The Man with the Iron Heart

XVI

Vladimir Bokov watched Germans go back and forth between the Russian and American zones in Berlin. The spectacle struck him as too anarchic for comfort. He turned to Moisei Shteinberg. “Comrade Colonel, we need to tighten this up,” he said. “People we should keep can get into one of the Western Allies’ Berlin zones easy as you please, and from there they can leave the Soviet zone of Germany altogether. And the Western Allies have such bad security, bandits can hide in their zones for as long as they want. Then they cross over and attack us.”

Shteinberg nodded. Captain Bokov hadn’t expected anything else. No NKVD man could go far wrong talking about the need to tighten up. And Shteinberg worried about things Bokov hadn’t even thought of: “It wouldn’t surprise me if the Anglo-Americans let Heydrich’s hyenas move about freely in their zones here. There always was talk about the USA and Britain lining up with the Hitlerites against the Soviet Union.”

“Da. There was,” Bokov agreed. No NKVD man could go far wrong by assuming all the enemies of the USSR were plotting together, either. “If we have to, we ought to build a wall between our zone and theirs, to make sure only the proper people pass from one to the other.”

“I’d like that,” Shteinberg said. “I’d like blockading the Western Allies’ Berlin zones to force them out of here even better. They didn’t spend their blood taking this city. We did. It should be ours by right of conquest. But…”

“But what?” Bokov said. “That’s a wonderful idea, sir! We ought to do it! We ought to start right away!”

“Unfortunately, the international situation does not permit it. Believe me, Comrade Captain, I’ve had discussions with our superiors about this.” Shteinberg sighed mournfully. “They fear deviating from the Four-Power agreement on Berlin would touch off a war. The military’s judgment-and the Politburo’s-is that we can’t afford one now.”

“Well…” Bokov had trouble arguing with that. Anyone who’d seen what the fight against the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union would. Yes, Eastern Europe obeyed Marshal Stalin’s every wish and busily remade itself on the Soviet model. Yes, the hammer-and-sickle flag flew in Berlin. But oh, the price of planting it here…!

“And there is another concern,” Shteinberg continued inexorably. “If we fight the United States, we risk the atom bomb. Till we also have this weapon, we have to be more cautious than we would if it did not exist.”

“Well…” That also made more sense than Captain Bokov wished it did. “How long till we build our own?”

“I don’t know, Volodya,” Shteinberg said with a shrug. “Till the Americans used one, I never dreamt anything like that was possible. I’m sure our people are doing everything they can.”

“Oh, so am I!” Bokov exclaimed. If all the free physicists in the USSR and all the ones who’d gone into the gulag for one reason or another (or for no reason at all-nobody knew better than an NKVD man that you didn’t always need a reason to end up in a camp) weren’t working twenty-one-hour days in pursuit of uranium, he would have been astonished.

“And we will have taken some German physicists back to the motherland, I’m sure, the same as we’ve taken some rocket engineers,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov nodded. “No doubt. Everybody knows the German rocket engineers are good, though-the Americans have grabbed the ones we didn’t. But the Fascists couldn’t make an atom bomb-”

“A good thing, too, or they would have used it on us,” his superior broke in.

That seemed too likely even to rate a nod. Bokov went on with his own train of thought: “How good are their physicists? How much can they help us?”

“If they can’t, they’ll be sorry.” Cold anticipation filled Shteinberg’s voice. A German brought to the USSR who earned his keep might get good treatment. A German who didn’t…was gulag fodder. If he died in a camp, well, the gulags never ran short of bodies.

But Bokov found something else to worry about. “What about the physicists the Heydrichites snatched up, the ones England turned loose in Germany?” he said. “How much harm can they do? They’re probably better men than the ones we took.” He was resigned to the fact that the more capable German scientists and engineers had wanted to get captured by the Anglo-Americans, not the Red Army.

“They can’t make Heydrich a bomb.” Shteinberg sounded completely confident about that. “And if they can’t make him a bomb, they’re a nuisance, a propaganda coup, an embarrassment to what passes for England’s security system.”

“We understand propaganda. So do the Fascist jackals-Hitler made a point of it in Mein Kampf. But the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov shook his head. “Only when it bites them.” He went on, “Do you think the bandits can actually make them take their troops out of the zones they occupy? The last thing we need is a Germany where the Nazis are running free again.”

