The Man with the Iron Heart (50 page)

When Diana heard the sharp
pop!,
it didn’t register as anything but a backfire. But Gus van Slyke fell over. Something warm and wet splashed Diana’s arm—she was wearing a sleeveless dress because of the heat. It was blood. She could smell it. She could smell something else, too—van Slyke had fouled himself. His feet drummed on the platform, but not for long. He lay in a spreading pool of his own gore.

Diana jammed a hand in her mouth to keep from shrieking. Out in the crowd, people did start screaming. Some of them tried to run away. They stepped on other people. No, they trampled them—they weren’t being polite about it. More screams and yells and wails rang out, which only led to more trampling as chaos spread.

Lieutenant Offenbacher stepped around the red, red pool as he strode to the microphone. “This assembly is canceled,” he declared. “This is a crime scene, a murder investigation.” That didn’t stop the panic in the crowd, either. If anything, it made matters worse.

The fireworks got canceled, too.

O
FFICIAL
W
ASHINGTON CELEBRATED THE
F
OURTH OF
J
ULY ON THE
Mall. The President made a speech. No doubt it was full of patriotic fervor. The fireworks display was second to none. With Uncle Sam footing the bill, they could afford to make it lavish.

Tom Schmidt wasn’t there. Somebody else was covering President Truman’s hot air for the
Chicago Tribune.
Unofficial Washington gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to tell official Washington what it thought of Truman’s German policy. Official Washington, of course, was hard of hearing.

“No,” Tom muttered as Clark Griffith, who owned the Washington Senators—first in boos, first in shoes, last in the American League—tore into Truman. “Official Washington is hard of listening.”

“What’s that?” another reporter asked him.

“Nothing. Just woolgathering,” Tom lied. He wrote the line down. Sure as hell, it would help the column along.

Griffith finally ran out of words and backed away from the microphone. Next batter up was Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Dirksen had kind of fishy features, wildly curly hair, and the exaggerated gestures of a Shakespearean ham actor. The combination should have made him ridiculous. Somehow, it didn’t. His baritone bell of a voice had a lot to do with that. So did the genuine outrage that poured from him now.

“Out in Indiana, they are killing us—killing us, I tell you!” he thundered, pounding a fist down on the lectern. “Councilman Augustus van Slyke tried to exercise his rights under the First Amendment of our great Constitution. He tried to peaceably petition our government for redress of grievances. And our government has a great many grievances to redress, but I shall speak of that another time. Augustus van Slyke tried to tell the truth to the powers that be, and what became of him?
What became of him?
He was shot dead, my friends, shot down like a dog in the highway, without so much as a bunch of lace at his throat!”

Something stirred in Tom Schmidt as he scribbled notes. That was from a poem. He’d read it in high school. “The Highwayman,” that was it, though he was damned if he could remember who wrote it. Well, he could check Bartlett’s when he got back to the bureau. Only somebody like Dirksen (though there wasn’t really anybody
like
Dirksen—he was one of a kind) would throw a poem into a political speech.

But it worked. The hum that rose from the crowd said it worked. Half the people there, maybe more, must’ve read “The Highwayman” or heard somebody recite it. Dirksen might be a crazy fox, but a fox he was.

“How dare they?
How dare they?
” He pounded the lectern again. “They are no longer content with lying to us. No, that does not satisfy them any more, for they begin to see that we begin to see through the tissue of their lies. And so, where words will not suffice them, they commence to argue with bullets. But will even bullets stop us, friends?”

“No!”
the crowd roared. That cry must have rattled windows in the White House. Harry Truman wasn’t there to hear it—he’d be speechifying to his friends right now. If he had any friends. To his supporters, anyhow. Maybe he’d hear it on the Mall, too.

Hammier than any actor, Dirksen cupped a hand behind one ear. “What was that?” he asked mildly.

“No!”
That oceanic crowd-roar came again, even louder this time. Tom’s ears rang. A little nervously, he wondered how many people here carried guns. Some pulp horror writer—Schmidt couldn’t come up with his name, either, and it wouldn’t be in Bartlett’s—once advanced a rule about raising demons.
Do not call up that which you cannot put down.
Had Everett Dirksen ever heard of that rule? The White House
was
right across the street. If the crowd tried to storm it, Councilman van Slyke wouldn’t be the only one who got shot today. Unh-unh. Not even close.

