The Man with the Iron Heart

XIII

Cold rain pissed down out of a gray, curdled sky. Bernie Cobb manned a checkpoint outside of Erlangen and steamed. The rain blew into his face and dripped down the back of his neck, which did nothing to improve his mood. He looked this way and that-he tried to look every which way at once. Visibility wasn’t much more than a hundred feet, so looking didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good. The only consolation was, a Nazi sniper couldn’t see any farther than he could.

“What did they stick us out here for?” Mack Leff asked for about the tenth time.

Leff wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d got here after V-E Day, so Bernie didn’t trust him as far as he would have trusted somebody who’d been through the mill. “Beats me,” Bernie said. “Something’s screwed up somewhere, though-that’s for goddamn sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put so many of us out on patrol at once.”

“Yeah,” Mack agreed mournfully. His left hand moved inside the pocket of his field jacket. Bernie knew what that meant: he was feeling a pack of cigarettes in there and wondering if he could keep one lit in this downpour. He must have decided he couldn’t, because he didn’t try to light up.

Bernie had already made the same glum calculation and come up with the same answer. He wasn’t twitchy from missing a smoke yet, but he sure wanted one. “The orders we got are all bullshit, too,” he went on-he could always piss and moan, even if he couldn’t light up. “Check everybody’s papers. Hold anybody suspicious for interrogation. Suspicious how?”

“You come out in this weather at all, you ought to have your head examined,” Mack Leff opined.

“Got that right.” Bernie wondered if he could peel the paper off a cigarette and chew the tobacco inside. He’d always thought a chaw was disgusting (to say nothing of hillbilly), but out in the open in weather like this…. “Rained this hard when we got over the Rhine last year. Then, at least, we could lay up in a house or a barn or somethin’ and stay out of it sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.” Leff nodded. “Musta been good when you knew who the enemy was, when you didn’t have to worry about everybody from the grocer to the old lady with a cat. You didn’t have to watch your back so hard then.”

“Fuck,” Bernie muttered. Mack actually thought he’d had it easy when the real war was on. How was that for a kick in the nuts? The really weird thing was, the new guy might have a point. You kinda had to look at things sideways to see it, but when you did….

He became aware of a new noise punching through the endless hiss of rain off paving and fields. “Heads up, Mack,” he said. “Car’s comin’.”

The jeep they’d ridden out here made a decent obstacle after they’d pulled it across the road. If you wanted to go around it, you’d probably get stuck in the mud and you’d probably get shot, too. Bernie had the safety off on his M-1. If Mack Leff didn’t, he was too dumb to deserve to live.

Only worry was whether whoever was in the oncoming car could spot the jeep in time to stop. They did, which impressed Bernie-that Kubelwagen had seen plenty of better years. Hitler’s equivalent of a jeep could do most of the stuff a real one could, only not so well.

Two men sat in the Kubelwagen. If they weren’t vets, Bernie’d never seen any. “Cover me,” he told Leff as he came out from behind the jeep. He raised his voice and used some of his terrible German: “Papieren, bitte!” Then, hopefully, he added, “You guys speak English?”

Both krauts shook their heads. Bernie sighed; he might’ve known they wouldn’t. It was that kind of day. They passed him the papers. The guy behind the wheel was Ludwig Mommsen, the documents said. The other fellow, whose long, thin nose kind of leaned to one side and who needed a shave like nobody’s business, was Erich Wisser.

“You-in Krieg?” Bernie asked them. They looked at each other. “Where?” he said. “Uh, wo?”

“Ostfront,” Wisser answered. “Danzig.” Mommsen nodded again, to show he’d served over there, too.

Bernie grunted. You couldn’t get a Jerry to admit he’d ever taken a shot at an American. If you listened to those guys talk, nobody’d fought between Normandy and central Germany-not a soul. Bernie wished he didn’t know better.

These guys seemed legit, though. He handed back their documents. “Wo gehen Sie?” he asked.

“Nurnberg,” Mommsen answered, pronouncing it the way a kraut would instead of Nuremberg like an American.

They were on the right road. “Okay,” Bernie said, and then, louder, “Move the jeep, Mack!”

Leff did. The Germans put the Kubelwagen back in gear and drove off to the south. “That wasn’t so bad,” Leff said.

