Greg Iles - Black Cross

At the rear door of the hospital, backlit by the dying white light of a parachute flare, stood a tall, black-suited figure. When it lifted an arm toward them, Stern’s mind shouted Gun ! so loudly that he had Sturm’s rifle off his shoulder and aimed in an instant.

Anna fired her pistol but missed. Twenty meters was well beyond her effective range.

Stern pulled the rifle’s trigger.

Nothing happened. Sergeant Sturm had failed to fully chamber another round. As he worked the bolt, a brilliant red light bloomed in the window behind the silhouette.

It was the flash of multicolored cloth against the black suit that made Stern pull his aim. His bullet smashed the window of the door behind the figure. He knocked Anna’s arm wide, then waved both arms wildly. He had no idea how McConnell had gotten down the hill so fast, but he knew no German would be wearing a piece of Scottish tartan in the heat of battle.

When McConnell reached them, he leaned in close and said, “We’ve got to get out of here! The gas works! The alley is full of dead!”

Stern’s gas mask had no speech diaphragm, so he took the risk of unclipping his air hose. “How the hell did you get here?” he asked, immediately sealing the hole with his palm.

“Air mail!” McConnell shouted, his voice rendered cartoonish by the buzzing diaphragm.

“What?”

“Forget it!”

“What about the factory?” Stern asked. “Do we run? Or do we finish the job?”

“Do we have a car?”

“The Mercedes.”

“What about the camera and the sample canisters?”

“In Greta’s Volkswagen,” Anna said.

McConnell saw something move on the floor. “What the hell is that?”

“A little girl,” Stern told him. “There’s an oxygen bottle in there with her, but we’ve got to get her away from here.”

“What about the other children?” Anna asked.

“The E-Block is full,” said Stern. “The rest. . . ” He shook his head. “This is the one we can still save.”

“Put your air hose back on!” McConnell yelled. “Anna, take the girl in the Mercedes and wait for us by the river. The wind blowing off the water will make that the safest place. Jonas and I are going to do what we came here to do. We’ll meet you at the river. We’ll use the Mercedes to make a run for the coast.” He turned to Stern. “Good enough?”

Stern nodded.

“Any sign of Schörner?” McConnell asked.

“No,” said Anna.

Stern shook his head.

“Find a dark spot to wait,” McConnell told her.

“There’s a ferry down there,” Anna said. “A one-truck ferry used for bringing supplies from the south. If we used that, we wouldn’t have to risk meeting Schörner on the main road.”

Stern nodded with an exaggerated motion, then bent down and hoisted Hannah Jansen onto his right shoulder.

Anna led the way through the front door with her revolver. McConnell suddenly slammed into the air tank on her back. He squeezed past her and stood gaping at the Appellplatz. Two blinding red fires lay burning in the snow like Roman candle flares. He could see two more burning in a straight line beyond the front gate, probably near the river bank. Seeing the ruby flare burst behind him at the rear door of the hospital, he had imagined a flare fired by a dying SS man.

This was something different.

There was almost a pattern to the fires, as if they were comets cast down by an angry but methodical god. McConnell might have kept staring had Stern not shoved him forward and run down the steps like a man with the devil at his heels. Anna pulled McConnell down with her and grabbed a leather bag from the backseat of Greta’s car. Together they followed Stern around the hospital to the Mercedes.

They met him coming back. McConnell called out to ask what the hell was going on, but Stern had already passed him, running across the Appellplatz toward the headquarters building.

They found Hannah on the passenger seat of the idling Mercedes. The oxygen bottle inside the vinyl sheet was slowly inflating it like a balloon. McConnell helped Anna into the driver’s seat. The air tank on her back pressed her chest into the steering wheel, but she managed to shift the car into gear.

“See you at the river!” he shouted, slamming the door.

The Mercedes’ wheels began spinning on the ice.

On impulse McConnell pulled open the back door, jumped across the seat and yelled, “Drop me at the front of the camp!”

It took Major Schörner five minutes to cover the same distance McConnell had covered in eighty seconds. Where McConnell had crossed it in a straight line, Schörner had had to wrestle the troop truck down the tortuous hill road and around the wreckage of his field car just to get within a quarter mile of the camp. Counting the time it had taken him to regroup his men at the power station, he was running very late. With every red fire he passed, the sense of urgency grew in him. He knew what those fires meant. He had seen them in Russia. As the troop truck roared toward the camp gate, he leaned out of the window to shout at the gate guards.

He saw none.

“Slow down!” he shouted at the driver. “Slower, you swine!”

He opened the door and stood on the truck’s running board. As the driver coasted forward, Schörner felt a sudden and powerful sense of dread. He never knew the source of these intuitions, but in Russia he had learned not to question them.

“Stop the truck!” he ordered. “ Stop !”

The truck skidded to a halt.

Schörner jumped down onto the snow and took a couple of steps toward the gate. Peering into the darkness, his eyes were drawn to three dark forms on the ground about five meters inside the twisted gate. He looked up at the nearest watchtower. The upper half of the tower-gunner’s body was hanging over the gun parapet.

Schörner blinked in disbelief. He backed blindly toward the troop truck, then turned and scrambled up into the cab. “Back up!” he screamed, rolling up the window as fast as he could. “Get us out of here!”

The driver stared at him as if he were mad.

Schörner drew his pistol and put it against the driver’s head. “ There’s been a gas release! I want this truck two hundred meters back up the road !”

The panicked driver jammed the transmission into reverse and spun the tires for ten seconds before they finally caught on the icy gravel.

“Target Indicators down, sir,” the navigator said. “Aiming Point verified.”

“This is the Master Bomber,” Squadron Leader Sumner said into the radio mike. “If there was any ack-ack down there, they’d be coning us now. Take your time and do it properly. The power station first, then the camp. Bomb on red indicators. Bomb at will.”

Sumner’s Mosquito continued to circle at fifteen hundred feet while the lead bomber went in. The modified aircraft made its run south to north, aiming for the red markers at the power station. It dropped its load one half second too late, causing the single 4,000 pound high-explosive bomb it carried to drift just past the hilltop.

Moments later, the village of Dornow ceased to exist.

McConnell was halfway out of the Mercedes when a shuddering blast wave shook the earth beneath his feet. He looked back toward the hospital and saw a mushroom-shaped fireball boiling into the night sky beyond the hills. As he stared, the crown of the highest hill disappeared in a daisy chain of star-white explosions. The flash arced over Totenhausen, freeze-framing a field of corpses.

Now he understood the red fires.

Now he understood what Stern had figured out the moment he saw the Target Indicators laid out like a grid over the camp. But what the hell did Stern think he could do about it? He couldn’t call 8th Air Force HQ in England and ask them to cancel a bombing raid.