The Man with the Iron Heart

XIV

A teletype chattered. Tom Schmidt pulled the flimsy paper off the machine. The dateline was Munich. The headline said, HEYDRICH MOCKS PURSUERS AFTER ESCAPE. The story was…just what you’d expect after a headline like that. The boss of the German national resistance was back in hiding again, and thumbing his nose at the blundering Americans who’d let him slip through their fingers.

“Well, Jesus Christ!” Schmidt said in disgust. “We really can’t do anything right over there, can we?”

“What now?” asked another reporter in the Tribune’s Washington bureau. He was interested enough not to light his cigarette till he got an answer.

Schmidt gave it to him, finishing, “What d’you think of that, Wally?”

Wally did light up before replying, “I think it stinks, that’s what. What am I supposed to think? First the krauts grabbed a bunch of guys with slide rules, then when their own big cheese put his neck on the chopping block we couldn’t bring the goddamn hatchet down. Somebody’s head ought to roll if Heydrich’s didn’t.”

“Sounds right to me,” Tom said. “You know what else?”

“I’m all ears,” Wally said. He wasn’t so far wrong, either; he really did have a pair of jug handles sticking out from the sides of his head.

“I’ll tell you what.” Tom always had liked the sound of his own voice. “This part of the war is harder on us than whipping the Wehrmacht was, that’s what.”

“How d’you figure?” Wally asked.

“’Cause when we were fighting the Wehrmacht we knew who was who and what was what,” Tom said. “Now we’re in the same mess the Nazis got into when they had to fight all the Russian partisans. You can’t tell if the guy selling cucumbers likes you or wants to blow you to kingdom come. And does that pretty girl walking down the street have a bomb in her handbag? How are you supposed to win a fight like that if the other side doesn’t want to let up?”

“Kill ’em all?” Wally suggested.

“We aren’t gonna do that,” Tom said, and the other reporter didn’t disagree with him. After a moment, he added, “Hell, even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could. Hitler’s goons pretty much tried it, and even they couldn’t pull it off. Besides, d’you really wanna imitate the goddamn SS?”

“They didn’t have the atom bomb, so they had to do it retail,” Wally said. “We could do it wholesale.”

“Maybe we could, but we won’t,” Tom said. “Ain’t gonna happen-no way, nohow. I almost wish it would. It’s the only thing that could get us out of the deep shit we walked into.”

“Either that or just packing up and going home,” Wally said. “You oughta write the rest of it up. It’d make a good column, y’know, especially if you use the Heydrich story for a hook.”

“Damned if it wouldn’t.” Tom carried his filthy mug over to the coffee pot that sat on a hot plate in the corner of the room. The pot had been there since sunup, and it was late afternoon now. The black, steaming stuff that came out when he poured would have stripped paint from a destroyer’s gun turret. Adulterated with plenty of cream and sugar, it also tickled brain cells.

Tom ran a sheet of paper into his Underwood and started banging away. When things went well, he could pound out a column in forty-five minutes. This was one of those times. He passed it to Wally when he finished.

“Strong stuff,” the other reporter said, nodding. “Truman’ll call you every kind of name under the sun.”

“Okay by me,” Tom said. “Only thing I want to know now is, what’ll the guys back in Chicago do to me?”

“If you don’t like getting edited, you shoulda written books instead of going to work for the papers,” Wally said.

“Nah,” Tom replied. “I’ll never get rich at this racket, but I won’t starve, either. You try writing books for a living, you better already have somebody rich in the family. Yeah, I don’t like what the editors do sometimes, but I can live with it. A regular paycheck helps a lot.”

“You think I’m gonna argue with you?” Wally shook his head. “Not me, Charlie. I got two kids, and a third on the way.”

Schmidt’s column ran in the Tribune the next day. At the President’s next press conference, Truman said, “I didn’t imagine anybody could make me think a guttersnipe like Westbrook Pegler was a gentleman, but this Schmidt character shows me I was wrong.” Tom felt as if he’d been giving the accolade.

Then Walter Lippmann, who was staunchly on the side of keeping American troops in Germany till the cows came home, attacked him in print. Up till then, Lippmann had never deigned to acknowledge that he existed, much less that he was worth attacking. Tom fired back in another column, one that drew him even more notice than the first had. He was as happy as Larry.

