The Man with the Iron Heart

II

Reinhard Heydrich hardly noticed the distant put-put from the generator any more. He hardly noticed the faint smell of the exhaust, either. He hoped he-or somebody-would notice if that smell got stronger. The ventilation system down here was supposed to be as good as anybody knew how to make it, but carbon monoxide could still get you if your luck turned sour.

His mouth twisted. This past month, Germany’s luck had turned sour. The Fuhrer, dead by his own hand! Himmler dead, too, also by his own hand! The whole country prostrate, surrendered, occupied from east and west. Almost all the important officials of State and Party in the Western Allies’ hand; or, worse, in the Russians’.

I’m on my own, Heydrich thought. It’s up to me. If they think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost. If we think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost.

Thinking of the Western Allies’ hands, and of the Russians’, made him glance down at his own. The light from the bare bulb was harsh. Even so, he was amazed how pale he’d got, this past year underground. He’d always been a man who rejoiced in the outdoors. He’d always been a man who tanned as if someone had rubbed his skin with walnut dye, too.

When he proposed this scheme to Himmler, when he proposed himself to head it, he hadn’t grasped everything it entailed. If you were going to fight a secret war, a guerrilla war, against enemy occupiers, you had to disappear yourself. And so…he had.

“I’ll come out in the sun again when Germany comes out in the sun again,” he murmured.

“What was that, Herr Reichsprotektor?” Hans Klein asked. His onetime driver was with him still. After the assassination attempt in Prague, Heydrich knew he could count on the veteran noncom. Klein had loudly and profanely turned down promotion to officer’s rank. The mere idea affronted him.

“Nothing.” Heydrich said it again, to make himself believe it: “Nothing.” But it wasn’t. He shouldn’t have let Klein see what was going on inside his head, even for a heartbeat.

The Oberscharfuhrer had too much sense to push it. Instead, he asked, “Anything interesting in the news bulletins?”

Of course they monitored as many broadcasts as they could. Their own signals were few and far between, to keep from leaving tracks for the hunters. Since the Reich collapsed, they had to do the best they could with enemy propaganda and the military traffic they could pick up and decipher. Heydrich fiddled with some papers. “They’ve found paintings and some other art that Goring salted away.”

That made Klein chuckle. “The Fat One wasn’t in it for the money, but he sure was in it for what he could grab.”

“Ja.” Heydrich admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But when I said he salted stuff away, I meant it. They took this art out of an abandoned salt mine.”

“Oh. Scheisse.” Hans Klein might not have much book learning, but he was nobody’s fool. “Does that mean they’ll start poking around other mines?”

“I hope not,” Heydrich answered. “We have ways to keep them from finding the entrance.” He sounded confident. He had to, to keep Klein’s spirits up. But he knew things could go wrong. Anyone who’d survived in Germany knew that. And, of course, one traitor was worth any number of unlucky chances. He had endless escape routes, and didn’t want to use any of them.

“What else is in the news?” Klein inquired. Maybe he didn’t want to think about everything that could go tits-up, either.

“The Americans say they’ve almost finished conquering Okinawa.” Heydrich had needed to pull out an atlas to find out just where Okinawa lay. He had one to pull out; when Germans set out to do something, they damned well did it properly.

His former driver only sniffed. “They’ve been saying that for a while now. The little yellow men are making them pay.”

“They are,” Heydrich agreed. “And these suicide planes…If you can use an airplane to sink a warship, that’s a good bargain.”

“Not one I’d want to make myself,” Klein said.

“It all depends,” Heydrich said in musing tones. “It truly does. A man who expects to die is hard to defend against. The Russians taught us that, and the Japanese lesson is a different verse of the same song. We have men dedicated enough to serve that way, don’t you think?”

“You mean it.” Klein considered the question as a senior sergeant might. “Well, sir, I expect we could, as long as they saw they were taking a bunch of those other bastards with ’em.”

