Black Cross (32 page)

“You do that, lad.”

The light was nearly gone. In the distance McConnell heard a muffled explosion, yet another prelude to the great cataclysm that would soon smash to rubble what was left of Europe.

He leaned on the bridge rail and watched the water sluice over the falls. You could lose yourself in that sound, he thought. In the sound, and the smell of wet stone and woodsmoke and mist. As he stared, a great salmon leaped from the shadowy pool below the falls. Its sides gleamed like pewter dipped in oil, and its tail flashed darkly in the dusk.

“Did you see that!” he cried, looking to his right.

No one was there. Only the empty stone bridge, and the lane leading back into the mossy tunnel of the Dark Mile. The Laird of Achnacarry had vanished. As crazy as he felt doing it, McConnell reached into his pocket to make sure the swatch of tartan was still there, to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated the whole damned thing.

He hadn’t. The cloth felt reassuringly coarse against his fingers. He started back toward the castle, thinking of what Lochiel had told him.
Pick your battles
. He hadn’t picked this one. Duff Smith had picked it for him. It was odd. In war you ended up taking orders from men like Smith, pragmatic generals who assessed casualty projections with all the detachment of actuaries at Lloyd’s. Why couldn’t it be a man like Sir Donald Cameron who sent you in harm’s way? A man of flesh and blood and compassion. A leader who didn’t manipulate, but inspired?

McConnell slung his book bag over his shoulder and broke into a run, feeling his temples throb with frustration. He’d had it up to the neck with training. It was time to get on with it.

While McConnell ate alone in the solitary hut behind the castle, Jonas Stern sat in Colonel Vaughan’s office, still half expecting to be raked over the coals by the colonel for stealing the bicycle. It was not Charles Vaughan who appeared at the door, however, but Brigadier Smith. The SOE chief wore a heavy raincoat and his stalker’s cap, but tonight he carried no map case. He sat down heavily in Vaughan’s chair, pulled a bottle of single-malt whiskey and two glasses from a file cabinet, and poured two fingers into each glass.

“Drink that,” he ordered Stern.

Stern sat motionless. “What’s wrong? You haven’t scrubbed the mission?”

“Scrubbed it? I should say not. McShane and his men are flying toward Germany as I speak.”

“What is it then?”

Smith’s voice carried a note Stern had never heard from him before. Almost . . . compassion. “I drove over from the takeoff point just to see you,” he said. “We’ve had some news out of Germany. It may concern you.”

“How?”

The brigadier pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his inside coat pocket. “Three days ago, SOE scraped a Pole off a Baltic ice floe. He’d worked wonders for us, but he was blown. He managed to bring out one last haul. Among his papers were several lists of names. People who’d died at certain camps. One of those camps was Totenhausen.”

Stern nodded slowly. “And?”

Smith handed the sheet across the desk. Scanning it quickly, Stern saw about fifty names, some obviously Jewish, others not. There were numbers beside each name. He found it near the bottom of the page, a name that stood out like letters of fire among the others:
Avram Stern (87052)
.

Stern cleared his throat. “How old is this list?” he asked in a shaky voice.

“We don’t know. Could be months, could be as recent as a week. Is it your father, lad?”

“How the hell do I know?” Stern exploded. “There could be a hundred Avram Sterns inside concentration camps!”

“In the Rostock area?” Smith asked softly.

Stern raised his right hand, pleading for silence. “I told him,” he said, staring at the floor. “I begged him. But he wouldn’t leave. I was fourteen and I could see it. But he’d fought for the Kaiser in the Great War. Said Hitler would never betray the veterans. What shit. What
shit
!” He stood up and moved to leave.

“Hold on a minute,” Smith said. “I know this is a hard blow. I debated whether or not to show you that list. But it’s a man’s right to know. You may not come back from Germany yourself.”

Stern nodded dully.

“You’re going in tomorrow night. Almost the dark of the moon.” Smith seemed hesitant to proceed. “I’ve got to say this. You know you can’t bring anyone out with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Jews,” Smith said firmly. “No one is coming out of Germany but you and McConnell. If you do bring anyone out, the sub won’t take them aboard. Clear? No one can ever know about this mission, Stern.
Ever
. Especially the Americans.”

