The Madagaskar Plan (25 page)

“Watch. It will sink for nothing.” Despite having his hands on his head and a rifle against his ribs, he made no effort to conceal his disdain.

Kepplar was irritated by how impregnably sure the man was. He decided to take him to Lava Bucht: they had interrogation specialists there who had honed their skills during the rebellion. It would be interesting to test the limit of the man’s arrogance.

He stepped closer to the prisoner till their bodies were almost touching, making the leather of his boots and belt creak the way Hochburg used to. “You know Cole,” he said. “You think you can hide it, but it’s seeping from every pore. Where is he?”

“The last I heard, on a boat to Panama. You’ve got the wrong ocean.”

“Yesterday he was in Roscherhafen.”

Their roles were reversed. The blond searched his features to see if he was telling the truth. None of his poise left him.

Kepplar prodded further. “I am certain he’s headed for the island. On your boat or the next. Tell me where and I’ll save the others—”

There was a shout of alarm, then rapid bursts of BK44 fire. Along the deck, soldiers were targeting the dhow.

Kepplar craned his neck to see what was happening. “I said no shooting!”

The blond dropped his hands from his head. One swiped against Kepplar’s neck, rigid as a spade, sending him to the floor; the other reached behind himself, drew a pistol, and leveled it between the guard’s eyes. He fired without hesitation.

These were the swift, practiced movements of a man at ease with violence, thought Kepplar, not a smuggler. Slumped on his knees, he watched with envy.

*   *   *

From beneath Salois’s boots came distorted yells and the pounding of fists on wood. The hold smelled of tarred timbers and cloves; it was dingy, stacked with crates.

“How do we free them?” he asked Xegoe; he had dragged the captain with him.

Xegoe toppled the cases in front of him to reveal a hatch. He lifted up a floorboard next to it and reached inside for the lever. He pulled it twice.

“It kaput,” he said. His eyes were jacked open with fright.

Salois took his place and tried the lever himself. It was as heavy and limp as a broken arm. In the coffee-ground light he searched for a tool with which to pry open the hatch, till he found a harpoon; the crew used it to spear mahimahi fish that got caught in their nets. He drove the point into the groove between hatch and the floorboard, forcing his weight on it; a gap opened. Instantly, fingers appeared.

“Xegoe!” he called. “I need your help.”

The captain had already fled.

Salois heaved again, his elbows and thighs rigid with exertion. The hatch broke open. In the compartment below were Denny and Private Grace, chest-deep in bilge. Salois helped them out before moving the next tower of crates. Denny watched him work, then scrambled out of the hold.

“Denny!” shouted Salois after him. “You coward!”

Grace was fighting with the next lever, his golden hair dripping. He shook his head as Salois slipped the harpoon between the slats of wood. The hatch rose a few centimeters—the slosh of a drowning chamber, frantic yells—before banging shut. Another heave: the steel of the harpoon was bending.

“Out of the way!”

There was barely time to move before an axe buried itself in the floor. Denny pried it out and swung again, breaking a hole. Salois put his hand in and lifted the cover free. Below, the marines were up to their chins in bubbling water.

Salois took the axe from the sergeant. “Collect as much food and equipment as you can. Make sure you get the explosives for Diego. Then find us a way off this boat.”

There were two compartments left. They freed the men from the first before Salois ordered everyone but Grace on deck to help Denny. The pounding beneath their feet became louder, more desperate and frenzied, reverberating through the floorboards and up the walls till Salois felt he was inside the ventricle of a huge wooden heart.

Seawater began to surge from the hatches they’d opened. The beating fists slowed.

“You’re not going to die!” shouted Salois, struggling to position the harpoon.

The trapped marines were Perabo and McCullough: part of his Diego team. They had both been at Dunkirk, professional soldiers who had known the shame of digging potato fields prior to being returned home in their dove suits. The night before, McCullough had told him that after Diego, after they’d won in Africa, it would be better for all if the Jews stayed in Madagaskar.
Not under the Krauts,
he clarified,
but you can’t come back now
.

The hold shook and cracked, the ocean churning around Salois’s knees. He fought to lift the cover. When the harpoon buckled he squatted, water whipping his chest, and tried to wedge his fingers under the hatch. The thump of hands grew weaker, then silent. Private Grace stared at him with childish disbelief.

