Black Cross (9 page)

Stern was vaguely aware of Peter Owen shouting something as he climbed into the Bentley, but all he remembered was Brigadier Smith’s final exchange with the Welshman before he rolled up the rear window. Owen was protesting that General Little wanted Stern in custody, and that Major Dickson would be hunting him with a vengeance if he was not. Smith did not seem at all perturbed. He said something to Owen in a language Stern would later learn was Welsh. The gist of the translation was, “
You don’t have a problem, laddie. You never found him, you never saw me, and that’s the end of the story. Find yourself a pub and stop worrying. Nobody ever found anything Duff Smith hid, and nobody ever will
.”

During the next two hours, as the Bentley rolled through the bleak winter streets of the blacked-out city, Stern learned more about the reality of the coming European war than he had dreamed in his most cynical fits of depression. In the beginning he pressed the brigadier about the mission he’d hinted at, but the Scotsman had his own way of coming to the meat of things. The first thing he did was deflate any hopes Stern had of the Allies saving the Jews still trapped in Europe. Several phrases would come back to Stern much later, and he would marvel at how frankly Smith had laid it all out.

“Don’t you see, man?” Smith had said. “If we offer sanctuary to the Jews still alive in Europe, Hitler might say
yes
. And the truth is, we don’t want them. Neither do the Americans. You Jews are a highly educated race. Consequently, you take away jobs faster than any other immigrant group. There are military reasons, as well. Little wasn’t joking in there. The Nazis already laid down the law to the Red Cross. ‘Touch the concentration camps, and we will no longer keep the Geneva Convention regarding military POWs.’ That’s no empty threat.”

The Bentley rolled past the Royal Hospital. “You’re ahead of your time, Stern. Though not by much, I’ll wager. It won’t be long before Chaim Weizmann goes to Churchill with the same request you made this afternoon. Bomb the camps. But it won’t make any difference. Bomber Command is practically a law unto itself. There are a hundred ways to bury a request like that in committees and feasibility studies. You’d lost the battle before you even went in there today. To men like Little you’re nothing but a meddling civilian. That’s enough reason to deny your request, no matter how much sense it might make.” Smith chuckled. “I don’t know what you thought you were playing at. The bloody Archbishop of Canterbury lobbied for sanctuary in England for European Jews, and he failed. And you a wanted terrorist!”

“I had to try,” Stern said. “If you knew the sheer numbers of innocent people dying, you would—”

“Numbers aren’t the half of it.” Duff Smith shook his head.

“I’ve seen eyewitness transcripts myself. Polish girls raped and tortured and thrown into the street with blood streaming from their bodies. Entire families stripped naked and made to stand on metal plates to be electrocuted. Jewish women being sterilized and sent to military brothels. Children wrenched from their mothers’ teats. The whole hellish circus. What you don’t understand is that
none of that matters
. War is supposed to be hell, Stern. That kind of thing has lost its shock value, especially to soldiers like Little, who watched their friends slaughtered by the thousands in the Great War. To men like that, civilian deaths are regrettable but irrelevant. They have no direct relation to the prosecution or outcome of the war.”

“You can’t all be like Little,” Stern said. “I can’t conceive of that.”

“You’re right. There are a lot more like Major Dickson.”

The brigadier paused to pack and light a hand-carved pipe.

“There must be some decent men in England.”

“Of course there are, lad,” said Smith, puffing gently. “Churchill is one of your strongest advocates. He’s all for establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine after the war. Not that that means anything. Those bastards in Parliament will drop Winston like a hot brick just as soon as he’s won the war for them.”

After convincing Stern of the utter futility of his journey to England, Duff Smith finally got around to his proposition. “What I said back there,” he drawled, “about killing Germans inside Germany. I wasn’t joking.”

“What do you have in mind?” Stern asked suspiciously.

Smith’s face grew very hard, very quickly. “I’m not going to lie to you, lad. I’m not trying to save the pathetic remnants of European Jewry. Frankly, it’s not my bailiwick.”

“What
are
you trying to do?”

Smith’s eyes flickered. “Not much, except alter the course of the war.”

Stern sat back against the plush seat. “Brigadier . . . who are you? Who do you work for?”

