The Man with the Iron Heart

XXXI

When the phone rang, it was the Mothers Against the Madness in Germany line. It usually was, these days. “Diana McGraw,” Diana said in her crisp public voice.

“Hi, Mrs. McGraw. E. A. Stuart here, from the Times,” the reporter replied in her ear.

“Hello, E.A. How are you?” Diana said. Only the Indianapolis Times, not the one from Los Angeles, let alone New York’s. Well, she lived next door to Indianapolis. And other papers would pick up whatever she said to Stuart. She’d got used to having people all over the world pay attention to what she thought. She liked it, in fact.

“I’m fine, thanks. Yourself?” Unlike reporters from far away, E.A. knew her well enough to chitchat for a bit before he got down to business. He might have thought it would soften her up. And he might have been right.

“Doing all right.” Diana wasn’t lying…too much. Her conscience still gnawed at her for that San Francisco night. She did feel bad about it-and she felt worse because she’d felt so good while it was going on. I was drunk, she told herself. I didn’t know what I was doing. The first part of that was true. The rest? She’d known what she was doing, all right. And she’d gone and done it. And she’d enjoyed it like anything-then. Afterwards was a different story. Afterwards commonly was. She ducked away from the worries: “What can I do for you this morning?”

“Well, I was wondering if you wanted to comment on the death of Reinhard Heydrich.”

“I’m glad the miserable skunk is dead,” Diana said at once. “So many people have called me a Nazi, and it’s a filthy lie. You know it’s a lie, E.A. The maniacs that evil so-and-so led murdered my Pat. If we’d caught him alive, I’d’ve been glad to string him up myself.”

“To hang the Hangman?” Stuart asked.

Diana nodded, which the reporter couldn’t see. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s just right.”

“Okay.” By the pause, E. A. Stuart was likely nodding, too. “How do you think his death changes the situation in Germany?”

Since Diana’d been thinking about that ever since the news broke, she could answer without the least hesitation: “It just gives us one more reason to keep bringing our troops back to America. We’ve been saying all along that we wanted him dead, that we needed him dead, that he was the most dangerous man in the world, and I don’t know what all else. Fine. Now he’s dead. Now the fanatics can’t cause anywhere near as much trouble as they could before. That means we’ve got even less excuse for sticking around. The sooner all the soldiers come home, the better.”

“Hang on,” Stuart said. She could hear him scribbling notes. Even though he took shorthand, she’d got ahead of him. Then he asked, “What would have happened if all the American soldiers were out of Germany before we found out where Heydrich was hiding out?”

Diana scowled at the telephone. Doggone it, E.A., you’re supposed to be on my side. But she didn’t say it out loud. He would have to deny it, and he might have to go out of his way to show it wasn’t true. That wouldn’t be so good.

“Maybe we would have gone back after him. I’ve never said we shouldn’t get rid of him,” she answered. “Or maybe the German police could have dug him out on their own.”

“Mm. Maybe.” Stuart didn’t sound as if he believed it. He tried a different kind of question: “How do you feel about President Truman taking credit for bumping him off?”

“If we’d caught Heydrich right after V-E day, he would’ve been entitled to some,” Diana said tartly. “Now we’re only a couple of months away from 1948. It’s not just about time Heydrich’s dead-it’s way past time.”

“Hang on,” E. A. Stuart said once more, and then, “Okey-doke. Got it. Thanks a lot, Mrs. McGraw. ’Bye.” He hung up.

“So long.” Diana set the phone down, too. She heated up the coffee, took the pot off the stove, and poured herself a cup. It wasn’t as good as it had been when she made it right after she and Ed got up, but it wasn’t too much like battery acid yet. And she was too lazy to fix a fresh pot.

Battery acid. She shook her head. Would the comparison even have occurred to her if Ed hadn’t worked at the Delco-Remy plant since the Year One? How many car and truck batteries did they turn out there every year? Zillions-that was all she knew.

