Black Cross (69 page)

McConnell saw they had entered another village. “What
are
you going to do then?”

Stern hunched over the wheel. “Be ready to move fast, Doctor. I’ll carry the child, you take the woman. No matter what happens,
don’t get separated
.”

McConnell had no intention of doing that. “I’m ready,” he said.

Stern drove right down the main street of the village. It looked deserted, but at the end of the street McConnell saw the faint silhouette of masts against the night sky. A light burned in a shack at the entrance to the jetty. Stern stopped long enough to wriggle out of his oilskin suit, then pulled up beside the shack and gave a loud blast on the horn.

“Are you crazy?” McConnell asked.

Stern pulled his SD cap out of his bag, set it on his head at an angle and got out of the car, leaving the engine running.

A uniformed officer of the coastal police stumbled out of the shack with a flashlight in his hand. He was about to curse to high heaven whomever had disturbed his sleep when the beam of his torch fell upon the blood-soaked uniform, the Iron Cross First Class, and the rank badge of a colonel in the SD.

“Get that light out of my face, idiot!” Stern barked. “Stand at attention!”

The policeman — a fifty-year-old veteran of World War One — snapped instantly erect, his thumbs at the seams of his trousers. “What can I do for you, Standartenführer?”

“Who are you?”

“Feldwebel Kurt Voss.”

“Well, Feldwebel, I need a boat.”

The policeman’s face was gray with fright, but he was not stupid enough to mention the blood and bruises on the face of the Nazi apparition before him. “There are many boats here, Standartenführer. What type of boat do you require?”

“A motor launch. A seaworthy vessel, the fastest on the dock.”

The policeman swallowed. “Most of the boats here are for fishing, Standartenführer. And with the ice this time of year . . . well, few go out at all.”

“There must be something.”

“There is the Kriegsmarine patrol boat. Its crew put in earlier tonight for . . . well—”

“I understand perfectly, Feldwebel.” Stern smiled coldly. “Lead the way to this craft. I will follow in my car.”

“But you must speak to the captain first, Standartenführer. He will certainly . . .”

The policeman fell silent under Stern’s withering glare.

Stern cocked his chin and enunciated each word separately in the Gestapo fashion, like whiplashes. “The captain will do
what
, Feldwebel? Report to Berlin that he was unavailable to assist an SD officer on Reich security business because he was lying drunk in a brothel?”

The policeman shook his head violently. “You are right, Standartenführer! Follow me. I’ll have the boat running before you get aboard.”

There was some confusion at the boat when Anna and little Hannah appeared. The wide-eyed policeman could not convince himself that a wounded woman and a child were involved in official SD business, but he was trying hard. Stern carried Hannah into the cabin and laid her in a berth. McConnell and Anna sat down opposite her.

“I’ll be on the bridge,” Stern told them. He squeezed Anna’s good arm. “We’re almost there.”

He found the policeman standing at the wheel. “How much fuel do we have, Feldwebel?”

“The tanks are full, Standartenführer. There’s also an extra can in the hold.”

“Enough to get us to Sweden?”

“Sweden!” The policeman’s terror of the SD battled with his fear of being charged in some treasonous scheme. “Standartenführer, if your business is that important, I’m sure Captain Leber would be glad to ferry you across. Let me call him for you. I know exactly where he is.”

“I’m sure you do.” Stern revved the engines of the
Schnellboot
and was rewarded with a powerful rumble. He motioned the policeman closer. “Feldwebel,” he said softly, “what I am about to say you will repeat on pain of death. The woman and child you just saw are the mistress and child of Reichsführer Himmler. I am their bodyguard. Two hours ago, they were nearly kidnapped by officers disloyal to the Führer. We barely escaped with our lives. The Reichsführer personally instructed me to get them to Sweden by dawn. Now —
do I have enough fuel
?”

The policeman nodded hopelessly.

“How far to open water?”

“Six kilometers.”

“That is all I require, Feldwebel. Return to your post.”

