Greg Iles - Black Cross

As the frightened women spoke among themselves, Avram turned and reached through the shattered window in the hospital’s back door and pushed down the handle with the butt of the machine pistol. Walking through, he felt a tug on his belt. He turned and looked into the eyes of Rachel Jansen, who carried her three-year-old son on her left hip. The boy’s eyes were glazed with shock.

“Where are you going, Shoemaker?” Rachel asked.

“To look for money.”

“I want to come with you.”

Avram nodded and led her into the dark building.

In an office on the second floor he found a hundred Reichmarks, but it was not even a quarter of what he would need.

“Will money help us in Poland?” Rachel asked.

Still ransacking drawers, Avram did not answer.

“Do you really believe we can cross the border and contact a friendly resistance group?”

“There’s a fair chance.” Avram slammed a door shut and turned to face her. “But I don’t think it’s the best chance. You don’t have to go to Poland if you don’t want to.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you have the courage, you can come with me. I have a friend in Rostock. A Gentile. He worked ten years in my shop. He offered to help me many years ago, but I was too stupid to understand the danger. I am going to try to reach him now.”

“You mean go into the city itself?” Rachel asked fearfully.

“It will be dangerous,” he conceded. “If we had money it would be better. We could try to buy our way across to Sweden. I’ve found a little, but not enough. And we don’t have time to search the whole camp.”

Rachel was silent in the darkness. At length she said, “Do you really think Rostock is the best chance?”

“For me, yes. For you and the child, yes. But no more.”

“I have money, Shoemaker.”

“ What ? How much?”

“Three more diamonds. I found them the night you caught me outside. The night Marcus died.”

Avram seized her arms with joy. “I thank God you are a devious woman! Hurry, you’ll need an SS uniform. I saw one in the closet here. It belonged to one of the assistant doctors. Rauch, I think.”

They heard the bellow of the troop truck before Rachel finished dressing. When she had, Avram carried Jan down the stairs and they joined the crowd outside.

“Into the truck!” Avram said. “Everyone, hurry!”

While mothers passed children up into the bed of the truck, Avram sought out the two women he’d sent to the SS barracks to find uniforms. He found them by the cab. They’d taken it upon themselves to procure rifles as well as uniforms. Perhaps they have a chance after all , Avram thought. With their short-cropped hair they could certainly pass for SS men at a distance.

“We found it idling on the road with its headlights burning,” said the larger of the pair.

“You can drive a truck?” he asked.

She nodded curtly. “You are not coming?”

“No. Listen to me. Drive eastward by as straight a route as you can, but stick to the back roads. It shouldn’t take more than three hours. Stop for nothing. If anyone does manage to stop you, tell them you’re taking typhus-infected prisoners into the forest to shoot them, by order of SS Lieutenant-General Herr Doktor Klaus Brandt. Do you understand?”

The women nodded.

“When you get close to the border, drive the truck into the trees. Cross on foot through the forest. If you are being chased, don’t make a fight of it and don’t stop to try to save any wounded. Run for your lives. Your only hope is contacting a friendly resistance group in the forest.” He turned up his palms. “That is all I know to tell you. You’d better get moving.”

The two women climbed up into the cab and shifted the truck into gear. Avram helped lift the last of the children into the back, then signaled to the driver. As the truck trundled past the dead and out of the alley, he thought of the old woman who had compared the E-Block to a lifeboat. She was dead now, but she had been right. Now the truck was the lifeboat. He lifted Jan from Rachel’s arms and began walking out of the alley.

“Where are we going?” Rachel asked.

“They keep a Kubelwagen parked behind the gas storage tanks. That’s perfect for us. Small but official.”

Rachel had to hurry to keep up with his long strides. “Are you sure about Rostock? You’ll have to get us through checkpoints, speak to policemen.”

“I’m sure.”

“Can you fool them?”

Avram laughed softly. “Frau Jansen, I was once a German soldier. I had a medal from the Kaiser. I can convince those bastards we’re on a mission for Hitler himself if it will get us a step closer to freedom.”

Rachel took his free hand in hers and squeezed hard. “To Palestine,” she said.

One mile north of Dierhagen, Jonas Stern extinguished the running lights of the patrol boat and let it idle in the open water. At least the dangerous run through the narrow ice channel was over. He assumed the Kriegsmarine had been alerted by now, but hoped that his emphasis on reaching Sweden would cause them to establish a blockade line farther out to sea. He blinked the running lights on and off three times in quick succession, waited thirty seconds, then repeated the signal.

He saw nothing. Three hundred and sixty degrees of darkness. He wondered if there had ever been a submarine at all. Had Smith ever believed he and McConnell would get this far?

“Why have we stopped?”

McConnell had poked his head up from the cabin.

“How’s the nurse?” Stern asked.

“Okay for now. There was no morphine in the first aid kit. I gave her some schnapps I found in a bag. I need real medical supplies, Jonas.”

Stern nodded. “This is where we’re supposed to meet the submarine. But there’s no sub here.”

“But Smith knows we’re coming, right? I mean, he knows we succeeded.”

Stern rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Did you ever consider the possibility that Brigadier Smith never meant for us to get out alive, Doctor? That the attack was the only real point of all this?”

McConnell said nothing. Stern’s suggestion was more than a possibility. A man who would send bombers to wipe out all trace of their mission would not hesitate to leave them stranded in a black ocean between the SS and the German Navy.

“My God,” Stern murmured. “Look!”

Forty meters off the bow, the massive conning tower of a submarine rose out of the waves like the Biblical leviathan.

“They must have been watching us through their periscope!” Stern cried. “They were looking for a raft, not a German patrol boat. Get Anna and the girl ready.”

By the time Stem brought the patrol boat alongside the submarine, its captain, first officer, two ratings, and a man not in uniform but wearing a black turtleneck sweater were waiting for them. The first officer carried a submachine gun. Stern saw “HMS Sword ” painted on the submarine’s hull. The ratings caught hold of the patrol boat with long hooks.

“Code names?” called the man in the black sweater.

“Butler and Wilkes!” Stern replied.

“Come aboard.”

Stern went below and brought Hannah Jansen out of the cabin. McConnell followed, supporting Anna. As they approached the rail, the man in the black sweater pointed at them and said something to the captain.

“Hold!” the captain shouted. “We can only take the two of you aboard! No refugees!”

McConnell saw that this order had not surprised Stern at all. “Captain, I’m a medical doctor!” he shouted. “This woman has a gunshot wound. The other is a child. They need immediate medical attention!”

The captain’s resolve seemed to waver. The man in the black turtleneck spoke angrily in his ear. The captain brushed him away and said, “I’m sorry, Doctor, but the normal rules do not apply. I have specific orders — only the two of you. You’ve got ten seconds to get aboard this ship.”