Bernie barely had room to snake a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. After he lit up, one of the guys who’d made it plainest that he thought Bernie was an idiot tried to cadge a smoke from him. Bernie was tempted to tell him to shove it. The other guy likely would have done that to him. But he’d learned you always shared in the field-if you ran out of this or that, somebody else would share with you.
He couldn’t help saying, “I don’t look like such a jerk now that I’ve got something you want, huh?”
“Yeah, well-” The fellow did manage to seem faintly embarrassed. He held the Chesterfield out to Bernie. “Can you give me a light, too?”
“Jeez Louise!” Bernie said, but he did.
After a while, the truck stopped at a checkpoint. An MP with a grease gun eyed the soldiers in the back with a look that said he thought they were all SS men in disguise. “Who won the American League pennant in ’44?” he demanded fiercely.
“The Browns. Only time they’ve ever done it,” Bernie answered before anybody else could. “I was already over here by then, but I know that.”
He figured the MP would shut up, but the guy didn’t. “Did they win the Series?” the snowdrop asked. “One of you other clowns-not him.”
“No,” said the soldier who didn’t want to be in Germany at all. “The Cards beat ’em in…was it seven games?”
“Six,” Bernie said.
“Okay.” Now the MP was satisfied. “You guys are Americans, all right. You can go on.”
“What the hell are we getting into?” Bernie asked.
“You think they tell me what’s going on?” the MP said. The PFC driving the truck put it back in gear. It rolled down into the valley.
“Wonder what they woulda done if we didn’t know baseball,” said one of the GIs in the back.
“Fucked us over and wasted a bunch of everybody’s time,” Bernie said. “Then when it finally did get straightened out they would’ve acted like it was our fault for being such a dumb bunch of cocksuckers.”
“You don’t like MPs, do you?” the soldier asked him.
“Gee, how’d you figure that out?” Bernie said, deadpan. Almost everybody back there laughed.
It got warmer as the truck went down into the valley-not warm, but warmer. Bernie munched on part of a D-ration bar. The damn thing tasted the way he’d always thought a chocolate-flavored candle would. It was too waxy to be enjoyable, but a whole bar would keep you running all day. D-rats were supposed to have all the vitamins and stuff you needed. Bernie didn’t know about that. He did know they were the perfect antidote for prunes; if you had to live on them for two or three days, the memory, among other things, lingered for quite a while afterwards. But it was what he had on him. Unlike these new guys, he didn’t feel like scrounging from people he didn’t know.
After a while, the truck stopped. “Ritz Hotel!” the driver shouted. “All ashore that’s going ashore!”
“Funny guy-a fuckin’ comedian,” Bernie said. “He should take it on the radio…and then stuff it.”
“There you go, man,” said the kid who didn’t want to be there. They agreed about something, anyhow.
One by one, the GIs hopped out. It wasn’t the Ritz. It was a bunch of olive-drab tents set down in the middle of the valley. A barbed-wire perimeter and machine-gun nests protected by thick layers of sandbags protected the camp from direct assault.
“What the fuck is all this?” said one of the soldiers who’d got out of the truck with Bernie.
“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. It feels like a trap,” Bernie said. The other soldier gave him a funny look, but he set his jaw, nodded, and waved to the mountains reaching up to the sky on either side. “Fucking fanatics want to throw stuff down on us, who’s gonna stop ’em? High ground counts for a lot.” He spoke from experience, which was something the other guy probably didn’t have.
A captain came out of a tent, followed by an older guy in black-dyed fatigues without any insignia-some kind of civilian attached to the Army. “It’s not a trap, on account of we hold the heights,” the captain said. By the way he talked, he came from New York or New Jersey or somewhere around there. “We hold this whole goddamn valley, matter of fact. And somewhere under it, I hope like hell, is Reinhard Heydrich. We’re gonna dig the son of a bitch out.”
“How many other Nazis has he got with him?” asked one of the other fellows just off the deuce-and-a-half. “They gonna shoot it out with us?” He didn’t sound delighted at the prospect.
