“And so?” Klein was persistent. This must have been on his mind for a while now.
“We’ve done what we can,” Heydrich said. “We work in cells. The cell leaders don’t know where their orders come from-only that they’d better follow them. Losing men won’t make the system unravel. Even if our government surrendered, it’s still a war. What else can I tell you?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” the Oberscharfuhrer answered. He didn’t sound happy.
“Nothing at all,” Heydrich said firmly. “It is still a war, dammit. We hurt the enemy as best we can. Sometimes he hurts us. That’s a part of war, too, as much as we wish it weren’t. Eh?” He wouldn’t have wasted time cajoling many other people-maybe no one else still alive-but he and Hans went back a long way.
“Ja. I suppose so,” Klein said. “But…”
“But what?” Heydrich snapped. Even with his old driver, he ran out of patience quickly. He was too used to automatic obedience to be comfortable with anything less.
“But we can’t afford to get hurt much any more,” Klein said. “If we do, the resistance movement will fall to pieces.”
Heydrich sucked in a deep breath, ready to scorch the obstreperous noncom with hot words. He exhaled with Klein still unscorched. How could you come down on somebody who was obviously right? Only long habits of discipline, obedience, and patriotism would make a man go out and blow himself up to hurt the occupiers. If the troops in the field had no one of suitable authority to obey…Germany would be ruined forever.
“They haven’t found us. They won’t find us. Even if they discover this place, we’ve got others to go to.” Heydrich realized he was bucking up his own spirits as well as Klein’s. And why not? His morale mattered, too. “We are going to win this fight, Hans. However long it takes, we’ll do it. And the Vaterland will be free again.”
“Ja, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced, but he didn’t call Heydrich a liar with his tone, either. That was something, anyhow. In this uncertain twilight struggle, Heydrich took whatever he could get.
George Patton had the bad habit of sitting up very straight in his jeep. Sometimes he’d even stand up behind the pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine gun the jeep carried. Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-his driver said, “General, I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that so much, especially when the road runs through woods like this.”
Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-the commander of the U.S. Third Army laughed as if he’d just heard the juiciest joke ever. “Take an even strain, Smitty,” he said. “The Huns are whipped.”
“My ass…sir.” Smitty hunched low behind the jeep’s wheel. He had a wife and two kids in Dearborn, and he wanted to get home to see them again-he had just about enough points to do it, too. “They string that piano wire between trees just above windshield level, and no way in hell you can see it till it catches you in the neck. I hear they’ve taken two guys’ heads clean off.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Patton said. “Stories always get bigger in the telling. Do you know either of these unlucky souls? Can you put names to them?”
“Well…no,” Smitty admitted.
“There you are!” Patton said triumphantly. “The Huns are whipped, I tell you. Maybe a few of them don’t know it yet, but we’ll keep licking them till they do. I promise you that.”
“Yes, sir.” Sometimes you couldn’t win. Smitty’d done all the fighting he cared to do before the Germans surrendered. He didn’t want to keep on doing it three and a half months later. But if he said so, Patton would go up like a Bouncing Betty. Smitty did say, “I sure wish you’d leave that chromed helmet back in the barracks, though. It’s like you’re wearing a SHOOT ME sign, y’know?”
“Nonsense!” Patton said. “The Germans fear me, and I don’t fear them-not one bit, d’you hear me? Let them see trouble’s heading their way.”
He stood up again. He swung the big, heavy machine gun back and forth. Sure as hell, he had plenty of firepower at his disposal. But God didn’t issue anybody eyes in the back of his head.
Not to Patton, and not to Smitty, either, however much the driver longed for them. The jeep’s rearview mirror made a piss-poor substitute. Smitty didn’t see the man in ragged Feldgrau get up on one knee in the roadside bushes and launch his Panzerschreck.
He did see the burst of flame from the antitank rocket. The Panzerschreck was a German copy of the U.S. bazooka round. The Germans didn’t just copy it, either; they improved it. A Panzerschreck had more range and penetrated thicker armor than its American prototype.
