The Man with the Iron Heart (34 page)

“It appears the guard was deceived, sir, if that’s what you mean,” Patterson answered stolidly.

“What would have happened if the guard wasn’t asleep at the switch?” Jerry liked his own phrase better. It made the guard and the Secretary of War look bad. “Wouldn’t the whole enclave have been saved?”

“Well, sir, I think the most likely thing is that the fanatic behind the wheel would have touched off the vehicle at the first sign of trouble,” Patterson replied. “There was a lot of explosive in that truck. It still would have blown up a large area, and it would have spread the, uh, radioactive material far and wide any which way.”

Damn,
Jerry thought. That seemed likely to him, too, even if he wished it didn’t. He tried a different jab: “How did Heydrich’s fanatics get their hands on radioactive material in the first place? How did they know what to do with it?”

Patterson licked his lips. “They kidnapped physicists out of the British zone. The radioactive material came from the French zone.”

“So none of this is the War Department’s fault? Is that what you’re saying?” Jerry asked. “The bomb blew up in the American zone, didn’t it? It contaminated the American zone, didn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” the Secretary of War said.

“And this, uh, radioactive material the fanatics got from the French zone—how did they know it was there?” Jerry pressed.

“I presume one of the German physicists told them,” the Secretary of War said.

“Now, we knew the stuff was there? But we didn’t try to get it because we didn’t want to alert the French to its presence? Isn’t that right?” Jerry said.

Patterson sipped from the glass of ice water in front of him before answering, “Yes, Congressman, I believe it is.”

In his shoes, Jerry would have been sweating, too, and would have wanted to cool down. “We held our cards too close to our chest, wouldn’t you say?” Jerry asked.

“It did turn out that way, yes, sir. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” Patterson said.

“How many people got blown up by the bomb, Mr. Secretary? How many will die of radiation sickness or cancer because of it? Couldn’t we have used some twenty-twenty foresight?” Jerry demanded.

Bang!
The committee chairman used his gavel. “There will be no badgering of witnesses,” he declared. “You need not respond to that, Mr. Patterson.”

“Sorry, Mr. Chairman,” Jerry said. But, when he thought about the stories the papers would run, he wasn’t sorry one bit.

S
OME
S
OVIET PRINTER IN
B
ERLIN HAD RUN OFF COUNTLESS COPIES OF
the latest ukase from Moscow. The fellow must have, if one appeared on the desk of an officer as junior as Vladimir Bokov. With the order in hand, he went down the hall to see what his superior thought of it.

Colonel Shteinberg was reading the pronunciamento when Bokov came in. “Hello, Volodya,” he said. “You’ve seen this?” He held up the sheet of cheap pulp paper.

“
Da,
Comrade Colonel.” Bokov displayed his own copy. “What do you make of it?”

“It will be a little inconvenient, maybe, but of course we’ll do it, because the order comes straight from Marshal Stalin,” Shteinberg said.

“Of course,” Bokov agreed, straight-faced. Anyone who didn’t follow an order from Stalin would regret it the rest of his life, which might not be long but would be unpleasant. “We will have to help organize postage and reparations to make sure everything is examined by Geiger counter before it proceeds to the motherland.” He paused, then asked, “Comrade Colonel, how many of these Geiger counters are there in the Soviet zone, and what are they for?”

“They measure radioactivity. I found that out with a phone call to a doctor who did a course in physics before the war,” Shteinberg replied. “At the moment, I believe we have seven in the Soviet zone. But more are coming from the USSR.”

“Good. That’s good,” Bokov said with what he thought of as commendable optimism. Every motherland-bound letter, parcel, truck, soldier, dismounted factory? Seven of these Geiger counters? Yes, they needed more—thousands more!

All the same, he thought he understood why Stalin gave the order. Radioactivity could kill, and kill invisibly. The bandits’ bomb in Frankfurt must have put the Little Father’s wind up. If the Heydrichites still had any of their radioactive material—whatever it was—left, they could strike a blow at the very heart of the Soviet Union. Of course Stalin would do everything he could to block it.

Another question formed in Bokov’s mind. “What do we do if we find something that’s, uh, radioactive?” He had only the vaguest notion of what the word meant.

“Ah. They must not have issued you the supplement.” Moisei Shteinberg brandished another sheet of paper. “In that case, we are to find out who delivered it, and where, and where he got it. This may give us some leads on who gave it to him.”

