After studying Bokov a long moment, the Jew-the senior NKVD officer-gently inquired, “Have you no confidence in the ability of the Soviet system to defend itself against the Fascist bandits?”
What a minefield lay under one innocent-sounding question. “I have perfect confidence that our system will triumph in the end.” Captain Bokov answered with the greatest of care-and also took care not to show how careful he was. “But no one can know ahead of time the road by which it will triumph, or how strongly the reactionaries will be able to resist.”
“Khorosho, Volodya. Ochen khorosho.” The smile that flickered across Shteinberg’s face said he appreciate the response no less than he might have savored a particularly lovely passage in a new Shostakovich symphony. “Still, even if it’s a good answer, it doesn’t tell us how to keep such disasters from happening to us.”
Shrugging, Bokov said, “We work hard. We hope we stay lucky.” He paused, wondering whether to press his own luck. With Colonel Shteinberg pleased with him, he decided to: “And maybe we really ought to work more with the Anglo-Americans.”
No matter how pleased Shteinberg was, he shook his head without the least hesitation. “Nyet,” he said firmly. “Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. It won’t happen, and you’ve got no idea how much trouble you’ll end up in if you suggest it to anybody but me. I keep trying to tell you that, but you don’t want to listen.”
“All right, Comrade Colonel.” By the way Bokov said it, it wasn’t, but his superior wouldn’t come down on him for that. “Still seems a shame, though…”
“Sending a good officer to Kolyma would be a shame, too,” Shteinberg observed. Since Kolyma, in far eastern Siberia, was one of those places that lay well above the Arctic Circle, Bokov decided not to press the argument any further. Too bad, but you did have to live if they’d let you.
“Stand clear!” the demolitions guy yelled.
Bernie Cobb figured he was already well beyond anything the charge in the throat of the old mine could throw. He backed up a few more paces just the same. Some chances he got paid-not enough, but paid-to take. This wasn’t one of them.
Several other GIs also retreated a few steps. The first sergeant with the detonator looked around one more time. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and rammed the plunger home.
Boom! Bernie had heard a lot of explosions like this one. He watched dust and a few rocks fly out of the mouth of the shaft. None of the rocks came anywhere near his buddies and him. They all knew how far to back up by now.
As the dust settled, he saw that the shaft was closed, presumably for good. He nodded to himself. The fellow with the explosives knew what he was doing, which was reassuring. If you handled that shit, you needed to know what was going on. Anyone who didn’t would end up slightly dead, or more than slightly. And a butterfingers was liable to take some ordinary dogfaces with him, too.
The thought had hardly crossed Bernie’s mind before something out of the ordinary happened. Most of the time-all the time up till now-there’d been the explosion, and the roar as the mouth of the shaft fell in, and that was it.
Except that wasn’t it, not today. Things down underground kept falling over. It was like listening to a house of cards collapse, if you could imagine cards made of rock and each about the size of a bus.
“Holy Moses!” said one of the GIs standing alongside of Bernie.
“Son of a bitch!” another one added, meaning about the same thing.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said the first sergeant with the detonator. “I figured this was a little blind shaft like all the others I closed off. Sure don’t seem like it. God only knows what all’s under there. We sure as shit can’t get at it from here any more-you can sing that in church.”
For a bad moment, Bernie’d feared the top kick would order the men to get out their entrenching tools and start digging through the rubble clogging the top of the shaft. But, for a wonder, the man had better sense. Maybe he realized he’d get the shaft if he tried giving an order like that.
“Whatever was in there, you’re right-we won’t get at it now,” Bernie said, to drive home the point.
“Nope,” the demolitions man agreed. “Sounded like a whole bunch of dominoes falling over down below.”
“Yeah. It did!” Bernie grinned. The other guy’d come up with a better figure of speech than he had himself. Somewhere back in the States, an English teacher would have been happy if only she knew.
“Maybe we could use POWs to dig it out,” the first sergeant said thoughtfully.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Bernie didn’t want to come right out and say he didn’t think that was such a hot idea. He let his tone of voice do it for him.
