The Man with the Iron Heart (41 page)

Frank reclaimed the pack. He lit a cigarette of his own. “Way you talk, I’m one of the jerks who want to run away. I’m on your side, Lou.”

“Yeah, I know, sir. Honest, I do. But—” Lou’s wave was expansive enough to cover two continents’ worth of discontent and the Atlantic between them. “Do these people
want
to fight another war in fifteen or twenty years? Do they think the Nazis
won’t
take over again if we quit? Or the Russians if the Nazis don’t?”

“What we need is Heydrich’s head nailed to the wall,” Howard Frank said. “If we get rid of him and things start settling down, maybe we can make the occupation work after all.”

“That’d be something,” Lou agreed. “Not much luck yet down in the mountains, though. A few weapons caches, but those are all over the fucking country. No Alpine Redoubt—or if there is, it’s as close to invisible as makes no difference.”

“Those may not be the same thing,” Frank said thoughtfully.

“Huh,” Lou said, also thoughtfully, and then, “You’ve got a point. Redoubt or not, though, you know what Germany is these days?”

“Sure, a fucking mess,” Frank answered.

“I mean besides that,” Lou said. “It’s like one of those small-town china shops with a sign in the window that goes
YOU DROP IT, YOU BREAK IT, YOU PAY FOR IT.
And we dropped it, and we broke it, and—”

“We’re paying for it. Boy, are we ever,” Major Frank said. “But what the folks back home can’t see is, we’ll end up paying even more later on if we bail out now. Hell, could you see that if your kid came home in a box a year and a half after Hitler blew his brains out and the Nazis surrendered?”

“I don’t know, sir—honest to God, I don’t.” Lou stubbed out his cigarette, which had got very small. All the butts in the ashtray would get mixed in with the general trash and then thrown out. And once the stuff got beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, the krauts would pick through it like packrats and get hold of every gram of tobacco and every scrap of crust of burnt toast. Times were tough here. That it was the Jerries’ own goddamn fault made it no less true.

“Well, there you are, then.” Frank had kept on with the conversation while Lou’s wits wandered.

“Yeah, here I am,” Lou agreed. “And you know what else? No matter how fucked up this lousy place is, I need to be here. So do you. So do we—all of us. But how much longer will all the big brains back in Washington let us do what we gotta do?”

“You get that one right, Lou, you win the sixty-four dollars,” Howard Frank said.

B
ERLIN WAS A RAVAGED CITY: NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT.
A
ND YET,
Vladimir Bokov had come to realize, it could have been worse. The
Wehrmacht
had done the bulk of its fighting off to the east, trying to hold the Red Army away from the German capital. Blocks in Berlin—especially blocks around the seat of the Nazi government—had got smashed up, certainly. But not every block, every house, had been fought over till one side or the other could fight no more. In that, Berlin differed from Stalingrad or Kharkov or Warsaw or Budapest or Königsberg or…a hundred or a thousand other places, large and small, on the Eastern Front.

The Germans would be able to rebuild Berlin faster because of that. The women and kids and stooped old men chucking broken bricks into bins one by one had only millions to dispose of, not tens of millions the way they would have if every building had been wrecked. Captain Bokov grimaced. The Soviet line proclaimed that the German people weren’t the USSR’s enemies: only the former Hitlerite regime and the Heydrichite bandits who wanted to resurrect it.

Bokov wasn’t stupid enough to criticize the Soviet line. An NKVD officer who did something like that—assuming anyone could be so idiotic—would soon discover just how far north of the Arctic Circle his country built camps. But, even if he wouldn’t say so out loud, Bokov was a lot more suspicious of the German people than Soviet propaganda suggested he ought to be.

That kid with the peach fuzz and the drippy nose and the mittens full of holes who was chucking rubble into a bucket…was he old enough to have toted a rifle or a Schmeisser the last year of the declared war? Sure he was. The
Volkssturm
had sucked in plenty of younger guys. And the scrawny bastard working next to him, the one with the gray stubble and the limp…What had he done before he got hurt? He warily watched Bokov, letting his eyes drift down or away whenever the NKVD man looked in his direction.

