The Man with the Iron Heart (38 page)

“There’s a cheery thought!” Bokov exclaimed. “Do you think they could have?”

“No. That, no.” The major shook his head. “And even if they did, they wouldn’t get far. Everybody in our T-34s and Stalin tanks would start shooting off everything he had the second he laid eyes on one of those slab-sided Nazi contraptions.”

“Da,”
Bokov said. The bandits had stowed away small arms and antitank rockets and mortars in truly horrendous quantities. But those were all small and easy to hide. Panzers weren’t. Which didn’t mean you couldn’t play games with them. Bokov remembered one stunt the
Wehrmacht
and the Red Army had each used against the other before the surrender. “Are you sure the Fascist hyenas can’t steal any of our tanks and use them to fuck us over?”

The major blinked, whether at the idea or the language Bokov wasn’t sure. “Comrade Captain, I am not responsible for tank security,” the man said slowly. “I command infantry. The tanks are under the jurisdiction of the division’s armored regiment.”

Not many Red Army officers were willing to move even a centimeter beyond their stated duties. They would follow orders (no matter how harebrained or suicidal) or die trying (knowing there was no excuse for disobedience). When it came to showing initiative…They didn’t. Say what you would about the Germans, they could think for themselves in the field. This major wore decorations on his chest. He still dared not do anything outside his assigned sphere.

And do I?
Bokov wondered. He looked west. If the Soviets worked with the Anglo-Americans (and even the French) against the Heydrichites instead of apart from the Western Allies…If he proposed it, his superiors would tell him no; Colonel Shteinberg was dead right about that. If he tried to do it without proposing it…He sighed. If he was lucky, they’d shoot him for espionage. If he wasn’t, they’d spend a long time hurting him and then shoot him for espionage.

So much for
my
initiative and moral courage.
Chastened, Bokov dragged himself back to the business at hand. “I will consult with the officers in armor, then,” he said. He saw the relief in the major’s gray eyes as he took his leave. The Red Army had more guns, but the NKVD still made people shiver.

Talking with the commanders from the armored regiment turned out to be a good idea. They hadn’t thought the bandits might try to hijack a tank or two. “We will strengthen the guard force around the tank park immediately, Comrade Captain,” a lieutenant colonel—Surkov, his name was—said. “Thank you for bringing this to our notice. If something had gone wrong—” He made a small choking noise. That was about what would have happened to him, all right—again, if he was lucky.

Even now, the lieutenant colonel might get reprimanded for inadequate readiness. But he wouldn’t get his shoulder boards torn off. He wouldn’t get shipped to a gulag. And Vladimir Bokov went back to his office and drafted a memo about alertness in the armored forces.

It went out to units all over the Soviet zone—and, for all he knew, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, too. It might do some good. Whether it would do as much as cooperating with the Anglo-Americans…he didn’t have the initiative to find out.

“O
H, THIS HERE WAS CUTE,”
S
ERGEANT
T
OBY
B
ENTON SAID.

“Watcha got?” Lou Weissberg asked. They were only a couple of hundred yards outside the barbed-wire perimeter around American headquarters in Nuremberg.

“You see how this painting’s got a wire coming off it—looks like it might be part of the wire that hung it to the wall,” the explosives expert said.

“Right.” Lou nodded. He saw it when the Oklahoman pointed it out. He’d learned a lot from Benton. But he wouldn’t make an ordnance man if he lived another fifty years. And he wouldn’t live anywhere near that long if he tried the trade.

“Painting’s old. Looks like it might be worth a little somethin’. But the dogface who found it reckoned it might be booby-trapped, so he didn’t pull it off the wall. He called the explosives guys—me—instead. Good thing, too, on account of that wire leads to a Bouncing Betty in the wall.”

“Oh, my!” Lou said in shrill falsetto. He crossed his hands in front of his crotch like a pretty girl surprised skinnydipping. Some Nazi engineer must have won himself a bonus for the Betty. When the mine went off, a small charge kicked the main charge up in the air. The main charge blew up at waist height and sprayed shrapnel all around. Too many American soldiers were singing soprano for real.

