The Hess Cross (32 page)

It took Holz sixty seconds to rise to his feet. The back of his head pounded rhythmically. He stumbled past the wreckage of his hut, which was illuminated by the fires rapidly consuming the remains of the other buildings. Fighting numbness in all his limbs, Holz crawled into his jeep.

Hans Graf would have laughed at the sound of the explosions had it not been for the extra perimeter patrol.

"I thought you said they came around every fifteen minutes, Lange," Graf whispered. The three stormtroopers were kneeling in tall grass north of the fence. An unexpected team of shore patrolmen was walking in and out of the dim fence-post lights along the perimeter.

"It was every fifteen minutes, Colonel," Lange responded, ignoring Graf. "Now it's every seven or eight."

"It means we were discovered before the explosions," von Stihl said quietly. "They wouldn't have had time to set up the extra patrols, otherwise. Someone saw the truck." He scanned the distance between them and the fence. It looked immeasurably more formidable than when they had come in. "We'll have to break for it. Same setup formation. Lange, you go over first and cover us."

They waited in the grass. Von Stihl shivered uncontrollably. Lange nervously flicked the bolt on his Schmeisser. Now the shore patrolmen were alert, searching the grass and woods with their eyes. They had been briefed and had just heard the series of explosions. This SP's rifle was in his hands, not slung over his shoulder. The dog sensed his master's urgency and kept his nose to the frozen ground. The patrol disappeared down the line of lights.

Von Stihl was about to sprint for the fence when he heard the low rumble of a jeep in first gear approaching from the east. He quickly ducked back down into the grass.

"They've called in the cavalry," Graf said.

The jeep had a thirty-caliber machine gun mounted behind the front seat. An angry SP crouched behind it, gripping the firing handle, looking for something to blow away. The jeep prowled down the fence and vanished in the darkness.

Von Stihl rose to his knees and checked the fence line. He could see no other patrols. "Let's go."

The Germans left their blind at a dead run. Graf scooped up the ladders as they passed. Navy guards would be in sight in two or three minutes.

The escape arch was erected even faster than when they had come in. While von Stihl surveyed the fence line, Lange hustled up and over the ladders. He jumped to the ground and dashed for the cover of the woods. He posted himself between two elms and looked back as von Stihl climbed over the arch. No patrols were in sight. Nor could he hear a jeep's engine. As von Stihl raced to the forest edge, Hans Graf began the ladder climb.

Lieutenant Michael Sullivan was pulled through the woods by the instincts of an Irish setter after a duck. He and the agents had heard the explosions a half-mile back. Smithson had remained at the bakery van with his pistol drawn. Sullivan and Crown lurched through the Stygian woods, stumbling over exposed roots and vines. Crown could barely see Sullivan's back as they high-stepped over the treacherous ground. The cop was puffing hard. His pistol was drawn, and he was begging for a fight. Crown hoped they weren't the first to find the stormtroopers. Sullivan and he were carrying popguns compared to the German's weapons. A fire fight would be short and predictable. Crown saw the flickering light of a fence post through the thick bank of trees.

Sullivan clawed through a thorny bush to the edge of the fence clearing just as Graf reached the apex of the ladder arch. They saw each other at the same instant. Precariously perched atop the ladders, Graf raised his submachine gun, but was too late. Sullivan fired three times. Graf's fingers convulsed around the Schmeisser's trigger, and it spat out an aimless stream of bullets into the ground. He toppled forward into the barbed wire. His arms caught and twisted in the wire as he somersaulted down and away. The
huge body almost reached the ground before it was snapped back by the tension of the barbed wire. Graf's feet swung two feet above the ground, with his arms entangled above him. His legs spasmed several times and then relaxed as Hans Graf died.

John Crown acted without thinking. He yanked Sullivan by the collar back into the woods just as Willi Lange jumped two steps into the clearing thirty yards west of them. The German fired, but the bullets careened harmlessly off trees. His targets had disappeared into the undergrowth. As the echoes of the Schmeisser blast died, von Stihl heard the jeep again. It was rushing toward them along the fence line. From the other direction, two sentries and their dog sprinted toward Graf's body.

