The Man with the Iron Heart

XXX

When Lou Weissberg heard the shooting start on the mountainside above him, he thought he was really and truly screwed. How many troops had the Nazis hidden in this stinking subterranean fortress of theirs? A division’s worth? That had to be impossible…didn’t it?

But the shooting up there didn’t last long. As soon as it stopped, he forgot about it, because the diehards on the far slope were still doing their goddamnedest to murder him. And then, off in the distance, he saw the headlights of a truck convoy coming down from the head of the pass. He breathed a long heartfelt sigh of relief. As soon as the reinforcements arrived, his ass was saved.

And a great burden slid off his shoulders. He might have fucked up, but the radioman hadn’t. As long as somebody’d kept his head, the story would probably have a happy ending.

Not right away, though. “They better kill those lights, or the krauts’ll knock the shit out of ’em when they get a little closer,” said a GI not far from him.

Sure as hell, mortar bombs did start dropping near the oncoming trucks. One of them took a direct hit, caught fire, and slewed off the road. The other drivers suddenly got smart. Almost in unison, their headlights went out.

The trucks stopped close enough to let Lou hear the order the officer in charge gave his men: “We’re going up that hill, and we’re gonna clean those assholes out!” Then he said one more thing: “Come on!”

They went. Every so often, one of them would shoot at something. That let the diehards know they were on the way. Machine-gun tracers stabbed through the night toward them. Other tracers replied-the new guys had machine guns of their own. And they had a mortar crew. Lou cheered when red sparks rose steeply into the air. But the American bombs burst short of the enemy positions. The Germans, damn them, had more range because they were shooting downhill.

Even so, they could see the writing on the wall. They quit pounding the men by the mineshaft. A couple of MG42s-Hitler’s saws, the Russians called the vicious German machine guns-kept spraying death at the Americans advancing upslope. What were the fanatics not manning those machine guns doing? Trying to get away, unless Lou had lost his marbles.

He hardly cared. “Jesus,” he said. “I think I lived through it.” He realized how much he wanted a cigarette. He also realized a sniper still might ventilate his brainpan if he lit up. Regretfully, he didn’t. He discovered he had a hunk of D-ration bar in the same pocket as his Luckies. Gnawing on the hard chocolate wasn’t the same, but it was better than nothing.

He knew the Jerries’ jig was up when the MG42s stopped ripping the air apart. Maybe their crews were dead, or maybe those men were trying to escape, too. Again, he had trouble caring. Nobody was trying to shoot him right this minute. That, he cared about. A few spatters of gunfire went on, up there on the mountainside, when Germans and Americans got too close to one another. But the main event was done.

Part of Lou wanted to sleep for a week. The rest wondered whether he’d ever sleep again with so much adrenaline zinging through him. Shaking his head, he stood up and started trying to think like an officer once more. “Do what you can for the wounded,” he told the men who’d gone through the fight with him. “We should have medics here real soon now-docs, too, I hope.”

“Some of these guys are bleeding bad, sir,” a GI said out of the night. “They don’t get plasma or something pretty damn quick, they ain’t gonna make it.”

“Yeah,” Lou said unhappily. He didn’t know what else to say, because he couldn’t do one single thing about it.

Then he heard footsteps coming down from above. “Don’t shoot, nobody!” someone called in accents surely American. “I gotta talk to the guy in charge of diggin’ out this mine.”

“That’s me,” Lou called. “What’s up?”

The Yank thumped closer. Or was he an English-speaking German with an explosive vest, intent on vengeance? Dr. Freud would call that paranoia, Lou thought. But you’re not paranoid when they’re really after you, he retorted to himself. And then all that silly fluff blew out of his head, because the guy said, “We’ve got Heydrich’s body up there. Somebody’s one rich motherfucker.”

“Heydrich?” Lou said dazedly. “For sure? No shit?”

“Looks just like him-we’ve all seen enough posters to know. His face ain’t hardly tore up at all,” the GI answered. “Papers on the body say he’s some horseshit noncom, but you know what that kinda crap’s gonna be worth. And there’s another German noncom still breathin’ who says it’s him.”

“Heydrich,” Lou said again. He could hardly believe it, even if it was exactly what he’d been trying to accomplish. “Take me to him. This I gotta see.”

