Any second now, though, they’d go do it instead of talking about it. If he was gonna get ’em, best to do it while they were still bunched up. As quietly as he could, he pulled the grenade’s pin. Then he rose up onto his knees and flung it into their midst. He heard a thump, a startled exclamation, a blam! and all the screams he could’ve hoped for.
He fired a short burst from his grease gun. More screams! “Jerries!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Whole buncha fuckin’ Jerries!” He squeezed off another burst and bellyflopped down behind the boulder again.
Just in time, too. Quite a few of the Germans had to be hurt. They all had to be discombobulated. All the same, some of them were pros. Bullets from one of their nasty assault rifles spanged off the boulder in front of Bernie and snarled by overhead. He slid to the left and returned fire again, more to give the krauts something new to worry about than in the serious expectation of hitting them.
If too many GIs had ignored the officer’s orders, he was screwed. The Germans would flank him out and slaughter him like a fat hog on barbecue day. Sure as shit, here came urgent running footsteps, around toward the right side of the boulder. Hardly even looking, Bernie twisted and fired. His magazine ran dry, but not before he won himself a screech and a moan from the Jerries.
And then fire started coming in on the krauts from both sides. M-1s and grease guns could put a lot of lead in the air. “Thank you, Jesus!” Bernie murmured-he did still have friends in the neighborhood, after all. With those friends raking the Germans, they had too much on their plate to care about finishing him off.
He stuck another magazine on his submachine gun and banged away at them again. It wasn’t aimed fire, but it didn’t have to be. If you spat out enough bullets, some of them were bound to bite. And even the ones that didn’t scared the crap out of people they just missed.
“Surrender!” somebody shouted in English, following it with “Hande hoch!”
Damned if that wasn’t the officer who’d told everybody to sit tight. He’d turned out to be 112 percent right-probably right enough to win himself a medal.
Bernie wasn’t sure any Germans were left to surrender. But someone called, “Waffenstillstand! Bitte, Waffenstillstand!” They wanted a truce. They even said please. No matter what they wanted or how polite they were, Bernie didn’t stand up.
XXX
When Lou Weissberg heard the shooting start on the mountainside above him, he thought he was really and truly screwed. How many troops had the Nazis hidden in this stinking subterranean fortress of theirs? A division’s worth? That had to be impossible…didn’t it?
But the shooting up there didn’t last long. As soon as it stopped, he forgot about it, because the diehards on the far slope were still doing their goddamnedest to murder him. And then, off in the distance, he saw the headlights of a truck convoy coming down from the head of the pass. He breathed a long heartfelt sigh of relief. As soon as the reinforcements arrived, his ass was saved.
And a great burden slid off his shoulders. He might have fucked up, but the radioman hadn’t. As long as somebody’d kept his head, the story would probably have a happy ending.
Not right away, though. “They better kill those lights, or the krauts’ll knock the shit out of ’em when they get a little closer,” said a GI not far from him.
Sure as hell, mortar bombs did start dropping near the oncoming trucks. One of them took a direct hit, caught fire, and slewed off the road. The other drivers suddenly got smart. Almost in unison, their headlights went out.
The trucks stopped close enough to let Lou hear the order the officer in charge gave his men: “We’re going up that hill, and we’re gonna clean those assholes out!” Then he said one more thing: “Come on!”
They went. Every so often, one of them would shoot at something. That let the diehards know they were on the way. Machine-gun tracers stabbed through the night toward them. Other tracers replied-the new guys had machine guns of their own. And they had a mortar crew. Lou cheered when red sparks rose steeply into the air. But the American bombs burst short of the enemy positions. The Germans, damn them, had more range because they were shooting downhill.
Even so, they could see the writing on the wall. They quit pounding the men by the mineshaft. A couple of MG42s-Hitler’s saws, the Russians called the vicious German machine guns-kept spraying death at the Americans advancing upslope. What were the fanatics not manning those machine guns doing? Trying to get away, unless Lou had lost his marbles.
