The Man with the Iron Heart (25 page)

“C’mon, get up! Get moving!” Corvo shouted. “We gotta make sure Adenauer’s okay. Fanatics are bound to be after him.”

Bernie hadn’t even thought about that. He hadn’t thought about getting up under fire, either. He’d done it more often than he cared to remember during the war, but the war was over…wasn’t it? But seeing the sergeant stand up brought Bernie to his feet, too.

Several other U.S. soldiers were also up. Most of them headed for the platform from which Adenauer spoke. Another mortar bomb scythed one of them down. Bernie looked away. You didn’t want to remember what explosives and jagged metal fragments could do to flesh.

The mortar rounds stopped falling then. Either somebody’d caught the guys serving the nasty little piece or they’d figured they’d done their duty and bugged out. Bernie knew what he hoped. He also knew what he thought. They weren’t the same.

There lay the auburn-haired gal he’d wished he were searching. Nobody’d want to feel her up now. A bad chest wound, a worse head wound…She was still moving and moaning, but Bernie didn’t think she’d last long. Too bad, too bad.

He jumped up onto the platform, pointing his M-1 this way and that. It was dumb—he knew as much even while he did it. The bastards who’d done this weren’t close enough for the rifle to do him a nickel’s worth of good. Everybody here in the square with him probably hated the mortarmen as much as he did. But you wanted to hit back somehow, even when you couldn’t.

“Oh…motherfuck.” Sergeant Corvo used his rifle, too, pointing with the muzzle.

One of the mortar bombs had blasted Konrad Adenauer off the platform. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His thinning gray hair was mussed. A single drop of blood splashed the end of his long, pointed nose. Other than that, his face was untouched. He looked mildly surprised.

Below his face…Bernie looked away. The mortar rounds had done worse to Adenauer than they had to the pretty woman with the dark red hair. “Motherfuck,” Carlo Corvo said again.

“You got that right,” Bernie agreed. “He ain’t gonna be making more speeches any time soon. I mean, not unless it’s to St. Peter or the Devil, one.”

A groan from a little farther away drew their attention to Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal. He leaned against a wall, clutching one arm with his other hand. Blood leaked out between his fingers.

“Can I bandage that for you, sir?” Bernie called.

“I don’t think you’d better.” Rosenthal sounded eerily calm, as wounded men often did. “I’m holding it closed better than a bandage could. If you want to yell for a medic, that’d be good.” He paused as if remembering something. And he was, for he asked, “How’s Adenauer?”

Bernie wished he could lie, but didn’t see how it would help. “Sir, he bought a plot.” He raised his voice: “Corpsman! We need a corpsman over here!”

“Shit!” Rosenthal sounded furious. Then he said “Shit” again, this time in the way Bernie’d heard much too often before: the wound was starting to get its claws into him. Baring his teeth, the American officer went on, “Adenauer was the best hope we had for a Germany that isn’t either Nazi or Red.”

“‘Was’ is right, sir. He’s a gone goose.” Bernie pointed toward the politician’s crumpled body. People always looked smaller when they were dead. He didn’t know why that was true, but it was.

“Shit,” Keith Rosenthal said yet again. “Score a big one for Heydrich and his assholes, then. Who’s gonna have the nerve to try and stand up to ’em after this?”

From in back of Bernie, Carlo Corvo said, “Here comes a medic.”

“That was quick.” For a moment, Bernie was admiring. Then he wondered how come the aid man had got here so fast. Had the American authorities feared trouble and put the medics on alert, maybe even posted them close by? What did that say about Konrad Adenauer, who’d trusted U.S. security arrangements? It said he’d been a jerk—that was what.

And what did it say about how things were going in Germany generally? Nothing good. Bernie Cobb was goddamn sure of that.

V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV HAD BEEN THROUGH THE INFLUENZA BEFORE.
Y
OU
spent a week flat on your back. Then you spent another week feeling as if you’d been beaten with knouts. After that, you were pretty much all right.

Running on benzedrine while you were at your sickest meant that afterwards you felt as if you’d been beaten with knouts and chains. And you felt that way for three weeks, not one.

All of which got him scant sympathy from his superiors—not even from Moisei Shteinberg, who was as miserable as he was. “Did influenza keep anyone from holding the Nazis out of Moscow and Leningrad?” Shteinberg demanded. “Did it keep anyone from throwing them out of Stalingrad?” He paused for a coughing fit.