“You think so, do you?” Shteinberg’s irony had as many barbs as a porcupine’s quill. He was an NKVD man. He was a Soviet citizen. Though no doubt officially an unbeliever, he was a Jew. Even Jews who didn’t believe remained Jews; like most Russians, Bokov was convinced of that. The colonel continued, “I have no idea what the Anglo-Americans will do next. I often think they have no idea what they’ll do next.”

“But if they should walk away from the occupation?” Bokov persisted. “What do we do then?”

Moisei Shteinberg’s gaze put Bokov in mind of Murmansk winter. The junior officer was glad it wasn’t aimed straight at him. “In that case,” Shteinberg said quietly, “we do whatever we have to do.”

“No, no, no,” a democratic Congressman said, exasperation filling his voice. “No one is talking about pulling American troops out of Germany, and-”

“If the distinguished gentleman from New York doesn’t think anybody is talking about bringing our boys home from Germany, I suggest that he’d better pull his head out of the sand,” a Republican broke in.

Bang! Sam Rayburn rapped loudly for order. “That will be enough of that,” the Speaker of the House declared. “As a matter of fact, that’s too much of that.”

“Sorry, Mr. Speaker.” The Republican sounded anything but. Still, he observed the forms.

It’s getting rough, Jerry Duncan thought. After Pearl Harbor, foreign policy had been thoroughly bipartisan. Before Pearl Harbor, with the exception of a few war-related measures like Lend-Lease, foreign policy had barely been on the House’s radar screen (and nobody’d ever heard of radar). But now the two sides were going at each other like a bucket of crawdads.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the Democrat from New York said pointedly. “If I may take up my remarks from the point where I was interrupted…No one is talking about pulling our troops out of Germany. And even if we were to remove them for any reason, the Russians would not proceed to occupy the western zones. I can guarantee that, because-”

He got interrupted again, by a different Republican this time: “How can you guarantee it? Who told you? God? God’s the only one who knows what the Reds are liable to do next.”

Bang! Speaker Rayburn wielded the gavel again. “If you let the gentleman finish, maybe he’ll tell you how he can guarantee it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the Democrat repeated. “As a matter of fact, I was about to do that. The Russians won’t invade western Germany because we will drive them out with atom bombs, if necessary.”

“Or maybe we’ll just let them keep it,” another Democrat put in. “We know we can deal with Uncle Joe-we’ve been doing it since 1941. But does anybody want to let the Nazis get up off the mat after all we did to knock ’em flat? That’s what taking our troops out of Germany means, whether you like it or not.”

Jerry muttered under his breath. That was the administration’s trump card. Truman and his backers tried to make anybody who favored removing troops from Germany seem pro-Nazi. As far as Jerry was concerned, it wasn’t even slightly fair. “Mr. Speaker!” he called, jumping to his feet.

“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” Sam Rayburn intoned.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The problem is, thousands of our men are getting killed and maimed for no good reason. Thousands, Mr. Speaker, more than a year after this war was alleged to be over. And for what? For what? Are we one inch closer to putting down the German fanatics than we were the day after what was called V-E Day? If we are, where’s the evidence?”

“Are you asking me, Mr. Duncan?” Rayburn inquired. “I am not a military man, nor do I pretend to be.”

“I understand that, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “But the military men have no answers, either. They say so-and-so many fanatics have been killed. So-and-so many bunkers have been uncovered, and so-and-so many weapons have been captured or destroyed. And I say, so-and-so what? They don’t say the fanatics will quit any time soon. They don’t say the fanatics will quit at all-which seems wise, because they show no signs of quitting. But if these men show no signs of quitting, if we can’t put them down, what are we doing there? Besides wasting American lives and American taxpayers’ money, I mean?”

“I will speak to that,” the Democrat from New York said.

“By all means,” Rayburn told him. “Please go ahead.”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the New Yorker said.

He had even more reason to be polite than Jerry did. Jerry was on the other side; he wouldn’t get anything out of Sam Rayburn no matter what. But a Democrat who offended the Speaker of the House could find himself almost as unhappy about his office space and his committee assignments as your run-of-the-mill Republican. Like a lot of politicians, Rayburn had a long memory for slights.

