blood.
Frau Hagan knelt over Rachel. “Are you all right, Dutch girl?”
Rachel could barely breathe, much less speak. Tears of gratitude stung her cheeks. She heard cries of rage and confusion reverberating through the camp. No one could quite believe what had happened.
A savage barking chilled Rachel’s blood. But instead of cowering before the fearsome noise, Frau Hagan rose into a crouch, turned, and braced herself for an attack. Rachel saw her face contort into a mask of fury — an anger that had been building for years, perhaps for a lifetime.
Rudi, Sturm’s favorite shepherd, was charging across the yard with his teeth bared. He tore over the frozen ground faster than a racing hound and leaped at Frau Hagan while he was still four meters away.
The Block Leader shouted something in Polish and held up her left forearm. Rudi’s jaws snapped shut on unprotected flesh as he landed, flailing his head from side to side and fighting to push the woman off her feet.
With all the power in her thick body Frau Hagan slashed upward and plunged the spade into the animal’s throat. An explosive squeal echoed across the snow. The dog kept thrashing its head, teeth ripping flesh, but its motions seemed mechanical, confused. Frau Hagan yanked out the spade and struck lower, ripping open its belly from groin to breastbone.
Rudi let go. Frau Hagan threw herself upon the beast like a madwoman, mauling it with maniacal strength. Steam rose from the dog’s open belly.
Rachel tensed when she heard the first shot, but she saw no immediate effect. The second bullet thudded into flesh, but Frau Hagan continued to slash away. Rachel realized then that an excited guard had shot the dog — either by mistake or to put it out of its misery.
Frau Hagan looked back over her shoulder. “
Rachel struggled to move but her limbs would not obey. “No!” she yelled back. “Come with me!”
Another rifle bullet slammed into the dog. One of the tower-gunners fired a short burst to take his range. Frau Hagan looked at Rachel one last time, her eyes shining with a strange elation, then gathered up her shift and dashed toward the base of the guard tower where Sergeant Sturm stood watching in disbelief.
The enraged Pole was running at full speed with the spade held high when the tower gunner cut her down. The bullets blew her over onto her back, where she lay without moving.
Totenhausen lay perfectly silent. From the ground Rachel searched the faces of the women prisoners that had formed a loose perimeter around her. For the first time since her arrival, she sensed a real potential for violence among them. Frau Hagan was known to them all. Dozens in the crowd owed her favors, some owed her their lives. She was a symbol of survival in the face of the worst the Nazis could do. For some seconds Rachel was seized by the feeling that the women might actually follow Frau Hagan’s example and charge the guards.
She heard an SS man shout an order to return to barracks. No one moved. Across the yard, in the shadow of the hospital, Rachel spied Anna Kaas. The blond nurse was standing beside the concrete steps, looking directly at her. In her white uniform she looked strangely like an angel. When she had caught Rachel’s eye, Anna raised both hands sharply toward the sky. Rachel stared back. The nurse signaled again, more violently.
She scrabbled up onto her forearms, then her knees. Frau Hagan lay motionless twenty meters away. Sergeant Sturm was bellowing orders one after another. Some of the women prisoners were moving
Someone fired a shot into the air.
The mob pushed on toward the gate. At any other camp they would have been shot down without a thought, but these were Brandt’s guinea pigs. The guards hesitated. Rachel stepped over the mutilated dog and moved toward her fallen friend. She could not stop herself. She felt a remarkable sense of calm. For the first time, she realized, her children were not uppermost in her mind. Death was beckoning, yet she felt no fear.
She had almost reached Frau Hagan when someone seized her arm. She looked up into the face of Anna Kaas. The nurse pulled her away from Frau Hagan, toward the hospital.
Rachel looked back at the dead Pole. “Where are you taking me?”
“Shut up and follow me!”
There was a sudden hail of gunfire. Rachel turned toward the main gate. The SS were shooting into the ground at the mob’s feet. The line of advancing women wavered, but several shouted defiantly. Then Sergeant Sturm pointed his revolver at the crowd and fired three times in quick succession.
“He’s shooting people,” Rachel said.
The mob broke and ran, leaving its wounded behind.
Anna dragged her up the hospital steps and into the main corridor. Instead of taking her to an examining room, she pushed Rachel into a dark alcove that smelled of dirty linens.
“Before the yard is cleared you must return to your block,” she said quickly. “You don’t want to see a doctor. The doctors here will use your injuries as an excuse to kill you. Do you understand?”
Rachel stared.
Anna took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Hagan is dead! You are alive! Without you, your children will die! Do you hear?”
Rachel nodded dully.
“It is madness!” Anna said, a hysterical tone underlying her voice. “I thought we would all be dead by now. And now this! God knows what Sturm will do after what Hagan did!”
She pulled Rachel out of the alcove and marched her to the back door of the hospital. “You know where you are. Go left, toward the latrines. Get into your block any way you can.” She opened the door and looked out. The alley was empty. “Go now!” She shoved Rachel down the steps and closed the door.
Rachel went.
30
McConnell had been waiting alone in the cellar of Anna’s cottage for eight hours when he heard someone knock at the front door. He turned off the gas lamp and sat completely still in the darkness. He knew the knocking might be Stern, but Stern had taken off without a word and he could find his own goddamn way back in.
Besides, it might not be Stern. Stern could have been caught by a German patrol ten minutes after he left the cottage and been tortured ever since. He could have given up its location only minutes ago. The sound of the knocking was faint, probably because there was a staircase and a heavy door between McConnell and the kitchen, and then the foyer beyond that.
The knocking stopped.
McConnell didn’t try to relight the gas lamp. He took several deep breaths and tried to slow the pounding of his heart. He wasn’t sure if it was light or dark outside, but he figured dark.
Where the hell
After his dramatic dawn exit, Anna had shown McConnell through a narrow door in the corner of the kitchen that led to the cellar. Down a steep flight of wooden steps was a low-ceilinged room stacked with bellied boxes and rusted farm machinery. There was a sofa at the back, and a couple of old duvets. He’d collected the bags from the foyer and hauled them down the steps one piece at a time while Anna watched him with a hopeless look in her eyes. She’d spoken a few puzzled words, then left for Totenhausen.
During the first two hours McConnell had jumped at every sound, expecting to hear sirens or gunfire or whatever alarms might result from Stern gassing the prison camp. After that, he’d begun having visions of Stern in the hands of the SS, trying to hold out against God only knew what kind of tortures. But when no storm troopers arrived to break down the cottage door and arrest him, he calmed down enough to eat some cheese from his bag and consider his situation.
Brigadier Smith had proved to be even more devious than McConnell had given him credit for. The moment McConnell climbed out of that Lysander onto German soil, he had become an accessory to the mission, helpless to
