Mud flew up from under this jeep’s tires as it roared toward the edge of a two-bit stream. The PFC driving it gave it more gas. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” the guy said cheerfully. “I’ll get you there-and I’ll get you back, too.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Lou answered, and he was telling the truth-about that, at any rate. He was worried about Heydrich getting away. If the report was true, they should have grabbed the son of a bitch by now. They’d found the Kubelwagen, or a Kubelwagen, not too far from here. That much checked out. But no Heydrich. That Jerry hoping for a big chunk of change had to be sweating bullets right now, for all kinds of reasons. If the kraut was bullshitting, the Americans would come down on him hard. If he wasn’t, who’d want to sell him life insurance?
The jeep half skidded to a stop. Lou hopped out. Carrying a grease gun, he trotted over to the GIs by the side of the stream. The mud tugged at his boots, but he’d been through plenty worse, plenty thicker. “Seen anything?” he called to the dogfaces.
He’d been thinking of Stars and Stripes. One of the soldiers had a bent nose and a dented helmet, just like Joe of Willie and. “Not a goddamn thing,” he said, adding, “Uh, sir,” a beat later when he noticed the silver bar painted onto Lou’s steel pot. “Only Fritzi running smokes like usual.”
“Who’s Fritzi?” Lou asked.
The GIs looked at one another. Lou could tell what was going through their minds. This guy is supposed to help run things, and he doesn’t know stuff like that? Patiently, the one who looked like Joe explained, “He’s this kraut who lives in the swamp around here. He gets cigarettes-hell, I dunno where, but he does. And he makes his living turning ’em over, y’know what I mean? He’s a good German, Fritzi is.”
“How do you know that?” Lou had met any number of Germans who’d done things that would make Jack the Ripper puke, but who were kind family men and never kicked the dog. You just couldn’t tell.
“Oh, you oughta hear him cuss Hitler and the generals,” the soldier answered. “Far as he’s concerned, they screwed things up like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Terrific,” Lou said tightly. “You searched the boat, right?”
They eyed one another again. At last, the guy who looked like Joe said, “Nah, we didn’t bother. Fritzi’s okay, like I said. And we woulda had to notice the cigarettes, and that woulda just complicated everybody’s life.” His buddies nodded.
“Suppose he was carrying Heydrich?” Lou snapped.
“Then we fucked up,” the GI said, shrugging. “But what’re the odds?”
“Okay. Okay. But when the prize is this big, we gotta tie up all the loose ends,” Lou said. “If all he’s got’re cigarettes, I don’t give a shit. But all the krauts hate Hitler-now. Ask ’em five years ago and you woulda got a different answer. So which way did this goddamn boat go?”
“Thataway,” the soldier said, as if he’d watched too many Westerns. He jerked a thumb toward the southeast.
“Then we’ll go after him,” Lou declared. He had a radio in the jeep, and turned back towards it. “I’ll call in reinforcements.”
“Call in a bunch-sir,” the dogface told him. “You go much farther and things start getting tricky-like.” Again, his pals’ heads went up and down.
Lou shrugged, too, in a different way. “Fine. So things get tricky. I will call in a bunch.” And he did.
Then he had to wait for the reinforcements to get there. When they did, his heart sank. They were new draftees-you could always tell. They didn’t want to be there, and barely bothered to hide it. They squelched into the swamp like guys ordered to take out the Siegfried Line with slingshots.
“Just remember the price on Heydrich’s head, guys,” Lou called to them. “A million bucks, tax-free. You’re set for life if you nail him.” Anything to get the reluctant soldiers moving. If he thought they would have believed him, he would have promised them a week of blowjobs from Rita Hayworth.
They did move a little faster, but only a little. One of them said, “Yeah, like this fuckin’ kraut’s really in there. Now tell me another one.” Like any other soldier with an ounce of sense, the American GI was a professional cynic. These fellows didn’t know much about soldiering yet, but they’d sure figured that out.
Sometimes there was no help for a situation. Sometimes there was. Lou knew one that front-line officers had often used before the surrender. “Well, follow me, goddammit!” he snapped, and plunged past the draftees into the swamp himself. They muttered and shook their heads, but they did follow.