He stumped uphill after the soldier. He stumbled in the darkness a couple of times, but he didn’t fall. Before long, he was breathing hard. A desk job with the CIC didn’t keep him in great shape. But he would have walked up the side of Mt. Everest on his hands to see Reinhard Heydrich dead.

No more shooting on this slope. Up ahead, a couple of flashlight beams marked the place where the GI was taking him. He saw American soldiers and guys in Feldgrau milling around. All the Germans kept hands above head.

“Here comes the captain,” his escort called so nobody would get jumpy. “He wants to see the body.”

Lots of German corpses in uniform lay in a compact knot, with others out around the fringes. “Looks like a bunch of ’em got taken by surprise,” Lou remarked.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier agreed. “They came out right behind one of our guys. He chucked a grenade into ’em, and then he started shooting ’em up.”

“Good for him,” Lou said. The air stank of blood and shit and smokeless powder. One of the GIs shone a flashlight at him. He waved. The beam swerved away: he was judged all right. He raised his voice a little: “Show me Heydrich.”

“Over here, sir,” another man called. He had a flashlight, too, and pointed it at a pale, still face on the ground. “This bastard.”

Lou bent down. The dead man’s pale, narrow eyes were still open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. The face was long and thin. So was the nose, which had a slight kink in it. “Son of a gun,” Lou whispered. “I think it really is him.” He undid the corpse’s tunic. Whoever this guy was, he’d taken grenade fragments and bullets in the chest and belly. “Shine it under his arm,” Lou told the GI with the light. “I want to check his blood group.”

He had to wipe away blood before he could make out the tattoo. It was an A-just what he wanted to see. “Well?” the soldier asked.

“Yeah.” Lou felt as if he’d swallowed a big slug of straight bourbon. “It matches.” He paused, remembering. “The guy who brought me up here said you’d captured another Jerry in noncom’s clothes who could ID him.”

“That’s right, sir.” The other American turned away for a moment. “Hey, Manny! Bring that cocksucker over here. The captain wants him.”

“Sure,” said somebody-presumably Manny. He spoke a couple of words of rudimentary German: “Du! Komm!”

Unlike Heydrich, the man who came over to Lou blinked when the GI shone a flashlight in his eyes. He looked like a guy who’d been a noncom for a long time-put a different uniform on him and he would have made a perfect American tech sergeant. “Who are you?” Lou asked. He pointed to the dead man. “How do you know this is Heydrich?”

“I am Oberscharfuhrer Johannes Klein,” the noncom answered. “I was the Reichsprotektor’s driver, and then his aide when we went underground.”

“Wow,” Lou said. Klein’s name was on his list, too-on all kinds of CIC lists. Nobody seemed to know what he looked like. Well, here he was, in the flesh. Quite a bit of flesh, too. Whatever the diehards had been doing underground, they hadn’t been starving. Lou dragged his attention back to the business at hand. “So what happened here? What went wrong for you?”

“He made a mistake,” Klein answered matter-of-factly. He sounded like an American noncom giving an officer the back of his hand, too. “He thought the diversionary attack would pull your men off this side of the mountain. He turned out to be wrong. We had just come out when….” He spread his hands. One of them had blood on it, but it wasn’t his.

Another German came over. He stared down at Heydrich’s body for a long time. “So he is truly dead,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lou.

“What difference does it make to you? Who are you, anyway?” Lou asked him auf Deutsch.

“I am Karl Wirtz,” the man answered in fluent British English.

For a second, the name didn’t mean anything to Lou. Then it did. “The physicist!” he exclaimed. Wirtz nodded. Lou tried to ask something that wasn’t too dumb. The best he could come up with was, “Where are your, uh, colleagues?”

“Poor Professor Diebner lies over there. Sadly, he is dead,” Wirtz said. “The others…I do not know what has happened to the others.” He nodded toward Klein. “But I believe the Oberscharfuhrer may.”

“How about it?” Lou said. Johannes Klein only shrugged. Wirtz’s grimace told what he thought of that. Lou thought the same thing. “So-you disposed of them, did you?”

Klein shrugged again. “At the Reichsprotektor’s order. They could never have kept up during the escape.” His shoulders went up and down one more time. “Fat lot of good it turned out to do.”