This one didn’t need the extra range. Smitty had time to go “Aw, shit!” He was starting to yank the wheel hard left when the rocket hit the jeep’s right rear and flipped it over. Patton’s startled squawk cut off abruptly when a ton and a half of metal and burning gasoline came down on top of him.
Smitty was luckier-he got thrown clear of the jeep. He put his teeth through his lower lip and broke several of them when he met the road facefirst, but he could crawl dazedly away from the inferno that engulfed the general.
He’d had a grease gun beside him on the seat. He couldn’t find it now. If the kraut with the Panzerschreck came after him, he was history. But the German seemed content with blasting the jeep-he bailed out. And why not? He’d just scragged a four-star general.
IV
Erlangen was shut down tight-“tighter’n a fifty-buck whore’s snatch,” one GI put it-for General Patton’s funeral procession. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside of town made sure nobody unauthorized got in. Mustangs and Thunderbolts buzzed overhead, ready to strafe infiltrators or shoot down any enemy airplanes that tried to interrupt the proceedings.
Lou Weissberg wondered how much good all that would do. If the fanatics-a name for the diehard Nazis the papers were using more and more often-already had people in town, they wouldn’t need to sneak in more now. He wondered why nobody with a grade higher than his seemed to have thought of that. No one to whom he mentioned it seemed to want to listen.
He also wondered why the occupation authorities were making such a show out of Patton’s rites. As far as he was concerned, Old Blood and Guts was a blowhard, a good fighter with few other virtues. During the war, his men worshipped and despised him in about equal numbers. Since…If he could have stirred up a war with the Red Army, he would cheerfully have rearmed the Jerries and sent them into battle alongside the U.S. Army. He cared not a pfennig for Eisenhower’s denazification orders.
Rumor said Eisenhower was about to remove him from command of Third Army when the krauts removed him permanently. Lou didn’t know whether the rumor was true. He wouldn’t have been surprised, though. Eisenhower and Patton had been banging heads since the invasion of Sicily, two years ago now.
But here came Ike, driven down Erlangen’s Hauptstrasse-main drag-in a jeep, a look of pious mourning on his face. Another jeep followed, this one with Patton’s coffin on a standard Army quarter-ton trailer hooked up behind. An American flag covered the coffin.
The Hauptstrasse led to the Altstadter Kirche-the Old City Church-north of the market square. American soldiers lining the parade route fell in behind the jeep to crowd into the square. Germans who tried to do the same were discouraged, more firmly than politely. Again, Lou hoped it would matter.
A couple of GIs with scope-sighted rifles peered out from the church’s steeple. Snipers, Lou thought. Terrific. But maybe having them there was better than not having them. Maybe.
Newsreel cameras recorded the goings-on. One of them peered up at the riflemen. And how would they look to folks back home, here months after peace was supposed to have come? What were they thinking on the far side of the Atlantic? How much did they like this festering aftermath of war?
Eisenhower climbed down from his jeep. Two unsmiling dogfaces with Tommy guns escorted him to a lectern in front of the church’s steps. The sun glinted from the microphones on the lectern…and from the pentagon o
f stars on each of Ike’s shoulder straps. “General of the army” was a clumsy title, but it let him deal with field marshals on equal terms.
He tapped a mike. Noise boomed out of speakers mounted to either side of the lectern. Had some bright young American tech sergeant checked to make sure the fanatics didn’t try to wire explosives to the microphone circuitry? Evidently, because nothing went kaboom.
“Today it is our sad duty to pay our final respects to one of the great soldiers of the twentieth century. General George Smith Patton was admired by his colleagues, revered by his troops, and feared by his foes,” Ike said. If there were a medal for hypocrisy, he would have won it then. But you were supposed to speak only well of the dead. Lou groped for the Latin phrase, but couldn’t come up with it.
“The fear our foes felt for General Patton is shown by the cowardly way they murdered him: from behind, with a weapon intended to take out tanks. They judged, and rightly, that George Patton was worth more to the U.S. Army than a Stuart or a Sherman or a Pershing,” Eisenhower said.