Benton nodded. “Uh-huh. But that ain’t the worst, Captain.”

“Gevalt!”
Lou said. Toby Benton had worked with him often enough to have a notion of what that meant. After a moment, Lou went on, “So what’s worse than a Bouncing Betty?”

“I tore up the wall to get at the son of a bitch,” Benton answered, “but I didn’t want to lift it out right away, y’know? Maybe I watched too many movies or somethin’. I kinda got to thinking,
This here is mighty slick—maybe even a little too slick.
So instead of taking out the Bouncing Betty like I usually woulda done, I dug down
underneath
the bastard instead.”

“Yeah?” Lou said.

“Yeah.” Sergeant Benton nodded. “And I found me
another
wire, goin’ down below the building. An’
that
son of a bitch was attached to a ton and a half of TNT, with a delay fuse so it woulda gone off after there was a good old crowd here takin’ care of the poor sorry shitheel who blew his nuts off with the Bouncing Betty…or to pat the explosives guy on the back when he really wasn’t smart enough.”

“Wow!” Lou said. That didn’t seem remotely adequate. He tried again: “I’ll write you up for a medal.”

“Write me up so I can go on home, sir,” Toby said. “I’d like those orders a fuck of a lot better, an’ you can sing that in church.”

“Yeah, well, I believe you,” Lou said. “Shit, I’ll even try. God knows you just earned yourself a ticket to the States. But it won’t do any good. I can tell you right now what the brass’ll say. ‘This guy is good. We can’t afford to discharge him, ’cause too many people’ll get hurt if we do.’”

“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Benton said disgustedly. “If I do me a crappy job, I get my sorry ass blown up. If I do me a great job, they make me stick around—so’s I can get my sorry ass blown up.” He spat on the filthy floor. “Ought to be a name for somethin’ like that, where you get fucked over comin’ an’ goin’.”

“Yeah, it’s a heller, all right. One of these days, I bet there will.” Lou got a strange kick out of thinking like an English teacher instead of a counterintelligence officer. “A guy who’s been through the mill will write a story or a book about it. He’ll hang some kind of handle on it, and from then on everybody’ll call it that.”

Toby Benton let out a thoughtful grunt. “Well, maybe so. Till then, ‘fucked over comin’ an’ goin’ ’ works good enough.”

“Sure does,” Lou agreed. He shook his head. The classroom inside it vanished. He was back in bombed-out, stinking, fanatic-infested Nuremberg again, doing Uncle Sam’s job, not his old one.
Aw, shit,
he thought wearily. “How long would it’ve taken for Heydrich’s fuckers to set this up?”

“Well, you don’t sneak in a ton and a half of explosives an’ bury ’em overnight, not if you don’t want the sentries yonder and the patrols and all to spot you while you’re doin’ it,” Benton answered.

“Yeah.” Lou’s voice was sour. “I figured you’d say something like that. So we’ve got fanatics hiding out inside of Nuremberg, huh? And there’s bound to be ordinary krauts who know just who the assholes are, too. Only stands to reason. But have they said anything to us? Don’t you wish?”

“Ain’t there a reward for that kinda information?” Toby asked.

“Certainly.” It came out more like
Soitainly,
as if Lou were Curly from the Three Stooges. “You know how long a German who turns stoolie usually lives afterwards?”

Sergeant Benton chewed on that. He grunted again. Then he said, “Likely makes my line of work look downright safe by comparison.”

The average guy in his line of work had a life expectancy measured in months—sometimes in weeks. He was far above average, which (along with fool luck, especially at the start) was why he was still breathing.

And, unfortunately, he was dead right here. “We have to make the Jerries like us better than they like the fanatics, or we have to make ’em more afraid of us. So far, we haven’t managed either one. You find an answer there, Sergeant, and I’ll get you home if I have to carry you on my back,” Lou said.

“Won’t hold my breath. You smart guys can’t fix it, don’t expect me to,” Benton said.

