“Lord, will it ever!” Lou exclaimed, picturing the mess in his mind. “Millions and millions of dollars.”
“Uh-huh.” Major Frank eyed the bourbon longingly. This time, though, he didn’t pick it up. “And I guess that’s why nobody’s stormed the planes in Madrid and Lisbon. If a bunch of hostages get shot, who do we blame? Franco and Salazar, right? That’s how they’re bound to see it, anyway.”
Lou grunted. He also wanted another snort, and also hung back. “Makes sense. I almost wish it didn’t, but it does. But if the fucking SS men are shooting hostages anyway…”
“Hey, it’s happening in Europe. A bunch of the people on those planes are bound to be foreigners. So it’s nothing anybody in the United States needs to worry about, is it?” Frank said.
“Of course not.” But Lou reached for the bourbon after all.
Vladimir Bokov had all kinds of reasons not to want to go to the Prague airport. He’d had plenty of work on his plate back in Berlin-important work, too, not just stuff to make time go by. Dealing with Czechoslovakian officials was still tricky. Too many of them thought they could restore the bourgeois republic they’d had before the war. They didn’t see that, with Soviet troops occupying their country, it had to accommodate itself to the USSR. And dealing with the Nazi terrorists who’d hijacked this Li-2 and ordered it flown here might be even trickier.
None of which had anything to do with anything. When Bokov and Colonel Shteinberg got orders to drop everything, to go to Prague, and to recapture the passenger plane without making concessions, they went. What other choice did they have? None, and Bokov knew it.
Which didn’t keep him from complaining. “Why us?” he groused, peering at the Li-2 through captured German binoculars (better than any the Soviet Union made).
“Why us, Volodya?” Moisei Shteinberg’s chuckle said he was amused to find such naivete in a fellow NKVD officer. “You mean you don’t know?”
“If I did, would I be pissing and moaning like this?” Bokov answered irritably.
“I’ll tell you why, then.” And Shteinberg proceeded to do just that: “Lieutenant General Vlasov, that’s why. We did well giving Birnbaum to the Americans after he didn’t want us to. So now he gives us this mess. If we don’t make a hash of it, we solve his problem for him. And if we do, he’s even with us, and he writes something good and foul on our fitness report.”
“Well, fuck me!” Bokov said, and not another word. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to admit he should have seen that for himself. And he should have. As soon as Shteinberg pointed it out to him, he knew it was true. In Yuri Vlasov’s shoes, Bokov would have done the same thing.
All the troops ringing the Li-2 belonged to the Red Army. The Czechoslovakians had grumbled about that, which did them no good whatever. The plane was Russian. That gave the Soviet commandant in Prague all the excuse he needed to use his own men. If some pimp of a Czech colonel who’d probably get purged once the other shoe here dropped didn’t like it, too goddamn bad.
The radio crackled to life. “Do you read me, Prague airport?” one of the Nazi hijackers asked.
“We hear you, yes,” Bokov answered in German.
“You’d better get cracking on our demands, then,” the fanatic said. “Time’s running short. If we don’t know for sure that you’re freeing prisoners and moving soldiers out of the Vaterland, it’s too bad for the people on this plane.”
“We are doing what you told us to do,” Bokov lied. Not even the Americans were stupid enough to yield to the hijackers’ demands. If you did that even once, you set yourself up for endless trouble down the line.
“We’d better see some sign of it, or we start shooting,” the German warned.
“There’s no hope for you if you do,” Bokov said. That was true, but there’d been no hope for the fanatics once they commandeered the airplane.
“Maybe not, but there’s no hope for your important people, either,” the Nazi said. The passengers were important: officers, engineers, agricultural officials, a prominent violinist. No one but important people flew, not in Soviet airspace. But that also had nothing to do with anything.
A Red Army lieutenant handed Colonel Shteinberg a note. He read it and nodded to Bokov. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Bokov told the fanatic. “We’ll do what you want, and we’ll get you the evidence you need. Out.” He made sure he’d switched off before asking Shteinberg, “Everything’s ready?” The Jew nodded again. Bokov switched frequencies on the radio and said one word in Russian: “Now!”
