The Man with the Iron Heart

XX

More than a year and a half after the war in Europe was supposed to have ended, London remained a sorry, miserable place. Food was still rationed. So was coal. People wore greatcoats even indoors. Demobilized soldiers seemed to huddle in theirs as they ambled along looking for work-but jobs were as hard to come by as everything else in Britain these days.

Police Constable Cedric Mitchell counted himself lucky. He’d had his position reserved for him when he came back from the war-if he came back. Plenty of his mates hadn’t. He’d made it across the Channel from Dunkirk in a tugboat that got strafed by two Stukas. Then he’d gone to North Africa, and then on to the slow, bloody slog up the Italian boot. Now he had a Military Medal, a great puckered scar on the outside of his right thigh, and nightmares that woke him up shrieking and sweating once or twice a week.

He also had a new dream that wasn’t so nasty: to retire to Algiers or Naples or somewhere else with decent weather one day. Down in those countries, winter didn’t mean long, long nights and fogs and endless coughs and shivers. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but he damn well had.

“Italy’s wasted on the bloody Eyties,” he muttered, his breath adding to the mist that swirled in front of Parliament. “Fucking wasted.”

He walked his beat, back and forth, back and forth. The most lethal weapon he carried was a billy club. Thinking of that made him snort, which also added to the mist. No Jerry’d sneak up behind him and cut his throat here. No stinking dago who still loved Mussolini’d chuck a German potato-masher grenade into his foxhole. He didn’t need a Sten gun or a fighting knife or an entrenching tool-which could be a lot more lethal than a knife if you knew what to do with it, and he did.

A fellow in American pinks and greens-khaki trousers and olive-drab jacket-looked left before he stepped out into St. Margaret’s Street. “Watch yourself, Yank!” PC Mitchell shouted. The American froze. A truck rumbled past from the direction in which he hadn’t looked.

“Jesus!” he said. “Why don’t you guys drive the right way?”

“We think we do,” Mitchell answered. “And since you’re over here, you’d jolly well better think so, too.”

“That’s the third time the past two weeks I almost got myself creamed,” the Yank said.

Do you suppose you ought to suspect a trend? But Mitchell didn’t say it. Even though the Americans were two years late getting into the war-a year better than the last time around, at that-they’d done all right once they got going. He’d fought alongside them in Italy, so he knew they’d paid their dues. And Britain would have gone under without the supplies they sent. So…

“Well, have a care crossing,” was what did come out of Mitchell’s mouth. His sergeant would have been proud of him. He beckoned the American on. “Seems safe enough now.”

“It seemed safe enough before,” the Yank said darkly. But he made it from the houses of Parliament to Westminster Abbey without getting run down. Not that many cars were on the road. Petrol was still rationed, too, and hard to come by.

PC Mitchell wondered how long the country would need to get back to normal. Then he wondered if it ever would. India wanted to leave the Empire, and nothing short of another war seemed likely to keep it in. Without India, what was left wasn’t worth tuppence ha’penny. And there wouldn’t be a war on the far side of the world when Germany, only a long spit away, had turned into a running sore.

Blam! No sooner had Mitchell heard the explosion than he was flat on his belly. It hadn’t knocked him over-he’d hit the dirt. That was a hell of a big bomb going off somewhere not far enough away-not close enough to hurt him, but nowhere near far enough away.

Across the street, the Yank in pinks and greens had also flattened out like a hedgehog smashed by a lorry. He’s seen action, too, then, Mitchell thought as he started to scramble to his feet.

Lorries. No sooner had they crossed his mind than a big one-one of the kind the USA had built by the millions during the war-came tearing down the middle of the street toward him. It was as if the driver knew he ought to stay on the left but had trouble remembering. “Jesus!” Mitchell said, furiously blowing his whistle. Just what the poor sorry world needed: a drunken Yank driving a deuce-and-a-half like he’d just been let out of the asylum.

Then PC Cedric Mitchell got one glimpse of the driver’s face as the fellow swerved across the street toward Westminster Abbey. The bloke was a nutter, all right, but not that kind of nutter. Not barking mad but exalted mad. He had the face of someone about to do something marvelous, and the devil with the consequences. He had a face that made PC Mitchell hit the dirt again.

