The Man with the Iron Heart (4 page)

“Over there, in that cow barn.” Eshchenko pointed to a big wooden building surrounded by shiny new barbed wire and a couple of squads’ worth of Soviet guards. The major snorted. “Damned thing is fancier than we’d use for people, fuck your mother if it’s not.”

He was taking a chance, talking like that. What he wanted to say was,
I’m a regular guy, and I figure you are, too.
But if Bokov decided he meant the insult personally, he was dead meat. Again, Bokov had bigger worries than a major with a loose tongue. All he said was, “I’ll see what I can get out of them.”

His blue and crimson arm-of-service colors got him past the junior lieutenant in charge of the guards. The lieutenant did give him a couple of men with submachine guns, saying, “My orders are not to let anybody go in amongst the Nazis by himself.”

The kid spoke of them as if they were lions or bears. His orders made sense, too. If the Germans took a hostage…Well, it wouldn’t do them any good, but they might be too stupid to realize that. And Bokov was sure the Soviets would deal with the hostage-takers without caring what happened to the man they held.

One of the soldiers opened the barred door. The stink that wafted out said the barn didn’t have much in the way of plumbing. Most likely, it didn’t have anything. “Give the swine the works,” the trooper said.

“I aim to, Corporal,” Bokov said. Then he switched to German and shouted, “Prisoners, attention!” He’d learned the language before the war started. Only luck, he supposed, that that hadn’t made someone suspect him.

How the Germans scrambled to form neat lines! They all wore uniform, and ranged in age from maybe fourteen to sixty-five. Bokov found himself nodding. Whoever’d taken out Marshal Koniev had used a military weapon, and used it like someone who knew how. So the occupying troops would have hauled in as many men in field-gray as they could catch.

Bokov could see which Germans had already been interrogated. They were the ones who stood there with fresh bruises and scrapes, the ones who had trouble standing up at all. He pointed to a fellow who still wore a senior sergeant’s single pip on each shoulder strap. “You.
Feldwebel.
Come with me.”

Gulping, the man came. He hadn’t been thumped yet. Plainly, he thought he was about to be. And he was right. But the Red Army men would have shot him on the spot had he even peeped.

“Tie him to a tree,” Bokov told the troopers. “Do a good job of it.” They did. From somewhere, one of them produced wire instead of rope. The
Feldwebel
wouldn’t be going anywhere, no matter what. Bokov took out a pen knife. He started cleaning his nails with it. The German watched the point with fearful fascination. Casually, Bokov asked him, “What do you know about Marshal Koniev’s murder?”

“Only that he’s dead, sir,” the noncom said quickly. Too quickly? Well, Bokov had all the time in the world to find out.

He slapped the German across the face, forehand and backhand. “That’s just a taste of what you’ll get if I decide you’re lying. Now—let’s try it again. What do you know about this murder?”

“Nothing. On my mother’s honor, sir, I—” Another pair of slaps interrupted the
Feldwebel.
Blood and snot ran from his nose. Bokov eyed him with distaste. He didn’t particularly enjoy this, but it was part of the work. If he got something useful from this poor bastard, his bosses would remember. Unfortunately, they’d also remember if he didn’t.

With some help from the troopers, he did what he needed to do. The
Feldwebel
didn’t enjoy it, but he wasn’t supposed to. Bokov soon became sure he wasn’t the fellow who’d fired the
Panzerfaust.
That didn’t mean he was a born innocent. At a certain point in the proceedings, he shrieked, “Jesus Christ! Why are you doing this to me? Why don’t you torture the Werewolves? They’re the ones who really know something!”

“Werewolves?” Vladimir Bokov paused to light another mild American cigarette. He blew smoke in the prisoner’s eyes. “Tell me more….”

Reinhard Heydrich hardly noticed the distant
put-put
from the generator any more. He hardly noticed the faint smell of the exhaust, either. He hoped he—or somebody—would notice if that smell got stronger. The ventilation system down here was supposed to be as good as anybody knew how to make it, but carbon monoxide could still get you if your luck turned sour.

His mouth twisted. This past month, Germany’s luck had turned sour. The
Führer,
dead by his own hand! Himmler dead, too, also by his own hand! The whole country prostrate, surrendered, occupied from east and west. Almost all the important officials of State and Party in the Western Allies’ hand; or, worse, in the Russians’.

I’m on my own,
Heydrich thought.
It’s up to me. If they think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost. If
we
think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost.

Thinking of the Western Allies’ hands, and of the Russians’, made him glance down at his own. The light from the bare bulb was harsh. Even so, he was amazed how pale he’d got, this past year underground. He’d always been a man who rejoiced in the outdoors. He’d always been a man who tanned as if someone had rubbed his skin with walnut dye, too.

When he proposed this scheme to Himmler, when he proposed himself to head it, he hadn’t grasped everything it entailed. If you were going to fight a secret war, a guerrilla war, against enemy occupiers, you had to disappear yourself. And so…he had.

“I’ll come out in the sun again when Germany comes out in the sun again,” he murmured.

