Much too much like that, in fact.
Blast picked PC Mitchell up and slammed him into something hard. “Oof!” he said, and then, “Ow!” He could barely hear himself, even though that second noise came closer to a shriek than a yelp. Blast had also smashed at his ears.
Had the Nazi struck at Parliament, Mitchell would have been nothing more than a smear on the sidewalk. But he’d steered his truck into Westminster Abbey before detonating it…and God help that poor bloody American in his smart uniform.
Broken glass clattered and clinked down around the bobby. A big, sharp shard shattered between his legs. He shuddered. A foot higher up and that one would have cut it right off him or left him with no need to shave for the rest of his days.
He snuffled as he staggered to his feet. A swipe at his nose with his sleeve showed he was bleeding there like a mad bastard. No great surprise: he realized he was lucky he was still breathing. Blast could tear up your lungs, kill you from the inside out, and not leave a mark on you. He’d seen that more than once, fighting north through Italy.
No broken ribs grated and stabbed when he moved. That was nothing but fool luck. And his bobby’s helmet had kept him from smashing his head. It wasn’t anywhere near so tough as an army-style tin hat, but evidently it was tough enough.
Across the street…Every English or British sovereign since William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The bulk of the structure dated from the reign of Henry III, in the late thirteenth century. Not all of it was ancient; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the last war was in the west nave.
No. Had been in the west nave. The Abbey’d come through the Blitz and the later unmanned German Doodlebugs and the even more terrifying V-2s without much damage. But Cedric Mitchell couldn’t imagine a building in the world that would have come through unscathed if a deuce-and-a-half stuffed to the gills with high explosives blew up alongside it. And Westminster Abbey hadn’t.
Through rags of mist and through much more roiling dust-literally, the dust of centuries-he saw the Abbey was nothing more than rubble and wreckage. But for the size of the pile, it might have been an Italian country-town church hit by shellfire. Flames started licking through the brick and stone and timber. Wood burned-Mitchell shook his head, trying to clear it. Of course wood burns, you bloody twit. So does anything with paint on it.
To his slack-jawed amazement, people came staggering and limping and crawling out of the rubble. A priest in bloodied vestments lurched up to him and said-well, something. Police Constable Mitchell cupped a scraped hand behind his right ear. “What’s that, mate?” he bawled. His mouth was all bloody, too. Was he also bleeding from the ears? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
“More caught in there,” the priest shouted, loud enough this time for Mitchell to make out the words. “Will you help?”
“I’ll do my damnedest,” Mitchell answered. The words didn’t seem blasphemous to him till later. The injured priest took them in stride.
Another wall went over with a crash that made Mitchell flinch. Anything loud enough for him to hear was liable to be frightening. He followed the priest across St. Margaret’s to the ruin. They both had to skirt the crater the exploding lorry had blown in the pavement. Water was rapidly filling it.
“Bloody Nazi must have wrecked the pipes,” Mitchell said. The priest, a pace in front of him, didn’t turn around. The other man’s ears must have suffered in the blast, too.
A woman’s legs lay under some bricks. Together, the bobby and the priest pulled some of them off her. Then Mitchell twisted away, wishing they hadn’t. What was left of her upper body wasn’t pretty.
“How do we get revenge for this?” he bawled into the priest’s ear.
“I don’t know,” the man answered. “It may be un-Christian of me to say so, but we need to do that, don’t we? Here and St. Paul’s-”
“That’s where the other one was?” PC Mitchell broke in. The priest nodded. Mitchell swore, not that that would do any good, either. Would anything? He didn’t think so.
Now Lou Weissberg had seen both Stars And Stripes and the International Herald-Trib. No English shutterbug seemed to have matched the photographer who’d snapped the Eiffel Tower in mid-topple. No picture of St. Paul’s splendid dome collapsing, nor of Westminster Abbey falling down. Only rubble and wreckage and bodies.
And rage. Some of it came from Clement Attlee’s Labour government. “The Germans show why their ancestors were named Vandals,” Attlee thundered-as well as a mild little bald man with a scrawny mustache could thunder. “Destruction and murder for the sake of destruction and murder will settle nothing, and will only rouse the hatred of the entire civilized world.”
