After a short pause, Weitz began to laugh. The sound chilled Stern’s blood. “Who is that?” he asked, aiming the torch at the desk.
“Berlin.” Weitz smiled eerily. “Reichsführer Himmler is holding for the Herr Doktor.”
Weitz held the phone against Klaus Brandt’s shattered skull and looked up at Stern. The flashlight reflected the whites of his eyes and the teeth of his grin.
Stern leaped forward and snatched the phone away before Weitz could say anything more. He held the receiver to his ear and heard an irritated voice: “Brandt? Brandt! Confounded telephone lines . . . the Allies have knocked them out again.”
A chill raced across Stern’s arms and shoulders.
“Brandt!” Himmler said again. “What the devil is going on up there?”
Stern touched his lips to the bloody mouthpiece. Very slowly and clearly he said, “Listen to me, chicken farmer. You lost the war tonight. Keep your cyanide pill close. We are coming back for you in the spring.”
He set the phone gently in its cradle, picked up the Raubhammer suit and walked out of the office. Weitz followed with his machine pistol. Before they reached the main hall, the telephone was ringing again.
Rachel waited in the corridor with Hannah in her arms.
“For God’s sake, woman!” yelled Stern.
Rachel shook her head and clung desperately to her daughter. Stern saw in her eyes that she was close to collapse. He had seen it happen to men in the desert, a kind of cumulative shock that could make a man lie down to sleep in the middle of a blazing battlefield. If he took the time to put on the Raubhammer suit, Rachel Jansen would not cross the alley to the E-Block alive. He dropped the suit and the flashlight on the floor, took Weitz’s machine pistol and pulled her toward the back door.
As he crashed through it he saw the rear of the camp — trees, fence, the roof of the E-Block, the alley — illuminated as if by daylight.
What was happening?
Halfway across the alley, he heard a babble of voices to his left. A tall figure wearing a brown SS uniform was running toward him, pulling two children along behind, one by each hand.
“Father?”
Jonas shouted.
The figure stopped dead. “Jonas? My son?”
Stern threw his left arm around his father.
“The blood!” cried Avram. “What have they done to you?”
A pistol shot cracked at the far end of the alley. Jonas turned to his right. Just beyond the alley stood the huge barn that held the laboratory and gas factory. When the second crack sounded, he realized what he was hearing — the detonation of the trigger mechanisms on the gas cylinders.
“Into the E-Block!”
he yelled.
“Now! Everyone!”
He pushed the two children down the concrete steps that led to the gas chamber. Rachel and Hannah already waited by the hatchway.
“They saw me!” Avram said as they shoved the children through the hatch.
“Who saw you?”
“The men. It’s a mob! They know something is happening, Jonas. The E-Block won’t hold another soul! Every Jewish child and some of the Gentile children are inside. The women are holding them on their shoulders, squeezing them into every corner . . . it’s a nightmare!”
Stern pulled Hannah from her mother’s arms. “You are the last, Rachel! Say farewell!”
Rachel took her daughter’s face between her hands. “Remember what I told you, little one. Do whatever Herr Stern tells you. Never” — her voice cracked — “
never
forget me.” She kissed the terrified child hard on the forehead and then backed away.
“I am going to live,” she told Stern, her black eyes bright with tears. “One day I will come to Palestine. I will want her back. Don’t ever leave her!”
As Jonas pushed her through the hatch, Rachel reached into her shift and pressed something into his hand. It was too large to be another diamond. He looked down. A
dreidl
. He stuffed the little top into the trouser pocket of the SD uniform.
“She won’t remember!” Rachel cried, backing hard against the wall of bodies behind her. “So you must tell her! It is all she will have of her parents!”
With that she turned and hurled herself into the mass of bodies seeking refuge in the gas chamber.
Another crack sounded from behind the factory. Jonas wrapped the blanket around Hannah’s head and set her on a step. Then he took his father by the shoulders and shook him.
“Get your ass through that door! Now!”