The policeman climbed onto the dock without a word. Running up the jetty, he heard the thunder of the patrol boat’s twin inboard engines as Stern sped north through the black channel that led through the ice sheet to the open waters of the Baltic. Once inside his hut, the feldwebel reached for his telephone, then pulled his hand back into his lap. Stern’s scandalous story was sufficient to stay his hand for several minutes. But in the end he snatched up the phone again and called a certain well-known house in Dierhagen to inform Kriegsmarine Captain Leber that a son of a whore from the SD had hijacked his patrol boat to go to Sweden.

After one hour and twenty minutes inside the E-Block, Avram Stern knew the women and children could stand no more. There was no light. Children perching on their mothers’ shoulders blocked all four porthole windows. The heat was stifling, almost unbearable; several women had already fainted, and there was nowhere for them to fall. The noise was unbearable. The ceaseless shrieks and wails of hysterical women and children hammered at the shoemaker’s eardrums, raising the specter of panic in his own mind. He’d shouted a dozen times for them to be silent, but to no avail.

He felt the dead weight of an unconscious woman sag against him. The child who had been sitting on her shoulders screamed and toppled the other way, into the clawing, shoving mass. Avram tried to take a deep, calming breath, but the air that entered his lungs tasted like acid. He took the machine pistol from the boy Jonas had given it to and began climbing over the heads of the women. Fingernails raked his face and neck, but he struck back, fighting toward the only window whose position he was sure of relative to the door: the window from which Heinrich Himmler had observed the last selection.

He saw a glimmer of moonlight.

When he finally reached the window, he had to fight the urge to immediately shoot it out. No matter how bad things were inside the gas chamber, death might wait without. He pressed his face to the double-paned glass. Bodies lay strewn across the alley as if they had fallen off a plague wagon. Bile rose into his chest. Avram knew he would recognize every dead face in the alley. What had Jonas done? And why? Where was the benefit? As he stared at the hellish scene, something moved slowly into his field of vision.

A dog.

It wasn’t one of Sturm’s German shepherds with powerful haunches and a glowing coat, but a mongrel from the hills. A scavenger that survived on the refuse of Dornow. The mongrel moved from one corpse to another with boldness driven by hunger. It lingered at the corpse of a woman, tugged at her shift, then licked her face and backed up to gauge the response. Avram counted to sixty, warding off angry blows from below.

The dog was still alive.

Avram pressed the barrel of the machine pistol to the window and pulled the trigger.

Opening the hatch of the E-Block wasn’t half as difficult as climbing through the jagged porthole had been. The moment he pulled back the steel door, limp bodies cascaded through it like corpses he’d once seen at a rail siding in eastern Germany. He backed up the cement stairs and waited for the hysterical mass of women and children to empty from the gas chamber.

When the alley was full of milling prisoners, he climbed to the top of the hospital steps and fired the machine pistol into the air. “Listen to me!” he shouted. “We have survived, but we are not yet saved. SS reinforcements are bound to arrive soon.” A ripple of fear passed through the crowd. “We must get away immediately. The best hope for all of you is the forests of Poland. I want the two largest German-speakers among you to go to the SS barracks and put on uniforms like mine. Do not try to strip the dead! Gas on their clothing could kill you. Look for spare uniforms in closets or chests. I want ten others to search the camp for the troop truck. The trucks by the factory will be badly contaminated. Touch
nothing
unless absolutely necessary. There could be lethal gas on any surface.”

As the frightened women spoke among themselves, Avram turned and reached through the shattered window in the hospital’s back door and pushed down the handle with the butt of the machine pistol. Walking through, he felt a tug on his belt. He turned and looked into the eyes of Rachel Jansen, who carried her three-year-old son on her left hip. The boy’s eyes were glazed with shock.

“Where are you going, Shoemaker?” Rachel asked.

“To look for money.”

“I want to come with you.”

Avram nodded and led her into the dark building.

In an office on the second floor he found a hundred Reichmarks, but it was not even a quarter of what he would need.

“Will money help us in Poland?” Rachel asked.

Still ransacking drawers, Avram did not answer.

“Do you really believe we can cross the border and contact a friendly resistance group?”