That accomplished less than he wished it would have. He rapidly discovered why the troopers who knew Fritzi had set up their checkpoint where they did. Past that, the stream split up into half a dozen narrow channels that crossed and recrossed, braided and rebraided, like a woman’s pigtail woven by a nut. Some of what lay between the channels was mud, some was bushes, some was rank second-growth trees. All of it was next to impossible to get through.
“Have a heart, Lieutenant,” one of the draftees panted after a while. “If that what’s-his-name asshole came this way, he’ll never make it out again.” Several of the other new fish nodded.
“My ass,” Lou said sweetly. “You wouldn’t be dogging it if the Jerries were plastering this place with 105s-I guarandamntee you that.”
Behind him, the GIs muttered. Nobody directly answered him, though. He knew what that meant. It meant just what he’d thought: these guys were fresh off the boat from the States. They’d never been under fire, and they had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Something fair-sized and brown splashed into the water and swam away. Lou came that close to opening up on it before he realized it was an animal…one that walked on four legs. Most of the GIs came out with variations on “What the fuck was that?” But one of them said, “Hey, Clifton, that a muskrat or a nutria?”
“Muskrat, I betcha. Nutria’s even bigger.” Clifton sounded froggier than most of the Frenchmen Lou’d met. Five got you ten he was born within spitting distance of the Louisiana bayou. After a moment, he went on, “Damfino what either one of ’em’s doin’ here. They’s American critters.”
“Waddaya wanna bet the krauts brung ’em over to raise for fur and they got loose, way nutrias did when we shipped ’em up from South America?” his buddy answered. “My uncle raise nutrias for a while. Then he go bust and sponge offa Pa.”
Lou didn’t give a muskrat’s ass about escaped rodents or the soldier’s sponging uncle. “Spread out,” he told his none too merry men. “God damn it to hell, we are gonna comb this swamp and see what’s in here.”
He hadn’t gone another fifty yards before he realized it was hopeless. A regiment could have gone through here and missed an elephant standing quietly in the shade of the trees. No elephants, or none he saw-the Jerries wouldn’t have brought them in for fur. But with the best will in the world the platoon he led couldn’t have searched the whole swamp in under a year.
And these clowns didn’t have the best will in the world, or anything close to it. They pissed and moaned. They dragged their feet. Reward or not, they couldn’t have cared less about catching Reinhard Heydrich, because they didn’t think he was within miles. As for Fritzi and his rowboat full of illicit tobacco…The only thing that mattered to them was that they were getting muddy and their poor little tootsies were soaked.
More than once, Lou had heard krauts-especially krauts who didn’t know he spoke German-wonder out loud how the hell the USA won the war. He’d never been tempted to wonder the same thing himself…till now.
A gray heron almost as tall as a man made him nervous-all the more so because its plumage was only a little lighter than Feldgrau. But no Landser ever born came equipped with that cold yellow stare or that bayonet beak. The heron’s head darted down. A carp wriggled briefly, then disappeared.
The sun sank toward the western horizon. Clifton said, “No offense, Lieutenant, but we ain’t gonna find him.”
“Yeah,” Lou said, and then se
veral things quite a bit warmer than that. Maybe the GIs posted on the far side of the swamp would scoop Heydrich up when he came out. Lou had to hope so. He wasn’t going to be the hero himself. The Reichsprotektor shouldn’t have got away-but it looked like he had.
XIV
A teletype chattered. Tom Schmidt pulled the flimsy paper off the machine. The dateline was Munich. The headline said, HEYDRICH MOCKS PURSUERS AFTER ESCAPE. The story was…just what you’d expect after a headline like that. The boss of the German national resistance was back in hiding again, and thumbing his nose at the blundering Americans who’d let him slip through their fingers.
“Well, Jesus Christ!” Schmidt said in disgust. “We really can’t do anything right over there, can we?”
“What now?” asked another reporter in the Tribune’s Washington bureau. He was interested enough not to light his cigarette till he got an answer.
Schmidt gave it to him, finishing, “What d’you think of that, Wally?”