Do you always kill people on your own side? Lou didn’t ask it, however much he wanted to. He was too sure Klein would look at him and say something like Of course I do, if my superior tells me to. He’d already been down that road with too many other Germans. So he stuck to what might be immediately useful: “Where were you going to go after you came out of your tunnel?”

“We were to split up and head for safe houses in the next valley,” Klein said. “The only one I know of is the one I was to go to. And then-” He stopped.

“Then what? Come on-talk,” Lou said. He didn’t believe Klein knew about only one safe house, either. If he was Heydrich’s aide, wouldn’t he have found out about plenty of them?

“Well, you will have heard this by now, I’m sure.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to be talking himself into talking, so to speak. After a moment, he went on, “Sooner or later, Jochen Peiper’s people would pick us up and take us to his headquarters.”

“Ah?” Lou’s ears quivered and came to attention. “And where’s that?”

“I have no idea. I never tried to find out. I suppose the Reichsprotektor must have known, but I don’t think anyone else down below”-Klein stamped his foot on the mountainside-“had any idea. What we weren’t told, we couldn’t give away if we got caught.”

“Huh,” Lou said. “We’ll see about that.” The kraut gave a much more elaborate denial here than he had about the safe houses. Maybe that meant he was bullshitting. On the other hand, maybe it meant he was telling the exact truth. Some remorseless squeezing of everybody left alive who’d come up out of the ground would tell the tale. Lou tried another question: “What do you know about Peiper?”

“Only that the Reichsprotektor thought he was an able man,” Klein said.

Lou grunted. He didn’t know as much about Jochen Peiper as he wished he did. Nobody outside the fanatics’ shadowy network did. Peiper had been a promising and rapidly rising young panzer officer in the Waffen-SS till he dropped out of sight late in 1943. Since V-E Day, Heydrich had been the German Freedom Front’s visible face. Could Peiper step out of the shadows and keep the enemy fighting? Lou hoped like hell the answer was no.

The ground under his feet rumbled and jerked. “What was that?” Professor Wirtz yipped.

“Explosives and incendiaries,” Klein said calmly. “The Reichsprotektor started the timer before we left. No one will learn anything from what we could not bring.” Even now, he sounded proud of Heydrich.

“Aw, shit,” Lou said wearily. Germanic thoroughness could drive you nuts. It could also screw you to the wall. Not wanting to think about that, he switched to English and asked, “Where’s the guy who jumped on the Jerries after they came out of their hole in the ground?”

“’At’s me.” The dogface who came up looked like…a dogface. “Name’s Bernie Cobb. Watcha need, sir?”

“Well, Cobb, there’s a Jewish DP down by the mineshaft”-Lou hoped like anything that Birnbaum was still in one piece-“who’s got a pretty fair claim to part of the reward for Heydrich. I’d say you’re odds-on for the rest.”

“Holy fuck.” Cobb started to laugh. “Wasn’t so long ago I told a buddy I’d never catch the asshole on my own. Shows what I know, don’t it?”

“Sure does,” Lou sad. “But you were on the ball, and it paid off.”

“When the shooting started, we wanted to go down and give you guys a hand,” Cobb said. “But one of our officers held us in position. That’s why I was at where I was at. He oughta get a chunk.”

“Maybe he will,” Lou said.

Cobb pointed at him. “And what about you, Captain? Weren’t you the guy in charge of digging these fuckers out? That’s who Jonesy went to get. Sounds like you have a claim on some yourself.”

“Me?” Lou’s voice hadn’t broken like this since he was seventeen. “You gotta be kidding!”

“They’re gonna give it to somebody,” Bernie Cobb said. “If you flushed out dickhead here”-he nodded toward Heydrich’s corpse-“you deserve a chunk.”

Do I want any? Lou wondered. How many Jews, how many Americans, did that son of a bitch murder? Can I take money because of a man like that? But can I turn down a big part of a million bucks? Wouldn’t my wife murder me if I did? Wouldn’t any jury in the world acquit her if she did?

“Fuck it. We’ll sort it out later,” he said. Dawn was starting to lighten the eastern sky. A new day was coming.

Tom Schmidt hadn’t seen President Truman so chipper since-when? He couldn’t remember ever seeing Truman so chipper. The President beamed at the reporters filing into the White House press room.

