The Man with the Iron Heart (32 page)

“I’ve been doin’ it since before the surrender, and I’m still in one piece. So are a bunch of other guys,” Benton answered. “The krauts, they’re pretty sneaky, but I’ve learned to be sneaky the same way.”

“Sounds good to me.” Bernie swerved around a freshly repaired pothole. Maybe the fix was legit, or maybe it concealed a land mine. Sure as hell, the diehards were pretty sneaky. He noticed every jeep in front of him had also dodged the pothole. Either the ones behind him also swerved or else it really was okay, because nothing went boom. Things not going boom was one of the sweetest sounds Bernie had ever heard.

He hadn’t been up to Frankfurt before. Erlangen hadn’t suffered badly during the war. Nuremberg had. Frankfurt was bigger than Nuremberg—say, about the size of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. It looked as if God had stomped on the town and then ground in his heel. And so He had, except He’d used B-17s and B-24s and Lancasters instead of a mile-long boot.

“Boy, oh boy,” Bernie said. “You look at a place like this, you wonder how anybody lived through the bombing.”

“People always do,” Toby Benton said. “I guess maybe that’s how come we made the atom bomb. Drop one of those suckers and that’s all she wrote.”

“I’d drop one on Heydrich in a red-hot minute if it’d stop all the crap we’ve gone through,” Bernie said. The ordnance sergeant nodded. Bernie couldn’t think of a single dogface in Germany who wouldn’t make that deal.

He honked his horn to warn the Jerries in a labor gang to get out of his way. They stepped aside, though none of them moved any faster than he had to. Regulations said German men weren’t supposed to wear
Wehrmacht
uniform any more, but these guys either hadn’t got the news or, more likely, didn’t have anything else. They were skinny and pale—hell, most of them looked green—and badly shaven.

“Some master race, huh?” Benton said.

“You betcha,” Bernie agreed. Looking down your nose at the Germans was easy—unless one of the bastards carried an antitank rocket or had dynamite and nails under his raggedy tunic or drove a truck full of explosive till he found a bunch of GIs all together and pressed down on the firing button wired to his steering wheel.

Hausfraus
queued patiently for cabbages or potatoes or whatever the guy in the shop was doling out. Most of them looked shabbier than their menfolk. They’d got even less in the way of clothes than German soldiers had. The stuff they were wearing was falling to pieces and years out of style and had been dumpy to begin with. A couple of them had on cut-down
Feldgrau
—probably the only cloth they owned. Their complexions were also fishbelly pale. A few of them had put on rouge and mascara. It made things worse, not better—Bernie thought of so many made-up corpses.

A block or two farther on, a buxom young
Fräulein
walked hand in hand with a GI. Nothing wrong with
her
complexion, by God—she was radiantly pink. She had meat on her bones, too: luxuriantly curved meat. Her dress didn’t cover all that much of her, and clung to what it did cover. The American soldier on whom she bestowed her favors looked as if he’d invented her—but not even Thomas Edison was that smart.

“Some hardass MP spots them, he’ll get in trouble for fraternizing,” Sergeant Benton said.

“Worth it,” Bernie declared. The ordnance specialist didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.

Right in the middle of Frankfurt, behind a barbed-wire fence nine feet high, was another world. The Army had built what amounted to an American suburb for something close to a thousand families of U.S. occupation officials and high-ranking officers.

Close to half a million Germans lived in postwar misery all around them, but they had it as good as they would have back in the States—better, because they couldn’t have afforded servants there. Except for those servants, the enclave was off-limits to Germans. Electricity ran twenty-four hours a day there, not two hours a day as it did in the rest of Frankfurt. The enclave boasted movie theaters, beauty shops, a gas station, a supermarket, a community center, and anything else the homesick Yankee soul might desire.

“Holy Moses,” Bernie said as he drove up to the gate in front of the guardhouse. “No wonder they keep this place behind barbed wire. If you were a kraut, you wouldn’t need to be one of Heydrich’s goons to want to blow it to kingdom come.”

“Yeah, that’s crossed my mind a time or three, too,” Toby Benton agreed. “But if you’re just a little guy like us, what can you do about it? Try and make sure the fanatics don’t sneak in any bombs—that’s all I can see. And that’s what I’m here for.”