Three 105mm shells slammed into the Li-2’s cockpit. They blew off most of the plane’s nose. A truck with a scaling ladder-taken from a Prague fire engine-sped down the runway. The ladder went up. Red Army men with submachine guns swarmed into what was left of the cockpit.
Another truck raced over to the Li-2’s right-side doorway. This one needed a shorter ladder. The first soldier up it sprayed the lock with bullets from his PPSh. Then he threw the door open and sprang into the plane. The rest of his squad followed.
It was all over in less time than it took to tell. The Russians threw two hijackers’ bodies out of the Li-2’s shattered nose. One more corpse came out through the side door. They were bound to be dead already, but men on the ground filled them full of lead anyway, just to stay safe.
Then live soldiers and passengers started coming out. Another lieutenant hurried back to the tower to report to Shteinberg and Bokov. “Your plan worked very well,” he said, saluting the NKVD men. “The sons of bitches only had time to shoot three men, and one of them isn’t badly hurt. Oh, and shell fragments killed the pilot and wounded the copilot and one passenger.”
“Too bad, but it’s the cost of doing business,” Bokov said.
Colonel Shteinberg nodded. “Cheaper than dealing with hijackers any day.”
A moment later, the Li-2 caught fire. Blasting the cockpit had pretty much wrecked it anyway. The Red Army soldiers and the surviving people who’d been aboard pulled away in a hurry. Vladimir Bokov impassively watched the fat column of black smoke rise into the sky. The plane was part of the cost of doing business, too.
And as for Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov…Go fuck yourself, Yuri Pavlovich, Bokov thought happily. The senior NKVD man had given Bokov and Shteinberg this assignment hoping they would botch it: Shteinberg was bound to be right about that. But they hadn’t. They’d done as well with it as anyone could reasonably hope to do. They’d given no concessions, the hijackers were dead, and most of the passengers were alive. If Vlasov didn’t like it…Drop dead, cuntface. Bokov grinned. Maybe he’d said it out loud, because Moisei Shteinberg smiled, too. Or maybe the Jew was just thinking along with him. After what they’d managed here together, that wouldn’t surprise him at all.
Seeing what his hijackings had wrought, Jochen Peiper was more happy than not. One thing was clear: taking over a Russian plane didn’t yield enough to make it worthwhile. The Russians, as he already had painful reason to understand, proved at least as remorseless and relentless as his own people. To them, the hijacked aircraft and the people aboard it were expendable. As long as they got rid of the hijackers, they didn’t care about anything else.
“All right,” Peiper muttered. “We won’t mess with them again. Not like that, anyhow.”
But the plane that landed in Madrid, and the one that came down in Lisbon…Both of those were successes, no two ways about it. The German fighting men aboard had killed a few fat, rich fools. They’d got wonderful publicity. Every airline that flew anywhere in Western Europe was frantically revamping security procedures. That would cost piles of dollars or pounds or francs or whatever currency they used. It would also cost them endless wasted time and uncountable passenger goodwill.
The team in Madrid had even managed to torch their Constellation as they walked out. They were in jail now, as were the hijackers who’d gone to Lisbon. The USA, and UK, and France were all screaming for their heads. Jochen Peiper didn’t think they�
��d get them. The Reich still had friends in high places in Spain and Portugal, even if those friends had to work quietly and discreetly these days. His best guess was that the hijacking teams would stay locked up till the foo-faraw died down, and then, without any fuss, someone would open the door, shove them out through it, and do his goddamnedest to pretend the whole thing never happened.
That suited Peiper fine. He didn’t think he would have any trouble recruiting people for more hijackings.
And the rest of the German Freedom Front’s business seemed to be going well enough. Most important, the Amis hadn’t brought bulldozers and steam shovels into this valley to dig out Peiper’s headquarters. Nobody the enemy had caught when they dug out Heydrich must have known where this place was. Peiper had hoped that would prove true, but he’d known too well there was no guarantee. Either Heydrich had paid proper attention to security, or luck meant no one who knew what he shouldn’t had survived. Peiper didn’t-couldn’t-know which, but either would do.
