The Man with the Iron Heart (29 page)

Sometimes, though, he needed to impress—no, to intimidate—people. And so today he wore the high-peaked cap, the tunic with the SS runes on the black collar patch and the eagle holding a swastika on the right breast, the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross at his throat, and the rest of his decorations on his left breast. It was all devilishly uncomfortable, but he looked the part of the
Reichsprotektor,
which was the point of the exercise.

Hans Klein, also in full SS regalia, came in and said loudly, “
Herr Reichsprotektor,
the scientist Wirtz to see you, as you ordered!”

“Send him in,
Oberscharführer,
” Heydrich replied.

“Zu befehl, Herr Reichsprotektor!”
Klein clicked his heels. They never would have bothered with that nonsense if Karl Wirtz weren’t out in the corridor listening. But they had to make Wirtz and the other captured physicists believe the
Reich
was still a going concern. And, to a certain degree, they had to believe it themselves.

Klein strode out. He returned a moment later with Professor Wirtz. The scientist looked to be in his late thirties. He was tall and thin, with a hairline that had retreated like the
Wehrmacht
on the Eastern Front, leaving him with a forehead that seemed even higher than it would have anyhow.

Heydrich’s right arm snapped up and out.
“Heil
Hitler!” he barked.

Wirtz gaped. “Er—Hitler’s dead,” he muttered.

“You will address the
Reichsprotektor
by his title,” Hans Klein rumbled ominously, sounding every centimeter the senior underofficer.

“The
Führer
may be dead,” Heydrich said. “The
Reich
he founded lives on—and will live on despite any temporary misfortunes. And you,
Herr Doktor
Professor Wirtz, will help ensure its survival.”

“M—Me?” If the prospect delighted Wirtz, he hid it very well. “All I ever wanted to do was come home from England and get back to my research.”

“You are home—home in the
Grossdeutsches Reich,
” Heydrich said. “And we brought you and your comrades here so you could conduct your research undisturbed by the English and the Americans.”

“You want us to make a bomb for you…
Herr Reichsprotektor.
” Wirtz wasn’t altogether blind—no, indeed.

“That’s exactly what we want, yes,” Heydrich agreed. “With it, we are strong. We can face any foe on even terms. The Americans, the Russians—anyone. Without it, we are nothing. So you will give it to us.”

Wirtz licked his lips. “It makes me very sorry to say this,
Herr Reichsprotektor,
but what you ask is impossible.”

He was sorry to say it, Heydrich judged, because he feared what the
Reichsprotektor
would do to him. And well he might. But, though Wirtz didn’t know it, Heydrich had already heard the same thing from several other physicists. All he said now was, “Why do you think so?”

“You do not have the uranium ore we were using before, do you? The ore from which we would have to extract the rare pure material we need for the bomb?” Wirtz said. When Heydrich didn’t answer, the physicist went on, “And you do not have the factories we would need to perform the extraction. The Americans spent billions of dollars to build those factories. Billions,
Herr Reichsprotektor
! When I think how we had to go begging for pfennigs to try to keep our research going…” He shook his head. “We were fighting a foe who was bigger than we are.”

Again, Heydrich had heard the same thing before. He liked it no better now than he had then. “Can you get the uranium you need?”

“I have no idea where we would do that…sir,” Professor Wirtz said. “We were working at Hechingen and Haigerloch, in the southwest, when the war ended. French troops, and Moroccans with them”—he shuddered—“captured the towns and captured us. Then American soldiers took charge of us and took charge of the uranium we were using.”

Hechingen and Haigerloch were still in the French zone. The French fought Heydrich’s resisters almost as viciously as the Red Army did—no doubt for many of the same reasons. Still, something might be managed…if it had a decent chance of proving worthwhile. “The uranium is all gone? Everything is all gone?”

“Yes,” Wirtz said, as the other reclaimed scientists had before him. But then, as none had before, he added, “Except perhaps—”

Heydrich leaned forward abruptly enough to make the swivel chair creak under his backside. “Except perhaps what,
Herr Doktor
Professor?” he asked softly.