Right after Nazi fanatics bombed the Eiffel Tower, soldiers had appeared in front of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s and a few other places. Then, when nothing happened, they vanished again. Mitchell had most of a second to wish men with rifles and Sten guns were anywhere close by-or even that bobbies like him carried firearms.

Then the fanatic in the truck-and he couldn’t have been anything else-touched it off. The other explosion had been too close for comfort, frightening but not dangerous. This one…When this one went off, it was like getting stuck in the middle of the end of the world.

Much too much like that, in fact.

Blast picked PC Mitchell up and slammed him into something hard. “Oof!” he said, and then, “Ow!” He could barely hear himself, even though that second noise came closer to a shriek than a yelp. Blast had also smashed at his ears.

Had the Nazi struck at Parliament, Mitchell would have been nothing more than a smear on the sidewalk. But he’d steered his truck into Westminster Abbey before detonating it…and God help that poor bloody American in his smart uniform.

Broken glass clattered and clinked down around the bobby. A big, sharp shard shattered between his legs. He shuddered. A foot higher up and that one would have cut it right off him or left him with no need to shave for the rest of his days.

He snuffled as he staggered to his feet. A swipe at his nose with his sleeve showed he was bleeding there like a mad bastard. No great surprise: he realized he was lucky he was still breathing. Blast could tear up your lungs, kill you from the inside out, and not leave a mark on you. He’d seen that more than once, fighting north through Italy.

No broken ribs grated and stabbed when he moved. That was nothing but fool luck. And his bobby’s helmet had kept him from smashing his head. It wasn’t anywhere near so tough as an army-style tin hat, but evidently it was tough enough.

Across the street…Every English or British sovereign since William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The bulk of the structure dated from the reign of Henry III, in the late thirteenth century. Not all of it was ancient; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the last war was in the west nave.

No. Had been in the west nave. The Abbey’d come through the Blitz and the later unmanned German Doodlebugs and the even more terrifying V-2s without much damage. But Cedric Mitchell couldn’t imagine a building in the world that would have come through unscathed if a deuce-and-a-half stuffed to the gills with high explosives blew up alongside it. And Westminster Abbey hadn’t.

Through rags of mist and through much more roiling dust-literally, the dust of centuries-he saw the Abbey was nothing more than rubble and wreckage. But for the size of the pile, it might have been an Italian country-town church hit by shellfire. Flames started licking through the brick and stone and timber. Wood burned-Mitchell shook his head, trying to clear it. Of course wood burns, you bloody twit. So does anything with paint on it.

To his slack-jawed amazement, people came staggering and limping and crawling out of the rubble. A priest in bloodied vestments lurched up to him and said-well, something. Police Constable Mitchell cupped a scraped hand behind his right ear. “What’s that, mate?” he bawled. His mouth was all bloody, too. Was he also bleeding from the ears? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

“More caught in there,” the priest shouted, loud enough this time for Mitchell to make out the words. “Will you help?”

“I’ll do my damnedest,” Mitchell answered. The words didn’t seem blasphemous to him till later. The injured priest took them in stride.

Another wall went over with a crash that made Mitchell flinch. Anything loud enough for him to hear was liable to be frightening. He followed the priest across St. Margaret’s to the ruin. They both had to skirt the crater the exploding lorry had blown in the pavement. Water was rapidly filling it.

“Bloody Nazi must have wrecked the pipes,” Mitchell said. The priest, a pace in front of him, didn’t turn around. The other man’s ears must have suffered in the blast, too.

A woman’s legs lay under some bricks. Together, the bobby and the priest pulled some of them off her. Then Mitchell twisted away, wishing they hadn’t. What was left of her upper body wasn’t pretty.

“How do we get revenge for this?” he bawled into the priest’s ear.

“I don’t know,” the man answered. “It may be un-Christian of me to say so, but we need to do that, don’t we? Here and St. Paul’s-”

“That’s where the other one was?” PC Mitchell broke in. The priest nodded. Mitchell swore, not that that would do any good, either. Would anything? He didn’t think so.

