Black Cross (27 page)

“Herr Major!” she said in the most indignant and aristocratic German she could muster. “Does a gentleman force himself upon a lady?”

Schörner stared at her with a mixture of anger and fascination. Rachel searched frantically for some frame of reference the SS officer might relate to. “Would you have me against my will?” she asked. “I should think that would be like stealing a war medal.”

Schörner seemed intrigued by her reaction.

Rachel pushed ahead. What had she to lose now? “You say you are a man of honor. Would you falsely wear a medal for gallantry? It is the same with the act of love.”

Schörner smiled sadly, then scratched at the edge of his eyepatch. “There is an important difference, Frau Jansen.” He pulled his Knight’s Cross from beneath his collar. “Medals cannot keep a man warm at night,” he said, fingering the fine ribbon of red, white, and black. “They cannot erase the loneliness of this place for even a moment. But you could, I think. One hour in your arms could do it. At least for a while.”

Rachel was speechless. Here was one of the men who had murdered her husband and God knew how many others in cold blood, now asking her to go to his bed. “Herr — Herr Major,” she stammered, “I appeal to you as a gentleman. I am a new widow. I am not ready for this.”

Schörner’s face locked itself into a mask of formality. “I see,” he said stiffly. “You are still grieving. You require time to purge the memory of your husband from your mind.” He walked to the window and looked out at a squad of Sturm’s soldiers drilling in the yard. “How long do you think you will need?”

Rachel was dumbfounded. “I don’t. . .  Six months?”

Major Schörner took a deep breath and paused, as if mentally consulting a list of social mores. “Impossible,” he said finally. “Outside, the normal mourning period is quite long, of course. Up to a year.” He turned from the window. “Here things are different. We are at war, after all. Thousands of women are made widows every day. You cannot let your youth pass by simply because of a little sentimentality.”

Rachel tried to think of some further argument, but came up with nothing.

“I shall give you one week,” Schörner said. Then he moved back behind his desk and sat down.

“Is that all, Herr Major?”

“Yes. Oh, just a moment. From now on you will receive a special diet. When the evening meal is finished, go to the alley between the hospital and the Experimental Block. Inmate Weitz will meet you there with food.”

Schörner picked up a pen and began scratching on a form that lay on his desk. Rachel felt a sudden wild courage, like the implacable instinct that had driven her over the block fence to search for the diamonds. “May I bring my children, Herr Major?”

“What?” Schörner looked up and blinked.

“May I bring my children to eat this special food?”

“Oh.” A knowing gleam came into his eye. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Rachel turned and stepped toward the door. She stopped at the sound of Schörner’s voice.

“If you change your mind before the week is out, you can find me in my quarters. I am there every night. Do not take too long.” He returned to the file on his desk. “
Auf wiedersehen
.”

Rachel nodded to the door. “
Auf wiedersehen
, Herr Major.”

Frau Hagan was waiting behind the cinema annex of the administration building. Rachel did not walk directly toward her, but toward the barracks area. Frau Hagan contrived to walk in such a way that their paths seemed naturally to intersect in the Appellplatz.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“Me.”

“For sex?”

“Yes.”

“I told you. You came here too healthy. I’m surprised it was Schörner, though.” They walked for a few moments in silence. “At least it isn’t Sturm. You might not survive a night with him. He’s an animal. He would throw you to his pack when he was finished.”

“God, what am I to do?”

“You must go to him tonight?”

“No. He gave me a week.”

“What?”

“He said I could have one week to finish mourning. As if even a year would be enough!”

Frau Hagan stopped walking. “I think the major is taken with you, Dutch girl. As far as I can recall, Schörner has never had a woman in this camp. And why else would he let you wait a week? He could have you right this minute. There is nothing to stop him.”

Rachel drew a quick breath. “He told me I remind him of someone. I think perhaps . . . perhaps he has some remnants of decency left.”

The Pole seized Rachel’s wrist in a clawlike grip. “Don’t ever think that! If you walked within a meter of the wire he would shoot you himself. If you disobeyed an order he would have you on the Tree without a second thought.”