The phone rang again. This time, it was a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He wanted to find out what she thought of Heydrich’s untimely demise, too. She was still all for it. He asked almost the same questions as E. A. Stuart had. Later on, she got a call from the Boston Globe, and one from the Los Angeles Mirror-News.

“Do you feel like you’ve got revenge for your son now?” the reporter from the Mirror-News asked.

That was a more…interesting question than she usually got. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “When it’s your own flesh and blood…No, it’s not revenge, or not enough revenge. I don’t think there can be enough revenge for your own child. I’m still glad Heydrich’s dead, though.”

“You and everybody else. Well, thanks.” The reporter didn’t even say good-bye. He just went off to write up his piece.

In between phone calls, life went on. Diana sliced potatoes and carrots and chopped onions and put them into a pan with a pot roast. If a few tears fell, she could blame them on the onions. Supper went into the oven.

Ed got home about twenty to six, the way he always did. He took a Burgie out of the icebox, drank it faster than he was in the habit of doing, and then opened another one. “You all right?” Diana asked. “You don’t do that very often.” Ever since she got back from San Francisco, she’d watched him more closely than usual.

He let out a wordless grunt and got to work on the second beer. That alarmed her. Everything alarmed her these days-a sure sign of her guilty conscience. That same guilty conscience had made her extra accommodating in the bedroom since coming home. If only it had made her take more pleasure in what went on there.

Doggedly, she tried again: “Everything all right at the plant?”

“Fine,” Ed said. He poured down the Burgermeister.

He opened another one to go with supper. “You’ll get snockered,” Diana warned. She remembered too well what had happened when she got snockered. Ed just shrugged. He killed the beer, and killed one more while she was doing the dishes.

That seemed to get him where he needed to go. While she dried the last fork and put away the dish towel, he sat there waiting. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” he said, sounding sad and resigned at the same time.

“What is?” Her voice, by contrast, was a thin, nervous squeak.

“Us,” he said, and then, as if that weren’t comprehensive enough, “Everything.”

“What? We’re fine! I love you!” The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Diana hadn’t read any Shakespeare since high school. Why did that particular line have to come back to her right now? Why? Because she was protesting too goddamn much-why else?

“Yeah, well…” Ed turned toward the icebox, as if to get one more Burgie. But he didn’t. His smile was sad, too, sad and sweet at the same time. “You’ve got your head turned, babe. It took a while, but you do.”

“What are you talking about?” Diana wouldn’t have sounded so scared if she hadn’t known precisely what he was talking about.

He spelled it out for her anyhow: “You go here, you go there, you go all over the darn place. Reporters call you all the time. How many calls you get today on account of Heydrich’s kicked the bucket?”

“Four.” Automatically, she answered with the truth.

“Uh-huh.” Ed nodded. “And you hang around with big shots when you go traveling. Congressmen and mayors and Lord knows who all. And they figure you’re a big shot, too, ’cause you’ve got all this clout you made for yourself, and that’s great. And I bet they hit on you, too-you’re a darn good-lookin’ gal. I oughta know, huh? And then you come home.”

“I’m glad to come home,” Diana said. And she always had been, till this last trip.

Ed went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “You come home, and waddaya got? Me. Foreman at Delco-Remy. Ain’t gonna be anything more than foreman at Delco-Remy if I get as old as Methuselah. And it isn’t enough any more. I can tell.”

“How?” she whispered. Did she have a scarlet A on her chest? Did she remember high-school lit classes better than she’d ever thought she could? She sure did, but why, for God’s sake?

“How?” Her husband snorted. “I’ve known you for thirty years, that’s how. I’m not smart like a big shot, but I’m not blind, either.”

Diana started to cry. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want any of this to happen-not any of it. If Pat was alive-” She cried harder. Ed hadn’t really guessed. She hadn’t really admitted anything, either. But how much difference did that make? He’d nailed everything else down tight. Hadn’t he just! “What are we going to do?” she wailed.

