Black Cross

Stern stared at the young Welshman with eyes that said many things, but he did not speak.

“I said Tobruk is wiped clean,” Owen repeated, but the tone of his voice was uncertain.

“Sure, Peter.” Stern started to add something, but his words were drowned by the sudden growl of an engine. A long silver Bentley floated over to the curb and stopped beside the two men, engine running.

Stern shoved Owen against the passenger door and began to run. He heard the Welshman’s voice calling him back. He turned. Owen had snapped to attention beside the Bentley. Focusing on the car’s interior, Stern saw only a driver and a single passenger. He walked cautiously back. Someone had rolled down the rear window. Framed in its dark square Stern saw a weathered face lit by bright eyes, and the shoulder boards of a brigadier general.

“Recognize me?” asked a deep voice with a Scottish accent.

Stern stared at the face. “You were at the meeting.”

“I’m Brigadier Duff Smith, Mr. Stern. I’d like to have a word with you.”

Stern looked at Peter Owen, silently asking if this could be a trap. The Welshman shrugged.

Brigadier Smith held up a silver flask. “Have a dram? Beastly cold out.”

Stern did not accept the flask. As he stared at Brigadier Duff Smith, he felt a sudden certainty that he should run like hell. Get clear of this man and all his works. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was walking away from the Bentley.

The car kept pace, coasting along beside him. “Come on, lad,” Smith called. “Where’s the harm in a little chat?”

“What kind of chat?”

“A chat about killing Germans.”

“I’m German,” Stern said, still marching into the wind. He glanced up at the dark face of Admiralty House. “According to Major Dickson, anyway.”

“Nazis, I should have said.”

“I killed plenty of Nazis in North Africa. That’s not what I’m after.”

Smith’s reply was barely audible above the rumble of the Bentley’s motor, but it stopped Stern in his tracks. “I’m talking about killing Nazis inside Germany.”

The Bentley rolled to a standstill beside Stern. The brigadier’s eyes glinted with black humor. “That sound like your line of country, lad?”

The Bentley’s driver got out and opened the rear door opposite Smith, but Stern still hesitated.

“You speak good English,” Smith said, to fill the silence.

“Don’t take it as flattery. Know your enemy, that’s my motto.” Stern pointed at the brigadier. “Can you get Major Dickson off my back?”

“My dear fellow,” Smith said expansively, “I can make you disappear off the face of the earth, if I so choose.”

Stern was vaguely aware of Peter Owen shouting something as he climbed into the Bentley, but all he remembered was Brigadier Smith’s final exchange with the Welshman before he rolled up the rear window. Owen was protesting that General Little wanted Stern in custody, and that Major Dickson would be hunting him with a vengeance if he was not. Smith did not seem at all perturbed. He said something to Owen in a language Stern would later learn was Welsh. The gist of the translation was, “You don’t have a problem, laddie. You never found him, you never saw me, and that’s the end of the story. Find yourself a pub and stop worrying. Nobody ever found anything Duff Smith hid, and nobody ever will.”

During the next two hours, as the Bentley rolled through the bleak winter streets of the blacked-out city, Stern learned more about the reality of the coming European war than he had dreamed in his most cynical fits of depression. In the beginning he pressed the brigadier about the mission he’d hinted at, but the Scotsman had his own way of coming to the meat of things. The first thing he did was deflate any hopes Stern had of the Allies saving the Jews still trapped in Europe. Several phrases would come back to Stern much later, and he would marvel at how frankly Smith had laid it all out.

“Don’t you see, man?” Smith had said. “If we offer sanctuary to the Jews still alive in Europe, Hitler might say yes. And the truth is, we don’t want them. Neither do the Americans. You Jews are a highly educated race. Consequently, you take away jobs faster than any other immigrant group. There are military reasons, as well. Little wasn’t joking in there. The Nazis already laid down the law to the Red Cross. ‘Touch the concentration camps, and we will no longer keep the Geneva Convention regarding military POWs.’ That’s no empty threat.”

The Bentley rolled past the Royal Hospital. “You’re ahead of your time, Stern. Though not by much, I’ll wager. It won’t be long before Chaim Weizmann goes to Churchill with the same request you made this afternoon. Bomb the camps. But it won’t make any difference. Bomber Command is practically a law unto itself. There are a hundred ways to bury a request like that in committees and feasibility studies. You’d lost the battle before you even went in there today. To men like Little you’re nothing but a meddling civilian. That’s enough reason to deny your request, no matter how much sense it might make.” Smith chuckled. “I don’t know what you thought you were playing at. The bloody Archbishop of Canterbury lobbied for sanctuary in England for European Jews, and he failed. And you a wanted terrorist!”

“I had to try,” Stern said. “If you knew the sheer numbers of innocent people dying, you would—”

“Numbers aren’t the half of it.” Duff Smith shook his head.

“I’ve seen eyewitness transcripts myself. Polish girls raped and tortured and thrown into the street with blood streaming from their bodies. Entire families stripped naked and made to stand on metal plates to be electrocuted. Jewish women being sterilized and sent to military brothels. Children wrenched from their mothers’ teats. The whole hellish circus. What you don’t understand is that none of that matters. War is supposed to be hell, Stern. That kind of thing has lost its shock value, especially to soldiers like Little, who watched their friends slaughtered by the thousands in the Great War. To men like that, civilian deaths are regrettable but irrelevant. They have no direct relation to the prosecution or outcome of the war.”

“You can’t all be like Little,” Stern said. “I can’t conceive of that.”

“You’re right. There are a lot more like Major Dickson.”

The brigadier paused to pack and light a hand-carved pipe.

“There must be some decent men in England.”

“Of course there are, lad,” said Smith, puffing gently. “Churchill is one of your strongest advocates. He’s all for establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine after the war. Not that that means anything. Those bastards in Parliament will drop Winston like a hot brick just as soon as he’s won the war for them.”

After convincing Stern of the utter futility of his journey to England, Duff Smith finally got around to his proposition. “What I said back there,” he drawled, “about killing Germans inside Germany. I wasn’t joking.”

“What do you have in mind?” Stern asked suspiciously.

Smith’s face grew very hard, very quickly. “I’m not going to lie to you, lad. I’m not trying to save the pathetic remnants of European Jewry. Frankly, it’s not my bailiwick.”

“What are you trying to do?”

Smith’s eyes flickered. “Not much, except alter the course of the war.”

Stern sat back against the plush seat. “Brigadier . . . who are you? Who do you work for?”

“Ah. Officially, we’re known as SOE — Special Operations Executive. We raise mischief in the occupied countries, France mostly. Sabotage and the like. But with the invasion round the corner, that’s rather tapered off. We’re mostly dropping supplies now.”

“How can you alter the course of the war?”

Smith gave him an enigmatic grin. “Know anything about chemical warfare?”

“Hold your breath and put on your gas mask. That’s all.”

“Well, your former countrymen know quite a bit. The Nazis, I mean.”

“I know they’re using poison gas to murder Jews.”

Brigadier Smith waved his pipe in scorn. “Zyklon B is a common insecticide. Oh, it’s deadly enough in a closed room, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m talking about.”

In two minutes, Smith gave Stern a thumbnail sketch of the Nazi nerve gas program, including Heinrich Himmler’s private patronage. He leaned heavily on two points: Allied helplessness in the face of Sarin, and the Nazis’ predilection for testing their war gases on Jewish prisoners.