And the demolitions man’s rueful chuckle said Bernie had got the message to Garcia. “Or maybe not,” the explosives expert said. “Some of those guys hate the Nazis worse’n we do. Can’t blame ’em, either-the Nazis got their asses shot off.”
“Sure, Sarge. But most of the POWs who hate the Nazis hate ’em because they lost the war, not because they started in the first place,” Bernie said.
“I know. But I wasn’t done yet,” the demolitions man answered. “Some of ’em hate the Nazis, like I said before. But there’s others-if they saw a chance to duck into a tunnel and run straight to Heydrich’s assholes, they’d do it like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Boy, would they ever. So maybe putting POWs to work here ain’t the smartest notion since Tom Edison came up with the fucking light bulb.”
Bernie grinned at him. “You find a couple of those fucking light bulbs, pass one on to me. All I’ve seen is the regular kind.”
“Shit, you don’t need a special light bulb to fuck these kraut broads,” the first sergeant answered. “A pack of Luckies’ll do it, or a few cans of K-rats. You can’t get your ashes hauled here, you ain’t half tryin’, man.”
Since Bernie’d discovered the same thing, he would have left it right there. But one of the guys in his squad-a new draftee, poor devil-said, “What about the orders against waddayacallit-against, uh, fraternization?” He pronounced the word with the excessive care of somebody who wasn’t sure what it meant.
“Well, what about ’em?” the first sergeant returned. “Look, buddy, nobody’s gonna make you fuck one of these German gals. But if you want to, they’re pushovers. Hell, after the Jerries knocked France out of the war, the French broads lay down and spread for ’em like nobody’s business. Now we’re the winners. And if you see how skinny some of these German gals are, you’ll know why they put out, too.”
“It’s against orders,” the new guy said. Some people were like that: if somebody told them what to do and what not to, they followed through right on the button. And they were happy acting that way. Bernie’d seen it before: it saved them the trouble of thinking for themselves. He figured a hell of a lot of Germans worked that way. What else did such a good job of explaining how they’d lined up behind Hitler?
“Fine. It’s against orders.” The demolitions man spoke with exaggerated patience. “I look at it this way. If the broads ain’t playing Mata Hari with me-or if they are, long as I don’t tell ’em anything they shouldn’t know-I’m gonna have me a good time. And the way things are nowadays, even if I come down venereal, so what? A couple of shots in the ass and I’m ready to hop in the sack again. Hell of an age we live in, ain’t it?”
“You come down venereal, the brass’ll give you a bad time,” the draftee observed.
“Sure they will-if they hear about it,” the first sergeant agreed indulgently. “Some people, though, some people know a corpsman or a sawbones who’ll give ’em some of this penicillin shit and not bother filling out all the paperwork afterwards, know what I mean?”
After some very visible thought, the new guy decided he did know. By his expression, he hadn’t been so surprised since his mother regretfully informed him the stork didn’t bring babies and leave them under cabbage leaves. And how long ago had that been? Maybe six months before he got his Greetings
letter from Selective Service? Bernie wouldn’t have been surprised.
But what the kid knew about the facts of life wasn’t Bernie’s problem. This underground collapse was, or could be. “Maybe we don’t use POWs to find out what happened under there,” he said. “We ought get there some kind of way, though.”
“Bulldozer crew. Nah, a coupla dozers,” the first sergeant said. “Beats working. Those mothers can dig faster’n a company’s worth of guys with picks and shovels.”
That idea Bernie did like. “You have the pull to get ’em?” he asked.
“Oh, hell, yes,” the demolitions man answered. “The first sergeant in an engineering battalion, he owes me from before the surrender. I tell him we need a couple of D-7s up here, they’ll come pronto. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”
Bernie snorted. “I been called a whole lotta things since I got sucked into the Army, but never pretty. Not till now, anyway.”
