Greg Iles - Black Cross

He laid the Raubhammer gas mask on the floor and held the machine pistol in both hands.

Jonas Stern strained against the ropes that held him to the chair, his eyes bulging from pain. His face and torso were covered with blood. Sergeant Sturm had opened several long, shallow cuts on his chest. One of Sturm’s assistants had brought salt from the mess and the sergeant had rubbed it into the wounds. He had also broken one of the fingers on Stern’s left hand, not by bending it backward, but by snapping it at a right angle like a dry twig. For a man of Sturm’s strength, the effort expended was minimal compared to the expected return.

Yet he’d gotten no return. The Jew masquerading as an SD officer had done nothing but scream, and he’d done damn little of that, considering. Sturm was beginning to worry that he might indeed lose his twenty marks.

For Stern’s part, the searing fire of the dagger blade and the caustic burning of the salt had finally merged into a general agony. His head and neck throbbed mightily from the blows, and his left eye was swollen almost shut.

But he was conscious.

It would all be over soon. They had taken away his watch, but he’d stolen a glance at the sergeant’s only a moment ago. It read 7:59. He hoped he would survive the gas long enough to see Sturm shitting his pants as he danced across the floor like a spastic and choked on his own vomit. He thought he could hold his breath long enough to see that.

“What are you thinking, you smug bastard?” Sturm bellowed. “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.” He glanced at his two comrades, who leaned against the wall smoking cigarettes. “I’m thinking it’s time to boil some water. It’s not a pretty sight, seeing a man scalded. A little splash from the soup pot is enough to make a man yell. I wonder how you’ll sound when we dump a steaming kettlefull down the front of your pants?”

One of the SS men dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with his boot. “I’ll get it from the mess.”

Stern craned his neck to see if the private was really going to get the water.

What he saw was the brown back of the man’s tunic explode into scarlet and he was lifted off his feet to the accompaniment of gunfire. A smallish man wearing an SS greatcoat walked through the doorway. A second later Stern recognized the man from Anna’s cottage. It was Brigadier Smith’s agent: Scarlett.

Things seemed to happen very slowly after that. The other SS private fumbled for his gun. Sergeant Sturm shouted, “ Put down that gun, Weitz! Have you gone mad ?” But the little man just kept walking forward until the barrel of his machine pistol touched the private’s belly and he pulled the trigger. The muffled burst eviscerated the private and chewed a hole in the wall behind him.

Sergeant Sturm reached for the latch on Schörner’s office window, but Weitz fired a burst into the wall beside him. Sturm looked up, his face white with panic and confusion.

“Weitz!” he screamed. “What madness is this?”

The little man began to laugh. Switching the gun from hand to hand, he slipped off the greatcoat and let it fall to the floor. Stern saw then that he was wearing a rubber suit very much like the ones McConnell had brought from Oxford.

“What the hell is that?” Sturm asked. “Why are you wearing that?”

A brief flash lit the window, followed instantly by a muffled explosion that rattled the window in its frame.

“What?” Sturm grunted.

A second explosion followed the first.

Now Weitz looked puzzled as well.

“That’s the gas!” Stern shouted from the chair. “British Sarin! I buried two cylinders by the dog kennels!”

Weitz smiled with sudden understanding. “You wanted to go outside, Hauptscharführer? Go ahead. Right through the window, where I can watch you.”

Sergeant Sturm conjured a conspiratorial smile. “How about a deal, Weitz? We’ve done business before, eh? What do you want?”

“I want to see your eyes popping out of your head while you breathe Sarin.”

Men were yelling in another part of the building. Sturm bent over and flipped the latch and jerked up the window. When he hesitated, Weitz shot out the panes over his head.

“Wait!” Stern shouted from the chair. “He has my keys!”

Sergeant Sturm cut his eyes at Jonas, then turned and jumped through the window.

“Stop him!” Stern shouted. “Hurry!”

Weitz went to the window. Sturm was running toward the hospital, and he didn’t seem to be suffering the effects of any gas. Weitz knelt and fired at the retreating figure until the chamber of his gun clicked empty. He saw Sturm fall, but the sergeant picked himself up and continued on toward the hospital.

“There’s no gas out there,” Weitz said. “Not Sarin, anyway.”

“Untie me!” Stern screamed. “Did you hit him?”

“Yes.” Weitz picked up the SS dagger and slashed the ropes binding Stern to the chair. “Can you walk?”

Stern jumped to his feet. “We’ve got to get away from here! I have a car but no keys!”

Weitz picked up the Raubhammer gas mask from the hall floor and put it on. Just before he snapped the air hose into place, he shouted through the hole in his face mask: “There’s another suit in the hospital! In Brandt’s office. Follow me!”

Stern had tried to shape the plastic explosive so that it would blow the cylinder heads straight off of the buried tanks. When the first pencil fuse fired, the charge blasted the cylinder head outward like an artillery shell, straight through the wall of one of the SS barracks. The six-pound piece of metal decapitated Private Otto Huth, and before his stunned friends could even take in what had happened, the second cylinder head tore through the wall, shattered the hip of a lance corporal and lodged in the opposite wall.

Fifty SS men at once scrambled for their weapons and charged the barracks door. The bottleneck created there forced them to regain some semblance of discipline. Twenty seconds later, three dozen nervous storm troopers were crouching outside, trying to pinpoint a threat that seemed to have vanished.

“Look!” said one, pointing past the dog kennels toward the woods. “Smoke. They’re bombing us from the air!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said a strapping soldier named Heinrich Krebs. “The snow must have detonated some of the mines we laid around the perimeter today.”

“I don’t remember putting any mines on this side.”

But Krebs was already walking around the kennels toward the fence.

“What’s wrong with the dogs?” asked a puzzled voice.

“Maybe they were killed by shrapnel,” someone suggested.

Several men stepped up to the kennel fence. “They’re not all down,” said one. “Look.”

“ Mein Gott , they’re sick. What . . .?”

The other SS barracks had also emptied at the sound of the explosions. Now more than seventy men were strung out along the narrow alley between the barracks and the dog kennels.

“See anything, Krebs?” called a sergeant.

There was no answer.

“Heini?”

“Shhh!” someone said. “Listen.”

It was a soft sound, like the hissing of a venomous snake. But almost immediately the hissing was drowned out by the sound of men gibbering, defecating, striking each other, and choking on their own tongues. A dozen storm troopers fell to the ground, convulsing like epileptics in seizure.

Heinrich Krebs was already dead.

Six miles north of Totenhausen, ten Mosquitoes of the GENERAL SHERMAN flight assumed a tandem bombing formation. A half mile south of them, Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner reached for his microphone to break radio silence.

“Leader approaching target,” he said in a mechanical voice. “I will mark with flares from one thousand feet, then go to fifteen hundred to act as Master Bomber. Number Two will drop red, repeat red, Target Indicators. I will verify Aiming Point, then give the go-ahead. High explosive followed by incendiaries. Let’s put one down Göring’s bunghole, eh?”