Every once in a while, though, he got reminded of what his happiness was built on. As if to celebrate Heydrich’s escape, the diehards blew up an American ammunition dump on the outskirts of Regensburg. The blast killed forty-five GIs, and wounded a number the War Department coyly declined to state. It broke windows ten miles away.

A survivor was quoted as saying, “I thought one of those atomic whatsits went off.”

How do we let things like this happen? Tom wrote. And if we can’t keep things like this from happening, why do we go on wasting our young men’s lives in a fight we can’t hope to win? Wouldn’t it be better to come home, let the Germans sort things out among themselves, and use our bombers and our atomic whatsits to make sure they can never threaten us again? Sure looks that way to me. He paused. That wasn’t quite a strong enough kicker. He added one more line-Sure looks that way to more and more Americans, too.

No Brigadier General summoned to testify before Congress ever looked happy. In Jerry Duncan’s experience, that was as much a law of nature as any of the ones Sir Isaac Newton discovered. This particular brass hat-his name, poor bastard, was Rudyard Holmyard-looked as if he’d just taken a big bite out of a fertilizer sandwich.

Which didn’t stop the Indiana Congressman from trying to rip him a new one. “How do we let things like this happen?” Duncan thundered. If a newspaper columnist had put it the same way a few days earlier, well, it was still a damn good question.

“Um, sir, when both sides have weapons and determination, you just aren’t likely to pitch a perfect game,” Holmyard said. “We found that out the hard way in the Philippines at the turn of the century, and again in the Caribbean and Central America during the ’20s and ’30s. Sometimes you get hurt, that’s all. You do your best to prevent it, but you know ahead of time your best won’t always be good enough.”

“One of those things, eh?” Jerry laced the words with sarcasm. General Holmyard nodded somberly. Jerry went on, “When we were fighting in the Philippines at the turn of the century, though, we didn’t have to worry about the guerrillas getting the atom bomb, did we?”

“No, sir,” the general replied. “Of course, we didn’t have it ourselves, either.”

Would we have dropped one on the Philippines if we’d had it then? Duncan wondered. His guess was that we probably would have. How could Teddy Roosevelt have carried a bigger stick? And the Philippines were a long way away, and the people there were small and brown and had slanty eyes. They weren’t quite Japs, but…. Yeah, Teddy would have used the bomb if he’d had it.

With an effort, the Congressman pulled his thoughts back to the middle of the twentieth century. “Why haven’t we been able to recapture any of the physicists the fanatics kidnapped?” he asked.

General Holmyard looked even gloomier; Jerry hadn’t thought he could. “A couple of points there, sir,” he said. “First, we don’t know for a fact that the missing scientists ever entered our occupation zone. They may be under British or French administration, or even Russian.”

“So they may. The only thing we’re sure of is that they’re under Reinhard Heydrich’s administration. Isn’t that a fact?”

A muscle in Holmyard’s jaw twitched. But his nod seemed calm enough. “Yes, sir,” he said stolidly. “Another thing I need to point out is that, unfortunately, a nuclear physicist looks like anybody else when he’s not wearing a white lab coat. Coming up with these guys is like looking for multiple needles in a heck of a big haystack.”

“Terrific,” Jerry said, at which point the Democrat running the committee rapped loudly for order. “Sorry, Mr. Chairman,” Duncan told him. He wasn’t, but the forms had to be observed. “I only have a few more questions. The first one is, how likely are the fanatics to be able to manufacture their own atom bombs now that they know it’s possible?”

“Very unlikely, Congressman. I have that straight from General Groves,” Holmyard replied. Jerry winced; having run the Manhattan Project to a successful conclusion, Leslie Groves owned a named to conjure with. General Holmyard continued, “Atom bombs may be possible, but they aren’t easy or cheap. You need a sizable supply of uranium ore, and you need an even bigger industrial base. The Nazi fanatics have neither.”

“You’re sure they can’t get their hands on uranium?” Duncan said.

“When we entered Germany, we had a special team ordered to take charge of whatever the Germans were using to try and build their own bomb,” Rudyard Holmyard said. “That team did a first-rate job. The War Department is confident Heydrich’s goons can’t come up with anything along those lines.”

“The War Department was also confident the Germans would stop fighting after they signed their surrender,” Jerry pointed out. The chairman banged the gavel again. Jerry didn’t care. He’d wanted to get in the last word, and now he had. “No further questions,” he said, and stepped away from the microphone.

