Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked gently.

“We bury him in the woods,” McShane barked. “Right here. Bury our chutes in the same hole. No time for anything else. Then we’ll retrieve the cylinders, bury the cargo chutes and move up the hill.”

“Those cylinders,” said Colin Munro. “I’ll bet if we ditched the carrying poles, and each of us took a cylinder on his shoulder, we could cut the transport time in half. Especially through these woods.”

“Those bloody tanks are heavy,” Lewis reminded them.

“No tougher than the logs at Achnacarry,” said McShane. “Will your knee take the weight then, John?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Right. This is where we live up to all that blarney we give the recruits about—”

“ Everybody down !”

McShane hit the wet snow beside Willi Gauss’s corpse. “What is it, Alick?”

Cochrane grabbed his arm and pointed toward the woods.

Forty yards to the north, a yellow light had appeared in the trees. After thirty seconds of absolute concentration, McShane decided the light was stationary.

“What do we do?” Lewis asked.

“Keep your bloody mouth shut and pray it goes away.”

Sybille Kleist stood at the front window of her cottage and peered into the darkness. She knew the sounds of her forest, and the brief Brrat ! that had punctuated the night after her lovely Willi left was not part of the normal Mecklenburg nocturne. She wondered if her paramour might be returning for one more round of lovemaking — she hoped so — but Willi did not reappear.

She took a drag on her cigarette and wished again for a telephone. Not that she could call anyone about her fears. They might stumble onto Willi, and that would be that. Life was becoming far too complicated. What would she do when her husband returned? Divorcing a heroic U-boat captain would brand her as a faithless, unpatriotic slut, no matter how boring the man was.

Nothing ever worked out as it should.

After another anxious minute of watching and listening, Sybille reluctantly went back to bed and lit a second cigarette. The sheets were still damp from Willi’s enthusiastic attentions. Thinking of him, she remembered the sharp sound from the path. It was probably only a stag, she told herself, scraping his antlers on a tree. But she would be glad when she saw Willi again, all the same.

“Everybody up,” McShane ordered softly. “We’ve only got seven hours till dawn. After we’ve hung the cylinders and stowed the radio, we’ve still got to make it to the beach.”

Colin Munro pulled a folding spade out of his pack. “Let’s haul this bastard into the trees and get him buried.”

It took ninety-six minutes to bury Willi Gauss, find all eight cylinders, attach the roller mechanisms and suspension arms to the cylinder heads and bury the cotton cargo chutes that had brought them all down. It required a further two hours to lug the eight cylinders — plus one box that was to be cached for Stern and McConnell — to the top of the highest hill.

They set up their base at the foot of the first pylon beyond the transformer station fence. The station itself was blacked out to keep it from the eyes of Allied bomber formations. A deep humming in the forest told the commandos that it was functioning, but a quick recon by Cochrane confirmed that it was deserted.

Lewis grumbled that to climb the pylon and work around the high-voltage wires in the rain was suicide. Ignoring him completely, McShane donned spikes and harness, tied a long coiled rope to his belt, and quickly climbed one of the sixty-foot support poles. Colin Munro was right on his heels. At the top, buffeted by wind and icy rain, McShane tied his toggle rope around the crossarm as a safety measure, then uncoiled the long rope and used it to haul up the block and tackle necessary to hoist the gas cylinders to the top of the pylon.

The commandos worked mostly in silence, albeit at a frantic pace. They had rehearsed the operation a dozen times at Achnacarry. Cochrane and Lewis attached the cylinder/roller wheel combinations at ground level, then used the block and tackle to haul the apparatus to the top of the pylon. McShane and Colin Munro handled the transfer to the auxiliary conductor wires.

At Achnacarry, Munro had likened the transfer process to hanging a 130-pound Christmas ornament on a tightrope. The cylinder was the ornament, and the roller wheel and suspension bar formed the hook. The analogy was apt, and it stuck. Hanging the ornament required perfect balance and enormous strength, as it had to be lifted off of the tackle hook that had brought it up to the crossarm, then raised still higher and set down on the outermost auxiliary wire — all without man or metal touching the live wire that ran just inches away.

McShane provided the strength, Munro the balance. Once the roller wheel had been fitted onto the wire, Munro would climb from the crossarm onto the cylinder itself, while McShane held both man and machine in place with a rubber rope attached to a hook on the cylinder’s bottom. Then McShane would let the cylinder — with Munro astride it — roll down a predetermined distance from the crossarm. When it stopped, Munro would remove a lubricated cotter pin from a pouch on his belt and fit it through a hole in the roller wheel. Then he would simultaneously arm the six pressure triggers that protruded from the hard wire netting covering each cylinder. The final step was to attach clips on a heavy gauge rubber rope to the oversized ring at the end of the cotter pin. It was this rope — attached in reverse sequence, so that the cylinder farthest from the pylon would be freed first — that Jonas Stern would use to initiate the gas attack.

Everything went according to plan until the last cylinder. McShane and Munro had decided to rest for sixty seconds before fitting the last tank into place. It hung just beneath them, still suspended from the block and tackle controlled by Cochrane and Lewis below. The two men were resting side by side on the crossbeam — McShane sitting, and Munro squatting with uncanny balance — when they heard a loud boom from the power station behind them.

Whether it was a lightning strike or a limb that had fallen across a live wire, neither man knew, but Ian McShane grunted explosively as the auxiliary wire energized and the rubber rope came alive in his hands. The Highlander did not know he had made a sound; he knew only that his arm had been yanked by a gorilla, so he tried to yank back. Then suddenly the current was gone and he toppled off the crossarm.

His toggle rope saved him. Tied from his belt to the crossarm, it held him suspended fifty-seven feet above the ground, in a perfect position to watch his mission end in catastrophe. He stared helplessly as the farthest cylinder from the crossarm began to roll down the wire toward Totenhausen.

Then he saw the most remarkable feat of bravery or madness he had ever witnessed. A black shadow flew through the air above him and caught itself on the four-foot suspension bar between the moving roller wheel and the cylinder head. At first he thought the shadow was an owl or a nighthawk.

Then he realized it was Colin Munro.

The weapons instructor had heard McShane’s grunt and seen him try to jerk free, in the process yanking the pin from the cylinder farthest from the crossarm. Without an instant’s reflection Munro had leaped off the crossarm.

McShane stretched out his hand in a futile attempt to snatch Munro back, but the moment was past. Man and machine trundled away down the wire, quickly gathering speed. Seconds later he lost sight of both in the darkness.

Forty yards down the auxiliary line, rolling rapidly toward the second pylon, Colin Munro felt electricity crackle in his hair. The knowledge that the wire above him was live — that he himself was “live” — nearly made him lose his stomach. It was a miracle he was not dead already, in that he had landed atop the cylinder without tripping one of the armed triggers. Yet he knew that for the next few seconds, at least, he was safe. Just as a bird can perch on a live conductor wire, so can a man if he is not grounded and if the voltage is not too high. This knowledge calmed him long enough to make some very quick calculations.