“Our enemies need to understand we are in earnest,” Heydrich said. “One thing to win a war. Quite another to win the peace afterwards. They think they can turn Germany into whatever they please. The Anglo-Americans go on about democracy-as if we want another Weimar Republic! And the Russians…”

“Ja. The Russians,” Klein echoed mournfully. One thing Stalin’s men were doing in the lands they’d occupied: they were proving that all the frantic warnings Nazis propagandists had pumped out were understatements. And who would have believed that beforehand?

“Well.” Heydrich pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “We have some more planning to do. And then-to work!”

Bernie Cobb had played baseball in high school. All the same, nobody would ever confuse him with Ty. For one thing, he was no Georgia Peach; he’d grown up outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. For another, even in that light air he was no threat with the bat, though he could field some.

He wasn’t as fast as he had been then. He’d frozen his feet in the Battle of the Bulge, and they still weren’t back to a hundred percent. Instead of short or center, he played third in the pickup game outside of Erlangen.

The town, northwest of Nuremberg, had come through the war pretty well. The way it looked to Bernie, it wasn’t big enough to plaster. Maybe it had a few more people than Albuquerque-which ran about 35,000-but that didn’t make it any threat to New York City, or even Munich.

They played on a more or less mowed meadow just outside of town. The pitcher on the other side claimed he’d spent three years in the low minors. He could throw hard, but he needed a road map and a compass to find the plate. Maybe that was why he never got to the high minors. Or maybe he was talking through his hat.

A fastball at Bernie’s ribs made him spin out of the box. “Ball four! Take your base!” the ump bawled. He was a first sergeant with a face like a clenched fist. He wasn’t much of an umpire, but nobody had the nerve to tell him so.

Tossing the bat aside, Bernie trotted down to first. “Way to go, man!” one of his teammates yelled. Bernie was just glad he hadn’t got drilled. A couple of GIs clapped. They weren’t buddies of his; maybe they had money on his team.

Along with the American soldiers were a few Germans: mostly kids out for candy or gum or C-rats or women out for whatever they could get. Fraternizing with them was against regulations, which didn’t stop it. Bernie hadn’t come down venereal, but not from lack of effort. He knew half a dozen guys who had. They hardly cared-not the way they would have while the war was on. They only wanted to go home. If they couldn’t do that, they wanted to fuck. Well, so did Bernie. Why not? Even if you caught something, pills or shots could cure you quick nowadays.

No more than three or four German men watched the game. One was an old fart in a suit, a town councillor out to see what the conquerors did in their spare time. Another was talking to a GI Bernie knew, a guy who spoke no German. Maybe the kraut had spent time in the States before the war.

“Strike!” the ump yelled. Bernie thought the pitch was high by six inches, but what could you do?

The pitcher threw over to first. Bernie dove back to the bag. You stupid asshole, he thought as he picked himself up. With my bad feet, am I gonna run on you?

“Ball!”

To Bernie, that pitch looked better than the one before. If he said so, the umpire would probably rip out his spleen.

He took a very modest lead. The pitcher stared over at him anyway. Bernie ignored the big dumb rube. There was one other German guy in the crowd. He was the same age as most of the GIs, which meant he’d likely been a soldier himself, but he wore baggy, nondescript civvies. They weren’t what made Bernie notice him as he pressed his way in among the soldiers back of third base. The guy had the worst thousand-yard stare Bernie’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus.

“Ball!” the ump said. And it was a ball-it sent the batter staggering away from the plate like the last one to Bernie a couple of minutes before.

Blam! Bernie flattened out before he knew he’d done it. It might be July, but he still had his combat reflexes. An explosion made him hit the dirt faster than a high hard one at his ear.

“What the fuck?” That was the first baseman, sprawled a few feet away from him. “Christ, we playin’ on a goddamn minefield?”

Bernie cautiously raised his head. He didn’t have a sidearm, let alone his M1. The war was over, dammit.

It was sure over for some of the guys who’d been watching behind third. Over permanently. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. Half of somebody’s left leg bled ten feet in front of the low mound. Other gruesome souvenirs spattered the left side of the infield.