Lou sighed. “I will write you up for the medal. Whether you want it or not, it’s something I can do.” It seemed a GI could only get what he didn’t want.
Fucked over comin’ an’ goin’
rang in Lou’s mind again.

Bernie Cobb was not a happy man. Occupation duty in Erlangen hadn’t been so bad. Oh, you looked sideways at about every third Jerry you passed on the street, but he’d kind of got used to that. And Erlangen wasn’t a big city. Yeah, the fanatics had bumped off that Adenauer guy there, but that was just one of those things. (Half-remembered bits of Cole Porter spun through his head—something about gossamer wings. He wished he had some right this minute.)

What he was doing now wasn’t occupation duty. It was war—no other name for it. He was part of a skirmish line combing through a valley somewhere in the Alps, looking for—well, anything that didn’t belong there. Some of the things that didn’t belong here were krauts with rifles and Schmeissers and machine guns. Not all of them were Heydrich’s diehards. The rest were just brigands. They’d lived by robbery all through the war, and hadn’t felt like quitting after the surrender. But they could kill you every bit as dead as any fanatic.

Yeah, those gossamer wings would come in handy, all right. Bernie imagined flying above the rocky landscape, spying out trouble that’d be hard to spot from the ground. Then he imagined some asshole in a ragged
Wehrmacht
greatcoat doing antiaircraft work with an MG42. His imagination came back to earth with a thump, the same way he would if the bastard shot him down.

His breath smoked. His short Eisenhower jacket didn’t keep him warm enough. Fall was here, sure enough. Erlangen was cooler than Albuquerque—all of Europe that he’d seen was cooler than Albuquerque—but in summer that was okay. Now, tramping through these miserable mountain valleys…He shook his head and exhaled more fog.

Haystacks dotted the valleys. All the grass was going yellow because of the night freezes, so the stacks were less picturesque than they would have been a few weeks earlier. That didn’t mean they were any less dangerous. Haystacks were great to sleep in and to hole up in. Bernie’d found that out for himself plenty of times before the surrender.

He and his buddies warily approached the closest stack. They fanned out so they could make sure nobody was hiding on the far side. Inside was harder to be sure about.
“Raus!”
Bernie yelled.
“Hände hoch!”

Nobody came out with his hands up. “Want me to give it a burst?” another dogface asked, hefting his grease gun.

“Bet your ass, Roscoe,” Bernie said. The rest of the GIs stood clear. Roscoe sprayed three short bursts through the haystack. Nobody staggered out bleeding and wailing, either.

“Okay. This one’s clean,” another soldier said.

“Is now, by God,” Bernie agreed. If some German hiding in there had just quietly died with his brains blown out, Bernie wouldn’t shed a tear. Son of a bitch had the chance to give up. That was more than he would’ve given the guys hunting him.

The Americans tramped on. Bernie lit a cigarette. A few hundred yards off, a GI in another group of troops waved, silently asking what the gunfire meant. Bernie’s answering wave said everything was jake. The distant soldier gave back one more flourish to show he got it. Then he returned to his own hunt.

Bernie’s bunch came to a farmhouse and outbuildings. The farmer was about fifty, so maybe he’d put in his time and maybe he hadn’t. His skinny wife eyed the Americans as if she’d just taken a big swig of vinegar. They had a daughter who might’ve been cute if she hadn’t looked even more sour than her ma.

And, on the mantel, they had a framed photo of a young man in the uniform of a
Wehrmacht
junior noncom. Bernie pointed at it and raised an eyebrow.
“Ostfront,”
the farmer said.
“Tot?”
A sad shrug.
“Gefangen?”
Another one.

“Dead or captured fighting the Russians,” said Roscoe, who had the usual GI bits and pieces of German.

“Yeah, I got it, too,” Bernie said. He pointed at the farmer.
“Soldat? Du? Westfront? Ostfront?”

“Nein. Bauer durchaus Krieg,”
the man replied in elementary
Deutsch.
German for morons, not that Bernie cared. He got the answer he needed—the guy claimed he’d farmed all through the war.

