Black Cross

her. She had saved the last two grenades for a reason. Major Schorner had once told her a story about a wounded SS officer left behind by his unit during a retreat on the Eastern front. The man had sat calmly against a burning tank as the Russian infantry approached. When they came within five meters of him, he smiled, pulled the pins on the grenades and blew a half dozen Russians to pieces with him.

Anna had endured many nightmares in which she was tortured by Gunther Sturm. She had no intention of enduring the reality. If they managed to stop Greta’s VW with gunfire, she would surrender like the man on the Russian front. With a smile on her face and live grenades in her hands.

“Dark as a bloody coal chute down there!” the navigator complained.

“What about your radar?”

“All I see is the river bend. It looks like the right one.”

Squadron-Leader Harry Sumner expelled air from his cheeks with a sound that betrayed the tripwire tension beneath his calm voice. “How sure are you?”

“Well . . . eighty-five percent?”

“That’s not good enough, Jacobs. If we bomb the wrong target, they’ll just send us back.” Sumner paused. “I’m going to drop a single flare. You’ll have to verify our location visually.”

The navigator looked up from his radar. “One flare, sir? Everyone down there will know we’re here, and we’ll still have to do a full marking run.”

“They’ll know soon enough anyway.” Sumner reached for a lever. “There’s no known ack-ack between here and Rostock, and we’ve got to be sure.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can’t risk wasting the lot on the wrong bend in the river.”

“No, sir.

“Here we go.”

McConnell perched on the crossarm of the pylon like a man in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship. He blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes and looked around. Above him hung the inverted black bowl of sky and stars, a cold sliver of moon. Below him, to the north, shone the faint lights of Dornow village. To the south curved the silver line of the Recknitz River, sheltering Totenhausen Camp on its near bank. He recognized the spot by the bluish glow of spotlights.

His nerves thrummed. A staggering amount of effort had gone into putting one man on top of this pylon with the gas cylinders under his control. He was not that man, but he was the man who had made it here. And if the British nerve gas worked, he could doom every SS man in Totenhausen as surely as Jonas Stern could have. If the gas worked. If the cylinders stayed on track during their run down to the camp. If, if, if—

He could hear Schorner’s men beating the bushes below him. Flashlight beams ricocheted off the snow in all directions. He heard a dog barking wildly, someone encouraging the dog. They were trying to track his scent over the snow. He didn’t see how they could, as he’d been wearing a rubber suit while he walked, but the torches were getting closer. He didn’t feel particularly nervous. They would capture him eventually, of course, but too late.

Right now he was untouchable.

The drama that caught his attention was closer. On the south face of the hills, two sets of headlights careened down the switchback road through the trees. Anna was in front, the SS car behind. The field car was slowly closing the gap, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Anna would be overtaken and killed within minutes. He tried to focus his mind on the task at hand, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the swerving lights below.

And then it hit him. In thirty seconds both cars would break out onto the flat stretch that led from the base of the hill around to Totenhausen’s front gate. By road, they might be a third of a mile away, but as the crow flew — or the bullet — the distance was probably more like three hundred meters. With the shouts of Schorner’s men ringing up from the woods below, McConnell swung down off the crossarm and drove his spikes into the support pole beneath it. Clipping his safety belt around the pole, he jerked Stan Wojik’s bolt-action Mauser off his shoulder and laid it over the crossarm, aiming south.

He chambered a round from the magazine and waited.

As he stared, he realized that the shot was damn near impossible. The problem was not the rifle, but the darkness. He was staring across open sights into a wall of night. Even when the cars appeared beneath him, he would have no way to accurately judge distance. It would be like aiming at stars.

Anna’s car burst out of the trees at the foot of the hill, her red taillights accelerating away from him almost directly in line with the descending pylons. She had opened up a lead, but her flight was leading her headlong toward Totenhausen, straight into death. He stuck his gloved forefinger into the trigger guard of the Mauser and began tracking her lights. He almost threw the rifle down in frustration. He would be lucky if his bullet struck within fifty yards of the car.

He heard the dog barking in the trees below him, closer now. A voice in his brain told him to drop the rifle, to climb back onto the crossarm and release the cylinders. He was about to do just that when he heard the rumble of powerful engines.

Had Schorner brought more trucks into the forest?

The SS field car broke out of the trees. McConnell sighted in on the dim taillights and shook the sweat from his eyes, his heart pounding with the futility of his effort. But as his finger touched the trigger, he heard something pop in the sky high above him. The hillside came alive with light as surely as if God had thrown a switch in heaven. He had no idea who had fired the flare, but his eye instantly oriented him to distance by pylons, treetops, the stretch of road. . .

He led the field car high and pulled the trigger.

“Rifle fire!” Major Schorner shouted, his eyes turned skyward in an attempt to locate the flare. “Rifle fire in the trees! Move south!”

Led by the dog, Schorner and his men crashed through the trees toward the sound of the gunfire.

McConnell’s second bullet tore through the canvas roof of the field car and into the neck of an SS man in the backseat. The storm trooper squealed like a dying pig. Blood sprayed over his comrades, who immediately ducked below the windows, assuming they were being fired on from the sides. Four seconds later another slug knocked off the car’s wing mirror. The driver had hardly registered the impact when McConnell’s fifth bullet drilled down through the trunk panel and punctured the fuel tank. Gasoline funneled onto the road behind the car, and the sparks from the overheated exhaust quickly ignited the mixture.

The tank blew with a dull crump like a mortar shot, breaking the rear axle and dropping the back of the car onto the road with a metallic screech. The SS men who were still alive dove through the doors before it stopped, leaving their wounded comrades behind in the burning vehicle.

Anna shut her eyes and swerved, stunned by the flash behind her. She had no idea what could have destroyed the field car. Could it have hit a land mine? She skidded back onto the road and took her foot off the accelerator, realizing that her diversionary sacrifice was no longer required. What should she do? What could she do? Go back to the pylon? It was too late to help McConnell now. What about the camp? If all went as planned, it would soon be saturated with gas. She let the VW coast forward, her mind spinning with confusion.

And then she remembered the children.

She had the gas suit. She had the pistol.

And she had a debt to pay.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Harry Sumner asked.

“No idea, sir. Small explosion.”

“Well, damn it? Is this the place?”

The navigator took his eyes off the swirl of flame and scanned the land below. As the lone parachute flare drifted away on the wind, he caught sight of something like a metal cage on a hilltop to the northwest.

“There it is, Harry! The power station! This is it! One hundred percent sure!”