Black Cross (4 page)

“Okay,” David said. “What happened next?”

“Smith tells me Sarin
is
a German gas. Stolen from the heart of the Reich, he says. Then he tells me I’m wrong — there
is
something I can do to protect our cities.”

“What’s that?”

“Develop an equally lethal gas, so that Hitler won’t dare use Sarin himself.”

David nodded slowly. “If he’s telling the truth about Sarin, that sounds like the only thing to do. I don’t see the problem.”

Mark’s face fell. “You don’t? Christ, you of all people should understand.”

“Look . . . I don’t want to get into this pacifist thing again. I thought you’d come to terms with that. Hell, you’ve been working for the British since 1940.”

“But only in a defensive capacity, you know that.”

David expelled air from his cheeks. “To tell you the truth, I never really saw the difference. You’re either working in the war effort or you’re not.”

“There’s a big difference, David, believe me. Even in liberal Oxford, I’m an official leper.”

“Be glad you’re in Oxford. They’d beat the crap out of you at my air base.”

Mark rubbed his forehead with his palms. “Look, I understand the logic of deterrence. But there has never been a weapon like this before.
Never
.” He watched with relief as the two professors left the pub. “David, I’m going to tell you something that most people don’t know, and we’ve never discussed. Until one month ago, poison gas was the most humane weapon in the world.”

“What?”

“It’s the truth. Despite the agony of burns and the horror of chemical weapons, ninety-four percent of the men gassed in World War One were fit for duty again in nine weeks. Nine weeks, David. The mortality figure for poison gas is somewhere around two percent. Mortality from guns and shells is twenty-five percent — ten times higher. The painful fact is that our father was an exception.”

David’s confusion was evident in his bunched eyebrows. “What are you telling me, Mark?”

“I’m trying to explain that, until Sarin was invented, my aversion to gas warfare was based primarily on the paralyzing terror it held for soldiers, and the psychological aftermath of being wounded by gas. Figures don’t tell the whole truth, especially about human pain. But with Sarin, chemical warfare has entered an entirely new phase. We’re talking about a weapon that has four times the mortality rate of shot and shell. Sarin is one hundred percent lethal. It will kill
every living thing
it touches. I would rather carry a rifle at the front than be responsible for developing something that destructive.”

David’s whole posture conveyed the reluctance he felt to stray onto this territory. “Listen, I swore I’d never argue with you about this again. It’s the same argument I always had with Dad. The Sermon on the Mount versus machine guns. Gandhi versus Hitler. Passive resistance can’t work against Germany, Mark. The Nazis just
don’t give a damn
. You turn the other cheek, those bastards’ll slice it off for you. Hell, it was the Germans who gassed Dad in the first place!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Yeah, yeah. Jeez, I don’t like where this conversation’s ended up.” The young pilot scratched his stubbled chin, deep in thought. “Okay . . . okay, just listen to me for a minute. Everybody back home calls you Mac, right? They always have.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just listen. Everybody calls me David, right? Or Dave, or Slick. Why do you think everybody calls you Mac?”

Mark shrugged. “I was the oldest.”

“Wrong. It was because you acted just like Dad did when he was a kid.”

Mark shifted in his seat. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, hell. You know I’m right. But what you don’t know, or don’t want to know, is that you
still
act just like him.”

Mark stiffened.

“Our father — the great physician — spent most of his life inside our house.
Hiding
.”

“He was blind, for God’s sake!”

“No, he wasn’t,” David said forcefully. “His eyes were damaged, but he could see when he wanted to.”

Mark looked away, but didn’t argue.

“God knows his face looked bad, but he didn’t have to hide it. When I was a kid I thought he did. But he
didn’t
. People could’ve gotten used to him. To the scars.”

Mark closed his eyes, but the image in his mind only grew clearer. He saw a broken man lying on a sofa, much of his face and neck mutilated by blistering poisons that had splashed over half his body and entered his lungs. As a young boy Mark had watched his mother press cotton pads against that man’s eyes, to soak up the tears that ran uncontrollably from the damaged membranes. She would retreat to the kitchen to weep softly when she was sure his father slept.

