Greg Iles - Black Cross

He slipped three into his bag.

McConnell found Brandt’s principal laboratory log lying open on a desk. Sergeant Sturm had apparently evacuated the chemists in the midst of dismantling their equipment for transport. Everything had been left as it was, like a table set for dinner in a burned-out house. McConnell thumbed quickly through the thick notebook. There were passages written in several different hands, many with detailed chemical formulas, most based on organic phosphates. Each entry had been carefully initialed after completion. Several bore the letters K.B . beneath them. McConnell stuffed the log into Stern’s bag, then picked up the cylinder-transport crate and motioned for Stern to follow him. They had got what they came for.

It was time to run.

“Rottenführer!” Major Schörner shouted. “By the gate! What do you see?”

The young corporal stared through the windshield. He had idled the truck forward fifty meters in the last minute, but he still saw nothing. “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer.”

“By the gate , fool! Look now! Crossing the road!”

The corporal followed the beam of the truck’s headlights. At last he saw — or thought he saw — a brighter blackness moving against the general darkness. “What is that, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner slapped his knee in frustration. “Commandos,” he said. “They’re wearing chemical suits. Move the truck forward, Rottenführer. Very slowly.”

As the truck edged forward, its headlight beams caught two figures for an instant. They ducked and ran, flashing as if made of black foil.

Schörner slammed his hand down on the dash. “They’re running for the ferry!”

“What should I do, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner thought furiously. When the answer came to him, he felt a moment of doubt. But then a second realization hit him like a spike through the heart. If Allied commandos had just released the Soman stocks inside Totenhausen, Rachel Jansen was dead. The men in the black suits had not only wiped out the installation he had been ordered to protect, but they had also murdered the only woman he had felt anything for since the love of his life was killed by British bombs. With the calm deliberation of a man under sentence of death, he opened the door and climbed down from the cab.

He took one deep breath, then another. “Everyone all right?” he called to the men in the back of the truck.

“Hofer died from a shrapnel wound, Sturmbannführer. But the rest of us are all right.”

“Get down. All of you.”

Ten SS men leaped to the ground and formed a line with their rifles and submachine guns at the ready.

Schörner adjusted the patch over his eye and stood erect. “There are at least two Allied commandos on the riverbank near the ferry, possibly more. The ferry is probably iced in, but there may be poison gas between us and them. Bock, Fischer, remain in the truck in case they try to flee this way in a vehicle. The rest of us will advance to the ferry on foot.”

Schörner moved up the line as he spoke, finding the eye of every man at least once. “I want five men to form a line in front of me, spaced at ten-meter intervals. I want one man on each side of me — twenty meters away — and one man behind, fifteen meters back. Fire on anything that moves. If any of us fall to gas, the rest will move in the opposite direction, but continue firing. Clear?”

Schörner had seen a few faces whiten when he mentioned gas, and the rest when they realized he meant to use them as human gas alarms. But situations like this were what the SS had been created for. Would Sturm’s concentration camp scum live up to the tradition of their corps? They might be scum, but they were German scum. He swept his eyes once more up the line.

“Remember your oath to the Führer, gentlemen. ‘ I vow to Thee and to the superiors Whom Thou shalt appoint Obedience unto Death, so help me God .’ Heil Hitler!”

As one, ten pairs of jackboots cracked and ten arms lifted to the cold night sky. “ Heil Hitler !” came the answer.

Rifle bolts clicked in the darkness. The troops assumed the exact formation Schörner had ordered and moved quickly toward the ferry.

Anna nearly fired her pistol when the black-suited figure hammered on the window of the Mercedes. She had been watching the headlights of the troop truck and had not seen anyone cross the road. The swatch of tartan wedged into McConnell’s tank harness registered in her brain before she pulled the trigger. She got out of the Mercedes, closed the door, and hugged him tightly.

There was a sudden deep rumbling, and the ferry began to shudder in the water. Anna looked over the roof of the Mercedes. Stern was in the wheelhouse, giving the twin screws all the power they would take. The ferry heaved itself away from the bank and smashed into the sheet of ice covering the ferry channel, throwing Anna and McConnell to the deck. Stern shifted the engines into reverse, backed up and rammed the sheet again.

Nothing.

The third time, he backed the stern of the ferry flush against the dock, shearing off part of the access ramp with a screech of tearing metal. Then he shifted gears, gunned the engine, closed his eyes, and prayed. He heard the deep, shivering crack of ice as the first bullets shattered the windows of the wheelhouse.

“Faster!” Schörner shouted. “They’ve started the ferry!”

The major’s formation had been advancing steadily, parallel to the river, firing as they closed on the dock. While the men shot at the spot they thought the ferry should be, Schörner had kept his eye on the line in front of him, watching for signs of gas. But when the ferry motor roared to life, he knew the time had come to risk all. Eighty meters away, the flat craft nosed out into the river, a clear target now against the white ice sheet. Schörner opened his mouth to order his men to charge the dock at a full run. Then he realized that the man he had posted on his left side was no longer there.

“Gas!” he shouted. “Move right! Schnell !”

The line of men broke toward the water, still moving forward, still firing at the ferry. Schörner slammed into the back of the man in front of him, losing his balance. Furious, he got to his feet and shoved the halted trooper forward. The man would not budge. Then Schörner saw why. Two soldiers lay squirming on the ground thirty meters ahead. His five-man frontal screen had been reduced to three, plus the right wingman, who had been forced up to Schörner’s side when the squad pressed against the river. He glanced behind him. The rear guard was still on his feet.

“Hold here and give them everything you’ve got!”

Stern crouched low in the wheelhouse, trying to guide the heavy ferry without standing up inside the glass cube that enclosed the upper wheelhouse. Three sides of the enclosure had already been shattered by bullets.

Anna and McConnell were hunkered down behind the Mercedes, at the edge of the deck. There was no railing, and with Stern pushing the engines to the maximum — plus the give-and-take jolting of the bow smashing the ice — there was a real danger of falling into the river. Anna motioned for McConnell to get the little girl out of the backseat, but he thought the child was safer where she was.

Anna didn’t. Using the door handle to steady herself, she pulled herself into a half crouch and opened the door.

The Mercedes’ interior light clicked on.

One second later a rifle bullet tore through the opposite window and drilled through Anna’s right shoulder.

All McConnell saw was her body flying backward. Then she was gone. Screaming for Stern to stop, he closed the car door and jumped after her into the swirling black water.

“We’ve hit the pilot!” Schörner shouted, seeing the ferry slow three quarters of the way across the river. “Pour it in!”