The Man with the Iron Heart

XII

Diana McGraw paid attention to the newspapers in ways she never had before Pat got killed. Back in those prehistoric days, she’d looked at the funnies and the recipes and the advice and gossip columns. Foreign news? As long as the Americans and their allies kept moving forward-and, from 1942 on, they pretty steadily did-who worried about foreign news?

She did, now. The Indianapolis papers didn’t carry as much as she wanted, as much as she needed. And so the postman brought her the New York Times. She got it a few days late, but that was better than not getting it at all. The same went for the Washington Post. If you wanted to find out what was going on in Congress, you had to read a paper that covered it seriously.

She was reading the Times when she looked up and said, “Ha!”

Ed was rereading The Egg and I. He’d stop and chuckle every so often. Diana had read it, too. The only way you wouldn’t stop and chuckle was if you’d had your sense of humor taken out with your tonsils when you were a kid. But that Ha! was on an entirely different note. “What’s up, sweetie?” Ed asked.

She pointed to the story that had drawn her notice. “This German politician named Adenauer”-she figured she was messing up the pronunciation, but she hadn’t taken any German in high school-“is coming into the American zone to talk to the Germans there.”

“He’s not a Nazi, is he?” Ed answered his own question before Diana could: “Nah, he wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t let him get away with it if he was. So how come you think he’s a big deal?”

“I think we’re pushing Truman and Eisenhower and all the other blockheads running things over there-pushing ’em our way, I mean,” Diana said. “If they set up some kind of German government, that gives ’em an excuse to say, ‘Well, we’ve done what we need to do, so we can bring our boys home now.’”

“Sounds good to me,” Ed said.

She nodded. “To me, too. So let’s hear it for Mr. Konrad Adenauer.” She tried the name a different way this time. Ed only shrugged. He’d come back from Over There with a few scraps of German, but he’d forgotten it in the generation since.

The phone rang. She picked it up. “Diana McGraw,” she said crisply. The phone rang all the time these days. She had to answer it as if she were running a business. What else was she doing, when you got right down to it? She was just glad she wasn’t on a party line; the ringing that wasn’t for them would have driven all the other people crazy.

“Hello, Mrs. McGraw. This is E. A. Stuart,” the reporter said.

She’d already recognized his voice. She’d never imagined she would get to know reporters so well, but it didn’t impress her. She would gladly have traded everything-travel, getting acquainted with prominent people, even meeting the President-to have her only son back again. But God didn’t make deals like that. Too bad. It was almost enough to tempt you into atheism.

Since she couldn’t have what she wanted, she did what she could with what she had. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stuart?” She used other reporters’ first names. With Ebenezer Amminadab Stuart, formality seemed a better choice.

“I was wondering if you had any comment on the speech Senator Taft made this afternoon,” Stuart said.

She would see that speech when today’s Post or New York Times got to Anderson…three or four days from now. “Can you tell me what he said?” she asked. “If it got reported on the radio, I missed it.” Radio news made even the local papers look thorough. When you had to shoehorn everything into five minutes’ worth of air time…Well, you couldn’t. That was about the size of it.

“Basically, he said Truman doesn’t know what he’s doing in Germany. He said Truman had won the war, but he was losing the peace. He said we heard all through the war how wicked the German people were. If that’s true, he said, they aren’t worth any more American lives. And if it’s not true, why were the President and the whole government lying to the American people from Pearl Harbor to V-E Day?”

“Wow!” Diana said.

“That’s not a, mm, useful remark,” E. A. Stuart reminded her.

“Sorry. You’re right, of course,” Diana said. “Let me see…. Youcan say I agree with everything the Senator said, and he put it better than I could have.”

“Okey-doke.” She could hear Stuart’s pencil skritching across paper. “Yeah, you may not like Taft-an awful lot of people don’t-but you have a devil of a time ignoring him.”

“No kidding,” Diana said. “Has Truman answered him yet?”

