Black Cross (21 page)

Stern and McConnell looked at each other, then snatched up their bags and hurried after him. At the end of the platform, they saw the Scotsman climb into a covered jeep and start the engine.

“Hey!” McConnell yelled. “Sergeant! Wait!”

McShane leaned out and said, “Follow this road west across the Caledonian Canal, turn north at Gairlochy, march along the loch till you sight Bunarkaig, then up the switchback road to the castle. It’s about seven miles, all told. You can’t get lost.”

“But there’s plenty of room in the jeep!” Stern objected.

McShane’s blue eyes seemed to grow tired. “That’s no’ the point at all, Mr. Butler. Nobody rides to Achnacarry their first time up. All transport is by foot.” He glanced at Stern’s worn leather shoes. “We’ll get you some proper gear at the castle. I will take those bags for you, though.”

McConnell loaded the heavy suitcases into the jeep, then tossed Stern’s leather bag after them.

“But it’s pouring rain!” Stern shouted.

Sergeant McShane looked skyward and smiled. “Aye. It’s pissin’ it down, all right. I suggest you get used to it, Mr. Butler. It always rains at Achnacarry.”

Stern whirled toward McConnell, perhaps to suggest that they try to board the jeep by force, but the American was no longer standing behind him. He was walking toward the main road, leaning grimly into the rain.

“See you at the castle, Mr. Butler,” Sergeant McShane said. The jeep spun its tires and fishtailed onto the road, headed west, leaving Stern standing alone in the mud.

Stern slung the picnic basket over his shoulder and trotted after McConnell, catching him on the stone bridge for which the village had been named. “Where are you going?” he yelled. “Let’s wait for the rain to stop!”

“It may not stop,” McConnell said, walking faster on the rising grade.

Stern quickened his pace and punched McConnell on the right shoulder. “Do you really want to walk seven miles through freezing rain?”

“No, I don’t. So I think I’ll run it. Even with these hills, it probably shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half. Two hours at the most.”

“What?”

McConnell broke into a trot, leaving Stern fuming in the road, his dark hair plastered to his head. Stern took the last sandwich from the basket and wolfed it down. He watched the American top a ridge, disappear, then reappear a quarter mile farther on, a dim shadow against the gray wall of rain, growing steadily smaller.

“Arschloch,”
he muttered. In Africa he had walked over endless miles of desert without water when forced to, but
schlepping
up these mountains in a driving rain when there were surely options available was insane. He kicked the empty picnic basket and began jogging up the road.

He kept up his pace for about a mile and a half, then slowed to a lopsided walk so that he could massage the knifelike stitch in his right side. All he could see ahead was more hills, a long black lake, and a few tiny stone houses. No traffic on the road. No sign of McConnell. No castle.

Then he saw the bicycle.

McConnell reached the top of the switchback road that led to Achnacarry Castle exactly sixty minutes after he started running. The steep hills combined with the thrashing wind and rain had nearly beaten him. But he’d made it. The outlines of a great baronial house emerged from the darkness. Warm yellow light glowed in one upper window. He slowed to a walk and made for the building. Down the shallow slope below the castle, the gleaming tin roofs of prefabricated Nissen huts made a strange contrast to the medieval landscape he had seen so far.

As he neared the castle, something else caught his eye. It was a row of graves. The graves followed the line of the drive. Each was marked by a white cross and a board which bore a name, rank, and brief epitaph. The first one McConnell stooped over read:
He showed himself on a ridge line
. The second read:
Failed to take appropriate cover under mortar barrage
.

As he stood puzzling over the inscriptions, he heard a slow creak. Then a familiar voice called out of the darkness: “The dead dinna mind the rain, Mr. Wilkes!”

Sergeant McShane.

“But I’d advise the livin’ to get indoors!”

McConnell jogged up to the great wooden door, wiped his muddy shoes, and squeezed past McShane’s broad body. He found himself in a spacious entrance hall which had been stripped of all furniture.

“Where’s your friend, then?” McShane asked. “Mr. Butler.”

McConnell shrugged. “Back out there somewhere, I guess.”

The Highlander eyed him with new interest. “I’m not surprised. You must have set a cracking pace to make it that quickly.”

“I’ve done a little running.”