"Through the woods, Lange," von Stihl yelled, already plummeting into the protective darkness of the timber.

Crown and Sullivan struggled back to the dirt road. Smithson was behind the car, with his pistol aimed at the woods over the hood. He jerked it toward Crown as he emerged from the trees.

"Christ, it sounds like a war in there."

"It is," Crown answered as he joined Smithson behind the car. "They'll be coming out this way. They're outgunned by the shore patrol behind them."

Sullivan produced a shotgun from the trunk of his car. He crouched behind the bakery van. From the woods came the sound of a fire fight. Several short bursts were followed by a deeper, more ferocious pounding of the navy's .30-caliber. A single shot echoed in the forest. The .30-caliber answered.

Crown turned to the hoarse drone of an approaching navy jeep. It, too, had a mounted automatic weapon on its flank. It parked near the van, and the SP swung the barrel toward the trees. Crown felt as if he had captured his chess
opponent's queen. The men inside the woods were trapped. They would be defeated by the only strategy they understood—hard blows with heavy weaponry.

For an instant Crown thought the dark object flying at him was a bat. He ducked, and it bounced off the car. A Luger. From inside the woods came an accentless voice: "We surrender. We're coming out."

Sullivan yelled from the van, "The little one's got a submachine gun, Crown."

That and a lot of gall if they believe I'll buy the surrender story, Crown thought. Men this ferocious don't surrender so easily.

A Schmeisser tumbled through the air and landed in the dirt at Crown's feet. Again from the woods: "There's two of us. One's injured. I'll be helping him out."

Leaves rustled directly in front of Crown. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sullivan's shotgun raise as he zeroed in on the sound.

"Sullivan," Crown yelled, "they come out of there alive. Lower your shotgun."

"To hell with you, Crown. You know what I said about prisoners."

With a menace Crown believed him incapable of, Smithson growled, "They die, you die." The fat agent raised his pistol to cover Sullivan.

Willi Lange staggered from the woods onto the dirt road. He was holding Erich von Stihl around the waist. Blood poured from a gash on the colonel's head. His eyes were vacant, and he stumbled, almost bringing the slight Lange to his knees with the weight.

"We surrender," Lange yelled again. He raised one hand above his head. He was quickly surrounded by the jeep's shore patrolmen, who violently searched him and von Stihl, oblivious of the colonel's wound. They were shoved against
the car. The colonel slumped to the ground. Lange thrust both his hands above his head.

These can't be stormtroopers, Crown thought. They were bums. The little one, the one who was supposed to be so dangerous with a submachine gun, was the dregs of the earth. His clothes were worn and filthy. He was unshaven, and twigs and bits of leaves clung to his tousled hair. The blond with blood running down his face was no cleaner. His pants had been torn at the knee. One shoe was missing. The blond groaned and sputtered blood as it seeped into his mouth. Crown was disappointed. He had unrealistically been expecting men with polished jackboots and Nazi regalia pinned on their uniforms, not hobos.

"Well," Everette Smithson said as he pushed his gun into his pants, "we got them alive. Where should we put them?"

"It doesn't matter. Maybe the navy has a stockade." Crown looked at Sullivan, who was fuming behind the steering wheel of his squad car. "We can't let Sullivan or any other cops have them if we want to interrogate them, though."

Smithson looked around to make sure they were out of hearing range of the others. "Why not hold them at the EDC house? We've got another bedroom there that's as secure as the one Hess is in. Plus, we've got the best interrogator in the world there. Professor Ludendorf. If he can't find out why these guys are here, no one can."

It made sense. If the saboteurs were somehow connected with Hess's presence in Chicago, as the Priest suspected, then the sooner Ludendorf found out their motive, the safer Hess would be. Plus, the EDC house was guarded so heavily that, even if their mission was to kill Hess, there would be no way for them to reach the deputy führer, even though he was two bedrooms away.

"All right," Crown said.

"I'll talk to the base commander. He'll turn them over to us."

Crown nodded. He already had a mental list of questions he wanted Professor Ludendorf to ask the saboteurs. Why did they go to so much trouble to get to a training center? How did they get into the country? Why didn't they bring their own explosives with them, rather than risk hijacking a truck? Above all, how are these Germans connected with Rudolf Hess?