His shoulder went up and down in a tried shrug. “I dunno, babe. What are we gonna do?”

When it came to American foreign policy, she found answers with the greatest of ease, and she was always sure they were right. Here? Here she had no answers at all. She started crying again.

“He’s dead. Good riddance to him,” Jerry Duncan said on the House floor. “And now, God willing, the fanatics in Germany will see that their cause is hopeless. And, I note, this is all happening even though our troops are coming home from Europe. The world hasn’t fallen to pieces. And it won’t fall to pieces, in spite of the doomsayers’ croakings in this very House.”

Congressmen who agreed with him clapped and cheered. Congressmen who didn’t were much less polite. Boos, catcalls, shaken fists…Jerry didn’t seen any upraised middle fingers this time, which was progress of a sort. He did hear several insistent shouts: “Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”

Joe Martin pointed. “The chair recognizes the Representative from California.”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Helen Gahagan Douglas said.

Maybe Martin had recognized her because her voice stood out among those of the Democrats clamoring for his notice (and well it might-not only was she a woman, but she’d also sung opera, so she had impressive volume when she needed it). Or maybe he’d thought she would be milder than most of her colleagues. If he had, he was unduly optimistic. Now that the wartime consensus lay dead, nobody saw much point to mildness any more.

And Congresswoman Douglas proved as much, saying, “Many years ago, Chancellor Bismarck remarked that God loved children, drunkards, and the United States of America. The way things are these days, I hesitate to speak well of any German, but it seems to me that Bismarck knew what he was talking about. The distinguished gentleman from Indiana wouldn’t be celebrating Reinhard Heydrich’s death today if he’d got his own heart’s desire a few months earlier. If we didn’t have any men on the ground to dig him out once we learned where he hid, he’d still be down there sneering at us.”

People on her side applauded. People on Jerry’s side were at least as rude to Helen Gahagan Douglas as people who agreed with her had been to him. The first thing that ran through his mind was Well, fuck you, bitch. He didn’t say it. Consensus might have expired, but civility, though hospitalized, still breathed.

And she wasn’t a bitch, and Jerry knew it perfectly well when he wasn’t pissed off himself. She was a highly capable Congresswoman who disagreed with him on the President’s German policy. The way things went these days, the distinction seemed ever more academic.

“Mr. Speaker!” Jerry said.

“You have the floor, Mr. Duncan,” Joe Martin replied.

“Thanks, Mr. Speaker. How many of our young men did the fanatics murder and torture while we lingered in Germany because President Truman couldn’t see we didn’t belong there? Are they a fair trade for Heydrich?” Jerry asked. Attacking the President was easier and more likely to be profitable than swinging directly at Helen Gahagan Douglas.

She didn’t mind swinging right at him. “If someone makes a habit of murdering and torturing our young men-and that’s what the Nazis do, no doubt about it-isn’t it better to make sure he can’t do it any more than to run away from him?” she demanded.

“I would say yes, except the Army has made it much too plain they can’t do that, either,” Jerry answered.

“How do you expect it to, when you’ve been doing everything you could to hamstring it since V-E Day?” Helen Gahagan Douglas said. “You’ve been blaming the administration for Chiang Kai-shek’s losses in China. But when the administration tries to blame this Congress for our losses in Germany, you don’t think that’s fair.”

“It isn’t fair,” Jerry snapped. “Our losses in Germany started long before Republicans gained the majority. We gained it not least because of American losses in Germany. And those losses started almost before the ink dried on the so-called surrender. The Army in Germany had full wartime appropriations in 1945, as I am sure the distinguished Representative from California recalls.” His tone declared he was sure of no such thing. “Even with those full appropriations, even with that flood of manpower, the U.S. Army had no better luck against partisan warfare than the Wehrmacht did in France or Russia or Yugoslavia.”