Roadside bombs, sabotaged vehicles and railroad lines, poisoned liquor, brave men in explosive vests who could take out a platoon of Amis or Tommies or Ivans if they pressed the button at the right time…All that was the small change of partisan warfare-unless you had to try to stop it. Peiper’s side had had to do that in Russia and Poland…and Yugoslavia, and Greece, and France, and the Low Countries, and Norway. Unfortunately, the Reich hadn’t made a popular overlord.
Now the Germans got to jump up and down on the other pan in the scale. If the Anglo-Americans and the Russians (oh, yes-and the French, too) didn’t like it, let them have the joy of figuring out what to do about it. The Americans had already decided they didn’t know. The English weren’t likely to be far behind. And then…
Then what? Peiper wondered. But he knew. Then we take over, that’s what. The Anglo-Americans would leave behind political parties and policemen to try to keep the National Socialists from reclaiming the power that was rightly theirs. Peiper chuckled. How long would that last? Not bloody long!
In the German-occupied East, how many Russian policemen had also served the Red Army or the NKVD? Way too goddamn many-Jochen Peiper knew that for sure. And how many German policemen in the occupied Reich also served the German Freedom Front? Quite a few-Peiper also knew that for sure.
“The fight goes on,” he murmured, and nodded to himself. “Whoever has the most patience-he wins.” He nodded again. The Americans and the English had already seen more trouble than they’d ever wanted. Before too long, the French would, too. Without the Anglo-Americans to prop them up, they weren’t much. The Russians…Jochen Peiper grimaced. The Russians were a different story. Against the Russians, you had to look a lifetime down the line if you were going to accomplish anything. But a free and independent and National Socialist Deutsches Reich in western Germany would do for a start. Peiper thought they could win that much pretty soon.
Anybody could go to New York city to interview troops coming home. Since Tom Schmidt couldn’t go to Germany, he didn’t want to go to New York. Yes, lots of people-and lots of reporters-did, but wasn’t that the point? What were your chances of finding an interesting story if you did the same thing as everybody else? Pretty goddamn slim, that’s what.
And so Tom went to Baltimore instead. It was a major port, nobody else except people from there gave two whoops in hell about it, and it was only a little more than an hour by train from Washington. How could you not like the combination?
It was chilly and rainy there, as it had been when he set out from Union Station. Winter wasn’t on the calendar yet, but it sure was in the air. He stood under an umbrella a few paces beyond the tent that called itself a deprocessing center and waited for demobilized soldiers to come by. Out at the end of the pier squatted the Peter Gray, as unlovely a rustbucket as shipfitters had ever slapped together. Tom wondered who the Liberty ship was named for. Not the one-armed outfielder on the 1945 Browns, surely? But what other even slightly famous Pete Gray had there been?
MPs discouraged him from getting to the returning soldiers before they went through the deprocessing center. That irked him. “I happen to know other people have been able to talk to them beforehand,” he fumed.
All he got back from the sergeant in charge of the MPs was a shrug and a dismissive, “Sorry, sir.” The three-striper didn’t sound one bit sorry. Tacking insult on to injury, he added, “You understand-we’ve got our orders.”
So did the guards at Dachau and Belsen. Tom almost said it. He would have if he’d figured it would do him any good. But the boss MP’s dull eyes and blunt features argued that he would have made a pretty good concentration-camp guard himself. That being so, hearing himself compared to one would have pissed him off all the more. He had no real reason to run Tom in, which might not stop him from inventing one. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was keep your mouth shut.
Here came a soldier proudly wearing a shiny new Ruptured Duck on his lapel. “Talk to you a minute?” Tom asked. “Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune.” Taking notes, he realized, would be a bitch. It was like driving the hills of San Francisco, where you needed one foot on the gas, one on the brake, and one on the clutch. Here he needed one hand for the umbrella, one for the pencil, and one for the notebook.
As things turned out, he didn’t need pencil or notebook this time. The GI shook his head and kept walking. “Sorry, Mac. All I wanna do is haul ass for the train station, get aboard, and head for home.”
