The Hess Cross (31 page)

As Graf disappeared through the door, von Stihl dug into
the backpack to find the matting and another wire roll. Setting the charges should take no more than ten minutes, during which time another patrol would pass the fence. His team would exit the base in the time gap between the next two patrols. He blew on his hands, rubbed them together trying to generate warmth, and unrolled the mat.

Daniel Morgan had made his fortune early in life. Thirty years ago, he and four friends had pooled their inheritances and founded the Chicago Life Indemnity Company. Five years later the company branched out into commercial fire, theft, and liability insurance, products which soon eclipsed their life-insurance sales. Morgan's company adhered to what in those days was an unusual public-relations gimmick—dealing fairly with customers. The word spread. Ten years after the company's founding, Morgan and his friends were millionaires. Morgan rewarded himself and his family with the ultimate symbol of achievement in Chicago, a home on the lake. It took more than a million to afford a waterfront home inside Chicago's city limits, so he settled for a suburban mansion in Lake Forest. His property bordered the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.

One of the inconveniences of waterfront property in Lake Forest was that after Morgan turned off Sheridan Road, he had to traverse almost a mile of unimproved dirt road to reach home. That night, they were returning from Mrs. Potter Palmer's party at which the beginning of the Christmas season for Chicago society was officially declared. Five minutes after the stormtroopers crossed the fence, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan almost collided with the parked bakery van. Mrs. Morgan had indulged excessively and did not notice the car's violent swerve other than to smile even more sweetly and drunkenly.

"Jesus," Morgan yelped as he tromped on the brakes. The car careened to a stop several inches short of an oak tree
alongside the dirt road. He quickly looked at his wife, who was still smiling, charming the jockey box.

"Now, what miserable idiot would park a truck on a one-lane dirt road?" Morgan asked angrily as he climbed out of the car. He immediately saw the truck's cab was empty. "And why park it here? We're the only house at the end of the road."

Anger turned to puzzlement. One of the truck's doors was open. It creaked as a gust of wind swung it. Nothing unusual about the cab. Horsehair tufts clung to a spring that stuck through the dilapidated seat cover. As Morgan stepped to the rear to check the truck's panel doors, a word painted on the side caught him as if a hand had grabbed his hair. "Bakery." He stared at it for five full seconds before its import registered. Daniel Morgan ran back to his car.

John Crown and Everette Smithson leaned against their car, parked at the Glencoe police station. Thirty minutes before, the Chicago police chief had received a relayed phone call from a Glencoe schoolteacher who had been walking his dog on Sheridan Road. The teacher had spotted the bakery truck crossing the suburb's northern city limits. Lieutenant Sullivan and the two agents had sped to Glencoe, but no further sightings had been reported. The Glencoe Police Department was now in on the search. Nothing.

The Great Lakes Naval Training Station had been notified. The station's security chief ordered the three secret submarine-tracking devices surrounded by shore patrolmen. Nothing else on the base had anything but the lowest secrecy priority. The guard at the gates and on perimeter patrols was doubled. No other defense measures were ordered.

Sullivan sprinted from the Glencoe station and dived into his squad car. Crown was already in when the engine
jumped to life, but Smithson had barely stuffed himself into the back seat before the car screeched away from the curb.

"One of the millionaires on the North Shore spotted the truck," Sullivan said as he jammed the transmission into second gear. "It's in his driveway, which is a long dirt road right next to the naval station."

"What's there, Everette?" Crown asked.

"Three top-secret buildings," Smithson puffed. "By now they're surrounded by shoulder-to-shoulder sailors. Nothing else of importance." Smithson shrugged his meaty shoulders. "I can't figure out why they'd head there."

"They've gone to a lot of trouble," Crown said. "And they've got a lot of powder with them. So whatever their target is, it'll be blown to shreds."