Guards inspected the jeep with microscopic care before they let it into the enclave. The kids playing there didn’t wear rags. They didn’t look as if a strong breeze would blow them away. Fords and De Sotos rolled along the clean, rubble-free streets. Bernie wondered for a second where the hell he really was.

Yeah, if the Jerries saw this…But Bernie Cobb shook his head.
If they don’t like what they’ve got now, they shouldn’t have lined up behind Hitler back then,
he thought.

Vladimir Bokov watched Germans go back and forth between the Russian and American zones in Berlin. The spectacle struck him as too anarchic for comfort. He turned to Moisei Shteinberg. “Comrade Colonel, we need to tighten this up,” he said. “People we should keep can get into one of the Western Allies’ Berlin zones easy as you please, and from there they can leave the Soviet zone of Germany altogether. And the Western Allies have such bad security, bandits can hide in their zones for as long as they want. Then they cross over and attack us.”

Shteinberg nodded. Captain Bokov hadn’t expected anything else. No NKVD man could go far wrong talking about the need to tighten up. And Shteinberg worried about things Bokov hadn’t even thought of: “It wouldn’t surprise me if the Anglo-Americans let Heydrich’s hyenas move about freely in their zones here. There always was talk about the USA and Britain lining up with the Hitlerites against the Soviet Union.”

“
Da.
There was,” Bokov agreed. No NKVD man could go far wrong by assuming all the enemies of the USSR were plotting together, either. “If we have to, we ought to build a wall between our zone and theirs, to make sure only the proper people pass from one to the other.”

“I’d like that,” Shteinberg said. “I’d like blockading the Western Allies’ Berlin zones to force them out of here even better. They didn’t spend their blood taking this city. We did. It should be ours by right of conquest. But…”

“But what?” Bokov said. “That’s a wonderful idea, sir! We ought to do it! We ought to start right away!”

“Unfortunately, the international situation does not permit it. Believe me, Comrade Captain, I’ve had discussions with our superiors about this.” Shteinberg sighed mournfully. “They fear deviating from the Four-Power agreement on Berlin would touch off a war. The military’s judgment—and the Politburo’s—is that we can’t afford one now.”

“Well…” Bokov had trouble arguing with that. Anyone who’d seen what the fight against the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union would. Yes, Eastern Europe obeyed Marshal Stalin’s every wish and busily remade itself on the Soviet model. Yes, the hammer-and-sickle flag flew in Berlin. But oh, the price of planting it here…!

“And there is another concern,” Shteinberg continued inexorably. “If we fight the United States, we risk the atom bomb. Till we also have this weapon, we have to be more cautious than we would if it did not exist.”

“Well…” That also made more sense than Captain Bokov wished it did. “How long till we build our own?”

“I don’t know, Volodya,” Shteinberg said with a shrug. “Till the Americans used one, I never dreamt anything like that was possible. I’m sure our people are doing everything they can.”

“Oh, so am I!” Bokov exclaimed. If all the free physicists in the USSR and all the ones who’d gone into the gulag for one reason or another (or for no reason at all—nobody knew better than an NKVD man that you didn’t always need a reason to end up in a camp) weren’t working twenty-one-hour days in pursuit of uranium, he would have been astonished.

“And we will have taken some German physicists back to the motherland, I’m sure, the same as we’ve taken some rocket engineers,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov nodded. “No doubt. Everybody knows the German rocket engineers are good, though—the Americans have grabbed the ones we didn’t. But the Fascists couldn’t make an atom bomb—”

“A good thing, too, or they would have used it on us,” his superior broke in.

That seemed too likely even to rate a nod. Bokov went on with his own train of thought: “How good are their physicists? How much can they help us?”

“If they can’t, they’ll be sorry.” Cold anticipation filled Shteinberg’s voice. A German brought to the USSR who earned his keep might get good treatment. A German who didn’t…was gulag fodder. If he died in a camp, well, the gulags never ran short of bodies.

