Black Cross

My hands felt suddenly cold. “Were you … in the camps?”

“No. I escaped to Sweden, along with the surgeon and his wife. But you see, I left my unborn children behind.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever told that to a Christian,” Leibovitz said.

“I’m not a Christian, Rabbi.”

His eyes narrowed. “Do you know something I don’t? You’re not Jewish.”

“I’m not anything. An agnostic, I guess. A professional doubter.”

Leibovitz studied me for a long time, his face lined by emotions I could not interpret. “You say that so easily for one who has lived through so little.”

“I’ve seen my share of suffering. And alleviated some, too.”

He waved his hand in a European gesture that seemed to say many things at once. “Doctor, you have not even peered over the edge of the abyss.”

Laying his hand across his eyes, Leibovitz sat motionless for nearly a minute. He seemed to be deciding if he had the strength to tell his story after all. Just as I was about to speak, he removed his hand and said, “Now are you ready to listen, Mark? Or would you prefer to leave things as they are?”

I looked down at the Victoria Cross, the faded note, the Scottish tartan and the photograph of the woman. “You’ve hooked me,” I said. “But wait here a minute.”

I went back to my grandfather’s bedroom and got the small tape recorder he had used for dictating medical charts, and a thin box of Sony microcassettes. “Do you mind if I tape this?” I asked, setting up the recorder. “If the story is that important, perhaps it should be documented.”

“It should have been told years ago,” Leibovitz said. “But Mac would have none of it. He said knowing or not knowing about it wouldn’t change human history by one whit. I dis-agreed with him. It’s long past time to bring this story into the light.”

I glanced at the window. “The light’s almost gone, Rabbi.”

He sighed indifferently. “Then we’ll make a night of it.”

“Can I give you a bit of advice? Editorially speaking?”

“Ah. You’re an editor now?”

I shrugged. “I’ve written a few journal articles. Actually, I’ve been toying with writing a novel on my off weekends. A medical thriller. But perhaps I’ve found a new story to tell. Anyway, here’s my advice—you can take it or leave it. That ‘picture the scene’ and ‘I suppose’ business? Drop all that. Just tell the story like you think it happened. Like you were a fly on the wall.”

After a few moments, Leibovitz nodded. “I think I can do that,” he said. He poured himself another brandy, then settled back into the leather wing chair and held up his glass in a toast.

“To the bravest man I ever knew.”

TWO

Oxford University, England, 1944

Mark McConnell quietly lifted the long steering pole out of the Cherwell River and slapped it back down. A spray of water and ice drenched the leather-jacketed back of his brother, who perched on the forward seat of the narrow wooden punt.

“You goddamn shitbird!” David whirled around, almost upsetting the boat in the process. He dug his gloved right hand into the river and shot back a volley of water and ice.

“Hold it!” Mark cried. “You’ll sink us!”

“You surrendering?” David dipped his hand into the water again.

“Declaring a temporary cease-fire. For medical reasons.”

“Chickenshit.”

Mark wiggled the pole. “I’ve got the firepower.”

“Okay, truce.” David lifted his hand and turned back to the prow of the flat-bottomed punt as it crunched slowly around the next bend in the icy river. He was the shorter of the two brothers and built like a halfback, with sprinter’s legs, a narrow waist, and thickly muscled shoulders. His sandy blond hair, strong jaw, and clear blue eyes completed the picture of Norman Rockwell charm. While Mark watched warily, he slid down onto the cross slats of the punt, leaned back, cradled his head in his hands and shut his eyes.

Mark scanned the river ahead. The bare trees on both banks hung so heavily with icicles that some branches nearly touched the snow carpeting the meadows beneath them. “This is insane,” he said, flicking a final salvo of drops onto David’s face. But he didn’t mean it. If his younger brother hadn’t driven down from the 8th Air Force base at Deenethorpe, this winter day would have been like any other at Oxford: a bleak fourteen-hour newsreel watched through foggy laboratory windows. Rain changing into sleet and then back into rain, falling in great gray sheets that spattered the cobbled quads of the colleges, shrouded the Bodelian Library, and swelled the lazy Cherwell and Thames into torrents.