Now Lou Weissberg had seen both Stars And Stripes and the International Herald-Trib. No English shutterbug seemed to have matched the photographer who’d snapped the Eiffel Tower in mid-topple. No picture of St. Paul’s splendid dome collapsing, nor of Westminster Abbey falling down. Only rubble and wreckage and bodies.

And rage. Some of it came from Clement Attlee’s Labour government. “The Germans show why their ancestors were named Vandals,” Attlee thundered-as well as a mild little bald man with a scrawny mustache could thunder. “Destruction and murder for the sake of destruction and murder will settle nothing, and will only rouse the hatred of the entire civilized world.”

That was good, as far as it went. A lot of Englishmen didn’t think it went nearly far enough. Winston Churchill, wandering in the wilderness after the electorate turned him out of office the year before, aimed his thunder at the Labour government. “How could these barbarous swine smuggle the tools of their filthy trade into our fair country?” he demanded. “How could they do so altogether undetected? ‘Someone had blundered,’ Tennyson said. The poet never claimed to know who. I hope we shall do rather better than that in getting to the bottom of our shameful failure here.”

Major Frank walked into Lou’s office while he was drowning his sorrows in coffee. Somehow this latest outrage didn’t make him want to run out and get crocked the way the fall of the Eiffel Tower had. Maybe you could get used to anything, even enormities. Wasn’t that a cheery thought?

Howard Frank pointed to the picture of the ruins of St. Paul’s on the front page of the Herald-Trib. “Well, the fuckers got the frogs and they got the limeys,” he said. “Next thing you know, they’ll make it to Washington and blow up the Capitol.”

Lou eyed him. “If they wait till the new Congress gets sworn in next January before they try it, they’ll do the country a big favor.”

“Now, now.” Frank clucked at him like a mother reproaching a little boy. “We have to respect the will of the people.”

“My ass,” Lou said, and then, a long beat later, “sir.”

“Dammit, we really do,” Major Frank said. “If we don’t, what’s the difference between us and the fucking Nazis?”

“What did Trotsky tell one of the guys who followed him? ‘Everybody has the right to be stupid, Comrade, but you abuse the privilege.’ Something like that, anyhow,” Lou said. “Well, the American people are abusing the privilege right now, goddammit, and we’ll all end up paying ’cause they are.”

“Treason,” Frank said sadly.

“Damn straight,” Lou agreed. “Call the MPs and haul me off to Leavenworth. I’ll be a hell of a lot safer in Kansas than I am here.”

“If they don’t get to take me away, they don’t get to take you, either,” Frank said. “And I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Ha! That’s what you think,” Lou told him. “Fucking isolationists in Congress won’t give Truman two bits to keep us here. We’ll all be heading home pretty damn quick. Got a cigarette on you?”

“You give me all this crap I don’t need and then you bum butts offa me?” Major Frank shook his head in mock disbelief. “I oughta tell you to geh kak afen yam.” Despite the earthy Yiddish phrase, he tossed a pack down onto the newspapers on Lou’s desk.

When Lou picked it up and started to extract a cigarette, he paused because his eye caught a phrase he’d missed before. “Here’s Heydrich, the smarmy son of a bitch: ‘Thus we remind the oppressors that the will to freedom still burns strong in Germany.’ And we’re gonna turn our backs on this shit and just go home?” He did light up then, and sucked in smoke as hard as he could.

Frank reclaimed the pack. He lit a cigarette of his own. “Way you talk, I’m one of the jerks who want to run away. I’m on your side, Lou.”

“Yeah, I know, sir. Honest, I do. But-” Lou’s wave was expansive enough to cover two continents’ worth of discontent and the Atlantic between them. “Do these people want to fight another war in fifteen or twenty years? Do they think the Nazis won’t take over again if we quit? Or the Russians if the Nazis don’t?”

“What we need is Heydrich’s head nailed to the wall,” Howard Frank said. “If we get rid of him and things start settling down, maybe we can make the occupation work after all.”

“That’d be something,” Lou agreed. “Not much luck yet down in the mountains, though. A few weapons caches, but those are all over the fucking country. No Alpine Redoubt-or if there is, it’s as close to invisible as makes no difference.”

“Those may not be the same thing,” Frank said thoughtfully.

“Huh,” Lou said, also thoughtfully, and then, “You’ve got a point. Redoubt or not, though, you know what Germany is these days?”

