“Has to be the Germans who laid in the supply,” Bokov said. “If the barmen and serving girls knew anything, we would’ve pulled it out of them.” He and Shteinberg and their comrades had pulled all kinds of things from the people who’d been at the Schloss Cecilienhof that night. All kinds of things, but not what they wanted-what they needed.
“There should be a list of those people,” Shteinberg said. “There should be-but there isn’t.”
“Maybe nobody bothered to keep one,” Bokov said. Had Germans given the orders-“Round up that liquor!”-they would have kept a list. Since the command probably came from a Soviet quartermaster, who could say? Russian efficiency was no byword. Bokov added, “If someone did keep one, somebody else made it disappear.”
“If we can find out who did that-” Shteinberg broke off, shaking his head. “Anybody who’s smart enough to make a list disappear is smart enough to make himself disappear, too.”
“Da,” Bokov agreed glumly. “I used to wonder how the Red revolutionaries could operate right under the noses of the Tsar’s secret police. Why didn’t they all get arrested and shipped to Siberia? Bozhemoi! Why didn’t they all get arrested and killed?”
“Some of the Tsar’s men were secretly on our side. Some were soft. Some were stupid.” Shteinberg stopped again. “And some were very good at what they did. We had to kill a good many of them. But others…others we reeducated. Some of them still serve the Soviet Union better than they ever served the Tsars.”
A young, able lieutenant or captain from 1917 would be a colonel or a general or even a marshal now…if he’d lived through all the purges in the generation between. Some would have made it. Some could-what did people say about Anastas Mikoyan? — some could dance between the raindrops and come home dry, that was it.
Something else Shteinberg had said made Bokov mutter to himself. “How many of our people are secretly on Heydrich’s side?”
“Not many Russians. You’d have to be a Vlasovite-worse than a Vlasovite-to side with the Nazis now,” Shteinberg said. Bokov nodded. The Germans had captured General Andrei Vlasov in 1942, and he’d gone over to them, even if they never quite trusted him. Anyone who’d served in his Russian Liberation Army was either dead or in a camp wishing he were dead.
“But the Germans who say they’re on our side…” Bokov said. He felt the same way about those Germans as the Hitlerites had felt about Vlasov and his fellow Russians: they might be useful, but would you really want to have to rely on one of them at your back?
“Yes. We shall have to go through them. That seems all too clear. Heydrich’s men want us to think they’re ordinary mushrooms when they’re really amanitas.” Shteinberg would have gone on, but he had another coughing spasm. “This damned grippe. I don’t think it’ll ever let go.”
Bokov displayed a vial of benzedrine tablets. “They still help-but I have to take more to get the same buzz.”
“I have some, too,” Shteinberg said. “I try not to take them unless I have to. Sometimes, though, there’s no help for it. So, Volodya-how do we get the amanitas out of our mushroom stew?”
Reinhard Heydrich’s chin and cheeks itched. He’d let his beard grow for a couple of weeks before emerging from the mine where he’d sheltered for so long. He wore beat-up civilian clothes, with an equally ragged Wehrmacht greatcoat over them: the kind of outfit any German male of military age might have.
Hans Klein sat behind the dented, rusty Kubelwagen’s wheel. Heydrich hadn’t wanted to risk using an American jeep-it might have roused suspicion. “Are you sure you should be doing this at all, sir?” Klein asked.
Since Heydrich wasn’t, he scowled. But he answered, “The operation is too important to leave to anyone else.”
“If you say so.” Klein didn’t believe him. Klein thought he was using that as an excuse to come out and do his own fighting. Klein was much too likely to be right, too. But Klein was only an Oberscharfuhrer. Heydrich was the Reichsprotektor. If he decided he had to come out, none of the other freedom fighters had the rank to tell him he couldn’t. And if anything went wrong, Jochen Peiper, fidgeting inside another buried command post, would take over and do…as well as he could, that was all.
So far, everything was fine. They’d already made it from the American zone up into the one the British held. Their papers had held up at every inspection. Things would have been harder where the Russians ruled. The Russians did Heydrich’s men the dubious courtesy of taking them and their uprising seriously. Neither Amis nor Tommies seemed eager to do that. They wanted the fighting to be over, and so they did their best to pretend it was.
