“Thank you, sir!” Lou’s salute was as snappy as he could make it. He felt about ready to bust his buttons with pride. If America wasn’t the greatest country in the world…No, it damn well was, and that was all there was to it. His folks had come through Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. He wished they could see him now, college-educated and exchanging salutes with a four-star general. If something like this wasn’t the dream of every hard-working immigrant’s son, what would be?
“Hey, Captain-uh, Major!” a reporter called. “You’re in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Lou said uncomfortably. The one thing wrong with getting your name in the paper was that you weren’t so useful to the CIC after you did. A well-known spy was your basic contradiction in terms.
The reporter didn’t care-or, more likely, didn’t even think about it. “Those Nazi so-and-so’s gonna dry up and blow away now that Heydrich’s dead and gone?” he asked, poising pencil above notebook to wait for Lou’s reply. A good story…That, he cared about.
Lucius Clay leaned toward Lou, too, anxious to hear his answer. It wasn’t an enormous, showy lean: only an inch or so, two at the most. But any lean at all from the straight-spined general seemed remarkable. With Clay leaning, Lou picked his words with even more care than he would have otherwise. “Nobody knows what’s coming up-I figure that’s how come everybody spends so much time guessing and hoping about it,” he said. “So the most I can give you now is a guess and a hope. My guess is, we’ve got a decent chance that they’ll quit. And you can bet I hope like anything I’m right.”
What was a decent chance? Thirty percent? Eighty percent? Lou didn’t say, because he had no idea. The reporter didn’t notice, and wrote down what he did say. General Clay, on the other hand, recognized bullshit when he heard it. He made a point of straightening up again: Lou showed he didn’t have any better notion than Clay did himself. Lou wished he could have sounded surer. Hell, he wished he could have been surer. Too bad life didn’t work that way.
Bernie Cobb was drunk. He was drunk As a Lord,in fact-or he thought so, even if no lords were around for comparison. He couldn’t remember ever buying drinks for so many other guys before, either. Of course, he’d also never had a quarter of a million bucks burning a hole in his pocket before.
He didn’t exactly have a quarter of a million bucks now. In spite of the fancy ceremony with General Clay, the money was going into a Stateside bank account for him. The idea was to keep him from blowing the wad before the Army shipped him home. Whoever’d decided on that knew what he was doing-and knew Bernie much too well.
So what he was spending was back pay and poker winnings and whatever other cash he could scrape together. You had to throw some kind of bash when $250,000 came your way, didn’t you? Bernie thought so. And the Silver Star didn’t hurt.
“So when do they turn you loose and send you back?” asked one of his many new-found close friends.
That set Bernie laughing. Right now, almost anything would, but this was really funny. “Y’know the medal they pinned on me? Even with the way they’re bumping up points, that gave me enough for my Ruptured Duck. So as soon as they find me a ship or a plane, I am fucking gone!”
People laughed and cheered and pounded him on the back. Why not? He was still slapping money down on the bar. Somebody else asked him, “Did you know it was Heydrich when you opened up on those Jerries?”
“Shit, no,” Bernie answered. “All I knew was, they were Germans and they weren’t supposed to be there. I figured I better get ’em while they were still all bunched up, like, so I did.”
“Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” The other GI sounded jealous. And he had a quarter of a million reasons to sound that way. No, a quarter of a million and one, because Bernie had a ticket home, too. Well, the way things were going, everybody’d be heading back from Germany soon. Bernie didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked going home himself just fine.
Engines roaring, the big triple-tailed Constellation rolled down the runway outside of Amsterdam. The TWA airliner took off smooth as you please. It would stop at Paris to let passengers off and take on new ones, and to top up its fuel tanks. Then it would cross the Atlantic-eight or ten times as fast as the fastest ocean liner-and land at New York City.
Over the intercom, the pilot explained all that in English and French and Dutch. Before the war, he surely would have used German, too. He didn’t think he needed to now. Konrad could follow English, and Dutch after a fashion, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of what the pilot thought the flight would be doing, Konrad and his friends had other plans.