“Sure wasn’t,” Bernie agreed. “They should all be so easy.”

Lou Weissberg read the report howard Frank Gave him. Then he handed it back to his superior officer. He didn’t have rank enough to get his own copy. For that matter, neither did Captain Frank. He’d have to give the report to his own superior, who would stow it in a stout safe where no unauthorized eyes could see it.

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exclaimed. He and Captain Frank exchanged self-conscious half-smiles. That was a hell of a thing for a Jew to say, but plenty born in the States did it all the time. “Did the limeys screw the pooch or what?”

“They sure did,” Frank said. “They screwed it like you wouldn’t believe. And so now the fanatics have nine first-rate atomic physicists…somewhere.”

“Can they make a bomb?” Lou asked. “The guy who wrote your little paper doesn’t think so, but does he know his ass from third base?”

“How am I supposed to tell? Do I look like Einstein?” Frank returned. “One thing I will say is that making a bomb seems to take a lot of fancy equipment. Heydrich’s baboons have all kinds of shit, damn them, but I don’t see ’em having that kind of gear. So I’d bet against it.”

“Mm.” Lou nodded. That made sense-a certain amount of it, anyhow. “If they can’t make a bomb, how come the diehards nabbed ’em?”

“Maybe to make us yell and scream and jump up and down like we’ve got ants in our pants,” Captain Frank answered. “Or maybe just for the hell of it-they don’t think the slide-rule boys can pull a rabbit out of the hat, but they don’t want to take the chance they might be wrong. If you were in Heydrich’s shoes, what would you do?”

“Hang myself and save everybody else a lot of trouble,” Lou said promptly. He won a snort from his superior. After a moment, he went on, “Been a week since they made the snatch, right?”

“Yup,” Frank said.

“And nobody’s caught any physicists since. Not many diehards, either.”

“Nope.” The captain turned downright laconic.

“Well, shit,” Lou said. “Chances are that means they got away clean.”

“Yup,” Frank said one more time. “If we’d caught ’em, people like you and me never would have got to see this report. Now it’s gonna be up to us to try and track the bastards down.”

“My aching back!” Lou said. That didn’t satisfy him, so he added, “Gevalt!” Howard Frank’s head bobbed up and down. Lou took the name of the Lord in vain. “The fanatics’ll stash ’em underground somewhere way the hell down south. How many places have they got in the mountains there?”

“Too many-and we haven’t found a tenth of ’em yet,” Frank said. “They were ready for the collapse, damn them. They started getting ready two years before the surrender. That’s what the interrogation reports say, anyhow. Way things look, you’ve got to believe it, too.”

“Uh-huh.” Lou sounded as uncomfortable as his superior. Interrogators didn’t always bother playing by Geneva Convention rules when they caught diehards alive. The Reich had surrendered, after all. And they needed information, and didn’t much care how they got it-especially since the krauts weren’t playing by the rules, either. If a hotshot lawyer or a reporter who sided with the let’s-run-away-from-Germany people back home found out what went on questioning fanatics, the fur would fly. Oh, boy, would it ever! And the Chicago Tribune and the other anti-administration papers would print every goddamn word.

“Well, now you’ve got all the good news,” Captain Frank said. “Where we go from here, God only knows.”

“If He does, I wish He’d tell us.” Lou scowled. God didn’t work that way. If anybody’d had any doubts, what went on during the war would have quashed them. “And I wish He’d tell us why He decided to throw all the Yehudim from France to Russia into the fire.” Nobody knew how many were dead for no other reason than that they were Jews, not even to the closest million.

“Nobody has a good answer for that,” Frank said heavily. “God doesn’t have a good answer for that.” The words should have sounded like blasphemy. To anyone who’d seen the inside of a German concentration camp, they seemed only common sense. Reputable German firms had taken contracts for crematoria and bone crushers and all the other tools that went along with industrialized murder. Lou had followed more paper trails than he cared to remember. And they all led back to businessmen who said things like, We didn’t know what they’d be used for. And how could we say no to the government? The scary thing was, they meant it. Sometimes saying no to the government was the most important thing you could ever do, but try and explain that to a German.

“And Heydrich wants to start it all up again, only worse this time,” Lou said.