Screams rose from wounded American soldiers. So did cries for a medic. Bernie ran over to do what he could for the injured men. It wasn’t much. He didn’t carry wound dressings or a morphine syrette, the way he would have while the war was still cooking. By the helpless looks and muffled profanity that came from the other unhurt GIs, neither did anybody else.

Bernie crouched by a guy who was clutching at a bloody leg. “You want a tourniquet on that?” Bernie asked him. He could improvise one with a shoelace and a stick. When the hell would an ambulance show up?

“I don’t think so. I ain’t bleedin’ that bad,” the other answered. In a wondering voice, he added, “He blew himself up.”

“Huh?” Bernie said brilliantly. “Who?”

“That fuckin’ kraut. He blew himself to kingdom come. Blew half of us with him, too, the goddamn son of a bitch.”

“He didn’t step on a mine? Somebody didn’t step on a mine?”

A siren warbled, approaching from the direction of downtown Erlangen. The warble meant it was a German vehicle. Bernie wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not right now. The guy with the gash in his leg went on, “Nah, not a chance. Look at what’s left of the asshole.”

Not much was, and even less between the knees and the neck. Bernie gulped and looked away in a hurry. He’d hoped he would never see shit like that again. No such luck.

Just as the ambulance pulled up, the wounded GI yanked what looked like a tenpenny nail out of his leg. “Jesus!” he said, staring at three inches of pointed iron. “The mother didn’t just have explosives. He had his own fuckin’ shrapnel!”

“That’s nuts,” Bernie said. “Who ever heard of a kamikaze Nazi?”

“Maybe you better put somethin’ around my leg,” the other guy said. “It’s bleeding more now that I pulled that sucker out.”

“Okay.” Bernie sacrificed a leather shoelace to the tourniquet.

Three krauts hopped out of the ambulance. They stared at the carnage in disbelief. “Der Herr Jesus!” one of them blurted. Another one crossed himself. Then they got to work. Their unflustered competence made Bernie guess they’d been Wehrmacht medics up till a few weeks earlier.

One Jerry spoke some English. Unhurt and slightly wounded men followed his orders as if he were an American officer. He plainly knew what he was doing.

But when he started to pick up the remains of the fellow who’d blown himself up, the sergeant who’d been doing umpire duty pushed him away. “Leave what’s left of that bastard right where he’s at,” the noncom said.

“Warum?” the German asked, startled out of his English. He got it back a moment later: “Why?”

“On account of our guys are gonna have to try and figure out how come the shithead went kablooie,” the sergeant said. “It’s a murder, right? You don’t fuck around with the scene of a crime.” More to himself than to the guy from the ambulance, he added, “The stuff you pick up from mystery stories.”

How much of what he said did the German get? Enough so he didn’t go near what was left of the human bomb, anyhow. Bernie Cobb understood all of it. It made much more sense than he wished it did.

Lou Weissberg wanted to go back to the States. He didn’t want to examine any more mangled flesh. He didn’t want to smell the sick-sweet stench of death any more, either. (Not that you could avoid it in Germany, not in towns where the Army Air Force or the RAF had come to call…and in a lot of places the Army’d gone through, too.)

That stench was mild here, two days after the bombing with most of the dead meat taken away. Mild or not, it was there, and it made his stomach want to turn over. Toby Benton’s mouth twisted, too. “Hell of a thing-uh, sir,” the sergeant said.

“You better believe it.” Lou’s nod was jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”

“Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did-more stuff too-but not that much more.”

“Mm.” Lou hadn’t thought of it in those terms, which didn’t mean the ordnance sergeant was wrong. “If you were out to turn somebody into a walking bomb, how would you go about it?”

“Same way these fuckers did, I reckon,” Benton replied. “The Nazis bite the big one, but nobody ever said they couldn’t handle shit like this. Explosives-around the guy’s middle, I guess, so they wouldn’t show so much. Scrap metal, nails, whatever the hell for shrapnel. A battery. A button to push. And kapow!”

“Yeah. Kapow!” Lou’s echo sounded hollow, even to himself.