Konrad and Max carried Dutch passports-or excellent forgeries of Dutch passports, anyhow. A couple of rows farther back, Arnold and Hermann flew on Belgian passports-or equally excellent forgeries. Along with the false documents, all four men had also brought cut-down Schmeissers onto the plane. But the submachine guns weren’t on display, not yet.
A steward came down the aisle with a tray of drinks. It was almost empty by the time it got to Konrad and Max. Plenty of people needed help forgetting they were three or four kilometers up in the air. Max took a cocktail. Konrad didn’t.
They landed at Orly Airport. Like the rest of the people going on to New York, Konrad and Max and Arnold and Hermann sat tight while other stylish men and women got off and on. If you couldn’t afford stylish clothes, odds were you couldn’t afford a plane ticket, either.
After the layover, the L-049 took off again. The pilot came on the intercom to brag in his three languages about the meals TWA would be serving. Then he explained how to fold the seats down into reasonable approximations of beds. No matter how much faster than a ship it was, the airliner would still take a long time to get to New York City.
It would take far longer than the pilot expected, but he didn’t know that yet. Time he found out.
“Ready?” Konrad asked quietly. Max nodded. Konrad twisted and looked back over his shoulder. He caught Arnold’s eye, and Hermann’s. They nodded, too. All four Germans took their Schmeissers out of their travel cases. No one had searched them before they boarded. Except for a few panicky editorial writers, no one had seen the need, even after the German Freedom Front flew that captured C-47 into the Russians’ Berlin courthouse.
A stewardess-quite a pretty girl, really-was drawing near when Konrad and Max, Arnold and Hermann, all stood up at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding more curious than alarmed.
Then she saw the Schmeissers. Her eyes-green as jade-opened so wide, Konrad could see white all around the irises, as he might have with a spooked horse on the Eastern Front. Crash! The tray of drinks hit the floor.
“Don’t do anything dumb,” Konrad said-he was lead man in this operation not least because he knew English. “Take us to the cockpit.”
“What-What will you do?” The girl’s voice quavered, which was hardly a surprise.
“Nobody will get hurt if people do what we say,” Konrad answered, which committed him to nothing. He gestured sharply with the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Now go on! Move!”
When the cockpit door opened, the pilot grinned at the stewardess. “Hey, beautiful! What’s going on?” Then he saw the four men with submachine guns behind her. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”
“I will shoot you if you do not do everything I tell you,” Konrad said. “The plane will crash. Everyone will die. If you do what I tell you, I think everyone can live. Is it a bargain?”
“Who the hell are you?” the pilot demanded.
That was a fair question. He meant Are you a pack of crazy people? If he decided Konrad and his friends were, he wouldn’t see any point to dealing with them. He might think crashing the plane now would be the best thing he could do, so they wouldn’t try to make him fly it into a building or something. Since Konrad didn’t want to die, he spoke quickly: “We belong to the German Freedom Front. We were soldiers in the war. We still fight to liberate
the Fatherland.”
Pilot and copilot looked at each other. Neither seemed to like the answer very much. “What do you want us to do?” the pilot asked after a considerable pause.
“Fly this airplane to Madrid. Land there,” Konrad replied. “We will-how do you say it? — use the airplane and the passengers as poker chips to move our cause forward. We will not shoot unless you try to overpower us. Everyone in that case will be very unhappy.”
“When we go off course, the radar will see it,” the pilot said. “They’ll call us up and ask us what’s wrong. What are we supposed to tell ’em?”
“Tell them the truth. Tell them you have men from the German Freedom Front on your airplane. Tell them these men require you to fly to Spain,” Konrad answered.
The pilot eyed him. “You son of a bitch! You want everybody to know!”
“Aber naturlich,” Konrad said. “The world must learn we are still fighting for a free Germany, and we are serious in what we do.” As he had with the stewardess, he let a twitch of the Schmeisser’s muzzle make his point for him. “Now-to Madrid.”
“Right. To fucking Madrid,” the pilot muttered. The L-049 swung from west to south.
