Greg Iles - Black Cross

As the volume of fire increased, he heard a choked cry behind him. He whirled. The man he had posted behind him seemed to be trying to grab his face with his left hand. Then he suddenly bent double, vomited, snapped back up and fired his submachine gun skyward in an uncontrolled burst. Schörner stared in horror as the man fell backward on the snow and ceased all movement. His nostrils filled with the nauseating odor of feces and urine.

The stench of death.

He held his breath and kept firing at the ferry.

McConnell fought his way toward the gas mask he saw bobbing in the black water. The current was pulling Anna toward the shelf of white ice that covered the rest of the river. If she passed under that, she would be lost. His arms seemed suddenly made of lead. Even in the oilskin suit the water chilled him to the bone, and his heavy rubber boots were pulling him down. He drove his gloved hands against the water and reached out . . .

Two fingers hooked under the leather harness of Anna’s air tank. He looked back. The ferry was twenty yards away. He got a firmer grip on Anna’s harness, then began swimming.

He knew he would never reach the ferry under his own power. At some point he had torn his gas suit. Its oilskin legs were filling with freezing water, dragging him toward the bottom. Only the buoyancy of their air tanks was keeping him and Anna from sinking like boulders. He had actually stopped swimming when he saw the ferry moving slowly back toward them.

Wolfgang Schörner had not felt real fear since the retreat from Kursk. But when he saw two of the three rifle-men in front of him begin jerking spasmodically, a film of cold sweat broke out over his whole body. Was he breathing the gas now? Was it entering his skin even as he knelt on the ground? With a last roar of anger and courage he stood erect and charged down the riverbank toward the dock.

McConnell shoved his right arm through a half-submerged tire on the side of the ferry and pulled Anna close to him. “ Go! Go !” he shouted, gasping for air. “I’ve got her! Go!”

Stern firewalled the throttles. The ferry’s twin screws lifted the foredeck right out of the water as it closed the last few yards to the far bank, smashing ice as it went. Stern looked back at the dock they’d left behind. A barrel-melting burst of yellow muzzle flashes strobed in the darkness, throwing a hail of bullets across the water. Stern dove out of the wheelhouse as the slugs shattered the remaining glass and riddled the side of the Mercedes.

The ferry would have to land itself.

He prayed that none of the tires on the Mercedes had been punctured.

Wolfgang Schörner was dying on his feet. Even as the bullets poured out of his weapon, a deadly poison was shutting down his central nervous system. The invisible nerve gas had entered his body through every exposed surface, but quickest through the mucus membranes of his mouth and nose, and through the moist sclera of his eyes.

His machine gun clicked empty. He wanted to throw it down, but his hand would not open. He felt a strange embarrassment as his bladder involuntarily voided. Then his bowels let go. He saw the ferry collide with the opposite bank. Almost immediately the taillights of the car clicked on. Schörner was nodding his head violently up and down, but could not understand why. At the last moment he realized that the river itself might afford him protection from the gas. With tremendous concentration he forced his right leg to take a step. Then he lurched forward and fell flat on his face at the end of the pier.

The last thing he felt was the icy water of the river tugging at his right hand.

49

Racing southwest on the hard gravel road that followed the river, Stern had left Totenhausen far behind. But McConnell knew the Mercedes had sat inside the camp too long not to have been contaminated. He leaned back over the passenger seat and cranked down the rear window beside Anna’s still-masked head. He wanted to apply pressure to her shoulder wound, but if there was gas residue on his glove, he might kill her by doing it. He reached across the inflated vinyl bundle that held Hannah Jansen and rolled down the other window.

Cold air blasted through the car.

After a full minute, he ripped the air hose out of his mask and breathed deeply. He had never tasted air so sweet. He waited thirty seconds more, then removed Stern’s mask. Stern’s face was badly bruised and covered with dried blood, and one of his eyes nearly swollen shut.

“How far to the coast?” McConnell asked, unzipping his suit and pulling his hands out of the oilskin sleeves.

“Forty kilometers in a plane. Probably an hour by road.”

Something jabbed McConnell in the crotch. He reached into his suit for the offending object. It was Anna’s diary, soaked by river water. Churchill’s note hung out of the top like a soggy bookmark. He dropped the diary into Stern’s leather bag, then climbed into the back seat to attend to Anna. After she managed to follow his orders and unzip her own suit, he tore out a section of her blouse and stuffed it into the hole in her shoulder. Being careful to touch only the inner surfaces, he gently lifted the transparent gas mask off her head and threw it out of the window.

“We’re about to cross the river again,” Stern said over the seat. “This is Tessin. Stay down.”

McConnell leaned across Anna’s lap as they rolled through the blacked out village.

“Is the little girl alive?” Stern asked.

“She’s still moving.”

Using a British commando knife from Stern’s bag, McConnell carefully cut away the rapidly deflating vinyl sheet that held the little girl and the oxygen bottle. “I doubt this thing was completely airtight,” he said, “but the pressure of the escaping oxygen should have kept the nerve gas from getting inside.”

A high-pitched shriek announced the re-entry of two-year-old Hannah Jansen into the land of the living. McConnell dropped the sheet out of the window and hugged the dark-haired child close, trying to comfort her as best he could. It would be a long time, he knew, before she purged the horror of this night from her mind.

“You know where we’re supposed to go?” he asked.

Stern nodded, his eyes on the dark road.

“You think anybody knows what happened? I mean, do you think they’ll have troops out looking for us?”

Stern looked back across the seat, his swollen eye sockets crusted with dried blood.

“Just take care of the women, Doctor. Leave the rest to Standartenführer Stern.”

McConnell kept pressure on Anna’s wound as the Mercedes rolled through the night. Whenever they came to a village, Stern would slow down and coast through at moderate speed. McConnell remembered the names for a long time after: Tessin; Sanitz; Gresenhorst; Ribnitz. Not long after Ribnitz, he smelled sea air. Stern didn’t slow down as he expected, but instead accelerated.

“What are you doing?” McConnell asked.

Stern leaned forward and stared through the windshield. “Our inflatable dinghy is supposed to be hidden in the rocks beneath a certain jetty near Dierhagen. A two-man job. But I’m not about to take an inflatable out into a shipping channel cut by an icebreaker. Not with a wounded woman and a child. It would probably take us two hours just to find the damned thing and inflate it.”

McConnell saw they had entered another village. “What are you going to do then?”

Stern hunched over the wheel. “Be ready to move fast, Doctor. I’ll carry the child, you take the woman. No matter what happens, don’t get separated .”

McConnell had no intention of doing that. “I’m ready,” he said.

Stern drove right down the main street of the village. It looked deserted, but at the end of the street McConnell saw the faint silhouette of masts against the night sky. A light burned in a shack at the entrance to the jetty. Stern stopped long enough to wriggle out of his oilskin suit, then pulled up beside the shack and gave a loud blast on the horn.