That was good, as far as it went. A lot of Englishmen didn’t think it went nearly far enough. Winston Churchill, wandering in the wilderness after the electorate turned him out of office the year before, aimed his thunder at the Labour government. “How could these barbarous swine smuggle the tools of their filthy trade into our fair country?” he demanded. “How could they do so altogether undetected? ‘Someone had blundered,’ Tennyson said. The poet never claimed to know who. I hope we shall do rather better than that in getting to the bottom of our shameful failure here.”
Major Frank walked into Lou’s office while he was drowning his sorrows in coffee. Somehow this latest outrage didn’t make him want to run out and get crocked the way the fall of the Eiffel Tower had. Maybe you could get used to anything, even enormities. Wasn’t that a cheery thought?
Howard Frank pointed to the picture of the ruins of St. Paul’s on the front page of the Herald-Trib. “Well, the fuckers got the frogs and they got the limeys,” he said. “Next thing you know, they’ll make it to Washington and blow up the Capitol.”
Lou eyed him. “If they wait till the new Congress gets sworn in next January before they try it, they’ll do the country a big favor.”
“Now, now.” Frank clucked at him like a mother reproaching a little boy. “We have to respect the will of the people.”
“My ass,” Lou said, and then, a long beat later, “sir.”
“Dammit, we really do,” Major Frank said. “If we don’t, what’s the difference between us and the fucking Nazis?”
“What did Trotsky tell one of the guys who followed him? ‘Everybody has the right to be stupid, Comrade, but you abuse the privilege.’ Something like that, anyhow,” Lou said. “Well, the American people are abusing the privilege right now, goddammit, and we’ll all end up paying ’cause they are.”
“Treason,” Frank said sadly.
“Damn straight,” Lou agreed. “Call the MPs and haul me off to Leavenworth. I’ll be a hell of a lot safer in Kansas than I am here.”
“If they don’t get to take me away, they don’t get to take you, either,” Frank said. “And I ain’t going anywhere.”
“Ha! That’s what you think,” Lou told him. “Fucking isolationists in Congress won’t give Truman two bits to keep us here. We’ll all be heading home pretty damn quick. Got a cigarette on you?”
“You give me all this crap I don’t need and then you bum butts offa me?” Major Frank shook his head in mock disbelief. “I oughta tell you to geh kak afen yam.” Despite the earthy Yiddish phrase, he tossed a pack down onto the newspapers on Lou’s desk.
When Lou picked it up and started to extract a cigarette, he paused because his eye caught a phrase he’d missed before. “Here’s Heydrich, the smarmy son of a bitch: ‘Thus we remind the oppressors that the will to freedom still burns strong in Germany.’ And we’re gonna turn our backs on this shit and just go home?” He did light up then, and sucked in smoke as hard as he could.
Frank reclaimed the pack. He lit a cigarette of his own. “Way you talk, I’m one of the jerks who want to run away. I’m on your side, Lou.”
“Yeah, I know, sir. Honest, I do. But-” Lou’s wave was expansive enough to cover two continents’ worth of discontent and the Atlantic between them. “Do these people want to
fight another war in fifteen or twenty years? Do they think the Nazis won’t take over again if we quit? Or the Russians if the Nazis don’t?”
“What we need is Heydrich’s head nailed to the wall,” Howard Frank said. “If we get rid of him and things start settling down, maybe we can make the occupation work after all.”
“That’d be something,” Lou agreed. “Not much luck yet down in the mountains, though. A few weapons caches, but those are all over the fucking country. No Alpine Redoubt-or if there is, it’s as close to invisible as makes no difference.”
“Those may not be the same thing,” Frank said thoughtfully.
“Huh,” Lou said, also thoughtfully, and then, “You’ve got a point. Redoubt or not, though, you know what Germany is these days?”
“Sure, a fucking mess,” Frank answered.