He hardly cared. “Jesus,” he said. “I think I lived through it.” He realized how much he wanted a cigarette. He also realized a sniper still might ventilate his brainpan if he lit up. Regretfully, he didn’t. He discovered he had a hunk of D-ration bar in the same pocket as his Luckies. Gnawing on the hard chocolate wasn’t the same, but it was better than nothing.
He knew the Jerries’ jig was up when the MG42s stopped ripping the air apart. Maybe their crews were dead, or maybe those men were trying to escape, too. Again, he had trouble caring. Nobody was trying to shoot him right this minute. That, he cared about. A few spatters of gunfire went on, up there on the mountainside, when Germans and Americans got too close to one another. But the main event was done.
Part of Lou wanted to sleep for a week. The rest wondered whether he’d ever sleep again with so much adrenaline zinging through him. Shaking his head, he stood up and started trying to think like an officer once more. “Do what you can for the wounded,” he told the men who’d gone through the fight with him. “We should have medics here real soon now-docs, too, I hope.”
“Some of these guys are bleeding bad, sir,” a GI said out of the night. “They don’t get plasma or something pretty damn quick, they ain’t gonna make it.”
“Yeah,” Lou said unhappily. He didn’t know what else to say, because he couldn’t do one single thing about it.
Then he heard footsteps coming down from above. “Don’t shoot, nobody!” someone called in accents surely American. “I gotta talk to the guy in charge of diggin’ out this mine.”
“That’s me,” Lou called. “What’s up?”
The Yank thumped closer. Or was he an English-speaking German with an explosive vest, intent on vengeance? Dr. Freud would call that paranoia, Lou thought. But you’re not paranoid when they’re really after you, he retorted to himself. And then all that silly fluff blew out of his head, because the guy said, “We’ve got Heydrich’s body up there. Somebody’s one rich motherfucker.”
“Heydrich?” Lou said dazedly. “For sure? No shit?”
“Looks just like him-we’ve all seen enough posters to know. His face ain’t hardly tore up at all,” the GI answered. “Papers on the body say he’s some horseshit noncom, but you know what that kinda crap’s gonna be worth. And there’s another German noncom still breathin’ who says it’s him.”
“Heydrich,” Lou said again. He could hardly believe it, even if it was exactly what he’d been trying to accomplish. “Take me to him. This I gotta see.”
He stumped uphill after the soldier. He stumbled in the darkness a couple of times, but he didn’t fall. Before long, he was breathing hard. A desk job with the CIC didn’t keep him in great shape. But he would have walked up the side of Mt. Everest on his hands to see Reinhard Heydrich dead.
No more shooting on this slope. Up ahead, a couple of flashlight beams marked the place where the GI was taking him. He saw American soldiers and guys in Feldgrau milling around. All the Germans kept hands above head.
“Here comes the captain,” his escort called so nobody would get jumpy. “He wants to see the body.”
Lots of German corpses in uniform lay in a compact knot, with others out around the fringes. “Looks like a bunch of ’em got taken by surprise,” Lou remarked.
“Yes, sir,” the soldier agreed. “They came out right behind one of our guys. He chucked a grenade into ’em, and then he started shooting ’em up.”
“Good for him,” Lou said. The air stank of blood and sh
it and smokeless powder. One of the GIs shone a flashlight at him. He waved. The beam swerved away: he was judged all right. He raised his voice a little: “Show me Heydrich.”
“Over here, sir,” another man called. He had a flashlight, too, and pointed it at a pale, still face on the ground. “This bastard.”
Lou bent down. The dead man’s pale, narrow eyes were still open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. The face was long and thin. So was the nose, which had a slight kink in it. “Son of a gun,” Lou whispered. “I think it really is him.” He undid the corpse’s tunic. Whoever this guy was, he’d taken grenade fragments and bullets in the chest and belly. “Shine it under his arm,” Lou told the GI with the light. “I want to check his blood group.”
He had to wipe away blood before he could make out the tattoo. It was an A-just what he wanted to see. “Well?” the soldier asked.
“Yeah.” Lou felt as if he’d swallowed a big slug of straight bourbon. “It matches.” He paused, remembering. “The guy who brought me up here said you’d captured another Jerry in noncom’s clothes who could ID him.”
