Greg Iles - Black Cross

Before she could open the door, he pushed her aside, smashed the window with his rifle butt and shattered the interior light. Then he opened the door and shoved her all the way across the front seat.

“Get down!” he said. “All the way on the floor!”

Anna obeyed. McConnell stretched flat on his back on the seat, his head just beneath the passenger window, inches from her face, his feet angled down beneath the steering wheel. He held the rifle tight along his body, right forefinger on the trigger.

“Why the lights?” he asked.

“They’ll assume anyone breaking blackout regulations so flagrantly must be inside. But if they do check the cars first . . .” She held up her revolver.

The squeal of automobile brakes mingled with the groan of a heavy truck gearing down. McConnell tensed and tried to decipher the sounds. The truck stopped between the car and the cottage, but kept its engine idling. Four doors opened and closed. Heavy boots crunched on the snow. McConnell raised his head to peek out, but his and Anna’s breath had already fogged the window glass. He heard a loud rapping on the cottage door.

“Fräulein Kaas!” shouted a male voice. “Fräulein Kaas, open the door!”

“Schörner,” Anna hissed.

The sound of the submachine gun hit McConnell like an electric shock. Schörner had shot the lock off the door.

A muffled female voice shouted: “Help me! In the name of the Führer help me!”

“Christ, Sabine got loose!” McConnell heard boots clattering on the floorboards of the cottage.

Anna gripped his arm. “What can you see?” she asked.

He sat up slowly and rubbed a small clear circle in the fogged window on the driver’s side. “A half dozen soldiers by the cottage door. Maybe a dozen more in the troop truck.”

“Get ready. When you hear me shout, start the car.”

McConnell had barely got his feet on the pedals when he saw Anna pull the pins out of two grenades. She opened the Volkswagen’s door and stepped out as casually as if she were getting out at a restaurant, then turned toward the troop truck and tossed the grenades. She was firing her pistol into the knot of soldiers by the door even before the grenades exploded.

“For God’s sake move!” she screamed, with only one foot in the car.

The Volkswagen’s engine roared to life. McConnell floored the accelerator, but the tires spun in vain on the ice.

Two grenades detonated a split second apart in blinding white flashes. Anna kept shooting. McConnell saw an SS man charge through the cottage door, then fly backward like a dog jerked on a leash. Anna dove back into the car and pulled the door shut, and he eased up on the gas and the tires caught.

The Volkswagen fishtailed onto the road. He thanked God for the winters he had spent in England; most Georgia natives couldn’t drive a car half a mile on ice like this. Anna reloaded her pistol and aimed it back over the seat toward the cottage as they sped away.

“They’re not following,” she cried. “What are they doing?”

“Questioning your sister!” McConnell kept his eyes focused on the road. “Put on Stern’s gas suit. Put it on !”

Wolfgang Schörner picked himself up off the cottage floor and walked calmly to the door. He watched the taillights of the Volkswagen racing back up the hill road. The SS corporal who had been driving the troop truck stumbled up to him, his face white with horror.

“Five men dead, Sturmbannführer! Eight wounded! What do we do?”

“First you calm down.” Schörner took a deep, satisfied breath. “The war has finally come to Totenhausen, Rottenführer. People die in wars.”

“Do we go after them?”

“Not yet. The fools are running straight toward the camp.” He turned and looked back into the kitchen. Sabine Hoffman was being helped off of the floor by an SS private. “I apologize for the interruption, Madam. As I was saying, I met you several months ago in Berlin. Your husband is Gauleiter Hoffman?”

“Yes, Sturmbannführer!”

“Can you tell me who left in that car?”

“My sister! She’s gone mad! There were two men with her most of the day. One American, the other a Jew. He was dressed as an SD officer!”

“We have that man in custody,” Schörner said in a reassuring voice. “Do you know what your sister and this American planned to do tonight?”

“I heard the Jew saying something about an electrical station.”

Schörner felt a prick of anxiety. “Anything else?”

“Anna was asking the American something about poison gas. He seemed to know quite a lot about it.”

The color drained from Schörner’s face. “Is there a telephone here?”

Sabine shook her head.

“Rottenführer, I want four men in my car! The rest follow in the truck.”

“What about the wounded, Sturmbannführer? Some of them can’t walk.”

“Leave them in the road!”

Twenty-two miles north of Totenhausen, the navigator in the lead bomber of GENERAL SHERMAN sighted the mouth of the Recknitz River below him.

“That’s it, sir. Time to turn.”

Squadron Leader Harry Sumner banked the Mosquito to the south. “Everyone with us, Jacobs?”

“Right on our tail.”

Sumner checked his fuel gauge. A headwind had put them slightly behind schedule, but they would benefit by the same wind on the ride home. They had lost one plane already, forced to turn back due to mechanical failure. That was the way of it. But they still had more than enough bombload and Target Indicators to carry out the mission.

“Think you can find this place, Jacobs? It’s supposed to be almost covered with trees.”

The navigator was holding a pen-sized torch in his teeth and studying a map. “Just stay over the river,” he said in a garbled voice. “The H 2S will show me the bends. If this map is accurate, we can use Dornow village and the river as brackets. Flares will give us a visual on the power station and the camp.”

Sumner peered through the dark windscreen. The silver line of the river led them southward like a magic road. A rum mission, this, even by Special Duties Squadron standards. All the way into Germany to bomb a tiny prison camp for SOE? The Air Marshals constantly fought Duff Smith tooth and nail to keep their precious planes out of his clutches. How had he managed to divert a Mosquito squadron for this? Sumner had mentioned it to his superior at Wick, but all he’d got in reply was a sour look and a mumbled, “If we want to fight this one, we’ll have to go all the way to Downing Street.”

He hadn’t known what to make of that. But he did know one thing. From one thousand feet without ack-ack, his squadron could hit an outdoor privy dead center and leave nothing but a crater for a square mile around.

“Eight minutes out,” the navigator said.

“They’re still not following!” McConnell said, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror and pushing the Volkswagen as fast as he dared.

“They will.” Anna thrust her arms into the sleeves of the oilskin jumpsuit and started to zip up its front.

He caught her hand. “You have to put on the mask first, then zip the suit over the part that drapes over your shoulders. It’s the only way to get an airtight seal.”

Anna reached back for both masks.

“Put yours on now,” he said. “I’ll be able to hear you if you need to talk.”

The road climbed sharply. McConnell reduced speed. Just ahead he saw the first curve of the switchback road that wound across the hills. As he took the turn, he caught sight of lights in the distance behind them.

“There they are,” he said. “You know anything about compressed air bottles?”

“I’ve administered oxygen a hundred times.”