The Man with the Iron Heart (26 page)

Into the town they strode. Some wore the
Stahlhelm.
Others used American or Russian helmets instead. Their weapons were a similar blend. And the Tommies didn’t even seem to realize they were there.

The British had converted the fancy clothier’s emporium where they housed the German physicists into a residence hall. It stood near the center of Alswede. Heydrich hoped to bag all the brains, because they had to be back at their new residence by sundown every day.

As his ragged little force converged on the emporium, he imagined himself a field marshal on the Eastern Front, moving armies and corps like chessmen on the board. But those methods had failed the
Reich.
Maybe this platoon’s worth of men would do more for Germany than an army group had in the Ukraine.
It had better,
Heydrich thought.

Yawning Tommies stood sentry outside the physicists’ quarters. The British weren’t altogether idiots. But the sentries didn’t expect trouble.

“Hands up!” an English-speaking German called to them. “If you surrender, you will not be harmed.”

A burst from a Sten gun answered him. Unlike the tin Tommy gun that had almost murdered Heydrich in Prague, this one worked fine. But so did the Germans’ assault rifles and Schmeissers and grenades. The sentries went down one after another. Lights came on all over Alswede as people woke to the firefight and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Heydrich’s raiders charged into the haberdashery.
“Schnell!”
he called to them. “We have to be gone before the Tommies come in force.” He didn’t know how long they had. Fifteen minutes, he judged, would be uncommon luck.

Long before fifteen minutes were up, the raiders came out again, herding along men middle-aged and elderly in their nightclothes. “We’ve grabbed nine of them!” a captain yelled to Heydrich. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where’s the last one?” As long as they were in Alswede, Heydrich wanted to make a clean sweep.

But the captain answered, “He’s
kaput
—caught a bullet in the head, poor bastard.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ground.

“All right.” As long as the loose end was cleared up, Heydrich wouldn’t fuss. He’d known going in that they took that chance if the British resisted. They were lucky—more than one of the slide-rule boys might have stopped something. Heydrich raised his voice: “Withdraw! Plan One!”

Some of the raiders left Alswede heading north. They made a hellacious racket, whooping and shouting and firing their weapons into lighted windows. Everyone in town could tell exactly where they were—and could tell the British exactly where they’d gone.

Along with the captured physicists—who were now starting to shiver in the late-night chill—Heydrich and the rest of his men quietly retreated to the south. Far fewer locals would pay them any attention. Far fewer would be able to tell the Tommies where they’d headed. And, with luck, the British would be slow to figure out they were the important group. How important could they be if they didn’t fire off everything they were carrying?

One of the scientists—a middle-aged fellow with rumpled, greasy hair and thick glasses—asked, “Why did you shoot poor Heisenberg?”

“Shut up, Professor Diebner, or we’ll shoot you, too.” Heydrich was pleased with himself for recognizing who’d spoken. “Heisenberg was an accident.”
An unfortunate accident, too,
he thought. Heisenberg was—had been—a high-horsepower physicist. Coldly, Heydrich went on, “We will shoot you on purpose, though, if you slow us down or give us away.”

“Give you away? I don’t even know who you are,” Diebner said.

“A man who believes in a free, strong Germany,” Heydrich answered. “A man who doesn’t believe the war is over yet, or lost.”

Behind the spectacle lenses, Diebner’s eyes were enormous. Maybe the lenses magnified them; Heydrich wasn’t sure. He didn’t care much one way or the other. “But—” Diebner began, and then clamped his mouth shut. That made sense; he was in no position to argue.

He and the others had probably spilled their guts while the enemy held them in England. Heydrich didn’t even reckon it treason. Obviously, the Anglo-Americans were ahead of Germany in nuclear physics. He would have grabbed American scientists if he could. But his countrymen were the best he could get his hands on. Maybe they’d be able to come up with…something, anyhow.

Out of Alswede. Into the woods. The raiders divided into smaller groups, splitting the physicists among them. Gunfire broke off to the north. Heydrich smiled wolfishly. His distraction was working just the way he’d hoped it would.