“Worse. Yeah,” Captain Frank said gloomily. “Who woulda thought that was possible after the Nazis surrendered? Nothing could be worse’n what they already did, right? Then along comes the atom bomb, and we find out maybe that’s not right after all. Swell old world we got, huh?”

Before Lou could answer, the phone on his desk rang. It was an Army field telephone, patched into a network that also included what was left of the German national telephone system. He picked it up: “Weissberg here.”

“You da guy in charge o’ going after the fanatics?” By the way the GI on the other end of the line talked, he was from New Jersey, too, or maybe Long Island.

“I’m one of ’em,” Lou said. “How come?”

“On account of I got a kraut right here who’s ready t’swear on a stack o’ Bibles he seen that Heydrich drive through town a little while ago.”

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exploded, this time altogether unselfconsciously. “Put him on.”

The German knew some English, but proved more comfortable in his own language. “He had a beard, but I recognized him,” he said. “His picture was all over the papers when the English tried to kill him in the war. There is a reward for me if you catch him, ja?”

“Jawohl,” Lou agreed. The reward for Heydrich, dead or alive, was up to a million bucks. Lou had no idea who this German was or what he’d done between 1939 and 1945. Whatever it was, it was nothing next to Heydrich’s list.

“What’s cooking?” Frank asked. One hand over the mouthpiece, Lou told him. The captain almost jumped out of his skin. “We can catch him! We really can! Find out how long ago this guy saw him and which way he was headed. We can spread the net ahead of him so tight a hedgehog couldn’t sneak through.”

Lou got back on the phone. He asked the Jerry Captain Frank’s questions, then relayed the replies he got: “Less than an hour ago, and heading southeast.”

“Son of a bitch!” Howard Frank said reverently. “We’ve got him!”

Reinhard Heydrich had served in the Navy before the war-till he left it abruptly after not marrying the senior officer’s daughter he’d seduced. He’d flown combat missions over Poland and the Soviet Union. The only experience he had as a foot soldier was getting away from the Ivans after his 109 crash-landed between their lines and the Germans’.

Squelching through a swamp and ducking down into the mud and the water plants wasn’t his idea of fun. But Hans Klein had the perfect spur for him: “Do you want the fucking Amis to catch you, sir?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Heydrich admitted.

“Well, then, don’t stand straight up and down like a heron looking for frogs. Get down here with me,” Klein said. He hadn’t had much ground combat experience himself-certainly none since he became Heydrich’s driver. But he sure talked like somebody who knew what he was talking about.

“If you’d been able to fix the Kubelwagen when it broke down for real-” Heydrich began peevishly.

But that didn’t wash, either. The Oberscharfuhrer let out a derisive snort. “Ja, doch, then what? I’ll tell you what…sir. I’d’ve driven us straight into a Yankee ambush, that’s what, and they’d’ve filled both of us full of holes.”

Again, he was altogether too likely to be right. That made Heydrich love him no better when freezing water filled his shoe…again. Maybe infantrymen really were the heroes of the war, even if pilots and panzer commanders got more ink from Goebbels. Infantrymen put up with more shit-no possible doubt about that.

The Kubelwagen had flatulently expired about ten kilometers outside of Nuremberg. The horrible noises it made told Klein he didn’t have the tools to fix it. They started off for a farmhouse they could see a couple of kilometers off the road. Maybe the farmer would have the tools. If he didn’t…If he didn’t, they would think of something else, that was all.

They’d just trudged into a grove of apple trees not far from the farmhouse when Klein looked back over his shoulder and said, “Mm, Herr Reichsprotektor, I think maybe we don’t want to go back no matter what.”

“Are you out of your-?” Heydrich had begun. Then he’d looked over his shoulder, too. American jeeps and an armored car and U.S. soldiers in their pot helmets and ugly greenish khaki uniforms swarmed around the dead Kubelwagen. When Heydrich turned to say as much to Klein, Klein wasn’t there. He was down on the ground, and reaching out to tug urgently at Heydrich’s trouser leg. Heydrich needed a second to get it, which proved him no infantryman. Then he hit the dirt, too.

They crawled away from the car that had chosen such an opportune moment to crap out. No bullets chased them, so the Amis hadn’t spotted them before they went down.