“What do we do about shit like this, Lieutenant?” Benton asked. “If this asshole wasn’t just your garden-variety nut, seems to me like we got ourselves some trouble. The way we fight is, we want to live, and we want to make sure the other sons of bitches don’t. Always figured the krauts played by the same rules. But if all of a sudden-like they don’t give a shit no more, sure as hell makes ’em harder to defend against.”

“I know.” Lou clenched his fist and pounded it against the side of his thigh. He didn’t notice he was doing it till it started to hurt. Then he quit. “God damn it to hell, Toby, the war in Europe is over. They surrendered. We can do whatever we want to their people, and they’ve got to know it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Benton agreed. “That’s how come I hope he was a nut. If they’ve got waddayacallems-partisans…Russians and Yugoslavs gave old Adolf a fuck of a lot of grief with guys like that. I guess even the froggies caused him some trouble.” After hitting the beach on D-Day, his opinion of France and things French could have been higher.

“Well, it’s not my call, thank God,” Lou said. “I haven’t got the stomach for lining rows of people up against a wall and shooting ’em. Even Germans-except camp guards and mothers like that.” His voice went ferocious. He’d done Latin in college before the war, and remembered coming across the Roman Emperor who wished all mankind had one neck, so he could get rid of it at a single stroke. Back then, he’d thought that was one of the most savage things he’d ever heard. He felt the same way about SS men himself these days.

“Shit, sir, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was only them. But all these chickenshit civilians and Wehrmacht guys who swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t know squat about any concentration camps…No, sirree, not them. My ass!” Benton made as if to retch, and for once the death reek had nothing to do with it.

“Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “And the real pisser is, they expect us to believe that crap. How dumb do they think we are?” He knew the answer to that: your average German-your average German with a guilty conscience-thought your average American was pretty goddamn dumb. By the way some U.S. officers were willing to use Nazis to help get the towns they were in charge of back on their feet, maybe your average German hit the nail right on the head, too.

“You gonna talk with the town councillor who was here?” Benton asked. “What the hell’s his handle, anyway?”

“Herpolsheimer,” Lou said with a certain gloomy relish. “Anton Herpolsheimer. Jeez, what a monicker. Yeah, I’ll talk to him. Don’t know what he would’ve seen that our GIs didn’t, but maybe something.”

Herr Herpolsheimer’s house stood next to the post office on the Hugenottenplatz. Once upon a time, the Germans had taken in persecuted French Protestants instead of clobbering them. Worth remembering they could do such things…Lou supposed.

“Hey, Joe, got any gum?” a kid maybe eight or nine years old called in pretty fair English as Lou and Sergeant Benton neared the house. Benton ignored him. Lou shook his head. He wasn’t feeling sympathetic to Germans, even little ones, right then. The kid dropped back into German for an endearment: “Stinking Yankee kikes!”

“Lick my ass, you little shitface,” Lou Weissberg growled in the same language. “Get the fuck out of here before I give you a noodle”-German slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He might have done it, too; his hand dropped toward the.45 on his belt before he even thought.

The kid turned white-no, green. How many uncomprehended insults had he got away with? He damn well didn’t get away with this one. He disappeared faster than a V-2 blasting off.

“Wow!” Benton said admiringly. “What did you call him?”

“About a quarter of what he deserved.” Lou pushed on, his thin face closed tight. The ordnance sergeant had the sense not to push him.

Lou took some satisfaction in banging on Anton Herpolsheimer’s front door. If the town councillor thought the American Gestapo was here to grill him…it wouldn’t break Lou’s heart.

When the door didn’t open fast enough to suit him, he banged some more, even louder. “We gonna kick it down?” Sergeant Benton didn’t sound bothered.

“If we need to.” By then Lou looked forward to it.

But the door swung wide then. A tiny, ancient woman in a black dress-housekeeper? — squinted up at the two Americans. “You wish…?” she asked in a rusty voice, as politely as if they were holding teacups with extended pinkies.

“We must see Herr Herpolsheimer at once,” Lou said. If she tried to stall, she’d be sorry, and so would the councillor with the funny name.

But she didn’t. She nodded and said, “Jawohl, mein Herr. Please wait. I will bring him.” Then she hurried away.