“What was that,
Herr Reichsprotektor
?” Hans Klein asked. His onetime driver was with him still. After the assassination attempt in Prague, Heydrich knew he could count on the veteran noncom. Klein had loudly and profanely turned down promotion to officer’s rank. The mere idea affronted him.

“Nothing.” Heydrich said it again, to make himself believe it: “Nothing.” But it wasn’t. He shouldn’t have let Klein see what was going on inside his head, even for a heartbeat.

The
Oberscharführer
had too much sense to push it. Instead, he asked, “Anything interesting in the news bulletins?”

Of course they monitored as many broadcasts as they could. Their own signals were few and far between, to keep from leaving tracks for the hunters. Since the
Reich
collapsed, they had to do the best they could with enemy propaganda and the military traffic they could pick up and decipher. Heydrich fiddled with some papers. “They’ve found paintings and some other art that Göring salted away.”

That made Klein chuckle. “The Fat One wasn’t in it for the money, but he sure was in it for what he could grab.”

“Ja.”
Heydrich admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But when I said he salted stuff away, I meant it. They took this art out of an abandoned salt mine.”

“Oh.
Scheisse.
” Hans Klein might not have much book learning, but he was nobody’s fool. “Does that mean they’ll start poking around other mines?”

“I hope not,” Heydrich answered. “We have ways to keep them from finding the entrance.” He sounded confident. He had to, to keep Klein’s spirits up. But he knew things could go wrong. Anyone who’d survived in Germany knew that. And, of course, one traitor was worth any number of unlucky chances. He had endless escape routes, and didn’t want to use any of them.

“What else is in the news?” Klein inquired. Maybe he didn’t want to think about everything that could go tits-up, either.

“The Americans say they’ve almost finished conquering Okinawa.” Heydrich had needed to pull out an atlas to find out just where Okinawa lay. He had one to pull out; when Germans set out to do something, they damned well did it properly.

His former driver only sniffed. “They’ve been saying that for a while now. The little yellow men are making them pay.”

“They are,” Heydrich agreed. “And these suicide planes…If you can use an airplane to sink a warship, that’s a good bargain.”

“Not one I’d want to make myself,” Klein said.

“It all depends,” Heydrich said in musing tones. “It truly does. A man who expects to die is hard to defend against. The Russians taught us that, and the Japanese lesson is a different verse of the same song. We have men dedicated enough to serve that way, don’t you think?”

“You mean it.” Klein considered the question as a senior sergeant might. “Well, sir, I expect we could, as long as they saw they were taking a bunch of those other bastards with ’em.”

“Our enemies need to understand we are in earnest,” Heydrich said. “One thing to win a war. Quite another to win the peace afterwards. They think they can turn Germany into whatever they please. The Anglo-Americans go on about democracy—as if we want another Weimar Republic! And the Russians…”

“
Ja.
The Russians,” Klein echoed mournfully. One thing Stalin’s men were doing in the lands they’d occupied: they were proving that all the frantic warnings Nazis propagandists had pumped out were understatements. And who would have believed
that
beforehand?

“Well.” Heydrich pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “We have some more planning to do. And then—to work!”

B
ERNIE
C
OBB HAD PLAYED BASEBALL IN HIGH SCHOOL.
A
LL THE
same, nobody would ever confuse him with Ty. For one thing, he was no Georgia Peach; he’d grown up outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. For another, even in that light air he was no threat with the bat, though he could field some.

He wasn’t as fast as he had been then. He’d frozen his feet in the Battle of the Bulge, and they still weren’t back to a hundred percent. Instead of short or center, he played third in the pickup game outside of Erlangen.

The town, northwest of Nuremberg, had come through the war pretty well. The way it looked to Bernie, it wasn’t big enough to plaster. Maybe it had a few more people than Albuquerque—which ran about 35,000—but that didn’t make it any threat to New York City, or even Munich.

They played on a more or less mowed meadow just outside of town. The pitcher on the other side claimed he’d spent three years in the low minors. He could throw hard, but he needed a road map and a compass to find the plate. Maybe that was why he never got to the high minors. Or maybe he was talking through his hat.

A fastball at Bernie’s ribs made him spin out of the box. “Ball four! Take your base!” the ump bawled. He was a first sergeant with a face like a clenched fist. He wasn’t much of an umpire, but nobody had the nerve to tell him so.

Tossing the bat aside, Bernie trotted down to first. “Way to go, man!” one of his teammates yelled. Bernie was just glad he hadn’t got drilled. A couple of GIs clapped. They weren’t buddies of his; maybe they had money on his team.

Along with the American soldiers were a few Germans: mostly kids out for candy or gum or C-rats or women out for whatever they could get. Fraternizing with them was against regulations, which didn’t stop it. Bernie hadn’t come down venereal, but not from lack of effort. He knew half a dozen guys who had. They hardly cared—not the way they would have while the war was on. They only wanted to go home. If they couldn’t do that, they wanted to fuck. Well, so did Bernie. Why not? Even if you caught something, pills or shots could cure you quick nowadays.