“Mr. Speaker!” Congresswoman Douglas exclaimed. “It’s outrageous to compare the United States Army to Hitler’s murder machine! Outrageous!”

“I wasn’t comparing them, except to point out that even the Wehrmacht couldn’t stamp out partisans. The Red Army isn’t having much fun trying it, either. And if you can’t hope to win a fight like that, why keep flushing blood down the toilet trying?” Jerry said.

Neither Helen Gahagan Douglas nor any of the other pro-administration Representatives wanted to listen to him. They yelled and fussed and carried on. So did the Congressmen on Jerry’s side. Up on the rostrum, Joe Martin banged his gavel and, not for the first time, looked as if he had no idea why he’d ever wanted to become Speaker of the House.

Flashbulbs burst like artillery shells. Blinking, Lou Weissberg tried to hide a shiver. He knew more about bursting shells-or at least mortar bombs-than he’d ever wanted to find out. Up there on the platform with him stood Bernie Cobb, Shmuel Birnbaum in black fatigues with “DP” armband, and Second Lieutenant Mark Davenport, the young officer who’d stopped Cobb and his buddies from leaving their position, so they’d been there when Heydrich and company came out.

Also on the platform stood General Lucius D. Clay. Lou had figured the only way he’d get to meet the commander of American forces in Germany was by monumentally screwing up. He’d never dreamt he could do something right enough to draw a four-star general’s notice. Life was full of surprises.

Clay stepped over to the microphone. More flashbulbs went off. Reporters got out notebooks and poised themselves to report. A movie camera recorded the event for posterity-and for the newsreel before next week’s two-reeler, or maybe week after next’s.

Looking straight into the camera, General Clay said, “These four brave men with me today are most responsible for ridding the world of Reinhard Heydrich, would-be Fuhrer of the Nazi diehards and war criminal beyond compare. The U.S. Army and the government of the United States take pride in honoring them and rewarding them for their courage.”

Lou translated Clay’s remarks into low-voiced Yiddish for Shmuel Birnbaum. Then Clay called the DP’s name. Lou stepped up to the mike with him to go on interpreting. Clay said, “We offered a million dollars for help leading to Heydrich’s capture or death. Mr. Birnbaum, who was forced to help excavate the Nazi leader’s headquarters and who later narrowly escaped the murder that would have silenced him forever, gave information that led us to him. His share of the reward will be $250,000.”

Reporters and soldiers gave Birnbaum a hand. Shyly, his head bobbed up and down as he acknowledged the applause. “What will you do with the money?” somebody called. Lou translated the question.

“I want to go to Palestine,” the DP answered without hesitation. “Everybody else has a homeland. Jews should have one, too.” After Lou also translated that, the mostly American crowd nodded. Englishmen wouldn’t have; the UK wasn’t having much fun trying to keep its old League of Nations mandate from exploding into civil war. An ordinary Jewish DP would have had a devil of a time even getting British permission to enter Palestine. For the man who’d fingered Reinhard Heydrich, though-and for a man with a quarter of a million smackers in his pocket-many more things were possible.

Birnbaum and Lou stepped back. “Lieutenant Mark Davenport!” Lucius Clay said.

Davenport strode forward and delivered a parade-ground salute. “Sir!” he said. He was skinny and blond, and looked about seventeen.

“For your cool head, for your gallantry on the mountainside, and for your vital role in ensuring that Heydrich could not escape after coming out of his shelter, I am pleased to promote you to first lieutenant, to present you with a Silver Star in recognition of your courage, and to reward you with $250,000. Congratulations!”

“Thank you very much, sir!” Davenport sounded as if he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. Well, if he didn’t, who could blame him? As if to compound the surreal atmosphere, Clay personally pinned the Silver Star on his chest.

“Private Bernard Cobb!” Before Cobb could even salute him, General Clay corrected himself: “Sergeant Bernard Cobb!”