Avram looked confused. “Jonas . . .” His face was working through stages of incomprehension. Things had not turned out as they were supposed to. He should have been dead before now. “I can’t be the only man left alive. Not after—”
For the first time in his life Jonas Stern struck his father. He hit him so hard that Avram doubled over and fell as surely as if he had taken a bullet in the belly. Jonas dragged him to his feet and stood him up beside the hatch. He saw only blackness inside. The heat in the chamber was already stifling. A cacophony of wailing women and children filled his ears. He called for Rachel, but she had already been swallowed by the tangle of limbs. He grabbed the nearest arm to the door and pulled.
“Can you hear me?”
he asked in Yiddish.
“Yes, sir!” answered a shaky male voice.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen, sir.”
“Help me pull him in. He’s not SS. You know the shoemaker?”
“Yes.”
Stern heard the crack of another detonator. When they’d got his father inside, he shoved Weitz’s machine pistol into the boy’s clammy hands. “Hold tight to that! Don’t let anyone take it from you. Stay in here until there’s no more air to breathe. Then shoot out a window, crawl out, and open the hatch. That’s the
only way out
. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
The voice sounded frightened but resolute. Stern squeezed the boy’s arm, then backed up, took hold of the heavy steel door and forced it shut. As he cranked the great wheel into the closed position, he felt he was sealing people into a tomb, not a lifeboat.
Only time would tell which.
Coming up the steps with Hannah in his arms, he saw a group of men enter the alley from the factory end. They wore prison stripes, not SS uniforms. Panic seized him. Even if he’d still had the machine pistol, he could not keep them away from the E-Block for long. Several men began throwing their arms about like puppets controlled by a madman.
Two fell to their knees, retching in the snow.
“God forgive me,” Jonas said. He raced across the alley and up the hospital steps without looking back.
McConnell clung desperately to the suspension bar as the roller-wheel jumped over the shattered transformer on the seventh pylon and raced down the wire. He was three quarters of the way down the hill with no sign of slowing and no idea how to get off of the cylinder alive. The parachute flares floated down through the blackness like white stars, illuminating the landscape from the hillside to the river with a hypnotic light.
What did they mean? Had some emergency signal been triggered? If so, it was a hell of a show. He tore his eyes away from the flares and forced himself to think. He was moving too fast to catch hold of a crossarm, and he was too high to hope to drop into the snow and survive. He did not realize he had the means to save his life until he caught sight of the cylinder ahead of him. The image of it hurtling down the power line tripped a memory in his mind. The Death-Ride at Achnacarry, when he and Stern had been ordered to leap from a tree and slide across the Arkaig River on a taut wire using only their toggle ropes. . .
Toggle ropes . . .
Anna felt a sense of peace when she saw the lights of Totenhausen wink out. Alarmed tower-gunners began firing on the Volkswagen when they realized it was not going to stop, but they were too late. She steamrollered the gate at sixty miles per hour and roared across the parade ground. Bullets shredded her rear tires, but she drove on.
A lone SS man caught in her high-beams fired at her.
She ran him down.
She swerved around the headquarters and headed toward the inmate blocks. Had the Jewish women and children reached the E-Block? Had Stern even reached the block to warn them about the attack? And what of the Christian children? They had nowhere to go. Perhaps she could lead them to safety somewhere.
She gasped and hit the brakes as her headlights revealed the block area. A frantic mob of ghostly figures was milling around like patients set free from a lunatic asylum. Some clung to the fence wires, others writhed in the snow, their backs arched in spasm like human bows. Anna saw children among them. Unconsciously she touched her air hose to make sure it was secured to her mask.
As the VW slowed, a group of men noticed the car and charged with suicidal recklessness. She yanked the wheel to the right and gunned the motor. To get out of the car here would be like leaping into the sea to save a hundred drowning people. Better to go to the E-Block by running through the hospital corridor.
She skidded to a stop beside the hospital steps. There were corpses here too. Her gas suit had no pockets, so she left the keys in the car. With shredded tires the Volkswagen was useless anyway. She reloaded her pistol, then hoisted the heavy air tank onto her back and struggled up the hospital steps.
“Looks like someone already had a go at the power station, sir,” said the navigator. “It’s burning.”