“However many pals he has, that’s their tough luck. We’ve got what we need to blast ’em all,” the captain answered. He was skinny and sharp-nosed. A Jew, Bernie judged. So was the fellow in black fatigues, unless he missed his guess. No wonder the officer’d stayed so gung-ho, then. Bernie wasn’t sure he had himself. Then the captain said, “There’s a million bucks on Heydrich’s head, remember. A cool million, and you’ll never hear from the IRS. Think about that, guys.”
They thought about it. They liked it…better than they had before, anyhow. Bernie looked down the valley. Other encampments were in place. And…He started laughing.
“What’s funny?” the captain snapped.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I been here before-patrol last year.” He remembered the farmhouse with the dirty pictures. “Maybe I walked on Heydrich’s grave.”
The captain’s grin made him look years younger. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you did.”
XXIX
There was a graveyard up on the mountainside. The Americans in the valley paid it no attention. Why should they? By the tumbled headstones and leaning crosses over the graves, it had been there a long, long time. No one shot at the Amis from the position. No one down on the valley floor seemed to remember it was around.
All of which suited Reinhard Heydrich fine. One of those leaning crosses was a dummy. It concealed a periscope, from which an observer surveyed the scene below. Heydrich admired the conceit. He’d filched it from a Russian field fortification the Waffen-SS somehow smoked out. This was an improved version. The observer had a field telephone. He wasn’t actually in a grave, but in a passage that led down to the main mine. If he saw trouble coming, he could get away. Explosives in the passage would make sure nobody followed him.
“They keep bringing in more troops and more digging equipment, Herr Reichsprotektor,” he said now, his voice tinny in Heydrich’s ear. “It sure looks like they know something. What are we going to do?”
Heydrich didn’t want to believe the Amis could know where his hideout lay. They’d come through here before, done some superficial damage, and gone on their way. They’d treated this valley no differently from two dozen others in the Alps.
They were treating it differently now, dammit. How? Heydrich wondered. Why? Had they found one of the drops where his people communicated with the outside world? He couldn’t believe it. The drops were well sited, and everybody who knew about them had the discipline to use them discreetly.
A traitor? Heydrich was sure that would have been Hans Klein’s guess. And it wasn’t unlikely, worse luck. Somebody who decided a million dollars would set him up for life could cause a lot of trouble. But everyone who was supposed to be underground here was accounted for. Some men in Jochen Peiper’s underground center knew where this one was. They would have betrayed both of them, though. And there was no sign Peiper’s center was in trouble. One of the outside connections, then? Even if the worst happened here, Heydrich hoped the pigdog wouldn’t live to enjoy his foul loot.
Or-a new thought-could one of the laborers who’d dug most of this place out of the living rock have survived in spite of everything? Could he have figured out what he’d been working on? Could he have gone to the Amis with the story? Would they have believed somebody like that?
Heydrich shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered. The extermination camps were most efficient. He knew that. He damn well should have. Hadn’t he set the Einsatzgruppen in motion against the Jews of Eastern Eu
rope? Hadn’t he organized the Wannsee Conference, which got all the antisemitic forces in the Reich moving on parallel tracks against the Jewish enemy? So, no, surviving laborers were anything but likely.
But the observer in the graveyard heard him, which he hadn’t intended. “It’s not impossible, Herr Reichsprotektor. I only wish it were. But they’re really here,” the man said. “What will we do? What can we do?”
That was a better question than Heydrich wished it were. He and his men had escape routes. They would have sufficed to let the Germans give most bands of attackers the slip. But the American net was cast wider than Heydrich had ever dreamt it could be.
Decision crystallized in the Reichsprotektor’s mind. “For now, we sit tight,” he answered. “They may have a good notion we’re here, but they can’t be sure. Finding us won’t be easy. Neither will digging us out.”
“I sure hope you’re right, sir,” the observer said, and rang off.
Heydrich hoped he was right, too. The generators would run out of fuel before too long-or maybe he’d have to turn them off to keep their noise from betraying itself to listening devices. The mines had good natural ventilation, but even so…. Heydrich tried to imagine running the war for the liberation of the Reich by candle-and lantern light.