XVI

T
HE PHONE BOOTH WAS CRAMPED,
and like most men, John Crown couldn't sit comfortably. It was the telephone company's way of keeping conversations short. His knee banged against the folding door, and he muttered an expletive summarizing his feelings for the phone company.

"Pardon me?" Richard Sackville-West said from Washington, D.C.

"Nothing. I'm trying to close the door here."

"How're you holding up under the long gun?"

"Fine. I use a bathroom every thirty minutes, but other than that, just fine."

"You've been keeping busy. That should help," Sackville-West suggested.

"I guess it has. I hardly thought about it when we were trailing those stormtroopers. I was always surrounded by cops, so I wasn't an easy target. But now I'm back to the routine of taking Hess to these interrogation sessions and escorting Heather around at night."

"That doesn't sound that bad, particularly the evenings with your British girlfriend." The Priest laughed softly.

"Sure. Knowing that any minute some pro is going to launch a bullet at me is a lot of fun."

"When are you going to set it up?"

"Later today. It'll be the first time since they began looking for me that I won't be surrounded by cops or passersby. Heather knows our plans, so the assassin does, too. He'll strike this afternoon."

"You'll be ready?" A redundant question. Sackville-West could almost hear his agent's chilly smile over the phone.

"I'll be ready."

"What about the German stormtroopers you caught?"

"None of that makes any sense," Crown replied. "First, look at their caliber. I first heard about Erich von Stihl in 1939 when our intelligence pegged him as second-in-command of the German force that dressed in Polish Army uniforms and then assaulted the German radio station, giving Hitler an excuse to invade Poland."

"It was callous, but well executed," Sackville-West said.

" 'Callous,' for Christ's sake. 'Murder' is a better word."

"A little jumpy, aren't you?"

Without answering, Crown looked through the long panes of glass in the booth door to the uniformed guard leaning against the Metallurgical Lab's hallway wall. He wore sergeant's stripes and a crew cut. Crown turned away from him and said, "We also know he led the first assault on the Athens airport that wiped out the RAF in Greece."

"That we do."

"His unit didn't suffer a single casualty in the raid. That's all I know about him."

"He also spent several months training stormtroopers for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, which Hitler abandoned in October 1940," Sackville-West added.

"So von Stihl is a legend that all young German
stormtroopers emulate. His reputation is deserved. Apparently he's a brilliant special-task operative." Crown paused to look at the booth ceiling for a vent. There was none. It was stifling with the door closed. Rivulets of sweat were running down his back. "Did you have anything on the Wehrmacht corporal, Willi Lange?"

"No. Neither do the British."

"Well, I figure he's also very talented. Small weapons, especially the submachine gun," Crown said. "He did a couple unbelievable and very deadly stunts with his Schmeisser before we caught him."

"What about the one who was killed?"

"We don't know his name yet. From the tattoo under his arm, he's an SS member. He was huge, six-feet-five, two hundred and forty pounds. Our doctor says he was in remarkable physical shape. All his muscles were striated. No cavities in his teeth. He had a bad scar under his right ear, and, interestingly, calluses on his knuckles."

"Like a bare-knuckle boxer."

"Who knows, but you can be sure he was also a specialist, probably something physical, like silent killing. So we have a team of highly talented German commandos. Another puzzling fact is that they went to a lot of trouble to get here. We know this because they left no trace of their travels. It's difficult and expensive for three people to enter this country and cross a thousand miles of it invisibly. Then, after going to all the effort to move secretly, when they got to Chicago they hijacked the dynamite truck, which splashed them all over the front pages. I can't figure out why they went to so much trouble to remain invisible, then do something so bloody it was guaranteed to make the newspapers across the country. It doesn't make sense."

"And there's the question of the explosives."

"Right. There're a lot easier ways to steal dynamite than the way they did it. They could've broken into a warehouse
or into the powder company's storage buildings. Or they could have brought it into the country with them. So why did they hijack the truck? It wasn't necessary."

"The big question," Sackville-West said, and Crown could hear him puffing on his pipe as he lit it, "is, why did they hit the navy training center?"