“This is the life,” David murmured. “This is exactly how we picture you eggheads when we’re on the flight line. Living the life of Reilly, canoeing around a goddamn college campus. We risk our asses every day while you bums sit up here, supposedly winning the war with your little gray cells.”

“You mean punting around a goddamn college campus.”

David opened one eye, looked back and snorted. “Jeez, you sound more like a limey every year. If you called Mom on a telephone, she wouldn’t even know you.”

Mark studied his younger brother’s face. It was good to see him again, and not merely because it provided an excuse to get out of the lab for an afternoon. Mark needed the human contact. In this place that offered so much comradeship, he had become a virtual outcast. Lately, he’d had to fight a wild impulse to simply turn to a sympathetic face on a bus and begin talking. Yet looking at his brother now—an Air Force captain who spent most days on white-knuckle bombing runs over Germany—he wondered if he had the right to add his own pressures to those already on David’s shoulders.

“I think my hands are frostbitten,” Mark grumbled, as the punt pushed on through the black water. “I’d give a hundred pounds for an outboard motor.”

Once already he had resolved to talk to David about his problem—three weeks ago, on Christmas Day—but a last-minute bombing assignment had scotched their plans to get together. Now another month had almost slipped by. It had been that way for the last four years. Time rushing past like a river in flood. Now another Christmas was gone, and another New Year. 1944. Mark could scarcely believe it. Four years in this sandstone haven of cloisters and spires while the world outside tore itself to pieces with unrelenting fury.

“Hey,” David called, his eyes still closed. “How are the girls down here?”

“What do you mean?”

David opened both eyes and craned his neck to stare back at his brother. “What do I mean? Has four years away from Susan pickled your pecker as well as your brain? I’m talking about English dames. We’ve got to live up to our billing, you know.”

“Our billing?”

“Overpaid, oversexed, and over here, remember? Hell, I know you love Susan. I know plenty of guys who are crazy about their wives. But four years. You can’t spend every waking moment holed up in that Frankenstein lab of yours.”

Mark shrugged. “I have, though.”

“Christ, I’d tell you about some of my adventures, only you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.”

Mark jabbed the pole into the river bottom. It had been a mistake to send Susan home, but any sane man would have done the same at the time, considering the danger of German invasion. He was getting tired of paying for that particular misjudgment, though. He’d been on the wrong side of the Atlantic longer than any American he knew.

“To hell with this,” he said. As they rounded the bend at St. Hilda’s College, he levered the punt into a sharp embankment near Christ Church Meadow. The impact of the bow against the shore practically catapulted David out of the boat, but he landed with an athlete’s natural grace.

“Let’s get a beer!” David said. “Don’t you eggheads ever drink around here? Whose dumbass idea was this, anyway?”

Mark found himself laughing as he climbed out of the punt. “As a matter of fact, I know a few chaps who’d be glad to take you on in the drinking contest of your choice.”

“Chaps?” David gaped at his brother. “Did I hear you say chaps, Mac? We gotta get you back to the States, old sport. Back to Georgia. You sound like the Great Gatsby.”

“I’m only playing to your Tom Buchanan.”

David groaned. “We’d better go straight to whiskey. A little Kentucky bourbon’ll wash that limey accent right out of your throat.”

“I’m afraid they don’t stock Kentucky’s finest here in Oxford, Slick.”

David grinned. “That’s why I brought a fifth in my muzette bag. Cost me thirty bucks on the black market, but I wouldn’t drink that high-toned limey swill if I was dying of thirst.”

They crossed Christ Church Meadow mostly in silence. David took several long pulls from the bottle stowed in his flight bag. Mark declined repeated offers to share the whiskey. He wanted his mind clear when he spoke about his dilemma. He would have preferred to have David’s mind clear as well, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Walking side by side, the differences between the brothers were more marked. Where David was compact and almost brawny, Mark was tall and lean, with the body of a distance runner. He moved with long, easy strides and a surefootedness acquired through years of running cross-country races. His hands were large, his fingers long and narrow. Surgeon’s hands, his father had boasted when he was only a boy. David had inherited their mother’s flashing blue eyes, but Mark’s were deep brown, another legacy from his father. And where David was quick to smile or throw a punch, Mark wore the contemplative gaze of a man who carefully weighed all sides of any issue before acting.