No more than three or four German men watched the game. One was an old fart in a suit, a town councillor out to see what the conquerors did in their spare time. Another was talking to a GI Bernie knew, a guy who spoke no German. Maybe the kraut had spent time in the States before the war.

“Strike!” the ump yelled. Bernie thought the pitch was high by six inches, but what could you do?

The pitcher threw over to first. Bernie dove back to the bag.
You stupid asshole,
he thought as he picked himself up.
With my bad feet, am I gonna run on you?

“Ball!”

To Bernie, that pitch looked better than the one before. If he said so, the umpire would probably rip out his spleen.

He took a very modest lead. The pitcher stared over at him anyway. Bernie ignored the big dumb rube. There was one other German guy in the crowd. He was the same age as most of the GIs, which meant he’d likely been a soldier himself, but he wore baggy, nondescript civvies. They weren’t what made Bernie notice him as he pressed his way in among the soldiers back of third base. The guy had the worst thousand-yard stare Bernie’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus.

“Ball!” the ump said. And it was a ball—it sent the batter staggering away from the plate like the last one to Bernie a couple of minutes before.

Blam!
Bernie flattened out before he knew he’d done it. It might be July, but he still had his combat reflexes. An explosion made him hit the dirt faster than a high hard one at his ear.

“What the fuck?” That was the first baseman, sprawled a few feet away from him. “Christ, we playin’ on a goddamn minefield?”

Bernie cautiously raised his head. He didn’t have a sidearm, let alone his M1. The war was
over,
dammit.

It was sure over for some of the guys who’d been watching behind third. Over permanently. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. Half of somebody’s left leg bled ten feet in front of the low mound. Other gruesome souvenirs spattered the left side of the infield.

Screams rose from wounded American soldiers. So did cries for a medic. Bernie ran over to do what he could for the injured men. It wasn’t much. He didn’t carry wound dressings or a morphine syrette, the way he would have while the war was still cooking. By the helpless looks and muffled profanity that came from the other unhurt GIs, neither did anybody else.

Bernie crouched by a guy who was clutching at a bloody leg. “You want a tourniquet on that?” Bernie asked him. He could improvise one with a shoelace and a stick. When the hell would an ambulance show up?

“I don’t think so. I ain’t bleedin’
that
bad,” the other answered. In a wondering voice, he added, “He blew himself up.”

“Huh?” Bernie said brilliantly. “Who?”

“That fuckin’ kraut. He blew himself to kingdom come. Blew half of us with him, too, the goddamn son of a bitch.”

“He didn’t step on a mine?
Somebody
didn’t step on a mine?”

A siren warbled, approaching from the direction of downtown Erlangen. The warble meant it was a German vehicle. Bernie wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not right now. The guy with the gash in his leg went on, “Nah, not a chance. Look at what’s left of the asshole.”

Not much was, and even less between the knees and the neck. Bernie gulped and looked away in a hurry. He’d hoped he would never see shit like that again. No such luck.

Just as the ambulance pulled up, the wounded GI yanked what looked like a tenpenny nail out of his leg. “Jesus!” he said, staring at three inches of pointed iron. “The mother didn’t just have explosives. He had his own fuckin’ shrapnel!”

“That’s nuts,” Bernie said. “Who ever heard of a kamikaze Nazi?”

“Maybe you better put somethin’ around my leg,” the other guy said. “It’s bleeding more now that I pulled that sucker out.”

“Okay.” Bernie sacrificed a leather shoelace to the tourniquet.

Three krauts hopped out of the ambulance. They stared at the carnage in disbelief.
“Der Herr Jesus!”
one of them blurted. Another one crossed himself. Then they got to work. Their unflustered competence made Bernie guess they’d been
Wehrmacht
medics up till a few weeks earlier.

One Jerry spoke some English. Unhurt and slightly wounded men followed his orders as if he were an American officer. He plainly knew what he was doing.

But when he started to pick up the remains of the fellow who’d blown himself up, the sergeant who’d been doing umpire duty pushed him away. “Leave what’s left of that bastard right where he’s at,” the noncom said.

“Warum?”
the German asked, startled out of his English. He got it back a moment later: “Why?”

“On account of our guys are gonna have to try and figure out how come the shithead went kablooie,” the sergeant said. “It’s a murder, right? You don’t fuck around with the scene of a crime.” More to himself than to the guy from the ambulance, he added, “The stuff you pick up from mystery stories.”

How much of what he said did the German get? Enough so he didn’t go near what was left of the human bomb, anyhow. Bernie Cobb understood all of it. It made much more sense than he wished it did.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG WANTED TO GO BACK TO THE
S
TATES.
H
E DIDN’T
want to examine any more mangled flesh. He didn’t want to smell the sick-sweet stench of death any more, either. (Not that you could avoid it in Germany, not in towns where the Army Air Force or the RAF had come to call…and in a lot of places the Army’d gone through, too.)

That stench was mild here, two days after the bombing with most of the dead meat taken away. Mild or not, it was there, and it made his stomach want to turn over. Toby Benton’s mouth twisted, too. “Hell of a thing—uh, sir,” the sergeant said.