“Ah. Officially, we’re known as SOE — Special Operations Executive. We raise mischief in the occupied countries, France mostly. Sabotage and the like. But with the invasion round the corner, that’s rather tapered off. We’re mostly dropping supplies now.”

“How can you alter the course of the war?”

Smith gave him an enigmatic grin. “Know anything about chemical warfare?”

“Hold your breath and put on your gas mask. That’s all.”

“Well, your former countrymen know quite a bit. The Nazis, I mean.”

“I know they’re using poison gas to murder Jews.”

Brigadier Smith waved his pipe in scorn. “Zyklon B is a common insecticide. Oh, it’s deadly enough in a closed room, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m talking about.”

In two minutes, Smith gave Stern a thumbnail sketch of the Nazi nerve gas program, including Heinrich Himmler’s private patronage. He leaned heavily on two points: Allied helplessness in the face of Sarin, and the Nazis’ predilection for testing their war gases on Jewish prisoners.

“We’ve pinpointed parts of their testing program to three prison camps,” Smith concluded. “Natzweiler in Alsace, Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and Totenhausen near Rostock.”

“Rostock?” Stern exclaimed. “I was born in Rostock!”

Smith raised his eyebrows. “Were you now?”

“What is it you want to do? Disable one of these plants? A commando raid?”

“No, I’ve something a little more complex in mind. Something with a little
flair
.” The brigadier cracked his knuckles, beginning with his left little finger. “What I want to do is frighten the Nazis so badly that they won’t dare to use their nerve gas, not even when the Reich is falling down around their ears.”

“How can you do that?”

“I neglected to tell you one fact about the Allied gas program, Stern. After intensive analysis of the stolen sample of Sarin, a team of British chemists has managed to produce a facsimile nerve agent.”

Stern breathed faster. “How much do you have?”

“One-point-six metric tons.”

“Is that a lot?”

Smith sighed. “Frankly, no.”

“How much do the Nazis have?”

“Our best estimate is five thousand tons.”

Stern went pale. “Five
thousand
—? My God. How much would it take to seriously damage a city?”

“Two hundred fifty tons of Sarin could wipe out the city of Paris.”

Stern turned away from Brigadier Smith and pressed his cheek to the cold car window. His head was starting to throb. “And you have one metric ton?”

“One-point-six.”

“How wonderful for you. What do you plan to do with it?”

Brigadier Smith’s voice cut the air like a rusty saber. “I plan to kill every man, woman, child, and dog inside one of those three camps. SS men, prisoners, the lot. And I’m going to let Heinrich Himmler know exactly who did it.”

Stern wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. He took a moment to try and digest the enormity of what he thought the brigadier had suggested. “Why in God’s name are you going to do that?”

“It’s a bluff. A gamble. Perhaps the biggest gamble of the war. I’m going to use our thimbleful of gas to try to convince Heinrich Himmler that we not only have our own nerve gas, but the will to use it. When he finds one of his precious camps wiped out to the last man, yet with every piece of German equipment in pristine condition, he will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I want him to reach. That if the Nazis were to deploy nerve gas against our invasion force, their cities would be
annihilated
by the same weapon.”

“But how do you know Hitler won’t retaliate with his superior stockpiles?”

“I don’t. But if I’m right about Himmler running the nerve gas program on his own, Hitler will never even find out about our raid. Himmler will sweep the whole thing under the rug. Even if Hitler were to find out, he wouldn’t have any evidence to hold up to the world as an excuse for a retaliatory strike. Not the way I’ve planned this show.”

“You’re mad,” said Stern. “Hitler doesn’t need to justify his actions to anyone.”

“You’re wrong,” Smith said confidently. “Hitler doesn’t hesitate to massacre Jews, but he
does
try his best to cover up the fact that he’s doing it. He cares about public opinion. Always has.”

Stern felt a sudden apprehension. “Brigadier, this is a
strategic
mission. Why have you come to me?”

“Because my hands are tied by some regrettable political considerations.”

“Such as?”

“The Yanks are against it.” Smith grunted. “Bloody schoolboys. They’re content to fight with sticks and pebbles and hope no one gets angry enough to go home for his father’s shotgun. American opposition rules out my using British or American commandos for the operation.”

“What about your SOE operatives?”

