The Volkswagen fishtailed onto the road. He thanked God for the winters he had spent in England; most Georgia natives couldn’t drive a car half a mile on ice like this. Anna reloaded her pistol and aimed it back over the seat toward the cottage as they sped away.
“They’re not following,” she cried. “What are they doing?”
“Questioning your sister!” McConnell kept his eyes focused on the road. “Put on Stern’s gas suit.
Wolfgang Schorner picked himself up off the cottage floor and walked calmly to the door. He watched the taillights of the Volkswagen racing back up the hill road. The SS corporal who had been driving the troop truck stumbled up to him, his face white with horror.
“Five men dead, Sturmbannfuhrer! Eight wounded! What do we do?”
“First you calm down.” Schorner took a deep, satisfied breath. “The war has finally come to Totenhausen, Rottenfuhrer. People die in wars.”
“Do we go after them?”
“Not yet. The fools are running straight toward the camp.” He turned and looked back into the kitchen. Sabine Hoffman was being helped off of the floor by an SS private. “I apologize for the interruption, Madam. As I was saying, I met you several months ago in Berlin. Your husband is Gauleiter Hoffman?”
“Yes, Sturmbannfuhrer!”
“Can you tell me who left in that car?”
“My sister! She’s gone mad! There were two men with her most of the day. One American, the other a Jew. He was dressed as an SD officer!”
“We have that man in custody,” Schorner said in a reassuring voice. “Do you know what your sister and this American planned to do tonight?”
“I heard the Jew saying something about an electrical station.”
Schorner felt a prick of anxiety. “Anything else?”
“Anna was asking the American something about poison gas. He seemed to know quite a lot about it.”
The color drained from Schorner’s face. “Is there a telephone here?”
Sabine shook her head.
“Rottenfuhrer, I want four men in my car! The rest follow in the truck.”
“What about the wounded, Sturmbannfuhrer? Some of them can’t walk.”
“Leave them in the road!”
Twenty-two miles north of Totenhausen, the navigator in the lead bomber of GENERAL SHERMAN sighted the mouth of the Recknitz River below him.
“That’s it, sir. Time to turn.”
Squadron Leader Harry Sumner banked the Mosquito to the south. “Everyone with us, Jacobs?”
“Right on our tail.”
Sumner checked his fuel gauge. A headwind had put them slightly behind schedule, but they would benefit by the same wind on the ride home. They had lost one plane already, forced to turn back due to mechanical failure. That was the way of it. But they still had more than enough bombload and Target Indicators to carry out the mission.
“Think you can find this place, Jacobs? It’s supposed to be almost covered with trees.”
The navigator was holding a pen-sized torch in his teeth and studying a map. “Just stay over the river,” he said in a garbled voice. “The H2S will show me the bends. If this map is accurate, we can use Dornow village and the river as brackets. Flares will give us a visual on the power station and the camp.”
Sumner peered through the dark windscreen. The silver line of the river led them southward like a magic road. A rum mission, this, even by Special Duties Squadron standards. All the way into Germany to bomb a tiny prison camp for SOE? The Air Marshals constantly fought Duff Smith tooth and nail to keep their precious planes out of his clutches. How had he managed to divert a Mosquito squadron for this? Sumner had mentioned it to his superior at Wick, but all he’d got in reply was a sour look and a mumbled, “If we want to fight this one, we’ll have to go all the way to Downing Street.”
He hadn’t known what to make of that. But he did know one thing. From one thousand feet without ack-ack, his squadron could hit an outdoor privy dead center and leave nothing but a crater for a square mile around.
“Eight minutes out,” the navigator said.
“They’re still not following!” McConnell said, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror and pushing the Volkswagen as fast as he dared.
“They will.” Anna thrust her arms into the sleeves of the oilskin jumpsuit and started to zip up its front.
He caught her hand. “You have to put on the mask first, then zip the suit over the part that drapes over your shoulders. It’s the only way to get an airtight seal.”
Anna reached back for both masks.
“Put yours on now,” he said. “I’ll be able to hear you if you need to talk.”
The road climbed sharply. McConnell reduced speed. Just ahead he saw the first curve of the switchback road that wound across the hills. As he took the turn, he caught sight of lights in the distance behind them.
“There they are,” he said. “You know anything about compressed air bottles?”
“I’ve administered oxygen a hundred times.”
“Same principle. Open the valve, attach the air hose to your mask and breathe normally.” He wrenched the wheel to avoid colliding with a bank of birch trees. “Jesus! This is like a logging road!”
Anna had her mask on now. It blurred her facial features and dulled her eyes. She looked like an extra in a Flash Gordon feature. “The boots are too big,” she said, her voice buzzing through the speech transmission diaphragm near her mouthpiece.
“Put them on anyway. And zip the legs down around them.” He braked for another curve. “How far to the power station?”
“Not far.”
“I’ll drive the car into the trees. Schorner and his men should drive right past us.”
Anna nodded and pointed to the left. “Slow down.”
He let the VW drift past the transformer station. He saw a wooden watchman’s hut inside the dark jungle of metal struts, a faint light glowing in its window. Thirty meters past the station, he turned off the road and rolled forward until tree trunks forced him to stop.
He pulled on his mask and zipped his suit, then climbed out. The silence was eerie after the frantic skirmish at the cottage. Anna helped him strap on his air tank. He felt like a draft horse wearing blinders. Before he attached his air hose, he leaned forward and said, “I guess we’d better take the guns with us.”
She shook her head and handed him the Mauser rifle.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m staying here,” she said. “Schorner may stop at the power station. He might even turn in here. We can’t take the chance.”
“But you couldn’t stop them if they did.”
“I’ve got Stern’s grenades,” she said. “And my pistol. You keep your rifle as a last resort.”
“Anna—”
“Go!”
He started to say something else, but she slung the Mauser over his shoulder and pushed him farther into the trees. He turned back and looked at her. She was standing motionless in the dark beside the car, a fine-figured woman wrapped in heavy black oilskin and wearing a clear vinyl bag over her head. Ludicrous. Tragic. He thought of the diary she had labored over so long, that was now wedged into the left leg of his gas suit. He hoped she would be alive to make a final entry when this night was over.
He raised his hand, then turned and trudged across the snow toward the pylon.
Major Schorner raced up the hills at nearly twice the speed McConnell had. The excitable corporal occupied the field car’s passenger seat, while three more SS men were scrunched into the back, each armed with a