He chose the Welsh Pony, in George Street. The pub did a brisk evening trade, but privacy could be had if desired. Mark went up to one of the two central bars and ordered a beer to justify the use of the table, then led David to the rear of the pub. By the time he was half-way to the bottom of his mug, he realized that David had drunk quite a lot of bourbon, with English stout to chase it down. Yet David remained surprisingly lucid. He was like their father in that way, if in no other. The analogy was not comforting.

“What the hell’s eating you, Mac?” David asked sharply. “All day I’ve had the feeling you wanted to say something, but you keep backing off. You’re like an old possum circling a garbage can. You’re driving me nuts. Get it out in the open.”

Mark leaned back against the oak chair and took his first long swallow of the night. “David, what does it feel like to bomb a German city?”

“What do you mean?” David straightened up, looking puzzled. “You mean am I scared?”

“No, I mean actually dropping the bombs. How does it feel to drop stick after stick of five-hundred-pound bombs on a city you know is full of women and children?”

“Hell, I don’t drop ’em. The bombardier does that. I just fly the plane.”

“So that’s how you do it. You distance yourself from the act. Mentally, I mean.”

David squinted at his brother. “Jesus, let’s don’t start, okay? It’s not enough I had to listen to all that crap from Dad when I enlisted? Now that he’s gone, you’re going to take over?” He swung a heavy forearm to take in the pub and the snowy alley visible through a frosted window. “You sit up here in your little land of Oz, playing paper games with the other eggheads. You lose touch real quick. You start forgetting why we got into this war in the first place.”

Mark held up his hand. “I know we have to stop the Nazis, David. But we’re destroying so much more than that.”

“Wake up, Mac. It’s 1944. We’re talking Hitler here. The fucking Führer.”

“I realize that. But do you notice how Hitler is used to justify any Allied act, any Allied sacrifice? Area bombing. Suicide missions. The politicians act as if Hitler sprang fully formed from the brow of Jupiter. Men of conscience could have stopped that madman ten years ago.”

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” David muttered. “Welcome to the real world. Hitler asked for it, and now he’s gonna get it.”

“Yes, he did, and he is. But must we destroy an entire culture to destroy one man? Do we wipe out a whole country to cure one epidemic?”

David suddenly looked very angry indeed. “The Germans, you mean? Let me tell you about those people of yours. I had a buddy, name of Chuckie Wilson, okay? His B-17 went down near Würzburg, after the second Schweinfurt raid. The pilot was killed in flight, but Chuckie and two other guys got out of the plane. One guy was captured, another was smuggled out of France by the Resistance. But Chuckie was captured by some German civilians.” David downed a double shot of whiskey, then lapsed into a sullen silence.

“And?”

“And they lynched him.”

Mark felt the hairs on his neck rise. “They what?

“Strung him up to the nearest tree, goddamn it.”

“I thought the Germans treated captured flyers well. At least on the Western Front.”

“Regular Kraut soldiers do. But the SS ain’t regular, and the German civilians hate our guts.”

“How do you know about the lynching?”

“The guy who made it out saw the whole thing. You want to know the worst part? While these civilians were stringing Chuckie up, a company of Waffen SS drove up in a truck. They sat there laughing and smoking while the bastards killed him, then drove away. Made me think of that colored guy that got lynched on the Bascombe farm back home. The lynchers claimed he raped a white girl, remember? But there wasn’t any evidence, and there damn sure wasn’t any trial. Remember what Uncle Marty said? The sheriff and his deputies stood there and watched the whole thing.”

David slowly opened and closed his left fist while he knocked back a swig of bourbon with his right. “The guy who saw Chuckie lynched said there were just as many women there as men. He said one woman jumped up and hung on his feet while he swung.”

“I see your point.” Mark leaned back and took a deep breath. “Down here we lose sight of how personal war can be. We don’t see the hatred.”

“Damn right you don’t, buddy. You oughta fly a raid with us sometime. Just once. Freezing your balls off, trying to remember to breathe from your mask, knowing ten seconds of exposed flesh could mean frostbite surgery. The whole ride you’re cursing yourself for every time you ever skipped Sunday school.”