“Thanks, sir.” Bernie Cobb did salute then. Lou had got to know him a little the past few hectic days. Cobb had had as much of the Army as he wanted, and then some. Three stripes on his sleeve wouldn’t impress him. Neither would a Silver Star, even if Lucius Clay presented it with his own hands. A quarter of a million dollars were bound to be a different story.

“What will you do next?” a reporter asked.

“Soon as I get out of the Army, I’m going back to New Mexico,” Cobb answered. “I’ll buy me a house, buy a car, maybe go to school, find a girl, find a job, settle down. No offense to anybody, but I’ve worn a uniform as long as I want to.”

“The Army needs men like you, but I have to admit I understand-and I sympathize,” General Clay said. Then he turned to Lou. “Captain-no, Major-Louis Weissberg!”

“Sir!” Lou blinked-he hadn’t expected the promotion. Down in the crowd, Howard Frank grinned and waved and gave him a thumbs-up.

Lou wasn’t sure he deserved a Silver Star, either. Unlike Bernie Cobb or Lieutenant Davenport, he’d spent a hell of a lot more time in Heydrich’s valley getting shot at than shooting. Then Lucius Clay said, “You earned your share of the reward for ending Reinhard Heydrich’s career not just in the valley last week but also in your relentless pursuit of him and of other war criminals since V-E Day. As I told Sergeant Cobb, the Army needs more men like you. Well done!”

“Thank you, sir!” Lou’s salute was as snappy as he could make it. He felt about ready to bust his buttons with pride. If America wasn’t the greatest country in the world…No, it damn well was, and that was all there was to it. His folks had come through Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. He wished they could see him now, college-educated and exchanging salutes with a four-star general. If something like this wasn’t the dream of every hard-working immigrant’s son, what would be?

“Hey, Captain-uh, Major!” a reporter called. “You’re in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Lou said uncomfortably. The one thing wrong with getting your name in the paper was that you weren’t so useful to the CIC after you did. A well-known spy was your basic contradiction in terms.

The reporter didn’t care-or, more likely, didn’t even think about it. “Those Nazi so-and-so’s gonna dry up and blow away now that Heydrich’s dead and gone?” he asked, poising pencil above notebook to wait for Lou’s reply. A good story…That, he cared about.

Lucius Clay leaned toward Lou, too, anxious to hear his answer. It wasn’t an enormous, showy lean: only an inch or so, two at the most. But any lean at all from the straight-spined general seemed remarkable. With Clay leaning, Lou picked his words with even more care than he would have otherwise. “Nobody knows what’s coming up-I figure that’s how come everybody spends so much time guessing and hoping about it,” he said. “So the most I can give you now is a guess and a hope. My guess is, we’ve got a decent chance that they’ll quit. And you can bet I hope like anything I’m right.”

What was a decent chance? Thirty percent? Eighty percent? Lou didn’t say, because he had no idea. The reporter didn’t notice, and wrote down what he did say. General Clay, on the other hand, recognized bullshit when he heard it. He made a point of straightening up again: Lou showed he didn’t have any better notion than Clay did himself. Lou wished he could have sounded surer. Hell, he wished he could have been surer. Too bad life didn’t work that way.

Bernie Cobb was drunk. He was drunk As a Lord,in fact-or he thought so, even if no lords were around for comparison. He couldn’t remember ever buying drinks for so many other guys before, either. Of course, he’d also never had a quarter of a million bucks burning a hole in his pocket before.

He didn’t exactly have a quarter of a million bucks now. In spite of the fancy ceremony with General Clay, the money was going into a Stateside bank account for him. The idea was to keep him from blowing the wad before the Army shipped him home. Whoever’d decided on that knew what he was doing-and knew Bernie much too well.

So what he was spending was back pay and poker winnings and whatever other cash he could scrape together. You had to throw some kind of bash when $250,000 came your way, didn’t you? Bernie thought so. And the Silver Star didn’t hurt.