“Sure, a fucking mess,” Frank answered.

“I mean besides that,” Lou said. “It’s like one of those small-town china shops with a sign in the window that goes YOU DROP IT, YOU BREAK IT, YOU PAY FOR IT. And we dropped it, and we broke it, and-”

“We’re paying for it. Boy, are we ever,” Major Frank said. “But what the folks back home can’t see is, we’ll end up paying even more later on if we bail out now. Hell, could you see that if your kid came home in a box a year and a half after Hitler blew his brains out and the Nazis surrendered?”

“I don’t know, sir-honest to God, I don’t.” Lou stubbed out his cigarette, which had got very small. All the butts in the ashtray would get mixed in with the general trash and then thrown out. And once the stuff got beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, the krauts would pick through it like packrats and get hold of every gram of tobacco and every scrap of crust of burnt toast. Times were tough here. That it was the Jerries’ own goddamn fault made it no less true.

“Well, there you are, then.” Frank had kept on with the conversation while Lou’s wits wandered.

“Yeah, here I am,” Lou agreed. “And you know what else? No matter how fucked up this lousy place is, I need to be here. So do you. So do we-all of us. But how much longer will all the big brains back in Washington let us do what we gotta do?”

“You get that one right, Lou, you win the sixty-four dollars,” Howard Frank said.

Berlin was a ravaged city: no two ways about it. And yet, Vladimir Bokov had come to realize, it could have been worse. The Wehrmacht had done the bulk of its fighting off to the east, trying to hold the Red Army away from the German capital. Blocks in Berlin-especially blocks around the seat of the Nazi government-had got smashed up, certainly. But not every block, every house, had been fought over till one side or the other could fight no more. In that, Berlin differed from Stalingrad or Kharkov or Warsaw or Budapest or Konigsberg or…a hundred or a thousand other places, large and small, on the Eastern Front.

The Germans would be able to rebuild Berlin faster because of that. The women and kids and stooped old men chucking broken bricks into bins one by one had only millions to dispose of, not tens of millions the way they would have if every building had been wrecked. Captain Bokov grimaced. The Soviet line proclaimed that the German people weren’t the USSR’s enemies: only the former Hitlerite regime and the Heydrichite bandits who wanted to resurrect it.

Bokov wasn’t stupid enough to criticize the Soviet line. An NKVD officer who did something like that-assuming anyone could be so idiotic-would soon discover just how far north of the Arctic Circle his country built camps. But, even if he wouldn’t say so out loud, Bokov was a lot more suspicious of the German people than Soviet propaganda suggested he ought to be.

That kid with the peach fuzz and the drippy nose and the mittens full of holes who was chucking rubble into a bucket…was he old enough to have toted a rifle or a Schmeisser the last year of the declared war? Sure he was. The Volkssturm had sucked in plenty of younger guys. And the scrawny bastard working next to him, the one with the gray stubble and the limp…What had he done before he got hurt? He warily watched Bokov, letting his eyes drift down or away whenever the NKVD man looked in his direction.

He probably wasn’t wearing an explosive vest right now-he was too skinny. But if he put one on, with a raggedy greatcoat to camouflage it, and went looking for a crowd of Russians…No, the only Germans Bokov was sure he could trust close to him were naked women. Even then, he’d heard stories that some of them deliberately spread disease to put occupiers out of action.

He didn’t know that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen that the Germans deserved their reputation for thoroughness. No one who’d been through one of their murder factories could possibly doubt it. Why wouldn’t they use infected prostitutes as a weapon?

Then a bullet cracked past his head. He forgot about subtle weapons like syphilitic whores. Not a goddamn thing subtle about rifle fire. He heard the report as he threw himself flat in the wreckage-strewn street. Had to be a sniper shooting from long range, if the round beat its sound by so much.

Another bullet pierced the air where he’d stood a moment before. It spanged off a paving stone behind him. A woman screeched and clutched at her arm. The ricochet must have got her.

Three or four Red Army soldiers, most of them carrying PPSh submachine guns, trotted purposefully in the direction from which the gunfire had come. The Germans in the work gang-except the wounded woman-started making themselves scarce. They knew the Soviet Union took hostages when somebody fired at its troops. They knew the Russians shot hostages, too.