None of the other Congressmen raked General Holmyard over the coals the way Jerry had. Of course, the majority of the committee members were Democrats, but the rest of the Republicans also stayed cautious. The Democrats wished the issue of Germany would dry up and blow away. Too many men on the same side of the aisle as Jerry Duncan didn’t have the nerve to reach out and grab it with both hands.

Of course the majority were Democrats…. Jerry muttered to himself as he went back to his office. Ever since the Depression crashed down, the Democrats had ruled Congress. These days, most people took their comfortable majorities for granted. Jerry didn’t. He thought Germany was a prime way to pry them out of the chairmanships and perquisites they’d enjoyed for so long. He only wished more Republicans agreed with him.

As usual, a fat pile of correspondence awaited him when he sat down at his desk. Actually, two piles: one from within his own district, the other from outside it. Before he made a name for himself about Germany, nobody outside the area that stretched northeast from Anderson and Muncie had cared a nickel for him. That had suited him fine, too.

Now, though, people from all over the country sent him letters and telegrams. Some said he should run for President. Others called him a fathead, or told him he would burn in hell, or said he had to be a Nazi or a Communist or sometimes both at once. And still others-sadly, fewer than he would have liked-were thoughtful discussions of what was going on in Germany and what the United States ought to do about it.

This latest stack of mail from all over would have to wait a while. His district came first. Any Congressman who didn’t get that didn’t stay in Congress long. More people from Indiana seemed to understand what he had in mind. Not only did he know his district, but he’d represented it long enough to let it get to know him, too.

Oh, there were a couple of burn-in-hell letters here, and one unsigned one decorated with swastikas. But you couldn’t make everybody happy no matter what you did. The local mail wasn’t anything that made Jerry doubt he’d win in November.

And winning in November was what he had to do. Once he’d taken care of that, he would look around and see everything else he needed to deal with. But if he lost the upcoming election-well, there wasn’t much point to anything after that, was there?

Reinhard Heydrich didn’t bother with full dress uniform very often. What was the point, God only knew how many meters underground? The other resisters down here knew who he was and what he was and that he had the authority to command them. What more did he want-egg in his beer?

Sometimes, though, he needed to impress-no, to intimidate-people. And so today he wore the high-peaked cap, the tunic with the SS runes on the black collar patch and the eagle holding a swastika on the right breast, the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross at his throat, and the rest of his decorations on his left breast. It was all devilishly uncomfortable, but he looked the part of the Reichsprotektor, which was the point of the exercise.

Hans Klein, also in full SS regalia, came in and said loudly, “Herr Reichsprotektor, the scientist Wirtz to see you, as you ordered!”

“Send him in, Oberscharfuhrer,” Heydrich replied.

“Zu befehl, Herr Reichsprotektor!” Klein clicked his heels. They never would have bothered with that nonsense if Karl Wirtz weren’t out in the corridor listening. But they had to make Wirtz and the other captured physicists believe the Reich was still a going concern. And, to a certain degree, they had to believe it themselves.

Klein strode out. He returned a moment later with Professor Wirtz. The scientist looked to be in his late thirties. He was tall and thin, with a hairline that had retreated like the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, leaving him with a forehead that seemed even higher than it would have anyhow.

Heydrich’s right arm snapped up and out. “Heil Hitler!” he barked.

Wirtz gaped. “Er-Hitler’s dead,” he muttered.

“You will address the Reichsprotektor by his title,” Hans Klein rumbled ominously, sounding every centimeter the senior underofficer.

“The Fuhrer may be dead,” Heydrich said. “The Reich he founded lives on-and will live on despite any temporary misfortunes. And you, Herr Doktor Professor Wirtz, will help ensure its survival.”

“M-Me?” If the prospect delighted Wirtz, he hid it very well. “All I ever wanted to do was come home from England and get back to my research.”

“You are home-home in the Grossdeutsches Reich,” Heydrich said. “And we brought you and your comrades here so you could conduct your research undisturbed by the English and the Americans.”

“You want us to make a bomb for you…Herr Reichsprotektor.” Wirtz wasn’t altogether blind-no, indeed.

“That’s exactly what we want, yes,” Heydrich agreed. “With it, we are strong. We can face any foe on even terms. The Americans, the Russians-anyone. Without it, we are nothing. So you will give it to us.”