“I mean besides that,” Lou said. “It’s like one of those small-town china shops with a sign in the window that goes YOU DROP IT, YOU BREAK IT, YOU PAY FOR IT. And we dropped it, and we broke it, and-”
“We’re paying for it. Boy, are we ever,” Major Frank said. “But what the folks back home can’t see is, we’ll end up paying even more later on if we bail out now. Hell, could you see that if your kid came home in a box a year and a half after Hitler blew his brains out and the Nazis surrendered?”
“I don’t know, sir-honest to God, I don’t.” Lou stubbed out his cigarette, which had got very small. All the butts in the ashtray would get mixed in with the general trash and then thrown out. And once the stuff got beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, the krauts would pick through it like packrats and get hold of every gram of tobacco and every scrap of crust of burnt toast. Times were tough here. That it was the Jerries’ own goddamn fault made it no less true.
“Well, there you are, then.” Frank had kept on with the conversation while Lou’s wits wandered.
“Yeah, here I am,” Lou agreed. “And you know what else? No matter how fucked up this lousy place is, I need to be here. So do you. So do we-all of us. But how much longer will all the big brains back in Washington let us do what we gotta do?”
“You get that one right, Lou, you win the sixty-four dollars,” Howard Frank said.
Berlin was a ravaged city: no two ways about it. And yet, Vladimir Bokov had come to realize, it could have been worse. The Wehrmacht had done the bulk of its fighting off to the east, trying to hold the Red Army away from the German capital. Blocks in Berlin-especially blocks around the seat of the Nazi government-had got smashed up, certainly. But not every block, every house, had been fought over till one side or the other could fight no more. In that, Berlin differed from Stalingrad or Kharkov or Warsaw or Budapest or Konigsberg or…a hundred or a thousand other places, large and small, on the Eastern Front.
The Germans would be able to rebuild Berlin faster because of that. The women and kids and stooped old men chucking broken bricks into bins one by one had only millions to dispose of, not tens of millions the way they would have if every building had been wrecked. Captain Bokov grimaced. The Soviet line proclaimed that the German people weren’t the USSR’s enemies: only the former Hitlerite regime and the Heydrichite bandits who wanted to resurrect it.
Bokov wasn’t stupid enough to criticize the Soviet line. An NKVD officer who did something like that-assuming anyone could be so idiotic-would soon discover just how far north of the Arctic Circle his country built camps. But, even if he wouldn’t say so out loud, Bokov was a lot more suspicious of the German people than Soviet propaganda suggested he ought to be.
That kid with the peach fuzz and the drippy nose and the mittens full of holes who was chucking rubble into a bucket…was he old enough to have toted a rifle or a Schmeisser the last year of the declared war? Sure he was. The Volkssturm had sucked in plenty of younger guys. And the scrawny bastard working next to him, the one with the gray stubble and the limp…What had he done before he got hurt? He warily watched Bokov, letting his eyes drift down or away whenever the NKVD man looked in his direction.
He probably wasn’t wearing an explosive vest right now-he was too skinny. But if he put one on, with a raggedy greatcoat to camouflage it, and went looking for a crowd of Russians…No, the only Germans Bokov was sure he could trust close to him were naked women. Even then, he’d heard stories that some of them deliberately spread disease to put occupiers out of action.
He didn’t know that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen that the Germans deserved their reputation for thoroughness. No one who’d been through one of their murder factories could possibly doubt it. Why wouldn’t they use infected prostitutes as a weapon?
Then a bullet cracked past his head. He forgot about subtle weapons like syphilitic whores. Not a goddamn thing subtle about rifle fire. He heard the report as he threw himself flat in the wreckage-strewn street. Had to be a sniper shooting from long range, if the round beat its sound by so much.
Another bullet pierced the air where he’d stood a moment before. It spanged off a paving stone behind him. A woman screeched and clutched at her arm. The ricochet must have got her.
Three or four Red Army soldiers, most of them carrying PPSh submachine guns, trotted purposefully in the direction from which the gunfire had come. The Germans in the work gang-except the wounded woman-started making themselves scarce. They knew the Soviet Union took hostages when somebody fired at its troops. They knew the Russians shot hostages, too.
Bokov didn’t have time to worry about that right now. He wriggled behind the burnt-out, rusting carcass of a German halftrack that had sat there since the last battle. One of these days, somebody would haul it off for scrap metal, but that hadn’t happened yet.
