Black Cross (66 page)

47

“Did you get the oxygen bottle?” Stern shouted, running toward the flashlight beam at the opposite end of the hospital corridor.

The beam moved down and illuminated a green bottle lying on a dark, reflective sheet. Stern set the kicking bundle that was Hannah Jansen on the sheet.

“Took it from a pneumonia case,” came Weitz’s muffled reply. “You’d better put on that suit.”

Stern lost no time doing that. But as he tried to work the recessed zipper, he realized something was wrong. Weitz could not be holding the flashlight to help him see and at the same time be taping the little girl into the vinyl sheet — which the sounds Stern had been hearing indicated he was doing.

“Who else is here?” Stern cried, throwing himself out of the beam of the flashlight.

“It’s all right!” Weitz said, shining the torch onto another black-suited figure wearing an air tank on its back. The figure looked up from its work. In the glow of the flashlight Stern first saw only a reflection. Then, through the clear vinyl mask McConnell had brought from Oxford, he saw the blond hair and dark eyes of Anna Kaas. She stared back at him for a moment, obviously stunned by the blood and bruising on his face, then pointed at his gas suit and went back to her work.

Stern lost no time zipping up the Raubhammer suit. Suddenly, the hospital lights blinked on, faded, then stayed on.

The bright light paralyzed Stern.

“The emergency generator,” said Weitz. “There’s someone in the basement!” He jabbed Stern on the shoulder. “What did you do with my gun?”

“I gave it to someone.”

Weitz cursed and raced around the corner toward Brandt’s office. Anna held up her revolver and called out, but the buzz produced by the speech diaphragm of her mask died after a few feet. She put down her gun and with Stern’s help sealed the vinyl sheet as completely as possible with the roll of tape Weitz had provided. Stern picked up the bundle — much heavier now with the oxygen bottle added to the child’s weight — and turned toward the hospital door.

Sergeant Gunther Sturm stood beside the stairwell, unsteady on his feet but holding an infantry rifle in his hands. The left side of his tunic was soaked in blood.

As Stern bent to set down the child, Sturm fired.

He missed.

The SS man jerked back the bolt for a second shot.

Though years of conditioned reflexes told Stern to attack the man, something stronger surged through him. He threw himself over Hannah Jansen’s body, shielding her from the bullets even as the inner voice told him he would die for it.

He heard gunshots, but too many too quickly to be the bolt-action rifle in Sturm’s hands. He looked up to see Ariel Weitz barreling out of the side corridor firing Klaus Brandt’s Luger.

Sergeant Sturm returned fire at point-blank range.

The boom of the rifle in the wide hallway had not even died when Weitz hit the tile floor. The sergeant staggered over to the fallen man, pulling back the rifle bolt as he walked. Weitz struggled on the floor, but could not rise or even crawl away. Sturm’s bullet had broken his back.

Jonas started to lunge toward the SS man — then a heavy caliber revolver exploded beside his right ear. He threw up his hand to protect his eardrum, watching in astonishment as Anna Kaas fired three more bullets, spiking Sturm to the hospital wall. The sergeant hung there a moment, his arms flung wide, then dropped like a sack of sausage filling, leaving scarlet streaks behind him.

Anna knelt beside Weitz. The little man was fighting just to breathe. She gently pulled off his mask and airhose.

Weitz was unshaven as usual. A faint smile lit his eyes. “Remember what you said?” he whispered.

The lights in the corridor dimmed again, but stayed on.

Anna squeezed the rubber that covered his right hand. “I’m sorry, Herr Weitz?”

“You said . . . God . . . sees how it really is.” He tried unsuccessfully to swallow. “I hope that’s true,” he gasped, and died.

Anna bowed her head.

Stern touched her shoulder. “Do you have a car, Fräulein Kaas?”

As Anna turned to answer, the hospital lights went out and stayed out. Stern pulled her to her feet in the darkness.

“Greta’s car won’t take us far,” she said. “They shot the tires to pieces. What about Sabine’s Mercedes?”

“No.” Stern heard the muffled screaming of the child in the sealed sheet. “Wait!”

He dropped to his knees and felt his way across Gunther Sturm’s bloody corpse, searching for pockets. He almost shouted with relief when he felt his right hand close over car keys. “We’ve got it!” he said, sliding his palms over the cold tiles in search of the SS man’s rifle. “We’ll pick up McConnell at the pylon.”

