So it was no great surprise when Yuri Vlasov’s cold, narrow-eyed glare-he had Tartar eyes like Bokov’s, and his were also dark-swung from the captain to Colonel Shteinberg and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And it was no great surprise when he barked, “Nyet.”
“But, Comrade General, we have this excellent information-new and excellent information,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “We have it, and we can’t do anything with it ourselves. It’s like having a pretty girl when you can’t get it up.”
Much less earthy than most Russians, Shteinberg hardly ever cracked jokes like that. Maybe he shouldn’t have cracked this one. Lieutenant General Vlasov’s right hand cramped into a white-knuckled fist; his cheeks and ears blazed red. Had he tried playing games with some German popsy with big tits and come up short?
Whether he had or he hadn’t, he snarled, “Fuck your mother, Shteinberg. I told you you couldn’t go to the American pricks, and you goddamn well can’t. That is an order. Do you understand it?”
“Da, Comrade General,” Shteinberg answered tonelessly: the only thing he could say.
Those fierce Tartar eyes lit on Bokov again. He wished they wouldn’t have. “What about you, Captain?” Vlasov demanded. “Do you also understand the order?”
“Da, Comrade General,” Bokov said, as Shteinberg had before him.
“Khorosho.” But it wasn’t good enough to suit Vlasov, for he rounded on Shteinberg once more. “You’re a zhid yourself, so you were born sneaky-just like this so-called informant of yours. Asking if you understand isn’t enough. Will you obey the order?”
Bokov didn’t know whether the loophole had occurred to Shteinberg. It had occurred to him: a measure of his own rage and desperation. He waited to see what Shteinberg would say. The Jew said what he had to say yet again: “Da, Comrade General.” He sighed afterwards, which did him not a fart’s worth of good.
Yuri Vlasov proceeded to nail things down tight: “You will obey, too, Captain Bokov?”
“Da, Comrade General. I serve the Soviet Union.” Bokov did his best to turn the ritual phrase of acknowledgment into a reproach.
His best wasn’t good enough. “All right, then. That’s settled,” Vlasov said, relentless as a bulldozer. “Fuck off, both of you.”
They…fucked off. Once outside of-well outside of-Yuri Vlasov’s office, Bokov began, “I’d like to-”
“Wait in line, Captain. I’m senior to you,” Shteinberg said. “So many people like him, and we beat the Hitlerites anyway. Only goes to show Germany was pretty screwed up, too.”
“But this Shmuel-” Bokov kept spluttering phrases. “We ought to-”
Colonel Shteinberg took him by the elbow and steered him out of NKVD headquarters before he could splutter a phrase that would cook his goose. “No,” Shteinberg said, regretfully but firmly. “He gave us an order. We promised to obey it. If we go back on that…” He shivered, though the day was warm enough and then some. “Even if it worked out well, they’d still make examples of us.”
That was such obvious truth, Bokov didn’t waste his breath arguing it. He did say, “That goddamn fathead will be sorry he gave his stupid order.”
“One way or another, things will even out,” Shteinberg said. “Unless, of course, they don’t.”
A crew of German Stevedores In Overalls Loaded Crates InTO the C-47. First Lieutenant Wes Adams eyed his cargo manifest. Equipment, it said, which told him exactly nothing. “You know what we’re taking to Berlin?” he asked his copilot.
“Buncha boxes and two krauts,” answered Second Lieutenant Sandor Nagy-he inevitably went by Sandy.
The krauts were on the manifest, too, at the bottom. “Wonder who they paid off to get a lift,” Wes said.
Sandy shrugged. “Beats me. They finagled it, though, one way or another. So we’ll haul ’em and kick ’em off the plane and say bye-bye.”
The Germans came aboard right on time. They were krauts, all right-probably figured somebody’d execute ’em for showing up five minutes late. The guy was pale and skinny, in a suit that had been new about when the Depression started. The woman would have been pretty if not for a scar on one cheek. The way she scowled at Wes and Sandy made the pilot bet she’d got the scar in a wartime air raid.
Tough shit, lady, Wes thought. He pointed to a couple of folding seats right behind the cockpit. “Sit here. Buckle yourselves in. Stay here till we get to Berlin.”