Wally did light up before replying, “I think it stinks, that’s what. What am I supposed to think? First the krauts grabbed a bunch of guys with slide rules, then when their own big cheese put his neck on the chopping block we couldn’t bring the goddamn hatchet down. Somebody’s head ought to roll if Heydrich’s didn’t.”
“Sounds right to me,” Tom said. “You know what else?”
“I’m all ears,” Wally said. He wasn’t so far wrong, either; he really did have a pair of jug handles sticking out from the sides of his head.
“I’ll tell you what.” Tom always had liked the sound of his own voice. “This part of the war is harder on us than whipping the Wehrmacht was, that’s what.”
“How d’you figure?” Wally asked.
“’Cause when we were fighting the Wehrmacht we knew who was who and what was what,” Tom said. “Now we’re in the same mess the Nazis got into when they had to fight all the Russian partisans. You can’t tell if the guy selling cucumbers likes you or wants to blow you to kingdom come. And does that pretty girl walking down the street have a bomb in her handbag? How are you supposed to win a fight like that if the other side doesn’t want to let up?”
“Kill ’em all?” Wally suggested.
“We aren’t gonna do that,” Tom said, and the other reporter didn’t disagree with him. After a moment, he added, “Hell, even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could. Hitler’s goons pretty much tried it, and even they couldn’t pull it off. Besides, d’you really wanna imitate the goddamn SS?”
“They didn’t have the atom bomb, so they had to do it retail,” Wally said. “We could do it wholesale.”
“Maybe we could, but we won’t,” Tom said. “Ain’t gonna happen-no way, nohow. I almost wish it would. It’s the only thing that could get us out of the deep shit we walked into.”
“Either that or just packing up and going home,” Wally said. “You oughta write the rest of it up. It’d make a good column, y’know, especially if you use the Heydrich story for a hook.”
“Damned if it wouldn’t.” Tom carried his filthy mug over to the coffee pot that sat on a hot plate in the corner of the room. The pot had been there since sunup, and it was late afternoon now. The black, steaming stuff that came out when he poured would have stripped paint from a destroyer’s gun turret. Adulterated with plenty of cream and sugar, it also tickled brain cells.
Tom ran a sheet of paper into his Underwood and started banging away. When things went well, he could pound out a column in forty-five minutes. This was one of those times. He passed it to Wally when he finished.
“Strong stuff,” the other reporter said, nodding. “Truman’ll call you every kind of name under the sun.”
“Okay by me,” Tom said. “Only thing I want to know now is, what’ll the guys back in Chicago do to me?”
“If you don’t like getting edited, you shoulda written books instead of going to work for the papers,” Wally said.
“Nah,” Tom replied. “I’ll never get rich at this racket, but I won’t starve, either. You try writing books for a living, you better already have somebody rich in the family. Yeah, I don’t like what the editors do sometimes, but I can live with it. A regular paycheck helps a lot.”
“You think I’m gonna argue with you?” Wally shook his head. “Not me, Charlie. I got two kids, and a third on the way.”
Schmidt’s column ran in the Tribune the next day. At the President’s next press conference, Truman said, “I didn’t imagine anybody could make me think a guttersnipe like Westbrook Pegler was a gentleman, but this Schmidt character shows me I was wrong.” Tom felt as if he’d been giving the accolade.
Then Walter Lippmann, who was staunchly on the side of keeping American troops in Germany till the cows came home, attacked him in print. Up till then, Lippmann had never deigned to acknowledge that he existed, much less that he was worth attacking. Tom fired back in another column, one that drew him even more notice than the first had. He was as happy as Larry.
Every once in a while, though, he got reminded of what his happiness was built on. As if to celebrate Heydrich’s escape, the diehards blew up an American ammunition dump on the outskirts of Regensburg. The blast killed forty-five GIs, and wounded a number the War Department coyly declined to state. It broke windows ten miles away.
A survivor was quoted as saying, “I thought one of those atomic whatsits went off.”
How do we let things like this happen? Tom wrote. And if we can’t keep things like this from happening, why do we go on wasting our young men’s lives in a fight we can’t hope to win? Wouldn’t it be better to come home, let the Germans sort things out among themselves, and use our bombers and our atomic whatsits to make sure they can never threaten us again? Sure looks that way to me. He paused. That wasn’t quite a strong enough kicker. He added one more line-Sure looks that way to more and more Americans, too.
