The Man with the Iron Heart (3 page)

Benton’s eyes slid to what was left of the two GIs’ bodies. Those would either get buried in a military cemetery here or go back to the States in sealed coffins, probably with sandbags to keep them company and make them weigh what they should. Lou hoped the Graves Registration people would plant them here. The less these guys’ relatives knew about what had happened to them, the better.

He walked over to the jeep that had brought him out from Nuremberg. Benton had his own jeep. A bored-looking private sat in Lou’s machine, checking out a magazine full of girls in pinup poses. Reluctantly, the driver set down the literature. “Take you back now, sir?” he asked. Violation of the surrender terms? A honking big crater and two mangled bodies? He probably didn’t care much about anything, but he cared more about the leg art than this business.

And maybe he had the right attitude, too.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Lou said.

The driver started the engine. Jeeps were almost as reliable as Zippos. They fired up first time every time. Not much traffic on the road. What there was was nearly all U.S. military: olive-drab vehicles marked with a white star, usually inside a white circle.

Lou didn’t get his ass in an uproar about trucks and jeeps and halftracks that ran. He didn’t worry about the Germans he saw, either, even though a lot of them still wore
Feldgrau
and some hadn’t handed in their weapons yet. But he flinched whenever he rolled by crumpled metal wreckage—and there was plenty of it. If those Nazi
schmucks
had booby-trapped one dead truck, who could say they hadn’t done it to more than one?

Nuremberg looked as if God had jumped on it with both feet and then spent a while kicking it, like a kid throwing a tantrum. The town where the Nazis threw their big wingdings, the town where Leni What’s-her-name filmed
Triumph of the Will,
was the biggest rubble field in the world.

Or maybe not. Lou hadn’t seen Berlin yet. The Russians played for keeps. And well they might. Hitler’s team had come that close—
that
close—to doing unto them instead, and they had to know it. It never occurred to most Americans that they might have lost the war. The Atlantic and Pacific didn’t shield the USSR from nasty neighbors. Fighting their way west across their own smashed and shattered country, Red Army men could see what a narrow escape they’d had.

Lou suddenly snickered, which made the driver look at him as if he’d started picking his nose. He didn’t care. Suppose that truck had been sabotaged by organized diehards who weren’t ready to quit. Maybe they thought Americans were too soft to give them what they deserved. Maybe they were even right.

But he would have bet dollars to doughnuts that the surviving Nazis had too much sense to piss off the Russians. He laughed again, louder this time. If the krauts didn’t have that kind of sense, the Reds would be happy—fucking delighted—to pound it into them.

M
ARSHAL
I
VAN
S
TEPANOVICH
K
ONIEV WAS ABOUT AS UNHAPPY AS A
jubilant man could be. His First Ukrainian Front had done everything an army group could do to smash the last German defenses in the east. It had broken into Berlin, and paid its share in blood to take Hitler’s capital away from him and throw the Third
Reich
into the coffin it deserved.

So far, so good. But Stalin’s orders gave the most important targets in Berlin to Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Front. “
Yob tvoyu mat’,
Georgi Konstantinovich,” Koniev muttered.

No matter what he said about Zhukov’s mother, Koniev hadn’t really expected anything else. Hoped, yes; expected, no. Zhukov was Stalin’s fair-haired boy, and that was that. Stalin trusted Zhukov not to try to overthrow him: the kind of trust a dictator didn’t give lightly—or, sometimes, at all. Having given it, Stalin could afford to be extravagant in giving Zhukov anything else he fancied.

That Zhukov was a damned good general had nothing to do with anything, not so far as Koniev was concerned. Without false modesty, the commander of the First Ukrainian Front knew he was a damned good general himself. So did Zhukov. And so did Stalin.

All the same, Stalin had only one favorite. Koniev knew he wasn’t it. Zhukov was. So Zhukov’s men got the Chancellery and the
Führer
’s bunker. It seemed unfair. It certainly did to Koniev, whose men broke into Berlin ahead of the other marshal’s.

“Nichevo,”
Koniev said. And it
couldn’t
be helped, not unless he felt like quarreling with Stalin. He might be—he was—irked, but he wasn’t suicidal.