“We killed the black-hearted son of a bitch,” Truman announced without preamble. “Reinhard Heydrich, who earned the lovely nicknames of Butcher, Hangman, and Man with the Iron Heart, got what he deserved in the Bavarian Alps last night. The head of the lie called the German Freedom Front died trying to escape his underground headquarters as American troops were digging him out. Most of the other people in that hole in the ground-maybe all of them-were also captured or killed.” He grinned out at the assembled reporters. “How about that, boys?”

They all tried to shout questions at once. “Who got him?” seemed to be the one that came most often.

Truman glanced down at his notes. “The man who seems likeliest to have done it is Private Bernard Cobb. He comes from New Mexico, a little town near Albuquerque.”

“Are they sure it’s Heydrich?” Tom asked before anybody else could get in a different question. “How do they know?”

“It’s really him, Tom, no matter how much that disappoints you and the Tribune,” the President jabbed, and his grin got even wider. “An officer who knows what he looks like identified him at the scene. German prisoners confirmed his identity. His blood-group tattoo matches Heydrich’s group-his blood type, we’d say here. And his fingerprints match, too. The Nazis could pull a lot of stunts, but I don’t see how they could manage that.”

Tom didn’t see how they could, either. No matter what Harry Truman thought, he wasn’t sorry Heydrich was dead. Anybody who’d spent any time at all in post-surrender Germany knew Reinhard Heydrich was indeed a black-hearted son of a bitch. Whether he was sorry the Truman administration was taking credit for Heydrich’s long-overdue demise might be a different story.

“How’d we finally catch him?” another reporter asked.

Truman beamed at him. “Because the bastard’s own past came back to bite him, that’s how. The Nazis used slave laborers to dig their hideouts. Then they killed them-dead men tell no tales. But this man lived through Auschwitz. Eventually, Soviet intelligence learned he had important information. The Russians passed him on to us, because Heydrich’s hole was in our zone. We found it, and Heydrich was in it, and now we don’t have to worry about him any more.”

“We worked with the Russians?” the reporters yelled-except for the ones who yelled, “The Russians worked with us?”

“That’s right.” Truman nodded happily. “We sure did. They sure did. When it comes to the damn Nazis, everybody works together against them. Everybody in the whole world, near as I can see, except the Republicans in Congress and some chuckleheads who’ve started a silly movement that means well but can’t see what’s important in the long run-oh, and some reporters who want us to fail in Germany because they think writing snotty stories sells papers.”

To Tom and at least half a dozen other people in the press room, that was waving a red flag in front of a bull. “Well, we got him even though we’re bringing our troops home, right?” another reporter said.

“We didn’t catch him because we’re bringing them home. We caught him in spite of that,” the President snapped. “If we’d learned of this a few months from now, we wouldn’t have had the manpower to do anything about it. Heydrich would still be down there thumbing his nose at us.”

“Now that he’s dead, you expect the German Freedom Front to fold up and die with him, right?” somebody else called before Tom could.

“We hope it will.” All of a sudden, Truman turned cagey. “We don’t know that for a fact. We ought to leave men in Germany in case it doesn’t.”

“Wait a minute!” Tom said. “A minute ago, getting rid of Heydrich was the greatest thing ever. Now it may not mean anything? Don’t you want it both ways?”

“I want to make sure Americans can stay safe and secure. Why do you have trouble seeing that?” Truman said.

“Because lots of Americans keep getting killed in Germany? Because the German Freedom Front hasn’t gone away?” Tom suggested. “How does that make us safe and secure?”

The President let out an exasperated sniff. “Because we aren’t getting ready to fight the Third World War against the Germans, that’s how. Shall we declare victory and then pull out? I couldn’t look the American people in the eye if we pulled a stunt like that.”

“But if the fanatics quiet down now that Heydrich’s dead, doesn’t that mean we don’t need to stay any more?”

“Not if they’re playing possum till we’re gone,” Truman answered. “They aren’t fools, unlike some people I could name.” He stared hard in Tom’s direction.

“Love you, too, sir,” Tom said, and got a chuckle from Truman. HEYDRICH’S GONE-SO WHAT? Tom scribbled in his notebook. If he couldn’t build a column around that, he wasn’t half trying.

