The Man with the Iron Heart (33 page)

Slowly, the people who’d applauded quieted down. Jerry figured he’d made his point, at least to them. The unhappy look on the New York Democrat’s face said he did, too.

“W
OW!”
L
OU
W
EISSBERG EYED THE SWARMS OF
GI
S WITH GREASE
guns and M-1s, the halftracks, and the Pershing heavy tanks surrounding the Nuremberg jail. Mustang fighters roared low overhead. “We could’ve captured half of Germany with a force this big.”

“Yeah, well…” Howard Frank let his voice trail off. He needed a few seconds to find a way to say what he was thinking. When he did, it turned out to be bleakly, blackly cynical: “Look how much all our security helped old Adenauer.”

Lou grunted. In a way, that was applicable. In another way, it wasn’t. “Heydrich’s goons wanted Adenauer dead. You gotta figure they’ll try a rescue here if they try anything at all.”

“Who knows? Who the hell knows anything any more?” Captain Frank said wearily. “We’ve given ’em a big concentration of our own troops to shoot at, and an asshole with a mortar is awful hard to catch.” Another P-51 thundered past at just above rooftop height. “Even with planes overhead, he’s still hard to catch,” Frank continued with a mournful sigh. “And besides, maybe Heydrich wants the other Nazi big shots dead. Then nobody can claim he doesn’t deserve to be
Führer.
”

“If he lets us try ’em, we’ll take care of that for him,” Lou said. “But he doesn’t want to do that, either.” He pointed northwest, toward the shattered Palace of Justice. “If the fanatics had let the trial go on, we would’ve hanged those bastards by now. Better than they deserve, too.”

“You don’t need to tell me, Lou. I already know.” Frank might have been on the point of saying something more, but the doors to the jail opened. Out came MPs with grease guns, followed by the Nazi prisoners in civilian clothes. Göring and Hess were easy to recognize, even though they’d both dropped a lot of weight. The rest…Without their uniforms, without the power those uniforms conferred, they looked like a bunch of small-town shopkeepers and tradesmen, with maybe a lawyer and a doctor and a preacher thrown in.

There were almost two dozen of them all told. The MPs hustled them into four halftracks. Guards also scrambled up into the armored personnel carriers. The tanks and other armored vehicles rolled away to take the lead in the convoy. One by one, the halftracks with the important captives followed. The rear guard was at least as strong as the force that had gone before.

More American troops and vehicles waited along the route the armored convoy would take. Still more were posted along routes it might have taken but wouldn’t. “I wonder how much this little move is costing the taxpayers,” Lou remarked.

“You’ll find out,” Captain Frank said. “As soon as the jerks who want to make Heydrich happy and go home hear what the number is, they’ll shout it from the housetops. Grab a copy of the
Chicago Tribune
or any Hearst paper and you’ll see it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lou said. “Don’t people understand the war’s still cooking even if the krauts did sign a surrender?”

“Hey, if you get a scoop, who gives a shit what happens to the poor goddamn dogfaces on the other side of the ocean?” Yeah, Frank was in a cynical mood, all right.

Lou also had a strong opinion about what people like that could do to themselves. It violated several commandments and other Biblical prohibitions, to say nothing of the laws of anatomy, physiology, and probably physics. He expressed it anyhow. His superior laughed. “Sideways,” Lou added.

“Well, it’s not like I don’t feel the same way,” Howard Frank said. “But I’m just a poor goddamn dogface on the other side of the ocean, too, far as they’re concerned.”

“Uh-huh.” Letters from Lou’s family—and, even more, letters he’d tried and failed to write to them—had painfully proved to him that he wasn’t a civilian any more. He wondered if he ever could be again. He had his doubts.

“But I think they’re just what you called ’em,” Frank said. “I’m not gonna worry about ’em—not unless they make so much noise, they don’t let us do what we’ve gotta do over here.”

“Sounds good to me, too, sir,” Lou said. The last Pershing—finally, an American tank that could match up with a Panther, only it got to the battlefield a couple of months before Panthers went out of business—rumbled away. Exhaust fumes choked the air.

