man-made comet. He was marveling at the impossible vision of something rolling uphill when the fireball flashed over his head and hurled itself into the power station.
The second explosion dwarfed the first.
When McConnell dropped the rifle barrel onto the live wire, 8,700 volts of electricity instantly sought the shortest route to earth. The heat of the flash charred the surface of his oilskin suit and knocked him off the crossarm. A sound like a lion’s roar split the night as the current discharged itself into the ground sixty feet below him. Hanging from his safety belt, McConnell thanked God that his basic knowledge of electricity had proved accurate: the shortest route from the live wire to earth had been through the rifle barrel and down through the far support pole, allowing him to remain outside the lethal circuit he had created.