“Mom never got used to them,” he said quietly.

“You’re right,” said David. “But it wasn’t his face. It was the scars inside she couldn’t handle. Do you hear what I’m saying? Dad was a certified war hero. He could’ve walked tall anywhere in America. But he didn’t. And do you know why,
Doctor
McConnell? Because he brooded too goddamn much. Just like you. He tried to carry the weight of the fucking world on his shoulders. When I enlisted in the air corps, he threatened to disown me. And that was from his deathbed. But long before that, he’d made you so scared and disgusted with the idea of war that he charted your whole life for you.” David wiped his brow. “Look, I’m not telling you what to do. You’re the genius in this family.”

“Come on, David.”

“Goddamn it, drop the phony bullshit! I was eight years behind you in school, and all the teachers still called me by your name, okay? I’m a flyer, not a philosopher. But I can tell you this. When Ike’s invasion finally jumps off, and our guys hit those French beaches, it’s gonna be bad. Real bad. Guys younger than me are gonna be charging fortified machine-gun nests. Concrete bunkers. They’re gonna be dying like flies over there. Now you’re telling me they might have to face this Sarin stuff. If you’re the guy who can stop Hitler from using it, or invent a defense against it, or at least give us the ability to hit back just as hard. . . . Well, you’d have to do a lot of talking to convince those guys it’s right to do nothing at all. They’d call you a traitor for that.”

Mark winced. “I know that. But what you don’t understand is that
there is no defense
. The clothing required to protect a man from Sarin is airtight, and it’s heavy. A soldier could fight in it for maybe an hour, two at the most. GIs won’t even wear their standard gas masks in combat now, just because of a little discomfort. They could never take a defended beach in full body suits.”

“So what are you saying? We’re whipped, let’s lie down and wait until we’re all eating Wiener Schnitzel?”

“No. Look, if Sarin
is
a German gas, Hitler has yet to use it. Maybe he won’t. I’m saying I won’t be the man that makes Armageddon possible. Someone else can have that job.”

David blinked his eyes several times, trying to focus on his watch. “Look,” he said, “I think I’m going to drive back up to Deenethorpe tonight.”

Mark reached across the table and squeezed his brother’s arm. “Don’t do that, David. I should never have brought this up.”

“It’s not that. It’s just . . . I’m so tired of the whole goddamn thing. All the guys I knew that never came back from raids. I stopped making friends two months ago, Mac. It isn’t worth it.”

Mark saw then that the bourbon had finally taken effect.

“I think about you a lot, you know,” David said softly. “When I feel those bombs drop out of Shady Lady’s belly, when the flak’s hammering the walls, I think, at least my brother doesn’t have to see this. At least he’s gonna make it back home. He deserves it. Always trying to do the right thing, to be the good son, faithful to the wife. Now I find out you’re dealing with this stuff . . .” David looked down, as if trying to perceive something very small at the center of the table. “I try not to think about Dad too much. But you really are just like him. In the good ways too, I mean. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he was right, too. I just don’t want to think about it anymore tonight. And if I’m here, there’s no way not to think about it.”

“I understand.”

Mark tipped the bartender as they left the pub, an act that always brought a wry smile from a man unused to the custom. David carefully tucked his nearly-empty bourbon bottle inside his leather jacket, then paused on the corner of George Street. “You’ll do the right thing in the end,” he said. “You always do. But I don’t want to hear another word about any forward surgical unit. You’re a real asshole sometimes. You must be the only guy in this war trying to think of ways to get closer to the fighting instead of away from it.”

“Except for officers,” Mark said.

“Right.” David looked up the blacked out street, then down at his captain’s bars. “Hey, I’m an officer, you know.”

Mark punched him on the shoulder. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“Good. Now where did I park that goddamn jeep?”

Mark grinned and took the lead. “Follow me, Captain.”

4

Twenty miles from the dreaming spires of Oxford, Winston Spencer Churchill stood stiffly at a window, smoking a cigar and peeking through a crack in his blackout curtains. The three men seated behind him waited tensely, watching the cigar’s blue smoke curl up toward the red cornice.

“Headlights,” Churchill said, a note of triumph in his voice.