The Democrat from New York turned to Jerry Duncan. “What we’re currently doing in our occupation zone-and what our allies are doing in theirs-is very simple. We are preventing Heydrich and the Nazis from taking over Germany again. President Truman thinks that’s a job worth doing. I agree with him.”

It was certainly the strongest argument the Democrats had. Nobody in the United States-hell, nobody in his right mind-had a good word to say about the Nazis. “Is this the best way to do that, though? Is this even close to the best way?” Jerry asked. “We were supposed to have knocked the Nazis over the head last May. How long will we have to stay in Germany? The Secretary of State talked about forty years. Do you want your grandsons shot at by German partisans in 1986? Do you think the American people will put up with spending forty years and God knows how many billions of dollars trying to drain a running sore?”

“If we leave, Heydrich wins. Do you want that?” the New Yorker said.

“If we stay, we throw away thousand-tens of thousands-of lives and those billions of dollars. Do you want that?” Jerry countered.

“We can’t let the fanatics drive us out,” the Democrat said.

“We can’t let them bleed us white, either,” Jerry Duncan said. “They pick their spots. They plant mines under a road or bombs in wreckage beside it. Our boys can’t pick up an ashtray without being afraid it’ll blow up in their hand. They can’t take a drink without being afraid it’s poisoned-look what the fanatics did to the Russians on New Year’s Eve. And when one of those maniacs with a truckload of explosives blows himself up, he costs Heydrich one man. He doesn’t cost him a truck, ’cause that’s one of ours, stolen. He takes out anywhere from a dozen to a hundred GIs. And we can’t stop it. By all the signs, we can’t even slow it down. Are you looking forward to forty more years of that?”

By the look on the Democratic Congressman’s face, he was looking forward to getting the hell out of there and having a long, stiff drink-or maybe three or four long, stiff drinks. “We are paying a price,” he said. Sam Rayburn jerked like a man who’d just found out he had a flea in his shorts. Democrats weren’t even supposed to admit that much. Doing his best to make amends, the New Yorker hurriedly went on, “But we’d pay a much higher price if we cut and run. We might pay the price of World War III.”

“So you’re saying it’s worthwhile to go right on bleeding till 1986?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t believe we’ll have to do that, or anything like that,” the Democrat from New York said. “I think we can defeat the fanatics in a reasonable amount of time. I think we will, too.”

Jerry pounced: “Then you’d favor a timetable for getting all our troops out of Germany?”

“I didn’t say that!” the New Yorker squawked.

“Sure sounded like you did,” Jerry said. By Sam Rayburn’s glower, he felt the same way.

“President Truman has said a timeline is unacceptable. I agree with him. A timeline just tells the enemy how long he has to wait before he wins,” the Democrat from New York said.

“In that case, you don’t really believe we can lick Heydrich’s goons in some reasonable time,” Jerry said. “You believe we’ll still be stuck there when that time is up. And you know what? I think we will, too. So what’s the point of waiting around and taking more casualties? Let’s bring the boys home now!”

Several people listening to the debate up in the gallery started to applaud. Sam Rayburn used his gavel. “Order! Order!” he called. They went on clapping. He banged the gavel some more. “We must have order,” he declared. “I will have the gallery cleared if this continues.”

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

“Wow!” Lou Weissberg eyed the swarms of GIs with grease guns and M-1s, the halftracks, and the Pershing heavy tanks surrounding the Nuremberg jail. Mustang fighters roared low overhead. “We could’ve captured half of Germany with a force this big.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truck was a deuce-and-a-half painted olive drab. Well, what the hell else would it be in Germany these days? The English used them. So did the French. So did the Russians. And the Jerries had used all the big American brutes they could capture. These babies beat the crap out of the Opels and the other hunks of tin the krauts had manufactured for themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Patterson didn’t look happy about coming before Congress. Jerry Duncan didn’t give a good goddamn about how the Secretary of War looked. “Let me get this straight, Mr. Secretary,” Jerry said. “We had this enormous enclave in Frankfurt for American officers and their dependents, constructed at taxpayer expense for several million dollars. Is that right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Soviet printer in Berlin had run off countless copies of the latest ukase from Moscow. The fellow must have, if one appeared on the desk of an officer as junior as Vladimir Bokov. With the order in hand, he went down the hall to see what his superior thought of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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