“They say, in Indianapolis, they have yet to find the murderer—to find the filthy
assassin.
” Dirksen hissed the last word with poisonous relish. “He shot a man dead in broad daylight, before witnesses uncounted, and they have yet to find him? My friends,
how hard are they looking?
”

Another roar rose up from the throng gathered together in the hot, sticky July night. This one was wordless, and all the angrier for that. Suddenly, Tom Schmidt wasn’t just anxious any more. He was scared green. Politics was what you did instead of shooting people who didn’t think like you. But once you started shooting, where did you stop? Anywhere?

If the Second Revolution—or maybe the Second Civil War—starts here, it’s a hell of a story, yeah,
Tom thought,
but am I gonna live long enough to file it?

And then he caught a break. Maybe the whole country caught a break—he was never sure afterwards, but he always thought so. Over on the Mall, the super-duper fireworks show began.

The noise was like gunfire, but the polychrome flameflowers and torrents of blazing sparks exploding across the velvet-black sky proclaimed by their beauty their peace. Everett Dirksen looked over his shoulder at them. That was probably sheer reflex to begin with, but he seemed transfixed by the spectacle—he couldn’t look away.

At last, he did. He lifted his glasses with one hand and rubbed at his eyes with the other. Then, softly at first but with his great voice swelling as the words poured out of him, he began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was a bitch of a song to sing, but he did it. He raised his hands, and the crowd joined in.

Tom Schmidt started singing before he quite realized he was doing it. He couldn’t carry a tune in a sack, but it didn’t matter right then. None of the reporters nearby sounded any better than he did. Chances were most of the people in Lafayette Park wouldn’t run Alfred Drake or Ethel Merman out of business any time soon, either. That also turned out not to matter. Added all together, they sounded pretty damn good.

“The bombs bursting in air…”
Tears ran unashamed down Everett Dirksen’s cheek, glistening in the spotlights. Did he mean them, or could he bring them on at command? With Dirksen, you never could tell. But half the hard-bitten newshounds near Tom were sniffling, too, as bombs
did
burst in air. And nobody stormed the White House.

NKVD Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov wore a permanent scowl.
I would, too,
Vladimir Bokov thought, warily eyeing Vlasov’s pinched, pulled-down mouth and angry, bristly eyebrows. The assistant chief of the NKVD’s Berlin establishment was cursed, and would be cursed till the day he died, with an unfortunate family name.

Red Army General Andrei Vlasov was the worst traitor the USSR had had in the Great Patriotic War. After surrendering to the Nazis, he’d commanded what Goebbels called the Russian Liberation Army, a Fascist puppet force of other Soviet traitors. And, after the
Wehrmacht
surrendered, he’d been captured and shot, and better than he deserved, too.

Yuri Vlasov had no family connection to him; the surname wasn’t rare. But the stench that went with it lingered. No Soviet citizen could say the word
Vlasovite
without feeling as if shit filled his mouth. Vlasov met the problem the same way Captain Bokov would have were he stuck with it: by acting ten times as tough as he would have otherwise.

So it was no great surprise when Yuri Vlasov’s cold, narrow-eyed glare—he had Tartar eyes like Bokov’s, and his were also dark—swung from the captain to Colonel Shteinberg and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And it was no great surprise when he barked,
“Nyet.”

“But, Comrade General, we have this excellent information—new and excellent information,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “We have it, and we can’t do anything with it ourselves. It’s like having a pretty girl when you can’t get it up.”

Much less earthy than most Russians, Shteinberg hardly ever cracked jokes like that. Maybe he shouldn’t have cracked this one. Lieutenant General Vlasov’s right hand cramped into a white-knuckled fist; his cheeks and ears blazed red. Had he tried playing games with some German popsy with big tits and come up short?

Whether he had or he hadn’t, he snarled, “Fuck your mother, Shteinberg. I told you you couldn’t go to the American pricks, and you goddamn well can’t. That is an order. Do you understand it?”

“
Da,
Comrade General,” Shteinberg answered tonelessly: the only thing he could say.

Those fierce Tartar eyes lit on Bokov again. He wished they wouldn’t have. “What about you, Captain?” Vlasov demanded. “Do you also understand the order?”

“
Da,
Comrade General,” Bokov said, as Shteinberg had before him.

“Khorosho.”
But it wasn’t good enough to suit Vlasov, for he rounded on Shteinberg once more. “You’re a
zhid
yourself, so you were born sneaky—just like this so-called informant of yours. Asking if you understand isn’t enough. Will you obey the order?”

Bokov didn’t know whether the loophole had occurred to Shteinberg. It had occurred to him: a measure of his own rage and desperation. He waited to see what Shteinberg would say. The Jew said what he had to say yet again: “
Da,
Comrade General.” He sighed afterwards, which did him not a fart’s worth of good.

Yuri Vlasov proceeded to nail things down tight: “You will obey, too, Captain Bokov?”