Wirtz licked his lips. “It makes me very sorry to say this, Herr Reichsprotektor, but what you ask is impossible.”

He was sorry to say it, Heydrich judged, because he feared what the Reichsprotektor would do to him. And well he might. But, though Wirtz didn’t know it, Heydrich had already heard the same thing from several other physicists. All he said now was, “Why do you think so?”

“You do not have the uranium ore we were using before, do you? The ore from which we would have to extract the rare pure material we need for the bomb?” Wirtz said. When Heydrich didn’t answer, the physicist went on, “And you do not have the factories we would need to perform the extraction. The Americans spent billions of dollars to build those factories. Billions, Herr Reichsprotektor! When I think how we had to go begging for pfennigs to try to keep our research going…” He shook his head. “We were fighting a foe who was bigger than we are.”

Again, Heydrich had heard the same thing before. He liked it no better now than he had then. “Can you get the uranium you need?”

“I have no idea where we would do that…sir,” Professor Wirtz said. “We were working at Hechingen and Haigerloch, in the southwest, when the war ended. French troops, and Moroccans with them”-he shuddered-“captured the towns and captured us. Then American soldiers took charge of us and took charge of the uranium we were using.”

Hechingen and Haigerloch were still in the French zone. The French fought Heydrich’s resisters almost as viciously as the Red Army did-no doubt for many of the same reasons. Still, something might be managed…if it had a decent chance of proving worthwhile. “The uranium is all gone? Everything is all gone?”

“Yes,” Wirtz said, as the other reclaimed scientists had before him. But then, as none had before, he added, “Except perhaps-”

Heydrich leaned forward abruptly enough to make the swivel chair creak under his backside. “Except perhaps what, Herr Doktor Professor?” he asked softly.

“When the Amis captured us, we were making a new uranium pile.” The actual word Wirtz used was machine, a term Heydrich had already heard from the other scientists he’d questioned. The physicist continued, “We also had about ten grams of radium. One of the technicians hid the metal under a crate that had held uranium cubes. The Americans took the uranium, of course, but I am sure they did not take the radium. As far as I know, it is still in Hechingen.”

Excitement tingled through Heydrich. Radium was potent stuff. Everybody knew that. Everybody had known that even before anyone imagined atomic bombs. And ten grams! That sounded like a lot. “Can you make a bomb with it?” Heydrich asked eagerly.

“Nein, Herr Reichsprotektor. If you expect me to do that, you’d better shoot me now. It is impossible.” Wirtz’s voice was sad but firm. He understood the way Heydrich thought, all right.

Heydrich didn’t want to believe him, but decided he had no choice. If Wirtz was lying, one of the other physicists-Diebner, most likely-would give him away. And then Heydrich would shoot him. He had to understand that. “Well, if you can’t make a bomb, what can you do with ten grams of radium?” Heydrich demanded. “You must be able to do something useful, or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”

“Let me think.” Wirtz did just that for close to a minute. Then he said, “Well, you know radium is poisonous even in very small doses.”

“How small? A tenth of a gram? A hundredth?” Heydrich asked. A poison that strong could make assassinations easier.

Karl Wirtz actually smiled. “Much less than that, Herr Reichsprotektor. Anything more than a tenth of a microgram is considered toxic.” He helpfully translated the scientific measurement: “Anything more than a ten-millionth of a gram.”

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Heydrich whispered. He did sums in his head, and then, when he didn’t believe the answer, did them again on paper. “Ten grams of radium could poison a hundred million people?” That stuff could kill off everybody still alive in Germany, with almost enough left over to do in France, too.

“Theoretically. If everything were perfectly efficient,” Wirtz said. “You couldn’t come anywhere close to that for real.”

“But we could still do a lot of damage with it.” Heydrich waited impatiently for the physicist’s response.

Wirtz slowly nodded. “Yes, you could. I have no doubt of that. I am not sure of the best way to go about it, though.”

“Well, that’s why you and your friends are here.” Heydrich’s grin was as wide and inviting as he knew how to make it.

Spring was in the air. Vladimir Bokov was almost back to his old self again. Everything should have been easy. After all, hadn’t the Fascist beasts suffered the most devastating military defeat in the history of the world? If they hadn’t, what was the tremendous victory parade through Red Square all about? Where had all those Nazi standards and flags that proud Soviet soldiers dragged in the dust come from?