“Be damned, sir,” Hans Klein said. “I think we pulled it off.”

“I said we would,” Heydrich answered. Klein kept his mouth shut. Officers and leaders said all kinds of things. Sometimes they delivered. Sometimes…Sometimes your
Vaterland
ended up occupied by unfriendly foreigners. But Heydrich had delivered. And maybe Germany wouldn’t stay occupied too much longer.

Cold rain pissed down out of a gray, curdled sky. Bernie Cobb manned a checkpoint outside of Erlangen and steamed. The rain blew into his face and dripped down the back of his neck, which did nothing to improve his mood. He looked this way and that—he tried to look every which way at once. Visibility wasn’t much more than a hundred feet, so looking didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good. The only consolation was, a Nazi sniper couldn’t see any farther than he could.

“What did they stick us out here for?” Mack Leff asked for about the tenth time.

Leff wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d got here after V-E Day, so Bernie didn’t trust him as far as he would have trusted somebody who’d been through the mill. “Beats me,” Bernie said. “Something’s screwed up somewhere, though—that’s for goddamn sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put so many of us out on patrol at once.”

“Yeah,” Mack agreed mournfully. His left hand moved inside the pocket of his field jacket. Bernie knew what that meant: he was feeling a pack of cigarettes in there and wondering if he could keep one lit in this downpour. He must have decided he couldn’t, because he didn’t try to light up.

Bernie had already made the same glum calculation and come up with the same answer. He wasn’t twitchy from missing a smoke yet, but he sure wanted one. “The orders we got are all bullshit, too,” he went on—he could always piss and moan, even if he couldn’t light up. “Check everybody’s papers. Hold anybody suspicious for interrogation. Suspicious how?”

“You come out in this weather at all, you ought to have your head examined,” Mack Leff opined.

“Got that right.” Bernie wondered if he could peel the paper off a cigarette and chew the tobacco inside. He’d always thought a chaw was disgusting (to say nothing of hillbilly), but out in the open in weather like this…. “Rained this hard when we got over the Rhine last year. Then, at least, we could lay up in a house or a barn or somethin’ and stay out of it sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.” Leff nodded. “Musta been good when you knew who the enemy was, when you didn’t have to worry about everybody from the grocer to the old lady with a cat. You didn’t have to watch your back so hard then.”

“Fuck,” Bernie muttered. Mack actually thought he’d had it easy when the real war was on. How was that for a kick in the nuts? The really weird thing was, the new guy might have a point. You kinda had to look at things sideways to see it, but when you did….

He became aware of a new noise punching through the endless hiss of rain off paving and fields. “Heads up, Mack,” he said. “Car’s comin’.”

The jeep they’d ridden out here made a decent obstacle after they’d pulled it across the road. If you wanted to go around it, you’d probably get stuck in the mud and you’d probably get shot, too. Bernie had the safety off on his M-1. If Mack Leff didn’t, he was too dumb to deserve to live.

Only worry was whether whoever was in the oncoming car could spot the jeep in time to stop. They did, which impressed Bernie—that
Kubelwagen
had seen plenty of better years. Hitler’s equivalent of a jeep could do most of the stuff a real one could, only not so well.

Two men sat in the
Kubelwagen.
If they weren’t vets, Bernie’d never seen any. “Cover me,” he told Leff as he came out from behind the jeep. He raised his voice and used some of his terrible German:
“Papieren, bitte!”
Then, hopefully, he added, “You guys speak English?”

Both krauts shook their heads. Bernie sighed; he might’ve known they wouldn’t. It was that kind of day. They passed him the papers. The guy behind the wheel was Ludwig Mommsen, the documents said. The other fellow, whose long, thin nose kind of leaned to one side and who needed a shave like nobody’s business, was Erich Wisser.

“You—in
Krieg
?” Bernie asked them. They looked at each other. “Where?” he said. “Uh,
wo?
”

“Ostfront,”
Wisser answered. “Danzig.” Mommsen nodded again, to show he’d served over there, too.

