Off in the distance, a woman shrieked. A Russian a few meters from Marshal Koniev chuckled. “One more cunt getting what she deserves,” he said. His buddies laughed out loud.
Koniev didn’t. The Red Army had avenged Nazi atrocities inside the USSR ever since it crossed the Reich’s borders. Berlin was no exception. Who’d wanted to say the Russian and Asiatic soldiers couldn’t have their fun after the war’s last battle? They owed the Germans plenty. But discipline was supposed to be returning. That scream-and others like it Koniev had heard in the ten days since the surrender-argued it still wasn’t all the way back.
Which went a long way towards explaining why almost all the Germans Koniev could see were men. German women feared Red Army soldiers would drag them off and gang-rape them if they showed themselves. They might have been right, too. They’d be safe enough in a few weeks. Not yet.
A driver came up to Koniev and saluted. “Comrade Marshal, your car is ready,” the man said.
“Good,” Koniev said. “Very good. I won’t be sorry to get out of this place for a while. It stinks.”
“Sure does.” The driver didn’t seem to care. “If you’ll come with me, sir…”
The car was a captured Kubelwagen-the German equivalent of a U.S. jeep-with red stars painted all over it to keep trigger-happy Russians from shooting it up. The driver carried a PPSh41 submachine gun to fight off not only stupid friends but stubborn enemies. Little dying spatters of resistance went on. Massive reprisals killed plenty of Germans, and would eventually snuff out the resistance, too-Koniev was confident of that.
Even a couple of kilometers outside of Berlin, the air improved. And then, abruptly, it got worse again: the Kubelwagen rattled past the bloated carcasses of a dozen cows in a cratered meadow. Koniev scowled at the stink, and also at the waste. “Our men should have butchered those animals,” he said.
“Sorry, Comrade Marshal.” The driver sounded afraid Koniev would think it was his fault. He added, “I never saw the beasts till this minute.”
“All right, Corporal.” While the fighting was still going on, Koniev might have looked to blame…somebody, anyhow. With the war over, he could afford to be more easygoing.
Artillery had chewed up the woods outside of Berlin, too. Some trees still stood straight. Others leaned at every angle under the sun. They’d been down long enough that their leaves were going from green to brown. Some of them would have fallen on the road from Berlin to Zossen-the former Wehrmacht headquarters, now taken over by the Red Army. Koniev wondered whether Red Army engineers or German POWs had cleared it. He would have bet his countrymen put the Germans to work.
Three or four men in field-gray scrambled off to the side of the road when they heard the Kubelwagen coming. “Those fuckers better move,” the driver said. “They stand there knocking pears out of the trees with their dicks, I’ll damn well run ’em over.”
“Right.” Marshal Koniev had to fight to swallow laughter. Russian profanity-mat-was almost a language in itself. The driver might have said If they stand there goofing off… Or he might not have. Even generals sometimes felt like using mat.
The road bent sharply. The driver slowed down. Something stirred among the dead trees near the asphalt.
Alarm stirred in Koniev. “Step on it!” he said urgently. If he turned out to have a case of the vapors, the driver could tell everybody he didn’t have any balls. Koniev wouldn’t mind, not one bit.
As the driver’s foot came down on the gas, somebody-a man in a gray greatcoat-stood up. He aimed a sheet-metal tube at the Kubelwagen. “Panzerfaust!” the driver yelped. He grabbed his submachine gun at the same time as Koniev reached for the pistol on his belt.
Too late. Trailing fire, the bazooka-style rocket roared toward the car. Marshal Koniev ducked. That did him exactly no good. The Panzerfaust was made to smash tanks. A soft-skinned vehicle like the Kubelwagen was nothing but fire and scrap metal-and torn, charred flesh-an instant after the rocket struck home.
Faces blank as if they were so many machines, Soviet soldiers led out ten more Germans and tied them to the execution posts. Some were men, some women. All were in the prime of life. Orders from Moscow were that no old people or children be used to avenge Marshal Koniev. For him, the defeated enemy had to give their best.
The Germans had to give, and give, and give. Blood puddled at the bases of those posts. Flies buzzed in the mild spring air. The iron stink of gore made Captain Vladimir Bokov’s nose wrinkle. He turned to the officer commanding the firing squads. “Smells like an outdoor butcher shop.”