“Have you now? Well. That’s a handy thing to have done if you’re required to spend any time at Achnacarry, Mr. Wilkes. There’s many a man who wished he’d done more of it. I’ve seen university distance runners fall flat in these hills.” The Scot’s lips cracked into a tight smile. “’Course, eighty pounds of gear on their backs doesna help much.”

Suddenly the front door was shoved open from outside. McConnell turned and saw Jonas Stern standing in the doorway with a satisfied smile on his face. He was wet to the skin, but didn’t look at all winded.

Before McConnell or Sergeant McShane could speak, he said, “Butler reporting for duty, Sergeant.”

McConnell looked at the sergeant with bewilderment, but the dour Scot was an old hand at appearing unflappable. “You made good time, Mr. Butler,” he said. “I was about to lock the door.”

“Go ahead.”

McShane did, then led them through a hall dark with wainscoting and turned up a wide staircase. “You’ll stay in the castle until further notice,” he said. “You’ll see hundreds of men coming and going in all manner of kit, speaking several languages. They’re commando trainees. You leave them be, they’ll do the same. Some will be instructors. They’re not marked as such, but you won’t have any trouble tellin’ who they are.”

Not if they all look like you,
McConnell thought. Sergeant McShane looked like a Highland clan chief who’d stepped straight out of the eighteenth century.

“Remember,” the Scotsman said, “you’re Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Butler. Dinna be givin’ those names unless you’re asked. The C.O. of the depot is Colonel Vaughan. You two may not be military, but you’d better snap to if he comes near. The MacVaughan doesna suffer fools gladly.”

They stopped in a dim passage with heavy wooden doors on either side. McShane pointed to the second door on the right. Stern pushed it open. Inside the small, square room were two cots, a paraffin lamp which had been burning for some time, and a bare clothes rack.

“Bath’s up the passage,” McShane said. “No hot water in this part of the castle.” He put his forefinger between Stern’s shoulder blades and shoved him into the room.

McConnell quickly followed, so as to stop any overreaction on Stern’s part.

“You two must be important,” the sergeant mused. “You’re the first civilians I know of to pass through Achnacarry.”

McConnell bent over one of the cots and picked up a horsehair rope about four feet long, with a permanent loop at one end and a straight wooden handle about six inches long attached to the other. An identical rope lay on the other cot.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Toggle rope,” McShane said. “Every commando carries one at all times. You’ll soon see why. I dinna want to see you without it. That’s it then. I’ll see you at breakfast. Six a.m.”

He turned and started back toward the staircase.

McConnell went after him and called, “Is a Brigadier Duff Smith staying in the castle tonight, Sergeant?”

McShane didn’t break stride. “I canna charge my memory about that just now, Mr. Wilkes.”

Realizing he would learn nothing else until morning, McConnell went back to the room and began taking off his wet clothes. He stripped to the skin, as his shorts were soaked through, then climbed into bed. Stern paced the hall for a few moments, then did the same. McConnell thought it odd that Stern turned off the lamp before removing his clothes. It was almost as if he were trying to hide his body.

McConnell lay silent in the dark for some time. But he could not go to sleep without asking one question. “How’d you make it up here so fast?” he said finally. “You found someone to give you a ride?”

Stern answered in English, giving a fair rendition of McConnell’s Georgia drawl. “None of your business, is it, Mr. Wilkes?”

McConnell took the barb in silence. He wondered if Stern realized that their code names had been taken from Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind
. It had been the biggest picture of 1939, but God only knew what corner of the desert Jonas Stern had been living in then. Duff Smith had obviously selected the code names, knowing that McConnell would realize the significance of being named after the milquetoast Ashley Wilkes.

He was nearly asleep when Stern’s disembodied voice said: “Did you see those grave markers?”

McConnell blinked in the chilly darkness. “I saw them.”

“Nothing but dirt under those crosses.”

“What do you mean? The graves are empty?”

“Right.”

“How do you know?”

“I know the British Army. Fought with them in Africa. On their side, if you can believe it. Those graves are typical of their crap. They put those crosses there to scare recruits. ‘Showed himself on a ridge line.’ What rot. The British Army’s just like those graves.”

McConnell saw nothing to be gained by arguing with Stern about the British. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.