He turned from the window. His face wore its customary scowl of pugnacious concentration, but these men knew him well. They saw the excitement in his eyes. “Brendan,” he said gruffly. “Meet the car outside. Show the general directly to me.”

Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s former private secretary, Man Friday, and now minister of information, hurried to the main entrance of Chequers, one of the country estates that the prime minister used as a wartime hideaway.

Churchill quietly regarded the two men left in the room. Sitting rigid by the low fire was Brigadier General Duff Smith. The fifty-year-old Scotsman’s empty left coat sleeve was pinned to his shoulder; the arm that should have filled it was buried somewhere in Belgium. A personal friend of Churchill, Smith now directed Special Operations Executive, the paramilitary espionage organization whose primary directive, penned by Churchill in 1940, was to “SET EUROPE ABLAZE.”

To Brigadier Smith’s right stood F. W. Lindemann, now Lord Cherwell. An Oxford don and longtime confidante, Lindemann advised the prime minister on all scientific matters, and monitored the work of a gaggle of geniuses — gleaned mostly from Oxford and Cambridge — who labored twenty hours a day to increase the Allies’ technological advantages over the Germans.

“Are we quite ready, gentlemen?” Churchill asked pointedly.

Brigadier Smith nodded. “As far as I’m concerned, Winston, it’s an open and shut case. Of course, there’s no guarantee Eisenhower will see it our way.”

Professor Lindemann started to speak, but Churchill had already straightened at the sound of boots in the hallway. Brendan Bracken opened the door to the study and General Dwight D. Eisenhower strode in, followed by Commander Harry C. Butcher, his naval aide and friend of long standing. Sergeant Mickey McKeogh, Eisenhower’s driver and valet, took up a post outside the door. The last American to enter was a major of army intelligence. He was not introduced.

“Greetings, my dear General!” Churchill said. He moved forward and pumped Eisenhower’s hand with all-American enthusiasm. His red, black, and gold dressing gown contrasted strangely with the American general’s simple olive drab uniform.

“Mr. Prime Minister,” Eisenhower replied. “It’s good to see you again, though unexpected.”

The two men’s eyes met with unspoken communication. Last month’s conferences at Cairo and Teheran had not gone off without tensions between the two men. With the invasion less than five months away, Churchill still had reservations about a cross-Channel thrust into France, preferring to attack Germany through what he called the “soft underbelly” of Europe. Eisenhower, though he had just been named supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, was still adjusting to the mantle of power and had yet to assert his primacy in matters of strategy.

“An uneventful trip up from London, I hope?” Churchill said.

Eisenhower smiled. “The fog was so thick on Chesterfield Hill that Butcher had to get out and walk ahead of the car with a flashlight. But we made it, as you can see.” He crossed the room and respectfully shook hands with Brigadier Smith, whom he’d known since 1942. Everyone else was introduced, excepting the American major of intelligence, who remained silent and stiff as a suit of decorative armor beside the closed study door.

Churchill rescued his dying cigar from an ashtray and walked over to his desk. He did not sit. This was the atmosphere he liked — his Parliamentary milieu — him on his feet, speaking to a captive audience sitting on its collective ass. He picked up something small off the desk and rolled it in his palm. It appeared to be a bit of ornamental glass.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “time is short and the matter at hand grave. So I’ll be brief. The Nazis” — he pronounced the word
Narzis
, with a slur that managed to simultaneously convey both contempt and menace — “are up to their old tricks again. And some new ones as well. At the very moment when the tide seems to be turning irrevocably in our favor — I daresay on the very cusp of invasion — the Hun has sunk to new depths of frightfulness. He has apparently decided that no scientific abomination is too ghastly to use in his quest to stave off disaster.”

Though well-accustomed by now to Churchill’s flamboyant rhetoric, Eisenhower listened intently. He had only just arrived from North Africa via Washington, and any hint of new information about the European theater tantalized him.

Churchill rolled the piece of glass in his hand. “Before I proceed, I feel I must restate that this meeting, for official purposes, never occurred. No entries should be made in private diaries to record it. I am even breaking my own inviolate rule. No one will be asked to sign the guest book when they leave.”