The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t want to admit they were beaten. The Russian zone in what was left of the shattered Reich, what had been eastern Germany and was now western Poland, what had been East Prussia and was now split between Poland and the USSR, western Czechoslovakia, the Soviet zone in Austria…Rebellion bubbled everywhere.

Bokov would have suspected the Western Allies of fomenting the trouble-the Soviet Union’s greatest fear had always been that the USA and Britain would end up in bed with Hitler, not Stalin-if he hadn’t known they had troubles of their own. They might even have had worse troubles than the USSR did, because they put them down less firmly.

Poland and Czechoslovakia were kicking out their Germans. The Soviets were doing the same thing in their chunk of East Prussia. What had been Konigsberg-a town the Nazis fought for like grim death-was now called Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s longtime henchmen. Reliable Russians poured in to replace the Germans, who were anything but.

Once Poland and Czechoslovakia were German-free, the uprisings there would fizzle out. That delighted Bokov less than it might have. You couldn’t expel all the Germans from the Soviet zones in Germany and Austria…could you? Not even Stalin, who never thought small, seemed ready for that.

And so the NKVD had to make do with lesser measures hereabouts. Mass executions avenged slain Soviet personnel. Mass deportations got rid of socially unreliable elements-and, often enough, of people grabbed at random to fill a quota. The survivors needed to understand they’d better not help or shelter Fascist bandits.

All that might have scared some of the remaining Germans into staying away from the bandits. Others, though, it only cemented to what should have been the dead Nazi cause.

Which was why Bokov bucketed along in a convoy of half a dozen jeeps, on his way south to Chemnitz. One jeep took the lead. Four more followed close together. The last one did rear-guard duty. The hope was that the formation would defeat bandits lurking by the side of the Autobahn with Panzerschreck or Panzerfaust-or, for that matter, with nothing fancier than a machine gun.

Bokov certainly hoped the stratagem worked. His neck, after all, was among those on the line here. This ploy was new. The bandits would take a little while to get used to it. After that…He knew his countrymen better than he wished he did. They would go on repeating it exactly-and the Germans would get used to it, and would find some way to beat it. Then the Red Army would take too long to figure out what to do differently.

Chemnitz wasn’t quite so devastated as Dresden had been. But Anglo-American bombers had visited the Saxon city, too. The old town hall and a red tower that had once been part of the city wall stood out from the sea of rubble.

In the old town hall worked the burgomeister, a cadaverous fellow named Max Muller. “Good to meet you, Comrade Captain!” he said, shaking Bokov’s hand. He belonged to the Social Unity Party of Germany, of course-the Russians wouldn’t have given him even the semblance of power if he hadn’t. And he might well have spent the Hitler years in Russian exile with Ulbricht if he so readily recognized Bokov’s rank badges.

“You’ve had a string of assassinations here,” Bokov said. Red Army soldiers had established a barbed-wire perimeter around the town hall. They wanted to keep Muller alive if they could. He was the fourth burgomeister Chemnitz had known since the surrender.

“We have,” he agreed now. Sweat glinted on his pale forehead, though the day was far from warm. He had to be wondering what the Heydrichites were plotting now-and who could blame him? “Neither our own resources nor those of the fraternal Soviet forces in the area have quelled them.”

He certainly sounded like a good Marxist-Leninist. All the same, Bokov’s voice was dry as he asked, “And what makes you think one more officer will be able to set things right like this?” He snapped his fingers.

“Oh, but, Comrade Captain, you’re not just one officer! You’re the NKVD!” Muller exclaimed.

“Well, not all of it,” Bokov said, more dryly still. He was glad this Fritz respected and feared the Soviet security apparatus. But he meant what he’d said before: there was only one of him.

“You have the rest behind you,” Muller declared in ringing tones.

The other NKVD men were probably goddamn glad they were nowhere near Chemnitz. The place stank of death. So did a lot of Germany, but this was worse.

A labor gang of Germans-old men in overalls, younger men in Wehrmacht rags, and women in everything under the sun-dumped rubble into wheelbarrows and carted it away. How many wheelbarrows full of broken bricks and shattered masonry did Chemnitz hold? How many did all the Soviet zone hold? How many did all of Germany hold? How many years would it take to clear them, and how big a mountain would they make added together?

