Greg Iles - Black Cross

What he heard was a sharp crack farther down the hill. Staring high into the darkness of the trees, he saw a blue-white fireball rolling up the hill like a man-made comet. He was marveling at the impossible vision of something rolling uphill when the fireball flashed over his head and hurled itself into the power station.

The second explosion dwarfed the first.

When McConnell dropped the rifle barrel onto the live wire, 8,700 volts of electricity instantly sought the shortest route to earth. The heat of the flash charred the surface of his oilskin suit and knocked him off the crossarm. A sound like a lion’s roar split the night as the current discharged itself into the ground sixty feet below him. Hanging from his safety belt, McConnell thanked God that his basic knowledge of electricity had proved accurate: the shortest route from the live wire to earth had been through the rifle barrel and down through the far support pole, allowing him to remain outside the lethal circuit he had created.

Relays in the station instantly attempted to open the circuit breakers, but the poorly maintained batteries that controlled this function had expended their last energy correcting the mishap of Colin Munro four night earlier. The tremendous electrical load placed on the lines by contact with the earth drew a massive overcurrent from the 100,000-volt transmission lines that fed into the station, allowing thousands of amps to heat the faulted line to an extreme temperature. At the pylon where McConnell hung suspended like a fallen mountain-climber, the current flashed across all three live wires, ionizing the air between them and creating an arc like a welder’s flame.

It was this arc that rolled up the wires and over Schörner’s head toward the source of the current. It flashed onto the copper bus bars of the station, ionizing the available air and crackling across the metal struts like something from a Frankenstein picture. Heated far beyond the tolerance they had been built to withstand, the contacts inside the circuit breakers instantly boiled the insulating oil they were submerged in and blasted apart their steel-drum containers like giant shrapnel bombs, spraying oil across the snow.

The sensors in the station responsible for rerouting the voltage to the auxiliary system did function, but they too failed in the end. The first poison-gas cylinder had already smashed two insulators, putting the auxiliary wire into direct contact with two crossarms. When the rerouted voltage reached the first damaged insulator, the previous event repeated itself almost exactly. As the second explosion reverberated through the hills, McConnell — still blinking his eyes from the passage of the second fireball — looked down toward Totenhausen.

Every light in the camp had gone out.

While Schörner’s men stared dumbfounded at the transformer station, the major aimed his flashlight along the boot tracks they had been following, toward the blue-white flash he had seen. Standing squarely in the middle of the tracks was a smooth, thick tree trunk. Schörner had shone his flashlight ten feet up the tree before he realized it was one leg of a power pylon.

“Bring your torches!” he shouted, running toward the pole. “Hurry!”

By the time Schörner’s shout echoed up from below, McConnell had righted himself on the crossarm and gotten his hand around the rubber rope. Three flashlights converged on one leg of the pylon. Stern had told him put space between the cylinders, but there was no more time. He yanked the third cotter pin loose, waited two beats, then jerked out the fourth and fifth simultaneously.

A flashlight flicked over the crossarm.

The last cylinder hung three feet down the wire from the crossarm, swaying gently in the darkness. As he tightened his grip on the rope to pull the final pin, McConnell realized something that sent spasms of fear along his spine.

He was going to die.

In a matter of seconds four torch beams would fix his position like London searchlights pinning a Luftwaffe bomber to the clouds, and machine gun bullets would follow. With this certainty came something unexpected — something quite different from what he had been feeling only moments ago — a flood of pure animal terror.

He wanted to live.

“There!” Schörner shouted, holding his beam steady on the top of the pylon. “Do you see something?”

“Nothing, Sturmbannführer.”

“The tracks end right here .”

“Maybe he doubled back.”

“Look at this!” cried an SS private, who had bent over something in the snow. He screamed suddenly and fell backward.

Schörner whirled and shone his flashlight onto the snow. A bolt-action Mauser rifle, scorched black and smoking, lay in a shallow well of melting snow. It took him only seconds to put together what had happened. He aimed his flashlight toward the top of the pylon.

“Lights!” he shouted.

“Sturmbannführer!” screamed one of the men. “The power station is burning!”

Schörner cursed as three torch beams disappeared. “ The pylon, you stupid swine! Put your lights on the pole !”

McConnell stretched out his legs, hooked both feet around the four-foot suspension bar that held up the last cylinder and yanked out the cotter pin. The rubber rope fell sixty feet onto the snow. Only his butt and his hands on the crossarm resisted the downhill tug of the cylinder hanging beneath him.

Twice already a flashlight beam had played over his black oilskin suit, but he forced himself to look down.

Wire netting covered the dark cylinder, and from the netting protruded six pressure-triggers, any one of which could blow the cap out of the cylinder head and release the gas within. There was no time for caution. If the triggers tripped and the British gas worked, he would have to rely on the gas suit and mask he had modified in Oxford. He would live or die by his own hands. Three torch beams stabbed the darkness around him.

With fire in his stomach he leaped off the crossarm.

“There!” Schörner shouted. “There’s someone up there!”

“Where, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner threw down his flashlight and snatched a submachine gun from the startled SS man, then turned it skyward and fired a long burst up along the length of the support pole.

McConnell’s breath went out of his lungs when his crotch crashed onto the cylinder head. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the balls by a mule. It was all he could do to hang onto the suspension bar, but the cylinder was rolling.

It was rolling fast .

He was already twenty feet from the pylon when Schörner’s fusillade of bullets ripped into the crossarm behind him. He looked down frantically to see if his legs had tripped any of the triggers. He couldn’t tell. More shouts and gunfire sounded behind him, but suddenly it was all meaningless. No one below understood yet what had happened.

McConnell did. And he knew his problems had only just begun. Somewhere out ahead of him, five cylinders of nerve gas were shunting along a length of steel winch cable toward Totenhausen, and he was almost certainly overtaking them. He was trying to work out just how quickly when the roller-wheel above his head jumped the shattered insulator on the second pylon.

He closed his eyes in terror until the wheel settled back onto the wire on the other side. It was a lot like riding a cable car, he thought, a very fast cable car with no operator. He would almost certainly reach Totenhausen alive. The problem was how to get off of the cylinder before it dropped sixty feet to the ground. He was squinting down the wire trying to answer that question when the whole night sky burst into flame like the Fourth of July.

46

Stern was right behind Ariel Weitz as the rubber-suited figure burst out of the back corridor of the headquarters building and into the Appellplatz. Weitz ran straight toward the hospital, but Stern swung out to his left. He had no intention of running unprotected through the invisible cloud of nerve gas that might be drifting across the yard from the SS barracks and dog kennels on his right. As he ran, he saw a white flash burst above the hills behind the camp.