Stern grunted contemptuously in the darkness. “Sweet dreams, Mr. Wilkes,” he said in German. “Come morning, I’ll show those limey bastards commando training.”

17

McConnell kicked Stern out of bed at nine a.m. After a quick trip to the toilet at the end of the hall, he dressed in the clothes McShane had provided: army denims, gaiters, and a heavy green cotton smock. Last, he put on the “toggle” rope, with its loop at one end and short handle at the other. He coiled it around his hand, then clipped the coil to the web belt he found in the clothes bag.

Stern was already dressed and standing by the door.

“You don’t have your toggle rope,” McConnell reminded him.

“I don’t need it.”

McConnell shrugged and led the way to the first floor of the castle. They met Sergeant McShane in the entrance hall. The Highlander wore his green beret, but he had forgone his kilt in favor of denims, a khaki shirt, and camouflaged rain smock.

“I was about to come lookin’ for you,” he said. “You missed breakfast.”

“We’re ready,” said Stern.

“Ready?” McShane stared at him in amazement. “I dinna see your toggle rope.”

“I don’t need the damned thing.”

“Oh, you’ll be needin’ it, Mr. Butler. Now, go back and get it.
Move
.”

When Stern returned with the rope, McShane led them outside into a gray Highland dawn. The smell of wood and peat smoke mingled with the scent of coffee and pine, bringing McConnell fully awake. At last he could see the place to which Brigadier Smith had sent them. Achnacarry itself was built of gray stone, with crenelated parapets and mock turrets at the corners. The gurgle of water from behind it announced a river he could not see, but beyond the castle roof rose wooded hills shrouded in mist like that in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in northern Georgia.

A majestic tree-lined drive led down from the castle to the glen below, where a great loch with a surface like burnished silver lay in the growing light. But the pastoral scene ended there. Achnacarry’s expansive lawns were dotted with corrugated steel Nissen huts and canvas bell tents, a metropolis of instant housing. In the center of a field McConnell saw a tent as big as an aircraft hangar, and just across the drive the long row of graves Stern claimed were empty.

Not far from the graves, a powerfully built soldier of about fifty was speaking to a tall, bearded farmer twenty years his senior. The soldier’s voice modulated quickly between apology and indignation, his accent the furthest thing imaginable from Highland Scots.

“That’s the colonel,” Sergeant McShane said.

McConnell was perplexed. “That’s Colonel Vaughan?”

“Aye.”

“But that’s a London accent. I thought he was a Highlander, like yourself. I thought he was lord of the castle.”

McShane laughed. “The
laird
, you mean? No, no. The real laird, Cameron of Lochiel, moved two miles up the loch to Clunes for the duration. But he keeps an eye on his place, make no mistake. It’s his duty to all Camerons around the world.”

McConnell regarded the heavy-jowled colonel. Vaughan seemed a bit on the bulky side for a commando, though he certainly looked as tough as an old army boot. “Vaughan’s a commando himself?”

McShane shook his head. “Ex-Regimental Sergeant Major in the Guards.”

“I don’t see any commandos,” Stern observed.

“They’re on their thirty-six-hour scheme. Should be in any time, though.”

“What’s a thirty-six-hour scheme?” McConnell asked.

“Exactly what it sounds like. Thirty-six hours of running up and down the Lochaber hills in full kit under live fire. Be glad you missed it.”

“They were out in that storm last night?”

“Aye. And it’s a good thing they didna run across you two—”

A cacophony of wild, primitive screams rose out of the trees from behind the castle. “What the hell’s that?” McConnell asked.

“Mock assault on the Arkaig bridge. Climax of the scheme.”

McConnell watched in amazement as over a hundred commandos wearing strange cloth caps charged out from behind the castle with bayonets fixed. “What’s that they’re yelling, Sergeant?”

“Who knows? They’re Free French blokes.”

By the time the French commandos reached the Nissen huts, their enthusiasm had vanished. As they collapsed around their tents, Colonel Vaughan marched up the drive, cursing under his breath.

“What is it, sir?” Sergeant McShane asked.

Vaughan’s face glowed red with anger. “Some fool pinched a bicycle from a crofter’s hut down the hill. Bloody beggar’s accusing one of our lads.”