Bokov didn’t have time to worry about that right now. He wriggled behind the burnt-out, rusting carcass of a German halftrack that had sat there since the last battle. One of these days, somebody would haul it off for scrap metal, but that hadn’t happened yet.

He waited for another shot. Unlike a soft-skinned vehicle, the halftrack really would protect him against small-arms fire. But the sniper didn’t shoot at Bokov or at the Red Army men now going after him. Since he’d failed, he seemed to want to get away and shoot at somebody else another time.

Cautiously, Captain Bokov peered out from behind the halftrack’s dented front bumper. If the sniper had outguessed him, if the son of a bitch had drawn a bead on the front end of the halftrack and was waiting for him to show himself…Well, in that case Bokov’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

But no. Bokov’s sigh reminded him he’d been holding his breath. The soldiers were heading for a block of flats that had to be almost a kilometer away. Yes, a marksman could hit from that range. Bokov didn’t like turning into a target-which wouldn’t matter a kopek’s worth to the damned Heydrichite with the scope-sighted rifle.

No more gunfire from the distant apartment block. Bokov stood up straight and brushed dust and mud off his uniform. He started toward the flats himself. His eyes flicked back and forth. If the sniper missed him again, he wanted to know where to dive next.

More soldiers came around a corner. They also headed for the apartments. They went in. Germans started coming out. Any of them over the age of twelve might have been the gunman. Bokov didn’t think any of them was. If the shooter wasn’t long gone, he would have been surprised.

A senior sergeant who’d been with the first bunch walked up to him. Saluting, the man said, “Well, Comrade Captain, we have enough of these bastards for the firing squads.”

“Good enough,” Bokov answered. “Did your men find any weapons or anti-Soviet propaganda in the flats?”

“No weapons, sir.” The underofficer suddenly looked apprehensive. “We weren’t really searching for propaganda. We could go back….”

“No, never mind,” Bokov said. The sergeant’s sigh of relief wasn’t much different from the one he’d let out himself behind the German halftrack. “If you had found something like that, it might have told us who’d want to harbor one of the bandits. Since you didn’t…” He shrugged. “Question the lot of them. If you don’t learn anything interesting, give them to the firing squads. If you do, bring the ones who know something over to NKVD headquarters and execute the rest. Have you got that?”

“Da, Comrade Captain!” With another sharp salute, the senior sergeant repeated Bokov’s orders back to him. He wore several decorations. Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d led a company during the war. More than a few underofficers had, casualties among lieutenants and captains being what they were. His look and manner proclaimed him a competent man.

“All right, then. Carry on,” the NKVD officer said.

“Da,” the sergeant repeated. Then he added something he didn’t have to: “Glad the son of a bitch missed you, sir. This kind of crap just goes on and on. There doesn’t seem to be any end for it, does there? And too damned often we’ve got to carry off the poor bastard who stopped one. That’s no good, you know? We won this fucking war…didn’t we?”

Bokov could have sent him to the gulag for those last two imperfectly confident words. He could have, but he didn’t. The senior sergeant made it plain he cared whether an NKVD man lived or died. From a Red Army trooper, that was close to miraculous. By the way they talked, most Soviet soldiers had more sympathy for Heydrichites than they did for Chekists.

When Bokov got back to his office, Moisei Shteinberg greeted him with, “Well, Volodya, I hear you had an adventure this morning.”

“Afraid so, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov agreed. “Sniper missed me-missed me twice, in fact. He got away afterwards, dammit. The Fascist bandits will probably reprimand him for bad shooting.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” Shteinberg was so serious, he destroyed Bokov’s small pleasure at his own joke. After a moment, the colonel went on, “We’ve been lucky over here for a while now. The Heydrichites haven’t used any radium against us, and they haven’t pulled off any outrages against us, either, the way they did in Paris and London.”

“How long can that last?” Bokov wondered aloud.

Colonel Shteinberg’s eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and narrow (not slanted like a Tartar’s-or like those of so many Russians, Bokov included-but definitely narrow). They were also very, very knowing. A Jew’s eyes, in other words. Bokov had never thought of them that way before, but when he did the notion fit like a rifle round in its chamber. Yes, a Jew’s eyes.