“Damn straight,” muttered the man standing next to Lou. He wore a tanker’s coveralls, so his opinion of tanks carried weight. Tears glinted in his eyes, which told all that needed telling of his opinion of Patton.
Eisenhower’s voice hardened, his Midwestern accent stern as weathered granite: “But these Nazi cowards also judged they could scare us out of Germany by murdering General Patton. They judged they could run us out of Germany, and they judged they could take over again once we cut and ran-take over and start getting ready for the Third World War. That’s what they thought. That’s how they thought.”
He looked out at the assembled GIs. “Well, folks, I am here-I am right here, in Erlangen, in the American occupation zone-to tell them they are wrong.”
Lou whooped. He clapped. He was one of many, very many. The soldiers here had seen too much of what Hitler’s thugs had done ever to want to see any more of that.
“We are doing all we can to put an end to their wicked violence,” Eisenhower went on. Then he used the word of the moment: “Because they’re fanatics, our enemies are taking longer than they should to realize they can’t hope to defeat the might of the United States of America.”
He got another round of applause, louder than the first. The tankman next to Lou joined in, but he also murmured, “Son of a bitch, but I wish I was back in Omaha.”
Lou wished he were back in New Jersey, too. Unfortunately, wishing wouldn’t put him there. Cleaning up the leftover Nazis just might. It looked like his best chance, anyhow.
“I have one more message for you men, and for the SS goons who skulk in the woods and in the darkness,” Eisenhower said. “It’s very simple. We are going to stay here as long as it takes to make sure Germany can never again trouble the peace of the world.”
He probably expected more cheers then. He got…a few. Lou was one of the men who clapped. The guy in the tanker’s coveralls edged away, as if afraid he had something contagious. That saddened him without much surprising him. He wondered how many of the others who applauded there were also Jewish. Quite a few, unless he missed his guess.
Yes, Eisenhower had looked for more in the way of approval there. He’d acted professionally grim before. Now his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned down. He wasn’t just grim any more; he was pissed off.
“We would waste everything we’ve done up till now if we walked away too soon,” he said, and Lou thought he was speaking off the cuff rather than from prepared remarks, as he had earlier. He pointed south. “Down in Nuremberg, we’re going to try the thugs who are the only reason we had to come here at all. And after that I’d be very much surprised if we don’t hang ’em higher than Haman.”
This time, Lou clapped till his palms hurt. Most of the soldiers in the market square joined him. They wanted to see the war criminals get what was coming to them, all right.
Eisenhower looked a little happier after that-not much, but a little. “And if we catch Reichsprotektor Heydrich by then, we’ll try him and hang him, too,” he said. “Or maybe we won’t bother trying Mr. Heydrich, not when the maniacs he leads have done so much dirty work after the surrender.”
More hot, fierce applause. Heydrich was Public Enemy Number One these days, sure as hell. Lou and the Counter-Intelligence Corps were responsible for that. Posters displaying Heydrich’s rather lizardy features were plastered to everything that didn’t walk. They promised the famous $500,000, tax-free to GIs, for information leading to his capture…or to his body. To a dogface making fifty bucks a month-and, with luck, to a kraut, too-that had to look pretty damn good.
It also looked pretty damn good to Lou: 250 years’ worth of a first lieutenant’s salary. He glanced around. Lots and lots of GIs. No Reinhard Heydrich, dammit. Heydrich was too cool a calculator to risk himself for the glory of it. He’d be hiding away somewhere, cooking up more trouble.
“And there’s one more reason we don’t want to step away before it’s time.” Eisenhower looked east. “The fanatics have hurt the Soviet Union, too. Remember, they killed Marshal Koniev before they got General Patton. But whatever Heydrich’s men do over in the Russian zone, they won’t drive drive out the Red Army. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
Lou looked around again. That comment didn’t raise much applause, but it made a good many soldiers nod thoughtfully. Almost the only thing that kept the USA and USSR on speaking terms was that they both hated and feared the Nazis worse than they hated and feared each other. Without the fanatics, they might have squabbled even more. There’s irony for you, Lou thought.
