Black Cross

you return to Skitten.”

Harry Sumner’s hands tingled at the controls. “Sounds kosher, Peter. What do you think?”

“It’s your call, Harry. You’ve got about ten seconds to stop the run.”

“I never heard a Jerry who could mimic a Highlander like that.” Sumner keyed the mike. “This is General Sherman,” he said tersely. “What year was the Battle of Harlaw fought?”

There was silence. Then the radio crackled: “Fourteen-eleven. Bless you, laddie, it was fourteen- eleven.”

Sumner snatched up the VHF mike. “This is the Master Bomber. Abort bomb run, abort bomb run. This is your squadron leader. Return to base. Abort, abort. Return to base.”

Navigator Jacobs sank back in his seat and sighed heavily. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Harry.”

“So do I,” Sumner said. “So do I.”

48

Walking across the dark Appellplatz after the bombs stopped falling, McConnell sensed for the first time the magnitude of what he had done. Sealed from head to toe in black oilskin, breathing air that had been compressed in an Oxford laboratory, he moved through the corpses like a ghost on a battlefield.

The dead lay everywhere, SS and prisoners together, men and women and children with their arms and legs thrown out at haphazard angles, mouths and eyes open to a sky scorched red by the sizzling Target Indicators. As horrifying as it was, McConnell knew this was but a shadow of the devastation that lay in store if twentieth-century science were completely harnessed to the engine of warfare. He looked over at Stern. The eyeholes in the young Zionist’s gas mask were pointed at the factory, not the ground. But even Stern could not ignore the obvious. They had saved some, but they had killed more.

Yet as they approached the factory gate, one thought filled McConnell’s mind. If a mere British copy of Sarin could accomplish this silent, bloodless slaughter, then in Soman the Germans possessed a weapon of truly apocalyptic power. He had understood that intellectually in Oxford. But to see a nerve agent used against human beings brought home to him in a way nothing else could how impossible were the dilemmas men like Duff Smith and Churchill faced.

Their bluff had to work. The alternative was Armageddon.

Stern was molding a charge of plastic explosive around the lock on the factory door. McConnell thought of all that had been done to bring him to this spot, to put him inside this German gas plant for fifteen minutes. Stern backed quickly away from the door and pulled McConnell with him. A moment later the plastic explosive blasted the doorknob into twisted fragments and the door fell gaping to one side.

When McConnell raised the powerful flashlight Stern had found in the wireless operator’s room, and shone it around the interior of the dark factory, he knew that Duff Smith had been right to send him. He was the best man for the job. The production area was smaller than he’d expected, but it contained industrial equipment without equal in the world. The closest thing he had seen to it was a classified DuPont research-and-development lab that one of his professors had walked him through. The production room was two stories high, packed with copper U- tubes and compressors and shallow closed vats. Every few feet along the wall, signs with letters three feet tall read RAUCHEN VERBOTEN! — NO SMOKING! The floor was covered with wooden crates, some open, some sealed. Without electricity for the factory lights, the camera was of little value, but Stern had it out anyway.

McConnell felt like a London tour guide leading Stern through the maze of apparatus, aiming the flashlight here and there while Stern tried long-exposure shots. He found the aerosols vecteurs device chained to a pallet in the center of the room. Using tools taken from a workbench, he tore at the heart of the machine until he found the secret it contained: filter discs. He marveled at the sequence of ten superfine droplet traps arranged in order of decreasing tolerance. By the time a war gas had passed from one end to the other, it would exist only as charged ions in suspension, rendering it not only invisible, but also unstoppable by conventional gas masks.

He slipped five of the filters into Stern’s bag, then moved on. It was only when Stern used up the first roll of film that they realized they could not change the film cartridge without removing their gas suits. Their oilskin gloves provided enough mobility to fire a gun, but not to thread film onto the tiny spool inside a camera. McConnell motioned for Stern to put the camera away. He wanted only two things from the building: a sample of Soman, and Klaus Brandt’s laboratory logs.

He found both in a one-story room in the rear of the factory. The equipment here was made of glass, not metal. This was where the real work was done. One wall of the lab was lined with rubber suits hanging from pegs on the wall. McConnell pointed at a heavy steel door. Stern shot off the lock with a pistol he had taken off a corpse on the way to the factory.

Behind the door they found a treasure trove that would keep the scientists at Porton Down busy for a year. There were small metal gas cylinders marked GA, GB, and with other letters McConnell did not recognize. The cylinders marked GB had strips of adhesive tape fixed to them, with handwritten letters on the tape: Sarin II; Sarin III; Tabun VII; Soman I; Soman IV. At the bottom of the storage closet was an empty wooden box like an ammunition crate, but with vertical slots sized to take the eight-inch-long cylinders. McConnell assumed Brandt had used the box to transport gas samples to other testing facilities.

While he filled the crate with samples, Stern explored a higher shelf, pulling down a variety of paraphernalia including a small metal sphere with a stem at the top. It too was marked with adhesive tape that read Soman IV. It took Stern a moment to realize what it was — an experimental grenade containing nerve gas.

He slipped three into his bag.

McConnell found Brandt’s principal laboratory log lying open on a desk. Sergeant Sturm had apparently evacuated the chemists in the midst of dismantling their equipment for transport. Everything had been left as it was, like a table set for dinner in a burned-out house. McConnell thumbed quickly through the thick notebook. There were passages written in several different hands, many with detailed chemical formulas, most based on organic phosphates. Each entry had been carefully initialed after completion. Several bore the letters K.B. beneath them. McConnell stuffed the log into Stern’s bag, then picked up the cylinder-transport crate and motioned for Stern to follow him. They had got what they came for.

It was time to run.

“Rottenfuhrer!” Major Schorner shouted. “By the gate! What do you see?”

The young corporal stared through the windshield. He had idled the truck forward fifty meters in the last minute, but he still saw nothing. “I’m sorry, Sturmbannfuhrer.”

“By the gate, fool! Look now! Crossing the road!”

The corporal followed the beam of the truck’s headlights. At last he saw — or thought he saw — a brighter blackness moving against the general darkness. “What is that, Sturmbannfuhrer?”

Schorner slapped his knee in frustration. “Commandos,” he said. “They’re wearing chemical suits. Move the truck forward, Rottenfuhrer. Very slowly.”

As the truck edged forward, its headlight beams caught two figures for an instant. They ducked and ran, flashing as if made of black foil.

Schorner slammed his hand down on the dash. “They’re running for the ferry!”

“What should I do, Sturmbannfuhrer?”

Schorner thought furiously. When the answer came to him, he felt a moment of doubt. But then a second realization hit him like a spike through the heart. If Allied commandos had just released the Soman stocks inside Totenhausen, Rachel Jansen was dead. The men in the black suits had not only wiped out the installation he had been ordered to protect, but they had also murdered the only woman he had felt anything for since the love of his life was killed by British bombs. With the calm deliberation of a man under sentence of death, he opened the door and climbed down from the cab.

He took one deep breath, then another. “Everyone all right?” he called to the men in the back of the truck.

“Hofer died from a shrapnel wound, Sturmbannfuhrer. But the rest of us are all right.”