After studying Bokov a long moment, the Jew-the senior NKVD officer-gently inquired, “Have you no confidence in the ability of the Soviet system to defend itself against the Fascist bandits?”

What a minefield lay under one innocent-sounding question. “I have perfect confidence that our system will triumph in the end.” Captain Bokov answered with the greatest of care-and also took care not to show how careful he was. “But no one can know ahead of time the road by which it will triumph, or how strongly the reactionaries will be able to resist.”

“Khorosho, Volodya. Ochen khorosho.” The smile that flickered across Shteinberg’s face said he appreciate the response no less than he might have savored a particularly lovely passage in a new Shostakovich symphony. “Still, even if it’s a good answer, it doesn’t tell us how to keep such disasters from happening to us.”

Shrugging, Bokov said, “We work hard. We hope we stay lucky.” He paused, wondering whether to press his own luck. With Colonel Shteinberg pleased with him, he decided to: “And maybe we really ought to work more with the Anglo-Americans.”

No matter how pleased Shteinberg was, he shook his head without the least hesitation. “Nyet,” he said firmly. “Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. It won’t happen, and you’ve got no idea how much trouble you’ll end up in if you suggest it to anybody but me. I keep trying to tell you that, but you don’t want to listen.”

“All right, Comrade Colonel.” By the way Bokov said it, it wasn’t, but his superior wouldn’t come down on him for that. “Still seems a shame, though…”

“Sending a good officer to Kolyma would be a shame, too,” Shteinberg observed. Since Kolyma, in far eastern Siberia, was one of those places that lay well above the Arctic Circle, Bokov decided not to press the argument any further. Too bad, but you did have to live if they’d let you.

“Stand clear!” the demolitions guy yelled.

Bernie Cobb figured he was already well beyond anything the charge in the throat of the old mine could throw. He backed up a few more paces just the same. Some chances he got paid-not enough, but paid-to take. This wasn’t one of them.

Several other GIs also retreated a few steps. The first sergeant with the detonator looked around one more time. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and rammed the plunger home.

Boom! Bernie had heard a lot of explosions like this one. He watched dust and a few rocks fly out of the mouth of the shaft. None of the rocks came anywhere near his buddies and him. They all knew how far to back up by now.

As the dust settled, he saw that the shaft was closed, presumably for good. He nodded to himself. The fellow with the explosives knew what he was doing, which was reassuring. If you handled that shit, you needed to know what was going on. Anyone who didn’t would end up slightly dead, or more than slightly. And a butterfingers was liable to take some ordinary dogfaces with him, too.

The thought had hardly crossed Bernie’s mind before something out of the ordinary happened. Most of the time-all the time up till now-there’d been the explosion, and the roar as the mouth of the shaft fell in, and that was it.

Except that wasn’t it, not today. Things down underground kept falling over. It was like listening to a house of cards collapse, if you could imagine cards made of rock and each about the size of a bus.

“Holy Moses!” said one of the GIs standing alongside of Bernie.

“Son of a bitch!” another one added, meaning about the same thing.

“Jesus H. Christ!” said the first sergeant with the detonator. “I figured this was a little blind shaft like all the others I closed off. Sure don’t seem like it. God only knows what all’s under there. We sure as shit can’t get at it from here any more-you can sing that in church.”

For a bad moment, Bernie’d feared the top kick would order the men to get out their entrenching tools and start digging through the rubble clogging the top of the shaft. But, for a wonder, the man had better sense. Maybe he realized he’d get the shaft if he tried giving an order like that.

“Whatever was in there, you’re right-we won’t get at it now,” Bernie said, to drive home the point.

“Nope,” the demolitions man agreed. “Sounded like a whole bunch of dominoes falling over down below.”

“Yeah. It did!” Bernie grinned. The other guy’d come up with a better figure of speech than he had himself. Somewhere back in the States, an English teacher would have been happy if only she knew.

“Maybe we could use POWs to dig it out,” the first sergeant said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Bernie didn’t want to come right out and say he didn’t think that was such a hot idea. He let his tone of voice do it for him.