“
Da,
Comrade General. I serve the Soviet Union.” Bokov did his best to turn the ritual phrase of acknowledgment into a reproach.

His best wasn’t good enough. “All right, then. That’s settled,” Vlasov said, relentless as a bulldozer. “Fuck off, both of you.”

They…fucked off. Once outside of—well outside of—Yuri Vlasov’s office, Bokov began, “I’d like to—”

“Wait in line, Captain. I’m senior to you,” Shteinberg said. “So many people like him, and we beat the Hitlerites anyway. Only goes to show Germany was pretty screwed up, too.”

“But this Shmuel—” Bokov kept spluttering phrases. “We ought to—”

Colonel Shteinberg took him by the elbow and steered him out of NKVD headquarters before he could splutter a phrase that would cook his goose. “No,” Shteinberg said, regretfully but firmly. “He gave us an order. We promised to obey it. If we go back on that…” He shivered, though the day was warm enough and then some. “Even if it worked out well, they’d still make examples of us.”

That was such obvious truth, Bokov didn’t waste his breath arguing it. He did say, “That goddamn fathead will be sorry he gave his stupid order.”

“One way or another, things will even out,” Shteinberg said. “Unless, of course, they don’t.”

A
CREW OF
G
ERMAN STEVEDORES IN OVERALLS LOADED CRATES INTO
the C-47. First Lieutenant Wes Adams eyed his cargo manifest.
Equipment,
it said, which told him exactly nothing. “You know what we’re taking to Berlin?” he asked his copilot.

“Buncha boxes and two krauts,” answered Second Lieutenant Sandor Nagy—he inevitably went by Sandy.

The krauts were on the manifest, too, at the bottom. “Wonder who they paid off to get a lift,” Wes said.

Sandy shrugged. “Beats me. They finagled it, though, one way or another. So we’ll haul ’em and kick ’em off the plane and say bye-bye.”

The Germans came aboard right on time. They were krauts, all right—probably figured somebody’d execute ’em for showing up five minutes late. The guy was pale and skinny, in a suit that had been new about when the Depression started. The woman would have been pretty if not for a scar on one cheek. The way she scowled at Wes and Sandy made the pilot bet she’d got the scar in a wartime air raid.

Tough shit, lady,
Wes thought. He pointed to a couple of folding seats right behind the cockpit. “Sit here. Buckle yourselves in. Stay here till we get to Berlin.”

“Kein Englisch.”
The guy spread his hands regretfully. Wes repeated himself, this time in rudimentary German.
“Ach, ja. Zu befehl,”
the man said, and the gal nodded.

Wes eyed him.
Zu befehl
was what a Jerry soldier said when he got an order, the way an American would go
Yes, sir.
Well, there weren’t a hell of a lot of German men who hadn’t gone through the mill. And he and his lady friend were settling into the uncomfortable seats peaceably enough. “Let’s go through the checklist, Sandy,” Wes said with a mental shrug.

“Sure thing, boss,” the copilot replied.

Everything came out green. Wes set an affectionate hand on the Gooney Bird’s steering yoke. A C-47 would fly through things that tore a fighter to pieces, and take off with all kinds of shit showing up red. He’d done that kind of thing during the war more often than he cared to remember. You didn’t have to in peacetime flying, which was nice.

Twin 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines fired up as reliably as Zippos. Wes and Sandy taxied out to the end of the runway. Taxiing was the only thing that could get tricky in a C-47. In tight spaces, you really needed pilot and copilot both paying close attention. But they had plenty of room here.

When the tower gave clearance, Wes gunned the engines. He pulled back on the yoke as the C-47 got to takeoff speed. Up in the air it went—sedately, because it was a transport, and a heavily laden transport at that—but without the least hesitation. If you wanted to fly something from here to there, this was the plane to do it.

They headed up toward 9,000 feet, where they’d cruise to Berlin. No need to worry about oxygen, not lazing along down here like this. Wes leaned back in his seat. “This is the life,” he said over the Pratt and Whitneys’ roar.

“Beats working,” Sandy agreed. The C-47 bounced a little as it ran into some turbulence. It was enough to notice, not enough to get excited about. Wes had flown straight through thunderstorms. A Gooney Bird was built to take it.

Because of the engine noise, he didn’t hear the cockpit door open. Motion caught from the corner of his eye made his head whip around. There stood the German couple. They both held pistols—no, cut-down Schmeissers. “What the fuck?” Wes said.

“Sorry, friend,” the man said. He spoke English after all.

That was Wes’ last startled thought. Then the submachine guns barked.