“Yup. He doesn’t waste any time-when somebody pokes him with a stick, he pokes right back.” E. A. Stuart sounded admiring and approving. Diana understood why: Truman made good copy. To a lot of reporters, nothing mattered more. They didn’t much care what public figures said or did, as long as it sold newspapers. Mercenaries, Diana thought scornfully. She had to deal with people like that, and to be interesting in her own right for them. She didn’t have to like them.

When Stuart showed no inclination to go on, Diana prodded him: “Well? What did Truman say?”

“He said Taft is like a guy yelling from the bleachers. He’s never been a manager in the dugout, let alone a player on the field. He said Taft doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but what can you expect from a guy up in the cheap seats?”

“The only reason he’s not in the bleachers himself is that FDR died,” Diana snapped. She had the uneasy feeling that Roosevelt wouldn’t have wanted to pull troops out of Germany, but she didn’t mention it to E. A. Stuart. The less you said that could make the people on your side unhappy with you, the better off you were. She’d learned all kinds of unsavory but needful lessons about how to run a political campaign.

Stuart chuckled. “He’d probably call that baptism by total immersion. He’d have a point, too.”

“Phooey,” Diana said. “And you can quote me.”

“Well, maybe I will,” the reporter answered. “Won’t take up any more of your time now. ’Bye.” The line went dead. I’ve got other things to do, he meant: one more polite lie. Diana had learned a raft of them the past few months.

“What did Stuart want?” Ed asked.

“My comments on something Senator Taft said, and on the President’s answer to it.” Diana had said things like that often enough by now that she almost took them for granted-almost, but not quite. “Taft makes good sense. Truman’s full of malarkey.”

“Well, what else is new?” her husband said.

Germans ambled into the market square in Erlangen to hear what Konrad Adenauer had to say. Bernie Cobb didn’t give a damn about the politician from the British zone. He wouldn’t be able to follow the speech anyhow. He’d picked up a little more German since the so-called surrender: enough to order drinks and food, and enough to get his face slapped if he tried to pick up the waitress afterwards. Politics? Who cared about politics?

He and the other GIs at the edge of the square weren’t there to listen to the speech. They were there to frisk the krauts mooching in, to make sure nobody was carrying a Luger or wearing an explosive vest. All Bernie knew about the Adenauer guy was that he was anti-Nazi. Well, no kidding! Otherwise, the occupying authorities never would’ve let him open his yap.

But if the American authorities liked him, you could bet your last pfennig that Heydrich and the fanatics wouldn’t. Which was why U.S. soldiers were searching the German men who came to listen to Adenauer.

“What I want to do is pat down the broads,” Bernie said. “Not all of ’em-you can keep the grannies and stuff. The cute ones. Hey, it’d be strictly line of duty, right?”

“Line of bullshit is what it’d be, Cobb,” said Carlo Corvo. The sergeant pointed toward the WACs and nurses who were searching German women. “See? It’s taken care of.”

One of the gals they were checking was a tall, auburn-haired beauty-just the kind Bernie’d had in mind. “Yeah, but they don’t put their hearts into their work the way I would.”

“Your heart? Is that what you call it these days?” Sergeant Corvo asked. But he was leering at the good-looking German gal, too.

None of the Jerries they frisked had anything lethal on him. Nobody else yelled out an alarm, either. And none of Heydrich’s goons blew himself up, and a few dogfaces with him, in frustration because he couldn’t get close enough to Konrad Adenauer.

The German politico came out to what Bernie thought of as extremely tepid applause. Hitler would have had the Germans screaming themselves sick. Maybe they’d learned better than to get too excited about politicians. More likely, Adenauer was about as exciting as soggy corn flakes without sugar. He was an old fart with a sly face that would have served him well in a poker game.

An American officer introduced Adenauer to the crowd in what sure sounded like fluent German to Bernie. Quite a few officers and some enlisted men could go pretty well auf Deutsch. Some had studied in school. Others, like this Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal, came by it in different ways.

Bernie wondered what Adenauer thought of having a Jew present him to his own countrymen. Or did Keith Rosenthal’s being an American count for more? Wasn’t Adenauer trying to show that Germans could handle their own affairs? Well, sure they could-as long as the occupying authorities said it was okay.