But Bokov found something else to worry about. “What about the physicists the Heydrichites snatched up, the ones England turned loose in Germany?” he said. “How much harm can they do? They’re probably better men than the ones we took.” He was resigned to the fact that the more capable German scientists and engineers had wanted to get captured by the Anglo-Americans, not the Red Army.

“They can’t make Heydrich a bomb.” Shteinberg sounded completely confident about that. “And if they can’t make him a bomb, they’re a nuisance, a propaganda coup, an embarrassment to what passes for England’s security system.”

“We understand propaganda. So do the Fascist jackals—Hitler made a point of it in
Mein Kampf.
But the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov shook his head. “Only when it bites them.” He went on, “Do you think the bandits can actually make them take their troops out of the zones they occupy? The last thing we need is a Germany where the Nazis are running free again.”

“You think so, do you?” Shteinberg’s irony had as many barbs as a porcupine’s quill. He was an NKVD man. He was a Soviet citizen. Though no doubt officially an unbeliever, he was a Jew. Even Jews who didn’t believe remained Jews; like most Russians, Bokov was convinced of that. The colonel continued, “I have no idea what the Anglo-Americans will do next. I often think they have no idea what they’ll do next.”

“But if they should walk away from the occupation?” Bokov persisted. “What do
we
do then?”

Moisei Shteinberg’s gaze put Bokov in mind of Murmansk winter. The junior officer was glad it wasn’t aimed straight at him. “In that case,” Shteinberg said quietly, “we do whatever we have to do.”

“N
O, NO, NO,” A
D
EMOCRATIC
C
ONGRESSMAN SAID, EXASPERATION
filling his voice. “No one is talking about pulling American troops out of Germany, and—”

“If the distinguished gentleman from New York doesn’t think anybody is talking about bringing our boys home from Germany, I suggest that he’d better pull his head out of the sand,” a Republican broke in.

Bang!
Sam Rayburn rapped loudly for order. “That will be enough of that,” the Speaker of the House declared. “As a matter of fact, that’s too much of that.”

“Sorry, Mr. Speaker.” The Republican sounded anything but. Still, he observed the forms.

It’s getting rough,
Jerry Duncan thought. After Pearl Harbor, foreign policy had been thoroughly bipartisan. Before Pearl Harbor, with the exception of a few war-related measures like Lend-Lease, foreign policy had barely been on the House’s radar screen (and nobody’d ever heard of radar). But now the two sides were going at each other like a bucket of crawdads.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the Democrat from New York said pointedly. “If I may take up my remarks from the point where I was interrupted…No one is talking about pulling our troops out of Germany. And even if we were to remove them for any reason, the Russians would not proceed to occupy the western zones. I can guarantee that, because—”

He got interrupted again, by a different Republican this time: “How can you guarantee it? Who told you? God? God’s the only one who knows what the Reds are liable to do next.”

Bang!
Speaker Rayburn wielded the gavel again. “If you let the gentleman finish, maybe he’ll tell you how he can guarantee it.”

“
Thank
you, Mr. Speaker,” the Democrat repeated. “As a matter of fact, I was about to do that. The Russians won’t invade western Germany because we will drive them out with atom bombs, if necessary.”

“Or maybe we’ll just let them keep it,” another Democrat put in. “We know we can deal with Uncle Joe—we’ve been doing it since 1941. But does anybody want to let the Nazis get up off the mat after all we did to knock ’em flat? That’s what taking our troops out of Germany means, whether you like it or not.”

Jerry muttered under his breath. That was the administration’s trump card. Truman and his backers tried to make anybody who favored removing troops from Germany seem pro-Nazi. As far as Jerry was concerned, it wasn’t even slightly fair. “Mr. Speaker!” he called, jumping to his feet.

“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” Sam Rayburn intoned.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The problem is, thousands of our men are getting killed and maimed for no good reason. Thousands, Mr. Speaker, more than a year after this war was alleged to be over. And for what? For what? Are we one inch closer to putting down the German fanatics than we were the day after what was called V-E Day? If we are, where’s the evidence?”

“Are you asking me, Mr. Duncan?” Rayburn inquired. “I am not a military man, nor do I pretend to be.”