L
UFTWAFFE
O
BERLEUTNANT
E
RNST
N
EULEN AND THE FORMER
F
LAK-HILFERIN
he knew only as Mitzi—what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell—pulled the Amis’ bodies out of their seats. “Good job,” he told her as he settled into the pilot’s seat himself. It was bloody, but that wouldn’t matter for long.

“Vielen Dank,”
she said primly, as if he’d complimented her on her dancing.

“Go get your umbrella,” Neulen told her.

She gave him a smile—a twisted one, because of that scar. Then she went back into the cargo compartment. The forwardmost crate had a trick side that opened easily if you knew what to do. Mitzi did. She shrugged on the parachute she found inside.

That done, she stepped into the cockpit again for a moment. “Good luck,” she told him.

“You, too,” he answered, his voice far away. He was cautiously fiddling with the throttle. Did it work German-style or like the ones in French and Italian planes, where you had to push instead of pulling and vice versa? Some young German pilots had bought a plot by forgetting the difference after training on foreign aircraft.
Oberleutnant
Neulen found out what he needed to know and relaxed.

“I’m going to bail out now,” Mitzi said.

“Right,” Neulen agreed, still getting a feel for the plane. It was a hell of a lot more modern than the trimotored Ju52/3s that had hauled cargo and soldiers for the
Reich.
He wouldn’t have wanted to try to land it, though he’d heard even coming in wheels-up was a piece of cake for a C-47. But he didn’t have to worry about that.

Mitzi disappeared again, no doubt heading for the cargo door. Neulen hoped she would make it down in one piece. She’d practiced on the ground, but she’d never jumped out of an airplane before. She’d never really landed, either. Well, all you could do was try and hope for the best.

He also hoped the Americans—or was the C-47 over the Russian zone by now?—wouldn’t grab her as soon as she touched ground. How much did she know? Too much: Neulen was sure of that. He hoped for the best again. German patriots on the ground would do their best for her when she landed, anyhow. He was sure of that.

He felt the door open, and heard the howl of the wind inside the cargo bay. Out Mitzi went. He felt that, too. “Luck,” Neulen said softly.

He flew on toward Berlin. He was about fifteen minutes outside the city when the radio crackled to life: “You’re a little north of the flight path. Change course five degrees right.”

“Five degrees right. Roger,” Neulen said in English, and made about half the change.

“Still a little north,” the American flight controller said. “You okay, Wes? You sound like you got a cold in the head.”

“I am okay,” Neulen answered, and said no more—less was better.

Pretty soon, the flight controller came back: “You’re still off course, and you’re up too high, too. Make your corrections, dammit. Is the aircraft all right?”

“All fine,” Neulen said. He did come down—why not? How fast could they scramble fighters? Nobody flew top cover over Berlin: someone was liable to go where he shouldn’t, and then the Russians and Anglo-Americans might start shooting at one another. Keep them happy as long as he could. Neulen didn’t want them phoning their flak batteries either.

He was below 2,000 feet—
600 meters,
he translated mentally—when he overflew the airport. “What are you doing, man? Are you nuts?” the flight controller howled. “They’re gonna ground your stupid ass forever!”

“Not that long,” Neulen answered. He gunned the C-47, almost straight into the early-morning sun.

“T
HIS TIME, WE TRY THE BASTARDS.
T
HIS TIME, WE HANG THE BASTARDS
,” Lou Weissberg said savagely. “I want to watch ’em swing. I want to hear their necks crack. All of ’em—and especially Streicher’s, the antisemitic motherfucker.”

“That’s not a Christian thought,” Howard Frank observed.

“Damn straight…sir,” Lou said. “I’m not a Christian, any more than you are. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sounds great to me. Let the Nazis turn the other cheek…under a hood, in the wind.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Ribbentrop and Keitel and Jodl are the ones I want most. The one plotted the war, and the other two fought it. And Göring for the
Luftwaffe,
even if he was pretty useless once the fighting started.”

“Worse than useless. Didn’t he tell Hitler he could keep the Germans in Stalingrad supplied by air?” Lou said.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Major Frank agreed. “Even so, he was one of Hitler’s right-hand men when the Nazis were coming up. If that’s not reason enough to put a noose around his neck—”

“Reason enough for all of them. Reason enough and then some. And this time they will get it. Oh, boy, will they ever.” Lou eyed the fortified ring the Russians had built around their courthouse. He eyed it from a distance of several hundred yards, because the Russians were liable to start shooting if anybody—anybody at all—got too close. One American officer had already got plugged for not reacting fast enough to
“Heraus!”
Luckily, he’d live. Nobody except maybe the NKVD knew how many Germans were wounded or dead.