A jeep with four British soldiers in it came down the road toward Heydrich and Klein. The jeep carried a machine gun. The Tommy behind it aimed it at the battered Kubelwagen. Heydrich had seen that was only an ordinary precaution. The fellow wouldn’t open up for the fun of it. He just feared that the Kubelwagen might be full of explosives, and the men inside willing to blow themselves up to kill him and his mates, too.
Not today, friend Tommy, Heydrich thought as the vehicles passed each other. We’ve got something bigger cooking.
After a while, Klein pulled off onto the shoulder. He started messing around in the Kubelwagen’s engine compartment, as if he’d had a breakdown. Heydrich watched the road. When it was clear in both directions, he said, “Now.”
They jumped back in. Klein drove into the woods till trees screened the Kubelwagen from the road. “You’ll know where the bunker is?” he asked.
“I’d better,” Heydrich answered confidently. Inside, though, he wondered. How far out of practice was he, and how much would finding out cost?
To his relief, a scrap of hand-drawn map in his greatcoat pocket (written with Russian names, to make it look like a relic from fighting much farther east if he were searched) and a compass brought him to a hole under a fallen tree. The hole led to a tunnel. The tunnel took him to the bunker.
Three men waited there. Despite exchanged passwords, they all pointed Schmeissers or assault rifles at the entrance till Heydrich and Klein showed themselves. “All right-it is you,” one of them said, lowering his weapon.
“Ja,” Heydrich said. “Let’s get what rest we can. We move at 0200.”
The underground hideout had bunks enough for all of them. Alarm clocks clattered to wake them at the appointed hour. They armed themselves and went up and out into the quiet German night. No blackouts any more, which seemed unnatural to Heydrich. He could see the little town ahead, even though it was mostly dark in the middle of the night.
Soft-voiced challenges and countersigns showed more Germans gathering around Alswede. This assault would be in better than platoon strength. The fighting wolves hadn’t shown their strength like this before.
Into the town they strode. Some wore the Stahlhelm. Others used American or Russian helmets instead. Their weapons were a similar blend. And the Tommies didn’t even seem to realize they were there.
The British had converted the fancy clothier’s emporium where they housed the German physicists into a residence hall. It stood near the center of Alswede. Heydrich hoped to bag all the brains, because they had to be back at their new residence by sundown every day.
As his ragged little force converged on the emporium, he imagined himself a field marshal on the Eastern Front, moving armies and corps like chessmen on the board. But those methods had failed the Reich. Maybe this platoon’s worth of men would do more for Germany than an army group had in the Ukraine. It had better, Heydrich thought.
Yawning Tommies stood sentry outside the physicists’ quarters. The British weren’t altogether idiots. But the sentries didn’t expect trouble.
“Hands up!” an English-speaking German called to them. “If you surrender, you will not be harmed.”
A burst from a Sten gun answered him. Unlike the tin Tommy gun that had almost murdered Heydrich in Prague, this one worked fine. But so did the Germans’ assault rifles and Schmeissers and grenades. The sentries went down one
after another. Lights came on all over Alswede as people woke to the firefight and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
Heydrich’s raiders charged into the haberdashery. “Schnell!” he called to them. “We have to be gone before the Tommies come in force.” He didn’t know how long they had. Fifteen minutes, he judged, would be uncommon luck.
Long before fifteen minutes were up, the raiders came out again, herding along men middle-aged and elderly in their nightclothes. “We’ve grabbed nine of them!” a captain yelled to Heydrich. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where’s the last one?” As long as they were in Alswede, Heydrich wanted to make a clean sweep.
But the captain answered, “He’s kaput-caught a bullet in the head, poor bastard.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ground.
“All right.” As long as the loose end was cleared up, Heydrich wouldn’t fuss. He’d known going in that they took that chance if the British resisted. They were lucky-more than one of the slide-rule boys might have stopped something. Heydrich raised his voice: “Withdraw! Plan One!”