Napoleon had fought his wars that way. So had Clausewitz, and even Moltke. None of them, though, had tried to do it from hundreds of meters underground. The sun rose every day for them. It never rose for Heydrich. When the candles and lanterns ran low…
“Klein!” he called.
“Yes, sir?” The Oberscharfuhrer wasn’t far away. Heydrich hadn’t thought he would be.
The decision that had crystallized broke up and re-formed. “Looks to me like we’ll have to try to break out,” the Reichsprotektor said. “We have…some people who won’t be able to fight or to keep up. You know who I’m talking about?” He waited for Klein to nod, then went on, “Good. I want you to see that’s taken care of, all right?”
Hans Klein nodded again. “I’ll make sure of it. Too bad, nicht wahr? Such a waste, after we went to all the trouble to grab them.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Heydrich sighed. He wanted an atom bomb as fast as he could get one after the Reich was free again. Germany needed that weapon. “Why don’t you leave Wirtz and Diebner for now? We can always tend to them later if we have to. The others…It is too bad, but they’d better disappear.”
“Right you are, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein sketched a salute and hurried away.
Reinhard Heydrich sighed once more. He didn’t know how or why things had gone wrong in the valley, but they had. Not everything worked out the way you wished it would. He patted his tunic. He had a cyanide capsule in his breast pocket, and others in other places about his person. Everybody down here did. Even if the Amis caught him, they wouldn’t question him or make sport of him or try him. He just had to bite down. If Himmler had done it, Heydrich was sure he could, too.
“There, Captain.” Shmuel Birnbaum pointed to what had been a mineshaft till an explosive charge closed up the front of it. “That one heads straight down. You could do like the people in the Jules Verne story and go straight to the center of the earth.”
“I read that book when I was a kid,” Lou Weissberg said. He’d read it in English, of course. Birnbaum would have seen it in Russian, or maybe Yiddish, or possibly even German. And it was really written in French. Ideas bounced across the world like rubber balls.
The main idea in Lou’s head now was seeing Heydrich dead. Maybe, if you chopped off the German Freedom Front’s head, the body would flop like a chicken that met the hatchet and then fall over and die. Maybe. Alevai. Lou muttered to himself. Please, God. Don’t You owe us a little something, anyway? It wasn’t exactly a prayer-more a bitter question. When the Nazis efficiently went about the business of murdering Jews by the million, God showed He’d got out of the habit of listening to prayers.
If God wouldn’t take care of things (or if God wasn’t there to take care of things, which Lou found much too likely), mere mortals would have to do their goddamnedest. Lou waved to the crews of the waiting bulldozers and steam shovels. “Come and get ’em!” he yelled, as if he were calling them to dinner.
They rumbled forward on their tracks, filling the pure mountain air with the stink of diesel exhaust. Dozer blades and the steam shovels’ buckets dug into the mountainside. Earth and stones went into piles off to either side of the closed shaft. This place wouldn’t be nearly so scenic after the excavators got through. Maybe that bothered the Germans who lived here. Lou was no tourist. He hadn’t come for the view.
Along with the dirt and boulders, the earth-moving equipment also dislodged timbers that had helped support the sides and roof of the shaft. Over the blat! of his engine, a dozer jockey shouted, “Damn things look like they’ve been here since B.C. You sure we’re in the right place, Captain?”
Lou wasn’t sure of anything. The people working under him needed to know that like they needed a hole in the head, though. He didn’t even look back at Shmuel Birnbaum as he nodded. “This is all camouflage,” he declared. “C’mon-you know the Germans do shit like that.”
“Hope you’re right, sir,” the dozer driver said, and plunged forward again.
So do I, Lou thought. If this didn’t work out the way he hoped it would, if he didn’t come up with a big burrow full of Nazis if not with the Reichsprotektor’s head on a platter, the Army would be only too happy to separate him from the service and boot his butt back to New Jersey. Chances were it would throw Howard Frank out, too. They would get exactly what eighty percent of the soldiers in Germany craved most: a ride home. It was, naturally, the last thing either of them wanted. If that wasn’t the Army way of doing things, Lou couldn’t imagine what would be.