Not five minutes later, a voice on the radio said, “TWA flight 57, this is Paris Control. Why have you changed course? Over.”
The pilot grabbed the microphone. “Paris Control, this is TWA57. We have four men from the German Freedom Front aboard. They are all armed, and they have directed us to fly to Madrid. To keep our passengers and crew safe, we are obeying. Over.” He clicked off the mike and looked back over his shoulder at Konrad. “There. Happy now?”
“You did what was needed. That is good,” Konrad answered. The pilot’s eyebrows said he didn’t think so.
“Jesus Christ!” Paris Control burst out. “Say that again, TWA57.” At Konrad’s nod, the pilot did. “Jesus!” Paris Control repeated. Then he asked, “Have the assholes hurt anybody?”
“Negative. They say they won’t if we play along with ’em. You might watch what you call ’em, since they’re in the cockpit with us.”
“Er-roger that,” Paris Control said. A different voice came over the air: “Shall we scramble fighters?”
“Negative! Say again, negative!” the pilot replied. “Not unless you aim to shoot us down. What else can fighters do?”
A long silence followed. At last, Paris Control said, “You may proceed. We will inform Spanish air officials of the situation.”
“Thank you,” the pilot said. He looked disgusted. Paris Control had sounded disgusted. Some of the Anglo-Americans had wanted to clean out Franco’s Spain after the Wehrmacht surrendered. They hadn’t done it, though, even if Spain sheltered more than a few German refugees and other Europeans who’d supported the Reich’s crusade against Bolshevism. Maybe they remembered that Franco hadn’t let the Fuhrer come in and run the English out of Gibraltar. All by itself, that had gone a long way toward costing Germany the war.
“Can we tell the passengers what’s going on?” the copilot asked. “They’re bound to be wondering by now.”
“Go ahead,” Konrad said, and then, in German, to his comrades, “If anybody back there makes trouble, kill him.”
Word went out over the airliner’s intercom. The copilot warned people not to do anything silly, and nobody did. The Constellation flew on, almost at right angles to its planned course.
After a while, Konrad saw the peaks of the Pyrenees ahead. The L-049 flew high above them. The land on the other side was Spain.
He and his fellow hijackers grinned at one another. Everything was going according to plan. The Spanish ground-control man who came on the radio hardly spoke English. He and the pilot went back and forth in French. Konrad didn’t know any, but Max and Hermann did. They nodded to show nothing was wrong.
Spanish planes came up to look the airliner over. “Son of a bitch!” the pilot exclaimed. “Thought I’d never seen another goddamn Messerschmitt again!”
To Konrad, the German design carried happier associations. “We sold many of them to Spain,” he said. “The Spaniards must use them yet.”
“I guess.” The pilot still sounded shaken.
He wasn’t too shaken to land smoothly, though. Tanks rolled toward the Constellation. They were also German-outdated Panzer IIIs-which did nothing to reassure Konrad. “Tell them to go away, or the passengers will answer for it,” he said sharply. The American relayed the message. The tanks pulled back.
“People are hungry. May I serve a meal?” the stewardess asked.
“Ja. Go ahead. Hermann, keep an eye on things,” Konrad said. Hermann smiled and nodded. Plainly, he was happy to keep an eye on the cute stewardess. That wasn’t what Konrad had meant, but…. The lead hijacker turned back to the pilot. “You can talk to the control tower, yes?”
“Yes,” the man said. “They finally found a guy who really knows some English, too.”
“Good. Very good. Get in touch with him.” When the pilot had, Konrad took a folded sheet of paper out of his inside jacket pocket. “Send to the tower the just demands of the German Freedom Front. Tell the tower to send these demands on to the troops unlawfully and improperly occupying Germany. Have you got it?”
“Take it easy. Let me give ’em that much before I start forgetting,” the pilot said. Konrad waved agreement. The pilot spoke into the microphone. Then he looked back to the hijacker to find out what came next.
Konrad was only too happy to oblige him. “First, all demands must be met within seventy-two hours. After that, we cannot answer for the safety of the passengers.”
“You’ll start shooting people, you mean,” the pilot observed bleakly.