Some of the raiders left Alswede heading north. They made a hellacious racket, whooping and shouting and firing their weapons into lighted windows. Everyone in town could tell exactly where they were-and could tell the British exactly where they’d gone.
Along with the captured physicists-who were now starting to shiver in the late-night chill-Heydrich and the rest of his men quietly retreated to the south. Far fewer locals would pay them any attention. Far fewer would be able to tell the Tommies where they’d headed. And, with luck, the British would be slow to figure out they were the important group. How important could they be if they didn’t fire off everything they were carrying?
One of the scientists-a middle-aged fellow with rumpled, greasy hair and thick glasses-asked, “Why did you shoot poor Heisenberg?”
“Shut up, Professor Diebner, or we’ll shoot you, too.” Heydrich was pleased with himself for recognizing who’d spoken. “Heisenberg was an accident.” An unfortunate accident, too, he thought. Heisenberg was-had been-a high-horsepower physicist. Coldly, Heydrich went on, “We will shoot you on purpose, though, if you slow us down or give us away.”
“Give you away? I don’t even know who you are,” Diebner said.
“A man who believes in a free, strong Germany,” Heydrich answered. “A man who doesn’t believe the war is over yet, or lost.”
Behind the spectacle lenses, Diebner’s eyes were enormous. Maybe the lenses magnified them; Heydrich wasn’t sure. He didn’t care much one way or the other. “But-” Diebner began, and then clamped his mouth shut. That made sense; he was in no position to argue.
He and the others had probably spilled their guts while the enemy held them in England. Heydrich didn’t even reckon it treason. Obviously, the Anglo-Americans were ahead of Germany in nuclear physics. He would have grabbed American scientists if he could. But his countrymen were the best he could get his hands on. Maybe they’d be able to come up with…something, anyhow.
Out of Alswede. Into the woods. The raiders divided into smaller groups, splitting the physicists among them. Gunfire broke off to the north. Heydrich smiled wolfishly. His distraction was working just the way he’d hoped it would.
“Be damned, sir,” Hans Klein said. “I think we pulled it off.”
“I said we would,” Heydrich answered. Klein kept his mouth shut. Officers and leaders said all kinds of things. Sometimes they delivered. Sometimes…Sometimes your Vaterland ended up occupied by unfriendly foreigners. But Heydrich had delivered. And maybe Germany wouldn’t stay occupied too much longer.
XIII
Cold rain pissed down out of a gray, curdled sky. Bernie Cobb manned a checkpoint outside of Erlangen and steamed. The rain blew into his face and dripped down the back of his neck, which did nothing to improve his mood. He looked this way and that-he tried to look every which way at once. Visibility wasn’t much more than a hundred feet, so looking didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good. The only consolation was, a Nazi sniper couldn’t see any farther than he could.
“What did they stick us out here for?” Mack Leff asked for about the tenth time.
Leff wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d got here after V-E Day, so Bernie didn’t trust him as far as he would have trusted somebody who’d been through the mill. “Beats me,” Bernie said. “Something’s screwed up somewhere, though-that’s for goddamn sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put so many of us out on patrol at once.”
“Yeah,” Mack agreed mournfully. His left hand moved inside the pocket of his field jacket. Bernie knew what that meant: he was feeling a pack of cigarettes in there and wondering if he could keep one lit in this downpour. He must have decided he couldn’t, because he didn’t try to light up.
Bernie had already made the same glum calculation and come up with the same answer. He wasn’t twitchy from missing a smoke yet, but he sure wanted one. “The orders we got are all bullshit, too,” he went on-he could always piss and moan, even if he couldn’t light up. “Check everybody’s papers. Hold anybody suspicious for interrogation. Suspicious how?”
“You come out in this weather at all, you ought to have your head examined,” Mack Leff opined.
“Got that right.” Bernie wondered if he could peel the paper off a cigarette and chew the tobacco inside. He’d always thought a chaw was disgusting (to say nothing of hillbilly), but out in the open in weather like this…. “Rained this hard when we got over the Rhine last year. Then, at least, we could lay up in a house or a barn or somethin’ and stay out of it sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.” Leff nodded. “Musta been good when you knew who the enemy was, when you didn’t have to worry about everybody from the grocer to the old lady with a cat. You didn’t have to watch your back so hard then.”