“Have they got dogs?” Klein whispered as they slithered away.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any,” Heydrich replied, also in a low voice. Low voice or not, he had trouble hiding his scorn. The Russians would have had dogs. The Russians, damn them, were serious about this twilight battle. The Americans didn’t seem to be. They thought his men annoyances, nuisances. They wanted everything peaceful and easy and smooth. Well, you didn’t always get what you wanted, even if you were an Ami.

After a while, Klein found another question: “Do you know of any bunkers around here?”

A map formed inside Heydrich’s mind. He had an excellent, even outstanding, memory and a knack for visualization. After a moment, he nodded. “Ja. There’s one maybe three kilometers east of here.”

“Can you find it? Shall we go there?”

“I can find it,” Heydrich said confidently: what he promised, he could deliver. The other half of Klein’s question wasn’t so easy to answer. After some thought, the Reichsprotektor said, “I’d rather not go to ground if I can help it. If they track us to the bunker, we’re trapped like a badger inside its sett.”

“Well, yes,” Klein returned, also after a pause to think. “But they can run us down in the open, too, you know.”

If Heydrich made it back to his underground headquarters, he didn’t plan on coming out again any time soon. In the meanwhile…“As long as we’re above the ground and moving, we’ve got a chance to get away. I think the risk that they can follow us to the bunker and dig us out is just too big.”

Had Klein argued, he might have convinced his superior to change his mind. As things were, the Oberscharfuhrer only sighed. “Well, you’re right about one thing, boss-we can get screwed either way.”

They weren’t screwed yet. The Americans made a ham-fisted job of going after a pair of fugitives. Without false modesty, Heydrich knew the SS would have caught up with him and Klein in short order. For that matter, so would the NKVD. Professionals knew what they were doing. The Americans…

How the devil did they win? They were brave-Heydrich couldn’t deny that. And there were lots of them. And what came out of their factories…Few Germans had imagined just how much the USA could make when it set its mind to it. Bombers, fighters, tanks, jeeps, trucks…Yes, each man from the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS was better than his enemy counterpart. But he wasn’t enough better, not when the other side had so many more troops and so much materiel.

And, however clumsy the other side was, it hadn’t given up here. American soldiers stumbled across the landscape. How far south and east the search extended, Heydrich didn’t want to think. Sooner or later, the Amis were much too likely to blunder across him and Klein by sheer luck. If they did…

If they do, I’m a dead man, Heydrich thought. So was Klein, but Hans could do his own worrying. If the noncom did, it stretched no further than himself. Heydrich also worried about the fate of the whole National Socialist uprising. It would go on without him; he knew that. Whether it would go on so well and sting the enemies from the east and west the way it had was a different question. Yes, Jochen Peiper was capable-he wouldn’t have been second in command if he weren’t. Still, Heydrich didn’t think anybody could match Heydrich.

“What are you idiots doing screwing around in this swamp?” The question came in such a broad Bavarian dialect that Heydrich barely understood it.

He almost plugged the man who asked it any which way. He’d had no idea anybody but Hans was anywhere within half a kilometer. But this wizened little grinning bastard appeared from behind a tussock as if he were a sprite in one of Wagner’s lesser operas. Now, was he a good sprite or the other kind? He was a sprite who was wary of firearms, that was for sure-he stood very still and kept his hands where Heydrich could see them.

“Hey, buddy, you don’t want to do that,” he said, his grin slipping only a little. “You shoot me, all the American pigdogs’ll come running this way.”

“Are you loyal to the Grossdeutsches Reich?” Heydrich demanded. He knew about the ever-rising price on his head. If this scrawny son of a bitch decided to play Judas, he’d get a lot more than thirty pieces of silver. But he won’t live to enjoy them if he does, the Reichsprotektor promised himself.

“Got out of the Ukraine in one piece. Got out of Romania in one piece. Hell, got out of Hungary almost in one piece-they grazed me while I was hightailing it over the border. Got stuck in Vienna after that, and got away there, too,” the Bavarian said. “We still owe folks a thing or three.”

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was spinning a line to lull Heydrich and Klein. The underofficer came straight to the point: “Can you get us out of here without tipping off the Amis?”

“Not a sure-fire deal, but I think so,” the Bavarian answered. “Want to come along and see?”

