Crucified (19 page)

"Not for you. And not for the Gestapo. You're actually screwing it tighter. That's because the threading is reversed.

Give it a sharp twist the other way."

Liz did and the button popped open to reveal a miniature compass inside.

"These," said Sweaty, "are two buttons from my fly."

"Torn off when some
Fraulein
removed your pants in a brothel?" teased Liz.

"I wish."

The sergeant set one small, domed button down on the table. Its dome was surmounted by a tiny, sharp pin that spiked up vertically. The other button had two dots on one edge and one on the opposite edge. When the radioman placed the dotted button on top of the spiked one, the two dots immediately revolved around on the pin to line up with magnetic north.

"Cool," said Liz.

"See this pencil?" Sweaty asked, pulling it from his box of relics from the war. "Break it at the letter 'B' on the side and you'll find a compass within."

"That's a lot of compasses."

"With a compass, a map, and some pimpernel pictures, it was possible to sneak home."

"Who dreamed up this stuff?" asked Liz.

"MI9."

"Like in James Bond?"

"That's MI6, Britain's external security agency. MI9 aided the Resistance and recovered Allied troops from Nazi-controlled Europe. It's now defunct."

"Do we know who Q was?"

"Q was a composite of several inventors," Wyatt cut in. "A First World War pilot and movie PR man named Christopher Clayton Hutton designed most of the compasses and Sweaty's escape boot.

He became so popular that he dug himself a secret underground bunker in the center of a field so he could work in peace."

"Thus the term 'mole'?" joked Liz.

"The Gestapo thought Colditz Castle was an escape-proof prison. They were mistaken. The first British officer to make it out was Airey Neave. He escaped through a trap door under the stage during a theatrical production. He made his way back to Britain by way of Switzerland, France, Spain, and Gibraltar, then was recruited as an evasion expert to help MI9. At one point in the war, MI9 was able to smuggle a complete floor plan of Colditz Castle to prisoners still inside."

"Hocus-pocus," said Liz.

"Those words best apply to Jasper Maskelyne. Three generations of Maskelynes were stage magicians. Jasper was a star in the 1930s. When the war broke out, he put his sleight-of-hand tricks into effect in North Africa, cobbling together a group of illusionists called the Magic Gang. To divert Nazi bombers from the port of Alexandria, he built a fake harbor in a nearby bay, complete with a dummy lighthouse and a dummy anti-aircraft battery that fired thunder flashes. To protect the Suez Canal, he outfitted searchlights with a revolving cone of mirrors that spun off a wheel of blinding beams nine miles wide."

"Smoke and mirrors," said Liz.

"Jasper's best deception was Operation Bertram, before the Battle of El Alamein. The Magic Gang hoped to convince the Desert Fox—Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—that Monty's attack would come from south of the German line, instead of north.

To that end, they created two thousand fake tanks out of plywood and painted canvas where there was no army. They even found a way to make the fakes leave tracks. To bolster the illusion, they created a fake water pipeline under construction, complete with sound effects like workers riveting things together and swearing when they dropped their hammers on their toes. The Nazis tracked the progress from the air. Did they assume nothing would happen until the army got its water? For whatever reason, when that attack came, the Germans were caught off guard."

"So Jasper saved the day?"

"He thought so. And the next we hear of him, he's at work in MI9, designing hiding places for escape aids."

"Too bad you didn't get to use them. Sweaty," said Liz.

"But I did. The barley sugar in my escape box, remember?

I gave it to the little girl in the farmhouse. You know, I often think of Heidi to this day."

"Want to meet her?" Wyatt asked.

+ + +

Lenny Jones never did show up with his grandfather's file, so they left without him.

With Wyatt driving the rental car and Sweaty seated beside him—"You take the front," Liz had said, "to see if the panorama matches what you recall"—the three foreigners forsook the picturesque medieval town for the countryside.