“Fuck me in the mouth! They got him!” Vladimir Bokov exulted.

“They did,” Colonel Shteinberg agreed. “I wouldn’t have bet on it when you gave them that Birnbaum, but they did. Now we find out how much difference it ends up making.”

“It’s got to make some,” Bokov said. “We haven’t been the same here since the Nazis poisoned so many officers at the New Year’s Eve celebration. Only stands to reason that losing their top leader will hurt them, too.”

“Well, yes, when you put it like that. They’re bound to be less efficient for a while-maybe less dangerous, too.” Shteinberg paused to light a cigarette before adding, “But that’s not the point.”

“Comrade Colonel?” Bokov said, in lieu of Well, what is the point, dammit? He knew how much rope the Jew gave him, and the answer here was not enough for that.

Moisei Shteinberg inhaled, blew out smoke, inhaled again, and finally said, “After the Heydrichites pulled off the New Year’s Eve massacre, what did we do?”

“We went after them. What else?” Bokov knew he’d never forget the benzedrine buzz-or the grippe it battled. He also knew he’d never forget how flattened he’d been getting over both of them at once.

“There you go, Volodya.” If Shteinberg’s nod said Bokov was slower than he might have been, it also said he’d got where he needed to go. Shteinberg continued, “That’s the point. We didn’t give up. We didn’t figure we’d lost and run away like a litter of scared puppies.”

“The way the Americans are now,” Bokov put in.

“Yes.” But Colonel Shteinberg brushed that aside: “So now we have to see what the Heydrichites do without Heydrich. If they say, ‘We can’t go on without the Reichsprotektor,’ and they forget about their weapons and go back to being farmers and shopkeepers and factory workers, we’ve won. But if they have the spirit to keep fighting under a new commander-in that case, we didn’t do as much as we would have wanted to.”

Reluctantly, Bokov nodded back. “Well, you’re right, Comrade Colonel,” he allowed. Part of his reluctance involved admitting to himself that Shteinberg really was a clever Jew-more clever than he was himself, dammit. And part involved acknowledging that the Fascist bandits really might regroup and keep harassing Soviet authorities-and, incidentally, the Anglo-Americans. “Bozhemoi, but I want them to fold up like a concertina!”

“Oh, so do I, Volodya. If I prayed, that’s what I would pray for.” Colonel Shteinberg blew out a long stream of smoke and ground out the cigarette. “But we’re men now, yes? Not children, I mean. You don’t get what you wish for, and you’d better remember it. You get what you get, and you have to make the best of it, whatever it turns out to be. That’s what a man does. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Bokov couldn’t very well say he was wrong. It might be a cold-blooded-no, a cold-hearted-way to look at the world, but if you looked at it any other way you’d end up dead or in a camp in short order. What Bokov did say was, “Let’s see General Vlasov make the best of this!”

“Oh, he will,” Shteinberg said, but the way he smiled said how little he loved Yuri Vlasov himself. Bokov doubted whether Vlasov’s mother could have loved him. If she had, wouldn’t the son of a bitch have come out better? Colonel Shteinberg said, “He’ll show his superiors that he authorized the transfer of Prisoner Birnbaum to the Americans, and that it turned out well. He doesn’t need any more than that to cover his own worthless ass.”

“Da,” Bokov said resignedly. They’d both known from the beginning that Vlasov would do something like that if handing Birnbaum over gave good results. Bokov’s anger flared anyhow. “He should have done it sooner, the pigheaded son of a bitch!”

“Of course he should. But saying no is always easier. So is doing nothing. If you do nothing, you can’t very well do anything wrong. All you have to say is, you were exercising due caution.” Shteinberg made the words-which Bokov himself had used more often than he suddenly cared to remember-sound faintly, or perhaps not so faintly, obscene.

Bokov lit a cigarette of his own-a good Russian Belomor, not an American brand. He needed it. The White Sea tasted the way a cigarette ought to. You took a drag on one of these, you knew you were smoking something! The name of the brand commemorated the opening of the White Sea canal before the war. Most Soviet citizens knew it had opened, and were proud of that. They knew no more. Bokov did. But not even the NKVD captain knew how many tens of thousands of zeks had given up the ghost digging the canal with picks and shovels in weather that made Leningrad’s look tropical. Well, none of them would trouble the state’s security again.