Heydrich and Klein looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time. Heydrich didn’t see how he could leave somebody who might be a betrayer at his back. He also didn’t see how he could quietly dispose of the fellow. Yes, the man might take them straight to the Amis. Sometimes you just had to roll the dice.

“Let’s go,” Heydrich said after a barely perceptible pause.

“Get moving, then,” the Bavarian replied. Off they went.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Klein whispered.

“No,” Heydrich returned. “Are you sure it isn’t?” The Oberscharfuhrer answered with another shrug.

After a few minutes, Heydrich became convinced the Bavarian wasn’t going straight to the Americans. He wasn’t going straight at all. His turns seemed at random, but they all took him and the half-trusting men at his heels deeper into the swamp. Bushes and scraggly trees-the edges of the Lorenzerwald-hid them ever more effectively.

“Right season, you can get all kinds of mushrooms around here.” Their guide smacked his lips.

“I believe it.” Hans Klein sounded more as if he was thinking of death and decay than of a thick slice of boiled pork smothered with mushrooms. Since Heydrich’s train of thought ran on the same track, he couldn’t very well tell Klein to shut up. The Bavarian chuckled. Not only was he at home in this miserable countryside, he was enjoying himself.

“How will you get us past the enemy?” Heydrich asked. One of his wet shoes was rubbing at the back of his heel. Pretty soon, like it or not, he’d start limping. He wondered if he’d do better barefoot. If he had to, he’d try that. But running something into his sole wouldn’t slow him up-it would stop him cold. He resolved to hang on to his shoes as long as he could.

“Oh, there are ways,” the other man said airily.

They came to a shack beside a little stream. The shack might have been built from junk salvaged after the surrender, or it might have been leaning there in growing decrepitude since the days of Frederick the Great…or Frederick Barbarossa. “Nice place,” Hans Klein said dryly.

The Bavarian chuckled. “Glad you like it. Follow me around back.”

Around the back, a stubby wooden pier stuck out into the stream. Like the shack, it might have been there a few months or a few hundred years. The boat tied to the pier wasn’t new, but also wasn’t obviously a remembrance of things past.

“Get in,” the Bavarian told Heydrich and Klein. “Then lie flat. It’s roomier down there than it looks.”

And so it was. This fellow probably didn’t smuggle fugitive National Socialist fighters every day. If he didn’t smuggle something every day, or often enough, Heydrich would have been astonished. Just to make sure of things, the Bavarian draped a ratty tarpaulin over them. The tarp smelled of mildew and tobacco. Heydrich nodded to himself. Thought so-cigarette smuggler. These days, cigarettes were as good as money in Germany. In a lot of places, they were money, near enough.

“Off we go.” The man’s voice came from the other side of the tarp like the sun from the far side of a cloud.

“What happens if the Americans make you stop?” Klein asked.

“We’ll worry about that when it happens, all right?” The Bavarian didn’t lack for nerve.

The boat began bobbing in a new way. It was floating down the stream now. Pretty soon, the Bavarian sat down and started rowing to help it along. The oarlocks creaked. Time stretched, all rubber-like. Heydrich didn’t know whether to be terrified or bored. Beside him, Klein started snoring softly. Heydrich found himself jealous of the underofficer. Sometimes not thinking ahead made life simpler.

After a while, Heydrich jerked awake and realized he’d been dozing, too. Hans Klein laughed softly. “You snore, Herr Reichsprotektor.”

“Well, so do you,” Heydrich said. “How far do you suppose we’ve come?”

“I dunno. A ways.”

“Shut up, you two,” the Bavarian hissed. “Amis on the banks.”

Sure as hell, a voice called out in accented but fluent German: “Hey, Fritzi, you old asslick, you running Luckies again?”

“Not me,” the Bavarian answered solemnly. “Chesterfields.”

He got a laugh from the American. But then the enemy soldier went on, “You seen a couple of guys on the lam? High command wants ’em bad-there’s money in it if you spot ’em.”

“Your high command must want them bad if it’s willing to pay,” the Bavarian observed, and won another laugh. “But me, I’ve seen nobody.” He kept rowing.