“That’s right, sir.” The other American turned away for a moment. “Hey, Manny! Bring that cocksucker over here. The captain wants him.”
“Sure,” said somebody-presumably Manny. He spoke a couple of words of rudimentary German: “Du! Komm!”
Unlike Heydrich, the man who came over to Lou blinked when the GI shone a flashlight in his eyes. He looked like a guy who’d been a noncom for a long time-put a different uniform on him and he would have made a perfect American tech sergeant. “Who are you?” Lou asked. He pointed to the dead man. “How do you know this is Heydrich?”
“I am Oberscharfuhrer Johannes Klein,” the noncom answered. “I was the Reichsprotektor’s driver, and then his aide when we went underground.”
“Wow,” Lou said. Klein’s name was on his list, too-on all kinds of CIC lists. Nobody seemed to know what he looked like. Well, here he was, in the flesh. Quite a bit of flesh, too. Whatever the diehards had been doing underground, they hadn’t been starving. Lou dragged his attention back to the business at hand. “So what happened here? What went wrong for you?”
“He made a mistake,” Klein answered matter-of-factly. He sounded like an American noncom giving an officer the back of his hand, too. “He thought the diversionary attack would pull your men off this side of the mountain. He turned out to be wrong. We had just come out when….” He spread his hands. One of them had blood on it, but it wasn’t his.
Another German came over. He stared down at Heydrich’s body for a long time. “So he is truly dead,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lou.
“What difference does it make to you? Who are you, anyway?” Lou asked him auf Deutsch.
“I am Karl Wirtz,” the man answered in fluent British English.
For a second, the name didn’t mean anything to Lou. Then it did. “The physicist!” he exclaimed. Wirtz nodded. Lou tried to ask something that wasn’t too dumb. The best he could come up with was, “Where are your, uh, colleagues?”
“Poor Professor Diebner lies over there. Sadly, he is dead,” Wirtz said. “The others…I do not know what has happened to the others.” He nodded toward Klein. “But I believe the Oberscharfuhrer may.”
“How about it?” Lou said. Johannes Klein only shrugged. Wirtz’s grimace told what he thought of that. Lou thought the same thing. “So-you disposed of them, did you?”
Klein shrugged again. “At the Reichsprotektor’s order. They could never have kept up during the escape.” His shoulders went up and down one more time. “Fat lot of good it turned out to do.”
Do you always kill people on your own side? Lou didn’t ask it, however much he wanted to. He was too sure Klein would look at him and say something like Of course I do, if my superior tells me to. He’d already been down that road with too many other Germans. So he stuck to what might be immediately useful: “Where were you going to go after you came out of your tunnel?”
“We were to split up and head for safe houses in the next valley,” Klein said. “The only one I know of is the one I was to go to. And then-” He stopped.
“Then what? Come on-talk,” Lou said. He didn’t believe Klein knew about only one safe house, either. If he was Heydrich’s aide, wouldn’t he have found out about plenty of them?
“Well, you will have heard this by now, I’m sure.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to be talking himself into talking, so to speak. After a moment, he went on, “Sooner or later, Jochen Peiper’s people would pick us up and take us to his headquarters.”
“Ah?” Lou’s ears quivered and came to attention. “And where’s that?”
“I have no idea. I never tried to find out. I suppose the Reichsprotektor must have known, but I don’t think anyone else down below”-Klein stamped his foot on the mountainside-“had any idea. What we weren’t told, we couldn’t give away if we got caught.”
“Huh,” Lou said. “We’ll see about that.” The kraut gave a much more elaborate denial here than he had about the safe houses. Maybe that meant he was bullshitting. On the other hand, maybe it meant he was telling the exact truth. Some remorseless squeezing of everybody left alive who’d come up out of the ground would tell the tale. Lou tried another question: “What do you know about Peiper?”
“Only that the Reichsprotektor thought he was an able man,” Klein said.