Despite the lukewarm hand Adenauer got, he waved as he stepped up to the microphone. Maybe the krauts had had all their political enthusiasm knocked out of them by now. If they had, that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing. When Bernie said so, Sergeant Corvo nodded. “You better believe it wouldn’t,” he opined. “Or maybe this Adenauer guy is as much of a boring old shithead as he looks like.”

Corvo always said exactly what he meant. Whether Adenauer was getting his message across was liable to be another story. If he fired up the krauts in the crowd, they hid it well. Again, chances were that was good news.

“You know a little of the lingo, right, Sarge?” Bernie said. “What’s he going on about?”

“He says Germany has to…do something with England and France.”

“Germany sure did something to ’em,” Bernie said.

“Shut up,” Corvo snapped. “When you talk, I can’t make out what he’s going on about…. He says Germany needs to reconcile, that’s what it is. He says Germany has a lot to atone for…. Yeah, he’sa Catholic, all right. Catholics like to talk about atoning for shit.”

“If you say so,” answered Bernie, a Methodist who hadn’t seen the inside of a church any time lately. New Mexico was full of Catholics, of course: well, as full of them as a mostly empty state could be. But he paid even less attention to their religion than to his own.

How long would Adenauer go on? Some of Hitler’s rants had lasted for hours, hadn’t they? Did the Jerries expect all their politicians to match that? If they did…If they did, they were even screwier than Bernie Cobb gave them credit for, which was saying a mouthful.

Fighting through France and Germany, Bernie’d hated land mines worse than anything else. They lay in wait for you, and if you stepped on one or tripped over a wire, that was all she wrote. Right behind them-right behind them-came mortar rounds. Ordinary artillery announced itself. Somebody yelled, “Incoming!” and a bunch of dogfaces hit the dirt or dove for holes. But half the time you didn’t know the bad guys had opened up with a mortar till the first bomb tore your buddy’s leg off…or maybe yours.

Bernie heard a faint hiss, a faint whistle, in the air. He had a second or two to pretend he didn’t. It could have been a flaw in the microphone and speakers. It could have been the wind, which was nasty and cold. It could have been…

Bam! An 81mm round burst right in the middle of the crowd of krauts listening to Konrad Adenauer. Next thing Bernie knew, he was as flat on the cobblestones as if a deuce-and-a-half had run over him. He wasn’t hurt. In a way, discovering his combat reflexes still worked was gratifying.

Carlo Corvo had flattened out beside him. Quite a few of the German men were also down on their bellies. Yeah, they’d been through the mill, too. Shrieks said some people were down because the mortar bomb had knocked them down.

And then another round came in, and another, and another. A trained two-man crew could fire ten or twelve a minute. Morons could use an 81mm once it was aimed. You dropped a bomb down the tube and you made sure it didn’t blow your head off when it came out again. It wasn’t near as tough as designing an atomic bomb.

“Where the fuck you think they are?” Corvo yelled as fragments whined not nearly far enough overhead.

“The mortar guys, you mean?” Bernie said. Corvo nodded without raising his head. Bernie’s shrug actually hunched him down lower. “Could be anywhere. With a full charge, one of those cocksuckers’ll shoot a mile and a half.”

He tried to imagine securing everything within a circle three miles across centered on the market square. His imagination promptly rebelled. Somewhere-in a fenced-in yard or a back alley or up on a roof-a couple of mortarmen were having a high old time. And they could just leave the tube and bipod behind when they finished. How many mortars-German and American and British and Russian-littered the local landscape? Thousands, maybe even millions.

“C’mon, get up! Get moving!” Corvo shouted. “We gotta make sure Adenauer’s okay. Fanatics are bound to be after him.”

Bernie hadn’t even thought about that. He hadn’t thought about getting up under fire, either. He’d done it more often than he cared to remember during the war, but the war was over…wasn’t it? But seeing the sergeant stand up brought Bernie to his feet, too.

Several other U.S. soldiers were also up. Most of them headed for the platform from which Adenauer spoke. Another mortar bomb scythed one of them down. Bernie looked away. You didn’t want to remember what explosives and jagged metal fragments could do to flesh.