The demolitions man eyed him. “Yeah, well, I can see why.” The other guys in Bernie’s squad chuckled. Even the new draftee thought that was funny.
“It’s okay. You won’t put Lana Turner out of business any time soon, either,” Bernie said. The first sergeant grinned at him. They’d probably never see each other again, so they could both sling the sass without getting hot and bothered.
It also wouldn’t bother Bernie if the bulldozers uncovered something juicy. He didn’t expect it-he’d given up expecting anything much-but it wouldn’t bother him one bit.
XXI
One of the first tricks Heydrich’s fanatics had tried was still among the nastier ones they used. As a matter of fact, the Germans had trotted this one out even before the surrender, so maybe some bright Wehrmacht Feldwebel dreamt it up. Stretch a wire across a road at just above windshield height on a jeep and you’d get anybody who was inside by the neck.
Scuttlebutt said the diehards had decapitated a few GIs with that little stunt. Lou Weissberg didn’t believe it, and he was in a better position to know than most American soldiers. He supposed it might be possible, if the wire was stretched good and tight and the jeep was really hauling ass. But the next confirmed report he saw would be the first.
Which didn’t mean a wire stretched across a road couldn’t put an unlucky or careless dogface in the hospital. In miserable winter weather like this, snow alternating with freezing rain, you’d never see a wire till you were way too close to stop.
That was why the jeep Lou rode in, like most in the American zone, had a wire cutter mounted on the hood. (Most jeeps in the British, French, and Soviet zones also mounted wire cutters these days.) The contraption, made from a couple of welded steel bars, would part any wire like Moses parting the Red Sea.
These days, casualties from murder wires were few and far between. Lou wondered why the fanatics kept running the risk of stretching them across highways. He supposed it was because they’d got used to doing it when it still accomplished something. It wasn’t as if they were the only military force ever to get bogged down in routine.
He remarked on that to his current driver, a swarthy fellow who went by Rocky and had five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. Rocky swore and spat as the jeep rattled along between Nuremberg and Munich. “Fuck, Lieutenant, nice to think something these assholes try don’t work so hot,” he said.
“Well…yeah.” Lou hadn’t thought of it like that. He wished Rocky hadn’t, either. The driver had a grease gun on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry. Lou carried a.30-caliber M2 carbine, which gave him about as much firepower as a submachine gun. But he also manned the jeep’s pintle-mounted.50-caliber Browning. That baby could reach out over a mile, and kill anything it reached. A damn nice weapon to have.
All the same, he and Rocky both kind of hunkered down whenever they passed a wrecked German or American vehicle by the side of the road. They did that at least every few hundred yards-sometimes a lot more often, where fighter-bombers had rocketed or just shot up a column on the move.
You never knew whether some bastard lurked in or behind a burnt-out hulk. If he popped up and let fly with an antitank rocket, your fancy.50-caliber machine gun might not do you one goddamn bit of good. You’d have a Panzerfaust up the ass, and he’d duck back down before you could even get a shot off at him.
“Almost 1947,” Rocky said after they rolled past a seventy-ton King Tiger tank that some colossal explosion had flipped over onto its side. Lou tried to imagine what it took to do that to one of the fearsomely lethal-and fearsomely immense-panzers. He had trouble coming up with anything plausible.
Answering Rocky seemed easier. “I won’t be sorry to see the end of 1946-I’ll tell you that,” he said.
But then the driver said, “Back when those Nazi cocksuckers signed the surrender, did you figure you’d still be here now?”
“Maybe to get rid of war criminals,” Lou said uncomfortably. “I didn’t think the fighting’d still be going. Who could have?”
“Yeah. Who?” Rocky gunned the jeep to hustle past a dead Panzer IV. Those babies weren’t nearly so dangerous as King Tigers-they made a pretty fair match for, say, a Sherman. The krauts had had a lot more of them than King Tigers, but nowhere near enough. A rocket had blown the turret clean off of this one. When the IV proved really and truly dead, Rocky went on, “Me, I won’t be sorry if Congress ships us all home. Only way we’ll ever get there, looks like to me.”
