left. Then another thump. Had Sergeant Sturm finally decided to follow him and see what he was up to in the forest at night?
Seconds later Willi stopped dead in the slushy path. Ten meters away stood a giant of a man wearing a dark uniform. Only the whites of two eyes flickered in the space where the face should have been. When Willi saw the parachute and shroud lines flap in the wind, a small voice in his brain said
A bright flash bloomed in front of the parachutist.
Willi felt a tremendous blow in the stomach. Then he was looking up into the stormy sky over Mecklenburg. The parachutist bent over him. Willi felt more puzzled than afraid. And tired. Unbelievably tired. As he stared upward, the blacked-out face above him swirled, disappeared, then coalesced into the soft features of Sybille Kleist. She looked different somehow. She looked . . . beautiful. As he lost consciousness, Willi realized that perhaps he loved her after all.
“He’s dead, Ian,” said a voice in English.
Sergeant McShane kicked the body. It didn’t move. “Make sure,” he ordered.
A dark figure dropped to the ground and drove a dagger into the fallen German’s heart.
“Papers,” McShane said.
The kneeling figure rifled the dead man’s pockets and came up with a brown leather wallet. “He’s a sergeant. SS Oberscharfuhrer Willi Gauss. Here’s a ration card with the word Totenhausen.”
McShane nodded. “I dinna think a lone sergeant with a pistol constitutes a patrol, Colin. Still, someone might be expecting him back at camp.”
The Achnacarry weapons instructor looked up from Willi Gauss’s corpse. “I smell liquor on him, Ian.”
McShane watched the path while he freed himself from his parachute harness. Within seconds two more shadows raced up and stopped beside him. Both men instructors from Achnacarry. One was Alick Cochrane — another Highlander built on the McShane model — the other John Lewis, the judo instructor Stern had embarrassed on the first day of training. By taping his knee, exercising it furiously each day and packing it in ice each night, Lewis had made good his promise to be fit enough for the mission.
“Do you know where we are, Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked.
“Between the two main groups of hills. West of the village and the camp, as planned, but we’re too far south. Bloody storm. Still, it could have been worse, jumping blind like that.”
“Aye,” Cochrane agreed. “I dinna think I could have done it if you hadn’t jumped first.”
“Where are the cylinders and the other gear?” asked Lewis.
McShane looked up at the dark hills and shielded his eyes from the driving rain. “Should be north of us, on the plain. Where we’re supposed to be. The electrical station should be at the top of these hills to our left. Due east.”
Colin Munro wiped his dagger clean and rose to his feet. “How do you want to play it, Ian?”
McShane looked down at the dead man in the path and forced himself to think clearly. From the moment they entered German airspace things had begun going wrong. They’d flown out of Wick airbase in Scotland, in the most secret aircraft of the Special Duties Squadron, a Luftwaffe JU-88A6 that had forced-landed in Cornwall and then been refitted by SOE for high-priority missions into Europe. The Junkers and a German-speaking RAF pilot had carried the team unchallenged over the occupied Low Countries, but the weather soon intervened. A Baltic storm had unexpectedly veered south and settled like a wall over the old German border. The pilot wanted to turn back, but McShane had forced him to fly straight into the storm. Using the Recknitz River as a landmark, he was able to bring the commandos almost directly over their target.
They had jumped blind, without flares or radio to guide them, and miraculously landed without injury. However, their cargo chutes and gas cylinders had been dropped too long after them. McShane knew he could eventually locate the cargo chutes; he’d watched them falling as long as he could. The dead man at his feet was the problem. Oberscharfuhrer Willi Gauss could wreck the entire mission before McConnell and Stern even reached Germany, simply by having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. McShane glanced around the dark forest. Someone could easily have heard the fatal shots fired. The silencers on the Stens were far from silent.
“Ian?” Alick Cochrane asked gently.
“We bury him in the woods,” McShane barked. “Right here. Bury our chutes in the same hole. No time for anything else. Then we’ll retrieve the cylinders, bury the cargo chutes and move up the hill.”
“Those cylinders,” said Colin Munro. “I’ll bet if we ditched the carrying poles, and each of us took a cylinder on his shoulder, we could cut the transport time in half. Especially through these woods.”
“Those bloody tanks are heavy,” Lewis reminded them.
“No tougher than the logs at Achnacarry,” said McShane. “Will your knee take the weight then, John?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Right. This is where we live up to all that blarney we give the recruits about—”
“
McShane hit the wet snow beside Willi Gauss’s corpse. “What is it, Alick?”
Cochrane grabbed his arm and pointed toward the woods.
Forty yards to the north, a yellow light had appeared in the trees. After thirty seconds of absolute concentration, McShane decided the light was stationary.
“What do we do?” Lewis asked.
“Keep your bloody mouth shut and pray it goes away.”
Sybille Kleist stood at the front window of her cottage and peered into the darkness. She knew the sounds of her forest, and the brief
She took a drag on her cigarette and wished again for a telephone. Not that she could call anyone about her fears. They might stumble onto Willi, and that would be that. Life was becoming far too complicated. What would she do when her husband returned? Divorcing a heroic U-boat captain would brand her as a faithless, unpatriotic slut, no matter how boring the man was.
Nothing ever worked out as it should.
After another anxious minute of watching and listening, Sybille reluctantly went back to bed and lit a second cigarette. The sheets were still damp from Willi’s enthusiastic attentions. Thinking of him, she remembered the sharp sound from the path. It was probably only a stag, she told herself, scraping his antlers on a tree. But she would be glad when she saw Willi again, all the same.
“Everybody up,” McShane ordered softly. “We’ve only got seven hours till dawn. After we’ve hung the cylinders and stowed the radio, we’ve still got to make it to the beach.”
Colin Munro pulled a folding spade out of his pack. “Let’s haul this bastard into the trees and get him buried.”
It took ninety-six minutes to bury Willi Gauss, find all eight cylinders, attach the roller mechanisms and suspension arms to the cylinder heads and bury the cotton cargo chutes that had brought them all down. It required a further two hours to lug the eight cylinders — plus one box that was to be cached for Stern and McConnell — to the top of the highest hill.
They set up their base at the foot of the first pylon beyond the transformer station fence. The station itself was blacked out to keep it from the eyes of Allied bomber formations. A deep humming in the forest told the commandos that it was functioning, but a quick recon by Cochrane confirmed that it was deserted.
Lewis grumbled that to climb the pylon and work around the high-voltage wires in the rain was suicide. Ignoring him completely, McShane donned spikes and harness, tied a long coiled rope to his belt, and quickly climbed one of the sixty-foot support poles. Colin Munro was right on his heels. At the top, buffeted by wind and icy rain, McShane tied his toggle rope around the crossarm as a safety measure, then uncoiled the long rope and used it to haul up the block and tackle necessary to hoist the gas cylinders to the top of the pylon.
