Black Cross

“Mr. Prime Minister,” Eisenhower replied. “It’s good to see you again, though unexpected.”

The two men’s eyes met with unspoken communication. Last month’s conferences at Cairo and Teheran had not gone off without tensions between the two men. With the invasion less than five months away, Churchill still had reservations about a cross-Channel thrust into France, preferring to attack Germany through what he called the “soft underbelly” of Europe. Eisenhower, though he had just been named supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, was still adjusting to the mantle of power and had yet to assert his primacy in matters of strategy.

“An uneventful trip up from London, I hope?” Churchill said.

Eisenhower smiled. “The fog was so thick on Chesterfield Hill that Butcher had to get out and walk ahead of the car with a flashlight. But we made it, as you can see.” He crossed the room and respectfully shook hands with Brigadier Smith, whom he’d known since 1942. Everyone else was introduced, excepting the American major of intelligence, who remained silent and stiff as a suit of decorative armor beside the closed study door.

Churchill rescued his dying cigar from an ashtray and walked over to his desk. He did not sit. This was the atmosphere he liked — his Parliamentary milieu — him on his feet, speaking to a captive audience sitting on its collective ass. He picked up something small off the desk and rolled it in his palm. It appeared to be a bit of ornamental glass.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “time is short and the matter at hand grave. So I’ll be brief. The Nazis” — he pronounced the word Narzis, with a slur that managed to simultaneously convey both contempt and menace — “are up to their old tricks again. And some new ones as well. At the very moment when the tide seems to be turning irrevocably in our favor — I daresay on the very cusp of invasion — the Hun has sunk to new depths of frightfulness. He has apparently decided that no scientific abomination is too ghastly to use in his quest to stave off disaster.”

Though well-accustomed by now to Churchill’s flamboyant rhetoric, Eisenhower listened intently. He had only just arrived from North Africa via Washington, and any hint of new information about the European theater tantalized him.

Churchill rolled the piece of glass in his hand. “Before I proceed, I feel I must restate that this meeting, for official purposes, never occurred. No entries should be made in private diaries to record it. I am even breaking my own inviolate rule. No one will be asked to sign the guest book when they leave.”

Eisenhower could stand no more buildup. “What the devil are you talking about, Mr. Prime Minister?”

Churchill held up the piece of glass he’d been fidgeting with. It was a tiny ampule. “Gentlemen, if I were to shatter this vial, every man-jack of us would be dead within a minute.”

This was vintage Churchill, the dramatic prop, the verbal bombshell. “What the hell is it?” Eisenhower asked.

The prime minister bit down on his cigar and lowered his round head in a posture of challenge. “Gas,” he said.

Eisenhower squinted his eyes. “Poison gas?”

The prime minister nodded slowly, deliberately, then pulled the cigar from his mouth. “And not the kitchen stuff we choked on during the last war, though God knows that was bad enough. This is something entirely new, something absolutely monstrous.”

Eisenhower noted that Churchill had used the word “we” in reference to suffering poison gas attacks. He wondered if this was a veiled allusion to the fact that he had not seen combat in the First World War, having served those years training tank troops in Pennsylvania. If Churchill was probing for a sore spot, he had found it. “Well,” he said curtly, “what kind of gas is it?”

“They call it Sarin. And it’s a bloody miracle we’ve even found out about it. We can all thank Duff Smith for that.” Churchill looked at the one-armed SOE chief, willing him to his feet. “Brigadier?”

Duff Smith, a seasoned veteran of the Cameron Highlanders regiment, stood with quiet confidence. “Thirty days ago,” he said with a vestigial Highland lilt, “we learned that our worst suspicions about the German chemical effort were accurate. Not only have they been pursuing weapons research at breakneck speed since before the war, but they’ve also been producing new gases and stockpiling them all over the country.”

“Just a minute,” Eisenhower broke in. “We’ve been doing the same thing, haven’t we?”

“Yes and no, General. Our programs didn’t really get cracking until we realized how much Germany had accomplished between the wars. And, quite frankly, we’ve never managed to catch up.”

“Are we talking about nerve agents?” asked the American major of intelligence, speaking for the first time. “We’ve known about Tabun for some time.”

“Something of quite another magnitude,” Smith said a bit testily. “The clearest indication of danger is that the Nazis have resumed testing these gases on human victims, mostly at SS-run concentration camps in Germany and Poland. These experiments have resulted in death for the exposed inmates in one hundred percent of the cases. We believe the Germans are setting up to deploy nerve gas against our invasion troops.”

Eisenhower cut his eyes at Commander Butcher.

“Did you say a hundred percent fatalities?” asked the army major. “Due strictly to the gas?”

“One hundred percent,” Smith confirmed. “Thirty days ago, the Polish Resistance managed to smuggle a sample of Sarin out of a camp in northern Germany. Two days later we delivered that sample to one of Lindemann’s chemical weapons specialists at Oxford.”

This time it was Eisenhower who interrupted. “I thought the British chemical warfare complex was at Porton Down, on Salisbury Plain.”

“In the main,” Smith responded, “that is correct. But we also have scientists working independently in other locations. Helps to keep everyone honest.”

Churchill broke in. “I think Professor Lindemann is better equipped to fill us in on the technical details. Prof?”

The famous British scientist had been fussing with a battered pipe which stubbornly refused to light. He made one last attempt and was surprised by success. He puffed seriously for a few moments, then looked at the Americans and began to speak.

“Yes . . . well. In the Great War, you’ll remember, chemical agents were classified by the Germans under the ”cross“system. That is, each gas cylinder or artillery shell was painted with a cross of a particular color, depending on what type of gas it contained. There were four colors. Green denoted the suffocating gases, mainly chlorine and phosgene. White for irritants, or tear gases. Yellow Cross indicated the blister gases, primarily mustard. Blue was for the gases that blocked molecular respiration — cyanide, arsine, carbon monoxide.”

General Eisenhower lit a second cigarette off his first and inhaled with great concentration.

“Eleven months ago,” Lindemann continued, “just after the German surrender at Stalingrad, we learned of the existence of Tabun. Tabun was interesting because it worked in an entirely different way than any previous gas, by crippling the central nervous system. Yet because it was not significantly more lethal than phosgene, we didn’t overreact. But we did realize that our own chemical weapons weren’t much further along than in 1918, and we moved to correct the imbalance. Sarin — while it shares some characteristics of Tabun — is a completely different animal.”

“I’m a little fuzzy on my chemistry,” Eisenhower said with disarming frankness. “What makes Sarin so different?”

Lindemann knitted his eyebrows. “Unlike most poison gases, General, Sarin is absolutely lethal. In 1939, the deadliest battlefield gas in the world was phosgene.” He paused to give his next statement the necessary emphasis. “Sarin is thirty times as deadly as phosgene. In sufficient concentration it can kill within seconds, and it need not even enter the lungs. It can pass directly through human skin.”

“Jesus Christ.” Eisenhower had blanched. “How does this stuff work?”

Lindemann considered the American commander for some moments. “General, every function of the human body, both conscious and unconscious, is controlled by the brain. Much as a general controls his troops. The brain passes its orders down to the organs and the limbs by means of nerve branches. The nerves are the couriers of the brain, you might say. When the brain sends a message down a nerve, a compound called acetylcholine is produced. Now, at this point, the nerve has temporarily lost its conductivity. The courier, having delivered his message, can no longer run. The nerve can only be restored to its conductive state by an enzyme called cholinesterase. Without this enzyme, the nerves of the body are nothing but dead tissue. The couriers die where they lie.”