Squadron Leader Harry Sumner started the climb to fifteen hundred feet. From there he would act as Master Bomber, using his radio to guide and correct the delivery of bombs by the other aircraft.
“We’re going to hit it anyway, Jacobs. Following orders, right down the line. They must want the whole hill flattened, to send the two cookies with us.”
Jacobs nodded. His squadron leader was referring to the two 4,000 lb. high explosive bombs carried in the bays of two Mosquitos which had been specially modified to carry the huge concrete-busting bombs to Berlin. Dropping those on the tiny power station and camp below would be like squashing ants with a mace.
Nothing would remain but holes in the ground.
But just in case it did, the additional 14,000 pounds of incendiaries carried by the remaining Mosquitoes would burn off anything left above ground.
“Overdoing it a bit, wouldn’t you say, sir?” commented the navigator.
“We’ll never know,” Sumner replied. “God only knows what’s down there. Could be the devil’s own furnace, buried where we can’t see it.”
“Could be, sir.”
“Verify placement of Target Indicators. I only want to do this once. And pray Jerry doesn’t have any decoys down there.”
“Ready, sir.”
The Squadron Leader keyed his mike twice, then began transmitting orders to one of the ten bombers wheeling in the sky below him.
McConnell watched in mute terror as the cylinder ahead of him rocketed off the tenth pylon like a skier from a cliff and smashed into the rear of a huge barnlike structure, then fell the remaining distance to the ground. Looking down, he saw that the power lines dropped almost perpendicularly from the tenth pylon to a distribution shed at the base of the factory. There would be no gradual descent.
He had to stop
now
.
He gripped the loop-end of his toggle rope in his left hand and focused on the roller-wheel above him. If he tangled the rope in that wheel, he would probably die. There was only one way to make the throw. He slipped his right wrist through the loop-end of the short rope, and with the same hand gripped the wooden handle at the other end — a throwing weight.
He leaned back as far as he could.
The roller-wheel above him whirred like a fishing reel spinning under a shark’s pull. Cocking his right arm, he threw the handle-end of the rope up and over the power line, aiming just behind the pulley-roller, and grabbed for the falling handle with his left hand.
He caught it!
Glancing down, he saw the crossarm of the tenth pylon rushing up to meet him. Thirty yards, twenty — had the British Sarin killed even a single SS man? — fifteen yards . . .
He twisted one end of the rope around each wrist and heaved himself up off the cylinder. The heavy tank shot out from under him like a wild bronco that had finally thrown its rider.
The horsehair toggle rope sang as it raked against the power line, slowing his descent. Was the friction enough? With all his strength he clenched the rope in his vibrating hands.
The toggle rope hit the crossarm with enough speed to snap McConnell’s whole body out ahead of the pylon, parallel to the wires. Momentum tore at his air tank, the harness on his back, his shoulders and wrists — but everything held. Rope, tank, harness, bones, and ligaments. Two seconds after the impact he was hanging suspended from the tenth pylon like a parachutist caught in a tree.
His arms felt as if they had been yanked from their sockets, so he swung his legs up over the crossarm and, in the upside-down position so common to twelve year old tree-climbers, worked his way along to the nearest support leg of the pylon.
Then he looked down.
Sixty feet below, six gas cylinders lay on the snow beside the factory wall. They looked harmless, used up, like scrap metal fallen off a junk truck. For all he knew, they might
be
harmless.
But they might not.
He looked to his right, down into the camp proper. Black stick figures of varying sizes sprawled on the snow at crazy angles, many concentrated in the area of the inmate blocks.
“God in Heaven,” he said, his voice alien inside the vinyl mask. “It works.”
He struggled to hold down the wave of nausea rising from his stomach. Vomiting in the mask might be fatal, since he could not risk removing it. Had any of the women and children reached the E-Block? Had he released the gas too early? Where was Anna? Stern? Stern had no gas suit. He looked down at his waist. Christ. He’d left his safety belt clipped to the top pylon.
The goddamn thing was useless anyway.
He took two massive breaths from his air tank, then jammed his spikes into wood, bear-hugged the pole and started down.