The mortar rounds stopped falling then. Either somebody’d caught the guys serving the nasty little piece or they’d figured they’d done their duty and bugged out. Bernie knew what he hoped. He also knew what he thought. They weren’t the same.

There lay the auburn-haired gal he’d wished he were searching. Nobody’d want to feel her up now. A bad chest wound, a worse head wound…She was still moving and moaning, but Bernie didn’t think she’d last long. Too bad, too bad.

He jumped up onto the platform, pointing his M-1 this way and that. It was dumb-he knew as much even while he did it. The bastards who’d done this weren’t close enough for the rifle to do him a nickel’s worth of good. Everybody here in the square with him probably hated the mortarmen as much as he did. But you wanted to hit back somehow, even when you couldn’t.

“Oh…motherfuck.” Sergeant Corvo used his rifle, too, pointing with the muzzle.

One of the mortar bombs had blasted Konrad Adenauer off the platform. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His thinning gray hair was mussed. A single drop of blood splashed the end of his long, pointed nose. Other than that, his face was untouched. He looked mildly surprised.

Below his face…Bernie looked away. The mortar rounds had done worse to Adenauer than they had to the pretty woman with the dark red hair. “Motherfuck,” Carlo Corvo said again.

“You got that right,” Bernie agreed. “He ain’t gonna be making more speeches any time soon. I mean, not unless it’s to St. Peter or the Devil, one.”

A groan from a little farther away drew their attention to Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal. He leaned against a wall, clutching one arm with his other hand. Blood leaked out between his fingers.

“Can I bandage that for you, sir?” Bernie called.

“I don’t think you’d better.” Rosenthal sounded eerily calm, as wounded men often did. “I’m holding it closed better than a bandage could. If you want to yell for a medic, that’d be good.” He paused as if remembering something. And he was, for he asked, “How’s Adenauer?”

Bernie wished he could lie, but didn’t see how it would help. “Sir, he bought a plot.” He raised his voice: “Corpsman! We need a corpsman over here!”

“Shit!” Rosenthal sounded furious. Then he said “Shit” again, this time in the way Bernie’d heard much too often before: the wound was starting to get its claws into him. Baring his teeth, the American officer went on, “Adenauer was the best hope we had for a Germany that isn’t either Nazi or Red.”

“‘Was’ is right, sir. He’s a gone goose.” Bernie pointed toward the politician’s crumpled body. People always looked smaller when they were dead. He didn’t know why that was true, but it was.

“Shit,” Keith Rosenthal said yet again. “Score a big one for Heydrich and his assholes, then. Who’s gonna have the nerve to try and stand up to ’em after this?”

From in back of Bernie, Carlo Corvo said, “Here comes a medic.”

“That was quick.” For a moment, Bernie was admiring. Then he wondered how come the aid man had got here so fast. Had the American authorities feared trouble and put the medics on alert, maybe even posted them close by? What did that say about Konrad Adenauer, who’d trusted U.S. security arrangements? It said he’d been a jerk-that was what.

And what did it say about how things were going in Germany generally? Nothing good. Bernie Cobb was goddamn sure of that.

Vladimir Bokov had been through the influenza before. You spent a week flat on your back. Then you spent another week feeling as if you’d been beaten with knouts. After that, you were pretty much all right.

Running on benzedrine while you were at your sickest meant that afterwards you felt as if you’d been beaten with knouts and chains. And you felt that way for three weeks, not one.

All of which got him scant sympathy from his superiors-not even from Moisei Shteinberg, who was as miserable as he was. “Did influenza keep anyone from holding the Nazis out of Moscow and Leningrad?” Shteinberg demanded. “Did it keep anyone from throwing them out of Stalingrad?” He paused for a coughing fit.

Influenza probably kept some Red Army men flat on their backs during those fights. Bokov knew better than to say so. Instead, he said, “The Western imperialists have lost one of their reactionary politicians. I suppose we need to protect the leaders of the Social Unity Party of Germany.”

“I suppose so. Ulbricht is…useful, no doubt about it.” Shteinberg spoke with the same not so faint distaste Bokov had used.

