Heydrich only shrugged. “We’ll manage. We’ll do it later if we don’t do it right away. We’re in this for the long haul, Hans. If we’re still down here in 1955 or 1960, then we are, that’s all.”
Klein looked down at his hand. “If we are, I’ll be pale as a ghost.”
“Remember to take your Vitamin D tablet,” Heydrich said. “But I don’t think we’ll still be down here then. We have the will for the struggle, however long it takes. Do our enemies? I don’t think so.”
Sound trucks blared Jerry Duncan’s message to the people in his district: “Reelect Duncan! Bring our boys home from Germany! Keep us prosperous!”
Jerry knew Reelect was the magic word. Once you got in, you had to do something pretty stupid to make the voters want to throw you out. Or things had to go into the toilet, the way they had in the Depression. Herbert Hoover dragged his whole party down the drain with him.
But they had a chance to come back here in ’46. At last! Jerry thought. Germany was Harry Truman’s mess, nobody else’s. More and more Democrats winced every time they stood up to support the President. Douglas Catledge’s posters said DON’T THROW VICTORY AWAY! How much of a victory was it, though, when the Eiffel Tower lay in ruins?
“President Truman doesn’t want to listen to the American people!” Duncan shouted at a speech in a park in Anderson. His wife stood on the platform with him, along with the mayor of Anderson and a couple of councilmen. The weather was gray and cool: summer giving way to fall. The forecast had said it might rain, but that seemed to be holding off. Jerry was glad-he had a good crowd on this Saturday afternoon. “Truman doesn’t want to listen!” he repeated, louder this time. “He doesn’t want to bring our soldiers home from Germany! Well, if he doesn’t want to, we just have to make him, that’s all!”
People clapped their hands. They cheered. Oh, a few hecklers lurked in the crowd. They jeered and hooted. Some of them tried to start a “Sieg heil!” chant. That was Truman’s best argument-tarring people who’d had enough with the Nazi brush. But Jerry’s backers didn’t let the “Sieg heil!” chorus get started. They hustled the chanters away. A few scuffles broke out, but cops kept things from getting out of hand.
“When you don’t have a plan of your own, you smear the man who does,” Jerry ad-libbed, and got another hand. He went on, “We don’t have any business in Germany any more. We’re just getting sucked deeper and deeper into this swamp.” He held up a newspaper. “Yesterday, six more GIs got killed in what people call the American zone. Another thirteen got wounded. Lucky thirteen, right?”
The laugh that rippled up was bitter, scornful-not at him, but at the President. “No more Truman! We need a new man!” somebody yelled. That won a hand, too-a bigger one than Jerry had got.
“We do need a new man,” Jerry agreed. “But we have to wait two more years for that. In the meantime, we have to bring the man we’ve got to his senses. No more blank checks for our stupidity across the Atlantic. No more money to keep our soldiers in Germany unless we start bringing them home right away!”
That did it. The crowd erupted. More hecklers tried to break up the tumultuous applause. They got shouted down. “Take a look at what’s happening in the French zone,” Jerry said. “The French tried to get revenge for the Eiffel Tower, and what did they end up with? Their very own shooting war, even worse than the one we’re stuck with in our zone. And do you know what’ll happen next? I’ll tell you what. They’ll come begging us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We had to do it in 1918. We had to do it two years ago, too. They sure can’t take care of themselves. They’ve proved that over and over again.”
More cheers. You couldn’t go wrong taking shots at France. Jerry had thought about trotting out the French war debt from World War I, but held off. Clobbering Truman was more likely to get his followers all hot and bothered.
And he had plenty to clobber Truman about. Foreign policy was one thing. If you had a son or a brother or a husband stuck in Germany, it mattered to you. But if you didn’t, what happened overseas didn’t seem to count so much.
On the other hand, everybody had to eat. “How many of you’ve tried to buy hamburger any time lately?” Jerry asked. A forest of hands went up. “How many of you managed to do it?” he asked. Quite a few of the hands went down. “How many of you paid less than a dollar a pound?” he inquired. Not a single hand stayed up. Jerry waved to show he got it. “Didn’t think so. I know my wife paid a dollar and seven cents-didn’t you, sweetheart?” Betsy Duncan nodded. Jerry finished, “And I’ll tell you something else I know, too. I know that’s a shame and a disgrace and a crime!”
Had he got hands like that every time he went up onto the stump, he could have been elected President himself. President? Hell, he could have been elected Pope-and he wasn’t even Catholic.
Vladimir Bokov felt himself cast back in time to the bad days, the dark days of 1941 and 1942. The Hitlerites had had the bit between their teeth then. They did whatever they chose to do, and the Soviet Union had to react to it.
Well, the Soviet Union did react, and react well. Otherwise, Captain Bokov wouldn’t have been prowling through the ruined streets of Berlin. Instead, some Sicherheitsdienst officer would have stalked through wrecked Moscow, trying to keep stubborn Soviet partisans from damaging the city any more.
“Bozhemoi!” Bokov muttered, shaking his head. This work had to be getting to him if pictures like that formed in his head.
It was. He knew it was. And he knew why. Despite the biggest military victory in the history of the world, the USSR was reacting to the Nazis again. The Heydrichites blasted radium all over the heart of Frankfurt. Soviet technicians had to check everything and everyone bound for the motherland from Germany to make sure no radium went along. Inconvenient? So what! Expensive? So what! Time-consuming? Again, so what! So said Moscow, against whose orders there was no appeal.
Now the Fascist bandits had managed to knock over the Eiffel Tower. Which meant…To Moscow, it meant all prominent cultural monuments in Eastern Europe needed special guards to keep the same thing from happening to them. Inconvenient? Expensive? Time-consuming? So what! Stalin had decided that the USSR wouldn’t be humiliated the way France had been.
Bokov had heard that Stalin couldn’t stand de Gaulle. Visiting Moscow, de Gaulle had called the battle of Stalingrad “a symbol of our common victories over the enemy.” Stalin hadn’t asked, What French victories? — though Bokov thought he himself might have, were he in the Marshal’s position. But Stalin never took de Gaulle seriously again after that, either.
More guards protected the monument commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin than any others. That was the one that had to gall the Heydrichites the most. The troops around it understood. “Oh, yes, Comrade Captain,” said a Red Army major commanding a battalion. “We know they may try and hit us. Well, they can try, but they won’t get through unless they’ve gone and stashed some tanks nearby.”
“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.
“Oh, this here was cute,” Sergeant Toby Benton 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.
XIX
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 on
e 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. “Hande hoch!”
Nobody came out with his hands up. “Want me to give it a burst?” another dogface asked, hefting his grease gun.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 34