The green of summer was giving way to the red-orange-yellow of autumn, and the last crops had ripened enough for harvesting. Already, the highlands off in the distance were whitened by snow.

"How did you find her?" Sweaty asked.

"Easy," Wyatt replied. "My friend Rutger—the fellow who set up the
Ace of Clubs
pass for me—knows the records the Nazis kept better than anyone. To my mind, he's the best historian of Hitler's Reich. With the date of the crash and the location of the unearthed plane, he was able to search Gestapo files. He found a record of your arrest and the statement given by the farmer living nearby. I phoned the farm this morning to confirm."

"Elke turned me in?"

"No. In fact, the Gestapo gave her a very rough time. What saved her from execution was your 'admission' that you had threatened her and her child."

"I was afraid for them."

"And rightly so," said Rook. "She could have been shot for helping the enemy to escape."

"What put the Gestapo on to me?"

"Your parachute caught in the tree. What's interesting is that earlier that night—
before
your plane was shot down—the Gestapo throughout this region got orders to take any downed RAF airmen alive, and to separate them from one another."

"Judas?"

"That's another piece that seems to fit our puzzle."

A lazy river with wooden bridges meandered through the hills and dales, fields and pastures. Man and horse worked the fields together as they had for centuries. With the help of German shepherds, farmers in funny-shaped hats and leather pants that never wore out herded cows for cheese and pigs for sausage. Apples shone red in the orchards. Soon, this world would be forced to give way to modern times, when the autobahn brought
Fahrvergniigen
—"the pleasure of driving"—to pollute its tranquility.

"That barn!" said Sweaty, pointing. "That I remember. Its beamed sides reminded me of Shakespeare country, and its roof drapes down like a nun's cowl."

"Check the map," Wyatt said to Liz in the back seat.

She laughed. "I assume the German cross you scrawled means X marks the spot?"

"Yes."

"Okay. We're here."

"And that's the farmhouse," Sweaty said, finger pointing again. "I hobbled across from that windbreak of trees, leaving my chute billowing in the branches."

Wyatt turned up the long driveway that led to the farmhouse door. They bumped about until they reached the end, where a woman was watching from the threshold. When they parked and got out, Sweaty smelled smoke in the air. It reminded him of childhood autumns back home in Wisconsin.

"Welcome," said the woman with gray streaks in her back-combed hair.

"Hello, Heidi. You've grown up," replied the old airman.

Holding out a metal box in one callused hand, the German raised its hinged lid and flashed him a smile. The same smile he'd seen when he'd fed candy to her doll.

"Have one," she offered. "I order them from London. You left me with a sweet tooth for barley sugar."

 Selecting a candy, Sweaty placed it on his tongue. More than half a century had passed since he'd last sucked one, but the distinctive taste flew him back to the war. Never again had he felt such camarader
ie.
And after all the faceless Germans they had killed from the air, this woman's mother was the one he'd saved.

Down memory lane, he thought.

The parlor hadn't changed much since the war. There was even a blaze on the hearth to ward off autumn's chill.

Heidi motioned Sweaty to the same overstuffed chair as Elke had, then served her guests coffee and a Bundt cake.

"Karl?" inquired the sergeant, eyeing the photo of the young man in the Luftwaffe uniform still displayed on the mantel. "Did he come back from the war?"

"Ja,"
said Heidi. "From a prisoner camp. That's where he learned English, which he later taught to me."

"Your English is good."

"I watch English-language films." A TV and DVD player were the only updates to the room.

"And your mother? Elke?"

"She died in a farm accident when I was a teenager. After that, my brother and I worked the land."

"That's a lot of work."

Heidi nodded. "Now he's gone, so I plan to sell."

"It's
good
to see you."

"You, too," she said. "I've waited a lifetime to thank you for not betraying my mother. Did they beat you?"

"No, they were decent. But I didn't want the Gestapo hurt-ing your mother for helping me."

"You were Karl."