Bernie grunted. You couldn’t get a Jerry to admit he’d ever taken a shot at an American. If you listened to those guys talk, nobody’d fought between Normandy and central Germany—not a soul. Bernie wished he didn’t know better.

These guys seemed legit, though. He handed back their documents.
“Wo gehen Sie?”
he asked.

“Nürnberg,” Mommsen answered, pronouncing it the way a kraut would instead of
Nuremberg
like an American.

They were on the right road. “Okay,” Bernie said, and then, louder, “Move the jeep, Mack!”

Leff did. The Germans put the
Kubelwagen
back in gear and drove off to the south. “That wasn’t so bad,” Leff said.

“Sure wasn’t,” Bernie agreed. “They should all be so easy.”

L
OU
W
EISSBERG READ THE REPORT
H
OWARD
F
RANK GAVE HIM.
T
HEN
he handed it back to his superior officer. He didn’t have rank enough to get his own copy. For that matter, neither did Captain Frank. He’d have to give the report to his own superior, who would stow it in a stout safe where no unauthorized eyes could see it.

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exclaimed. He and Captain Frank exchanged self-conscious half-smiles. That was a hell of a thing for a Jew to say, but plenty born in the States did it all the time. “Did the limeys screw the pooch or what?”

“They sure did,” Frank said. “They screwed it like you wouldn’t believe. And so now the fanatics have nine first-rate atomic physicists…somewhere.”

“Can they make a bomb?” Lou asked. “The guy who wrote your little paper doesn’t think so, but does he know his ass from third base?”

“How am I supposed to tell? Do I look like Einstein?” Frank returned. “One thing I will say is that making a bomb seems to take a lot of fancy equipment. Heydrich’s baboons have all kinds of shit, damn them, but I don’t see ’em having that kind of gear. So I’d bet against it.”

“Mm.” Lou nodded. That made sense—a certain amount of it, anyhow. “If they
can’t
make a bomb, how come the diehards nabbed ’em?”

“Maybe to make us yell and scream and jump up and down like we’ve got ants in our pants,” Captain Frank answered. “Or maybe just for the hell of it—they don’t
think
the slide-rule boys can pull a rabbit out of the hat, but they don’t want to take the chance they might be wrong. If you were in Heydrich’s shoes, what would you do?”

“Hang myself and save everybody else a lot of trouble,” Lou said promptly. He won a snort from his superior. After a moment, he went on, “Been a week since they made the snatch, right?”

“Yup,” Frank said.

“And nobody’s caught any physicists since. Not many diehards, either.”

“Nope.” The captain turned downright laconic.

“Well, shit,” Lou said. “Chances are that means they got away clean.”

“Yup,” Frank said one more time. “If we’d caught ’em, people like you and me never would have got to see this report. Now it’s gonna be up to us to try and track the bastards down.”

“My aching back!” Lou said. That didn’t satisfy him, so he added,
“Gevalt!”
Howard Frank’s head bobbed up and down. Lou took the name of the Lord in vain. “The fanatics’ll stash ’em underground somewhere way the hell down south. How many places have they got in the mountains there?”

“Too many—and we haven’t found a tenth of ’em yet,” Frank said. “They were ready for the collapse, damn them. They started getting ready two years before the surrender. That’s what the interrogation reports say, anyhow. Way things look, you’ve got to believe it, too.”

“Uh-huh.” Lou sounded as uncomfortable as his superior. Interrogators didn’t always bother playing by Geneva Convention rules when they caught diehards alive. The
Reich
had surrendered, after all. And they needed information, and didn’t much care how they got it—especially since the krauts weren’t playing by the rules, either. If a hotshot lawyer or a reporter who sided with the let’s-run-away-from-Germany people back home found out what went on questioning fanatics, the fur would fly. Oh, boy, would it ever! And the
Chicago Tribune
and the other anti-administration papers would print every goddamn word.

“Well, now you’ve got all the good news,” Captain Frank said. “Where we go from here, God only knows.”