He found the rifle, stood up, and slung it over his shoulder. At first he thought the frantic buzzing was some type of insect beside his ear. Then Anna punched him and he realized it was the nurse screaming inside her gas mask. He snapped straight and followed her pointing arm.

At the rear door of the hospital, backlit by the dying white light of a parachute flare, stood a tall, black-suited figure. When it lifted an arm toward them, Stern’s mind shouted
Gun
! so loudly that he had Sturm’s rifle off his shoulder and aimed in an instant.

Anna fired her pistol but missed. Twenty meters was well beyond her effective range.

Stern pulled the rifle’s trigger.

Nothing happened. Sergeant Sturm had failed to fully chamber another round. As he worked the bolt, a brilliant red light bloomed in the window behind the silhouette.

It was the flash of multicolored cloth against the black suit that made Stern pull his aim. His bullet smashed the window of the door behind the figure. He knocked Anna’s arm wide, then waved both arms wildly. He had no idea how McConnell had gotten down the hill so fast, but he knew no German would be wearing a piece of Scottish tartan in the heat of battle.

When McConnell reached them, he leaned in close and said, “We’ve got to get out of here! The gas works! The alley is full of dead!”

Stern’s gas mask had no speech diaphragm, so he took the risk of unclipping his air hose. “How the hell did you get here?” he asked, immediately sealing the hole with his palm.

“Air mail!” McConnell shouted, his voice rendered cartoonish by the buzzing diaphragm.

“What?”

“Forget it!”

“What about the factory?” Stern asked. “Do we run? Or do we finish the job?”

“Do we have a car?”

“The Mercedes.”

“What about the camera and the sample canisters?”

“In Greta’s Volkswagen,” Anna said.

McConnell saw something move on the floor. “What the hell is that?”

“A little girl,” Stern told him. “There’s an oxygen bottle in there with her, but we’ve got to get her away from here.”

“What about the other children?” Anna asked.

“The E-Block is full,” said Stern. “The rest. . . ” He shook his head. “This is the one we can still save.”

“Put your air hose back on!” McConnell yelled. “Anna, take the girl in the Mercedes and wait for us by the river. The wind blowing off the water will make that the safest place. Jonas and I are going to do what we came here to do. We’ll meet you at the river. We’ll use the Mercedes to make a run for the coast.” He turned to Stern. “Good enough?”

Stern nodded.

“Any sign of Schörner?” McConnell asked.

“No,” said Anna.

Stern shook his head.

“Find a dark spot to wait,” McConnell told her.

“There’s a ferry down there,” Anna said. “A one-truck ferry used for bringing supplies from the south. If we used that, we wouldn’t have to risk meeting Schörner on the main road.”

Stern nodded with an exaggerated motion, then bent down and hoisted Hannah Jansen onto his right shoulder.

Anna led the way through the front door with her revolver. McConnell suddenly slammed into the air tank on her back. He squeezed past her and stood gaping at the Appellplatz. Two blinding red fires lay burning in the snow like Roman candle flares. He could see two more burning in a straight line beyond the front gate, probably near the river bank. Seeing the ruby flare burst behind him at the rear door of the hospital, he had imagined a flare fired by a dying SS man.

This was something different.

There was almost a pattern to the fires, as if they were comets cast down by an angry but methodical god. McConnell might have kept staring had Stern not shoved him forward and run down the steps like a man with the devil at his heels. Anna pulled McConnell down with her and grabbed a leather bag from the backseat of Greta’s car. Together they followed Stern around the hospital to the Mercedes.

They met him coming back. McConnell called out to ask what the hell was going on, but Stern had already passed him, running across the Appellplatz toward the headquarters building.

They found Hannah on the passenger seat of the idling Mercedes. The oxygen bottle inside the vinyl sheet was slowly inflating it like a balloon. McConnell helped Anna into the driver’s seat. The air tank on her back pressed her chest into the steering wheel, but she managed to shift the car into gear.

“See you at the river!” he shouted, slamming the door.

The Mercedes’ wheels began spinning on the ice.

On impulse McConnell pulled open the back door, jumped across the seat and yelled, “Drop me at the front of the camp!”