“Kein Englisch.” The guy spread his hands regretfully. Wes repeated himself, this time in rudimentary German. “Ach, ja. Zu befehl,” the man said, and the gal nodded.
Wes eyed him. Zu befehl was what a Jerry soldier said when he got an order, the way an American would go Yes, sir. Well, there weren’t a hell of a lot of German men who hadn’t gone through the mill. And he and his lady friend were settling into the uncomfortable seats peaceably enough. “Let’s go through the checklist, Sandy,” Wes said with a mental shrug.
“Sure thing, boss,” the copilot replied.
Everything came out green. Wes set an affectionate hand on the Gooney Bird’s steering yoke. A C-47 would fly through things that tore a fighter to pieces, and take off with all kinds of shit showing up red. He’d done that kind of thing during the war more often than he cared to remember. You didn’t have to in peacetime flying, which was nice.
Twin 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines fired up as reliably as Zippos. Wes and Sandy taxied out to the end of the runway. Taxiing was the only thing that could get tricky in a C-47. In tight spaces, you really needed pilot and copilot both paying close attention. But they had plenty of room here.
When the tower gave clearance, Wes gunned the engines. He pulled back on the yoke as the C-47 got to takeoff speed. Up in the air it went-sedately, because it was a transport, and a heavily laden transport at that-but without the least hesitation. If you wanted to fly something from here to there, this was the plane to do it.
They headed up toward 9,000 feet, where they’d cruise to Berlin. No need to worry about oxygen, not lazing along down here like this. Wes leaned back in his seat. “This is the life,” he said over the Pratt and Whitneys’ roar.
“Beats working,” Sandy agreed. The C-47 bounced a little as it ran into some turbulence. It was enough to notice, not enough to get excited about. Wes had flown straight through thunderstorms. A Gooney Bird was built to take it.
Because of the engine noise, he didn’t hear the cockpit door open. Motion caught from the corner of his eye made his head whip around. There stood the German couple. They both held pistols-no, cut-down Schmeissers. “What the fuck?” Wes said.
“Sorry, friend,” the man said. He spoke English after all.
That was Wes’ last startled thought. Then the submachine guns barked.
Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Ernst Neulen and the former Flak-hilferin he knew only as Mitzi-what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell-pulled the Amis’ bodies out of their seats. “Good job,” he told her as he settled into the pilot’s seat himself. It was bloody, but that wouldn’t matter for long.
“Vielen Dank,” she said primly, as if he’d complimented her on her dancing.
“Go get your umbrella,” Neulen told her.
She gave him a smile-a twisted one, because of that scar. Then she went back into the cargo compartment. The forwardmost crate had a trick side that opened easily if you knew what to do. Mitzi did. She shrugged on the parachute she found inside.
That done, she stepped into the cockpit again for a moment. “Good luck,” she told him.
“You, too,” he answered, his voice far away. He was cautiously fiddling with the throttle. Did it work German-style or like the ones in French and Italian planes, where you had to push instead of pulling and vice versa? Some young German pilots had bought a plot by forgetting the difference after training on foreign aircraft. Oberleutnant Neulen found out what he needed to know and relaxed.
“I’m going to bail out now,” Mitzi said.
“Right,”
Neulen agreed, still getting a feel for the plane. It was a hell of a lot more modern than the trimotored Ju52/3s that had hauled cargo and soldiers for the Reich. He wouldn’t have wanted to try to land it, though he’d heard even coming in wheels-up was a piece of cake for a C-47. But he didn’t have to worry about that.
Mitzi disappeared again, no doubt heading for the cargo door. Neulen hoped she would make it down in one piece. She’d practiced on the ground, but she’d never jumped out of an airplane before. She’d never really landed, either. Well, all you could do was try and hope for the best.
He also hoped the Americans-or was the C-47 over the Russian zone by now? — wouldn’t grab her as soon as she touched ground. How much did she know? Too much: Neulen was sure of that. He hoped for the best again. German patriots on the ground would do their best for her when she landed, anyhow. He was sure of that.
He felt the door open, and heard the howl of the wind inside the cargo bay. Out Mitzi went. He felt that, too. “Luck,” Neulen said softly.
