“When are we going back to England?”
“Right now. Your brother will fly us in the Junkers. He flew you over from England four nights ago, though neither of you knew it.”
“I did?” David said. “I’ll be damned.”
“It was David who fixed the Lysander engine. Made the whole jaunt possible, I daresay.” Smith allowed himself a smile. “A credit to the Eighth Air Force, this lad. I hate to give him back. And he loves my JU-88A6.”
“That’s a fact,” David chimed in, but by now he had sensed the tension between his brother and the brigadier.
All McConnell could think of was the transatlantic call he had made to his mother three weeks before.
“I wasn’t counting on any refugees, Doctor,” Smith said tetchily. “I’m afraid you’ve caused a spot of bother there.”
McConnell looked at David again. Then he handed the cylinder to Stern and, before anyone could stop him, punched the brigadier in the belly with all his strength.
Smith doubled over, gasping for air.
Airman Bottomley leaped for McConnell, but he didn’t get past David. Seconds later he was hanging by his throat from the crook of the pilot’s elbow.
“Take it easy now, pardner,” David drawled.
Duff Smith straightened up with some difficulty. “It’s all right, Bottomley,” he croaked. “I suppose I deserved that one.”
“Damn right you did,” said McConnell. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here. All of us.”
Brigadier Smith waved his agreement.
McConnell saw Stern staring at him in astonishment. He slipped under Anna’s good arm and braced her for a walk. “Can you make it?” he asked quietly.
Her eyes were only half open, but she nodded.
As they moved along the jetty, David leaned over and said, “What did you punch that old coot for? He’s okay, once you get to know him.”
Mark hugged Anna to his side and shook his head. “Ask me in twenty years,” he said. “It’s a hell of a war story.”
EPILOGUE
“A hell of a story?” I said. “That’s not the end of it!” Rabbi Leibovitz looked at me a little strangely. Dawn was creeping around the edges of the drapes. We’d moved into the kitchen sometime during the night, where he told his tale over a pot of coffee. Later we’d come back to the study.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Well . . . everything. But first my Uncle David. I thought he was killed in the war, but according to you . . .”
“He was killed, Mark. Five months after Mac’s mission he was shot down over Germany. It happened to a lot of good boys. Too many, I’m afraid. They had a little time together, though. Brigadier Smith managed to keep David four extra days before returning him to the Eighth Air Force. He’d used Churchill’s note and some valuable SOE intelligence to get David’s superiors to go along with the deception. Anyway, Mac and David spent the four days following the mission in London. Mac remembered them as some of the best days of his life.”
I shook my head. “What about the others? Who got out alive? You left me hanging at the camp. Did the shoemaker and Rachel get to Rostock with Jan? Did they reach Sweden?”
“Miraculously enough, they did. They hid in the house of Avram’s old employee for three weeks. It took that long to arrange passage on a smuggler’s boat. It cost them all three diamonds, but they reached Sweden alive. They were interned there for the duration of the war.”
“What did Rachel do after the war?”
“She went to Palestine to find her daughter.”
“Palestine? I figured Hannah wound up in some British orphanage.”
“You underestimate Jonas Stern,” said Leibovitz. “With the diamonds Rachel and his father had given him, Stern arranged to have Hannah cared for by a Jewish family in London. He fought with the British in France, then with the Jewish Brigade later. He won a hatful of medals, then went back to Palestine to drive out the British and the Arabs. He took Hannah with him.”
“I’ll be damned. And Rachel found them?”
“With Avram’s help. The two of them traveled from Sweden to Palestine in the winter of 1945. Hannah was living with Jonas and his mother in Tel Aviv.”
“My God. Were Rachel and Stern lovers, then?”
Leibovitz smiled. “I don’t know. The two of them raised Hannah under the same roof for some years. They never married, though. From what I gathered, Stern’s work kept him traveling around the world for longer and longer periods. He was a born fighter. He spent his whole life in one branch or another of Israeli intelligence. Eventually Rachel married another man. Hannah is a grown woman now. Well into middle age. Jan is a lawyer, like his father was. In Tel Aviv.”
I shook my head. “And Avram?”
“Avram died twenty years ago. He was eighty-six.”
I felt a disturbing dislocation of time. In my mind, Avram Stern was a man of fifty-five, Hannah Jansen a child of two. “How do you know all this?” I asked. “My grandfather kept up with everyone?”
“A little. Not so often, but enough to know the big things. Every two or three years he got a letter from Stern. Postmarked from the ends of the earth, usually.”
I sat quietly, trying to take it all in. The man who raised me — the grandfather I thought I had known all my life — was really someone entirely different. Leibovitz was right. I felt different for hearing the story. How many gray heads had I passed in the street or spoken to in the emergency room, never imagining they had once hunched over the controls of a shattered bomber in the darkness over Germany or lain in an icy ditch while SS troops combed a forest for them.
“The rest of the story is not so happy,” Leibovitz said. “Fewer than half of the women and children who got away on the truck survived the war. I’ve spent several years trying to track them down. Life in the forests of occupied Poland was hard. Some ran into the wrong kind of resistance groups. Others died of sickness, even hunger. That’s the way it was. The most dramatic escape from a death camp in World War Two was from Sobibor. Three hundred escaped through the fence, yet only a handful survived the mines and the machine guns of the SS.”
“Christ.” I could see now why my grandfather felt confused about what he had done. “Was it worth it, Rabbi? How much of what my grandfather guessed was true? How much of what Brigadier Smith told them was the truth?”
Leibovitz straightened in the chair. “As costly as that mission was, I believe it was worth every life lost. Heinrich Himmler
“Cover it up.”
“Yes.”
“How did he do it?”
“He simply exaggerated the effects of the bombs delivered by the Mosquito flight. Who would argue with him? What had been the village of Dornow was hardly more than a crater in the snow. The power station was obliterated. The day after your grandfather left Totenhausen, Himmler ordered the camp demolished and the debris plowed under the ground.”
“Jesus.”