They staggered out of the hold, onto a deck flowing with dark red liquid; Salois thought someone’s throat had been slit. The dhow was slumping into the waves, its main mast toppled, the sails unfurled and snapping. Aboard their vessel, the Germans lined the gunwale, watching indifferently. Salois made his way through the smoke to Denny.

“The life raft?” he asked. The air was fruity with alcohol fumes and brine.

“Those fucking wogs had it.” Denny pointed out to sea. The dhow’s crew was rowing away from the S-boat, toward the horizon, the raft half empty. “We’re going to use barrels,” continued Denny. “Swim to shore.”

The other marines were emptying kegs; round their boots gushed Burgundy meant for the officers’ mess on Nosy Be.

“It’s too far.”

“Then you surrender, Major. Or drown.”

Salois looked toward the land. It was at least two kilometers, but the shore was distinct for the first time: a sliver of sand and the dark protective shawl of the forest. “Get everyone off the starboard side,” he said. “It’ll give us more protection.”

A whistle.

Xegoe stood at the edge of his boat, a sow-skin purse swinging from his neck. It was the one Cranley had given him, full of gold reichsmarks for their passage to Madagaskar.

“You bringed this on us,” he shouted at Salois. “You demon!” He tossed him a sack and leapt overboard, swimming toward the rest of his crew.

Salois retrieved the bag, which gave a wine-bottle jangle, and peered inside. The marines were rolling the empty barrels to the far side of the dhow. Salois stepped round them, scanning the swilling debris on the deck. The sack contained three rocket heads.

The dhow bobbed through the second ring of mines, so close it threatened to scrape against one.

The S-boat’s main gun erupted. Salois flattened himself against the floor as shells poured overhead, dismembering the life raft. Xegoe was caught between it and the dhow, a bawling brown head in the ocean. Two of the marines took up covering positions and returned fire. There was an instant reply of BK44s, then:
“Hold your fire! I want Cole alive.”

Salois found the discarded Panzerfaust. He wiped it down, speared on a rocket head, and got to his knees, focusing on the S-boat through the sight. The Germans saw him; there was a cry of alarm, and bullets whistled through the air. A stillness took hold of Salois; all the noises in his ear—the crackle of rifles, Xegoe screaming—faded to whispers. He searched the Nazi vessel for Cranley, thinking of the daughter he’d described, a spoiled girl with no mother, as blessed as the orphans of Madagaskar were shunned. When he failed to locate the Englishman, he squeezed the trigger.

The command deck exploded.

Without pausing, Salois loaded another warhead and targeted the main gun. The rocket smacked into it—a burst of star clumps—hurling men and munitions into the sky. A lingering satisfaction filled Salois as he squinted through the scope for a third time.

A hush descended: the immense silence of the ocean disturbed only by the rumble of smoke and Germans shouting, their voices tiny as they battled the fire. Two inky columns spiraled from the S-boat. It remained seaworthy but was listing, the waves teasing it away from the dhow.

A head emerged from the burning sea between the two vessels, gasping for air. Salois lowered the rocket launcher. It was Cranley.

“Major!” On the other side of the deck, Denny had ushered the rest of the marines off the boat. He thumped an empty barrel. “See you on the shore.”

“Watch for sharks,” Salois replied, turning his attention back to Cranley. He swam away from the S-boat, using a graceful front crawl. The one-eared Brigadeführer grabbed a life jacket and dived in after him.

The final ring of sea mines was approaching. The dhow drifted toward them, close enough for Salois to distinguish the detonation nodes. Cranley motioned at him to leap.

Salois rolled the last barrel overboard. There was a saying in the Legion: Lose your weapon, lose your mind, but never lose your boots. A maxim for the desert, not for a soldier at sea. Salois yanked them off his feet, tied the laces together, and dangled them around his neck. Then he hugged the soles and stepped barefoot to the edge of the deck. He’d never been a good swimmer.

The nearest mine rose from the water like the hump of a black whale.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Tana–Diego Railway, Madagaskar

18 April, 14:30

IT WASN’T THE Nazis who put a stop to Madeleine’s plan; it was the other Jews.

She was hunched over the floorboards, sawing as quietly as she could, her arm sore with the effort. A greasy tarpaulin screened off the toilet—a hole in the corner to squat over—from the rest of the passengers. The train rocked with a soothing rhythm.
Like a cradle,
thought Madeleine.

