“Bet your ass, Roscoe,” Bernie said. The rest of the GIs stood clear. Roscoe sprayed three short bursts through the haystack. Nobody staggered out bleeding and wailing, either.
“Okay. This one’s clean,” another soldier said.
“Is now, by God,” Bernie agreed. If some German hiding in there had just quietly died with his brains blown out, Bernie wouldn’t shed a tear. Son of a bitch had the chance to give up. That was more than he would’ve given the guys hunting him.
The Americans tramped on. Bernie lit a cigarette. A few hundred yards off, a GI in another group of troops waved, silently asking what the gunfire meant. Bernie’s answering wave said everything was jake. The distant soldier gave back one more flourish to show he got it. Then he returned to his own hunt.
Bernie’s bunch came to a farmhouse and outbuildings. The farmer was about fifty, so maybe he’d put in his time and maybe he hadn’t. His skinny wife eyed the Americans as if she’d just taken a big swig of vinegar. They had a daughter who might’ve been cute if she hadn’t looked even more sour than her ma.
And, on the mantel, they had a framed photo of a young man in the uniform of a Wehrmacht junior noncom. Bernie pointed at it and raised an eyebrow. “Ostfront,” the farmer said. “Tot?” A sad shrug. “Gefangen?” Another one.
“Dead or captured fighting the Russians,” said Roscoe, who had the usual GI bits and pieces of German.
“Yeah, I got it, too,” Bernie said. He pointed at the farmer. “Soldat? Du? Westfront? Ostfront?”
“Nein. Bauer durchaus Krieg,” the man replied in elementary Deutsch. German for morons, not that Bernie cared. He got the answer he needed-the guy claimed he’d farmed all through the war.
And maybe the kraut was even telling the truth. He was wearing patched overalls, like an Okie fleeing the Dust Bowl in the ’30s. His shirt and shoes weren’t Wehrmacht issue, either. A lot of Germans hung on to their army clothes because those were all they had. This stuff wasn’t any better than what the Jerries got from the Wehrmacht, but it was different.
“Let’s search the joint,” Bernie said.
Maybe Mother and Daughter Vinegar Phiz knew some English, because they looked even nastier than they had before. It did them exactly no good. They might have got themselves shot if they did anything more than glare, but they didn’t.
The GIs turned the place upside down and inside out. They opened drawers and scattered clothes all over the floor. Some of them got a giggle out of throwing women’s underwear around. They poked and prodded the mattress and bedclothes, and lifted them up to check underneath. They found a stash of dirty pictures, with plump, naked Frauleins doing amazing things to men with old-fashioned haircuts. Those were good for a giggle, too. Several guys helped themselves to the best ones. Bernie wondered how the farmer would explain them to his pickle-faced wife. That wasn’t his worry, thank God.
What they didn’t find were any weapons. The most lethal things in the place were the kitchen knives. They went out to the barn and the other outbuildings. Guys who’d grown up on farms back in the States led the search there. Again, they came up with nothing. Maybe these people really didn’t hang around with bandits.
“Danke schon,” Bernie said as the soldiers started to leave. He tossed the farmer a pack of Luckies. It wouldn’t square things, but it might help.
By the farmer’s expression, and by some of the things he muttered under his breath, it didn’t. If any of Heydrich’s fanatics wanted to hide here from now on, the guy would probably serve them roast goose and red cabbage. Well, too goddamn bad.
As the GIs trudged away, the farmer’s wife started screeching at him. “Oh, boy, is he gonna catch it,” Roscoe said, not without sympathy. He had one of the farmer’s finest photos carefully tucked into a breast pocket.
They hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when they came to the place where a mineshaft plunged into the hillside. It wasn’t much to look at: a roughly rectangular hole, a little bigger all the way around than a man was tall. Bernie went in as far as the light reached, which wasn’t very. Spider webs shrouded support timbers that looked as if they’d stood there since Napoleon’s day, or maybe Martin Luther’s.
But you never could tell. This was the kind of stuff they’d been sent out to find. One of the guys had a radio set on his back instead of his ordinary pack. He was already on the horn to divisional HQ when Bernie came out of the shaft. Bernie told him what little he’d seen, and the radioman passed it on.