Erich von Stihl unrolled the mat and placed it on the step in front of the security hut. It was a triggering mechanism Graf had made that afternoon out of odds and ends. The mat had several layers. Topmost was a rubber mat stolen from a front porch. It had "Welcome" printed on it in raised block letters. Under the rubber was a sheet of wire screen cut from a screen door. A dozen or so thumbtacks were inserted into the screen, with the points sticking down. Next was a quarter-inch-thick piece of cardboard. Below that was another piece of screen, this time with no tacks. The bottom layer was a second piece of cardboard. Electric wire was tied to the top screen, and another strand to the bottom screen. Von Stihl connected one wire to a small battery, which he hid under the step. He began to unroll wires that would connect the welcome mat and battery to the blasting cap implanted in the dynamite. When the mat was stepped on, it would be a completed and very deadly circuit.

Inside the hut, Hans Graf twisted two screws out of the bottom of the telephone and lifted the cover off the
mechanism. A phone made a perfect triggering device. Graf dug out two alligator clips from his kit and snapped them onto two screw connections on top of the phone's circuit box. He tucked a small relay box onto the phone chassis and connected the alligator clip wires to it. A phone does not have enough power to throw a switch. The relay box would cure that. He replaced the phone cover and reinserted the cover screws. He taped these relay-box wires to the phone cord, so they were almost impossible to see. He shoved the wires through a floor-level crack at the base of the wall, then placed the phone in the exact position on the desk it had been when he entered the shack.

The siren switch was on the wall next to the desk. It was a simple red-button/black-button box connected to the sirens on the roof. Graf stepped through the shack door, carefully avoiding von Stihl's welcome mat, and closed the door behind him. At the side of the shack, he found the relay-box wires and attached a battery to one of them. The phone trigger was ready.

It took Graf thirty seconds to turn the siren into the third switch by grafting a roll of wire onto the siren wire. With the telephone-wire roll in one hand and the siren roll in another, he backed away from the building, allowing the strands to play out from the unwinding rolls. He followed the welcome-mat wires von Stihl had laid a few minutes before.

When he reached the amphibious-craft garage, Graf dropped one of the rolls and continued backing toward the weather-observation post. At the side of the weather post was the crate of explosives the colonel had left there. With his SS dagger he cut the wire from the roll and split the strand into its two wires. He peeled back an inch of insulation from each, then wrapped the wires around the two prongs of the blasting cap that he had inserted into the paraffin that morning. The bomb was ready. He tucked the
package under a floor beam at the side of the weather building.

"Ready?" von Stihl asked. He had placed two packages under the floor of the pom-pom station.

Graf's laugh sounded like the crackling of icicles. "Let's wait to watch this."

"Five minutes after they go off, there'll be more sailors swarming over this place than there are in the North Sea Fleet. We can't risk it. Let's wire the garage and get away from here."

The last paraffin container was wired and placed inside an open window of the garage. Von Stihl whistled for Lange. The three stormtroopers began retracing their steps to the perimeter fence. The next patrol was due in three minutes, not long enough to construct the arch, so they would wait in the tall grass north of the fence.

Chief Petty Officer Bud Holz didn't envy his counterpart in charge of the sub-tracking trainers. They would be overworked and overwrought that night. Christ. A saboteur alert. The first real one in the naval training center's history. The rear admiral had doubled the perimeter patrols and stationed two armed jeeps at each of the gates. The CPO guarding the sub trackers had roused all his men to stand watch. Three shifts of angry shore patrolmen and a half-dozen yawning German shepherds patrolled the northwest quadrangle, where the secret equipment was located.

Holz's jeep growled down the dirt road toward his security headquarters. Despite the wool gloves, his hands seemed frozen to the steering wheel. His southeast quadrant was a sleeper. It was bordered on the north by a small creek and on the east by the lake. It contained numerous training facilities, but nothing that would make a likely target. The saboteurs were going after something big, concluded the rear admiral at the emergency briefing a few minutes
before. He couldn't imagine what it was, and neither could Holz. Probably a false alarm from the nutso Chicago cops. But then, that truck hijacking this morning that was splashed all over the papers was real enough. The hoods had gone loco. Holz would never understand it. He pumped the jeep's accelerator, and the four-wheeler jumped forward, spewing gravel behind it.

Gunning the jeep down the short dirt road to the shack was the only action Holz got in the navy since he had been withdrawn from fleet duty. He had been on the deck of the
Arizona
almost a year before, when a Japanese bomb tore into the foredeck and blew out his right eardrum. For some reason he failed to understand, the navy considered the injury sufficient to disqualify him from Pacific duty. He loathed stateside assignments, particularly this, guarding several desolate acres of Lake Michigan shoreline.