“Yes. It may.” Bokov didn’t believe that, but he had to sound like someone who did. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had practice.

“And so we have our orders, and so we will carry them out,” Shteinberg declared. “At my suggestion, the Red Army’s postmasters have directed that all mail to the motherland be routed through Berlin. Six of the seven Geiger counters are here, in this city. All rail traffic between the Soviet zone and the USSR will be centralized here, allowing us to inspect soldiers and functionaries.”

“Very good, Comrade Colonel. What about Germans assigned to camps?” Bokov asked.

“Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about them,” Shteinberg said with a certain savage satisfaction. “They won’t be going any place where they can endanger people who matter.”

Bokov nodded. “Makes sense to me. We won’t have to take any of these counters away from important work, then.”

“We’ll be stretched thin enough as is,” Shteinberg agreed.

“Can we borrow Geiger counters from the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov wondered. “They’re imperialist powers, I know, but they’re still our allies against the Fascist jackals.”

Shteinberg pondered, then clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Not a good idea, Comrade Captain. We will not show England or the United States that we are weak in any way.” When he put it like that, Bokov couldn’t possibly argue. Even trying would have been dangerous, so he didn’t.

Ravens were nasty birds. Lou Weissberg hadn’t seen many—truth to tell, he couldn’t remember seeing any—back in New Jersey. He hadn’t even seen that many crows. But he’d found out more than he ever wanted to know about ravens in the months before the German surrender. They pecked out corpses’ eyes and worried at wounds to make them bigger and get at the exposed flesh. Sometimes they didn’t wait till what they were pecking at was a corpse.

Here they were again, on the road between Nuremberg and Munich. The day before, a squad’s worth of fanatics had tangled with about an equal number of GIs. More often than not, the krauts’ assault rifles and Schmeissers would have given them a firepower edge over American troops. Not this time—three of the dogfaces were BAR men. The Brownings chewed up the fanatics and left them…ravens’ meat.

Vultures prowled the grass along with the ravens. European vultures were hawkier than their American equivalents. They looked as if they wouldn’t mind going out and killing something when the carrion ran short. Well, they didn’t need to do any extra work today. The GIs with the BARs had taken care of that for them.

The Americans had lost one dead and three wounded. The Germans were mostly dead. They’d given themselves a nasty surprise, sure as hell. But the GIs had captured a couple who were only wounded—he didn’t get to interrogate fanatics all that often.

Plenty of U.S. soldiers surrounded the tent that housed the wounded Aryan supermen. Most of the time, the Jerries would have gone to a hospital in Munich or Nuremberg. Not today, Josephine. So soon after the radioactive attack on Frankfurt, the brass wasn’t sure Heydrich’s goons wouldn’t try another one. A tent in the middle of nowhere didn’t make a promising target for that kind of thing.

Jumpy troopers made Lou show his ID three different times and frisked him twice before he got inside the tent. In the Far East, he’d heard, Army discipline was going right down the crapper. The Japs actually believed they were licked. American troops might not want to be in Europe, but they didn’t get slack and dick around here. Nothing concentrated the mind like the possibility you might get your head blown off.

A medic—no, a doc: he wore captain’s bars—looked up when Lou ducked into the tent. “You Weissberg? Heard you were coming.”

“Call me Lou.” Lou had captain’s bars of his own, brand new ones. That was more for time served than for anything he’d actually accomplished, and he knew it too well. He went on, “I wish your watchdogs woulda got the word. They wouldn’t’ve felt me up like I was Jane Russell. How’re the krauts?”

“One of ’em’s got a sucking chest. He’s in bad shape—dunno if he’ll make it,” the Army doctor answered. “Other guy’s got a smashed-up leg. Maybe I’ll have to amputate, maybe not. Penicillin and sulfa give him a chance to keep it, anyhow. Ten years ago, it would’ve been gone for sure. You can talk to him—he’s with it. The one with the chest wound keeps going in and out, know what I mean?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen fellows like that before,” Lou said.

“Our guys waxed these assholes—cleaned their clocks,” the doctor said. “Sure hope it gets into the papers.”

“Me, too, but I can’t do a thing about that,” Lou said. “So, I can talk to this one, huh?” He pointed to the German with a leg wrapped in bloody bandages.

“Yeah. He’s got plenty of morphine in him, too—he needs it. So if he’s flying, maybe he’ll sing for you. You can hope, anyway.”

