Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Are you crazy?” McConnell asked.

Stern pulled his SD cap out of his bag, set it on his head at an angle and got out of the car, leaving the engine running.

A uniformed officer of the coastal police stumbled out of the shack with a flashlight in his hand. He was about to curse to high heaven whomever had disturbed his sleep when the beam of his torch fell upon the blood-soaked uniform, the Iron Cross First Class, and the rank badge of a colonel in the SD.

“Get that light out of my face, idiot!” Stern barked. “Stand at attention!”

The policeman — a fifty-year-old veteran of World War One — snapped instantly erect, his thumbs at the seams of his trousers. “What can I do for you, Standartenführer?”

“Who are you?”

“Feldwebel Kurt Voss.”

“Well, Feldwebel, I need a boat.”

The policeman’s face was gray with fright, but he was not stupid enough to mention the blood and bruises on the face of the Nazi apparition before him. “There are many boats here, Standartenführer. What type of boat do you require?”

“A motor launch. A seaworthy vessel, the fastest on the dock.”

The policeman swallowed. “Most of the boats here are for fishing, Standartenführer. And with the ice this time of year . . . well, few go out at all.”

“There must be something.”

“There is the Kriegsmarine patrol boat. Its crew put in earlier tonight for . . . well—”

“I understand perfectly, Feldwebel.” Stern smiled coldly. “Lead the way to this craft. I will follow in my car.”

“But you must speak to the captain first, Standartenführer. He will certainly . . .”

The policeman fell silent under Stern’s withering glare.

Stern cocked his chin and enunciated each word separately in the Gestapo fashion, like whiplashes. “The captain will do what , Feldwebel? Report to Berlin that he was unavailable to assist an SD officer on Reich security business because he was lying drunk in a brothel?”

The policeman shook his head violently. “You are right, Standartenführer! Follow me. I’ll have the boat running before you get aboard.”

There was some confusion at the boat when Anna and little Hannah appeared. The wide-eyed policeman could not convince himself that a wounded woman and a child were involved in official SD business, but he was trying hard. Stern carried Hannah into the cabin and laid her in a berth. McConnell and Anna sat down opposite her.

“I’ll be on the bridge,” Stern told them. He squeezed Anna’s good arm. “We’re almost there.”

He found the policeman standing at the wheel. “How much fuel do we have, Feldwebel?”

“The tanks are full, Standartenführer. There’s also an extra can in the hold.”

“Enough to get us to Sweden?”

“Sweden!” The policeman’s terror of the SD battled with his fear of being charged in some treasonous scheme. “Standartenführer, if your business is that important, I’m sure Captain Leber would be glad to ferry you across. Let me call him for you. I know exactly where he is.”

“I’m sure you do.” Stern revved the engines of the Schnellboot and was rewarded with a powerful rumble. He motioned the policeman closer. “Feldwebel,” he said softly, “what I am about to say you will repeat on pain of death. The woman and child you just saw are the mistress and child of Reichsführer Himmler. I am their bodyguard. Two hours ago, they were nearly kidnapped by officers disloyal to the Führer. We barely escaped with our lives. The Reichsführer personally instructed me to get them to Sweden by dawn. Now — do I have enough fuel ?”

The policeman nodded hopelessly.

“How far to open water?”

“Six kilometers.”

“That is all I require, Feldwebel. Return to your post.”

The policeman climbed onto the dock without a word. Running up the jetty, he heard the thunder of the patrol boat’s twin inboard engines as Stern sped north through the black channel that led through the ice sheet to the open waters of the Baltic. Once inside his hut, the feldwebel reached for his telephone, then pulled his hand back into his lap. Stern’s scandalous story was sufficient to stay his hand for several minutes. But in the end he snatched up the phone again and called a certain well-known house in Dierhagen to inform Kriegsmarine Captain Leber that a son of a whore from the SD had hijacked his patrol boat to go to Sweden.

After one hour and twenty minutes inside the E-Block, Avram Stern knew the women and children could stand no more. There was no light. Children perching on their mothers’ shoulders blocked all four porthole windows. The heat was stifling, almost unbearable; several women had already fainted, and there was nowhere for them to fall. The noise was unbearable. The ceaseless shrieks and wails of hysterical women and children hammered at the shoemaker’s eardrums, raising the specter of panic in his own mind. He’d shouted a dozen times for them to be silent, but to no avail.

He felt the dead weight of an unconscious woman sag against him. The child who had been sitting on her shoulders screamed and toppled the other way, into the clawing, shoving mass. Avram tried to take a deep, calming breath, but the air that entered his lungs tasted like acid. He took the machine pistol from the boy Jonas had given it to and began climbing over the heads of the women. Fingernails raked his face and neck, but he struck back, fighting toward the only window whose position he was sure of relative to the door: the window from which Heinrich Himmler had observed the last selection.

He saw a glimmer of moonlight.

When he finally reached the window, he had to fight the urge to immediately shoot it out. No matter how bad things were inside the gas chamber, death might wait without. He pressed his face to the double-paned glass. Bodies lay strewn across the alley as if they had fallen off a plague wagon. Bile rose into his chest. Avram knew he would recognize every dead face in the alley. What had Jonas done? And why? Where was the benefit? As he stared at the hellish scene, something moved slowly into his field of vision.

A dog.

It wasn’t one of Sturm’s German shepherds with powerful haunches and a glowing coat, but a mongrel from the hills. A scavenger that survived on the refuse of Dornow. The mongrel moved from one corpse to another with boldness driven by hunger. It lingered at the corpse of a woman, tugged at her shift, then licked her face and backed up to gauge the response. Avram counted to sixty, warding off angry blows from below.

The dog was still alive.

Avram pressed the barrel of the machine pistol to the window and pulled the trigger.

Opening the hatch of the E-Block wasn’t half as difficult as climbing through the jagged porthole had been. The moment he pulled back the steel door, limp bodies cascaded through it like corpses he’d once seen at a rail siding in eastern Germany. He backed up the cement stairs and waited for the hysterical mass of women and children to empty from the gas chamber.

When the alley was full of milling prisoners, he climbed to the top of the hospital steps and fired the machine pistol into the air. “Listen to me!” he shouted. “We have survived, but we are not yet saved. SS reinforcements are bound to arrive soon.” A ripple of fear passed through the crowd. “We must get away immediately. The best hope for all of you is the forests of Poland. I want the two largest German-speakers among you to go to the SS barracks and put on uniforms like mine. Do not try to strip the dead! Gas on their clothing could kill you. Look for spare uniforms in closets or chests. I want ten others to search the camp for the troop truck. The trucks by the factory will be badly contaminated. Touch nothing unless absolutely necessary. There could be lethal gas on any surface.”