Rachel felt herself losing control. As they neared the block, she threw her arms around Frau Hagan like a terrified child. “Why me?” she wailed. “I am a Jew. I thought I was like a disease to the SS.”

Frau Hagan stroked Rachel’s nearly bald scalp. “That is what Goebbels and Himmler say. But people are people. I know of a case where an SS man actually fell in love with a Jewess. They were both shot.”

“What am I to do, then?”

Frau Hagan gently disengaged Rachel and held her at arms’ length. “At the end of the week you will have to give in,” she said firmly. “This is not Amsterdam. You have no choice.”

But as they entered the block, Rachel decided that maybe she did have a choice. If she had to yield to Schörner in seven days regardless, why shouldn’t she try to get something out of it?

Something for her children.

21

It is a curious fact that men who share extreme hardship — even those who previously dislike or even hate each other — form unspoken bonds that last forever. Not because of insensitivity or stupidity do armies train their recruits by driving them up to and beyond the point of maximum endurance. For thousands of years this system has forged the callow young men of numberless nations into soldiers ready to die for their comrades — even if these comrades are bound only by common hatred of their tormentor: the army.

Of course the process that bonds people need not be so extreme. Strangers standing at a bus stop will studiously ignore each other for quite some time. But let the bus be late, let a hard rain begin lashing the street, and the fragmented crowd quickly becomes a group united by resentment against the bus company and its lazy drivers.

It was a range of experiences between these two extremes that began to bridge the chasm between Mark McConnell and Jonas Stern. Though McConnell spent much time alone studying German and organic chemistry, and Stern climbed ice-slickened poles until he could do it wearing a blindfold, the two men found themselves thrown together on night marches, obstacle courses, at meals, and, most importantly, in the dark hut behind the castle in the exhausted minutes before sleep took them. A thaw was inevitable, and Smith should have seen it. There was simply no escaping the fact that the two men had no supporters at the castle other than themselves. No grumbling cadre of brothers-in-arms, as the commando recruits had, no friendly colleagues, as the instructors had. They were two civilians alone, training in a program wholly outside the normal routine of the Commando Depot.

For the staff they were an inconvenience, a disruption to be tolerated only at the request of the commanding officer, who was merely doing a favor for a friend. And excepting Sergeant Ian McShane, that tolerance was markedly thin. Some of Stern’s early remarks about McConnell’s pacifism had gotten around, and the instructors quickly came to view the American with the jaundiced eye that many in Oxford had. In Stern’s case the prejudice was more open. Anti-Semitism was widespread in the British army, but Stern’s German accent put him right over the top. He could hardly pass anyone at the castle without drawing a dark look or muttered imprecation.

And so by the fourth day, the two men, so different in philosophy, had been forced by prejudice onto common ground. Stern had maintained his fierce mask of cynicism, but McConnell soon sensed the somber, reflective intelligence behind it. Stern’s reappraisal of McConnell occurred more slowly — until something quite unexpected taught him that first impressions can be far from accurate.

At the toggle bridge — a long net of intertwined toggle ropes that spanned a wide stretch of the river Arkaig — Sergeant McShane was taking great pleasure in pointing out to Stern this ingenious use for his favorite tool. Stern retorted that the bridge suspended above the rushing waters had required at least fifty toggle ropes to construct, whereas he and McConnell would have only two.

While they traded barbs on the castle bank, a group of French commandos were being instructed on how to properly negotiate the flexible bridge under fire. The Arkaig was still in flood, concealing rocks that could snap bones like twigs if a man fell the twenty feet from the bridge to the river. A concealed sniper fired near-miss shots with a rifle, and to further enhance the realism of the exercise, explosive charges had been laid in the riverbed. Consequently, several furious commandos found themselves bunched at the middle of the sagging bridge while an instructor with a clipboard shouted cockney epithets from the bank, maligning their ancestors back to William the Conqueror. Every time a bomb exploded in the river, the Frenchmen screamed at each other with redoubled fury.

Between bouts of laughter, Sergeant McShane explained to Stern and McConnell what the Frenchmen were doing wrong. His laughter died when, after a particularly violent explosion, one of the young commandos lost his footing and slipped down through the spiderweb of toggle ropes, somehow catching his throat in the tangle. His body jerked taut like that of a man being hanged — then his head snapped up and he plunged into the river.