“To hell with the Americans. How can I bring anyone out if I’m not going inside the camp until after the attack?”

“That’s exactly my point. See that you don’t.”

Smith examined his fingernails. “Is the good doctor still trying to talk you out of going?”

“What? Oh. No. He talks. Doesn’t mean anything. Talking never adds up to anything.”

“So you’re ready, then? Even if McConnell loses his nerve, balks, whatever. You’ll carry it through?”

Stern looked up in exasperation, his burning black eyes answer enough.

“And the prisoners?”

“I know what has to be done.”

“There’s a good lad.” Smith gave a satisfied grunt, then poured himself another whiskey and took a measured sip. “There’s one last bit of business we have to discuss. It’s rough, but necessary. And you’re the man for it, I can see.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’ve been in hostile territory before. You know how it works. There can be no question of either of you being captured alive. Especially McConnell, with all he knows. It simply wouldn’t do.”

Stern reached into his shirt and brought out a small round medal with the Star of David engraved on it. Smith had never noticed the chain before. Stern worked the dull silver between his fingers, then opened his hand. In his palm lay an oblong black pill.

“I’ve carried it ever since North Africa,” he said.

The brigadier raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Good show. Usually best for everyone, yourself included. However, I doubt whether Dr. McConnell shares your philosophy of preparedness. In fact . . . I doubt the man would take cyanide even if he had it.”

“He wouldn’t,” agreed Stern.

Duff Smith sat without speaking for nearly a minute. Finally, he said, “You understand?”

Stern’s black eyes never blinked. “If that’s the way it has to be,” he said in a toneless voice. “
Zol zayn azoy
. So be it.”

When Stern had gone, Brigadier Smith folded his list of names and put it back into his pocket. Then he drank the whiskey Stern had left on the desk. He hadn’t really wanted to lie, but he had no alternative. In all his experience, he had never ordered a mission quite like this one. War always required blood to achieve victory, but never had he seen the equation so starkly laid out. BLACK CROSS did not require the sacrifice of trained soldiers at the hands of the enemy, but the murder of innocent prisoners by one of their own people. Under the cold light of a planning table, it was a simple calculus of casualties versus potential gain —
enormous
gain. But Smith had enough experience in the field to know that for the man on the ground, who would himself have to take those innocent lives, cold reason might not be enough. In that situation a man needed conviction that burned like lye in his belly.

He had just given Jonas Stern that conviction. SOE really had scraped a Pole off the Baltic coast three days ago. And the Pole
had
been carrying a list of dead Jews. But there was no Avram Stern among the names. Smith had no idea whether Avram Stern was alive or dead, and he didn’t much care. He’d gotten the name from Major Dickson in London, who had a file on Jonas Stern an inch thick, requisitioned from the military police in Palestine. The funny thing, Smith reflected, was that his lie about Stern’s father dying in Totenhausen was probably as close as anyone would ever come to knowing his true fate. And if that lie gave the son the fire he needed to carry out BLACK CROSS, then the old Jew would not have died in vain.

“Cheeky sod!” thundered a familiar voice. “Drinking my whiskey! I’ll pin your ruddy ears back, Duff!”

Smith blinked up at the massive bulk and florid face of Colonel Charles Vaughan. “Sorry,” he said, rising to his feet. “I was breaking a bit of bad news. A dram softens the blow, what?”

Vaughan’s expression changed instantly to paternal concern. “’Ere now, Duff, I was only ’aving you on. Let’s drain the bottle, eh? Absent friends.”

“Thanks just the same, Charles.” Smith stepped out from behind the desk and patted the colonel’s upper arm. “I need to get back to Baker Street.”

Vaughan frowned in disappointment. “All right, then. Cloaks and daggers. Did your special cargo come through all right?”

“Fine. I appreciate your lending me McShane and the others. A tough job wants tough men.”

“They’re my best, no mistake. And no one will ever know they were gone, Duff. Rest assured of that.”

“Thanks, old man.”

Smith stepped through the door, then turned back, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “You know, Charles, it’s frightening how committed some of these Jews are. Cold-blooded as Gurkhas when it comes to the killing. We’d better look to our guns in Palestine after the war’s over.”