If the American called for-Fritzi? — to stop…But he didn’t. The boat slid on down the stream. Heydrich wished he could see what was going on. He could see the bottom of the boat, the tarp, a little of himself, and even less of Hans. It wasn’t enough. He kept his head down anyhow.

After a while, the Bavarian said, “We gave that lot the slip. Shouldn’t be any more for a while. And even if there are, I can make it so they never see us.”

“Good by me,” Klein said.

“And me,” Heydrich agreed. One of the basic rules was, you didn’t argue with somebody who was saving your ass. Heydrich had broken a lot of rules in his time, but that one made too much sense to ignore.

Lou Weissberg could count the times he’d been on a horse on the fingers of one hand. He thought of a jeep as the next best thing, or maybe even the equivalent. A jeep could go damn near anywhere and almost never broke down. The Stars and Stripes cartoon of the sad cavalry sergeant putting a hand over his eyes as he aimed his.45 at the hood of a jeep that had quit only reinforced the comparison in his mind.

Mud flew up from under this jeep’s tires as it roared toward the edge of a two-bit stream. The PFC driving it gave it more gas. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” the guy said cheerfully. “I’ll get you there-and I’ll get you back, too.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Lou answered, and he was telling the truth-about that, at any rate. He was worried about Heydrich getting away. If the report was true, they should have grabbed the son of a bitch by now. They’d found the Kubelwagen, or a Kubelwagen, not too far from here. That much checked out. But no Heydrich. That Jerry hoping for a big chunk of change had to be sweating bullets right now, for all kinds of reasons. If the kraut was bullshitting, the Americans would come down on him hard. If he wasn’t, who’d want to sell him life insurance?

The jeep half skidded to a stop. Lou hopped out. Carrying a grease gun, he trotted over to the GIs by the side of the stream. The mud tugged at his boots, but he’d been through plenty worse, plenty thicker. “Seen anything?” he called to the dogfaces.

He’d been thinking of Stars and Stripes. One of the soldiers had a bent nose and a dented helmet, just like Joe of Willie and. “Not a goddamn thing,” he said, adding, “Uh, sir,” a beat later when he noticed the silver bar painted onto Lou’s steel pot. “Only Fritzi running smokes like usual.”

“Who’s Fritzi?” Lou asked.

The GIs looked at one another. Lou could tell what was going through their minds. This guy is supposed to help run things, and he doesn’t know stuff like that? Patiently, the one who looked like Joe explained, “He’s this kraut who lives in the swamp around here. He gets cigarettes-hell, I dunno where, but he does. And he makes his living turning ’em over, y’know what I mean? He’s a good German, Fritzi is.”

“How do you know that?” Lou had met any number of Germans who’d done things that would make Jack the Ripper puke, but who were kind family men and never kicked the dog. You just couldn’t tell.

“Oh, you oughta hear him cuss Hitler and the generals,” the soldier answered. “Far as he’s concerned, they screwed things up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Terrific,” Lou said tightly. “You searched the boat, right?”

They eyed one another again. At last, the guy who looked like Joe said, “Nah, we didn’t bother. Fritzi’s okay, like I said. And we woulda had to notice the cigarettes, and that woulda just complicated everybody’s life.” His buddies nodded.

“Suppose he was carrying Heydrich?” Lou snapped.

“Then we fucked up,” the GI said, shrugging. “But what’re the odds?”

“Okay. Okay. But when the prize is this big, we gotta tie up all the loose ends,” Lou said. “If all he’s got’re cigarettes, I don’t give a shit. But all the krauts hate Hitler-now. Ask ’em five years ago and you woulda got a different answer. So which way did this goddamn boat go?”

“Thataway,” the soldier said, as if he’d watched too many Westerns. He jerked a thumb toward the southeast.

“Then we’ll go after him,” Lou declared. He had a radio in the jeep, and turned back towards it. “I’ll call in reinforcements.”

“Call in a bunch-sir,” the dogface told him. “You go much farther and things start getting tricky-like.” Again, his pals’ heads went up and down.

Lou shrugged, too, in a different way. “Fine. So things get tricky. I will call in a bunch.” And he did.

Then he had to wait for the reinforcements to get there. When they did, his heart sank. They were new draftees-you could always tell. They didn’t want to be there, and barely bothered to hide it. They squelched into the swamp like guys ordered to take out the Siegfried Line with slingshots.

