“Help me pull him in. He’s not SS. You know the shoemaker?”
“Yes.”
Stern heard the crack of another detonator. When they’d got his father inside, he shoved Weitz’s machine pistol into the boy’s clammy hands. “Hold tight to that! Don’t let anyone take it from you. Stay in here until there’s no more air to breathe. Then shoot out a window, crawl out, and open the hatch. That’s the
“I think so.”
The voice sounded frightened but resolute. Stern squeezed the boy’s arm, then backed up, took hold of the heavy steel door and forced it shut. As he cranked the great wheel into the closed position, he felt he was sealing people into a tomb, not a lifeboat.
Only time would tell which.
Coming up the steps with Hannah in his arms, he saw a group of men enter the alley from the factory end. They wore prison stripes, not SS uniforms. Panic seized him. Even if he’d still had the machine pistol, he could not keep them away from the E-Block for long. Several men began throwing their arms about like puppets controlled by a madman.
Two fell to their knees, retching in the snow.
“God forgive me,” Jonas said. He raced across the alley and up the hospital steps without looking back.
McConnell clung desperately to the suspension bar as the roller-wheel jumped over the shattered transformer on the seventh pylon and raced down the wire. He was three quarters of the way down the hill with no sign of slowing and no idea how to get off of the cylinder alive. The parachute flares floated down through the blackness like white stars, illuminating the landscape from the hillside to the river with a hypnotic light.
What did they mean? Had some emergency signal been triggered? If so, it was a hell of a show. He tore his eyes away from the flares and forced himself to think. He was moving too fast to catch hold of a crossarm, and he was too high to hope to drop into the snow and survive. He did not realize he had the means to save his life until he caught sight of the cylinder ahead of him. The image of it hurtling down the power line tripped a memory in his mind. The Death-Ride at Achnacarry, when he and Stern had been ordered to leap from a tree and slide across the Arkaig River on a taut wire using only their toggle ropes. . .
Toggle ropes . . .
Anna felt a sense of peace when she saw the lights of Totenhausen wink out. Alarmed tower-gunners began firing on the Volkswagen when they realized it was not going to stop, but they were too late. She steamrollered the gate at sixty miles per hour and roared across the parade ground. Bullets shredded her rear tires, but she drove on.
A lone SS man caught in her high-beams fired at her.
She ran him down.
She swerved around the headquarters and headed toward the inmate blocks. Had the Jewish women and children reached the E-Block? Had Stern even reached the block to warn them about the attack? And what of the Christian children? They had nowhere to go. Perhaps she could lead them to safety somewhere.
She gasped and hit the brakes as her headlights revealed the block area. A frantic mob of ghostly figures was milling around like patients set free from a lunatic asylum. Some clung to the fence wires, others writhed in the snow, their backs arched in spasm like human bows. Anna saw children among them. Unconsciously she touched her air hose to make sure it was secured to her mask.
As the VW slowed, a group of men noticed the car and charged with suicidal recklessness. She yanked the wheel to the right and gunned the motor. To get out of the car here would be like leaping into the sea to save a hundred drowning people. Better to go to the E-Block by running through the hospital corridor.
She skidded to a stop beside the hospital steps. There were corpses here too. Her gas suit had no pockets, so she left the keys in the car. With shredded tires the Volkswagen was useless anyway. She reloaded her pistol, then hoisted the heavy air tank onto her back and struggled up the hospital steps.
“Looks like someone already had a go at the power station, sir,” said the navigator. “It’s burning.”
Squadron Leader Harry Sumner started the climb to fifteen hundred feet. From there he would act as Master Bomber, using his radio to guide and correct the delivery of bombs by the other aircraft.
“We’re going to hit it anyway, Jacobs. Following orders, right down the line. They must want the whole hill flattened, to send the two cookies with us.”
Jacobs nodded. His squadron leader was referring to the two 4,000 lb. high explosive bombs carried in the bays of two Mosquitos which had been specially modified to carry the huge concrete-busting bombs to Berlin. Dropping those on the tiny power station and camp below would be like squashing ants with a mace.
Nothing would remain but holes in the ground.
But just in case it did, the additional 14,000 pounds of incendiaries carried by the remaining Mosquitoes would burn off anything left above ground.
“Overdoing it a bit, wouldn’t you say, sir?” commented the navigator.
“We’ll never know,” Sumner replied. “God only knows what’s down there. Could be the devil’s own furnace, buried where we can’t see it.”
“Could be, sir.”
“Verify placement of Target Indicators. I only want to do this once. And pray Jerry doesn’t have any decoys down there.”
“Ready, sir.”
The Squadron Leader keyed his mike twice, then began transmitting orders to one of the ten bombers wheeling in the sky below him.
McConnell watched in mute terror as the cylinder ahead of him rocketed off the tenth pylon like a skier from a cliff and smashed into the rear of a huge barnlike structure, then fell the remaining distance to the ground. Looking down, he saw that the power lines dropped almost perpendicularly from the tenth pylon to a distribution shed at the base of the factory. There would be no gradual descent.
He had to stop
He gripped the loop-end of his toggle rope in his left hand and focused on the roller-wheel above him. If he tangled the rope in that wheel, he would probably die. There was only one way to make the throw. He slipped his right wrist through the loop-end of the short rope, and with the same hand gripped the wooden handle at the other end — a throwing weight.
He leaned back as far as he could.
The roller-wheel above him whirred like a fishing reel spinning under a shark’s pull. Cocking his right arm, he threw the handle-end of the rope up and over the power line, aiming just behind the pulley-roller, and grabbed for the falling handle with his left hand.
He caught it!
Glancing down, he saw the crossarm of the tenth pylon rushing up to meet him. Thirty yards, twenty — had the British Sarin killed even a single SS man? — fifteen yards . . .
He twisted one end of the rope around each wrist and heaved himself up off the cylinder. The heavy tank shot out from under him like a wild bronco that had finally thrown its rider.
The horsehair toggle rope sang as it raked against the power line, slowing his descent. Was the friction enough? With all his strength he clenched the rope in his vibrating hands.
The toggle rope hit the crossarm with enough speed to snap McConnell’s whole body out ahead of the pylon, parallel to the wires. Momentum tore at his air tank, the harness on his back, his shoulders and wrists — but everything held. Rope, tank, harness, bones, and ligaments. Two seconds after the impact he was hanging suspended from the tenth pylon like a parachutist caught in a tree.
His arms felt as if they had been yanked from their sockets, so he swung his legs up over the crossarm and, in the upside-down position so common to twelve year old tree-climbers, worked his way along to the nearest support leg of the pylon.
Then he looked down.