He listened for a little while, then gave the word: “They’ll send a search team and a demolition team. We’re supposed to wait till they get here, and then support the search team.”
“Suits,” Bernie said. He flopped down in front of the big, black hole in the ground and lit a cigarette. Some of the dogfaces dug out K-ration cans and chowed down. Others promptly started snoring. Bernie had lost the knack for sleeping on bare ground, and wasn’t sorry he had. But if they kept giving him shit like this to do, he might have to get it back.
The demolition squad and the searchers showed up a couple of hours later. Bernie wasn’t anxious to go back into the mine, but he did it. The search team brought flashlights that could have doubled as billy clubs.
“You oughta sell these suckers to MPs,” Bernie said, turning his this way and that. All he saw was carved-out gray rock and more of those ancient support timbers. His boots thumped on the stone floor of the shaft.
“Not a half-bad notion. Damn snowdrops’d be dumb enough to fork over,” said a corporal on the search team. Bernie snickered. The MPs’ white helmets and gloves gave them the scornful nickname.
“Hold up,” somebody called from ahead. “Big old cave-in here. This is the end of the road.” Bernie glanced at the corporal. The two-striper was already turning around. Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow him out-not even a little bit.
“Everybody out?” a man from the demolition squad yelled into the shaft. No one answered. Bernie looked around. All his people were standing outside the mine. The sergeant in charge of the search team seemed to have all his guys, too. The demolitions people placed their charges. They backed away from the opening. Again, Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow. The man who’d yelled used the detonator.
Boom! It wasn’t so loud as Bernie’d expected. Dust spurted out of the shaft. When it cleared, the hole was gone: full of fallen rock. “That’ll do it,” he said.
“Yeah,” agreed the soldier who’d touched off the blast. “Nobody going in or out of there. Now all we gotta do is seal off about a million more of these motherfuckers and we’ve got it licked.”
“Er-right.” Bernie wished he hadn’t put it that way. It made him think he’d be tramping through these miserable mountains forever. He looked around. Hell, he was liable to be.
Boom! The explosion was a long way off, which didn’t mean Reinhard Heydrich didn’t hear it. He swore. The Amis had just plugged one of the ways into and out of his underground redoubt. They didn’t know they’d done that, of course; all the shafts that led down here were artfully camouflaged to look as if they deadended. Even so…
Things had picked up. The Amis wanted him dead. They’d wanted him dead before, of course, but now they really wanted him dead. They wanted him dead enough to put some real work into killing him: into killing him in particular because he was what and who he was, not because he was some Nazi diehard.
I should thank them for the compliment, he thought wryly. He’d got under their skin. He’d hurt the enemy enough to make the enemy want to hurt him back. No, to make the enemy need to hurt him back. This wasn’t just war. It was politics, too. American elections were coming up soon. If the Amis could show off photos of Reinhard Heydrich’s mutilated corpse, their hard-liners would win votes.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” It would go out over the radio, in the newspapers, in their magazines. And the oppression of Germany would go on.
Clausewitz said war was an extension of politics by other means. Hitler had often-too often
-forgotten that. Now that the Fuhrer was dead, Heydrich could look at him and his policies more objectively. And Heydrich didn’t have the mighty Wehrmacht at his back. The mighty Wehrmacht was rotting meat and scrap metal. Heydrich couldn’t bludgeon foes out of the way. He had to keep stinging them, wasplike, till they decided Germany was more trouble than it was worth and left on their own.
He wanted to stay alive, too. He wanted to enjoy the free Germany he’d created. And he especially didn’t want to die if dying gave the occupying powers an advantage and hurt the rebuilding Reich.
Hans Klein walked in. “They aren’t coming after us.”
“Good.” Heydrich nodded. “I didn’t think they would. We spent a lot of time and a lot of Reichsmarks making the holes in the ground that lead in here look like holes in the ground that don’t go anywhere.”
“When you’re playing bridge, one peek is worth a thousand finesses,” Klein said. “When you’re playing our game, one traitor’s worth a thousand tonnes of camouflage.”