No Brigadier General summoned to testify before Congress ever looked happy. In Jerry Duncan’s experience, that was as much a law of nature as any of the ones Sir Isaac Newton discovered. This particular brass hat-his name, poor bastard, was Rudyard Holmyard-looked as if he’d just taken a big bite out of a fertilizer sandwich.
Which didn’t stop the Indiana Congressman from trying to rip him a new one. “How do we let things like this happen?” Duncan thundered. If a newspaper columnist had put it the same way a few days earlier, well, it was still a damn good question.
“Um, sir, when both sides have weapons and determination, you just aren’t likely to pitch a perfect game,” Holmyard said. “We found that out the hard way in the Philippines at the turn of the century, and again in the Caribbean and Central America during the ’20s and ’30s. Sometimes you get hurt, that’s all. You do your best to prevent it, but you know ahead of time your best won’t always be good enough.”
“One of those things, eh?” Jerry laced the words with sarcasm. General Holmyard nodded somberly. Jerry went on, “When we were fighting in the Philippines at the turn of the century, though, we didn’t have to worry about the guerrillas getting the atom bomb, did we?”
“No, sir,” the general replied. “Of course, we didn’t have it ourselves, either.”
Would we have dropped one on the Philippines if we’d had it then? Duncan wondered. His guess was that we probably would have. How could Teddy Roosevelt have carried a bigger stick? And the Philippines were a long way away, and the people there were small and brown and had slanty eyes. They weren’t quite Japs, but…. Yeah, Teddy would have used the bomb if he’d had it.
With an effort, the Congressman pulled his thoughts back to the middle of the twentieth century. “Why haven’t we been able to recapture any of the physicists the fanatics kidnapped?” he asked.
General Holmyard looked even gloomier; Jerry hadn’t thought he could. “A couple of points there, sir,” he said. “First, we don’t know for a fact that the missing scientists ever entered our occupation zone. They may be under British or French administration, or even Russian.”
“So they may. The only thing we’re sure of is that they’re under Reinhard Heydrich’s administration. Isn’t that a fact?”
A muscle in Holmyard’s jaw twitched. But his nod seemed calm enough. “Yes, sir,” he said stolidly. “Another thing I need to point out is that, unfortunately, a nuclear physicist looks like anybody else when he’s not wearing a white lab coat. Coming up with these guys is like looking for multiple needles in a heck of a big haystack.”
“Terrific,” Jerry said, at which point the Democrat running the committee rapped loudly for order. “Sorry, Mr. Chairman,” Duncan told him. He wasn’t, but the forms had to be observed. “I only have a few more questions. The first one is, how likely are the fanatics to be able to manufacture their own atom bombs now that they know it’s possible?”
“Very unlikely, Congressman. I have that straight from General Groves,” Holmyard replied. Jerry winced; having run the Manhattan Project to a successful conclusion, Leslie Groves owned a named to conjure with. General Holmyard continued, “Atom bombs may be possible, but they aren’t easy or cheap. You need a sizable supply of uranium ore, and you need an even bigger industrial base. The Nazi fanatics have neither.”
“You’re sure they can’t get their hands on uranium?” Duncan said.
“When we entered Germany, we had a special team ordered to take charge of whatever the Germans were using to try and build their own bomb,” Rudyard Holmyard said. “That team did a first-rate job. The War Department is confident Heydrich’s goons can’t come up with anything along those lines.”
“The War Department was also confident the Germans would stop fighting after they signed their surrender,” Jerry pointed out. The chairman banged the gavel again. Jerry didn’t care. He’d wanted to get in the last word, and now he had. “No further questions,” he said, and stepped away from the microphone.
None of the other Congressmen raked General Holmyard over the coals the way Jerry had. Of course, the majority of the committee members were Democrats, but the rest of the Republicans also stayed cautious. The Democrats wished the issue of Germany would dry up and blow away. Too many men on the same side of the aisle as Jerry Duncan didn’t have the nerve to reach out and grab it with both hands.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 25