They had their reasons. Walter Ulbricht was useful. He headed the Social Unity Party of Germany, the front through which the USSR intended to rule its chunk of the dead Reich. Like Lenin, he was bald and wore a chin beard. There the resemblance ended. Lenin, by all accounts, had been loyal to no one and nothing but himself-and the revolution.

Ulbricht, by contrast, was Stalin’s lap dog. He’d spent the war in exile in the USSR, returning to Germany in the Red Army’s wake. He would do exactly what the Soviet Union told him to do, no more and no less. If Heydrich’s hooligans blew him off the face of the earth, Moscow might have to turn to someone less reliable-to say nothing of the propaganda victory his death would hand the bandits.

With a sigh, Shteinberg went on, “I’m not really enthusiastic about keeping any Germans alive these days, if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, Comrade Colonel, plenty who were alive on New Year’s Eve are dead now, and plenty more will be,” Bokov said.

“They had it coming,” Shteinberg said coldly. Mass executions in Berlin and all through the rest of the Soviet zone warned the Germans that having anything to do with the Fascist bandits was a bad idea. Far bigger mass deportations drove home the same lesson. How the camps in the Arctic and Siberia would absorb so many…wasn’t Bokov’s worry. You could always plop prisoners down in the middle of nowhere and have them build their own new camp. If some of them froze before the barracks went up, if others starved-it was just one of those things.

Bokov had been through the Germans’ murder camps. They sickened him-the Soviet Union had nothing like them. They also struck him as wasteful. They didn’t squeeze enough labor out of condemned people before letting them give up the ghost. Zeks were to use, not just to kill. So it seemed to him, anyhow.

Shteinberg lit a cigarette. That made him cough, too, which didn’t keep him from smoking. “We never did catch the swine who poisoned the booze,” he wheezed, sucking in more smoke.

“Has to be the Germans who laid in the supply,” Bokov said. “If the barmen and serving girls knew anything, we would’ve pulled it out of them.” He and Shteinberg and their comrades had pulled all kinds of things from the people who’d been at the Schloss Cecilienhof that night. All kinds of things, but not what they wanted-what they needed.

“There should be a list of those people,” Shteinberg said. “There should be-but there isn’t.”

“Maybe nobody bothered to keep one,” Bokov said. Had Germans given the orders-“Round up that liquor!”-they would have kept a list. Since the command probably came from a Soviet quartermaster, who could say? Russian efficiency was no byword. Bokov added, “If someone did keep one, somebody else made it disappear.”

“If we can find out who did that-” Shteinberg broke off, shaking his head. “Anybody who’s smart enough to make a list disappear is smart enough to make himself disappear, too.”

“Da,” Bokov agreed glumly. “I used to wonder how the Red revolutionaries could operate right under the noses of the Tsar’s secret police. Why didn’t they all get arrested and shipped to Siberia? Bozhemoi! Why didn’t they all get arrested and killed?”

“Some of the Tsar’s men were secretly on our side. Some were soft. Some were stupid.” Shteinberg stopped again. “And some were very good at what they did. We had to kill a good many of them. But others…others we reeducated. Some of them still serve the Soviet Union better than they ever served the Tsars.”

A young, able lieutenant or captain from 1917 would be a colonel or a general or even a marshal now…if he’d lived through all the purges in the generation between. Some would have made it. Some could-what did people say about Anastas Mikoyan? — some could dance between the raindrops and come home dry, that was it.

Something else Shteinberg had said made Bokov mutter to himself. “How many of our people are secretly on Heydrich’s side?”

“Not many Russians. You’d have to be a Vlasovite-worse than a Vlasovite-to side with the Nazis now,” Shteinberg said. Bokov nodded. The Germans had captured General Andrei Vlasov in 1942, and he’d gone over to them, even if they never quite trusted him. Anyone who’d served in his Russian Liberation Army was either dead or in a camp wishing he were dead.

“But the Germans who say they’re on our side…” Bokov said. He felt the same way about those Germans as the Hitlerites had felt about Vlasov and his fellow Russians: they might be useful, but would you really want to have to rely on one of them at your back?