Heydrich grunted. Nothing like a cynical noncom to put his finger on your weakness. “We haven’t had to worry about that so far,” the Reichsprotektor said.
“We’ve been lucky so far,” Klein retorted.
Again, Heydrich couldn’t very well tell him he was talking through his hat. Klein damn well wasn’t. At least Heydrich had the sense to see as much. Plenty of people who’d yelled “Heil Hitler!” as loud as anybody were serving the Anglo-Americans now. Or they were licking the lickspittle Frenchmen’s boots, or else kowtowing to Stalin the way they’d once bowed down to their proper Fuhrer.
When such folk made conspicuous nuisances of themselves, Heydrich’s men disposed of them. A sniper from 800 meters, a bomb planted in an automobile or posted in a package, poison at a favorite eatery…There were all kinds of ways. Collaborators knew they had to be careful. Some of them decided the risk wasn’t worth it and quit collaborating. Every one like that counted as a victory.
But the enemy also had his weapons. One of them was cold, hard cash. Heydrich remembered the huge price on his head. A million U.S. dollars now, wasn’t it?
Would that be enough to tempt some sniveling little Judas who’d got sick of staying cooped up in a hole in the ground for years? Heydrich nodded to himself. A million dollars was plenty for a traitor to buy himself an estate and a Rolls and the kind of pussy that went with an estate and a Rolls. Then all he’d need to worry about was his former friends’ revenge.
He might figure the resistance movement would die with Heydrich. He might be right, too, though the Reichsprotektor didn’t think so. If the resistance had gone on after Hitler died, it would go on after Heydrich, too. Jochen Peiper was more than capable in his own right-and freedom for Germany was more important than any one man.
Which didn’t mean treason couldn’t hurt. “People do have to keep their eyes open,” Heydrich said.
“That’s right,” Klein agreed. “You can’t push it too hard, though, not when we’ve all been down here so long. Folks stop listening to you. Anything you have to say over and over starts sounding like Quatsch… uh, sir.”
“And you not even a Berliner,” Heydrich said with a mock-sorrowful shake of the head. But the slang word for bilge was understood all over Germany these days. After some thought, Heydrich nodded much more seriously. “That is one of the troubles with a fight like this. Well, if you think the warnings get to where they do more harm than good, let me know.”
“Will do, Herr Reichsprotektor,” Klein promised. Heydrich had no doubt he would, too. Klein was solid. You couldn’t win a war without leaders, but you also couldn’t win it without reliable followers. Heydrich would have paid a reward of his own to bring in more just like Hans Klein.
Meanwhile…“We’ve lost one doorway. We’ve still got plenty. If they think we can’t hurt them now-they’ll find out.”
November 5. Election day. Sunny but chilly in Anderson. Early in the morning, Jerry Duncan and his wife made the ceremonial stroll from their house to the polling place a couple of blocks away. Sure enough, two or three reporters and their accompanying photographers stood waiting on the sidewalk.
“Wave to the nice people, Bets,” Jerry said in a low voice, and followed his own advice.
Betsy Duncan did, too. Also quietly, she answered, “I know what to do. It’s not like this is the first time.”
“Nope,” Jerry agreed. The one who’d be sweating rivets was Douglas Catledge. Duncan didn’t think the Democrat had ever run for anything before he came back from the war.
“Who you gonna vote for, Congressman?” one of the reporters called.
“Who do you think, E.A.?” Jerry said. E. A. Stuart grinned. One of the other reporters laughed out loud. It was funny, and then again it wasn’t. About every other election, you heard of some little race-school board, maybe, or town councilman-decided by one vote. Sometimes it was decided when-oops! — one candidate chivalrously voted for his opponent. Like any serious politician, Jerry believed in winning more than he believed in chivalry.
The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school. Jerry shook hands with people in there till an election official-a skinny old lady and undoubtedly a Democrat-said, “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polls.”
“I wasn’t electioneering-just meeting friends,” Jerry lied easily.
He got his ballot, went into a booth, and pulled the curtain shut behind him. After he’d marked his ballot, he folded it up and gave it to the clerk in charge of the ballot box. That worthy stuffed it into the slot. “Mr. Duncan has voted,” he intoned ceremoniously. Betsy came out of her booth a moment later. The clerk took her ballot, too. “Mrs. Duncan has voted.”