Which led to another security question: “Comrade Colonel, what do we do when the Americans finish clearing out? The English won’t be far behind them, either.”

“That damned atom bomb,” Moisei Shteinberg said, as he had the last time Bokov asked the same question. It was more urgent, less hypothetical, than it had been then. But that damned atom bomb remained a complete and depressing answer. Till the Soviet Union had its own-which would, of course, be used only in the cause of peace-Marshal Stalin’s hands were tied.

“How long?” Bokov demanded, as if security would let an ordinary NKVD colonel learn such things.

And, naturally, Shteinberg just shrugged. “When we do-that’s all I can tell you. No, wait.” He caught himself. “There’s one thing more. Heydrich was hiding the German physicists he kidnapped in his headquarters. They’re all supposed to be dead or captured. So that will slow the fanatics down even if worse comes to worst.” He shrugged again, this time in a very Jewish way, as if to say, It’s not so good, but maybe it could be worse.

Bokov knew what if worse comes to worst meant, too. It meant a revived Fascist state in western Germany, and damn all the USSR could do about it. That was about as bad as things could get, all right. “Let’s hope they do give up now that Heydrich’s dead and gone,” he said.

“Yes,” Shteinberg said. “Let’s.”

Jochen Peiper hadn’t wanted to go down into a hole in the ground and pull it in after him. That was putting it mildly. The Waffen-SS hadn’t had many better panzer officers. He’d scared the shit out of the Ivans, and well he might have. The last thing he’d looked for was a peremptory order from Reinhard Heydrich. He’d taken his career-maybe his life-in his hands and gone over Heydrich’s head to Heinrich Himmler. All that got him was an even more peremptory order to shut up and do what Heydrich told him to.

So he did. As the Reich crumbled into ruin, he slowly realized he was doing something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he signed up for the SS. If Germany was going to rebuild itself, if it wasn’t going to get slammed into an American or Russian mold, it had to hold on to its own spirit and do its best to drive the occupiers nuts.

Fighting the long underground war was less exciting than a panzer battle. It turned out to be more intricate, more exacting. Was it more interesting? Peiper didn’t want to admit that, even to himself. He did what he could to help the cause of German liberty. He did what the Reichsprotektor told him to do. He quit complaining. No one would have listened to him any which way.

He didn’t even complain about being a spare tire. Like any good commander, Heydrich had run the resistance movement his own way. As there had been only one Fuhrer before him, there was only one Reichsprotektor.

And now I’m it, Peiper thought. The radio, the newspapers, and the magazines in American-occupied Germany were full of gloating glee because Heydrich had fallen in service of the cause. He’d been photographed dead more often than he ever was alive. THE GERMAN FREEDOM FRONT’S FRONT MAN IS NO MORE, a typical headline proclaimed proudly.

Jochen Peiper assembled the men who shared the underground secondary headquarters with him. “We’re fighting a war, and when you fight a war you go on even if you lose your general,” he said. “The man who’s next in line steps up, and you go on. The Reichsprotektor was a great German. We’ll miss him. He gave us hope for freedom even in the blackest days. He inspired the Werewolves to remind the enemy Germany wasn’t altogether beaten. The best way to honor his memory is to go on and free our country from the invaders’ yoke.”

He eyed them. A few of the fighters didn’t want to meet his gaze. They feared-or else they hoped, which would be worse-the struggle had died with the Reichsprotektor. But most of the SS men and soldiers seemed ready to keep on soldiering. That was what Peiper most wanted to see. He had to hope he wasn’t seeing it regardless of whether it was there or not.

“We can do this. We can, dammit!” he insisted. “We’ve already got the Americans on the run. We have to show them they haven’t cut the heart out of us. Reinhard Heydrich was a great man, a great German, a great National Socialist. No one would say anything different. But when great men fall, the ones they leave behind have to keep up the battle. And the Reichsprotektor had some ideas he didn’t live to use. We’ll see how wild they can drive the enemy.”

“What kind of ideas?” a man inquired.

“Well, for instance…” Peiper talked for some little while. He could have kissed the noncom who’d asked the question. If the troops were interested in what to try next, they wouldn’t brood because they’d lost their longtime commander. Or Peiper could hope they wouldn’t, anyhow.

