spine.
He was going to die.
In a matter of seconds four torch beams would fix his position like London searchlights pinning a Luftwaffe bomber to the clouds, and machine gun bullets would follow. With this certainty came something unexpected — something quite different from what he had been feeling only moments ago — a flood of pure animal terror.
He wanted to live.
“Nothing, Sturmbannfuhrer.”
“The tracks end
“Maybe he doubled back.”
“Look at this!” cried an SS private, who had bent over something in the snow. He screamed suddenly and fell backward.
Schorner whirled and shone his flashlight onto the snow. A bolt-action Mauser rifle, scorched black and smoking, lay in a shallow well of melting snow. It took him only seconds to put together what had happened. He aimed his flashlight toward the top of the pylon.
“Lights!” he shouted.
“Sturmbannfuhrer!” screamed one of the men. “The power station is burning!”
Schorner cursed as three torch beams disappeared. “
McConnell stretched out his legs, hooked both feet around the four-foot suspension bar that held up the last cylinder and yanked out the cotter pin. The rubber rope fell sixty feet onto the snow. Only his butt and his hands on the crossarm resisted the downhill tug of the cylinder hanging beneath him.
Twice already a flashlight beam had played over his black oilskin suit, but he forced himself to look down.
Wire netting covered the dark cylinder, and from the netting protruded six pressure-triggers, any one of which could blow the cap out of the cylinder head and release the gas within. There was no time for caution. If the triggers tripped and the British gas worked, he would have to rely on the gas suit and mask he had modified in Oxford. He would live or die by his own hands. Three torch beams stabbed the darkness around him.
With fire in his stomach he leaped off the crossarm.
“Where, Sturmbannfuhrer?”
Schorner threw down his flashlight and snatched a submachine gun from the startled SS man, then turned it skyward and fired a long burst up along the length of the support pole.
McConnell’s breath went out of his lungs when his crotch crashed onto the cylinder head. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the balls by a mule. It was all he could do to hang onto the suspension bar, but the cylinder was rolling.
It was rolling
He was already twenty feet from the pylon when Schorner’s fusillade of bullets ripped into the crossarm behind him. He looked down frantically to see if his legs had tripped any of the triggers. He couldn’t tell. More shouts and gunfire sounded behind him, but suddenly it was all meaningless. No one below understood yet what had happened.
McConnell did. And he knew his problems had only just begun. Somewhere out ahead of him, five cylinders of nerve gas were shunting along a length of steel winch cable toward Totenhausen, and he was almost certainly overtaking them. He was trying to work out just how quickly when the roller-wheel above his head jumped the shattered insulator on the second pylon.
He closed his eyes in terror until the wheel settled back onto the wire on the other side. It was a lot like riding a cable car, he thought, a very fast cable car with no operator. He would almost certainly reach Totenhausen alive. The problem was how to get off of the cylinder before it dropped sixty feet to the ground. He was squinting down the wire trying to answer that question when the whole night sky burst into flame like the Fourth of July.
46
Stern was right behind Ariel Weitz as the rubber-suited figure burst out of the back corridor of the headquarters building and into the Appellplatz. Weitz ran straight toward the hospital, but Stern swung out to his left. He had no intention of running unprotected through the invisible cloud of nerve gas that might be drifting across the yard from the SS barracks and dog kennels on his right. As he ran, he saw a white flash burst above the hills behind the camp.
A flare.
Was Schorner signaling for assistance? Had he trapped McConnell on the road?
Stern looked left. A woman was running toward him with a child in her arms. Rachel Jansen. He could scarcely believe it, but she was there, with a crowd of confused prisoners streaming out of the inmate blocks behind her.
“It’s after eight!” he shouted. “Get to the E-Block!”
“My son is already there! You promised to take Hannah!”
Stern heard a distant peal of thunder like artillery in the hills. The entire camp seemed to freeze and listen. A second explosion followed. Then every light in the camp went out.
Rachel held out the bundled blanket. “For God’s sake, take her with you!”
Stern took the little girl like a sack under his right arm and seized Rachel’s hand with his left. Paralyzing pain shot up from his broken finger as he sprinted toward the hospital with Hannah screaming for her mother and Rachel following behind.
“Where is my father?” he asked.
“Taking children to the E-Block!”
He raced up the front steps of the hospital and crashed through the front door into the darkness of the main corridor.
No answer.
Rachel slammed into his back. “Where is Hannah? Did you put her down?”
“I have her! Now, go to the E-Block! Go to your son! Straight through this corridor!”
While Stern pointed down the hall toward the back door, the window in the door lit up like a cinema screen. White light poured over his shoulders from the window in the door behind him.
“My God, what’s happening?” Rachel asked. “What is that?”
“Weitz! Where are you?”
He heard a crash off to his right, then a bloodcurdling scream. He handed the child to Rachel and stumbled down the hall to his right, into darkness, feeling his way along, his finger burning at the slightest contact. He heard more crashes, another scream. Someone was begging in German, but the words were slurred, confused. A beam of light sliced across the corridor. In its brief flash he caught sight of at least two dead SS men outside the doorway. He moved cautiously forward. He heard a sound like a rotten melon dropped onto concrete, then the shuffle of feet on tile.