He flew on toward Berlin. He was about fifteen minutes outside the city when the radio crackled to life: “You’re a little north of the flight path. Change course five degrees right.”
“Five degrees right. Roger,” Neulen said in English, and made about half the change.
“Still a little north,” the American flight controller said. “You okay, Wes? You sound like you got a cold in the head.”
“I am okay,” Neulen answered, and said no more-less was better.
Pretty soon, the flight controller came back: “You’re still off course, and you’re up too high, too. Make your corrections, dammit. Is the aircraft all right?”
“All fine,” Neulen said. He did come down-why not? How fast could they scramble fighters? Nobody flew top cover over Berlin: someone was liable to go where he shouldn’t, and then the Russians and Anglo-Americans might start shooting at one another. Keep them happy as long as he could. Neulen didn’t want them phoning their flak batteries either.
He was below 2,000 feet-600 meters, he translated mentally-when he overflew the airport. “What are you doing, man? Are you nuts?” the flight controller howled. “They’re gonna ground your stupid ass forever!”
“Not that long,” Neulen answered. He gunned the C-47, almost straight into the early-morning sun.
“This time, we try the bastards. This time, we hang the bastards,” Lou Weissberg said savagely. “I want to watch ’em swing. I want to hear their necks crack. All of ’em-and especially Streicher’s, the antisemitic motherfucker.”
“That’s not a Christian thought,” Howard Frank observed.
“Damn straight…sir,” Lou said. “I’m not a Christian, any more than you are. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sounds great to me. Let the Nazis turn the other cheek…under a hood, in the wind.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “Ribbentrop and Keitel and Jodl are the ones I want most. The one plotted the war, and the other two fought it. And Goring for the Luftwaffe, even if he was pretty useless once the fighting started.”
“Worse than useless. Didn’t he tell Hitler he could keep the Germans in Stalingrad supplied by air?” Lou said.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Major Frank agreed. “Even so, he was one of Hitler’s right-hand men when the Nazis were coming up. If that’s not reason enough to put a noose around his neck-”
“Reason enough for all of them. Reason enough and then some. And this time they will get it. Oh, boy, will they ever.” Lou eyed the fortified ring the Russians had built around their courthouse. He eyed it from a distance of several hundred yards, because the Russians were liable to start shooting if anybody-anybody at all-got too close. One American officer had already got plugged for not reacting fast enough to “Heraus!” Luckily, he’d live. Nobody except maybe the NKVD knew how many Germans were wounded or dead.
Major Frank was looking the other way. “Pretty soon they go through the maze and in.”
“Yeah.” Lou nodded. Soviet Stalin tanks, U.S. Pershings, and British Centurions would surround the halftracks carrying the accused to justice. The road had been widened-the Russians had blown up the buildings to either side-so the heavy armor could do just that. Demolitions people swept for mines every half hour. Even the sewers were blocked off, as they were around the court. No rescue for the Nazi big shots.
“Won’t be long,” Frank said, glancing down at his watch. “In they’ll go. The judges are already waiting for them.”
“Uh-huh. Just like they were back in Nuremberg.” Lou ground his teeth together, a split second too late to keep the words from escaping. That goddamn fanatic with his truck full of explosives…Lou counted himself lucky not to have been there when the blast went off. Too many of the men who would have tried the Nazis had died in it.
“Kineahora!” Howard Frank exclaimed.
Lou nodded vigorously. He hadn’t wanted to put the whammy on what was about to happen-just the opposite.
“Here they come,” Frank said.
Hearing the heavy rumble of approaching motors, Lou started to nod one more time. But he didn’t, because that heavy rumble was approaching much too fast. And it wasn’t coming up the widened road, either. It was…in the air? In the air!
The C-47 thundered over them at treetop height, maybe lower. The wind of its passage almost knocked Lou off his feet. “What the fuck?” he choked out-his mouth and eyes and nose were all full of dust and grit that wind had kicked up.
Ahead, a few of the Red Army men guarding the courthouse started shooting at the mad Gooney Bird-but only a few, and too late. Much too late. “It’s gonna-” Horror as well as dust clogged Major Frank’s voice. He tried again: “It’s gonna-”
And then it did.