“Fuck,” Bernie muttered. Mack actually thought he’d had it easy when the real war was on. How was that for a kick in the nuts? The really weird thing was, the new guy might have a point. You kinda had to look at things sideways to see it, but when you did….
He became aware of a new noise punching through the endless hiss of rain off paving and fields. “Heads up, Mack,” he said. “Car’s comin’.”
The jeep they’d ridden out here made a decent obstacle after they’d pulled it across the road. If you wanted to go around it, you’d probably get stuck in the mud and you’d probably get shot, too. Bernie had the safety off on his M-1. If Mack Leff didn’t, he was too dumb to deserve to live.
Only worry was whether whoever was in the oncoming car could spot the jeep in time to stop. They did, which impressed Bernie-that Kubelwagen had seen plenty of better years. Hitler’s equivalent of a jeep could do most of the stuff a real one could, only not so well.
Two men sat in the Kubelwagen. If they weren’t vets, Bernie’d never seen any. “Cover me,” he told Leff as he came out from behind the jeep. He raised his voice and used some of his terrible German: “Papieren, bitte!” Then, hopefully, he added, “You guys speak English?”
Both krauts shook their heads. Bernie sighed; he might’ve known they wouldn’t. It was that kind of day. They passed him the papers. The guy behind the wheel was Ludwig Mommsen, the documents said. The other fellow, whose long, thin nose kind of leaned to one side and who needed a shave like nobody’s business, was Erich Wisser.
“You-in Krieg?” Bernie asked them. They looked at each other. “Where?” he said. “Uh, wo?”
“Ostfront,” Wisser answered. “Danzig.” Mommsen nodded again, to show he’d served over there, too.
Bernie grunted. You couldn’t get a Jerry to admit he’d ever taken a shot at an American. If you listened to those guys talk, nobody’d fought between Normandy and central Germany-not a soul. Bernie wished he didn’t know better.
These guys seemed legit, though. He handed back their documents. “Wo gehen Sie?” he asked.
“Nurnberg,” Mommsen answered, pronouncing it the way a kraut would instead of Nuremberg like an American.
They were on the right road. “Okay,” Bernie said, and then, louder, “Move the jeep, Mack!”
Leff did. The Germans put the Kubelwagen back in gear and drove off to the south. “That wasn’t so bad,” Leff said.
“Sure wasn’t,” Bernie agreed. “They should all be so easy.”
Lou Weissberg read the report howard Frank Gave him. Then he handed it back to his superior officer. He didn’t have rank enough to get his own copy. For that matter, neither did Captain Frank. He’d have to give the report to his own superior, who would stow it in a stout safe where no unauthorized eyes could see it.
“Jesus Christ!” Lou exclaimed. He and Captain Frank exchanged self-conscious half-smiles. That was a hell of a thing for a Jew to say, but plenty born in the States did it all the time. “Did the limeys screw the pooch or what?”
“They sure did,” Frank said. “They screwed it like you wouldn’t believe. And so now the fanatics have nine first-rate atomic physicists…somewhere.”
“Can they make a bomb?” Lou asked. “The guy who wrote your little paper doesn’t think so, but does he know his ass from third base?”
“How am I supposed to tell? Do I look like Einstein?” Frank returned. “One thing I will say is that making a bomb seems to take a lot of fancy equipment. Heydrich’s baboons have all kinds of shit, damn them, but I don’t see ’em having that kind of gear. So I’d bet against it.”
“Mm.” Lou nodded. That made sense-a certain amount of it, anyhow. “If they can’t make a bomb, how come the diehards nabbed ’em?”
“Maybe to make us yell and scream and jump up and down like we’ve got ants in our pants,” Captain Frank answered. “Or maybe just for the hell of it-they don’t think the slide-rule boys can pull a rabbit out of the hat, but they don’t want to take the chance they might be wrong. If you were in Heydrich’s shoes, what would you do?”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 23