“Er-yes.” That officer didn’t seem to know how to respond. He was a Red Army major, so he nominally outranked Bokov. But the arm-of-service color on his shoulder boards was an infantryman’s maroon, and infantry majors were a kopek a kilo.
Bokov’s shoulder boards carried four small stars each, not one large one. His colors, though, were bright blue and crimson. He wore a special badge on his left upper arm: a vertical sword inside a wreath. No wonder a mere infantry major treated him with exaggerated caution-he belonged to the NKVD.
“Well, carry on,” he said.
“Very well, Comrade Captain,” said the infantry officer-his name was Ihor Eshchenko. That and his accent proclaimed him a Ukrainian.
He gestured to the troops tying the hostages to the posts. Make it snappy, the wave said. The men blindfolded the Germans. Eshchenko glanced at Bokov, but the NKVD man didn’t object. Moscow hadn’t said the executioners couldn’t grant that small mercy.
A fresh squad of Red Army soldiers came out to shoot the hostages. The local commanders didn’t make their men kill and kill and kill in cold blood; they rotated the duty whenever they could. One man in each squad had a blank in his weapon, too. If the soldiers wanted to think they weren’t shooting anybody, they could.
“Ready!” Eshchenko called. The soldiers brought up their rifles. “Aim!” he said. A couple of the Germans waiting to die blubbered and moaned. They might not understand Russian, but they knew how firing squads worked. “Fire!” Major Eshchenko shouted.
Mosin-Nagant carbines barked. The Germans slumped against their bonds. Back in pagan days, a chieftain who died took a retinue with him to the next world. Good Marxist-Leninists didn’t believe in the next world. All the same, the principle here wasn’t so different.
Some officers in charge of executions armed their men with submachine guns and let them blast away at full automatic. Major Eshchenko seemed to have too much of a feel for the military proprieties to put up with anything so sloppy. Vladimir Bokov had watched and taken part in plenty of executions, and this one was as neat as any.
One drawback to using rifles, though: two or three hostages weren’t killed outright. Eshchenko drew his pistol and gave each the coup de grace with a bullet at the nape of the neck.
Stone-faced Germans carried away the corpses. Once Germans were dead, the Red Army stopped caring about them. “Nicely done, Major,” Bokov said as Eshchenko came back. “Cigarette?”
“Spasibo,” Eshchenko replied, accepting one. He leaned forward to let Bokov give him a light. After taking a drag, he added, “This American tobacco is so mild, it’s hardly there at all.”
“I know.” Bokov nodded. “Better than going without, though.”
“Oh, you’d better believe it.” The infantry officer inhaled again. He blew out a perfect smoke ring-Bokov was jealous-and said, “Better than the horrible crap we smoked at the start of the war, too.”
Bokov sent him a hooded look. Though the NKVD man’s eyes were blue, they were narrow like an Asiatic’s: good for not showing what he was thinking. All he said was “Da.” Tobacco was wretched after the German invasion because the Nazis overran so much fine cropland. A vindictive man-or even a man with a quota to fill-might construe Eshchenko’s remark as criticism of Comrade Stalin. A word from Bokov, and the major would find out more than he ever wanted to know about Soviet camps.
But Bokov had other things on his mind today. As if picking
that from his thoughts, Major Eshchenko said, “Naturally, we also seized prisoners for interrogation. We’ve already, ah, questioned several of them. The rest we saved for you.”
Questioned, of course, was a euphemism for worked over. Well, a marshal was dead. You couldn’t expect the Red Army to stay gentle after that. And the GRU, the military intelligence unit, thought it knew as many tricks as the NKVD. The two services were often rivals. Not here, though. “Any real leads?” Captain Bokov asked.
Eshchenko shrugged. “None I’ve heard about. But I might not.”
Bokov nodded. If the infantry officer didn’t need to know something, nobody would tell him. That was basic doctrine. The NKVD man asked, “So where are these prisoners?”
“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….”
II
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 Fuhrer, 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 Oberscharfuhrer 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 Goring 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 everythi
ng 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!”
Bernie Cobb had played baseball in high school. All 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.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 3