It took Major Schörner five minutes to cover the same distance McConnell had covered in eighty seconds. Where McConnell had crossed it in a straight line, Schörner had had to wrestle the troop truck down the tortuous hill road and around the wreckage of his field car just to get within a quarter mile of the camp. Counting the time it had taken him to regroup his men at the power station, he was running very late. With every red fire he passed, the sense of urgency grew in him. He knew what those fires meant. He had seen them in Russia. As the troop truck roared toward the camp gate, he leaned out of the window to shout at the gate guards.

He saw none.

“Slow down!” he shouted at the driver. “Slower, you swine!”

He opened the door and stood on the truck’s running board. As the driver coasted forward, Schörner felt a sudden and powerful sense of dread. He never knew the source of these intuitions, but in Russia he had learned not to question them.

“Stop the truck!” he ordered. “
Stop
!”

The truck skidded to a halt.

Schörner jumped down onto the snow and took a couple of steps toward the gate. Peering into the darkness, his eyes were drawn to three dark forms on the ground about five meters inside the twisted gate. He looked up at the nearest watchtower. The upper half of the tower-gunner’s body was hanging over the gun parapet.

Schörner blinked in disbelief. He backed blindly toward the troop truck, then turned and scrambled up into the cab. “Back up!” he screamed, rolling up the window as fast as he could. “Get us out of here!”

The driver stared at him as if he were mad.

Schörner drew his pistol and put it against the driver’s head. “
There’s been a gas release! I want this truck two hundred meters back up the road
!”

The panicked driver jammed the transmission into reverse and spun the tires for ten seconds before they finally caught on the icy gravel.

“Target Indicators down, sir,” the navigator said. “Aiming Point verified.”

“This is the Master Bomber,” Squadron Leader Sumner said into the radio mike. “If there was any ack-ack down there, they’d be coning us now. Take your time and do it properly. The power station first, then the camp. Bomb on red indicators. Bomb at will.”

Sumner’s Mosquito continued to circle at fifteen hundred feet while the lead bomber went in. The modified aircraft made its run south to north, aiming for the red markers at the power station. It dropped its load one half second too late, causing the single 4,000 pound high-explosive bomb it carried to drift just past the hilltop.

Moments later, the village of Dornow ceased to exist.

McConnell was halfway out of the Mercedes when a shuddering blast wave shook the earth beneath his feet. He looked back toward the hospital and saw a mushroom-shaped fireball boiling into the night sky beyond the hills. As he stared, the crown of the highest hill disappeared in a daisy chain of star-white explosions. The flash arced over Totenhausen, freeze-framing a field of corpses.

Now he understood the red fires.

Now he understood what Stern had figured out the moment he saw the Target Indicators laid out like a grid over the camp. But what the hell did Stern think he could do about it? He couldn’t call 8th Air Force HQ in England and ask them to cancel a bombing raid.

The roar of the fleeing Mercedes brought him back to his senses. He kicked open the door to the building he had seen Stern disappear into and stopped dead. Yellow light was pouring into an empty corridor from a doorway up the hall. Where was the electricity coming from? He stared in wonder at the empty corridor. Why were there no dead Germans here? Had the gas not yet penetrated this building? He closed the door behind him and concentrated on sounds.

It was difficult to hear through the vinyl mask, but there was no mistaking the sound of the diesel generator. He moved quickly up the hall toward the source of the light, which turned out to be the wireless operator’s room. Stern was already seated at the console, searching for a frequency on the dial.

Another chain of explosions rattled the floorboards.

Stern pounded the desk in fury. McConnell immediately saw his problem. Stern wanted to use the radio, but couldn’t risk removing his air hose to speak. He had no idea who Stern wanted to talk to, but the scientist in him knew instantly that there was only one solution. He grabbed a pen by the radio console and scrawled three words on a codebook beside Stern’s hand.

COAL MINE CANARY!

Stern looked up through the bulging eyepieces of his gas mask. Then he grabbed the infantry rifle he had taken from Sergeant Sturm and bolted from the room.

McConnell heard another drumfire of explosions, much nearer this time. The blast waves jolted the radio sets on the shelf. Shit! How bad could their luck be? To be on the verge of success and have it all blown to hell because of poor organization? Duff Smith should have known Bomber Command or the 8th Air Force might unilaterally decide to wipe out a power station like the one on the hill above Dornow. He should have taken steps.