Black Cross by Greg Iles Page B

requisition any and all aid he deems necessary to prosecute military operations inside Occupied Europe from 15 January to 15 February 1944. This applies to both regular and irregular forces. All inquiries to No. 10 Annexe.
    Winston S. Churchill
    “Good God,” Smith exclaimed.
    “That won’t buy as much as you think,” Churchill said with a trace of irony. “See how far it gets you with Sir Arthur bloody Harris of the Air Force.”
    Smith deftly folded the note with his one hand and slipped it into his tunic. “You underestimate yourinfluence, Winston. Give me one of these good for three months and I’ll bring you Hitler’s head in a basket.”
    Churchill laughed heartily. “Godspeed, then. You’ve got thirty days. Don’t put your foot in it.” He extended his hand across the desk.
    Smith squeezed the plump hand, then saluted smartly. “God save the King.”
    “God bless America,” Churchill said. “And keep her ignorant.”

6
    T wo days after Dwight Eisenhower politely warned Churchill to leave the German gas stockpiles alone, Brigadier Duff Smith sat alone in the back row of a meeting room in one of the sandbagged defense buildings in Whitehall. At a long raised table in the front of the room waited two majors and a general of the British army. Smith cared nothing about them. For the past forty-eight hours he had been trolling through the SOE files at Baker Street, searching for the man he needed to lead his mission into Germany. His luck had not been good.
    The exclusion of British agents was the most frustrating restraint, but he knew it was justified. If British agents were captured on a strategic mission expressly forbidden by Eisenhower, the fragile Anglo-American alliance could be shattered overnight. SOE had hundreds of foreign agents on file, but few had the skills necessary to lead this mission. The typical SOE job—inserting agents into Occupied France—had become so routine that some officers called it the French shuttle. But sending men into Germany itself was another matter. The leader of this mission would have to be physically fit, fluent in German, unknown to the Abwehr and the Gestapo, yet experienced enough to move undetected inside the tightly controlled Reich on false papers. Most of all, he needed to be cold-blooded enough to kill innocent people in the accomplishment of his mission. This last requirement had disqualified several likely candidates.
    Brigadier Smith had stumbled upon today’s lead quite by accident. While lunching at his club, he’d overheard a discussion at a nearby table that tweaked his mental radar. A staff officer was telling a story about a young German Jew who’d fled to Palestine before the war and become aZionist guerrilla fighter. Apparently, this young fellow had just blackmailed his way into a passage from Haifa to London, by promising to reveal guerilla techniques used by the Haganah to terrorize the British occupation forces in Palestine. Due to arrive today, his solitary demand had been that he be granted an audience with the C-in-C of Bomber Command. He supposedly had a plan for single-handedly saving the Jews of Europe. The terrorist would get an audience, the officer joked, but not quite the one he expected. Smith had listened long enough to learn the young Jew’s name and the address of the meeting, then driven to Baker Street and wired an old friend in Jerusalem to see if there was a file on a Mr. Jonas Stern.
    There was. And the more Smith learned, the more intrigued he’d become. At twenty-five, Jonas Stern had been twice decorated by the British Army for his exploits guiding their forces in North Africa. Yet he was wanted by the British military police for crimes against His Majesty’s forces in Palestine, as a terrorist of the feared Haganah. He had less than five pounds to his name, but carried a bounty of one thousand Arab dinars on his head. The responding officer added a postscript, informing Smith that Jonas Stern was the prime suspect