“Ja,” Konrad said. “If we do not do this, no one pays attention to us. Send the warning.” After the pilot had, Konrad resumed: “We demand the immediate liberation of all prisoners captured while resisting the unlawful occupation. We demand also an end to the unlawful ban against National Socialist participation in German political life. And we demand-”
“Maybe you should start shooting now,” the pilot said. “They won’t give you any of that stuff.”
Konrad hefted his Schmeisser. “You had better hope they do.”
XXXII
Had Lou Weissberg tried for a year, he would have had trouble coming up with a photo he less wanted to see on the front page of the International Herald-Tribune. There was the big four-engined airliner parked at the edge of a runway in Madrid. There was the doorway, open. There was a faint view of a Nazi bastard with a submachine gun standing in the doorway. And there on the tarmac below the doorway lay a crumpled corpse in a spreading pool of blood.
“Motherfuckers even picked a Jew to murder first,” Lou snarled in helpless, frustrated fury-the story beside the photo said the dead man’s name was David Levinsky. “Probably the only Jew on the plane, but they found him, all right.”
“Sure they did,” Howard Frank agreed. “After everything you’ve seen since you got here, how come you’re surprised now?”
Lou sighed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe ’cause they’re still exactly the same assholes they were before, even though Heydrich’s dead. Why did Clay bother giving me a medal and all that cash if killing the bastard didn’t change anything?”
“He must have hoped it would, too,” Major Frank said. “And if you don’t want the money, I’ll take it off your hands. I bet I can figure out something to do with it.”
“You know what you can do with it-sideways,” Lou said. Chuckling, Frank lit up, too. Lou went on, “And the goddamn Spaniards just stand around watching with their thumbs up their asses.”
“Portuguese, too,” Major Frank said. A DC-4 had been hijacked to Lisbon. The Nazis aboard that plane hadn’t started shooting hostages yet.
“Yeah, the Portuguese, too. We shoulda gone into both countries after V-E Day. Then the krauts wouldn’t have anywhere to hide-I don’t think you can fly nonstop from Europe to Buenos Aires,” Lou said. “But you know the real pisser?”
>
Howard Frank suddenly seemed fascinated by the glowing coal on his cigarette. At last, without much wanting to, he said, “Nu?”
“The real pisser is, we’re still loading GIs onto troopships and taking them home,” Lou said. “That hasn’t slowed down one goddamn bit. I mean, why should it? We knocked the crap out of the Nazis, so they aren’t dangerous any more. Sure makes sense to me! Must make sense to you, too, right?”
“Riiight.” Frank stretched out the word like a train whistle fading in the distance. “Go close the door to my office, willya?”
“Huh? How come?” Lou said. Major Frank just looked at him. “Okay, okay. All right, already.” Lou walked over and shut it.
By the time he got back, Frank had produced an almost-full pint of bourbon from nowhere-more likely, from a desk drawer. He took a knock and handed Lou the bottle. “Here. Get the taste out of your mouth.”
“Thanks!” Lou was glad to drink. It wouldn’t help the poor SOBs in Madrid or Lisbon, but it made him feel better. “Ahh! You’re a mensh.”
“Well, I try.” Major Frank tilted the pint back again, not so far this time. “Russians have the same worry we do-just before you came in with the paper, I heard on the radio that there’s a hijacked plane in Prague.”
“Fuck!” Lou said. That made him want more bourbon himself, so he took some. “Fanatics have a new toy, don’t they?”
Howard Frank nodded. “Looks that way.”
“But what can they accomplish?” Lou asked. “No matter how many hostages they kill, we won’t do what they say. That’d be asking for even more trouble, if such a thing is possible. And they’ve gotta know the Russians’ll tell ’em to piss up a rope.”
“Sure.” Frank nodded again. “The kind of publicity they’re getting, though-you can’t buy headlines like that. And if they’re pulling this crap on regular airline flights, they’ll make us start patting people down and going through everybody’s luggage and stuff like that. It’ll cost millions of dollars and flush even more millions of man-hours down the shitter.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 58