Only the observers on the bank realized what had happened, and of them only McShane and the other instructor knew that two men had recently lost their lives under identical circumstances. In that case an explosion had shaken two men off the bridge. The flooded stream quickly swept them past all chance of aid, and their drowned bodies were later recovered at the mouth of Loch Lochy. A grappling net had since been suspended from the iron footbridge downstream, but Sergeant McShane was taking no chances. By the time the Frenchman’s absence had been noticed by his comrades, the Highlander had already dived into the flooded river and begun swimming after the floating body.

McShane swam strongly and, urged on by the shouts of the men on the bridge, managed to overtake the Frenchman in time. The commandos on the bridge fought their way over the toggle ropes while McShane dragged their fallen comrade up the far bank.

Even from where McConnell and Stern stood, it was plain that the young commando was badly hurt. Sergeant McShane had all he could do to keep the man’s friends far enough back to let him breathe. It was the Highlander’s cry for a medical officer that broke the spell on the near bank. McConnell splashed into the shallows, then dived into the rushing water and fought his way across. Stern raced up the bank and scampered across the toggle bridge.

When McConnell broke through the circle of men on the far bank, he saw a young man gasping like a landed fish, but getting no air into his lungs. The commando’s lips were already turning a deathly gray.

Cyanosis,
he thought.
Not much time.

The French commandos shouted wildly in their own language that someone should pump the water from their comrade’s lungs. The young man’s eyes bulged with terror as he tried vainly to suck air into his chest. McConnell elbowed two commandos aside, saying sharply, “
Je suis un medecin! Le Docteur
!” This parted the clamoring mass of Frenchmen. He knelt beside Sergeant McShane and palpated the Frenchman’s throat. The larynx had been fractured.

“I need a penknife,” he said. “
J’ai besoin d’un couteau
!”

“What are you doing?” McShane asked. “The man’s got water in his lungs!”

“No, he doesn’t. He just can’t breathe.
Un Couteau
!”

“We’ve got to lay him on his stomach!” McShane insisted. “Push the water out. Help me turn him.”

McConnell knocked the sergeant’s arm aside, then grabbed the young Frenchman’s hand and held it to McShane’s face. “Look at his nails, Sergeant! He’s suffocating!”

While McShane stared transfixed at the blue skin beneath the nails, someone thrust a small Swiss-made pocketknife into McConnell’s hand. He flicked open its two blades and chose the smaller for its sharpness. The young Frenchman’s face was turning bluer by the second. Using his left index finger, McConnell probed carefully for his primary landmark — the cricothyroid membrane at the center of the Adam’s apple — then brought the point of the knife blade in contact with the skin.

“Dinna try that!” Sergeant McShane said. “He’ll choke on his own blood! I’ve seen it happen in the field. If his throat’s crushed, we’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

“He’s dying!” McConnell snapped. “Hold him down!” He raised the knife, blade turned horizontally so as to pass cleanly between the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. “
Hold him, Sergeant
!”

Stunned by the American’s sudden assumption of authority, McShane restrained the Frenchman with his left forearm, but grabbed McConnell’s arm with his right. “Wait, damn you!”

“I’m a doctor!” McConnell shouted, turning on the big Scotsman. Then he shouted in French, “
Mets-le deahors
! Get this man away!”

A dozen hands jerked the astonished Highlander clear. Three French commandos took his place and pinned their young friend’s head and body to the cold ground. With one clean stroke McConnell punched the knifepoint through skin and membrane.

The Frenchman’s chest heaved.

“Mon Dieu!”
gasped a dozen commandos in unison.

“I need something hollow!” McConnell told them. “
J’ai
 . . . shit!
J’ai besoin de quelque chose de creux
. A reed, a straw, a pen . . .
un stilo
? Anything, quickly!”

As blood trickled from the small incision, he rotated the knife blade caudally to widen it. Then he slid his right index finger down the side of the blade and into the hole, drew out the blade, and left his finger in place to preserve the integrity of his incision. He was about to shout again when Jonas Stern knelt beside him and slapped a dismantled pen into his hand.