“When the Amis captured us, we were making a new uranium pile.” The actual word Wirtz used was
machine,
a term Heydrich had already heard from the other scientists he’d questioned. The physicist continued, “We also had about ten grams of radium. One of the technicians hid the metal under a crate that had held uranium cubes. The Americans took the uranium, of course, but I am sure they did not take the radium. As far as I know, it is still in Hechingen.”

Excitement tingled through Heydrich. Radium was potent stuff. Everybody knew that. Everybody had known that even before anyone imagined atomic bombs. And ten grams! That sounded like a lot. “Can you make a bomb with it?” Heydrich asked eagerly.

“
Nein, Herr Reichsprotektor.
If you expect me to do that, you’d better shoot me now. It is impossible.” Wirtz’s voice was sad but firm. He understood the way Heydrich thought, all right.

Heydrich didn’t want to believe him, but decided he had no choice. If Wirtz was lying, one of the other physicists—Diebner, most likely—would give him away. And then Heydrich
would
shoot him. He had to understand that. “Well, if you can’t make a bomb, what can you do with ten grams of radium?” Heydrich demanded. “You must be able to do something useful, or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”

“Let me think.” Wirtz did just that for close to a minute. Then he said, “Well, you know radium is poisonous even in very small doses.”

“How small? A tenth of a gram? A hundredth?” Heydrich asked. A poison that strong could make assassinations easier.

Karl Wirtz actually smiled. “Much less than that,
Herr Reichsprotektor.
Anything more than a tenth of a microgram is considered toxic.” He helpfully translated the scientific measurement: “Anything more than a ten-millionth of a gram.”

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Heydrich whispered. He did sums in his head, and then, when he didn’t believe the answer, did them again on paper. “Ten grams of radium could poison a hundred million people?” That stuff could kill off everybody still alive in Germany, with almost enough left over to do in France, too.

“Theoretically. If everything were perfectly efficient,” Wirtz said. “You couldn’t come anywhere close to that for real.”

“But we could still do a lot of damage with it.” Heydrich waited impatiently for the physicist’s response.

Wirtz slowly nodded. “Yes, you could. I have no doubt of that. I am not sure of the best way to go about it, though.”

“Well, that’s why you and your friends are here.” Heydrich’s grin was as wide and inviting as he knew how to make it.

S
PRING WAS IN THE AIR.
V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV WAS ALMOST BACK TO HIS
old self again. Everything should have been easy. After all, hadn’t the Fascist beasts suffered the most devastating military defeat in the history of the world? If they hadn’t, what was the tremendous victory parade through Red Square all about? Where had all those Nazi standards and flags that proud Soviet soldiers dragged in the dust come from?

The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t want to admit they were beaten. The Russian zone in what was left of the shattered
Reich,
what had been eastern Germany and was now western Poland, what had been East Prussia and was now split between Poland and the USSR, western Czechoslovakia, the Soviet zone in Austria…Rebellion bubbled everywhere.

Bokov would have suspected the Western Allies of fomenting the trouble—the Soviet Union’s greatest fear had always been that the USA and Britain would end up in bed with Hitler, not Stalin—if he hadn’t known they had troubles of their own. They might even have had worse troubles than the USSR did, because they put them down less firmly.

Poland and Czechoslovakia were kicking out their Germans. The Soviets were doing the same thing in their chunk of East Prussia. What had been Königsberg—a town the Nazis fought for like grim death—was now called Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s longtime henchmen. Reliable Russians poured in to replace the Germans, who were anything but.

Once Poland and Czechoslovakia were German-free, the uprisings there would fizzle out. That delighted Bokov less than it might have. You couldn’t expel
all
the Germans from the Soviet zones in Germany and Austria…could you? Not even Stalin, who never thought small, seemed ready for that.

And so the NKVD had to make do with lesser measures hereabouts. Mass executions avenged slain Soviet personnel. Mass deportations got rid of socially unreliable elements—and, often enough, of people grabbed at random to fill a quota. The survivors needed to understand they’d better not help or shelter Fascist bandits.

All that might have scared some of the remaining Germans into staying away from the bandits. Others, though, it only cemented to what should have been the dead Nazi cause.

