Black Cross (40 page)

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. “
Get up
!” she shouted. “
Run! You’ll be shot
!”

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.

Get up?
Rachel thought.
Is that what you are telling me? Yes. Get up and walk or you will die where you lie.

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
en masse
toward the main gate, where a small group of SS stood with their weapons leveled. Rachel got unsteadily to her feet.

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
was
Stern?

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 stop Stern except by killing him or turning him in to the SS — both moral impossibilities.

Smith had counted on that.

So here he was, cowering in the cellar of a frightened German nurse, unable to escape Germany without Stern’s help. The nurse intrigued him. She was the furthest thing imaginable from his idea of a spy. Had it been she who smuggled out the sample of Sarin that he’d tested in his Oxford lab? It was certainly possible. But if so, what had motivated her to take such a risk? In the absence of facts, he found himself certain that Anna Kaas had endured some great tragedy at the hands of the Nazis. Why else would she risk her life to fight them? Very few Germans had.

Her reluctance to embrace Brigadier Smith’s plan had surprised and pleased him. She must have been excited at the prospect of action, especially after months or even years of living a double life, always under threat of discovery yet never seeing any benefit from the risks she took. But now that the day had arrived, she seemed appalled by what “London” had decreed must be done. Before leaving the cottage, she’d looked back at him and said, “It’s odd, isn’t it? The Nazis say we must kill Jews to save the German people. Your Brigadier Smith says you must kill Jews to save the Jewish people. I wonder . . . do any of these men care about saving individual human beings?” A simplification, perhaps, but she had gotten to the heart of the matter. Maybe together they could convince Stern to abandon the idea of killing the prisoners.

Perhaps they could work out a compromise.

McConnell gripped the arm of the sofa. Something had made a crashing sound upstairs. He heard a quick scream, then voices. He felt along the sofa cushion until his left hand closed over the folding stock of his Schmeisser. He’d never thought he would really use the weapon, but if SS men were coming for him—

A shaft of light sliced down through the darkness.

He pointed the submachine gun at the top of the stairs.

“Are you down there?”

A woman’s voice. Anna. But she was not alone.

“Come on, Doctor!”

Stern.

McConnell exhaled in relief. Keeping the Schmeisser in his hands, he climbed the steps to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see Anna pour a glass of vodka and drink it in a single swallow. With trembling hands she poured another.

“What’s the matter?” McConnell asked. “What happened?”

“I frightened her,” said Stern, leaning in the foyer doorway. “I tried to get in earlier, but you wouldn’t answer the door. I didn’t want to break in, because I thought you might shoot me. I waited for her, then shoved in behind her when she opened the door.”

“Where the hell have you been all day?”

Stern walked over to Anna and drank a shot of vodka from her bottle. “Rostock,” he said, and wiped his mouth.

Anna’s glass clinked on the countertop. “You are insane! Why did you go there?”

Stern took another swallow of vodka. “It was too windy to make the attack. Besides, I knew we’d never reach the coast without being caught if an alarm was raised. Not in daylight.”

“But how did you get to Rostock?”

“I stole a car from the village.”

Anna shook her head. “You are mad.”

“I returned it to its owner,” Stern said casually. “But never mind that. When you got here, you dropped your bicycle and ran to your door. Something had frightened you long before you saw me. What was it?”

Anna looked away from him and drank from the glass. “You were right last night,” she said. “Totenhausen must be destroyed, whatever the cost. It is an abomination.”

McConnell stared at her in confusion.

“Tell me what happened,” Stern demanded.

She took a step back, retreating from Stern’s sudden intensity. “There was a killing today.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Only because it was a prisoner who killed an SS man.”

“What?”

“It was a woman. The Blockführer of the Jewish Women’s Barracks. She stabbed a corporal in the neck with a gardening spade. The biggest brute in the camp.”

“Why did she do that?”

“The guard was beating another prisoner to death. A Jewess from Amsterdam.”

Stern shook his head angrily. “This Blockführer was also a Jew?”

“No. But she and the Jewess were friends.”

“Did the Jewish woman die?”

“No. I got her away and sent her back to her block.” Anna half-turned away and looked at the floor as she spoke, as if she were being forced to reveal some terrible family secret. “Hauptscharführer Sturm went berserk after seeing that his man was really dead. With Brandt and Schörner gone, he was the senior officer in camp. He ordered immediate reprisals. Two women were hanged from the Punishment Tree, and eight more shot by firing squad. Ten people murdered.”

Stern grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “Jews?”

“No,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Polish Christians.”

Anna pushed past him and sat down at the table, the glass still clenched in her hand. “If Schörner hadn’t returned from Peenemünde, I think Sturm and his men would have murdered every prisoner in the camp.”

“Major Schörner imposed order?” Stern asked, standing right over her.

“More than that. He ordered Sturm confined to quarters. That man has the nerve of the devil.”

“But why would he do that?”

“I think it’s something personal between him and Sturm. Something to do with the woman.”

“The woman who killed the SS man?”

“No, the Jewess who was beaten. I think Schörner has pressured her into some sort of sexual arrangement.”

Stern looked pointedly at McConnell, as if to say,
You see what these Nazi pigs are capable of
? “And this sergeant disapproves of the major’s sexual arrangement?”

“I don’t think he cares about that,” Anna said. “There is something else between him and Schörner. Sturm really hates him.”

“What kind of crazy camp is this? Is there no discipline?”

She shook her head slowly, unshed tears pooling in her eyes. “It’s worse than anything you can imagine. Herr Doktor Brandt is in charge. Technically he is a lieutenant-general in the SS, but he has no military training. It is said he’s a personal friend of Himmler. There are three other SS doctors — two captains and a major — to fill out the officer complement. Major Schörner is head of security. After that it drops to Hauptscharführer Sturm and his men.”

“No midlevel officers?”

Anna shook her head. “That’s the way Brandt likes it. He wants doctors around him, not soldiers.”

At last Stern moved away from her and began pacing around the table. McConnell sat down so he wouldn’t have to keep stepping out of his way.

“What would happen if I attacked the camp now?” Stern asked.

“The same as last night,” Anna said in an exhausted voice. “You’d miss half of the SS garrison because Schörner has them out searching for parachutists, but you’d kill all of the prisoners. Not only that, since you told me about the wind I’ve been thinking about it. The wind at the camp blows faster than on this side of the hills. It blows down the river.”