Greg Iles - Black Cross

The “Mossies” would be near the limit of their range, but with no known antiaircraft guns to worry about, they could afford to make a slow, accurate bomb run. Their primary target was a prison camp sheltered between the hills and the river, known to them only as TARA. In tandem formation, they would pound the southern face of those hills with high-explosive and incendiary bombs until nothing remained but a fire burning hot enough to boil the nearby Recknitz River.

Jonas Stern walked into Anna’s bedroom and checked his SD uniform in the mirror. He had forgotten to remove the creosote stain he’d gotten while climbing the pylon, but that was a small thing now. He straightened his collar, checked the Iron Cross on his breast, felt the pocket that held his papers.

Staring at his reflection, Stern found it easy to believe that his father had not recognized him. Even though he had shaved in the afternoon, the face and eyes under the peaked SD cap seemed to belong to a man he did not know.

Perhaps they did. So much had happened in the past three days. The visit to Rostock had hit him hardest. Finding his father alive had been a miracle, and yet some part of him had not been surprised by it. Such miracles were not outside his experience of war. But the trip into Rostock, into the neighborhood where he had lived until age fourteen, had overwhelmed him. Even though he and his mother had fled Germany in fear, even though he knew as well as anyone the outrages perpetrated against the Jews who remained behind, some inaccessible part of him had clung to that small neighborhood, those few streets and buildings that had nurtured him. That part, that repository of memory, had remained German.

When he entered his street, expecting to find his old apartment building smashed to rubble, and then saw it standing as tall and proud as it ever had, hope welled in him. He climbed the stairs to the second floor with the unreasoning faith of a fool, shedding years with each step, his cynicism left at the curb with the stolen car. But when he knocked at the door he had once been unable to open because he could not reach the handle, it was answered not by his mother or father or his uncle or anyone else he remembered, but by a bespectacled man of sixty with white hair and soup stains on his shirt.

Stern stood mute, staring past the stranger. The furniture in the apartment was the furniture he had grown up with. His mother’s sofa and end tables, his father’s bookcase and wall clock. He swayed on his feet, his sense of time in free fall. The stranger asked if the Standartenführer was all right. Finally focusing on the face before him, Stern realized that the old man was trembling in fear. The SD uniform had worked its spell.

Even as he mumbled his apologies, Stern caught sight of the two blond children beyond the old man. The boy was only half-dressed, but the tunic hanging open on his shoulders, exposing his white chest, was the familiar black of the Hitler Youth. He wore it as naturally as a British boy would have worn a Boy Scout uniform.

Stern almost stumbled down the stairs in his haste to get back to the car. He would rather have found the whole street leveled by Allied bombs and his relatives dead under the wreckage. The sight of that apartment, filled by the furniture of his memory but empty of the people he had known, had punched like a stake into that hidden part of him that remained what he had been as a child, that remained German. As he turned the car out of the familiar street, he truly understood something for the first time. He was not German. He was a Jew. A man without a country, without even a home. A man who was only what he could make of himself, who could call home only that land he could take and hold by force of arms.

Anna’s voice rising in the kitchen brought Stern back to the present. He cocked the SD cap on his head, picked up his Schmeisser and walked into the kitchen. McConnell and the nurse were sitting at the table. They had spoken little to him since his attempt to shoot Sabine — who now lay trussed like a turkey in the basement — but he had no regrets. Leaving the woman alive was a mistake. If they couldn’t see that, so be it.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Just like one of them,” said Anna. “Except for the suntan. Maybe you are one of them.”

Stern ignored her. He set his Schmeisser on the table and folded his arms as he stood over them. “The whole thing is timing now,” he said. “It’s seven oh-five. I’m taking Sabine’s Mercedes to the camp, and I plan to be at the gate in ten minutes. I’m going to leave the climbing spikes at the foot of the pylon on my way. I don’t plan to be inside the camp longer than fifteen minutes.”

“What are you going to tell the prisoners?” asked McConnell. “You think you can explain the situation and get them to decide who will live or die in fifteen minutes?”

“The less time they have to think, the better. If all goes well, you will hear an explosion at seven-fifty. That will be me blowing out the transformers in the power station on the hill. You will be waiting here. When you hear the explosion, take the Volkswagen and meet me where the road comes closest to the pylon. Have the gas suits with you. We’ll go to the camp together and finish the job. If you haven’t heard the grenade by seven-fifty, I’ve failed. Then you must take the car up the hill, put on the climbing spikes as I showed you, climb the pylon and release the cylinders.”

“All in ten minutes?” McConnell asked. “Why don’t Anna and I just wait on the hill?”

“Because the only thing that can stop this attack now is someone discovering those cylinders before the attack. I don’t want either of you anywhere near that pylon until it’s absolutely necessary.”

“But that’s not enough time.”

“It is. I’ve seen you run, Doctor. I’ve seen you carry logs on your back. Even if you only climbed six feet per minute, you could climb that pole in ten minutes. You’ll climb it a lot faster than that, if it comes to it.”

Stern picked up a piece of cloth from the table. It was the swatch of tartan Sir Donald Cameron had given McConnell on the bridge. “The two buried cylinders will detonate automatically at eight,” he said, rubbing the tartan between his fingers. “If you’ve had to send down the cylinders yourself, consider the job done. I’ll be beyond help and there will probably be SS reinforcements on the way.” He dropped the tartan and tilted his head toward Anna. “She knows the area. The two of you might be able to reach the sub. She can take my place.”

“It won’t come to that,” McConnell said.

“Sure.” Stern shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Listen, if I don’t get out, and you do . . . well, my mother lives in Tel Aviv. Leah Stern.”

“It won’t come to that,” McConnell said again.

“Just promise you’ll do it. I don’t trust Smith. That lying bastard told me my father was dead.” He slung the Schmeisser over his shoulder. “Just tell my mother I was with Father at the end, okay? That I tried to get him out.”

“Smith told you your father was dead?”

Stern nodded. “He wanted me angry enough to kill anybody who stood in the way of getting this job done.”

McConnell shoved his chair back and stood up. “If the worst happens, I’ll get word to your mother. But you’re going to tell her about it yourself. It’ll be the big family story. The night Jonas saved his old man from the Nazis.”

Stern took McConnell’s hand and shook it.

“Shalom,” McConnell said, and smiled. “What do you say?”

Stern’s mouth split into a grin. He looked unbelievably young then, too young for what he was about to do. “Kiss my ass, Doctor. Is that right?”

“Close enough.”