He waited for another shot. Unlike a soft-skinned vehicle, the halftrack really would protect him against small-arms fire. But the sniper didn’t shoot at Bokov or at the Red Army men now going after him. Since he’d failed, he seemed to want to get away and shoot at somebody else another time.
Cautiously, Captain Bokov peered out from behind the halftrack’s dented front bumper. If the sniper had outguessed him, if the son of a bitch had drawn a bead on the front end of the halftrack and was waiting for him to show himself…Well, in that case Bokov’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending.
But no. Bokov’s sigh reminded him he’d been holding his breath. The soldiers were heading for a block of flats that had to be almost a kilometer away. Yes, a marksman could hit from that range. Bokov didn’t like turning into a target-which wouldn’t matter a kopek’s worth to the damned Heydrichite with the scope-sighted rifle.
No more gunfire from the distant apartment block. Bokov stood up straight and brushed dust and mud off his uniform. He started toward the flats himself. His eyes flicked back and forth. If the sniper missed him again, he wanted to know where to dive next.
More soldiers came around a corner. They also headed for the apartments. They went in. Germans started coming out. Any of them over the age of twelve might have been the gunman. Bokov didn’t think any of them was. If the shooter wasn’t long gone, he would have been surprised.
A senior sergeant who’d been with the first bunch walked up to him. Saluting, the man said, “Well, Comrade Captain, we have enough of these bastards for the firing squads.”
“Good enough,” Bokov answered. “Did your men find any weapons or anti-Soviet propaganda in the flats?”
“No weapons, sir.” The underofficer suddenly looked apprehensive. “We weren’t really searching for propaganda. We could go back….”
“No, never mind,” Bokov said. The sergeant’s sigh of relief wasn’t much different from the one he’d let out himself behind the German halftrack. “If you had found something like that, it might have told us who’d want to harbor one of the bandits. Since you didn’t…” He shrugged. “Question the lot of them. If you don’t learn anything interesting, give them to the firing squads. If you do, bring the ones who know something over to NKVD headquarters and execute the rest. Have you got that?”
&
nbsp; “Da, Comrade Captain!” With another sharp salute, the senior sergeant repeated Bokov’s orders back to him. He wore several decorations. Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d led a company during the war. More than a few underofficers had, casualties among lieutenants and captains being what they were. His look and manner proclaimed him a competent man.
“All right, then. Carry on,” the NKVD officer said.
“Da,” the sergeant repeated. Then he added something he didn’t have to: “Glad the son of a bitch missed you, sir. This kind of crap just goes on and on. There doesn’t seem to be any end for it, does there? And too damned often we’ve got to carry off the poor bastard who stopped one. That’s no good, you know? We won this fucking war…didn’t we?”
Bokov could have sent him to the gulag for those last two imperfectly confident words. He could have, but he didn’t. The senior sergeant made it plain he cared whether an NKVD man lived or died. From a Red Army trooper, that was close to miraculous. By the way they talked, most Soviet soldiers had more sympathy for Heydrichites than they did for Chekists.
When Bokov got back to his office, Moisei Shteinberg greeted him with, “Well, Volodya, I hear you had an adventure this morning.”
“Afraid so, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov agreed. “Sniper missed me-missed me twice, in fact. He got away afterwards, dammit. The Fascist bandits will probably reprimand him for bad shooting.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.” Shteinberg was so serious, he destroyed Bokov’s small pleasure at his own joke. After a moment, the colonel went on, “We’ve been lucky over here for a while now. The Heydrichites haven’t used any radium against us, and they haven’t pulled off any outrages against us, either, the way they did in Paris and London.”
“How long can that last?” Bokov wondered aloud.
Colonel Shteinberg’s eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and narrow (not slanted like a Tartar’s-or like those of so many Russians, Bokov included-but definitely narrow). They were also very, very knowing. A Jew’s eyes, in other words. Bokov had never thought of them that way before, but when he did the notion fit like a rifle round in its chamber. Yes, a Jew’s eyes.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 37
