Black Cross

“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 (#u9202e47e-8c10-57b0-9178-03a7dc256446)