Having got in his licks, Eisenhower stepped away from the lectern. After that, Patton’s memorial service was in religious hands. It wasn’t Lou’s religion, but that wasn’t why he stopped listening. Ike had surprised him a couple of times. The preacher sounded canned. You knew what he’d say three sentences before he got around to saying it. Nothing was wrong with his remarks, exactly, but they got bloody dull.
Somebody not far from Lou enlivened the proceedings by passing out. He’d stood in the sun too long, and was fine as soon as they flipped water on him. But the near-panic when he pitched forward on his face told how jumpy all the GIs were. No German snipers, no nothing-only jitters. Enough jitters, though, and you didn’t need anything else.
As the memorial broke up, a corporal talking to his buddy delivered his own verdict on Patton: “Sure he was a ballbuster, but he was our ballbuster.” The buddy nodded. So did Lou. That made more sense than most of the highfalutin blather he’d listened to before.
Like any Soviet citizen, Vladimir Bokov had learned more about what war could do than he ever wanted to know. Leningrad: besieged by the Germans and Finns for three years, with hundreds of thousands dead of bombs and shells and hunger and cold and disease. Stalingrad: blasted from the air, then systematically pounded flat by two armies till one could fight no more. Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don: both taken by the Nazis, retaken by the Red Army, taken back by the Nazis, and finally seized for good by the USSR, with each side slaughtering the other’s collaborators and toadies as soon as it grabbed power.
And those were only a few of the high points-or the low points, if you thought that way.
But despite everything Captain Bokov had learned, despite everything he’d seen, despite his utter lack of sympathy for the folk who’d come too close to enslaving the Soviet Union forever, Dresden gave him the willies. British and American bombers had visited hell on the city in the winter before the war…was alleged to have ended.
“Bozhemoi,” Bokov muttered, surveying square kilometers of barrenness, of charred shells of buildings, of places where asphalt had puddled and then run like rivers. The twin stenches of burning and death still thickened the air. He suspected they would linger for years.
“Cunts had it coming,” said his driver, a stolid peasant named Gorinovich.
“Oh, no doubt,” Bokov agreed. Not only did he really feel that way, but you never could t
ell to whom Gorinovich reported. An NKVD man saw wheels within wheels whether they were there or not. In the USSR, and in Bokov’s line of work, they commonly were. He did add, “If the Americans could do this without their fancy new bombs, screw me if I know why they needed them.”
Gorinovich grunted in response to that. Then he said, “You were going to Division HQ, sir?”
“Da.” Bokov nodded.
“All right. I’ll get you there.”
And he did. The paving was chewed up and sometimes nonexistent, but neither mud nor gravel nor anything else fazed the two-and-a-half-ton American truck. U.S. tanks had thin armor, weak guns, and highly inflammable gasoline engines. The planes the Americans gave the Soviet Union were mostly ones they didn’t want themselves. But nobody ever said a bad word about their trucks. The Red Army would have had a devil of a time winning the war without them.
With a word of thanks, Bokov hopped out of this one in front of the battered house flying the divisional commander’s flag. Sentries with submachine guns stood in front of the door. Like most of their kind, they scrambled out of the way with comic haste when they spotted his arm-of-service colors.
In a way, that wasn’t so good. A Nazi who got hold of an NKVD cap and shoulder boards might bluff his way in to see-or to assassinate-almost anybody. Worry about it later, Bokov told himself. One thing at a time. He turned the knob and walked into the house.
Major General Boris Antipov was drinking tea and laughing with a pretty redhead half his age. When Bokov came in, she turned red, exclaimed in German, and disappeared with a rustle of silk. She’d landed on her feet in postwar Germany-or more likely on her back.
“Who the-?” Antipov growled. Then he too noticed Bokov’s shoulder boards and cap. Some of the hostility left his voice as he went on, “Oh. You’re the fellow they sent from Berlin.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 7