“I sure can.” Lou leaned over the German, who wore a neater, less raggedy
Feldgrau
tunic than he’d seen for a while. And the man still had on a set of shoulder straps, with a senior sergeant’s rank badges, which had been against regulations since the dreadfully misnamed V-E Day. Well, the Jerry had bigger things than that to worry about.

Lou switched to Deutsch: “Hey, you!
Herr Feldwebel!
Can you hear me?”

The kraut’s eyes opened. They were aluminum-gray, a genuinely scary color. But they also looked back at Lou from a million miles away.
Plenty of morphine and then some,
Lou thought. “I’m not a goddamn
Feldwebel,
” the German said. “I’m a
Scharführer,
and don’t you forget it.” Contempt and weariness warred in his voice.

He had to be doped out of his skull, or he’d never admit to owning
Waffen
-SS rank. Lou decided to roll with it. “Sorry,
Herr Scharführer,
” he said. “Tell me who sent you out on this dumbheaded mission that got you shot.”

“God damn Egon to hell and gone. He can lick my asshole, the son of a whore.” Lou thought the
Scharführer
would bust right open, but he didn’t. No matter how full of drugs he was, he knew what he was supposed to say when somebody started interrogating him. “My name is Bauer, Rudolf Bauer. I am a
Scharführer, Waffen
-SS.” He gave Lou his serial number. “By the Geneva Convention, I am not required to tell you more.”

“Pigdog!” Lou yelled, loud enough to make the doctor jump. “Do you think the Red Army gives a rat’s ass about the Geneva Convention?”

Bauer’s aircraft-skin eyes widened. Lou watched him try to fight the morphine. “But—” he sputtered. “But—I am in the American zone. You are wearing an American uniform.”

Shit,
Lou thought. But
shit
wasn’t what came out of his mouth. Once upon a time, somebody who’d come back from a visit to smashed Berlin had taught him how to cuss a little in Russian. He’d never imagined that would come in handy, but maybe it did now.
“Gavno!”
he yelled, and, for good measure,
“Yob tvoyu mat’!”

Hearing him, a real Russian likely would have laughed his ass off. A drugged and wounded SS man was in no position to realize what a lousy accent he had. Rudolf Bauer gulped. The way his Adam’s apple swelled and contracted, he might have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He started to give his name, rank, and pay number again—he had nerve.

“Shut up!” Lou yelled. “Tell me who sent you out! What’s Egon’s whole name?”

Had he been a real Russian interrogator, he probably would have kicked that wounded leg about then. Morphine or no morphine, Bauer would’ve gone right through the roof of the tent. Lou didn’t have the stomach for it, even if the doctor wouldn’t have reported him. But Bauer didn’t have to know that.

The
Scharführer
gulped again. Then he whimpered; the leg had to hurt in spite of everything. “Talk, you stinking turd!” Lou screamed. In a horrible way, it was fun. He could see why SS and NKVD men enjoyed what they did for a living…and he wondered if he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved tomorrow morning.

In a very small voice, Bauer whispered, “He is
Hauptsturmführer
Steinbrecher.”

Aha! “Where do I find this cocksucker?” Lou demanded.

He’s dead. A BAR blew his brains out.
If Bauer said that and stuck to it, how could anybody prove he was lying—short of kicking his leg, anyhow? But once a prisoner started talking, he often sang like a nightingale. “He lives in the town of Pförring, outside Ingolstadt,” Bauer said. “He is a mechanic there.”

“How about that?” the doctor muttered—he spoke German, then.

“Yeah—how about that?” Lou agreed. “A break. Maybe. Sure could use one.” The fanatics were good. You couldn’t break into their cells very often. But if this Egon Steinbrecher was happily repairing stuff in Pförring, and if Lou and some GIs dropped in (you never could tell if somebody kept a Schmeisser handy)…“See you later, Doc.”

Lou tore out of the tent. He corralled some of the guys guarding the scene of the firefight. They piled into three jeeps and roared off toward Pförring, about twenty minutes away.

Most of the small town was intact. One block on the outskirts and then two more a little farther on had had the bejesus knocked out of them. Lou’d seen that kind of thing before. Those were the places where the krauts tried to make a stand when the American army came through.

At Lou’s order, the jeep stopped by an old woman carrying a few sticks of firewood. “Where do I find Egon Steinbrecher, the mechanic?” Lou asked her.