A tall one, Bokov hoped. Then he wondered how big a mountain the rubble in the USSR would make. Leningrad and Stalingrad weren’t much besides rubble these days. Plenty of cities, some of them big ones, had changed hands four times, not just twice. As the Nazis fell back, they’d destroyed everything they could to keep the Red Army from using it against them.

How long would the Soviet Union take to get over the mauling the Fascist hyenas had given it? Vladimir Bokov scowled, not liking the answer that formed in his mind. Germany had caught hell, no doubt about it. But, even though the Red Army finally drove the invaders off with their tails between their legs, it was plain the USSR had caught whatever was worse than hell.

How many dead? Twenty million? Thirty? Somewhere between one and the other, probably, but Bokov would have bet nobody could have said where. He knew-everybody knew, even if it wasn’t something you talked about-the Germans had inflicted far more casualties on the Red Army than the other way around.

But that wasn’t all. That was barely the beginning. The Germans had slaughtered Jews, commissars, intellectuals generally. Would the USSR’s intelligentsia ever be the same? And so many civilians had starved or died of disease or simply disappeared under German occupation.

It wasn’t all one-sided. The labor gang dug up an arm bone with some stinking flesh still clinging to it. As nonchalantly as if such things happened every day (and no doubt they did, or more often than that), a scrawny old geezer with a white mustache shoveled the ruined fragment of humanity into a wheelbarrow with the rest of the wreckage.

One of the women in the gang sent Bokov a look full of vitriol. He stared back stonily, and she was the first to drop her eyes. He and the Red Army hadn’t had anything to do with this death. It lay in the Anglo-Americans’ ledger. Captain Bokov only wished the bombing had done more, and done it sooner. Then fewer Soviet citizens might have died.

The woman muttered something the NKVD man didn’t catch. By the way several of the other Germans nodded, she was bound to be lucky he couldn’t hear her.

He thought about seizing her anyway, and the laborers who’d nodded. He could; rounding up a few Red Army men to take them away would be a matter of moments. The only question was whether it would be worthwhile. It would teach these Germans they couldn’t flout Soviet authority.

But it would also make their friends and families-who wouldn’t understand the progressive Soviet line toward provocations-more likely to throw in with the Heydrichites or at least to keep silent about their banditry. That calculation made Bokov stalk off instead of yelling for Russian soldiers.

It also made him stop in dismay a few paces later. If he was calculating about the Heydrichites as if they were serious enemies…“Fuck my mother!” he exclaimed. If he was thinking of them that way, then they really were. Diehards, fanatics, bandits…Names like those minimized them. They were enemy combatants, and this was still a war.

Lou Weissberg didn’t speak French. Captain Jean Desroches didn’t speak English. They were both fluent in German. Lou felt the irony. He couldn’t tell what, if anything, Desroches felt; the French intelligence officer had a formidable poker face.

“Hechingen. Something’s up with Hechingen,” Lou said auf Deutsch.

“And what would that be?” Desroches inquired.

“I don’t exactly know,” Lou answered. “But a couple of the fanatics we’ve caught lately have talked about it. I don’t mean men we caught together, either-one we nabbed up near Frankfurt and the other by Munich. So something’s going on.”

“Unless they want you to think something is while they really strike somewhere else,” Desroches said. “I mean-Hechingen?” He rolled his eyes. “The most no-account excuse for a town God ever made.”

“I don’t know much about the place,” Lou admitted. “But I’ll tell you something you may not know-Hechingen is where the German nuclear physicists got captured.”

“You mean, before Heydrich’s salauds captured them back?” Desroches used one word of French, but Lou had little trouble figuring out what it meant. His opposite number went on, “Besides, what difference does that make now?”

“I don’t know what difference it makes.” Lou was getting tired of saying he didn’t know, even if he didn’t. “But it’s liable to make some, and you guys ought to be on your toes on account of it.”

“You tend to your zone, Lieutenant,” Desroches said icily. “We will handle ours.”

“We can send some men if you’re short,” Lou offered.

He knew he’d made a mistake even before the words finished coming out of his mouth. Poker face or no, Captain Desroches gave the impression of a blue-haired matron who’d just been asked to do something obscene. “That will not be necessary,” he said. After a moment, as if feeling that wasn’t enough, he added, “You offer an insult to a sovereign and independent power, Monsieur.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Lou said, instead of something like Will you for God’s sake come off it?