“The Americans have elbowed their way in there as well. They’ve demanded that we set up two-man parachute teams — one Yank, one of ours — to go into France and prepare the Resistance for D day. It’s pathetic. I haven’t met one Yank who can speak enough French to order Boeuf Bourguignonne, much less fool a German.”

“So you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Refugees.”

Smith grinned. “Bloody terrorists, at that.”

“Do you have the authority to undertake this operation? Brigadier general isn’t exactly Supreme Commander.”

Duff Smith reached into the pocket of his beribboned tunic and pulled out an envelope. From it he withdrew Churchill’s note, which he handed to Stern. Stern didn’t blink once while he read it.

“Satisfied?” Smith asked.

“Mein Gott,”
Stern whispered.

“I want you to lead this mission. Are you my man or not?”

Stern nodded in the darkness. “Yes.”

Smith reached into his jacket and pulled out a map of Europe. Swastikas covered the paper from Poland to the French coast. Stern felt his pulse speeding at the prospect of action.

“Doesn’t look like we’ve accomplished much in five years, does it?” Smith said. “Look here. There is one thing you can help me with tonight. You may already have done it.”

“What?”

“Picked the target. I mentioned three camps. To be honest, I’ve already narrowed my list to two. Sachsenhausen is simply too large for the type of operation I have in mind. It’s Natzweiler or Totenhausen.”

Stern looked greedily at the map. He knew which camp he wanted to attack. Still, he didn’t want to seem too eager.

“Natzweiler is the larger by far,” Smith said. “The SS are almost certainly killing more Jews there.”

“A larger camp would be easier for me to slip into unnoticed,” Stern pointed out.

“You won’t be infiltrating the camp. Not the way I’ve designed this show.”

“Well,” Stern said in a neutral tone, “since you have only a limited amount of gas, you could increase your chances of success by targeting the smallest camp.”

“Quite,” Smith agreed.

“How far is Totenhausen from Rostock?”

“Twenty miles, due east. It’s on the Recknitz River.”

Stern could not keep the excitement out of his voice. “Brigadier, I know that area. My father and I used to hike the wilderness all around Rostock. I used to follow the
Wandervögel
around when I was a boy.”

Smith studied the map. “Totenhausen is practically on the Baltic coast. Much closer to Sweden than Natzweiler is. That would simplify both infiltration and escape.”

“Brigadier, it’s got to be Totenhausen!”

“I’m afraid I can’t make the final decision tonight.” The Scotsman rolled up the map. “But I can tell you this. Totenhausen was designed solely to test and manufacture Sarin and Soman. From a political standpoint, it’s the perfect target.”

Stern tried to control his impatience. “What do I do now? Where do I go?”

“Some of my people will look after you.” Smith leaned forward and opened a window in the partition separating them from the Bentley’s driver. “Norgeby House,” he said, then closed the window and turned to Stern. “There is more to this mission than killing people. There are other objectives which are extremely important. After the SS garrison is destroyed—”

“Just a minute,” Stern interrupted. “You said we had to kill the prisoners?”

“Yes. I’m afraid there’s no way around it. We can’t jeopardize the mission by trying to warn them. Even if we did warn them, there’s no way to get them out of the camp, much less out of Germany.”

Stern nodded slowly. “Are they all Jews?”

“God, man, it’s an odd time to get squeamish. Didn’t you just propose bombing four concentration camps with no warning at all?”

Stern felt a strange hesitancy. He
had
just proposed that. But somehow this was different. Bombing the death camps would have been an unmistakable assertion of Allied support for Jews, and a potentially crippling blow to the Nazi extermination system. Brigadier Smith’s plan also meant sacrificing Jews, but without any direct benefit to the Jewish people. Or was there? If Eisenhower’s invasion stalled on the beaches of France, Hitler would almost certainly have time to complete the genocide he had begun eleven years ago. Stern cleared his throat.

“You mentioned other objectives, Brigadier?”

Smith was watching him carefully. “Right. After the garrison is neutralized, you’ll move into the gas factory. First and foremost, we need a sample of Soman, their newest and most toxic gas. Second, we need photographs of the production apparatus. Nerve agents are extremely difficult to mass produce. A lot could be learned by studying photos of the German equipment.”