Wolfgang Schorner was dying on his feet. Even as the bullets poured out of his weapon, a deadly poison was shutting down his central nervous system. The invisible nerve gas had entered his body through every exposed surface, but quickest through the mucus membranes of his mouth and nose, and through the moist sclera of his eyes.
His machine gun clicked empty. He wanted to throw it down, but his hand would not open. He felt a strange embarrassment as his bladder involuntarily voided. Then his bowels let go. He saw the ferry collide with the opposite bank. Almost immediately the taillights of the car clicked on. Schorner was nodding his head violently up and down, but could not understand why. At the last moment he realized that the river itself might afford him protection from the gas. With tremendous concentration he forced his right leg to take a step. Then he lurched forward and fell flat on his face at the end of the pier.
The last thing he felt was the icy water of the river tugging at his right hand.
49
Racing southwest on the hard gravel road that followed the river, Stern had left Totenhausen far behind. But McConnell knew the Mercedes had sat inside the camp too long not to have been contaminated. He leaned back over the passenger seat and cranked down the rear window beside Anna’s still-masked head. He wanted to apply pressure to her shoulder wound, but if there was gas residue on his glove, he might kill her by doing it. He reached across the inflated vinyl bundle that held Hannah Jansen and rolled down the other window.
Cold air blasted through the car.
After a full minute, he ripped the air hose out of his mask and breathed deeply. He had never tasted air so sweet. He waited thirty seconds more, then removed Stern’s mask. Stern’s face was badly bruised and covered with dried blood, and one of his eyes nearly swollen shut.
“How far to the coast?” McConnell asked, unzipping his suit and pulling his hands out of the oilskin sleeves.
“Forty kilometers in a plane. Probably an hour by road.”
Something jabbed McConnell in the crotch. He reached into his suit for the offending object. It was Anna’s diary, soaked by river water. Churchill’s note hung out of the top like a soggy bookmark. He dropped the diary into Stern’s leather bag, then climbed into the back seat to attend to Anna. After she managed to follow his orders and unzip her own suit, he tore out a section of her blouse and stuffed it into the hole in her shoulder. Being careful to touch only the inner surfaces, he gently lifted the transparent gas mask off her head and threw it out of the window.
“We’re about to cross the river again,” Stern said over the seat. “This is Tessin. Stay down.”
McConnell leaned across Anna’s lap as they rolled through the blacked out village.
“Is the little girl alive?” Stern asked.
“She’s still moving.”
Using a British commando knife from Stern’s bag, McConnell carefully cut away the rapidly deflating vinyl sheet that held the little girl and the oxygen bottle. “I doubt this thing was completely airtight,” he said, “but the pressure of the escaping oxygen should have kept the nerve gas from getting inside.”
A high-pitched shriek announced the re-entry of two-year-old Hannah Jansen into the land of the living. McConnell dropped the sheet out of the window and hugged the dark-haired child close, trying to comfort her as best he could. It would be a long time, he knew, before she purged the horror of this night from her mind.
“You know where we’re supposed to go?” he asked.
Stern nodded, his eyes on the dark road.
“You think anybody knows what happened? I mean, do you think they’ll have troops out looking for us?”
Stern looked back across the seat, his swollen eye sockets crusted with dried blood.
“Just take care of the women, Doctor. Leave the rest to Standartenfuhrer Stern.”
McConnell kept pressure on Anna’s wound as the Mercedes rolled through the night. Whenever they came to a village, Stern would slow down and coast through at moderate speed. McConnell remembered the names for a long time after: Tessin; Sanitz; Gresenhorst; Ribnitz. Not long after Ribnitz, he smelled sea air. Stern didn’t slow down as he expected, but instead accelerated.
“What are you doing?” McConnell asked.
Stern leaned forward and stared through the windshield. “Our inflatable dinghy is supposed to be hidden in the rocks beneath a certain jetty near Dierhagen. A two-man job. But I’m not about to take an inflatable out into a shipping channel cut by an icebreaker. Not with a wounded woman and a child. It would probably take us two hours just to find the damned thing and inflate it.”
McConnell saw they had entered another village. “What
Stern hunched over the wheel. “Be ready to move fast, Doctor. I’ll carry the child, you take the woman. No matter what happens,
McConnell had no intention of doing that. “I’m ready,” he said.
Stern drove right down the main street of the village. It looked deserted, but at the end of the street McConnell saw the faint silhouette of masts against the night sky. A light burned in a shack at the entrance to the jetty. Stern stopped long enough to wriggle out of his oilskin suit, then pulled up beside the shack and gave a loud blast on the horn.
“Are you crazy?” McConnell asked.
Stern pulled his SD cap out of his bag, set it on his head at an angle and got out of the car, leaving the engine running.
A uniformed officer of the coastal police stumbled out of the shack with a flashlight in his hand. He was about to curse to high heaven whomever had disturbed his sleep when the beam of his torch fell upon the blood-soaked uniform, the Iron Cross First Class, and the rank badge of a colonel in the SD.
“Get that light out of my face, idiot!” Stern barked. “Stand at attention!”
The policeman — a fifty-year-old veteran of World War One — snapped instantly erect, his thumbs at the seams of his trousers. “What can I do for you, Standartenfuhrer?”
“Who are you?”
“Feldwebel Kurt Voss.”
“Well, Feldwebel, I need a boat.”
The policeman’s face was gray with fright, but he was not stupid enough to mention the blood and bruises on the face of the Nazi apparition before him. “There are many boats here, Standartenfuhrer. What type of boat do you require?”
“A motor launch. A seaworthy vessel, the fastest on the dock.”
The policeman swallowed. “Most of the boats here are for fishing, Standartenfuhrer. And with the ice this time of year . . . well, few go out at all.”
“There must be something.”
“There is the Kriegsmarine patrol boat. Its crew put in earlier tonight for . . . well—”
“I understand perfectly, Feldwebel.” Stern smiled coldly. “Lead the way to this craft. I will follow in my car.”
“But you must speak to the captain first, Standartenfuhrer. He will certainly . . .”
The policeman fell silent under Stern’s withering glare.
Stern cocked his chin and enunciated each word separately in the Gestapo fashion, like whiplashes. “The captain will do
The policeman shook his head violently. “You are right, Standartenfuhrer! Follow me. I’ll have the boat running before you get aboard.”
There was some confusion at the boat when Anna and little Hannah appeared. The wide-eyed policeman