“Three blocks that way and one block up.” She pointed. “A brick house with a shed to one side.” If she was lying, she was damn good on the spur of the moment.

The dogface driving the jeep didn’t know German. Lou gave him the directions. The other two jeeps zoomed after his.

There was the house. There was the shed. There was the guy who had to be Steinbrecher, working on something broken with a pair of pliers. Lou pointed a grease gun at his midsection. “Hold it right there!” Lou yelled. “Drop the pliers! Hands high!”

Clank!
The pliers fell on the cement floor.
“Was ist los?”
Steinbrecher said as he raised his hands. “I have done nothing wrong.”

“We’ll see about that,” Lou said in German, and then, in English, to one of his men, “Frisk him, Sandy. And check under his arm for the tattoo.”

“Sure thing, Captain.” The GI patted Steinbrecher down. He found nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. But, when he undid the German’s shirt and looked under his left armpit, he grunted and nodded. “Yeah, he’s got it.” Wearing your blood group on your skin made transfusions quick and easy and safe even if you were badly hurt and couldn’t tell the doctor what group you were. Egon Steinbrecher hadn’t bothered getting his tattoo removed as the war wound down.

“Bring him along, then,” Lou told Sandy. “We’ll question him back in Nuremberg.”

“But I have done nothing wrong!” Steinbrecher bleated again.

“Yeah, tell me another one,” Lou answered. He didn’t remember the last time he’d felt so good. Something had actually worked out for a change.

A
MAJOR IN DRESS UNIFORM READ FROM A STATEMENT IN A
P
ENTAGON
press room: “Nine of Heydrich’s fanatics were killed and two captured. One of them later died of his wounds. An SS captain was also captured afterwards. American losses in the skirmish were one dead, three wounded. We believe the captured officer will give us valuable information about the fanatics’ organization and resources.” He looked out at the reporters. “Questions, gentlemen?”

Tom Schmidt’s hand shot up. When the major nodded to him, he said, “Why should a story like this impress us? Germany surrendered more than a year ago. Shouldn’t it be quiet over there by now?”

One of the things Tom had learned in Germany was how to read campaign and decoration ribbons. Among others, the major wore one for a Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters attached. He also wore an expression that said he wanted to scrape Tom off the bottom of his shoe. “When you grow up, Mr. Schmidt, you learn there’s a difference between what ought to be and what is,” he said in the flat voice of formal hostility. “And you learn you have to deal with what is, not what ought to be.”

Some of the reporters in the briefing room snickered. They weren’t all administration backers, either. Tom’s ears felt incandescent. “Well, let me ask that another way, then, Major,” he said, doing his best not to show his own fury. “How could we have dealt with what was a year ago so we wouldn’t have this mess on our hands today?”

“Sir, I am trying to show you progress in the fight against the fanatics, and you don’t want to look at it,” the briefing officer complained.

Tom sniffed. “We won a skirmish. Hot diggety dog. A year ago, did you expect we’d still be having skirmishes today?”

“My opinion on these issues doesn’t matter,” the major said.

“Okay, fine. Did anybody in the War Department or the State Department or the White House expect we’d still be fighting a shooting war in Germany halfway through 1946?”

“That doesn’t matter now,” the major insisted. “The point now is that we have to win it, and we’re going to win it, and we are winning it. This fight we just had—”

“How many years before we can go back into Frankfurt? How many people from there are refugees?” Tom broke in. “Does that say we’re winning?”

The briefing officer turned brick red. “Maybe it would be better if someone else asked questions for a while, Mr. Schmidt.”

“Better for who?” another reporter inquired.

“For whom?” yet another man corrected. Assemble a bunch of people who made their living with words and somebody was bound to turn copy editor on you.

“For people who want full and accurate information, that’s for whom.” The major answered what had probably been a rhetorical question. “The papers only seem interested in bad news. When anything good happens, you don’t want to talk about it.”

Maybe he didn’t know how big a can of worms he was opening. Or maybe he had orders from people above him to try to put the fear of God into the Washington press corps. If he did, it didn’t work. Even the people who’d laughed when he mocked Tom Schmidt started screaming at him now. Tom was sure of that: as far as he could tell,
everybody
in the briefing room started screaming.

“I’ve had enough!” someone shouted—a variation on one of the Republicans’ campaign slogans.

“To err is Truman!” another reporter added, this time parroting the Republican line. Then he said, “And you’re right up there with him, Major.”