“Yes. We shall have to go through them. That seems all too clear. Heydrich’s men want us to think they’re ordinary mushrooms when they’re really amanitas.” Shteinberg would have gone on, but he had another coughing spasm. “This damned grippe. I don’t think it’ll ever let go.”

Bokov displayed a vial of benzedrine tablets. “They still help-but I have to take more to get the same buzz.”

“I have some, too,” Shteinberg said. “I try not to take them unless I have to. Sometimes, though, there’s no help for it. So, Volodya-how do we get the amanitas out of our mushroom stew?”

Reinhard Heydrich’s chin and cheeks itched. He’d let his beard grow for a couple of weeks before emerging from the mine where he’d sheltered for so long. He wore beat-up civilian clothes, with an equally ragged Wehrmacht greatcoat over them: the kind of outfit any German male of military age might have.

Hans Klein sat behind the dented, rusty Kubelwagen’s wheel. Heydrich hadn’t wanted to risk using an American jeep-it might have roused suspicion. “Are you sure you should be doing this at all, sir?” Klein asked.

Since Heydrich wasn’t, he scowled. But he answered, “The operation is too important to leave to anyone else.”

“If you say so.” Klein didn’t believe him. Klein thought he was using that as an excuse to come out and do his own fighting. Klein was much too likely to be right, too. But Klein was only an Oberscharfuhrer. Heydrich was the Reichsprotektor. If he decided he had to come out, none of the other freedom fighters had the rank to tell him he couldn’t. And if anything went wrong, Jochen Peiper, fidgeting inside another buried command post, would take over and do…as well as he could, that was all.

So far, everything was fine. They’d already made it from the American zone up into the one the British held. Their papers had held up at every inspection. Things would have been harder where the Russians ruled. The Russians did Heydrich’s men the dubious courtesy of taking them and their uprising seriously. Neither Amis nor Tommies seemed eager to do that. They wanted the fighting to be over, and so they did their best to pretend it was.

A jeep with four British soldiers in it came down the road toward Heydrich and Klein. The jeep carried a machine gun. The Tommy behind it aimed it at the battered Kubelwagen. Heydrich had seen that was only an ordinary precaution. The fellow wouldn’t open up for the fun of it. He just feared that the Kubelwagen might be full of explosives, and the men inside willing to blow themselves up to kill him and his mates, too.

Not today, friend Tommy, Heydrich thought as the vehicles passed each other. We’ve got something bigger cooking.

After a while, Klein pulled off onto the shoulder. He started messing around in the Kubelwagen’s engine compartment, as if he’d had a breakdown. Heydrich watched the road. When it was clear in both directions, he said, “Now.”

They jumped back in. Klein drove into the woods till trees screened the Kubelwagen from the road. “You’ll know where the bunker is?” he asked.

“I’d better,” Heydrich answered confidently. Inside, though, he wondered. How far out of practice was he, and how much would finding out cost?

To his relief, a scrap of hand-drawn map in his greatcoat pocket (written with Russian names, to make it look like a relic from fighting much farther east if he were searched) and a compass brought him to a hole under a fallen tree. The hole led to a tunnel. The tunnel took him to the bunker.

Three men waited there. Despite exchanged passwords, they all pointed Schmeissers or assault rifles at the entrance till Heydrich and Klein showed themselves. “All right-it is you,” one of them said, lowering his weapon.

“Ja,” Heydrich said. “Let’s get what rest we can. We move at 0200.”

The underground hideout had bunks enough for all of them. Alarm clocks clattered to wake them at the appointed hour. They armed themselves and went up and out into the quiet German night. No blackouts any more, which seemed unnatural to Heydrich. He could see the little town ahead, even though it was mostly dark in the middle of the night.

Soft-voiced challenges and countersigns showed more Germans gathering around Alswede. This assault would be in better than platoon strength. The fighting wolves hadn’t shown their strength like this before.

Into the town they strode. Some wore the Stahlhelm. Others used American or Russian helmets instead. Their weapons were a similar blend. And the Tommies didn’t even seem to realize they were there.