Flashbulbs from the photographers’ cameras filled the dingy auditorium with bursts of harsh white light. The walk back to the house was attended only by E. A. Stuart. Jerry’d hoped he would get to be an ordinary human being on the way home, but no such luck.
“What will you do if the Republicans win a majority today?” Stuart asked.
“Celebrate,” Betsy answered before Jerry could open his mouth.
Chuckling, Jerry said, “She’s right. You can write it down. I think the first thing we’ll do after that is try and bring our boys home from Germany.”
“President Truman won’t like it,” E.A. Stuart predicted. Jerry tried to remember his full handle, but couldn’t. It was something ridiculous and Biblical-he knew that. No wonder he went by his initials.
“Truman’s had a year and a half to fix the mess,” Jerry said. “He hasn’t done it-not even close. Things are worse now than they were right after the surrender. If he won’t get cracking on his own, we’ll just have to make him move.”
“And if the Democrats hold on?” Stuart asked. Jerry and Betsy Duncan made identical faces. The reporter laughed. “I can’t quote expressions, folks,” he said.
“Awww,” Jerry said, and E. A. Stuart laughed again.
He tried another question: “Would you oppose the occupation so strongly if Diana McGraw hadn’t mobilized opinion against it?”
Betsy’s step faltered, ever so slightly. She was jealous of Diana. Jerry hadn’t given her any reason to be, but she was. (What she didn’t know about a few young, pretty clerk-typists back in Washington wouldn’t hurt her.) He picked his words with care: “Of course Mrs. McGraw comes from my district.” He stressed Mrs. for his wife’s benefit. “That makes me pay some extra attention to her views. But the President’s disastrous policy would have sparked opposition with her or without her. I have to think I would have been part of it.”
“Okay,” Stuart said, scribbling. “Now-”
Jerry held up a hand. “Can we hold the rest for tonight or tomorrow? Then I’ll know what’s what. Right now I’d just be building castles in the air, okay?”
“Well, sure.” E. A. Stuart smiled crookedly. “But that’s half the fun.”
“Maybe for you.” Jerry turned into his own walk. A man’s home was his castle
, and reporters and other barbarians could damn well wait outside.
The polls closed at seven. Jerry and Betsy were at his campaign headquarters-a storefront three doors down from the Bijou-at five past. Radios turned to CBS, RCA, and Mutual stations blared returns. Some people had trouble straining information out of election-night chaos. Not Jerry. He could pick the East Coast nuggets from all the random chatter.
And all the nuggets seemed pure gold. Democrat after Democrat was losing or “trailing significantly,” as the pundits liked to say. Republican after Republican claimed victory. Excitement made Jerry’s fingertips tingle. It had been so long, so very long.
“And now we have the first returns from Indiana,” one of the radio announcers said. Everybody at campaign headquarters yelled for everybody else to shut up. While people were yelling, the announcer read off the returns. In spite of Jerry’s ear, he couldn’t make them out.
“Downstate,” someone said. “We’re leading three to two.”
“Is that all?” Someone else sounded disappointed. Downstate Indiana, down by the Ohio River, was as solidly Republican as anywhere in the country. Still, three to two wasn’t half bad, not by any standards. And most of the votes might have come from some local Democratic stronghold. Till you knew provenance, you had to be careful about what the raw numbers meant.
“In the suburbs of Indianapolis,” the announcer went on, “incumbent Jerry Duncan leads his Democratic challenger. The totals are 1,872 to 1,391 in what are still preliminary results.”
Cheers erupted. So did a few four-letter words aimed at the man on the radio. People from Anderson and Muncie didn’t like to hear their towns called suburbs of Indianapolis. When you got right down to it, they were, but folks didn’t like to hear it or think about it.
“What were the numbers like two years ago? I don’t remember exactly,” Betsy said.
“Not as good as they are now. I was only up by maybe a hundred votes at this stage of things.” Like most politicos, Jerry had total recall for all the returns in every election he’d ever contested. But he was also cautious: “Can’t tell too much yet. Besides, who knows where these votes come from?”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 35