Scrawny Germans, many still in threadbare uniforms, trudged gloomily through Berlin’s wreckage-strewn streets. They got out of the way in a hurry when Red Army men came by. If they didn’t, they’d pay for it. The stench of death hung in the air. Corpses still lay in the gutters, and sometimes in the middle of the street. Quite a few of them had got there after the surrender. No surviving Germans wanted to give the conquerors an excuse to add more.

Off in the distance, a woman shrieked. A Russian a few meters from Marshal Koniev chuckled. “One more cunt getting what she deserves,” he said. His buddies laughed out loud.

Koniev didn’t. The Red Army had avenged Nazi atrocities inside the USSR ever since it crossed the
Reich
’s borders. Berlin was no exception. Who’d wanted to say the Russian and Asiatic soldiers couldn’t have their fun after the war’s last battle? They owed the Germans plenty. But discipline was supposed to be returning. That scream—and others like it Koniev had heard in the ten days since the surrender—argued it still wasn’t all the way back.

Which went a long way towards explaining why almost all the Germans Koniev could see were men. German women feared Red Army soldiers would drag them off and gang-rape them if they showed themselves. They might have been right, too. They’d be safe enough in a few weeks. Not yet.

A driver came up to Koniev and saluted. “Comrade Marshal, your car is ready,” the man said.

“Good,” Koniev said. “Very good. I won’t be sorry to get out of this place for a while. It stinks.”

“Sure does.” The driver didn’t seem to care. “If you’ll come with me, sir…”

The car was a captured
Kubelwagen
—the German equivalent of a U.S. jeep—with red stars painted all over it to keep trigger-happy Russians from shooting it up. The driver carried a PPSh41 submachine gun to fight off not only stupid friends but stubborn enemies. Little dying spatters of resistance went on. Massive reprisals killed plenty of Germans, and would eventually snuff out the resistance, too—Koniev was confident of that.

Even a couple of kilometers outside of Berlin, the air improved. And then, abruptly, it got worse again: the
Kubelwagen
rattled past the bloated carcasses of a dozen cows in a cratered meadow. Koniev scowled at the stink, and also at the waste. “Our men should have butchered those animals,” he said.

“Sorry, Comrade Marshal.” The driver sounded afraid Koniev would think it was his fault. He added, “I never saw the beasts till this minute.”

“All right, Corporal.” While the fighting was still going on, Koniev might have looked to blame…somebody, anyhow. With the war over, he could afford to be more easygoing.

Artillery had chewed up the woods outside of Berlin, too. Some trees still stood straight. Others leaned at every angle under the sun. They’d been down long enough that their leaves were going from green to brown. Some of them would have fallen on the road from Berlin to Zossen—the former
Wehrmacht
headquarters, now taken over by the Red Army. Koniev wondered whether Red Army engineers or German POWs had cleared it. He would have bet his countrymen put the Germans to work.

Three or four men in field-gray scrambled off to the side of the road when they heard the
Kubelwagen
coming. “Those fuckers better move,” the driver said. “They stand there knocking pears out of the trees with their dicks, I’ll damn well run ’em over.”

“Right.” Marshal Koniev had to fight to swallow laughter. Russian profanity—
mat
—was almost a language in itself. The driver might have said
If they stand there goofing off…
Or he might not have. Even generals sometimes felt like using
mat.

The road bent sharply. The driver slowed down. Something stirred among the dead trees near the asphalt.

Alarm stirred in Koniev. “Step on it!” he said urgently. If he turned out to have a case of the vapors, the driver could tell everybody he didn’t have any balls. Koniev wouldn’t mind, not one bit.

As the driver’s foot came down on the gas, somebody—a man in a gray greatcoat—stood up. He aimed a sheet-metal tube at the
Kubelwagen. “Panzerfaust!”
the driver yelped. He grabbed his submachine gun at the same time as Koniev reached for the pistol on his belt.

Too late. Trailing fire, the bazooka-style rocket roared toward the car. Marshal Koniev ducked. That did him exactly no good. The
Panzerfaust
was made to smash tanks. A soft-skinned vehicle like the
Kubelwagen
was nothing but fire and scrap metal—and torn, charred flesh—an instant after the rocket struck home.

F
ACES BLANK AS IF THEY WERE SO MANY MACHINES
, S
OVIET SOLDIERS
led out ten more Germans and tied them to the execution posts. Some were men, some women. All were in the prime of life. Orders from Moscow were that no old people or children be used to avenge Marshal Koniev. For him, the defeated enemy had to give their best.