Influenza probably kept some Red Army men flat on their backs during those fights. Bokov knew better than to say so. Instead, he said, “The Western imperialists have lost one of their reactionary politicians. I suppose we need to protect the leaders of the Social Unity Party of Germany.”

“I suppose so. Ulbricht is…useful, no doubt about it.” Shteinberg spoke with the same not so faint distaste Bokov had used.

They had their reasons. Walter Ulbricht
was
useful. He headed the Social Unity Party of Germany, the front through which the USSR intended to rule its chunk of the dead
Reich.
Like Lenin, he was bald and wore a chin beard. There the resemblance ended. Lenin, by all accounts, had been loyal to no one and nothing but himself—and the revolution.

Ulbricht, by contrast, was Stalin’s lap dog. He’d spent the war in exile in the USSR, returning to Germany in the Red Army’s wake. He would do exactly what the Soviet Union told him to do, no more and no less. If Heydrich’s hooligans blew him off the face of the earth, Moscow might have to turn to someone less reliable—to say nothing of the propaganda victory his death would hand the bandits.

With a sigh, Shteinberg went on, “I’m not really enthusiastic about keeping
any
Germans alive these days, if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, Comrade Colonel, plenty who were alive on New Year’s Eve are dead now, and plenty more will be,” Bokov said.

“They had it coming,” Shteinberg said coldly. Mass executions in Berlin and all through the rest of the Soviet zone warned the Germans that having anything to do with the Fascist bandits was a bad idea. Far bigger mass deportations drove home the same lesson. How the camps in the Arctic and Siberia would absorb so many…wasn’t Bokov’s worry. You could always plop prisoners down in the middle of nowhere and have them build their own new camp. If some of them froze before the barracks went up, if others starved—it was just one of those things.

Bokov had been through the Germans’ murder camps. They sickened him—the Soviet Union had nothing like them. They also struck him as wasteful. They didn’t squeeze enough labor out of condemned people before letting them give up the ghost.
Zeks
were to use, not just to kill. So it seemed to him, anyhow.

Shteinberg lit a cigarette. That made him cough, too, which didn’t keep him from smoking. “We never did catch the swine who poisoned the booze,” he wheezed, sucking in more smoke.

“Has to be the Germans who laid in the supply,” Bokov said. “If the barmen and serving girls knew anything, we would’ve pulled it out of them.” He and Shteinberg and their comrades had pulled all kinds of things from the people who’d been at the Schloss Cecilienhof that night. All kinds of things, but not what they wanted—what they needed.

“There should be a list of those people,” Shteinberg said. “There should be—but there isn’t.”

“Maybe nobody bothered to keep one,” Bokov said. Had Germans given the orders—“Round up that liquor!”—they would have kept a list. Since the command probably came from a Soviet quartermaster, who could say? Russian efficiency was no byword. Bokov added, “If someone did keep one, somebody else made it disappear.”

“If we can find out who did that—” Shteinberg broke off, shaking his head. “Anybody who’s smart enough to make a list disappear is smart enough to make himself disappear, too.”

“Da,”
Bokov agreed glumly. “I used to wonder how the Red revolutionaries could operate right under the noses of the Tsar’s secret police. Why didn’t they all get arrested and shipped to Siberia?
Bozhemoi!
Why didn’t they all get arrested and killed?”

“Some of the Tsar’s men were secretly on our side. Some were soft. Some were stupid.” Shteinberg stopped again. “And some were very good at what they did. We had to kill a good many of them. But others…others we reeducated. Some of them still serve the Soviet Union better than they ever served the Tsars.”

A young, able lieutenant or captain from 1917 would be a colonel or a general or even a marshal now…if he’d lived through all the purges in the generation between. Some would have made it. Some could—what did people say about Anastas Mikoyan?—some could dance between the raindrops and come home dry, that was it.

Something else Shteinberg had said made Bokov mutter to himself. “How many of our people are secretly on Heydrich’s side?”

“Not many Russians. You’d have to be a Vlasovite—worse than a Vlasovite—to side with the Nazis now,” Shteinberg said. Bokov nodded. The Germans had captured General Andrei Vlasov in 1942, and he’d gone over to them, even if they never quite trusted him. Anyone who’d served in his Russian Liberation Army was either dead or in a camp wishing he were dead.