“‘Jawohl,’ huh?” Sergeant Benton didn’t know much German, but he followed that. “The way she talks, Lieutenant, you’re one heap big honcho.”

“I should be-not ’cause I’m me, but ’cause I’m an American,” Lou said. “We tell these German frogs to hop, they’d better be on the way up before they ask, ‘How high?’”

“Now you’re talkin’!” Benton said enthusiastically. Lou nudged him-here came Councillor Herpolsheimer.

Nobody’d told Lou that the bomber had wounded Herpolsheimer. But the old German walked with a limp. His left arm was in a sling. An almost clean bandage was wrapped around his head. “Good day, Herr Herpolsheimer,” Lou said, more politely than he’d expected to. “I’m here to ask some questions about the, ah, unfortunate events of the other day.”

“Unfortunate events? I should say so!” Herpolsheimer had a gray mustache and bushy gray eyebrows. (Lou could see only one of them, but the other was bound to look the same.) The old German added, “That maniac!”

“Do you know who he was? Had you seen him before?” Lou asked.

“No. Never.” Herpolsheimer winced a little as he shook his head. Maybe he had a concussion to go with his more obvious injuries. He said, “I fought in the last war. That’s where I got this.” He used his good hand to brush his leg, so he’d had the limp before he went out to watch the Yanks play baseball. The gesture was oddly dignified, almost courtly. “I fought in the last war,” he repeated. “No one back then would have done such a thing-not a German, not a Frenchman, not an Englishman. Nobody. Not even an American.” He seemed to remind himself what his interrogator was.

“Danke schon,” Lou said dryly. “How about a Russian?”

“Well, I fought in Flanders, so I didn’t face them,” the town councillor replied. “But I never heard of them doing anything like that.”

“Do you think the fellow who blew himself up was a German?” Lou inquired.

“Until he did…that, I didn’t pay much attention to him,” Herr Herpolsheimer said slowly. “I might have paid more had I thought he was a foreigner. But he didn’t seem to stand out. Oh, he looked like someone who’d been through a lot, but a lot of people look like that nowadays.” He stuck out his wattled chin, as if to say, And it’s all your fault, too.

Lou didn’t think it was all the Allies’ fault. If Hitler hadn’t swallowed Austria, raped Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, invaded Denmark and Norway, invaded the Low Countries and France, bombed the crap out of England, sunk everything he could in the North Atlantic, invaded the Balkans and North Africa, and then invaded Russia…Details, details, Lou thought.

But arguing politics with a Jerry was a waste of time. “It seemed like this guy, whoever he was, placed himself to hurt as many Americans as he could before he, uh, exploded himself.” That wasn’t supposed to be a reflexive verb, but nobody’d had to talk much about human bombs before.

Herr Herpolsheimer understood him, which was the point of the exercise. The old man nodded. “Yes, I thought so. He did it with definite military effect.”

“Wunderbar,” Lou muttered. If he’d been speaking English, he would have said Terrific the same way.

Herpolsheimer eyed him. “Your German is quite good, Herr Oberleutnant, but I do not think I have heard an accent quite like yours before.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Half the time, it isn’t German, or isn’t exactly German-it’s Yiddish.” Lou waited. Come on, you old bastard. Let’s hear the speech about how you didn’t know what those wicked Nazis were doing to the Jews here. No, you had no idea at all.

The town councillor clicked his tongue between his teeth. “My niece had a Jewish husband,” he said after a moment.

“Had?” Lou didn’t like the sound of that.

“Max hanged himself in 1939, after Kristallnacht,” Herpolsheimer said. “He could not get a visa to any foreign country, and he could not live here. In his note, he said he did not wish to be a burden on Luisa. She did not believe he was one-but, the way things went, she might have come to do so….”

What were you supposed to say after something like that? Lou couldn’t think of anything, so he got out of there as fast as he could. Then he had to tell Sergeant Benton what Herpolsheimer had said, which made him feel great all over again. “Son of a bitch,” the ordnance sergeant said when he got done. “Son of a bitch. Ain’t that a bastard?”

“Mazeltov, Toby,” Lou said. “That may be the understatement of the year.”