And maybe the kraut was even telling the truth. He was wearing patched overalls, like an Okie fleeing the Dust Bowl in the ’30s. His shirt and shoes weren’t
Wehrmacht
issue, either. A lot of Germans hung on to their army clothes because those were all they had. This stuff wasn’t any better than what the Jerries got from the
Wehrmacht,
but it was different.

“Let’s search the joint,” Bernie said.

Maybe Mother and Daughter Vinegar Phiz knew some English, because they looked even nastier than they had before. It did them exactly no good. They might have got themselves shot if they did anything more than glare, but they didn’t.

The GIs turned the place upside down and inside out. They opened drawers and scattered clothes all over the floor. Some of them got a giggle out of throwing women’s underwear around. They poked and prodded the mattress and bedclothes, and lifted them up to check underneath. They found a stash of dirty pictures, with plump, naked
Fräuleins
doing amazing things to men with old-fashioned haircuts. Those were good for a giggle, too. Several guys helped themselves to the best ones. Bernie wondered how the farmer would explain them to his pickle-faced wife. That wasn’t his worry, thank God.

What they didn’t find were any weapons. The most lethal things in the place were the kitchen knives. They went out to the barn and the other outbuildings. Guys who’d grown up on farms back in the States led the search there. Again, they came up with nothing. Maybe these people really didn’t hang around with bandits.

“Danke schön,”
Bernie said as the soldiers started to leave. He tossed the farmer a pack of Luckies. It wouldn’t square things, but it might help.

By the farmer’s expression, and by some of the things he muttered under his breath, it didn’t. If any of Heydrich’s fanatics wanted to hide here from now on, the guy would probably serve them roast goose and red cabbage. Well, too goddamn bad.

As the GIs trudged away, the farmer’s wife started screeching at him. “Oh, boy, is he gonna catch it,” Roscoe said, not without sympathy. He had one of the farmer’s finest photos carefully tucked into a breast pocket.

They hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when they came to the place where a mineshaft plunged into the hillside. It wasn’t much to look at: a roughly rectangular hole, a little bigger all the way around than a man was tall. Bernie went in as far as the light reached, which wasn’t very. Spider webs shrouded support timbers that looked as if they’d stood there since Napoleon’s day, or maybe Martin Luther’s.

But you never could tell. This was the kind of stuff they’d been sent out to find. One of the guys had a radio set on his back instead of his ordinary pack. He was already on the horn to divisional HQ when Bernie came out of the shaft. Bernie told him what little he’d seen, and the radioman passed it on.

He listened for a little while, then gave the word: “They’ll send a search team and a demolition team. We’re supposed to wait till they get here, and then support the search team.”

“Suits,” Bernie said. He flopped down in front of the big, black hole in the ground and lit a cigarette. Some of the dogfaces dug out K-ration cans and chowed down. Others promptly started snoring. Bernie had lost the knack for sleeping on bare ground, and wasn’t sorry he had. But if they kept giving him shit like this to do, he might have to get it back.

The demolition squad and the searchers showed up a couple of hours later. Bernie wasn’t anxious to go back into the mine, but he did it. The search team brought flashlights that could have doubled as billy clubs.

“You oughta sell these suckers to MPs,” Bernie said, turning his this way and that. All he saw was carved-out gray rock and more of those ancient support timbers. His boots thumped on the stone floor of the shaft.

“Not a half-bad notion. Damn snowdrops’d be dumb enough to fork over,” said a corporal on the search team. Bernie snickered. The MPs’ white helmets and gloves gave them the scornful nickname.

“Hold up,” somebody called from ahead. “Big old cave-in here. This is the end of the road.” Bernie glanced at the corporal. The two-striper was already turning around. Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow him out—not even a little bit.

“Everybody out?” a man from the demolition squad yelled into the shaft. No one answered. Bernie looked around. All his people were standing outside the mine. The sergeant in charge of the search team seemed to have all his guys, too. The demolitions people placed their charges. They backed away from the opening. Again, Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow. The man who’d yelled used the detonator.