“I understand that, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “But the military men have no answers, either. They say so-and-so many fanatics have been killed. So-and-so many bunkers have been uncovered, and so-and-so many weapons have been captured or destroyed. And I say, so-and-so what? They don’t say the fanatics will quit any time soon. They don’t say the fanatics will quit at all—which seems wise, because they show no signs of quitting. But if these men show no signs of quitting, if we can’t put them down,
what are we doing there?
Besides wasting American lives and American taxpayers’ money, I mean?”

“I will speak to that,” the Democrat from New York said.

“By all means,” Rayburn told him. “Please go ahead.”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the New Yorker said.

He had even more reason to be polite than Jerry did. Jerry was on the other side; he wouldn’t get anything out of Sam Rayburn no matter what. But a Democrat who offended the Speaker of the House could find himself almost as unhappy about his office space and his committee assignments as your run-of-the-mill Republican. Like a lot of politicians, Rayburn had a long memory for slights.

The Democrat from New York turned to Jerry Duncan. “What we’re currently doing in our occupation zone—and what our allies are doing in theirs—is very simple. We are preventing Heydrich and the Nazis from taking over Germany again. President Truman thinks that’s a job worth doing. I agree with him.”

It was certainly the strongest argument the Democrats had. Nobody in the United States—hell, nobody in his right mind—had a good word to say about the Nazis. “Is this the best way to do that, though? Is this even close to the best way?” Jerry asked. “We were supposed to have knocked the Nazis over the head last May. How long will we have to stay in Germany? The Secretary of State talked about forty years. Do you want your grandsons shot at by German partisans in 1986? Do you think the American people will put up with spending forty years and God knows how many billions of dollars trying to drain a running sore?”

“If we leave, Heydrich wins. Do you want that?” the New Yorker said.

“If we stay, we throw away thousand—tens of thousands—of lives and those billions of dollars. Do you want
that
?” Jerry countered.

“We can’t let the fanatics drive us out,” the Democrat said.

“We can’t let them bleed us white, either,” Jerry Duncan said. “They pick their spots. They plant mines under a road or bombs in wreckage beside it. Our boys can’t pick up an ashtray without being afraid it’ll blow up in their hand. They can’t take a drink without being afraid it’s poisoned—look what the fanatics did to the Russians on New Year’s Eve. And when one of those maniacs with a truckload of explosives blows himself up, he costs Heydrich one man. He doesn’t cost him a truck, ’cause that’s one of ours, stolen. He takes out anywhere from a dozen to a hundred GIs. And we can’t stop it. By all the signs, we can’t even slow it down. Are you looking forward to forty more years of that?”

By the look on the Democratic Congressman’s face, he was looking forward to getting the hell out of there and having a long, stiff drink—or maybe three or four long, stiff drinks. “We are paying a price,” he said. Sam Rayburn jerked like a man who’d just found out he had a flea in his shorts. Democrats weren’t even supposed to admit that much. Doing his best to make amends, the New Yorker hurriedly went on, “But we’d pay a much higher price if we cut and run. We might pay the price of World War III.”

“So you’re saying it’s worthwhile to go right on bleeding till 1986?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t believe we’ll have to do that, or anything like that,” the Democrat from New York said. “I think we can defeat the fanatics in a reasonable amount of time. I think we will, too.”

Jerry pounced: “Then you’d favor a timetable for getting all our troops out of Germany?”

“I didn’t say that!” the New Yorker squawked.

“Sure sounded like you did,” Jerry said. By Sam Rayburn’s glower, he felt the same way.

“President Truman has said a timeline is unacceptable. I agree with him. A timeline just tells the enemy how long he has to wait before he wins,” the Democrat from New York said.

“In that case, you
don’t
really believe we can lick Heydrich’s goons in some reasonable time,” Jerry said. “You believe we’ll still be stuck there when that time is up. And you know what? I think we will, too. So what’s the point of waiting around and taking more casualties? Let’s bring the boys home now!”

Several people listening to the debate up in the gallery started to applaud. Sam Rayburn used his gavel. “Order! Order!” he called. They went on clapping. He banged the gavel some more. “We must have order,” he declared. “I will have the gallery cleared if this continues.”