“Hot damn,” Benton said. “So what the hell are we going to do about this asshole who turned himself into a bomb?”

“What you said, pretty much-hope he’s one lone nut and there’s no more like him,” Lou answered. “Past that, I have no idea-I mean, none. And I may be breaking security to tell you the higher-ups don’t, either, but I don’t think I’m surprising you much.”

“Nope,” Sergeant Benton said. “I only wish to God you were.”

The explosion had taken out most of a city block. The damage wasn’t so obvious in fallen Berlin. The lost capital of the Reich had already taken more bombs and shells and rockets and small-arms fire than any town this side of Stalingrad. After all that, what difference did one more explosion make?

Captain Vladimir Bokov knew too well the difference this one explosion made. The bloodstains on still-standing walls and on the battered pavement were noticeably fresher than most in Berlin. And he could also make out bits and pieces of the GMC truck some clever German had packed with explosives before driving it up to some parading Russian soldiers and blowing them up-and himself with them.

“You see, Comrade Captain,” Colonel Fyodor Furmanov said. He’d led those parading Red Army troops. Only dumb luck no flying piece of truck got him in the kidneys-or in the back of the neck. He had burns and scrapes and bruises, nothing worse…and he seemed embarrassed to remain alive while so many of his soldiers didn’t.

“Oh, yes. I see,” the NKVD man said. Colonel Furmanov flinched. He knew his next stop might be a labor camp somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. “What kind of precautions did you take to keep that truck from getting close to your men?”

Furmanov flinched again. Bokov eyed the decorations on his chest. They said the Red Army officer had had himself a busy war. He spread his hands now. “Comrade Captain, I took none. The responsibility is mine. I thought the war was over. I thought no one would strike at us. I was wrong-and my poor men paid the price for my mistake.”

“You didn’t expect that the Fascist would be willing to blow himself up if that meant he could strike at the Soviet Union?” Bokov asked.

“No,” Colonel Furmanov said stonily. “If you believe what the Yankees are saying, the Japanese fight like that. But the Germans don’t-didn’t, I should say. Not before the surrender, they didn’t. You must know that as well as I do, Comrade Captain.”

His words said the right things. His tone said he doubted whether an NKVD man knew anything about what had gone on at the front-but didn’t say so blatantly enough to let Bokov call him on it. Abstractly, the captain admired the performance. The only way he could respond to the challenge was by pretending not to notice it. And so he simply nodded and said, “Yes. I do know.”

“Well, then.” Colonel Furmanov sighed. He’d been right to come out and accept responsibility. It would have landed on him anyhow. Being ready for it made him…look a little better.

Bokov lit another of his American cigarettes. When he handed Furmanov the pack, the older officer stared in surprise before taking it. Furmanov leaned close to get a light from Bokov’s cigarette. After giving it to him, the NKVD man spoke slowly and deliberately: “It seems, Comrade Colonel-it seems, I say-that some Nazis have decided to continue resistance in spite of the regime’s formal surrender. This bomb in the truck…is not an isolated incident.”

He didn’t want to admit that. Coming out and saying it made the USSR-and, maybe even more to the point, the NKVD-look bad. Easier by far to let this officer vanish into the gulag. Maybe he’d come out in ten years, or more likely twenty-five. Or maybe they would use him up before he finished his sentence, the way they did with so many.

If this were an isolated incident, Furmanov would be gone. As things were, though…“There are reports from the American occupation zone of Germans using explosives to kill U.S. soldiers-and killing themselves in the process.”

“Bozhemoi!” the infantry colonel exclaimed. “In the American zone, too? There really is a resistance, then!”

“It would seem so, yes,” Bokov said. “We are also trying to see whether these bombings are connected to Marshal Koniev’s assassination.”

Colonel Furmanov said “My God!” again. Then he cursed the Nazis with a fluency Peter the Great might have envied. And then, after he ran down, he asked, “What can we do about it?” He held up a hand. “Can we do anything about it that leaves more than maybe three motherfucking Germans alive?”