He probably wasn’t wearing an explosive vest right now—he was too skinny. But if he put one on, with a raggedy greatcoat to camouflage it, and went looking for a crowd of Russians…No, the only Germans Bokov was sure he could trust close to him were naked women. Even then, he’d heard stories that some of them deliberately spread disease to put occupiers out of action.

He didn’t
know
that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen that the Germans deserved their reputation for thoroughness. No one who’d been through one of their murder factories could possibly doubt it. Why
wouldn’t
they use infected prostitutes as a weapon?

Then a bullet cracked past his head. He forgot about subtle weapons like syphilitic whores. Not a goddamn thing subtle about rifle fire. He heard the report as he threw himself flat in the wreckage-strewn street. Had to be a sniper shooting from long range, if the round beat its sound by so much.

Another bullet pierced the air where he’d stood a moment before. It spanged off a paving stone behind him. A woman screeched and clutched at her arm. The ricochet must have got her.

Three or four Red Army soldiers, most of them carrying PPSh submachine guns, trotted purposefully in the direction from which the gunfire had come. The Germans in the work gang—except the wounded woman—started making themselves scarce. They knew the Soviet Union took hostages when somebody fired at its troops. They knew the Russians shot hostages, too.

Bokov didn’t have time to worry about that right now. He wriggled behind the burnt-out, rusting carcass of a German halftrack that had sat there since the last battle. One of these days, somebody would haul it off for scrap metal, but that hadn’t happened yet.

He waited for another shot. Unlike a soft-skinned vehicle, the halftrack really would protect him against small-arms fire. But the sniper didn’t shoot at Bokov or at the Red Army men now going after him. Since he’d failed, he seemed to want to get away and shoot at somebody else another time.

Cautiously, Captain Bokov peered out from behind the halftrack’s dented front bumper. If the sniper had outguessed him, if the son of a bitch had drawn a bead on the front end of the halftrack and was waiting for him to show himself…Well, in that case Bokov’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

But no. Bokov’s sigh reminded him he’d been holding his breath. The soldiers were heading for a block of flats that had to be almost a kilometer away. Yes, a marksman could hit from that range. Bokov didn’t like turning into a target—which wouldn’t matter a kopek’s worth to the damned Heydrichite with the scope-sighted rifle.

No more gunfire from the distant apartment block. Bokov stood up straight and brushed dust and mud off his uniform. He started toward the flats himself. His eyes flicked back and forth. If the sniper missed him again, he wanted to know where to dive next.

More soldiers came around a corner. They also headed for the apartments. They went in. Germans started coming out. Any of them over the age of twelve might have been the gunman. Bokov didn’t think any of them was. If the shooter wasn’t long gone, he would have been surprised.

A senior sergeant who’d been with the first bunch walked up to him. Saluting, the man said, “Well, Comrade Captain, we have enough of these bastards for the firing squads.”

“Good enough,” Bokov answered. “Did your men find any weapons or anti-Soviet propaganda in the flats?”

“No weapons, sir.” The underofficer suddenly looked apprehensive. “We weren’t really searching for propaganda. We could go back….”

“No, never mind,” Bokov said. The sergeant’s sigh of relief wasn’t much different from the one he’d let out himself behind the German halftrack. “If you had found something like that, it might have told us who’d want to harbor one of the bandits. Since you didn’t…” He shrugged. “Question the lot of them. If you don’t learn anything interesting, give them to the firing squads. If you do, bring the ones who know something over to NKVD headquarters and execute the rest. Have you got that?”

“
Da,
Comrade Captain!” With another sharp salute, the senior sergeant repeated Bokov’s orders back to him. He wore several decorations. Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d led a company during the war. More than a few underofficers had, casualties among lieutenants and captains being what they were. His look and manner proclaimed him a competent man.

“All right, then. Carry on,” the NKVD officer said.

“Da,”
the sergeant repeated. Then he added something he didn’t have to: “Glad the son of a bitch missed you, sir. This kind of crap just goes on and on. There doesn’t seem to be any end for it, does there? And too damned often we’ve got to carry off the poor bastard who stopped one. That’s no good, you know? We
won
this fucking war…didn’t we?”