And the demolitions man’s rueful chuckle said Bernie had got the message to Garcia. “Or maybe not,” the explosives expert said. “Some of those guys hate the Nazis worse’n we do. Can’t blame ’em, either-the Nazis got their asses shot off.”

“Sure, Sarge. But most of the POWs who hate the Nazis hate ’em because they lost the war, not because they started in the first place,” Bernie said.

“I know. But I wasn’t done yet,” the demolitions man answered. “Some of ’em hate the Nazis, like I said before. But there’s others-if they saw a chance to duck into a tunnel and run straight to Heydrich’s assholes, they’d do it like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Boy, would they ever. So maybe putting POWs to work here ain’t the smartest notion since Tom Edison came up with the fucking light bulb.”

Bernie grinned at him. “You find a couple of those fucking light bulbs, pass one on to me. All I’ve seen is the regular kind.”

“Shit, you don’t need a special light bulb to fuck these kraut broads,” the first sergeant answered. “A pack of Luckies’ll do it, or a few cans of K-rats. You can’t get your ashes hauled here, you ain’t half tryin’, man.”

Since Bernie’d discovered the same thing, he would have left it right there. But one of the guys in his squad-a new draftee, poor devil-said, “What about the orders against waddayacallit-against, uh, fraternization?” He pronounced the word with the excessive care of somebody who wasn’t sure what it meant.

“Well, what about ’em?” the first sergeant returned. “Look, buddy, nobody’s gonna make you fuck one of these German gals. But if you want to, they’re pushovers. Hell, after the Jerries knocked France out of the war, the French broads lay down and spread for ’em like nobody’s business. Now we’re the winners. And if you see how skinny some of these German gals are, you’ll know why they put out, too.”

“It’s against orders,” the new guy said. Some people were like that: if somebody told them what to do and what not to, they followed through right on the button. And they were happy acting that way. Bernie’d seen it before: it saved them the trouble of thinking for themselves. He figured a hell of a lot of Germans worked that way. What else did such a good job of explaining how they’d lined up behind Hitler?

“Fine. It’s against orders.” The demolitions man spoke with exaggerated patience. “I look at it this way. If the broads ain’t playing Mata Hari with me-or if they are, long as I don’t tell ’em anything they shouldn’t know-I’m gonna have me a good time. And the way things are nowadays, even if I come down venereal, so what? A couple of shots in the ass and I’m ready to hop in the sack again. Hell of an age we live in, ain’t it?”

“You come down venereal, the brass’ll give you a bad time,” the draftee observed.

“Sure they will-if they hear about it,” the first sergeant agreed indulgently. “Some people, though, some people know a corpsman or a sawbones who’ll give ’em some of this penicillin shit and not bother filling out all the paperwork afterwards, know what I mean?”

After some very visible thought, the new guy decided he did know. By his expression, he hadn’t been so surprised since his mother regretfully informed him the stork didn’t bring babies and leave them under cabbage leaves. And how long ago had that been? Maybe six months before he got his Greetings letter from Selective Service? Bernie wouldn’t have been surprised.

But what the kid knew about the facts of life wasn’t Bernie’s problem. This underground collapse was, or could be. “Maybe we don’t use POWs to find out what happened under there,” he said. “We ought get there some kind of way, though.”

“Bulldozer crew. Nah, a coupla dozers,” the first sergeant said. “Beats working. Those mothers can dig faster’n a company’s worth of guys with picks and shovels.”

That idea Bernie did like. “You have the pull to get ’em?” he asked.

“Oh, hell, yes,” the demolitions man answered. “The first sergeant in an engineering battalion, he owes me from before the surrender. I tell him we need a couple of D-7s up here, they’ll come pronto. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”

Bernie snorted. “I been called a whole lotta things since I got sucked into the Army, but never pretty. Not till now, anyway.”

The demolitions man eyed him. “Yeah, well, I can see why.” The other guys in Bernie’s squad chuckled. Even the new draftee thought that was funny.

“It’s okay. You won’t put Lana Turner out of business any time soon, either,” Bernie said. The first sergeant grinned at him. They’d probably never see each other again, so they could both sling the sass without getting hot and bothered.

It also wouldn’t bother Bernie if the bulldozers uncovered something juicy. He didn’t expect it-he’d given up expecting anything much-but it wouldn’t bother him one bit.