She banished the image and focused on cutting through the wood. Since she’d left the hospital, her mind had been absorbed by mundane activity, burrowing into itself to a place that was nebulous, numb. In the abattoir she’d been sent to, surrounded by Polish Jews with their ghetto stoops and incomprehensible talk, she’d worked for twelve hours a day in a trance, churning shovels of salt and cloves to make brine, scalding pig carcasses to remove the bristles. In that state, one urge dominated: to escape. It was a familiar thread in her life: escape from Vienna, escape from Cranley. Now this island.

After she had given birth to Alice, her body took months restoring itself, and she’d suffered a bout of depression, but in the meat plant Madeleine healed as rapidly as the lice that bred in her hair. It had been shaved to the scalp a month before and was growing back in spiky black tufts that itched. As her strength improved, she was moved from checking the labels on cans to more grueling duties, constantly shifted round the abattoir till she was familiar with its layout. Every place she went, she was occupied by the gates and fences, whether the windows were barred or not, when the guards took cigarette breaks, always alert for some chink that would allow her to break free. Several times she was convinced she had seen Burton—a pair of shoulders the same as his, a similar gait—and for an instant her haunted brain struggled to understand why he had joined the SS.

Finally she was assigned to the
Müllschlucker,
a series of chutes at the rear of the complex where the waste was flushed away into a slurry lake. The work gang had to keep the chutes clear, sweeping the detritus of industrial meat processing into the water. On the far shore was a mangy barbed-wire fence and an unmanned guard tower. The air broiled and stank.

“I’ve been watching you,” said one of the women during the midday break (ten minutes of rest, a mug of water, squabbles over green bananas). “You’re thinking you can swim to the far side and break out. It’s only a couple of hundred meters.” She spoke in German, her voice mocking and resentful.

Madeleine’s mouth and nose were covered by a scarf; she tugged it down. “Has anyone ever tried?” The words emerged haltingly. It was the first time she had spoken in weeks; her throat felt narrow, cracked.

The woman was startled. “I’m sorry. You’re German.”

“Austrian.”

“I thought you were just another peasant girl, a Pole. I can’t bear them—they’re so uncouth. Uneducated. And the Nazis say we’re all the same.” Her tone became more hospitable; like most people starved of conversation, she wanted to chat. “How come you’re here?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I shouldn’t be in the Eastern Sector, either. We’re from Berlin, me and generations of my family. Where did you live in Austria? I love Vienna. Sitting in the Burggarten, drinking a cappuccino. I was a teacher once, linguistics and riding.” The joke that followed was automatic: “I could have taught horses to speak! Now I’m in this pit. I swear, Jehovah above can smell it. I got mixed up in a work detail and lost my papers. That was a year ago. A year talking Yiddish. I’d forget my mother tongue if it wasn’t for the guards; they’re my only conversation. I keep telling them I’m a German Jew, shouldn’t be with these animals…”

Madeleine wasn’t listening. “Did anyone escape?”

“Several. I’ve thought about it myself, getting back to Antzu. My daughter’s there.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Swim through that?” She looked at the crust of excrement and bobbing offal, and made a puking noise. “Breathing it is bad enough. And afterward, kilometers of barren plateau, no food, no shelter. The last time someone got away, they didn’t bother with patrols—just picked up the bones. Hung them from a gibbet on the parade ground to let us know.”

“You’d be free,” said Madeleine.

“Free?” She cackled in response. “No, I’ll follow the paper route. I put a request in to the Ark. When my documents come through, they’ll send me home. I used to help the vet at Governor Quorp’s stables…” She became silent, staring at Madeleine through the haze. Her lips narrowed; they were blistered from the sun. “But I can see that you, girl, you are looking to hang.”

There was a whistle blast.

“What’s your name?” asked Madeleine.

“Jacoba.”

The women pulled their scarves over their mouths and went back to work, Madeleine’s eyes fixed on the far shore; her senses were lighting up. In the days that followed, she studied the guards’ routines more closely and stole food from the production line: pig ears meant for the guard dogs, trotters she could save for the journey and suck marrow from. Everything was ready. For the first time in months she woke with a fleck of hope. She would hide in the chute on Führertag and escape that evening when the Nazis were filling their veins with toasts to Hitler. Then the others ruined her plan.