Vaughan rubbed his square chin. “I wouldn’t lose sleep over that, Duff. I don’t think Adolf’s going to leave enough of them alive to start a riot, much less a war.”

25

SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss peered through the trees into darkness. Then he turned back and looked deeper into the forest, at the house he had left behind. Through the pouring rain he could see that Frau Kleist had already switched off the lamps. With a satisfied sigh he stepped out of the trees and began following the narrow footpath that led around the wooded hills and back to Totenhausen.

It would take him forty minutes of trudging through wind and rain to reach the camp, but he didn’t really care. His trips to Frau Kleist’s engendered an entirely different sort of fatigue than that produced by close-order drill. Frau Kleist’s husband was captain of U-238, stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. But the “old man” hadn’t been home for eighteen months, and his wife was not the type to martyr her sexuality for the German Navy. Willi thought the situation funny. Sybille Kleist hated the sea, but she’d married a submarine captain because she loved his dashing uniform. So typically German! Claiming that her husband didn’t get home frequently enough to warrant living in a seaport, she had chosen to live alone in a very comfortable house outside her home village of Dornow.

The captain’s misfortune was Willi Gauss’s salvation. Sybille Kleist was insatiable in bed. Willi was twenty-three years old, she forty. Yet Sybille drained him to exhaustion twice a week, sometimes three times. Some nights she would not even let him step outside the house to have a pee. She waited for this need to make him hard, then used him again. And Willi wasn’t complaining. Only lately had she begun to talk nonsense. She claimed she loved him. Even at twenty-three Willi knew that was dangerous. When the war was over, Captain Johann Kleist would return. U-boat captains were notoriously proud and tough men. Willi planned to have broken off the affair long before that day. Still, one or two more trips to Sybille’s bed wouldn’t make the ending any more difficult.

As he approached a dogleg on the dark path, he heard a muted thump somewhere ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar, but in the rain he couldn’t place the sound. As he rounded the turn, he heard a swish in the trees to his left. Then another thump. Had Sergeant Sturm finally decided to follow him and see what he was up to in the forest at night?

Seconds later Willi stopped dead in the slushy path. Ten meters away stood a giant of a man wearing a dark uniform. Only the whites of two eyes flickered in the space where the face should have been. When Willi saw the parachute and shroud lines flap in the wind, a small voice in his brain said
Kommando
. He discounted it. After all, he was standing on German soil, far from any battlefront. Perhaps Major Schörner had laid on some type of exercise to test the Totenhausen guards. This thought stayed Willi’s hand for a moment. Then he grabbed for the holster on his belt.

A bright flash bloomed in front of the parachutist.

Willi felt a tremendous blow in the stomach. Then he was looking up into the stormy sky over Mecklenburg. The parachutist bent over him. Willi felt more puzzled than afraid. And tired. Unbelievably tired. As he stared upward, the blacked-out face above him swirled, disappeared, then coalesced into the soft features of Sybille Kleist. She looked different somehow. She looked . . . beautiful. As he lost consciousness, Willi realized that perhaps he loved her after all.

“He’s dead, Ian,” said a voice in English.

Sergeant McShane kicked the body. It didn’t move. “Make sure,” he ordered.

A dark figure dropped to the ground and drove a dagger into the fallen German’s heart.

“Papers,” McShane said.

The kneeling figure rifled the dead man’s pockets and came up with a brown leather wallet. “He’s a sergeant. SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss. Here’s a ration card with the word Totenhausen.”

McShane nodded. “I dinna think a lone sergeant with a pistol constitutes a patrol, Colin. Still, someone might be expecting him back at camp.”

The Achnacarry weapons instructor looked up from Willi Gauss’s corpse. “I smell liquor on him, Ian.”

McShane watched the path while he freed himself from his parachute harness. Within seconds two more shadows raced up and stopped beside him. Both men instructors from Achnacarry. One was Alick Cochrane — another Highlander built on the McShane model — the other John Lewis, the judo instructor Stern had embarrassed on the first day of training. By taping his knee, exercising it furiously each day and packing it in ice each night, Lewis had made good his promise to be fit enough for the mission.

“Do you know where we are, Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked.