Greg Iles - Black Cross

A hot wave of revulsion washed over Schörner. He wouldn’t be surprised if Sturm’s comrades had made some oblique reference to Brandt’s perversions in their letter. He pressed down his disgust. “As you say, Herr Doktor.”

“I’m sure Hauptscharführer Sturm has seen the error of his ways.” Brandt patted the desk with both hands. “Let us concentrate our energies upon the upcoming test, Sturmbannführer. Destiny is at hand.”

Schörner fired his boot heels together and marched out.

Jonas Stern moved swiftly through the trees, his steps almost soundless in the newly fallen snow. He’d moved uphill after leaving the cottage, away from the village of Dornow, toward the power station. Toward the cylinders. Twice he had heard patrols pass within thirty meters of him, but he found it easy to avoid them. Usually the orange light or smell of cigarettes betrayed the SS men. Thirty minutes after leaving Anna Kaas’s cottage, he was standing beneath the tall wooden pylon where the gas cylinders hung.

He stood in the darkness beside the two great support poles and stared up through the foliage. It took some time for his eyes to adjust, but eventually he made out the silhouettes of the steel cylinders hanging in a neat row from one of the outermost electrical wires. He felt a sudden dizziness when he realized that the heavy tanks were swaying in the treetops. Even without the portable anemometer, he was certain that wind sufficient to move those cylinders was moving faster than the ideal speed for the attack.

He stomped on the snow around the base of the support leg nearest him. Buried beneath his feet, in a box with the anemometer and the emergency radio and the submarine signal lamp, were the climbing spikes and harness that would carry him to the top of the pylon. Within five minutes he could initiate the nerve gas attack on Totenhausen. The brisk wind might dilute the gas’s effects, but if the British nerve agent worked at all, it should certainly kill some SS men. On the other hand, if he waited for a while, the wind might drop off to nothing.

As he stood there in the snow, the hum of the nearby transformer station buzzing in his ears, he felt something even stronger than his hatred for the Nazis turning inside him. Something he would never admit to McConnell or the nurse or anyone else. Something he could hardly admit to himself. The visit to Rostock had dredged it up, and the longer he stood there, the more powerful it became until, to his surprise, he found himself moving again. Down the hill, away from the power station. Away from the cylinders.

He was moving toward Totenhausen Camp.

31

“Do you think he will do it this time?” Anna asked. McConnell sat opposite her at the kitchen table, two mugs of ersatz coffee made from barley between them. The brew tasted terrible, but it was hot.

“If he makes it up the hill alive, he probably will. Do you think he should do it?”

“Someone must do something,” Anna said. “I don’t know if it’s right to kill the prisoners. But he is right about one thing.”

“What?”

“Everybody in that camp is doomed no matter what we do. They’ll never survive the war.”

“Do you think what he said is true? Do you think I’m a coward for not helping him?”

Anna looked into her coffee. “People are different. What he calls courage you call stupidity. What you call courage he calls weakness. Some men are not made for war, I think. And that must be a good thing.” She looked up at him. “Why did they select you for this mission? It doesn’t seem to make sense.”

“They said they picked me because I’m not British and because I’m an expert on poison gases. I guess the idea was that together Stern and I would make one perfect soldier. A killer with the brain of a scientist. What about you? You’re a civilian nurse?”

“Yes. They said there was a shortage in the medical corps, but I think Brandt just prefers civilians.”

“I’m a civilian myself.”

She nodded. “A chemist, yes?”

He laughed. “By avocation only. I’m actually a medical doctor.”

Anna’s face underwent a subtle yet profound change. She seemed to be looking at McConnell through different eyes. “You are a physician?”

“Yes. Before the war, anyway.”

“You had a practice?”

“Briefly.”

She sat in silence, reflecting on this new information. Finally she said, “Is that the reason you are so hesitant to kill?”

McConnell hedged. “Part of it, I suppose.”

“It’s part of the reason I do what I do, too.”

“How do you mean?”

Anna glanced at the kitchen window. “It’s dangerous for you to be up here. Schörner might order a house-to-house search.”

“You want me to go down to the basement?”

She stood up and refilled their mugs, then took the half-empty vodka bottle from a sideboard. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I guess we’re both waiting for the same thing.”

“What is that, exactly?”

“The alarms at Totenhausen. If Stern carries out the attack, we will hear sirens, even in the basement.”

McConnell went down the steps first and lit the gas lamp. They sat on the sofa he’d slept on the night before, half-hidden behind the boxes and old farm-machinery parts.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But I’m curious.”

She looked at the floor and smiled sadly. “Why do I work against the Nazis? Yes?”

“Yes. You have to admit, not many Germans have.”

“Oh, I’ll admit that. The few who had the courage to fight were hunted down early on. The rest fall into two categories: those who love the new order, and those who simply take the path of least resistance. The latter is a highly developed feature of the German political character.”

“But not of yours.”

Anna poured a stiff shot of the vodka into her coffee. “It could have been.” She drank. “But it didn’t turn out that way. The funny thing is what changed me. I thought about it a moment ago, when you talked about yourself and Stern. About the two of you making one complete soldier.”

“What do you mean?”

“What made me different than other Germans. It was a man, of course.”

“A man like myself and Stern ? I can hardly imagine a man like that.”

She laughed. “This man was more like you than Stern. He was a doctor, in fact.”

“A physician?”

“Yes. But he was also a Jew.”

Anna said this with a certain defiance, and it was the last thing he expected. He didn’t know what to say. But he did want to hear the story. “This was in Dornow?”

“No, Berlin. I was raised in Bad Sülze, not far from here. My parents were rural people. Well-enough off, but very provincial. My sister and I had grander ideas. At seventeen I went off to Berlin to become a sophisticated city girl. When I completed my nurses’ training, I went to work for a general practitioner in Charlottenburg. Franz Perlman. That was 1936. The Nuremberg Laws had been passed by then, but I was a foolish girl. I had no idea how ominous it all was. The restrictions on Jews were being enforced in different fields at different speeds, and many doctors were still practicing. Franz really seemed too busy to notice. He worked from morning till night, and on everyone — Jews, Christians, whomever.”

Anna sipped from her coffee and stared into the soft light of the gas lamp. “There were three of us: Franz, the receptionist, and me. You can imagine how it happened. It’s not so uncommon a situation, is it? A doctor and a nurse? I was twenty at the time. I’d fallen in love with him by the third week. It wasn’t so hard to do. He was a kind and dedicated man. He tried to discourage me at first. He was a widower, and older. Forty-four. I didn’t care how old he was. I never thought about him being a Jew, either. After about a year he stopped discouraging me. Poor man. I was shameless. I wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t even let us be seen together outside the office. Only twice in all that time did he sneak into my flat, and he never allowed me in his.