Boom!
It wasn’t so loud as Bernie’d expected. Dust spurted out of the shaft. When it cleared, the hole was gone: full of fallen rock. “That’ll do it,” he said.

“Yeah,” agreed the soldier who’d touched off the blast. “Nobody going in or out of there. Now all we gotta do is seal off about a million more of these motherfuckers and we’ve got it licked.”

“Er—right.” Bernie wished he hadn’t put it that way. It made him think he’d be tramping through these miserable mountains forever. He looked around. Hell, he was liable to be.

B
OOM
!
T
HE EXPLOSION WAS A LONG WAY OFF, WHICH DIDN’T MEAN
Reinhard Heydrich didn’t hear it. He swore. The Amis had just plugged one of the ways into and out of his underground redoubt. They didn’t know they’d done that, of course; all the shafts that led down here were artfully camouflaged to look as if they deadended. Even so…

Things had picked up. The Amis wanted him dead. They’d wanted him dead before, of course, but now they
really
wanted him dead. They wanted him dead enough to put some real work into killing him: into killing him in particular because he was what and who he was, not because he was some Nazi diehard.

I should thank them for the compliment,
he thought wryly. He’d got under their skin. He’d hurt the enemy enough to make the enemy want to hurt him back. No, to make the enemy need to hurt him back. This wasn’t just war. It was politics, too. American elections were coming up soon. If the Amis could show off photos of Reinhard Heydrich’s mutilated corpse, their hard-liners would win votes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” It would go out over the radio, in the newspapers, in their magazines. And the oppression of Germany would go on.

Clausewitz said war was an extension of politics by other means. Hitler had often—too often—forgotten that. Now that the
Führer
was dead, Heydrich could look at him and his policies more objectively. And Heydrich didn’t have the mighty
Wehrmacht
at his back. The mighty
Wehrmacht
was rotting meat and scrap metal. Heydrich couldn’t bludgeon foes out of the way. He had to keep stinging them, wasplike, till they decided Germany was more trouble than it was worth and left on their own.

He wanted to stay alive, too. He wanted to enjoy the free Germany he’d created. And he especially didn’t want to die if dying gave the occupying powers an advantage and hurt the rebuilding
Reich.

Hans Klein walked in. “They aren’t coming after us.”

“Good.” Heydrich nodded. “I didn’t think they would. We spent a lot of time and a lot of Reichsmarks making the holes in the ground that lead in here look like holes in the ground that don’t go anywhere.”

“When you’re playing bridge, one peek is worth a thousand finesses,” Klein said. “When you’re playing our game, one traitor’s worth a thousand tonnes of camouflage.”

Heydrich grunted. Nothing like a cynical noncom to put his finger on your weakness. “We haven’t had to worry about that so far,” the
Reichsprotektor
said.

“We’ve been lucky so far,” Klein retorted.

Again, Heydrich couldn’t very well tell him he was talking through his hat. Klein damn well wasn’t. At least Heydrich had the sense to see as much. Plenty of people who’d yelled
“Heil
Hitler!” as loud as anybody were serving the Anglo-Americans now. Or they were licking the lickspittle Frenchmen’s boots, or else kowtowing to Stalin the way they’d once bowed down to their proper
Führer.

When such folk made conspicuous nuisances of themselves, Heydrich’s men disposed of them. A sniper from 800 meters, a bomb planted in an automobile or posted in a package, poison at a favorite eatery…There were all kinds of ways. Collaborators knew they had to be careful. Some of them decided the risk wasn’t worth it and quit collaborating. Every one like that counted as a victory.

But the enemy also had his weapons. One of them was cold, hard cash. Heydrich remembered the huge price on his head. A million U.S. dollars now, wasn’t it?

Would that be enough to tempt some sniveling little Judas who’d got sick of staying cooped up in a hole in the ground for years? Heydrich nodded to himself. A million dollars was plenty for a traitor to buy himself an estate and a Rolls and the kind of pussy that went with an estate and a Rolls. Then all he’d need to worry about was his former friends’ revenge.