The Germans had to give, and give, and give. Blood puddled at the bases of those posts. Flies buzzed in the mild spring air. The iron stink of gore made Captain Vladimir Bokov’s nose wrinkle. He turned to the officer commanding the firing squads. “Smells like an outdoor butcher shop.”

“Er—yes.” That officer didn’t seem to know how to respond. He was a Red Army major, so he nominally outranked Bokov. But the arm-of-service color on his shoulder boards was an infantryman’s maroon, and infantry majors were a kopek a kilo.

Bokov’s shoulder boards carried four small stars each, not one large one. His colors, though, were bright blue and crimson. He wore a special badge on his left upper arm: a vertical sword inside a wreath. No wonder a mere infantry major treated him with exaggerated caution—he belonged to the NKVD.

“Well, carry on,” he said.

“Very well, Comrade Captain,” said the infantry officer—his name was Ihor Eshchenko. That and his accent proclaimed him a Ukrainian.

He gestured to the troops tying the hostages to the posts.
Make it snappy,
the wave said. The men blindfolded the Germans. Eshchenko glanced at Bokov, but the NKVD man didn’t object. Moscow hadn’t said the executioners couldn’t grant that small mercy.

A fresh squad of Red Army soldiers came out to shoot the hostages. The local commanders didn’t make their men kill and kill and kill in cold blood; they rotated the duty whenever they could. One man in each squad had a blank in his weapon, too. If the soldiers wanted to think they weren’t shooting anybody, they could.

“Ready!” Eshchenko called. The soldiers brought up their rifles. “Aim!” he said. A couple of the Germans waiting to die blubbered and moaned. They might not understand Russian, but they knew how firing squads worked.
“Fire!”
Major Eshchenko shouted.

Mosin-Nagant carbines barked. The Germans slumped against their bonds. Back in pagan days, a chieftain who died took a retinue with him to the next world. Good Marxist-Leninists didn’t believe in the next world. All the same, the principle here wasn’t so different.

Some officers in charge of executions armed their men with submachine guns and let them blast away at full automatic. Major Eshchenko seemed to have too much of a feel for the military proprieties to put up with anything so sloppy. Vladimir Bokov had watched and taken part in plenty of executions, and this one was as neat as any.

One drawback to using rifles, though: two or three hostages weren’t killed outright. Eshchenko drew his pistol and gave each the coup de grâce with a bullet at the nape of the neck.

Stone-faced Germans carried away the corpses. Once Germans were dead, the Red Army stopped caring about them. “Nicely done, Major,” Bokov said as Eshchenko came back. “Cigarette?”

“Spasibo,”
Eshchenko replied, accepting one. He leaned forward to let Bokov give him a light. After taking a drag, he added, “This American tobacco is so mild, it’s hardly there at all.”

“I know.” Bokov nodded. “Better than going without, though.”

“Oh, you’d better believe it.” The infantry officer inhaled again. He blew out a perfect smoke ring—Bokov was jealous—and said, “Better than the horrible crap we smoked at the start of the war, too.”

Bokov sent him a hooded look. Though the NKVD man’s eyes were blue, they were narrow like an Asiatic’s: good for not showing what he was thinking. All he said was
“Da.”
Tobacco was wretched after the German invasion because the Nazis overran so much fine cropland. A vindictive man—or even a man with a quota to fill—might construe Eshchenko’s remark as criticism of Comrade Stalin. A word from Bokov, and the major would find out more than he ever wanted to know about Soviet camps.

But Bokov had other things on his mind today. As if picking that from his thoughts, Major Eshchenko said, “Naturally, we also seized prisoners for interrogation. We’ve already, ah, questioned several of them. The rest we saved for you.”

Questioned,
of course, was a euphemism for
worked over.
Well, a marshal was dead. You couldn’t expect the Red Army to stay gentle after that. And the GRU, the military intelligence unit, thought it knew as many tricks as the NKVD. The two services were often rivals. Not here, though. “Any real leads?” Captain Bokov asked.

Eshchenko shrugged. “None I’ve heard about. But I might not.”

Bokov nodded. If the infantry officer didn’t need to know something, nobody would tell him. That was basic doctrine. The NKVD man asked, “So where are these prisoners?”