But then another man asked, “Can the Americans sniff us out now?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Peiper answered, “Anything that can happen can happen to you, Heinz. They were supposed to use up all the workers who dug out the Reichsprotektor’s headquarters, but it sounds like somebody got through in spite of everything. That’s just bad luck. I don’t think it’s likely that that kind of thing could crop up here, too, but it’s possible.”

Unlike Heydrich, he’d had no direct role in eliminating Untermenschen. He’d been a combat soldier before his superiors tapped him for this slot. But he wasn’t naive about what the Reich had been up to. He talked about it in the same allusive, elusive, oddly dispassionate way someone who’d served in an extermination camp might have. If you talked about it that way, you didn’t dwell on what you were actually doing. Workers got used up, not killed. The survivor got through; he didn’t live. Jochen wished to God the bastard hadn’t lived.

Heinz had another awkward question: “What will we do without the physicists the Reichsprotektor liberated?”

“The best we can.” Peiper spread his hands. “I don’t know what else to tell you. We’ll be able to find other scientists who know some of what they knew, and we’ll find more people who can learn. We’re Germans. Other people would come here to study before the war. There are bound to be men who can do what we need. Remember, we know it’s possible now, and we didn’t during the war.”

Heinz nodded, apparently satisfied. Peiper wasn’t satisfied himself-not even close. He knew too well that losing those physicists meant Germany would take longer to build atom bombs. And he knew the resurgent Reich would need those bombs to keep it safe from the Americans and the Russians.

But, as he’d told the junior officer, all you could do was all you could do. He wasn’t even sure the fighters outside this headquarters would obey his orders. He had to nail that down first. If they wouldn’t follow him, the Amis and Tommies and Ivans had won after all. After keeping up the fight for so long despite the surrender of Wehrmacht and government, giving up now would be tragic.

He went back to his office to draft a proclamation. The struggle continues, he wrote. The hope for National Socialism, the hope for a revived German folkish state, does not lie in any one man. A man may fall. Adolf Hitler did; now Reinhard Heydrich has as well. But the cause goes on. The cause will always go on, because it is right and just. We shall not rest until we free our Fatherland. Sieg heil!

He looked it over, then nodded to himself. Yes, it would definitely do. He signed his name. After another moment’s hesitation, he added Reichsprotektor below the signature. Even though Heydrich had originally had the title because he governed the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, it also suited a partisan leader trying to shield Germany from the foes who oppressed her.

The headquarters had a small print shop, with a hand press not much different from the ones Martin Luther’s printers would have used. That would be plenty to get out a few hundred copies of the proclamation. Sympathetic printers in the U.S. and British zones could make thousands more once it reached them. Word would spread.

Which raised another question. Peiper wondered whether his fighters ought to stay quiet for a while. It might lull the enemy into a false sense of security. It would let Peiper consolidate his own authority within the German Freedom Front. Everybody’d known, and known of-and feared-Heydrich. By the nature of things, the number two man in any outfit was far more anonymous.

Peiper drummed his fingers on the desk. “Nein,” he muttered. Heydrich hadn’t made the Americans start bailing out of their zone by acting meek and mild. He’d harried them so harshly that they were glad to go. The best way to keep them on the run was to keep goosing them.

And the Russians…! No Russian ever born had ever admired meekness and mildness. The only way to get Ivan’s attention was to hit him in the face, and to keep on hitting him till he had to notice you. Peiper had fought the Red Army out in the open till he was recruited for the twilight struggle. Running it out of the Soviet zone wouldn’t be easy. He knew that. But not fighting, against the Russians, meant giving up.

He’d found his answers. He knew what kind of orders to give. Whether anyone would listen to them…He shook his head and said “Nein” again, louder this time. Some people would always follow a superior’s commands. He could use them to eliminate the fainthearts. No, to eliminate a few of them. That should scare the rest back into obedience. Fear was as much a weapon as an assault rifle.

It all seemed simple and straightforward. Peiper laughed at himself. If everything were as simple and straightforward as it seemed, the Reich would never have got itself into this mess. Well, the job of getting it out had landed on his shoulders. He’d do his damnedest.