"I know," Sweaty replied.

Heidi offered Liz a second piece of cake. "I hear your grandfather piloted the plane?"

"Yes," said the younger woman. "He vanished that night.

I'm here in hopes of unearthing what happened to him.

Wyatt found no trace in the Gestapo files."

"That's because the Gestapo didn't capture him."

Liz sat bolt upright. "You know his fate?"

"Ja," Heidi replied. "My childhood playmate grew up on a nearby farm. That night, he was awakened by the noise of a descending bomber. His father grabbed a pitchfork and ran off across their fields to intercept a parachute he spotted in the sky.

The next morning, he gave his son new toys."

From beneath her chair, Heidi retrieved a rusting biscuit box. With both hands, she passed it to Liz.

"When I heard you were coming, I went to my friend. He wants to remain anonymous, but he gave me this to give to you.

These are the 'toys' his father gave him that morning."

Liz took a deep breath and thumbed off the lid. Inside, she saw the insignia of a pilot's battledress, including the wings of RAF Bomber Command. One by one, she removed the trophies from the box, examining the gadgets designed for escape and evasion by the brains of MI9. Finally, she turned the box upside down, and into her palm fell a wedding ring.

"For Fletch, with love" was etched into the band.

"What happened?" Liz asked.

"Your grandfather landed where the farmer was waiting.

He'd lost his parents when Nuremberg was bombed."

"Oh," said Liz.

"That's why we were always told," Sweaty interjected, "to give up to the military, and not to civilians."

"When the farmer heard that the Gestapo wanted to take the crewmen alive, he feared for his life. He swore his family to secrecy, and no one found out, except me. I said nothing, until now."

"Thank you for telling me."

"If Karl had been killed in England, I would have wanted to know. Not far from here is a magnificent tree. The pilot was secretly buried beneath its canopy. If you'd like to go for a walk in the country, I'll accompany you to his grave."

GERMANY, 1944

Entering the U-boat was like crawling through the neck of a bottle. With the hatch closed, you said farewell to the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, and everyday life. Suddenly, your world shrank down to this oppressive, claustrophobic, constricted steel tube. The
Elektro
boat—a new weapon in the arsenal of the Reich—was half the size of the submarines that had begun the war. Less than ten feet wide, it wasn't designed for the comfort of its crew. The sub was a battle engine stuffed with machinery and torpedoes. It gave the men just enough room to vegetate and perform the chores essential to their mission. For weeks on end, the fourteen-member crew would stoop, step up, slip sideways, and bang their heads on pipes and hand-wheels as they moved along the central aisle. The Judas agent felt like Jonah inside the whale as this mechanical predator slipped silently beneath the sea toward its target.

His codename was Sturmer.

Daredevil, in English.

And daring indeed was this plan to smuggle Hitler's atomic secrets to Churchill in the
Black Devil.

The tide had turned in the Battle of the Atlantic. In the early years of the war, wolf packs of U-boats had attacked convoys on the surface, then submerged to escape from destroyers. But by the end of 1943, sub losses were greater than the number of ships torpedoed. What tipped the scales against Germany were aircraft equipped with radar. Forced underwater, the wolf packs were deprived of surface mobility, and solitary hunters had little chance against an escorted convoy. Clearly, Germany required a new type of sub.

The Judas agent had been sequestered in a hideaway on the Baltic Sea for a crash course on the revolutionary Type XXIII
Elektroboot.
Diesel power, Sturmer learned, was obsolete. By replacing it with electric motors juiced by high-capacity batteries, the Germans had built a machine that could stay submerged for 194 nautical miles, so it couldn't be "starved out" by surface pursuers. The electric boat could maintain a lightning attack for over an hour, and it was almost immune to echo-detection by sonar-probing destroyers. With double the attack speed of other submarines, the Type XXIII had the option of silence over swiftness by switching to an auxiliary electric "creep" motor.