“I just hope everything goes good on the other end, too,” Captain Frank said.

“Boy, me, too,” Lou said. “Next stop…” He dropped to a whisper. He wasn’t supposed to say where, even if the only guy who could possibly hear already knew anyway. Bringing out the place had a thrill of the forbidden: “Frankfurt.”

T
HE TRUCK WAS A DEUCE-AND-A-HALF PAINTED OLIVE DRAB.
W
ELL,
what the hell else would it be in Germany these days? The English used them. So did the French. So did the Russians. And the Jerries had used all the big American brutes they could capture. These babies beat the crap out of the Opels and the other hunks of tin the krauts had manufactured for themselves.

“Papers?” said the guard at the entrance to the American compound in Frankfurt.

Without a word, the driver passed them to him. The guard looked them over. They were in order. They looked in order, anyhow. It wasn’t the same thing, but the guard didn’t think of that.

“I’ve got to inspect your cargo,” he said. The driver only nodded. The guard eyed him. “Watsamatter? Cat got your tongue, buddy?” The driver mimed tipping back a stein, or maybe a bottle. He held his head in both hands and rolled his eyes. The guard laughed. “Okay, okay. I’ve tied one on a few times, or maybe a few times too many. But I still gotta look at your stuff.”

With a hesitant nod, the driver waved him on. The man was as pallid as if he’d got plastered the night before—that was for sure. The guard went around to the back of the truck. He scrambled up onto the rear bumper so he could look over the gate at what the canvas-covered truck body held.

Then he jumped down in a hurry. His own face felt as if it were on fire. He knew it had to be beet-red. Carton after cardboard carton, all with
KOTEX
printed on them in big, embarrassing scarlet letters. Soldiers’ wives, officers’ grown and mostly grown daughters…Sure, they’d need stuff like that, but a nineteen-year-old draftee didn’t want to get reminded of it.

“Well, go on, goddammit.” He tried to make his voice rough and deep, but it broke in the middle of the curse. Mortified anew, he waved the deuce-and-a-half forward.

It should have headed straight for the PX, which was for all practical purposes a supermarket. Instead, it made for the community center, right in the middle of the American compound in Frankfurt.

“Hey,” the GI said to his companion, who hadn’t bothered coming out of the guard shack. “What does he think he’s doing?”

“What is he doing?” The other guard emerged to look. He was a year older, which only meant his whiskers rasped more when he rubbed his chin. “Sure doesn’t know where he’s going, does he?”

“No, and he oughta, unless…” A sudden, horrid suspicion filled the kid who’d waved the truck through. He raised his grease gun, and his voice. “Hey, you! Halt, or else I’ll—!”

Too late. If there are two more mournful words in the English language, what could they possibly be? The truck was out of voice range, and almost out of grease-gun range. It hadn’t been full of Kotex after all. It blew sky-high.

I’m in deep shit,
the guard thought as he went ass over teakettle. That was pretty goddamn mournful, too, but it needed more than two words. Then he slammed into what was left of a wall across the street from the compound. A rib broke. It stabbed him from the inside out. “Motherfuck!” he gasped, and got stabbed again. That wasn’t mournful; it was half automatic, half furious.

At that, he was one of the lucky ones. When the German fanatic pressed the button on the steering wheel or wherever the hell it was, he’d got 300 yards—maybe even a quarter mile—into the compound: almost to the community center. He blasted himself to kingdom come, of course. He blew up twenty-nine U.S. soldiers, and seventy-three women, and nineteen children under the age of ten. The papers were very particular about that, for some reason.
Children under the age of ten,
they all said. The exploding truck wounded more than twice as many as it killed.

So the papers proclaimed right after the fanatic killed himself to strike at the USA. The luckless guard lay on a cot in a crowded room in a crowded Army hospital. His chest was bandaged so tight, he could hardly breathe. He had nothing to do—nothing he could do—but read the papers and listen to the radio that sat on a wall shelf in one corner of the room.