Lou grunted. He didn’t know as much about Jochen Peiper as he wished he did. Nobody outside the fanatics’ shadowy network did. Peiper had been a promising and rapidly rising young panzer officer in the Waffen-SS till he dropped out of sight late in 1943. Since V-E Day, Heydrich had been the German Freedom Front’s visible face. Could Peiper step out of the shadows and keep the enemy fighting? Lou hoped like hell the answer was no.
The ground under his feet rumbled and jerked. “What was that?” Professor Wirtz yipped.
“Explosives and incendiaries,” Klein said calmly. “The Reichsprotektor started the timer before we left. No one will learn anything from what we could not bring.” Even now, he sounded proud of Heydrich.
“Aw, shit,” Lou said wearily. Germanic thoroughness could drive you nuts. It could also screw you to the wall. Not wanting to think about that, he switched to English and asked, “Where’s the guy who jumped on the Jerries after they came out of their hole in the ground?”
“’At’s me.” The dogface who came up looked like…a dogface. “Name’s Bernie Cobb. Watcha need, sir?”
“Well, Cobb, there’s a Jewish DP down by the mineshaft”-Lou hoped like anything that Birnbaum was still in one piece-“who’s got a pretty fair claim to part of the reward for Heydrich. I’d say you’re odds-on for the rest.”
“Holy fuck.” Cobb started to laugh. “Wasn’t so long ago I told a buddy I’d never catch the asshole on my own. Shows what I know, don’t it?”
“Sure does,” Lou sad. “But you were on the ball, and it paid off.”
“When the shooting started, we wanted to go down and give you guys a hand,” Cobb said. “But one of our officers held us in position. That’s why I was at where I was at. He oughta get a chunk.”
“Maybe he will,” Lou said.
Cobb pointed at him. “And what about you, Captain? Weren’t you the guy in charge of digging these fuckers out? That’s who Jonesy went to get. Sounds like you have a claim on some yourself.”
“Me?” Lou’s voice hadn’t broken like this since he was seventeen. “You gotta be kidding!”
“They’re gonna give it to somebody,” Bernie Cobb said. “If you flushed out dickhead here”-he nodded toward Heydrich’s corpse-“you deserve a chunk.”
Do I want any? Lou wondered. How many Jews, how many Americans, did that son of a bitch murder? Can I take money because of a man like that? But can I turn down a big part of a million bucks? Wouldn’t my wife murder me if I did? Wouldn’t any jury in the world acquit her if she did?
“Fuck it. We’ll sort it out later,” he said. Dawn was
starting to lighten the eastern sky. A new day was coming.
Tom Schmidt hadn’t seen President Truman so chipper since-when? He couldn’t remember ever seeing Truman so chipper. The President beamed at the reporters filing into the White House press room.
“We killed the black-hearted son of a bitch,” Truman announced without preamble. “Reinhard Heydrich, who earned the lovely nicknames of Butcher, Hangman, and Man with the Iron Heart, got what he deserved in the Bavarian Alps last night. The head of the lie called the German Freedom Front died trying to escape his underground headquarters as American troops were digging him out. Most of the other people in that hole in the ground-maybe all of them-were also captured or killed.” He grinned out at the assembled reporters. “How about that, boys?”
They all tried to shout questions at once. “Who got him?” seemed to be the one that came most often.
Truman glanced down at his notes. “The man who seems likeliest to have done it is Private Bernard Cobb. He comes from New Mexico, a little town near Albuquerque.”
“Are they sure it’s Heydrich?” Tom asked before anybody else could get in a different question. “How do they know?”
“It’s really him, Tom, no matter how much that disappoints you and the Tribune,” the President jabbed, and his grin got even wider. “An officer who knows what he looks like identified him at the scene. German prisoners confirmed his identity. His blood-group tattoo matches Heydrich’s group-his blood type, we’d say here. And his fingerprints match, too. The Nazis could pull a lot of stunts, but I don’t see how they could manage that.”
Tom didn’t see how they could, either. No matter what Harry Truman thought, he wasn’t sorry Heydrich was dead. Anybody who’d spent any time at all in post-surrender Germany knew Reinhard Heydrich was indeed a black-hearted son of a bitch. Whether he was sorry the Truman administration was taking credit for Heydrich’s long-overdue demise might be a different story.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 55