“Just remember the price on Heydrich’s head, guys,” Lou called to them. “A million bucks, tax-free. You’re set for life if you nail him.” Anything to get the reluctant soldiers moving. If he thought they would have believed him, he would have promised them a week of blowjobs from Rita Hayworth.

They did move a little faster, but only a little. One of them said, “Yeah, like this fuckin’ kraut’s really in there. Now tell me another one.” Like any other soldier with an ounce of sense, the American GI was a professional cynic. These fellows didn’t know much about soldiering yet, but they’d sure figured that out.

Sometimes there was no help for a situation. Sometimes there was. Lou knew one that front-line officers had often used before the surrender. “Well, follow me, goddammit!” he snapped, and plunged past the draftees into the swamp himself. They muttered and shook their heads, but they did follow.

That accomplished less than he wished it would have. He rapidly discovered why the troopers who knew Fritzi had set up their checkpoint where they did. Past that, the stream split up into half a dozen narrow channels that crossed and recrossed, braided and rebraided, like a woman’s pigtail woven by a nut. Some of what lay between the channels was mud, some was bushes, some was rank second-growth trees. All of it was next to impossible to get through.

“Have a heart, Lieutenant,” one of the draftees panted after a while. “If that what’s-his-name asshole came this way, he’ll never make it out again.” Several of the other new fish nodded.

“My ass,” Lou said sweetly. “You wouldn’t be dogging it if the Jerries were plastering this place with 105s-I guarandamntee you that.”

Behind him, the GIs muttered. Nobody directly answered him, though. He knew what that meant. It meant just what he’d thought: these guys were fresh off the boat from the States. They’d never been under fire, and they had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Something fair-sized and brown splashed into the water and swam away. Lou came that close to opening up on it before he realized it was an animal…one that walked on four legs. Most of the GIs came out with variations on “What the fuck was that?” But one of them said, “Hey, Clifton, that a muskrat or a nutria?”

“Muskrat, I betcha. Nutria’s even bigger.” Clifton sounded froggier than most of the Frenchmen Lou’d met. Five got you ten he was born within spitting distance of the Louisiana bayou. After a moment, he went on, “Damfino what either one of ’em’s doin’ here. They’s American critters.”

“Waddaya wanna bet the krauts brung ’em over to raise for fur and they got loose, way nutrias did when we shipped ’em up from South America?” his buddy answered. “My uncle raise nutrias for a while. Then he go bust and sponge offa Pa.”

Lou didn’t give a muskrat’s ass about escaped rodents or the soldier’s sponging uncle. “Spread out,” he told his none too merry men. “God damn it to hell, we are gonna comb this swamp and see what’s in here.”

He hadn’t gone another fifty yards before he realized it was hopeless. A regiment could have gone through here and missed an elephant standing quietly in the shade of the trees. No elephants, or none he saw-the Jerries wouldn’t have brought them in for fur. But with the best will in the world the platoon he led couldn’t have searched the whole swamp in under a year.

And these clowns didn’t have the best will in the world, or anything close to it. They pissed and moaned. They dragged their feet. Reward or not, they couldn’t have cared less about catching Reinhard Heydrich, because they didn’t think he was within miles. As for Fritzi and his rowboat full of illicit tobacco…The only thing that mattered to them was that they were getting muddy and their poor little tootsies were soaked.

More than once, Lou had heard krauts-especially krauts who didn’t know he spoke German-wonder out loud how the hell the USA won the war. He’d never been tempted to wonder the same thing himself…till now.

A gray heron almost as tall as a man made him nervous-all the more so because its plumage was only a little lighter than Feldgrau. But no Landser ever born came equipped with that cold yellow stare or that bayonet beak. The heron’s head darted down. A carp wriggled briefly, then disappeared.

The sun sank toward the western horizon. Clifton said, “No offense, Lieutenant, but we ain’t gonna find him.”

“Yeah,” Lou said, and then several things quite a bit warmer than that. Maybe the GIs posted on the far side of the swamp would scoop Heydrich up when he came out. Lou had to hope so. He wasn’t going to be the hero himself. The Reichsprotektor shouldn’t have got away-but it looked like he had.