The British had converted the fancy clothier’s emporium where they housed the German physicists into a residence hall. It stood near the center of Alswede. Heydrich hoped to bag all the brains, because they had to be back at their new residence by sundown every day.

As his ragged little force converged on the emporium, he imagined himself a field marshal on the Eastern Front, moving armies and corps like chessmen on the board. But those methods had failed the Reich. Maybe this platoon’s worth of men would do more for Germany than an army group had in the Ukraine. It had better, Heydrich thought.

Yawning Tommies stood sentry outside the physicists’ quarters. The British weren’t altogether idiots. But the sentries didn’t expect trouble.

“Hands up!” an English-speaking German called to them. “If you surrender, you will not be harmed.”

A burst from a Sten gun answered him. Unlike the tin Tommy gun that had almost murdered Heydrich in Prague, this one worked fine. But so did the Germans’ assault rifles and Schmeissers and grenades. The sentries went down one after another. Lights came on all over Alswede as people woke to the firefight and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Heydrich’s raiders charged into the haberdashery. “Schnell!” he called to them. “We have to be gone before the Tommies come in force.” He didn’t know how long they had. Fifteen minutes, he judged, would be uncommon luck.

Long before fifteen minutes were up, the raiders came out again, herding along men middle-aged and elderly in their nightclothes. “We’ve grabbed nine of them!” a captain yelled to Heydrich. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where’s the last one?” As long as they were in Alswede, Heydrich wanted to make a clean sweep.

But the captain answered, “He’s kaput-caught a bullet in the head, poor bastard.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ground.

“All right.” As long as the loose end was cleared up, Heydrich wouldn’t fuss. He’d known going in that they took that chance if the British resisted. They were lucky-more than one of the slide-rule boys might have stopped something. Heydrich raised his voice: “Withdraw! Plan One!”

Some of the raiders left Alswede heading north. They made a hellacious racket, whooping and shouting and firing their weapons into lighted windows. Everyone in town could tell exactly where they were-and could tell the British exactly where they’d gone.

Along with the captured physicists-who were now starting to shiver in the late-night chill-Heydrich and the rest of his men quietly retreated to the south. Far fewer locals would pay them any attention. Far fewer would be able to tell the Tommies where they’d headed. And, with luck, the British would be slow to figure out they were the important group. How important could they be if they didn’t fire off everything they were carrying?

One of the scientists-a middle-aged fellow with rumpled, greasy hair and thick glasses-asked, “Why did you shoot poor Heisenberg?”

“Shut up, Professor Diebner, or we’ll shoot you, too.” Heydrich was pleased with himself for recognizing who’d spoken. “Heisenberg was an accident.” An unfortunate accident, too, he thought. Heisenberg was-had been-a high-horsepower physicist. Coldly, Heydrich went on, “We will shoot you on purpose, though, if you slow us down or give us away.”

“Give you away? I don’t even know who you are,” Diebner said.

“A man who believes in a free, strong Germany,” Heydrich answered. “A man who doesn’t believe the war is over yet, or lost.”

Behind the spectacle lenses, Diebner’s eyes were enormous. Maybe the lenses magnified them; Heydrich wasn’t sure. He didn’t care much one way or the other. “But-” Diebner began, and then clamped his mouth shut. That made sense; he was in no position to argue.

He and the others had probably spilled their guts while the enemy held them in England. Heydrich didn’t even reckon it treason. Obviously, the Anglo-Americans were ahead of Germany in nuclear physics. He would have grabbed American scientists if he could. But his countrymen were the best he could get his hands on. Maybe they’d be able to come up with…something, anyhow.

Out of Alswede. Into the woods. The raiders divided into smaller groups, splitting the physicists among them. Gunfire broke off to the north. Heydrich smiled wolfishly. His distraction was working just the way he’d hoped it would.

“Be damned, sir,” Hans Klein said. “I think we pulled it off.”

“I said we would,” Heydrich answered. Klein kept his mouth shut. Officers and leaders said all kinds of things. Sometimes they delivered. Sometimes…Sometimes your Vaterland ended up occupied by unfriendly foreigners. But Heydrich had delivered. And maybe Germany wouldn’t stay occupied too much longer.