“But the Germans who say they’re on our side…” Bokov said. He felt the same way about those Germans as the Hitlerites had felt about Vlasov and his fellow Russians: they might be useful, but would you really want to have to rely on one of them at your back?

“Yes. We shall have to go through them. That seems all too clear. Heydrich’s men want us to think they’re ordinary mushrooms when they’re really amanitas.” Shteinberg would have gone on, but he had another coughing spasm. “This damned grippe. I don’t think it’ll ever let go.”

Bokov displayed a vial of benzedrine tablets. “They still help—but I have to take more to get the same buzz.”

“I have some, too,” Shteinberg said. “I try not to take them unless I have to. Sometimes, though, there’s no help for it. So, Volodya—how do we get the amanitas out of our mushroom stew?”

R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH’S CHIN AND CHEEKS ITCHED.
H
E’D LET HIS
beard grow for a couple of weeks before emerging from the mine where he’d sheltered for so long. He wore beat-up civilian clothes, with an equally ragged
Wehrmacht
greatcoat over them: the kind of outfit any German male of military age might have.

Hans Klein sat behind the dented, rusty
Kubelwagen
’s wheel. Heydrich hadn’t wanted to risk using an American jeep—it might have roused suspicion. “Are you sure you should be doing this at all, sir?” Klein asked.

Since Heydrich wasn’t, he scowled. But he answered, “The operation is too important to leave to anyone else.”

“If you say so.” Klein didn’t believe him. Klein thought he was using that as an excuse to come out and do his own fighting. Klein was much too likely to be right, too. But Klein was only an
Oberscharführer.
Heydrich was the
Reichsprotektor.
If he decided he had to come out, none of the other freedom fighters had the rank to tell him he couldn’t. And if anything went wrong, Jochen Peiper, fidgeting inside another buried command post, would take over and do…as well as he could, that was all.

So far, everything was fine. They’d already made it from the American zone up into the one the British held. Their papers had held up at every inspection. Things would have been harder where the Russians ruled. The Russians did Heydrich’s men the dubious courtesy of taking them and their uprising seriously. Neither Amis nor Tommies seemed eager to do that. They
wanted
the fighting to be over, and so they did their best to pretend it was.

A jeep with four British soldiers in it came down the road toward Heydrich and Klein. The jeep carried a machine gun. The Tommy behind it aimed it at the battered
Kubelwagen.
Heydrich had seen that was only an ordinary precaution. The fellow wouldn’t open up for the fun of it. He just feared that the
Kubelwagen
might be full of explosives, and the men inside willing to blow themselves up to kill him and his mates, too.

Not today, friend Tommy,
Heydrich thought as the vehicles passed each other.
We’ve got something bigger cooking.

After a while, Klein pulled off onto the shoulder. He started messing around in the
Kubelwagen
’s engine compartment, as if he’d had a breakdown. Heydrich watched the road. When it was clear in both directions, he said, “Now.”

They jumped back in. Klein drove into the woods till trees screened the
Kubelwagen
from the road. “You’ll know where the bunker is?” he asked.

“I’d better,” Heydrich answered confidently. Inside, though, he wondered. How far out of practice was he, and how much would finding out cost?

To his relief, a scrap of hand-drawn map in his greatcoat pocket (written with Russian names, to make it look like a relic from fighting much farther east if he were searched) and a compass brought him to a hole under a fallen tree. The hole led to a tunnel. The tunnel took him to the bunker.

Three men waited there. Despite exchanged passwords, they all pointed Schmeissers or assault rifles at the entrance till Heydrich and Klein showed themselves. “All right—it
is
you,” one of them said, lowering his weapon.

“Ja,”
Heydrich said. “Let’s get what rest we can. We move at 0200.”

The underground hideout had bunks enough for all of them. Alarm clocks clattered to wake them at the appointed hour. They armed themselves and went up and out into the quiet German night. No blackouts any more, which seemed unnatural to Heydrich. He could see the little town ahead, even though it was mostly dark in the middle of the night.

Soft-voiced challenges and countersigns showed more Germans gathering around Alswede. This assault would be in better than platoon strength. The fighting wolves hadn’t shown their strength like this before.