“If He does, I wish He’d tell us.” Lou scowled. God didn’t work that way. If anybody’d had any doubts, what went on during the war would have quashed them. “And I wish He’d tell us why He decided to throw all the
Yehudim
from France to Russia into the fire.” Nobody knew how many were dead for no other reason than that they were Jews, not even to the closest million.

“Nobody has a good answer for that,” Frank said heavily. “God doesn’t have a good answer for that.” The words should have sounded like blasphemy. To anyone who’d seen the inside of a German concentration camp, they seemed only common sense. Reputable German firms had taken contracts for crematoria and bone crushers and all the other tools that went along with industrialized murder. Lou had followed more paper trails than he cared to remember. And they all led back to businessmen who said things like,
We didn’t know what they’d be used for. And how could we say no to the government?
The scary thing was, they meant it. Sometimes saying no to the government was the most important thing you could ever do, but try and explain that to a German.

“And Heydrich wants to start it all up again, only worse this time,” Lou said.

“Worse. Yeah,” Captain Frank said gloomily. “Who woulda thought that was possible after the Nazis surrendered? Nothing could be worse’n what they already did, right? Then along comes the atom bomb, and we find out maybe that’s not right after all. Swell old world we got, huh?”

Before Lou could answer, the phone on his desk rang. It was an Army field telephone, patched into a network that also included what was left of the German national telephone system. He picked it up: “Weissberg here.”

“You da guy in charge o’ going after the fanatics?” By the way the GI on the other end of the line talked, he was from New Jersey, too, or maybe Long Island.

“I’m one of ’em,” Lou said. “How come?”

“On account of I got a kraut right here who’s ready t’swear on a stack o’ Bibles he seen that Heydrich drive through town a little while ago.”

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exploded, this time altogether unselfconsciously. “Put him on.”

The German knew some English, but proved more comfortable in his own language. “He had a beard, but I recognized him,” he said. “His picture was all over the papers when the English tried to kill him in the war. There is a reward for me if you catch him,
ja
?”

“Jawohl,”
Lou agreed. The reward for Heydrich, dead or alive, was up to a million bucks. Lou had no idea who this German was or what he’d done between 1939 and 1945. Whatever it was, it was nothing next to Heydrich’s list.

“What’s cooking?” Frank asked. One hand over the mouthpiece, Lou told him. The captain almost jumped out of his skin. “We can catch him! We really can! Find out how long ago this guy saw him and which way he was headed. We can spread the net ahead of him so tight a hedgehog couldn’t sneak through.”

Lou got back on the phone. He asked the Jerry Captain Frank’s questions, then relayed the replies he got: “Less than an hour ago, and heading southeast.”

“Son of a bitch!” Howard Frank said reverently. “We’ve got him!”

R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH HAD SERVED IN THE
N
AVY BEFORE THE WAR
—till he left it abruptly after not marrying the senior officer’s daughter he’d seduced. He’d flown combat missions over Poland and the Soviet Union. The only experience he had as a foot soldier was getting away from the Ivans after his 109 crash-landed between their lines and the Germans’.

Squelching through a swamp and ducking down into the mud and the water plants wasn’t his idea of fun. But Hans Klein had the perfect spur for him: “Do you
want
the fucking Amis to catch you, sir?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Heydrich admitted.

“Well, then, don’t stand straight up and down like a heron looking for frogs. Get down here with me,” Klein said. He hadn’t had much ground combat experience himself—certainly none since he became Heydrich’s driver. But he sure talked like somebody who knew what he was talking about.

“If you’d been able to fix the
Kubelwagen
when it broke down for real—” Heydrich began peevishly.

But that didn’t wash, either. The
Oberscharführer
let out a derisive snort. “
Ja, doch,
then what? I’ll tell you what…sir. I’d’ve driven us straight into a Yankee ambush, that’s what, and they’d’ve filled both of us full of holes.”

Again, he was altogether too likely to be right. That made Heydrich love him no better when freezing water filled his shoe…again. Maybe infantrymen really were the heroes of the war, even if pilots and panzer commanders got more ink from Goebbels. Infantrymen put up with more shit—no possible doubt about that.