Oxford.
“What the hell is that?” Sturm asked. “Why are you wearing that?”
A brief flash lit the window, followed instantly by a muffled explosion that rattled the window in its frame.
“What?” Sturm grunted.
A second explosion followed the first.
Now Weitz looked puzzled as well.
“That’s the gas!” Stern shouted from the chair. “British Sarin! I buried two cylinders by the dog kennels!”
Weitz smiled with sudden understanding. “You wanted to go outside, Hauptscharfuhrer? Go ahead. Right through the window, where I can watch you.”
Sergeant Sturm conjured a conspiratorial smile. “How about a deal, Weitz? We’ve done business before, eh? What do you want?”
“I want to see your eyes popping out of your head while you breathe Sarin.”
Men were yelling in another part of the building. Sturm bent over and flipped the latch and jerked up the window. When he hesitated, Weitz shot out the panes over his head.
“Wait!” Stern shouted from the chair. “He has my keys!”
Sergeant Sturm cut his eyes at Jonas, then turned and jumped through the window.
“Stop him!” Stern shouted. “Hurry!”
Weitz went to the window. Sturm was running toward the hospital, and he didn’t seem to be suffering the effects of any gas. Weitz knelt and fired at the retreating figure until the chamber of his gun clicked empty. He saw Sturm fall, but the sergeant picked himself up and continued on toward the hospital.
“There’s no gas out there,” Weitz said. “Not Sarin, anyway.”
“Untie me!” Stern screamed. “Did you hit him?”
“Yes.” Weitz picked up the SS dagger and slashed the ropes binding Stern to the chair. “Can you walk?”
Stern jumped to his feet. “We’ve got to get away from here! I have a car but no keys!”
Weitz picked up the Raubhammer gas mask from the hall floor and put it on. Just before he snapped the air hose into place, he shouted through the hole in his face mask: “There’s another suit in the hospital! In Brandt’s office. Follow me!”
Stern had tried to shape the plastic explosive so that it would blow the cylinder heads straight off of the buried tanks. When the first pencil fuse fired, the charge blasted the cylinder head outward like an artillery shell, straight through the wall of one of the SS barracks. The six-pound piece of metal decapitated Private Otto Huth, and before his stunned friends could even take in what had happened, the second cylinder head tore through the wall, shattered the hip of a lance corporal and lodged in the opposite wall.
Fifty SS men at once scrambled for their weapons and charged the barracks door. The bottleneck created there forced them to regain some semblance of discipline. Twenty seconds later, three dozen nervous storm troopers were crouching outside, trying to pinpoint a threat that seemed to have vanished.
“Look!” said one, pointing past the dog kennels toward the woods. “Smoke. They’re bombing us from the air!”
“Don’t be an idiot,” said a strapping soldier named Heinrich Krebs. “The snow must have detonated some of the mines we laid around the perimeter today.”
“I don’t remember putting any mines on this side.”
But Krebs was already walking around the kennels toward the fence.
“What’s wrong with the dogs?” asked a puzzled voice.
“Maybe they were killed by shrapnel,” someone suggested.
Several men stepped up to the kennel fence. “They’re not all down,” said one. “Look.”
“
The other SS barracks had also emptied at the sound of the explosions. Now more than seventy men were strung out along the narrow alley between the barracks and the dog kennels.
“See anything, Krebs?” called a sergeant.
There was no answer.
“Heini?”
“Shhh!” someone said. “Listen.”
It was a soft sound, like the hissing of a venomous snake. But almost immediately the hissing was drowned out by the sound of men gibbering, defecating, striking each other, and choking on their own tongues. A dozen storm troopers fell to the ground, convulsing like epileptics in seizure.
Heinrich Krebs was already dead.
Six miles north of Totenhausen, ten Mosquitoes of the GENERAL SHERMAN flight assumed a tandem bombing formation. A half mile south of them, Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner reached for his microphone to break radio silence.
“Leader approaching target,” he said in a mechanical voice. “I will mark with flares from one thousand feet, then go to fifteen hundred to act as Master Bomber. Number Two will drop red, repeat red, Target Indicators. I will verify Aiming Point, then give the go-ahead. High explosive followed by incendiaries. Let’s put one down Goring’s bunghole, eh?”
Sumner hung up the mike. “Well, Jacobs?” he said.
The navigator remained bent over the fuzzy image on the screen of his air-to-ground radar. “Eighty percent sure, sir. It would help if we slowed a bit.”
Sumner keyed his mike. “Leader reducing speed. Holding at one thousand. Two, drop Target Indicators on my mark.”
He slammed his gloved hand down on the roof of his field car. “Tell Sturm everything I said!”
At that moment a grenade landed just behind the troop truck and exploded with an ear-splitting boom. Shrieks of agony filled the air. Schorner ran around the truck just in time to see the taillights of the Volkswagen flick on at the next curve. Snow kicked up into the air as the car raced away down the hill.
The driver of the troop truck revved his engine and shifted into gear, preparing to turn and pursue the fleeing car, but Schorner leaped up onto the running board and grabbed the wheel.
“Stop, you imbecile! You’re staying here! Let that dog out!”
He jumped down and told the driver of his field car to chase the VW only if it headed toward Totenhausen. The corporal saluted and sped away.
“We’re looking for an American and a bomb detonator!” Schorner yelled to the confused mass of SS troopers. “He’s wearing a Waffen SS uniform! I want four men inside the station. Everyone else into the trees!”
Anna pumped the brakes of the Volkswagen, waiting to be sure Schorner was following. After a few moments, she saw a pair of headlights skid around the curve behind her. The lights were low to the ground. The field car.
She kept pumping the brakes, but no other lights appeared. Why wasn’t the troop truck following? She didn’t think one grenade could have put it out of commission. When the field car closed to within four car lengths, she jammed the accelerator to the floor.
The Volkswagen glanced off a hard snow bank, but she maintained control and fought the car around the next switchback curve. Below her lay Totenhausen. She wondered briefly what was happening inside the camp, but thoughts of McConnell quickly returned. Would he be able to climb the pylon? Would he have the will to release the gas cylinders if he did? How odd it would be never to see him again, the man who had awakened her sleeping heart after so many years. She pumped the brake, preparing to take the next curve, but the car lurched forward, shuddering under the impact of machine gun bullets.
Anna momentarily lost control of the car, then righted it and hit the gas. She looked down on the seat beside