“Where is home?” Tom was nothing if not persistent. It did him no good this time. The soldier or ex-soldier or whatever he was shook his head again. He splashed every time his Army boots came down on the concrete. That had to be better than slopping through mud, though. Slowly, as if in a Hollywood dissolve, the curtain of rain made him disappear.
Here came another tired-looking GI. Tom took another shot at it: “Tom Schmidt, Chicago Tribune. Can I talk to you for a little bit?”
The GI-one stripe on his sleeve made him a PFC-paused. “Okay. Why not? You gonna put me in the paper?”
Tom nodded. “That’s the idea. What’s your name?”
“Atkins. Gil Atkins.”
“Where you from, Gil?” If Tom held both the notebook and the umbrella in his left hand, he could take notes…after a fashion.
“Sioux City, Iowa.”
“How about that?” Tom said: one of the rare phrases you could use with almost anything. He’d been to Sioux City. It was a place where nobody died of excess excitement. “What did you do there?”
“Short-order cook.”
“Were you a cook in the Army, too?”
“Not fuckin’ likely. I lugged a BAR.”
“Did you get to Germany before V-E Day or after?”
“After, not that it made much difference. Krauts may have said they gave up, but that didn’t mean shit, and everybody knew it. I’m just glad I made it home in one piece.” The kid’s face clouded over. “Bunch of my buddies didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. Gil Atkins only shrugged; maybe he recognized purely polite sympathy when he heard it. Tom tried again: “So you’re glad to come home from Germany, then?”
“Oh, hell, yes!” Nothing wrong with Atkins’ sincerity.
“What’s the best thing about being back in the States?”
“Lord! Where do I start?” Quite seriously, the returning PFC ticked off points on his fingers: “Let’s see. When I get on the train, I won’t have to worry that the fanatics have planted a block of TNT on the tracks. When I get into a jeep-sorry, I mean a car-I won’t have to watch the bushes by the side of the road to make sure no cocksucker with a rocket or a machine gun can blow it up. When I walk down the street, I won’t have to worry somebody’ll chuck a grenade under my feet and run away. I won’t have to wonder if the guy coming past me has dynamite and nails on under his coat. I won’t have to think the pretty gal pushing the baby carriage has maybe got a big old mine in there instead of a baby. I won’t have to be scared somebody’s go
nna bomb the place where I’m sleeping. If I buy myself a shot, I won’t have to wonder whether some asshole poisoned it. I won’t…Shit, buddy, I could go on a lot longer, but you’ve got the message, doncha?”
“I just might, yeah.” Tom mimed writer’s cramp, which made Atkins chuckle. “What do you think about the people who don’t think we ought to be pulling out of Germany?”
“Well, that depends. There were some of those guys over there, and you gotta respect them. I mean, hell, they were laying it on the line like everybody else, y’know? So that was okay. But the people back here, the safe, fat, happy people who wouldn’t be in any danger regardless of what goes on in Germany-fuck them and the horse they rode in on. Those clowns are ready to fight to the last drop of my blood. That’s how it looks to me, anyways.” Gil Atkins chuckled again, this time in mild embarrassment. “You’re gonna have to take out some words before you can put this in your paper, huh?”
“That’s part of the business,” Tom said. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. You helped a lot.”
“Only time I ever got in the paper before was on account of a car crash,” Atkins said. “And that one wasn’t even my fault-other guy was drunk, and he sideswiped me.” He bobbed his head and tramped off. Before long, no doubt, he’d find the station. He’d ride back to Sioux City and start scrambling eggs and frying bacon and flipping hamburgers. He’d have a regular job again. Hell, he’d have his life back again. Try as Tom might, he couldn’t see what was so bad about that.
Tom had his own job, too. “Hi. I’m Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune. Can I talk to you for a minute?” This guy with his shiny Ruptured Duck walked past him as if he didn’t exist. Try again-what else could you do? “Hello. My name’s Tom Schmidt. I’m from the Chicago Tribune….”
“Auld Lang Syne” came out of the radio. Guy Lombardo’s orchestra was playing in the New Year, the same as usual. Over the music, the announcer said, “In less than a minute now, the lighted ball in Times Square will drop. It will usher out 1947 and bring in 1948. Another year to look forward to…”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 59