France threw its weight around as if it would’ve had any weight to throw around if the United States and Britain-de Gaulle’s scorned “Anglo-Saxons”-hadn’t saved its bacon. But you couldn’t tell that to any Frenchman, not unless you really wanted to piss him off. Lou didn’t have the nerve to ask Desroches how he came to know German so well. Life in France had been…complicated from 1940 to 1944.

The Frenchman lit a cigarette: one of his own, a Gauloise. To Lou, the damn thing smelled like smoldering horseshit. He fired up a Chesterfield in self-defense. Through the clouds of smoke, Desroches said, “I will take you at your word.” Everything about the way he glared at Lou shouted You lying son of a bitch!

Since Lou was lying, or at least stretching the truth, he couldn’t call Desroches on it. He said, “If you don’t want our soldiers-”

“We don’t,” Desroches broke in.

“You don’t have to use them,” Lou went on, as if the other man hadn’t spoken. “But do keep an eye on Hechingen. If anything happens there, I sure hope you’ll let us know. My superiors-all the way up to General Eisenhower-sure hope you will.”

“Is that a threat?” Desroches demanded. “What will happen if we don’t?”

“I’m only a lieutenant. I don’t make policy. But the people above me said it could be important enough to affect how much aid France gets.” Lou eyed Captain Desroches, who was wearing U.S.-issue combat boots and a U.S. Army olive-drab uniform with French rank badges. Most of the French Army was similarly equipped, from boots to helmets to M-1 rifles to Sherman tanks (though they were also using some captured German Panthers). French soldiers ate U.S. C-and K-rations and slept in U.S. pup tents.

Desroches followed Lou’s gaze down himself. He went red. “You Americans have the arrogance of power,” he said.

“Aw, bullshit,” Lou said in English. As he’d figured, Captain Desroches got that just fine. In German, Lou went on, “Hitler had the arrogance of power. If we had it, you guys would be going ‘Heil Truman!’ right now.”

Desroches turned redder. He stubbed out his foul cigarette and lit another one. “Perhaps you are right. I phrased it badly. I should have said that you Americans have the arrogance of wealth.”

That did hit closer to the mark. Lou was damned if he’d admit it. “We have some worries about Hechingen-that’s what we have. France and the USA are allies, ja? We pass the worries on to you, the way allies are supposed to. If anything happens there, we hope you’re ready and we hope you’ll let us know-the way allies are supposed to.”

Captain Desroches sent up more smoke signals. “I will take this report back to my superiors, and we will do…whatever we do. Thank you for this…very interesting session, Lieutenant. Good day.” He got up and stamped out of Lou’s crowded little Nuremberg office.

“Boy, that was fun,” Lou said to nobody in particular. Dealing with the French was more enjoyable than a root canal, but not much.

He went to Captain Frank’s office down the hall. Frank was talking to a German gendarme-who also wore mostly U.S.-issue uniform, though dyed black-and waved for him to wait. Lou cooled his heels in the hallway for fifteen minutes or so. Then the Jerry came out looking unhappy. Lou went in.

“Nu?” Frank asked. Lou summarized his exchange with Desroches. His superior muttered to himself. “You sure we were on the same side?”

“That’s what folks say,” Lou answered.

“Are they going to pay any attention to Hechingen?” Captain Frank asked.

“My guess is, it’s about fifty-fifty, sir,” Lou said. “They sure are touchy bastards, aren’t they?”

“Oh, maybe a little,” Frank said. They both laughed, but neither smiled.

“Other thing is, sir, we don’t know for sure the fanatics’ll hit Hechingen, and we don’t know for sure the froggies’ll tell us if they do,” Lou said.

“Uh-huh. Ain’t we got fun?” Frank tacked on another mirthless laugh. “Gotta be something to do with the damn bomb scientists, doesn’t it?”

“Looks that way to me,” Lou agreed. “That’s where we grabbed those guys in the first place. But it could be something else, I guess. If they’ve got a big old stash of mortar rounds or Panzerfausts or something outside of town, they might be all hot and bothered about those instead.”

“Yeah. They might.” Howard Frank didn’t sound as if he believed it. Well, Lou didn’t, either.