The earth-movers were tearing the living crap out of the opening to the mineshaft. Lou wondered if they would just peel back the whole mountainside to get at whatever it concealed. Wouldn’t they fill the valley floor below with rocks and dirt if they did?
But the guys who ran the growling, farting, grinding machinery were more purposeful than that. They stayed on the old mine’s trail. Before long, the dozer blades and the steam shovels’ steel jaws clanged off some serious boulders. Here and there, they had to back out so demolition crews could make big ones into, well, littler ones, anyhow.
That dozer driver said, “Big old honking landslide, I bet. This woulda closed the place down better than our charge of dynamite.”
“Just keep going, goddammit.” Lou had the courage of his convictions. Of course, Hitler had also had the courage of his. Now, am I right, or nothing but a stubborn jackass? Is it the good turtle soup, or merely the mock? Lou wondered. One way or the other, I’ll find out.
Bulldozers and steam shovels kept banging through rocks. The drivers shouted to one another. Lou couldn’t always make out what they said. That was bound to be just as well. When one of them jerked a thumb in his direction and then spun an index finger in a circle next to his temple, Lou couldn’t stay in much doubt about what the GI meant.
Neither could Shmuel Birnbaum. “They think you’re crazy,” the DP said. “So they think I’m crazy, too.”
“Yeah, well, fuck ’em all,” Lou answered. “Long as they do what I tell ’em to, who gives a rat’s ass what they think?” Birnbaum gave him a look. Lou had no trouble translating it-something like You’re the champion of democracy? And, in a weird way, Lou was. But democracy and Army life mixed like water and sodium-they caught fire when they touched. What did democracy give rise to in the Army? We want to go home! and damn all else. The system might stink, but it worked.
The sun sank lower and lower, toward the pass in the west. Shadows stretched. A chilly breeze started moaning. Then one of the dozer drivers urgently waved to the rest. That had to mean Hang on! His cry of amazement pierced the diesel roar: “Fuck me up the asshole!” He pointed to something Lou couldn’t make out.
After scuttling like a pair o
f ragged claws to position himself better, Lou did see what had astonished him: a black hole driven straight into the side of the mountain. Sure as shit, the mine went on after the supposed cave-in. Which meant…well, they’d have to see what it meant. One thing it meant was that Shmuel Birnbaum wasn’t crazy-or not on account of that, anyway.
Lou was about to send men into that hole when explosive charges went off somewhere deep inside. The black opening fell in on itself. A great cloud of dust and more than a few rocks-some up to fist-sized and beyond-flew out. They clattered off the olive-drab machinery. One smashed a steam shovel’s windshield. Another caught a bulldozer driver in the shoulder. His howl said it sure didn’t do him any good.
But what those mine blasts said…Lou put it into plain, everyday English: “We’ve got the motherfuckers!”
Night. Black night. Black as the inside of an elephant. Cold, too. Bernie Cobb wished he had an overcoat, not just his thin, crappy Eisenhower jacket. He laughed at himself. Why don’t you wish for a hotel room and a bottle of bourbon and a naked blonde with legs up to there? If you were gonna wish, you should wish.
It might be dark, but it wasn’t quiet. Way down the mountainside from where he crouched in the gloom, Army engineers tore away at the blocked mineshaft. Something was sure as hell going on down there. Bernie still thought that was funny as hell. He’d been there when the demolitions guy closed that hole in the first place. If it turned out to be important now, the krauts had done a fuck of a job of disguising it. Well, they were good at that stuff. He’d seen as much since the minute he got to Europe.
Generators grunted down there, powering spotlights that bathed the work scene in harsh white light. Bernie looked every which way but that one. When he watched what was going on down there, his eyes lost their dark adaptation. He wondered how many of the guys scattered over the mountainside with him would think of that. Odds were most of ’em were rubbernecking for all they were worth.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 53