“That is the question.” Bokov impersonated Hamlet. After a moment, he added, “Why do you care? I promise you, nobody in Moscow will.” The Nazis had come much too close to wiping the Soviet Union off the map. Anything to help ensure that that never happened again seemed good to the men who shaped Soviet policy. It seemed good to Vladimir Bokov, too, not that his opinion on such things mattered a fart’s worth.

“Comrade Captain, if we send Germans up the smokestack the way the SS got rid of Jews, I’ll wave bye-bye to them while they burn. You’d best believe I will,” Furmanov said. “You can see by my record that I’m not soft on these fuckers. But if we do something that makes them desperate enough to go after my men without caring whether they live or die themselves…That I care about, because it endangers Soviet troops for no good reason.”

“The Germans aren’t doing what they’re doing because of how we’re treating them.” Now Bokov spoke with authority. “Like I said, they’re pulling the same damned stunts in the American zone, and you know the Americans go easy on them-Americans and Englishmen are halfway toward being Fascists themselves.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Colonel Furmanov agreed. “So why are they doing it, then?”

“I told you why. Some of them don’t think the war is over yet,” Bokov said. “Our job here will have two pieces, I think. One will be to hunt down the bandits and criminals who are to blame for these outrages.”

“Da.” Furmanov nodded. “You don’t commandeer a truck and load it full of shit like that by yourself. You’re right, Comrade Captain-some kind of conspiracy must lie behind it.”

Russians saw conspiracies as naturally as Americans saw profits. Like Americans chasing the dollar, they often saw conspiracies that weren’t there. Not this time, Bokov was convinced. Furmanov had it straight-somebody who put a lot of explosives in a truck and set it off had to have an organization behind him.

Then Furmanov asked, “What’s the other piece of your puzzle?”

“What you’d expect,” Bokov replied. “Somewhere out there are Germans who know about this conspiracy without being part of it. We have to find out who they are and make them tell us what they know. And we have to make all the Germans left alive more afraid to help the bandits than anything else in the world. If even one of them betrays us, they all have to suffer on account of it.”

Colonel Furmanov nervously clicked his tongue between his teeth. “This is what I was talking about before, Comrade Captain. With policies like this, we risk driving Germans who would stay loyal-well, quiet, anyhow-into the bandits’ arms.”

“They’ll be sorry if they make that mistake.” For all the feeling in Bokov’s voice, he might have been talking about the swine at a pig farm. “But they won’t be sorry long.”

“When the Hitlerites invaded the Soviet Union, they didn’t try to win the goodwill of the workers and peasants. Because they didn’t, the partisan movement against them sprang to life.”

Colonel Furmanov walked a fine line here, and, again, walked it well. He didn’t point out that the Nazis had enjoyed plenty of goodwill when they stormed into places like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine. That was true, but pointing it out could have won him a stretch in the camps. He also didn’t point out that Stalin’s policy here would be the same as Hitler’s there. That would have been even more likely to let him learn what things were like in a cold, cold climate. And he didn’t point out that the Russian partisans got massive amounts of help from unoccupied Soviet territory. Who would help these diehard Nazis?

Nobody. Captain Bokov hoped not, anyway.

Instead of arguing with Furmanov or even pointing out any of those things, Bokov said, “We’ll do all we can to track down the Fascists. The place to start, I think, is with the truck. How did the Germans get their hands on it?”

He hadn’t expected an answer from the infantry officer, but he got one: “So much stuff is going back to the motherland, Comrade Captain, that nobody pays much attention to any one piece. Maybe that truck was ours to begin with, or maybe it was one the Germans captured from us or from the USA. If somebody told one of our sentries he was taking it somewhere on somebody’s orders, the sentry might not have bothered to check. He’d figure, Who’d lie about something like that? Or do you think I’m wrong?”

Bokov wished he did. A German with nerve could probably disappear a truck just the way Furmanov described. “Shit,” Bokov said wearily. “One more thing we have to tighten up. I suppose I should thank you.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Furmanov said, which was never the wrong answer.

“We all do,” Bokov agreed. But, while it wasn’t the wrong answer, it might not be the right one, either.