“It’s all right,” Anna said.
“Well . . . Brandt has postponed the house-to-house search. He pulled in all the patrols.”
Stern’s eyes narrowed. “Why would he do that?”
“Sturm’s dogs dug up more British parachutes near the Dornow road. Cargo chutes this time. The rains uncovered them. Sturm came back with the parachutes right after Anna left. Schorner wanted to cordon off the whole village, but Brandt overruled him. Brandt thinks that by searching for commandos, Schorner would be leaving him and his lab open to attack. So they’re sealing off the camp.”
Stern closed his eyes for an instant, the only sign that this news had disturbed him. “How did you get out?”
“Brandt sent me to Dornow to get the only four technicians who are not on duty at the factory. I heard him and Schorner discussing plans to dismantle the lab tonight.”
“Dismantle the lab? Tonight? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know, but. . . ”
“But what?”
Weitz scratched his chin. “Well, if taking apart the lab means they are moving tomorrow, and the Raubhammer test is tomorrow, what can they be planning to do with the prisoners?”
Stern nodded. “Anything else?”
“No, Standartenfuhrer.”
“Stop calling me that. You are Jewish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you come out of the war alive, you should come to Palestine. We could use you there.”
Weitz’s hand went to his mouth. “
“Yes. And I want you to do something for me, if you can.”
“Anything.”
“When the attack comes, some of the SS will probably run for their bomb shelter. And that shelter might well protect them. Unless of course some enterprising soul found a way to booby-trap it.”
A slow smile crept over Weitz’s face. “It would be my pleasure, Standartenfuhrer.”
“Good man. Now go. Get back to your work. And think of a reason why you stopped here, in case anyone saw you.”
Weitz bowed his head and hurried away from the door.
Stern turned back to the kitchen. McConnell was restraining Sabine from behind in a wrestling hold.
Before Stern could speak, Anna said, “Brandt gassed your father.”
Stern’s face went white. “What are you telling me?” he whispered. “My father is dead?”
Anna held up a forefinger. “Give me your word that you will not kill my sister, or I tell you nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“I saw him walk into the E-Block with my own eyes,” Anna said.
McConnell heard the truth of it in her voice.
“All right,” said Stern. “You can take her to the basement and tie her. Now —
“Your father survived. It was a chemical-suit test. Your father wore one. I saw him walk out alive.”
Without even waiting for a response, Anna grabbed Sabine by the arm and pulled her to the cellar door. Sabine fought no more. It was plain even to her that Stern would shoot on the slightest provocation.
“You’d better gag her,” Stern called after them. “If I have to listen to any more mewling about Nazi high society, I’ll kill her just to shut her up.”
McConnell collapsed into a kitchen chair. “You heard that guy. They’ve sealed the camp. Schorner’s expecting something. You’ll never get in there tonight. You won’t be able to warn the prisoners to go into the E-Block.”
“I’ll get in,” Stern said with absolute conviction.
“How?”
Stern’s boot heels fired together with the crack of a small caliber pistol. His voice took on a saber edge. “It appears that Standartenfuhrer Ritter Stern from Berlin is going to have to make a security inspection.”
40
At 6:00 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time, twelve RAF Mosquito bombers lifted off from Skitten field, a division of Wick air base in Scotland, and headed across the North Sea toward Occupied Europe. Their code name was GENERAL SHERMAN. The Mosquitoes took off just behind an RAF Pathfinder force which was leading a wave of Lancasters to the oil plants at Magdeburg, Germany. Each specially modified Mosquito carried 4,000 pounds of bombs in its belly.
GENERAL SHERMAN would remain with the Pathfinder force across the Netherlands, but when the Pathfinders turned south near Cuxhaven, the Mosquitoes would continue east, past Rostock, to the mouth of the Recknitz River. Flying by dead reckoning, they would follow the river south, ticking off the villages as they went. When they passed Bad Sulze, they would follow the line of the river with their H2S blind bombing radars until they sighted Dornow village. There, the leading aircraft would drop parachute flares to bathe the area in light. Then the second plane would mark the Aiming Point with brilliant-burning red Target Indicators.
The “Mossies” would be near the limit of their range, but with no known antiaircraft guns to worry about, they could afford to make a slow, accurate bomb run. Their primary target was a prison camp sheltered between the hills and the river, known to them only as TARA. In tandem formation, they would pound the southern face of those hills with high-explosive and incendiary bombs until nothing remained but a fire burning hot enough to boil the nearby Recknitz River.
Jonas Stern walked into Anna’s bedroom and checked his SD uniform in the mirror. He had forgotten to remove the creosote stain he’d gotten while climbing the pylon, but that was a small thing now. He straightened his collar, checked the Iron Cross on his breast, felt the pocket that held his papers.
Staring at his reflection, Stern found it easy to believe that his father had not recognized him. Even though he had shaved in the afternoon, the face and eyes under the peaked SD cap seemed to belong to a man he did not know.
Perhaps they did. So much had happened in the past three days. The visit to Rostock had hit him hardest. Finding his father alive had been a miracle, and yet some part of him had not been surprised by it. Such miracles were not outside his experience of war. But the trip into Rostock, into the neighborhood where he had lived until age fourteen, had overwhelmed him. Even though he and his mother had fled Germany in fear, even though he knew as well as anyone the outrages perpetrated against the Jews who remained behind, some inaccessible part of him had clung to that small neighborhood, those few streets and buildings that had nurtured him. That part, that repository of memory, had remained German.
When he entered his street, expecting to find his old apartment building smashed to rubble, and then saw it standing as tall and proud as it ever had, hope welled in him. He climbed the stairs to the second floor with the unreasoning faith of a fool, shedding years with each step, his cynicism left at the curb with the stolen car. But when he knocked at the door he had once been unable to open because he could not reach the handle, it was answered not by his mother or father or his uncle or anyone else he remembered, but by a bespectacled man of sixty with white hair and soup stains on his shirt.
Stern stood mute, staring past the stranger. The furniture in the apartment was the furniture he had grown up with. His mother’s sofa and end tables, his father’s bookcase and wall clock. He swayed on his feet, his sense of time in free fall. The stranger asked if the Standartenfuhrer was all right. Finally focusing on the face before him, Stern realized that the old man was trembling in fear. The SD uniform had worked its spell.
Even as he mumbled his apologies, Stern caught sight of the two blond children beyond the old man. The boy was only half-dressed, but the tunic hanging open on his shoulders, exposing his white chest, was the familiar black of the Hitler Youth. He wore it as naturally as a British boy would have worn a Boy Scout uniform.
Stern almost stumbled down the stairs in his haste to get back to the car. He would rather have found the whole street leveled by Allied bombs and his relatives dead under the wreckage. The sight of that apartment, filled
