Black Cross. Greg Iles
cap from the table. “Good work, Clapham.”
Smith laid a hand on the rating’s shoulder and said, “From now on, all transmissions from source PLATO will be passed under the name SCARLETT. SCARLETT with two “T’s.”
“As in Gone with the Wind, sir?”
“Right.”
“Noted.” The young rating grinned. “Nice to know the Jerries are short of a few things too, eh?”
Duff Smith paused at the door and looked back thoughtfully. “They’ll never know what that missing copper cost them, Clapham.”
It was late afternoon in London when Brigadier Smith’s silver Bentley rolled onto the A40 and headed for Oxford. Smith was driving himself today, making use of an ingenious shift mechanism designed for him by SOE engineers. Jonas Stern sat beside him, studying a topographic map of Mecklenburg, the northernmost province of Germany.
“I remember it all,” he said excitedly. “Every road, every brook. Brigadier, the target has to be Totenhausen.”
“Be patient, lad.”
“I don’t see the concentration camp marked here.”
“I told you, Totenhausen isn’t like any camp you’ve ever heard of. It’s strictly a laboratory and testing facility. Compared to a place like Buchenwald, it’s minuscule. The SS let the trees grow right up to the electric fence. You need a larger scale map. Himmler is serious about hiding that camp.”
Brigadier Smith had not worn his uniform today. He looked professorial in a tweed jacket and stalker’s cap. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind about this meeting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t want you to say anything unless I ask you to.”
“Why not?”
Smith looked away from the road long enough to let Stern know he meant what he was about to say. “Dr. McConnell is not like most men. He’s too smart to be manipulated—by you, anyway—and he’s too principled to be shamed or bribed into doing anything he doesn’t believe in. He’s also too bloody pigheaded to listen to reason.”
Stern gazed out of the car window. “What kind of man calls himself a pacifist in 1944? Is he a religious fanatic?”
“Not at all.”
“A philosopher? Head in the clouds?”
“In the sand, more like. He’s a different sort of chap. Brilliant, but down to earth. Probably a genius. The pacifism comes from his father. He was a doctor too. Gassed in the Great War, one of the worst cases. Badly scarred, blinded. That’s why the son chose the field he did. Wanted to prevent that kind of thing from ever happening again. Didn’t muck about, either. His uncle owned a dye factory in Atlanta, Georgia. When McConnell was sixteen, he used the chemicals in that plant to brew his own mustard gas. Phosgene too. Tested it on rats he trapped in the basement. Building bloody gasmasks at sixteen.”
“He sounds like a dangerous sort of pacifist.”
“Oh, he could be, if he chose. He’s a riddle. He was a Rhodes scholar in 1930. Took a First at University College. Went back to America for medical school. Graduated top of his class there, then decided to go into general practice. Master’s degree in chemical engineering. Holds five or six patents in the U.S. for various industrial compounds.”
“He’s rich?”
“He didn’t grow up rich, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure he’s comfortable enough now. My point is this. He may say things that seem truly outlandish to you, or to anyone who really understands war. But don’t lose your temper, no matter what. And don’t mention his father. In fact, don’t say anything at all.”
Stern tossed the map of northern Germany onto the floor of the Bentley. “Why did you bring me along, then?”
“I want you to get a look at him. If he agrees to go on the mission, he’ll be your only partner.”
“What? You’re saying this is a two-man job?”
“As far as you’re concerned, yes.” Brigadier Smith revved the Bentley past a U.S. Army truck.
Stern shook his head slowly. “This sounds more like a suicide mission every day.”
“It may well be. But keep one thing clear in your mind. The mission you hear me propose to McConnell will be somewhat different than the mission I discussed with you. For obvious reasons, certain aspects of the offensive side of things will be … minimized. No matter what I say, you will show no surprise. Clear?”
“No matter what anybody says, I keep my mouth shut.”
Brigadier Smith glanced at the young Zionist one last time. “So far, you haven’t shown much of a talent for that.”
Stern showed his right palm to the brigadier and wiggled his middle finger up and down, the most obscene Arab gesture he knew.
In Oxford it was raining. McConnell stood inside a bewildering maze of metal pipes, pressurized storage tanks, rubber hosing and racks of gas masks—a maze of his own construction. There were enough skull-and-crossbones POISON signs tacked around the lab to scare off a German regiment. Two elderly white-coated assistants worked quietly at the far end of the lab, preparing for the afternoon’s experiment.
McConnell leaned against a window and looked down into the sandstone courtyard three floors below. Cold rain pooled in the cracks between the stones, running through channels carved over the past six centuries. He wondered if his brother was flying today. Did weather like this ground B-17s? Or was David navigating the sunny ether above the clouds, humming a swing tune while he pressed on towards Germany with death stowed under him?
Hardly a day had passed since their last meeting that Mark had not gone over his brother’s words again. His determination not to participate in the race for a doomsday gas remained as strong as it had been that night, yet something within him would not let the issue rest. How many scientists had faced similar dilemmas during the war? Certainly those on the Tube Alloys project, men who labored in the shadowy, Faustian field of atomic physics. They had much in common with the men working in the sealed chemical laboratories at Porton Down. Good men living in bad times. Good men making compromises, or being compromised. How could he explain why he couldn’t help them?
He watched the raindrops spatter on the window glass, wiggle like bacteria on a slide, then coalesce and run down, seemingly without direction, to join the water collecting in the gutter pipe, a liquid momentum with force enough to wear away the stone below. He thought of what David had said in the Welsh Pony, about the American boys gathering for the invasion. A rain of young men falling on England, out of airplanes, spilling out of the holds of ships, coalescing into groups that formed the cells of a colossal human wave. An incipient wave that grew each day, leaning eastward, that would soon be poised for a great leap across the Channel. It would leap as a whole, but it would break on the opposite shore and shatter into its component parts, individuals, young men who would water the ground with their blood.
That cataclysmic event, though still in the future, was already as unstoppable as the setting of the sun. The men behind it had come together in England, and around themselves were drawing young lives by the millions. They breathed the scent of history, and across the Channel perceived nothing less than the Armies of Darkness, Festung Europa, the fortress of the Antichrist, waiting to receive their mighty thrust.
But something else awaited them there. McConnell had seen it for himself, and heard it. He had traveled across the Channel to Belgium, and to France, and walked the fields that had once been crisscrossed