Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Don’t you see, man?” Smith had said. “If we offer sanctuary to the Jews still alive in Europe, Hitler might say yes . And the truth is, we don’t want them. Neither do the Americans. You Jews are a highly educated race. Consequently, you take away jobs faster than any other immigrant group. There are military reasons, as well. Little wasn’t joking in there. The Nazis already laid down the law to the Red Cross. ‘Touch the concentration camps, and we will no longer keep the Geneva Convention regarding military POWs.’ That’s no empty threat.”

The Bentley rolled past the Royal Hospital. “You’re ahead of your time, Stern. Though not by much, I’ll wager. It won’t be long before Chaim Weizmann goes to Churchill with the same request you made this afternoon. Bomb the camps. But it won’t make any difference. Bomber Command is practically a law unto itself. There are a hundred ways to bury a request like that in committees and feasibility studies. You’d lost the battle before you even went in there today. To men like Little you’re nothing but a meddling civilian. That’s enough reason to deny your request, no matter how much sense it might make.” Smith chuckled. “I don’t know what you thought you were playing at. The bloody Archbishop of Canterbury lobbied for sanctuary in England for European Jews, and he failed. And you a wanted terrorist!”

“I had to try,” Stern said. “If you knew the sheer numbers of innocent people dying, you would—”

“Numbers aren’t the half of it.” Duff Smith shook his head.

“I’ve seen eyewitness transcripts myself. Polish girls raped and tortured and thrown into the street with blood streaming from their bodies. Entire families stripped naked and made to stand on metal plates to be electrocuted. Jewish women being sterilized and sent to military brothels. Children wrenched from their mothers’ teats. The whole hellish circus. What you don’t understand is that none of that matters . War is supposed to be hell, Stern. That kind of thing has lost its shock value, especially to soldiers like Little, who watched their friends slaughtered by the thousands in the Great War. To men like that, civilian deaths are regrettable but irrelevant. They have no direct relation to the prosecution or outcome of the war.”

“You can’t all be like Little,” Stern said. “I can’t conceive of that.”

“You’re right. There are a lot more like Major Dickson.”

The brigadier paused to pack and light a hand-carved pipe.

“There must be some decent men in England.”

“Of course there are, lad,” said Smith, puffing gently. “Churchill is one of your strongest advocates. He’s all for establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine after the war. Not that that means anything. Those bastards in Parliament will drop Winston like a hot brick just as soon as he’s won the war for them.”

After convincing Stern of the utter futility of his journey to England, Duff Smith finally got around to his proposition. “What I said back there,” he drawled, “about killing Germans inside Germany. I wasn’t joking.”

“What do you have in mind?” Stern asked suspiciously.

Smith’s face grew very hard, very quickly. “I’m not going to lie to you, lad. I’m not trying to save the pathetic remnants of European Jewry. Frankly, it’s not my bailiwick.”

“What are you trying to do?”

Smith’s eyes flickered. “Not much, except alter the course of the war.”

Stern sat back against the plush seat. “Brigadier . . . who are you? Who do you work for?”

“Ah. Officially, we’re known as SOE — Special Operations Executive. We raise mischief in the occupied countries, France mostly. Sabotage and the like. But with the invasion round the corner, that’s rather tapered off. We’re mostly dropping supplies now.”

“How can you alter the course of the war?”

Smith gave him an enigmatic grin. “Know anything about chemical warfare?”

“Hold your breath and put on your gas mask. That’s all.”

“Well, your former countrymen know quite a bit. The Nazis, I mean.”

“I know they’re using poison gas to murder Jews.”

Brigadier Smith waved his pipe in scorn. “Zyklon B is a common insecticide. Oh, it’s deadly enough in a closed room, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m talking about.”

In two minutes, Smith gave Stern a thumbnail sketch of the Nazi nerve gas program, including Heinrich Himmler’s private patronage. He leaned heavily on two points: Allied helplessness in the face of Sarin, and the Nazis’ predilection for testing their war gases on Jewish prisoners.

“We’ve pinpointed parts of their testing program to three prison camps,” Smith concluded. “Natzweiler in Alsace, Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and Totenhausen near Rostock.”

“Rostock?” Stern exclaimed. “I was born in Rostock!”

Smith raised his eyebrows. “Were you now?”

“What is it you want to do? Disable one of these plants? A commando raid?”

“No, I’ve something a little more complex in mind. Something with a little flair .” The brigadier cracked his knuckles, beginning with his left little finger. “What I want to do is frighten the Nazis so badly that they won’t dare to use their nerve gas, not even when the Reich is falling down around their ears.”

“How can you do that?”

“I neglected to tell you one fact about the Allied gas program, Stern. After intensive analysis of the stolen sample of Sarin, a team of British chemists has managed to produce a facsimile nerve agent.”

Stern breathed faster. “How much do you have?”

“One-point-six metric tons.”

“Is that a lot?”

Smith sighed. “Frankly, no.”

“How much do the Nazis have?”

“Our best estimate is five thousand tons.”

Stern went pale. “Five thousand —? My God. How much would it take to seriously damage a city?”

“Two hundred fifty tons of Sarin could wipe out the city of Paris.”

Stern turned away from Brigadier Smith and pressed his cheek to the cold car window. His head was starting to throb. “And you have one metric ton?”

“One-point-six.”

“How wonderful for you. What do you plan to do with it?”

Brigadier Smith’s voice cut the air like a rusty saber. “I plan to kill every man, woman, child, and dog inside one of those three camps. SS men, prisoners, the lot. And I’m going to let Heinrich Himmler know exactly who did it.”

Stern wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. He took a moment to try and digest the enormity of what he thought the brigadier had suggested. “Why in God’s name are you going to do that?”

“It’s a bluff. A gamble. Perhaps the biggest gamble of the war. I’m going to use our thimbleful of gas to try to convince Heinrich Himmler that we not only have our own nerve gas, but the will to use it. When he finds one of his precious camps wiped out to the last man, yet with every piece of German equipment in pristine condition, he will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I want him to reach. That if the Nazis were to deploy nerve gas against our invasion force, their cities would be annihilated by the same weapon.”

“But how do you know Hitler won’t retaliate with his superior stockpiles?”

“I don’t. But if I’m right about Himmler running the nerve gas program on his own, Hitler will never even find out about our raid. Himmler will sweep the whole thing under the rug. Even if Hitler were to find out, he wouldn’t have any evidence to hold up to the world as an excuse for a retaliatory strike. Not the way I’ve planned this show.”

“You’re mad,” said Stern. “Hitler doesn’t need to justify his actions to anyone.”