Greg Iles - Black Cross

Rachel was dumbfounded. “I don’t. . . Six months?”

Major Schörner took a deep breath and paused, as if mentally consulting a list of social mores. “Impossible,” he said finally. “Outside, the normal mourning period is quite long, of course. Up to a year.” He turned from the window. “Here things are different. We are at war, after all. Thousands of women are made widows every day. You cannot let your youth pass by simply because of a little sentimentality.”

Rachel tried to think of some further argument, but came up with nothing.

“I shall give you one week,” Schörner said. Then he moved back behind his desk and sat down.

“Is that all, Herr Major?”

“Yes. Oh, just a moment. From now on you will receive a special diet. When the evening meal is finished, go to the alley between the hospital and the Experimental Block. Inmate Weitz will meet you there with food.”

Schörner picked up a pen and began scratching on a form that lay on his desk. Rachel felt a sudden wild courage, like the implacable instinct that had driven her over the block fence to search for the diamonds. “May I bring my children, Herr Major?”

“What?” Schörner looked up and blinked.

“May I bring my children to eat this special food?”

“Oh.” A knowing gleam came into his eye. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Rachel turned and stepped toward the door. She stopped at the sound of Schörner’s voice.

“If you change your mind before the week is out, you can find me in my quarters. I am there every night. Do not take too long.” He returned to the file on his desk. “ Auf wiedersehen .”

Rachel nodded to the door. “ Auf wiedersehen , Herr Major.”

Frau Hagan was waiting behind the cinema annex of the administration building. Rachel did not walk directly toward her, but toward the barracks area. Frau Hagan contrived to walk in such a way that their paths seemed naturally to intersect in the Appellplatz.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“Me.”

“For sex?”

“Yes.”

“I told you. You came here too healthy. I’m surprised it was Schörner, though.” They walked for a few moments in silence. “At least it isn’t Sturm. You might not survive a night with him. He’s an animal. He would throw you to his pack when he was finished.”

“God, what am I to do?”

“You must go to him tonight?”

“No. He gave me a week.”

“What?”

“He said I could have one week to finish mourning. As if even a year would be enough!”

Frau Hagan stopped walking. “I think the major is taken with you, Dutch girl. As far as I can recall, Schörner has never had a woman in this camp. And why else would he let you wait a week? He could have you right this minute. There is nothing to stop him.”

Rachel drew a quick breath. “He told me I remind him of someone. I think perhaps . . . perhaps he has some remnants of decency left.”

The Pole seized Rachel’s wrist in a clawlike grip. “Don’t ever think that! If you walked within a meter of the wire he would shoot you himself. If you disobeyed an order he would have you on the Tree without a second thought.”

Rachel felt herself losing control. As they neared the block, she threw her arms around Frau Hagan like a terrified child. “Why me?” she wailed. “I am a Jew. I thought I was like a disease to the SS.”

Frau Hagan stroked Rachel’s nearly bald scalp. “That is what Goebbels and Himmler say. But people are people. I know of a case where an SS man actually fell in love with a Jewess. They were both shot.”

“What am I to do, then?”

Frau Hagan gently disengaged Rachel and held her at arms’ length. “At the end of the week you will have to give in,” she said firmly. “This is not Amsterdam. You have no choice.”

But as they entered the block, Rachel decided that maybe she did have a choice. If she had to yield to Schörner in seven days regardless, why shouldn’t she try to get something out of it?

Something for her children.

21

It is a curious fact that men who share extreme hardship — even those who previously dislike or even hate each other — form unspoken bonds that last forever. Not because of insensitivity or stupidity do armies train their recruits by driving them up to and beyond the point of maximum endurance. For thousands of years this system has forged the callow young men of numberless nations into soldiers ready to die for their comrades — even if these comrades are bound only by common hatred of their tormentor: the army.

Of course the process that bonds people need not be so extreme. Strangers standing at a bus stop will studiously ignore each other for quite some time. But let the bus be late, let a hard rain begin lashing the street, and the fragmented crowd quickly becomes a group united by resentment against the bus company and its lazy drivers.

It was a range of experiences between these two extremes that began to bridge the chasm between Mark McConnell and Jonas Stern. Though McConnell spent much time alone studying German and organic chemistry, and Stern climbed ice-slickened poles until he could do it wearing a blindfold, the two men found themselves thrown together on night marches, obstacle courses, at meals, and, most importantly, in the dark hut behind the castle in the exhausted minutes before sleep took them. A thaw was inevitable, and Smith should have seen it. There was simply no escaping the fact that the two men had no supporters at the castle other than themselves. No grumbling cadre of brothers-in-arms, as the commando recruits had, no friendly colleagues, as the instructors had. They were two civilians alone, training in a program wholly outside the normal routine of the Commando Depot.

For the staff they were an inconvenience, a disruption to be tolerated only at the request of the commanding officer, who was merely doing a favor for a friend. And excepting Sergeant Ian McShane, that tolerance was markedly thin. Some of Stern’s early remarks about McConnell’s pacifism had gotten around, and the instructors quickly came to view the American with the jaundiced eye that many in Oxford had. In Stern’s case the prejudice was more open. Anti-Semitism was widespread in the British army, but Stern’s German accent put him right over the top. He could hardly pass anyone at the castle without drawing a dark look or muttered imprecation.

And so by the fourth day, the two men, so different in philosophy, had been forced by prejudice onto common ground. Stern had maintained his fierce mask of cynicism, but McConnell soon sensed the somber, reflective intelligence behind it. Stern’s reappraisal of McConnell occurred more slowly — until something quite unexpected taught him that first impressions can be far from accurate.

At the toggle bridge — a long net of intertwined toggle ropes that spanned a wide stretch of the river Arkaig — Sergeant McShane was taking great pleasure in pointing out to Stern this ingenious use for his favorite tool. Stern retorted that the bridge suspended above the rushing waters had required at least fifty toggle ropes to construct, whereas he and McConnell would have only two.

While they traded barbs on the castle bank, a group of French commandos were being instructed on how to properly negotiate the flexible bridge under fire. The Arkaig was still in flood, concealing rocks that could snap bones like twigs if a man fell the twenty feet from the bridge to the river. A concealed sniper fired near-miss shots with a rifle, and to further enhance the realism of the exercise, explosive charges had been laid in the riverbed. Consequently, several furious commandos found themselves bunched at the middle of the sagging bridge while an instructor with a clipboard shouted cockney epithets from the bank, maligning their ancestors back to William the Conqueror. Every time a bomb exploded in the river, the Frenchmen screamed at each other with redoubled fury.