“There’s a fair chance.” Avram slammed a door shut and turned to face her. “But I don’t think it’s the best chance. You don’t have to go to Poland if you don’t want to.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you have the courage, you can come with me. I have a friend in Rostock. A Gentile. He worked ten years in my shop. He offered to help me many years ago, but I was too stupid to understand the danger. I am going to try to reach him now.”

“You mean go into the city itself?” Rachel asked fearfully.

“It will be dangerous,” he conceded. “If we had money it would be better. We could try to buy our way across to Sweden. I’ve found a little, but not enough. And we don’t have time to search the whole camp.”

Rachel was silent in the darkness. At length she said, “Do you really think Rostock is the best chance?”

“For me, yes. For you and the child, yes. But no more.”

“I have money, Shoemaker.”

“
What
? How much?”

“Three more diamonds. I found them the night you caught me outside. The night Marcus died.”

Avram seized her arms with joy. “I thank God you are a devious woman! Hurry, you’ll need an SS uniform. I saw one in the closet here. It belonged to one of the assistant doctors. Rauch, I think.”

They heard the bellow of the troop truck before Rachel finished dressing. When she had, Avram carried Jan down the stairs and they joined the crowd outside.

“Into the truck!” Avram said. “Everyone, hurry!”

While mothers passed children up into the bed of the truck, Avram sought out the two women he’d sent to the SS barracks to find uniforms. He found them by the cab. They’d taken it upon themselves to procure rifles as well as uniforms.
Perhaps they have a chance after all
, Avram thought. With their short-cropped hair they could certainly pass for SS men at a distance.

“We found it idling on the road with its headlights burning,” said the larger of the pair.

“You can drive a truck?” he asked.

She nodded curtly. “You are not coming?”

“No. Listen to me. Drive eastward by as straight a route as you can, but stick to the back roads. It shouldn’t take more than three hours. Stop for nothing. If anyone does manage to stop you, tell them you’re taking typhus-infected prisoners into the forest to shoot them, by order of SS Lieutenant-General Herr Doktor Klaus Brandt. Do you understand?”

The women nodded.

“When you get close to the border, drive the truck into the trees. Cross on foot through the forest. If you are being chased, don’t make a fight of it and don’t stop to try to save any wounded. Run for your lives. Your only hope is contacting a friendly resistance group in the forest.” He turned up his palms. “That is all I know to tell you. You’d better get moving.”

The two women climbed up into the cab and shifted the truck into gear. Avram helped lift the last of the children into the back, then signaled to the driver. As the truck trundled past the dead and out of the alley, he thought of the old woman who had compared the E-Block to a lifeboat. She was dead now, but she had been right. Now the truck was the lifeboat. He lifted Jan from Rachel’s arms and began walking out of the alley.

“Where are we going?” Rachel asked.

“They keep a Kubelwagen parked behind the gas storage tanks. That’s perfect for us. Small but official.”

Rachel had to hurry to keep up with his long strides. “Are you sure about Rostock? You’ll have to get us through checkpoints, speak to policemen.”

“I’m sure.”

“Can you fool them?”

Avram laughed softly. “Frau Jansen, I was once a German soldier. I had a medal from the Kaiser. I can convince those bastards we’re on a mission for Hitler himself if it will get us a step closer to freedom.”

Rachel took his free hand in hers and squeezed hard. “To Palestine,” she said.

One mile north of Dierhagen, Jonas Stern extinguished the running lights of the patrol boat and let it idle in the open water. At least the dangerous run through the narrow ice channel was over. He assumed the Kriegsmarine had been alerted by now, but hoped that his emphasis on reaching Sweden would cause them to establish a blockade line farther out to sea. He blinked the running lights on and off three times in quick succession, waited thirty seconds, then repeated the signal.

He saw nothing. Three hundred and sixty degrees of darkness. He wondered if there had ever been a submarine at all. Had Smith ever believed he and McConnell would get this far?

“Why have we stopped?”

McConnell had poked his head up from the cabin.

“How’s the nurse?” Stern asked.

“Okay for now. There was no morphine in the first aid kit. I gave her some schnapps I found in a bag. I need real medical supplies, Jonas.”

Stern nodded. “This is where we’re supposed to meet the submarine. But there’s no sub here.”