The jeep slid to a stop in front of the security hut. Holz flipped the headlights and ignition off, then stared balefully at the shack. What an asshole job. An idiot could coordinate perimeter patrols. He spent most of his time in the shack reading or playing cards with shore patrolmen. Holz climbed out of the jeep and mockingly saluted each of his charges, the pom-pom trainer, the weather station, and the garage. He walked to the shack, wondering what variation of solitaire he would play that night. He knew every one ever invented. At least he had an electric heater in the shack, unlike the poor schmucks at the front gates. They would freeze their tails off tonight.

CPO Bud Holz would testify at the navy inquiry that he never saw the welcome mat. He stepped up to the shack door as he had done a hundred times before, but this time his foot pressed the thumbtacks through the layer of cardboard and into contact with the lower screen, completing the circuit. The antiaircraft trainer exploded with a horrendous roar. Holz dove onto the shack floor, a response
learned the hard way last December. Bits of wood blew by the shack door, and the pressure of the explosion slammed it shut. Windows rattled fiercely. Splintered beams and twisted metal shards landed heavily on the security hut's roof. Then Holz could hear nothing else over the waves.

He rose to his feet and stupidly tapped his right ear. The
Arizona
explosion blew the eardrum out. Maybe this one fixed it. No such luck. He quickly scanned his hut. No damage. He opened the shack door and stepped outside. The remains of the pom-pom trainer were on fire. Wind rushing in from Lake Michigan fanned the flames out over the dirt road. Jesus, he thought, if it hadn't been for the two buildings in between, I would've bought it.

The rear admiral's warning came back to Holz. He shook his head to clear it. Could it be the saboteurs? What else? A pom-pom doesn't explode on its own volition. Holy shit. Real saboteurs in his southeast quadrant. He ran back into the hut and stopped in front of his desk. What's the damned procedure? He held his hands in front of him like a wrestler about to meet his opponent, and spastically wiggled his fingers as adrenaline energy built inside him. The procedure. His eyes fell on the siren button. "Local breach requires local alert first," flashed from memory. He punched the red siren button.

A ferocious explosion tore the weather post from its foundations and hurled it over the embankment, where it rolled in a flaming ball to the beach. The blast blew out the security hut's windows and threw Holz onto his desk. Booming thunder stung his brain. His hand was numb, speckled with glass chips from the window. He could hear nothing but a dull ringing deep in his head. He forced air into his lungs. It smelled of cordite and fear. Holz rolled off the desk and stood on weak knees. Tiny crystals of glass dug into the CPO's palm as he tried to brace himself against the desk. His hand jerked back from the glass slivers and brushed
the phone. Only then was Holz reminded of his duty: warn the base. With his uninjured hand he lifted the phone receiver.

Holz's head seemed to erupt with pressure as the amphibious-craft garage was torn apart by the last bomb. The north wall of the security hut ripped from its frame and flew across the room, sweeping the heater, the desk, and Holz into the far wall. The thin plywood had no noticeable braking effect. Holz smashed through it and landed in the dirt ten feet from the remains of his shack.

He lay on his back without moving, afraid to try. He thought he was conscious. The ringing in his head was gone. Now there was no sound, no waves. A sharp pain in his mouth, and the taste of blood. He had bitten clear through his tongue. His eyes opened. The sky was red from the fires. He coughed. Bits of lung whooped up into his mouth. Bile mixed with blood, and he wanted to vomit. He gagged, rolled onto his stomach, and spit onto the dirt. His chest felt as if airplane cable was wrapped tightly around it, squeezing and suffocating him. He struggled to his knees. Consciousness began to seep from him, so he spread his hands to avoid toppling. He focused on staying awake and concentrated on the ticking.

It wasn't ticking. It was the crackling of the fires. Holz could hear. Elation welled within him. There were no more buildings to blow. They'd gotten them all, but they hadn't gotten his good ear. He croaked a laugh, but choked it back when blood from his tongue splashed to the ground.