Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Cheeky sod!” thundered a familiar voice. “Drinking my whiskey! I’ll pin your ruddy ears back, Duff!”

Smith blinked up at the massive bulk and florid face of Colonel Charles Vaughan. “Sorry,” he said, rising to his feet. “I was breaking a bit of bad news. A dram softens the blow, what?”

Vaughan’s expression changed instantly to paternal concern. “’Ere now, Duff, I was only ’aving you on. Let’s drain the bottle, eh? Absent friends.”

“Thanks just the same, Charles.” Smith stepped out from behind the desk and patted the colonel’s upper arm. “I need to get back to Baker Street.”

Vaughan frowned in disappointment. “All right, then. Cloaks and daggers. Did your special cargo come through all right?”

“Fine. I appreciate your lending me McShane and the others. A tough job wants tough men.”

“They’re my best, no mistake. And no one will ever know they were gone, Duff. Rest assured of that.”

“Thanks, old man.”

Smith stepped through the door, then turned back, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “You know, Charles, it’s frightening how committed some of these Jews are. Cold-blooded as Gurkhas when it comes to the killing. We’d better look to our guns in Palestine after the war’s over.”

Vaughan rubbed his square chin. “I wouldn’t lose sleep over that, Duff. I don’t think Adolf’s going to leave enough of them alive to start a riot, much less a war.”

25

SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss peered through the trees into darkness. Then he turned back and looked deeper into the forest, at the house he had left behind. Through the pouring rain he could see that Frau Kleist had already switched off the lamps. With a satisfied sigh he stepped out of the trees and began following the narrow footpath that led around the wooded hills and back to Totenhausen.

It would take him forty minutes of trudging through wind and rain to reach the camp, but he didn’t really care. His trips to Frau Kleist’s engendered an entirely different sort of fatigue than that produced by close-order drill. Frau Kleist’s husband was captain of U-238, stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. But the “old man” hadn’t been home for eighteen months, and his wife was not the type to martyr her sexuality for the German Navy. Willi thought the situation funny. Sybille Kleist hated the sea, but she’d married a submarine captain because she loved his dashing uniform. So typically German! Claiming that her husband didn’t get home frequently enough to warrant living in a seaport, she had chosen to live alone in a very comfortable house outside her home village of Dornow.

The captain’s misfortune was Willi Gauss’s salvation. Sybille Kleist was insatiable in bed. Willi was twenty-three years old, she forty. Yet Sybille drained him to exhaustion twice a week, sometimes three times. Some nights she would not even let him step outside the house to have a pee. She waited for this need to make him hard, then used him again. And Willi wasn’t complaining. Only lately had she begun to talk nonsense. She claimed she loved him. Even at twenty-three Willi knew that was dangerous. When the war was over, Captain Johann Kleist would return. U-boat captains were notoriously proud and tough men. Willi planned to have broken off the affair long before that day. Still, one or two more trips to Sybille’s bed wouldn’t make the ending any more difficult.

As he approached a dogleg on the dark path, he heard a muted thump somewhere ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar, but in the rain he couldn’t place the sound. As he rounded the turn, he heard a swish in the trees to his left. Then another thump. Had Sergeant Sturm finally decided to follow him and see what he was up to in the forest at night?

Seconds later Willi stopped dead in the slushy path. Ten meters away stood a giant of a man wearing a dark uniform. Only the whites of two eyes flickered in the space where the face should have been. When Willi saw the parachute and shroud lines flap in the wind, a small voice in his brain said Kommando . He discounted it. After all, he was standing on German soil, far from any battlefront. Perhaps Major Schörner had laid on some type of exercise to test the Totenhausen guards. This thought stayed Willi’s hand for a moment. Then he grabbed for the holster on his belt.

A bright flash bloomed in front of the parachutist.

Willi felt a tremendous blow in the stomach. Then he was looking up into the stormy sky over Mecklenburg. The parachutist bent over him. Willi felt more puzzled than afraid. And tired. Unbelievably tired. As he stared upward, the blacked-out face above him swirled, disappeared, then coalesced into the soft features of Sybille Kleist. She looked different somehow. She looked . . . beautiful. As he lost consciousness, Willi realized that perhaps he loved her after all.

“He’s dead, Ian,” said a voice in English.

Sergeant McShane kicked the body. It didn’t move. “Make sure,” he ordered.

A dark figure dropped to the ground and drove a dagger into the fallen German’s heart.

“Papers,” McShane said.

The kneeling figure rifled the dead man’s pockets and came up with a brown leather wallet. “He’s a sergeant. SS Oberscharführer Willi Gauss. Here’s a ration card with the word Totenhausen.”

McShane nodded. “I dinna think a lone sergeant with a pistol constitutes a patrol, Colin. Still, someone might be expecting him back at camp.”

The Achnacarry weapons instructor looked up from Willi Gauss’s corpse. “I smell liquor on him, Ian.”

McShane watched the path while he freed himself from his parachute harness. Within seconds two more shadows raced up and stopped beside him. Both men instructors from Achnacarry. One was Alick Cochrane — another Highlander built on the McShane model — the other John Lewis, the judo instructor Stern had embarrassed on the first day of training. By taping his knee, exercising it furiously each day and packing it in ice each night, Lewis had made good his promise to be fit enough for the mission.

“Do you know where we are, Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked.

“Between the two main groups of hills. West of the village and the camp, as planned, but we’re too far south. Bloody storm. Still, it could have been worse, jumping blind like that.”

“Aye,” Cochrane agreed. “I dinna think I could have done it if you hadn’t jumped first.”

“Where are the cylinders and the other gear?” asked Lewis.

McShane looked up at the dark hills and shielded his eyes from the driving rain. “Should be north of us, on the plain. Where we’re supposed to be. The electrical station should be at the top of these hills to our left. Due east.”

Colin Munro wiped his dagger clean and rose to his feet. “How do you want to play it, Ian?”

McShane looked down at the dead man in the path and forced himself to think clearly. From the moment they entered German airspace things had begun going wrong. They’d flown out of Wick airbase in Scotland, in the most secret aircraft of the Special Duties Squadron, a Luftwaffe JU-88A6 that had forced-landed in Cornwall and then been refitted by SOE for high-priority missions into Europe. The Junkers and a German-speaking RAF pilot had carried the team unchallenged over the occupied Low Countries, but the weather soon intervened. A Baltic storm had unexpectedly veered south and settled like a wall over the old German border. The pilot wanted to turn back, but McShane had forced him to fly straight into the storm. Using the Recknitz River as a landmark, he was able to bring the commandos almost directly over their target.

They had jumped blind, without flares or radio to guide them, and miraculously landed without injury. However, their cargo chutes and gas cylinders had been dropped too long after them. McShane knew he could eventually locate the cargo chutes; he’d watched them falling as long as he could. The dead man at his feet was the problem. Oberscharführer Willi Gauss could wreck the entire mission before McConnell and Stern even reached Germany, simply by having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. McShane glanced around the dark forest. Someone could easily have heard the fatal shots fired. The silencers on the Stens were far from silent.