“You want to fight another war in fifteen, twenty years?” Lou demanded.
“Shit, Captain, I’ll worry about that then-or I’ll let my nephew worry about it. He’s like six or seven now,” Rocky answered. “What I know for sure is, I don’t want to fight this motherfucking war any more. I’ve paid my dues and then some. Fifteen, twenty years till we go again? I think that sounds pretty goddamn good.”
Lou stared at him, as he might have stared at a blue giraffe in a zoo. Were people really shortsighted enough to think like that? Of course they were. Why else was the incoming Eightieth Congress full of folks who wanted to pretend that the United States could walk away from Europe without anything bad happening afterwards? But they weren’t pretending. They really believed it. That was even scarier.
They drove through some trees. Lou didn’t know whether to swing the heavy machine gun to the left or the right. He feared it wouldn’t do much good either way, because he couldn’t see very far in either direction. Well, with luck any lurking German fanatics also couldn’t see very far.
Only trouble with that was, he couldn’t know ahead of time where the fanatics lurked. They already had a pretty good notion where the road was. They could have their rocket launchers or machine guns all sighted in….
Spang! The wire cutter mounted on the jeep’s hood did its job. “Greatest thing since-” Rocky started.
He never got sliced bread out. The world blew up before he could.
That was how it seemed to Lou, anyhow. One second, he was grinning along with Rocky. This $1.29 wire-cutting wonder damn well was the greatest thing since sliced bread. American ingenuity and know-how beat the evil fanatics again. It was an ending straight out of a Hollywood serial.
Except it wasn’t. The next second, Lou flew through the air with the greatest of ease. He fetched up against a tree trunk on the far side of the road with an “Oy!” followed a moment later by a louder, more heartfelt “Shit!” That stab when he inhaled had to mean at least one fractured rib. If he hadn’t been a good boy and worn his helmet the way orders said he was supposed to, he likely would have had a fractured skull to go with it. He wasn’t a hundred percent positive he didn’t anyway. He was sure as hell seeing double as he struggled to sit up.
And, at that, he’d been lucky. Getting blown clear of the jeep was the best thing that could have happened to him. Well, actually, not getting into the jeep at all would have been luckier, but it was way too late to worry about that now. Way too late to worry about the blasted jeep, too. It had slewed sideways and caught fire. Whatever blasted
it to hell and gone must have killed Rocky. He wouldn’t have been pretty even without the flames. He seemed to be in several chunks….
Muzzily, Lou tried to figure out what the devil had happened. They’d taken care of that damn wire, and then…. “Shit,” Lou said again, on a different note this time. Cutting the wire must have touched off whatever explosive charge the fanatics had hooked up to it.
Explosive charge and fragments: it wouldn’t have done that to Rocky-and to the jeep-without plenty of fragments. A buried 155mm shell, maybe? The blast seemed about right for something like that. If Lou had been Catholic, he would have made the sign of the cross. He realized how lucky he was not to be ground round himself. Lucky, yeah-and Rocky caught some of the fragments that would have torn him up instead.
The only good thing you could say about Rocky was that he never knew what hit him. One second, he was being happy about the wire cutters. The next? Blam! No, he couldn’t have suffered much, not when he ended up looking like…that.
Lou hauled himself to his feet. That made the rib or ribs stab him again. It also informed him that one of his ankles could have been working better.
He scowled at the wire cutters, which he now saw through a curtain of flames and smoke-and through a deeper curtain of apprehension. If you took them off jeeps, the fanatics’ wires would start causing casualties again. But if you left them on, how many wires would turn out to be hooked up to big old artillery shells? You’d find out pretty damn quick. Boy, would you ever, the hard way.
Something warm dripped from Lou’s nose. Blood, he discovered when he wiped it on his sleeve. No surprise there. Blast could have broken both eardrums as easily as not. It could have torn up his lungs, too, if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling. If could have done all kinds of things it hadn’t-quite-done.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 38