Which was why Bokov bucketed along in a convoy of half a dozen jeeps, on his way south to Chemnitz. One jeep took the lead. Four more followed close together. The last one did rear-guard duty. The hope was that the formation would defeat bandits lurking by the side of the
Autobahn
with
Panzerschreck
or
Panzerfaust
—or, for that matter, with nothing fancier than a machine gun.

Bokov certainly hoped the stratagem worked. His neck, after all, was among those on the line here. This ploy was new. The bandits would take a little while to get used to it. After that…He knew his countrymen better than he wished he did. They would go on repeating it exactly—and the Germans would get used to it, and would find some way to beat it. Then the Red Army would take too long to figure out what to do differently.

Chemnitz wasn’t quite so devastated as Dresden had been. But Anglo-American bombers had visited the Saxon city, too. The old town hall and a red tower that had once been part of the city wall stood out from the sea of rubble.

In the old town hall worked the burgomeister, a cadaverous fellow named Max Müller. “Good to meet you, Comrade Captain!” he said, shaking Bokov’s hand. He belonged to the Social Unity Party of Germany, of course—the Russians wouldn’t have given him even the semblance of power if he hadn’t. And he might well have spent the Hitler years in Russian exile with Ulbricht if he so readily recognized Bokov’s rank badges.

“You’ve had a string of assassinations here,” Bokov said. Red Army soldiers had established a barbed-wire perimeter around the town hall. They wanted to keep Müller alive if they could. He was the fourth burgomeister Chemnitz had known since the surrender.

“We have,” he agreed now. Sweat glinted on his pale forehead, though the day was far from warm. He had to be wondering what the Heydrichites were plotting now—and who could blame him? “Neither our own resources nor those of the fraternal Soviet forces in the area have quelled them.”

He certainly sounded like a good Marxist-Leninist. All the same, Bokov’s voice was dry as he asked, “And what makes you think one more officer will be able to set things right like
this
?” He snapped his fingers.

“Oh, but, Comrade Captain, you’re not just one officer! You’re the NKVD!” Müller exclaimed.

“Well, not all of it,” Bokov said, more dryly still. He was glad this Fritz respected and feared the Soviet security apparatus. But he meant what he’d said before: there was only one of him.

“You have the rest behind you,” Müller declared in ringing tones.

The other NKVD men were probably goddamn glad they were nowhere near Chemnitz. The place stank of death. So did a lot of Germany, but this was worse.

A labor gang of Germans—old men in overalls, younger men in
Wehrmacht
rags, and women in everything under the sun—dumped rubble into wheelbarrows and carted it away. How many wheelbarrows full of broken bricks and shattered masonry did Chemnitz hold? How many did all the Soviet zone hold? How many did all of Germany hold? How many years would it take to clear them, and how big a mountain would they make added together?

A tall one, Bokov hoped. Then he wondered how big a mountain the rubble in the USSR would make. Leningrad and Stalingrad weren’t much besides rubble these days. Plenty of cities, some of them big ones, had changed hands four times, not just twice. As the Nazis fell back, they’d destroyed everything they could to keep the Red Army from using it against them.

How long would the Soviet Union take to get over the mauling the Fascist hyenas had given it? Vladimir Bokov scowled, not liking the answer that formed in his mind. Germany had caught hell, no doubt about it. But, even though the Red Army finally drove the invaders off with their tails between their legs, it was plain the USSR had caught whatever was worse than hell.

How many dead? Twenty million? Thirty? Somewhere between one and the other, probably, but Bokov would have bet nobody could have said where. He knew—everybody knew, even if it wasn’t something you talked about—the Germans had inflicted far more casualties on the Red Army than the other way around.

But that wasn’t all. That was barely the beginning. The Germans had slaughtered Jews, commissars, intellectuals generally. Would the USSR’s intelligentsia ever be the same? And so many civilians had starved or died of disease or simply disappeared under German occupation.

It wasn’t all one-sided. The labor gang dug up an arm bone with some stinking flesh still clinging to it. As nonchalantly as if such things happened every day (and no doubt they did, or more often than that), a scrawny old geezer with a white mustache shoveled the ruined fragment of humanity into a wheelbarrow with the rest of the wreckage.