Free Black Cross by Greg Iles Page B

Dickson screamed as footsteps pounded down the stairwell.
    Captain Owen threw himself in front of the door. “General Little! Please let me talk to him!”
    “Out of the way,” Major Dickson growled, “or I’ll order my men to shoot you down.”
    “For God’s sake, General!”
    “Attention!” General Little roared.
    The guards froze where they stood. Duff Smith had remained motionless throughout the confusion, as if watching a staged musical.
    “Steady, Dickson,” General Little said. “I’m going to let Captain Owen bring him back. There’s no sense in unnecessary bloodshed. You can question Stern at your leisure after you’ve calmed down.”
    “Sounds like a good plan, Johnny,” Duff Smith said, speaking for the first time.
    Major Dickson stood white-faced and shaking. “I’m going to throw that bastard in irons and sweat him until he diagrams the Haganah’s whole batting order! He’s one of the ringleaders. You can just tell .”
    “He’s only twenty-three, sir,” Owen said. “But you’re probably right about him being a leader.”
    “I’d hate to see that chap chained to a wall,” said General Little. “He’s got guts, even if he is a Yid.”
    “Interrogating him would be useless anyway,” Owen said in a monotone.
    “Why’s that?” asked Dickson.
    “Major, Jonas Stern could probably tell you every key man in the Haganah’s ranks. Probably in the Irgun, too. But he wouldn’t tell you. He’d die first.”
    “A lot of men say that,” Dickson said. “In the beginning. That attitude doesn’t last long.”
    Owen shook his head. “Stern’s different.”
    Dickson smirked. “How’s that?”
    “Didn’t you see the scars? He’s been there before. Tortured, I mean. And nothing like our methods, believe me. He was running from a raid near Al Sabah one night when his horse broke its leg. He was only seventeen. The Arabs were hot behind the raiding party. They ran him down almost immediately.”
    “What the hell did they do to him?” asked General Little.
    “I’m not sure, sir. He doesn’t talk about it. They only had him for a night and a day, but they were real tribesmen, the ones that got him. Murderous brutes. Stern somehow managed to escape on the second night. He never told them a thing. I heard some of his mates whispering about it during the North African campaign. He’s a legend to the Zionists. I never saw him with his shirt off before today.”
    “Good God,” Little muttered. “I saw the results of some Arab interrogations in the Great War, near Gallipoli. It’s a miracle the fellow survived.”
    “Like I said, sir. Not much use in questioning him, to my mind. He won’t talk unless he wants to.”
    “I see what you mean,” Little agreed. “We’ll sort out this mess tomorrow. You’ve got four hours to bring him in of his own volition, Owen. After that, Major Dickson’s men will have a free hand.”
    “I’ll find him, sir.”
    Little nodded. “That’s all, Captain.”
    “Thank you, sir.” The Welshman darted through the door.
    Brigadier Duff Smith rose slowly, nodded to Little, and followed Owen outside.

 
    7
     
    Jonas Stern stood alone in a coal-dark doorway, his shivering body pressed against cold stone, and watched the broad avenue of Whitehall. He had nowhere to run. He had come so far to get here. All the way from Germany at age fourteen, with his mother in tow and his father left behind. Thousands of miles overland in a refugee caravan where smugglers robbed them of all they had before taking them farther down the illegal route to Palestine. Weeks in a battered freighter that bled salt water through its rusting hull while people belowdecks died of thirst. Years of struggle in Palestine, fighting the Arabs and the British, then in North Africa fighting the Nazis. Then finally from Palestine to London, to the room with the British staff officers with their trimmed mustaches and haughty blue eyes. Major Dickson had at least told the truth: the only