Mark was thinking of an offer he had recently made to a Scottish brigadier general. In a fit of anger he’d threatened to leave his laboratory and volunteer to carry a rifle at the front. “Maybe I should get closer to the real war,” he said quietly. “What are my convictions worth if I don’t know what war really is? I could request a transfer to a forward surgical unit in Italy—”

David slammed his whiskey glass down, reached across the table and pinned his brother’s arm to the scarred wood. Several patrons looked in their direction, but one glare from David was enough to blunt their curiosity. “You try that, and I’ll break your friggin’ legs,” he said. “And if you try to do it without me knowing, I’ll find out.”

Mark was stunned by his brother’s vehemence.

“I’m dead serious, Mac. You don’t want to go anywhere near a real battlefield. Even from five miles up, I can tell you those places are hell on earth. You read me?”

“Loud and clear, ace,” Mark said. But he was troubled by a feeling that for the first time he was seeing his brother as he really was. The David he remembered as a brash, irrepressible young athlete had been transformed by the war into a haggard boy-man with the eyes of a neurosurgeon.

“David,” Mark whispered with sudden urgency, feeling his face grow hot with the prospect of confession. “I’ve got to talk to you.” He couldn’t stop himself. The words that became illegal the moment he uttered them came tumbling out in a flood. “The British are after me to work on a special project for them. They want me to spearhead it. It’s a type of weapon that hasn’t been used before—well, that’s not strictly true, it has been used before but not in this way and not with this much potential for wholesale slaughter—”

David caught hold of his arm. “Whoa! Slow down. What are you babbling about?”

Mark looked furtively around the pub. The background hum of voices seemed sufficient to cover quiet conversation. He leaned across the table. “A secret weapon, David. I’m not kidding. It’s just like the movies. It’s a goddamn nightmare.”

“A secret weapon.”

“That’s what I said. It’s something that would have little to guide it. It would kill indiscriminately. Men, women, children, animals—no distinction. They’d die by the thousands.”

“And the British want you to spearhead this project?”

“Right.”

David’s mouth split into an amazed smile. “Boy, did they ever pick the wrong guy.”

Mark nodded. “Well, they think I’m the right guy.”

“What kind of weapon is this? I don’t see how it could be much more destructive or less discriminating than a thousand-bomber air raid.”

Mark looked slowly around the pub. “It is, though. It’s not a bomb. It’s not even one of the super-bombs you’ve probably heard rumors about. It’s something … something like what wounded Dad.”

David recoiled, the cynicism instantly gone from his face. “You mean gas? Poison gas?”

Mark nodded.

“Shit, neither side has used gas yet in this war. Even the Nazis still remember the trenches from the last one. There are treaties prohibiting it, right?”

“The Geneva Protocol. But nobody cares about that. The U.S. didn’t even sign it.”

“Jesus. What kind of gas is it? Mustard?”

Mark’s laugh had an almost hysterical undertone. “David, nobody knows the horrific effects of mustard gas better than you or I. But this gas I’m talking about is a thousand times worse. A thousand times worse. You can’t see it, you don’t even have to breathe it. But brother it will kill you. It’s the equivalent of a cobra strike to the brain.”

David had gone still. “I assume you’re not supposed to be telling me any of this?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well … I guess you’d better start at the beginning.”

THREE

Mark let his eyes wander over the thinning crowd. Of those who remained, he knew half by sight. Two were professors working on weapons programs. He kept his voice very low.

“One month ago,” he said, “a small sample of colorless liquid labeled Sarin was delivered to my lab for testing. I usually get my samples from anonymous civilians, but this was different. Sarin was delivered by a Scottish brigadier general named Duff Smith. He’s a one-armed old war horse who’s been pressuring me on and off for years to work on offensive chemical weapons. Brigadier Smith said he wanted an immediate opinion on the lethality of Sarin. As soon as I had that, I was to start trying to develop an effective mask filter against it. Only in the case of Sarin, a mask won’t do it. You need protection over your entire body.”

David looked thoughtful. “Is this a German gas? Or Allied stuff?”

