Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Same principle. Open the valve, attach the air hose to your mask and breathe normally.” He wrenched the wheel to avoid colliding with a bank of birch trees. “Jesus! This is like a logging road!”

Anna had her mask on now. It blurred her facial features and dulled her eyes. She looked like an extra in a Flash Gordon feature. “The boots are too big,” she said, her voice buzzing through the speech transmission diaphragm near her mouthpiece.

“Put them on anyway. And zip the legs down around them.” He braked for another curve. “How far to the power station?”

“Not far.”

“I’ll drive the car into the trees. Schörner and his men should drive right past us.”

Anna nodded and pointed to the left. “Slow down.”

He let the VW drift past the transformer station. He saw a wooden watchman’s hut inside the dark jungle of metal struts, a faint light glowing in its window. Thirty meters past the station, he turned off the road and rolled forward until tree trunks forced him to stop.

He pulled on his mask and zipped his suit, then climbed out. The silence was eerie after the frantic skirmish at the cottage. Anna helped him strap on his air tank. He felt like a draft horse wearing blinders. Before he attached his air hose, he leaned forward and said, “I guess we’d better take the guns with us.”

She shook her head and handed him the Mauser rifle.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m staying here,” she said. “Schörner may stop at the power station. He might even turn in here. We can’t take the chance.”

“But you couldn’t stop them if they did.”

“I’ve got Stern’s grenades,” she said. “And my pistol. You keep your rifle as a last resort.”

“Anna—”

“Go!”

He started to say something else, but she slung the Mauser over his shoulder and pushed him farther into the trees. He turned back and looked at her. She was standing motionless in the dark beside the car, a fine-figured woman wrapped in heavy black oilskin and wearing a clear vinyl bag over her head. Ludicrous. Tragic. He thought of the diary she had labored over so long, that was now wedged into the left leg of his gas suit. He hoped she would be alive to make a final entry when this night was over.

He raised his hand, then turned and trudged across the snow toward the pylon.

Major Schörner raced up the hills at nearly twice the speed McConnell had. The excitable corporal occupied the field car’s passenger seat, while three more SS men were scrunched into the back, each armed with a submachine gun. Somehow the troop truck was managing to keep up, probably because its driver was as angry and bent on revenge as the storm troopers in back. Schörner issued a quick volley of orders to the corporal.

“We’ll split at the transformer station. You take two men and go back to Totenhausen in the car. Tell Sturm to expect a commando attack. The electricity may go off at any time. That means the electric fences will be off. Thank God I ordered those mines laid. Tell Sturm to put half his men around the gas storage tanks and the other half around the factory. Tell him” — the field car nearly skated off the road as Schörner took a dogleg curve, but he held it under control — “tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll use the men from the truck to surround the power station. The American must be trying to detonate explosives laid earlier in the week. The detonator will probably be somewhere in the trees outside the station. Ach , what I would give for Sturm’s dogs.”

The corporal’s face lit up. “But we have a dog, Sturmbannführer! In the cab of the truck!”

“At last, a little luck.” Schörner slung the car around another curve and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The strange thing, he thought, gripping the wheel like a Grand Prix champion, was that as bad as the situation was, he felt better than he had in months.

McConnell stumbled the last few meters to the pylon, his throat stinging from the dry air in the cylinder on his back. The climbing spikes and harness lay at the foot of the nearest support pole, as Stern had promised. He’d never worn anything like them before, but the principle was simple enough: one sharp iron spike for the instep of each foot, affixed to fishhook-shaped pieces of iron that fit beneath the feet and rose along the inner calves, with leather straps to hold them on. The safety harness was basically a broad, heavy belt with a steel ring in front, which clipped to a second belt sized to fit around the pole. McConnell dropped his rifle, sat down and strapped on the spikes.

That done, he slung the Mauser over his shoulder, fastened his safety belt around the support pole and drove his right spike into the wood. He expected it to break loose when he put his weight on it, but the spike held. He bear-hugged the pole and raised himself on the spike, then he slid the belt up, leaned back to steady himself, and drove his left spike into the pole two feet up. In this manner he began to ascend the pole at a surprising speed, although he seemed to be circling it as he went up, like a snake climbing a tree.

He couldn’t see much in the darkness, but he knew from Stern’s quick briefing that the double pylons marched down a narrow swath that had been cleared through the forested hills, their crossarms taller than all but the largest trees. A straight run of two thousand feet descending at a thirty degree angle — or so Stern had told him.

He cried out as his right spike broke free. He slid four feet down the icy pole before managing to hug it tightly enough to stop. The safety belt had done almost nothing to retard his fall. He prayed that no splinters had torn holes in his gas suit.

Three quarters of the way to the top, he saw the lights of the pursuing vehicles racing up the winding hill road. They seemed to flicker on and off as he stared down through the trees. He dug his spikes into the wood and forced himself higher, thinking of Anna waiting in the trees below. He had almost reached the crossarm when he heard an engine roar to life.

At first he thought the watchman from the power station had started a vehicle. But the sound had come from almost directly beneath the pylon. When he realized what was actually happening, he almost started back down the pole.

But of course he would be too late. Anna had planned it that way. There was nothing he could do.

She had decided to die for the mission.

45

Ariel Weitz stepped out of the front door of the hospital and hurried down the steps wearing Herr Doktor Brandt’s SS greatcoat, which he had pilfered from a closet. Brandt’s bulky coat was the only garment that minimized the odd hump at the small of Weitz’s back caused by the breathing bag of the Raubhammer gas suit. In his left hand he carried the accompanying gas mask, in his right a machine pistol.

He moved across the Appellplatz at a fast walk, his eyes on the headquarters building. Personally, he didn’t care much what happened to the shoemaker’s son. But the shoemaker had said that without him the gas attack would not take place. And having met the young commando, Weitz believed this might be true. He brought out a key to the back door of the headquarters, unlocked it, and walked inside.

He heard muffled screaming from the front of the building. Mentally he ran through the possibilities. Quartermaster’s office. Wireless officer’s room. Brandt’s administrative office. Schörner’s office. Down the corridor to his right — from the direction of the cinema — he heard a low buzz of voices. The factory technicians and their guards. He pulled the greatcoat close around him and moved quickly up the hallway.

He saw the brown-jacketed back of the wireless operator at his console. The quartermaster’s office was empty. He kept moving. Brandt’s administrative office. Empty. The screams grew louder now. He heard the sound of a blow. Men laughing. He heard Gunther Sturm’s voice braying something about losing a bet.