It wasn’t just a hurtling C-47 crashing into the courthouse. Somehow, the fanatics had loaded the plane with explosives. It could carry more than a deuce-and-a-half could. And when the shit went off…
Lou Weissberg and Howard Frank stood more than a mile from the blast. It hammered their ears and rocked them all the same. Lou staggered again, as he had only seconds before when the transport roared by overhead. The fireball that went up dwarfed the courthouse. By then, Lou had seen newsreel footage of what happened when an atom bomb blew up. This wasn’t just like that. A baby version. An ordinary blockbuster, Lou thought dazedly. Plenty bad enough.
“Gottenyu!” Frank burst out. “The bastards just took out the judges again, and the lawyers, and-”
“Vey iz mir!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. He heard Major Frank as if from very far away. He wondered if his ears would ever be the same. He’d wondered the same thing plenty of times before the sadly misnamed V-E Day. It had always come back then. Maybe it would now. He also wondered why he hadn’t thought of what Frank had. Because you’re punchy, dummy: the answer supplied itself.
More slowly than he might have, he noticed a rumble and clatter from behind him. He turned. Sure as hell, here came the tanks protecting the Nazi Bonzen on their way to trial. On their way to…nothing, now. Judges and attorneys had gone up in the fireball, but the foulest criminals in the history of the world were fine. The way things were going, they’d probably die of old age.
Helplessly, Lou started to laugh and cry at the same time. He waited for Major Frank to slap him silly and tell him to snap out of it. That was what happened when you got hysterical, right? But when he looked over at the other officer, he saw Frank doing the same goddamn thing.
Vladimir Bokov decided the fortifications around the courthouse seemed even more impressive from within than when viewed from the outside. Standing in a trench along the route by which the war criminals would at last come to justice, he couldn’t actually see very much. Even so, he knew he was in the middle of that maze of trenches and minefields and concrete antitank obstacles and barbed wire and machine-gun nests and…everything under the sun. Everything anyone could think of, including artillery and antiaircraft guns and thousands of Red Army and NKVD men.
“They’re going to get it. This time, they’re going to get it. And we’re going to give it to them.” He spoke with a certain somber pride. “We are: the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union.” And the NKVD, of course, and the Anglo-Americans, and even the afterthought that was France. But he knew the propaganda line, and he needed next to no conscious thought to echo it. Any Soviet citizen had plenty of practice with that.
And Moisei Shteinberg nodded. “We’ll do it right. We’ll show the Americans how to do it right.” That also came straight from the propaganda line. But then he lowered his voice to something not far above a whisper: “I wish we could show the Americans…”
“That fucking stupid pigheaded Vlasov.” Captain Bokov also whispered. Because of the Soviet traitor, taking the NKVD general’s name in vain felt extra filthy. And if the soldiers around them overheard him, they’d think he was cursing the collaborator.
“I-” Shteinberg’s head came up, as a wolf’s would have at an unexpected noise in the forest. “What’s that?”
Whatever it was, it got louder and closer much too fast. “Mother-cocksuckingfuck!” a Red Army sergeant shouted, and pointed into the sky.
Not very far into the sky-the C-47 roared by almost close enough to knock off Bokov’s cap. That was how it felt, anyhow. Colonel Shteinberg, the damned clever Jew, was quicker on the uptake than Bokov. “Nooo!” he howled-a wail of fury and despair-and fired a burst from his submachine gun at the plane.
Here and there, a few other Chekists and Red Army men shot at it. But most, like Vladimir Bokov, watched in frozen surprise. One antiaircraft gun opened up-only one, as far as Bokov could tell. Whatever its shells ended up hitting, they missed the C-47. It slammed into the courthouse at something over 350 kilometers an hour.
The blast knocked Bokov flat even though he was in the trench. He and Colonel Shteinberg fell all over each other, in fact. And they fell on the foul-mouthed sergeant, or he fell on them, and everybody close by was falling over everybody else. And then chunks of masonry and sheet metal and everything else that went into a building and an airplane started falling on them, and some of that was on fire.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 46