“Smith wouldn’t tell me. But he did warn me to take extra precautions. Christ, was he ever right. Sarin was like nothing I’d ever seen. It kills by short-circuiting the central nervous system. According to my experiments, it exceeds the lethality of phosgene by a factor of thirty.”

David seemed unimpressed.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, David? Phosgene was the most lethal gas used in World War One. But compared to Sarin it’s like … nothing. One tenth of one milligram of Sarin—one speck the size of a grain of sand—will kill you in less than a minute. It’s invisible in lethal concentration, and it will pass through human skin. Right through your skin.”

David’s mouth was working silently. “I’ve got the picture. Go on.”

“Last week, Brigadier Smith paid me another visit. This time he asked how I would feel if he told me Sarin was a German gas, and had no counterpart in the Allied arsenal. He wanted to know what I would do to protect Allied cities. And my honest answer was nothing. To protect the inhabitants of a city from Sarin would be impossible. It’s not like a heavy-bomber raid. As bad as those are, people can come out from the shelters when they’re over. Depending on weather conditions, Sarin could lie in the streets for days, coating sidewalks, windows, grass, food, anything.”

“Okay,” David said. “What happened next?”

“Smith tells me Sarin is a German gas. Stolen from the heart of the Reich, he says. Then he tells me I’m wrong—there is something I can do to protect our cities.”

“What’s that?”

“Develop an equally lethal gas, so that Hitler won’t dare use Sarin himself.”

David nodded slowly. “If he’s telling the truth about Sarin, that sounds like the only thing to do. I don’t see the problem.”

Mark’s face fell. “You don’t? Christ, you of all people should understand.”

“Look … I don’t want to get into this pacifist thing again. I thought you’d come to terms with that. Hell, you’ve been working for the British since 1940.”

“But only in a defensive capacity, you know that.”

David expelled air from his cheeks. “To tell you the truth, I never really saw the difference. You’re either working in the war effort or you’re not.”

“There’s a big difference, David, believe me. Even in liberal Oxford, I’m an official leper.”

“Be glad you’re in Oxford. They’d beat the crap out of you at my air base.”

Mark rubbed his forehead with his palms. “Look, I understand the logic of deterrence. But there has never been a weapon like this before. Never.” He watched with relief as the two professors left the pub. “David, I’m going to tell you something that most people don’t know, and we’ve never discussed. Until one month ago, poison gas was the most humane weapon in the world.”

“What?”

“It’s the truth. Despite the agony of burns and the horror of chemical weapons, ninety-four percent of the men gassed in World War One were fit for duty again in nine weeks. Nine weeks, David. The mortality figure for poison gas is somewhere around two percent. Mortality from guns and shells is twenty-five percent—ten times higher. The painful fact is that our father was an exception.”

David’s confusion was evident in his bunched eyebrows. “What are you telling me, Mark?”

“I’m trying to explain that, until Sarin was invented, my aversion to gas warfare was based primarily on the paralyzing terror it held for soldiers, and the psychological aftermath of being wounded by gas. Figures don’t tell the whole truth, especially about human pain. But with Sarin, chemical warfare has entered an entirely new phase. We’re talking about a weapon that has four times the mortality rate of shot and shell. Sarin is one hundred percent lethal. It will kill every living thing it touches. I would rather carry a rifle at the front than be responsible for developing something that destructive.”

David’s whole posture conveyed the reluctance he felt to stray onto this territory. “Listen, I swore I’d never argue with you about this again. It’s the same argument I always had with Dad. The Sermon on the Mount versus machine guns. Gandhi versus Hitler. Passive resistance can’t work against Germany, Mark. The Nazis just don’t give a damn. You turn the other cheek, those bastards’ll slice it off for you. Hell, it was the Germans who gassed Dad in the first place!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Yeah, yeah. Jeez, I don’t like where this conversation’s ended up.” The young pilot scratched his stubbled chin, deep in thought. “Okay … okay, just listen to me for a minute. Everybody back home calls you Mac, right? They always have.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just listen. Everybody calls me David, right? Or Dave, or Slick. Why do you think everybody calls you Mac?”

Mark shrugged. “I was the oldest.”