A broken rib. That wasn’t so much. After a while, you’d get better. Except the guard didn’t. He lost his appetite—easy enough to do with Army chow, but still…. When he scratched his head, his hair started coming out. He didn’t feel good at all, not even a little bit.

A frowning nurse gave him a blood test. Not too much later, a frowning doctor came in and asked him, “How long have you been anemic, son?”

“Huh? What? Me?” The guard didn’t even know what the word meant. “How come I’m going bald?”

The doctor didn’t answer, which pissed him off. It would have made him even madder if he’d felt better. He threw up that night, and the vomit had blood in it.

A tech sergeant walked into the ward much too early the next morning. He carried a metal box with…things attached to it. The guard, still nauseous, wasn’t inclined to curiosity just then. One of the…things was a set of earphones. The tech sergeant steered the other one over the guard. Something clicked in the earphones; even the sick guard could hear it. The sergeant looked down at a gauge on top of the metal box. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered, and got out of there in a hurry.

They carried the guard out of the ward later that day. The medics who moved him wore gas masks and thick gloves. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “I ain’t Typhoid Mary. I ain’t got smallpox or nothin’. I know I ain’t—I been vaccinated. All I got’s a coupla cracked ribs, right?”

“Well, no.” Coming through the gas mask, the medic’s voice sounded otherworldly.

“What is it, then? How come I feel so crappy?” the guard asked.

“After we A-bombed the Japs, the docs called it radiation sickness,” the medic replied.

“Son of a bitch!” The guard would have got more excited, but he did feel crappy. “That thing the fuckin’ kraut touched off—that was an atom bomb? How come I ain’t dead?”

The medic hesitated.
Maybe you will be
—something like that had to be going through his mind. The guard would have been more upset had he been less wrung out, too. At last, the medic said, “Well, it wasn’t a real atom bomb. What blew up was just TNT, that kinda shit. If it was a real atom bomb, Frankfurt wouldn’t be there any more—one gone goose. But the fuckin’ krauts put some kinda radioactive crap in with the explosive, and the blast spread it all over the place. You musta been pretty close to where it went off.”

“Yeah, I sure was. That’s how I got the ribs,” the guard agreed. “What happens now? Am I gonna die?” He wished he cared more.

“See how much of that crap you took in. See if you get better or not.” The medics who were lugging the guard stopped at a door with
ISOLATION
painted above it in big letters that looked new. A nurse held the door open for them. She was a blonde with a nice shape—Betty Grable legs—but a gas mask kept the guard from telling whether she was cute or not. He also wished he cared more about that. If he didn’t give a damn about what a girl looked like, he had to be much too close to buying a plot.

Several other guys already lay in the isolation ward. A couple of them seemed pretty chipper. Others looked even worse than the guard felt. The medics got him up onto a bed. He lay there like a lump, wondering what happened next or if anything happened next. He had a hard time caring one way or the other.

R
OBERT
P
ATTERSON DIDN’T LOOK HAPPY ABOUT COMING BEFORE
Congress. Jerry Duncan didn’t give a good goddamn about how the Secretary of War looked. “Let me get this straight, Mr. Secretary,” Jerry said. “We had this enormous enclave in Frankfurt for American officers and their dependents, constructed at taxpayer expense for several million dollars. Is that right?”

“Yes, Congressman.” Patterson looked even less happy. Jerry hadn’t been sure he could.

“Okay,” Jerry said. It wasn’t—not even close—but sometimes you had to soften ’em up before you bored in for the kill. “We had this enclave. Now we can’t use it any more, because this damned German fanatic blew himself up right in the middle and left it radioactive. We were going to try the German war criminals there, but now we can’t do that, either. Is all that right?”

“Yes, Congressman. Unfortunately, it is.” There had to be some bottom to the Secretary of War’s gloom, but he hadn’t found it yet.

“How did the German drive his truck into the middle of our enclave?” Jerry inquired, acid in his voice. “Was the guard asleep at the switch?”