Bokov could have sent him to the gulag for those last two imperfectly confident words. He could have, but he didn’t. The senior sergeant made it plain he cared whether an NKVD man lived or died. From a Red Army trooper, that was close to miraculous. By the way they talked, most Soviet soldiers had more sympathy for Heydrichites than they did for Chekists.

When Bokov got back to his office, Moisei Shteinberg greeted him with, “Well, Volodya, I hear you had an adventure this morning.”

“Afraid so, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov agreed. “Sniper missed me—missed me twice, in fact. He got away afterwards, dammit. The Fascist bandits will probably reprimand him for bad shooting.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” Shteinberg was so serious, he destroyed Bokov’s small pleasure at his own joke. After a moment, the colonel went on, “We’ve been lucky over here for a while now. The Heydrichites haven’t used any radium against us, and they haven’t pulled off any outrages against us, either, the way they did in Paris and London.”

“How long can that last?” Bokov wondered aloud.

Colonel Shteinberg’s eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and narrow (not slanted like a Tartar’s—or like those of so many Russians, Bokov included—but definitely narrow). They were also very, very knowing. A Jew’s eyes, in other words. Bokov had never thought of them that way before, but when he did the notion fit like a rifle round in its chamber. Yes, a Jew’s eyes.

After studying Bokov a long moment, the Jew—the senior NKVD officer—gently inquired, “Have you no confidence in the ability of the Soviet system to defend itself against the Fascist bandits?”

What a minefield lay under one innocent-sounding question. “I have perfect confidence that our system will triumph in the end.” Captain Bokov answered with the greatest of care—and also took care not to show how careful he was. “But no one can know ahead of time the road by which it will triumph, or how strongly the reactionaries will be able to resist.”

“
Khorosho,
Volodya.
Ochen khorosho.
” The smile that flickered across Shteinberg’s face said he appreciate the response no less than he might have savored a particularly lovely passage in a new Shostakovich symphony. “Still, even if it’s a good answer, it doesn’t tell us how to keep such disasters from happening to us.”

Shrugging, Bokov said, “We work hard. We hope we stay lucky.” He paused, wondering whether to press his own luck. With Colonel Shteinberg pleased with him, he decided to: “And maybe we really ought to work more with the Anglo-Americans.”

No matter how pleased Shteinberg was, he shook his head without the least hesitation.
“Nyet,”
he said firmly. “Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. It won’t happen, and you’ve got no idea how much trouble you’ll end up in if you suggest it to anybody but me. I keep trying to tell you that, but you don’t want to listen.”

“All right, Comrade Colonel.” By the way Bokov said it, it wasn’t, but his superior wouldn’t come down on him for that. “Still seems a shame, though…”

“Sending a good officer to Kolyma would be a shame, too,” Shteinberg observed. Since Kolyma, in far eastern Siberia, was one of those places that lay well above the Arctic Circle, Bokov decided not to press the argument any further. Too bad, but you did have to live if they’d let you.

“S
TAND CLEAR!” THE DEMOLITIONS GUY YELLED.

Bernie Cobb figured he was already well beyond anything the charge in the throat of the old mine could throw. He backed up a few more paces just the same. Some chances he got paid—not enough, but paid—to take. This wasn’t one of them.

Several other GIs also retreated a few steps. The first sergeant with the detonator looked around one more time. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and rammed the plunger home.

Boom!
Bernie had heard a lot of explosions like this one. He watched dust and a few rocks fly out of the mouth of the shaft. None of the rocks came anywhere near his buddies and him. They all knew how far to back up by now.

As the dust settled, he saw that the shaft was closed, presumably for good. He nodded to himself. The fellow with the explosives knew what he was doing, which was reassuring. If you handled that shit, you needed to know what was going on. Anyone who didn’t would end up slightly dead, or more than slightly. And a butterfingers was liable to take some ordinary dogfaces with him, too.

The thought had hardly crossed Bernie’s mind before something out of the ordinary happened. Most of the time—all the time up till now—there’d been the explosion, and the roar as the mouth of the shaft fell in, and that was it.

Except that wasn’t it, not today. Things down underground kept falling over. It was like listening to a house of cards collapse, if you could imagine cards made of rock and each about the size of a bus.