“So when do they turn you loose and send you back?” asked one of his many new-found close friends.

That set Bernie laughing. Right now, almost anything would, but this was really funny. “Y’know the medal they pinned on me? Even with the way they’re bumping up points, that gave me enough for my Ruptured Duck. So as soon as they find me a ship or a plane, I am fucking gone!”

People laughed and cheered and pounded him on the back. Why not? He was still slapping money down on the bar. Somebody else asked him, “Did you know it was Heydrich when you opened up on those Jerries?”

“Shit, no,” Bernie answered. “All I knew was, they were Germans and they weren’t supposed to be there. I figured I better get ’em while they were still all bunched up, like, so I did.”

“Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” The other GI sounded jealous. And he had a quarter of a million reasons to sound that way. No, a quarter of a million and one, because Bernie had a ticket home, too. Well, the way things were going, everybody’d be heading back from Germany soon. Bernie didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked going home himself just fine.

Engines roaring, the big triple-tailed Constellation rolled down the runway outside of Amsterdam. The TWA airliner took off smooth as you please. It would stop at Paris to let passengers off and take on new ones, and to top up its fuel tanks. Then it would cross the Atlantic-eight or ten times as fast as the fastest ocean liner-and land at New York City.

Over the intercom, the pilot explained all that in English and French and Dutch. Before the war, he surely would have used German, too. He didn’t think he needed to now. Konrad could follow English, and Dutch after a fashion, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of what the pilot thought the flight would be doing, Konrad and his friends had other plans.

Konrad and Max carried Dutch passports-or excellent forgeries of Dutch passports, anyhow. A couple of rows farther back, Arnold and Hermann flew on Belgian passports-or equally excellent forgeries. Along with the false documents, all four men had also brought cut-down Schmeissers onto the plane. But the submachine guns weren’t on display, not yet.

A steward came down the aisle with a tray of drinks. It was almost empty by the time it got to Konrad and Max. Plenty of people needed help forgetting they were three or four kilometers up in the air. Max took a cocktail. Konrad didn’t.

They landed at Orly Airport. Like the rest of the people going on to New York, Konrad and Max and Arnold and Hermann sat tight while other stylish men and women got off and on. If you couldn’t afford stylish clothes, odds were you couldn’t afford a plane ticket, either.

After the layover, the L-049 took off again. The pilot came on the intercom to brag in his three languages about the meals TWA would be serving. Then he explained how to fold the seats down into reasonable approximations of beds. No matter how much faster than a ship it was, the airliner would still take a long time to get to New York City.

It would take far longer than the pilot expected, but he didn’t know that yet. Time he found out.

“Ready?” Konrad asked quietly. Max nodded. Konrad twisted and looked back over his shoulder. He caught Arnold’s eye, and Hermann’s. They nodded, too. All four Germans took their Schmeissers out of their travel cases. No one had searched them before they boarded. Except for a few panicky editorial writers, no one had seen the need, even after the German Freedom Front flew that captured C-47 into the Russians’ Berlin courthouse.

A stewardess-quite a pretty girl, really-was drawing near when Konrad and Max, Arnold and Hermann, all stood up at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding more curious than alarmed.

Then she saw the Schmeissers. Her eyes-green as jade-opened so wide, Konrad could see white all around the irises, as he might have with a spooked horse on the Eastern Front. Crash! The tray of drinks hit the floor.

“Don’t do anything dumb,” Konrad said-he was lead man in this operation not least because he knew English. “Take us to the cockpit.”

“What-What will you do?” The girl’s voice quavered, which was hardly a surprise.

“Nobody will get hurt if people do what we say,” Konrad answered, which committed him to nothing. He gestured sharply with the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Now go on! Move!”

When the cockpit door opened, the pilot grinned at the stewardess. “Hey, beautiful! What’s going on?” Then he saw the four men with submachine guns behind her. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

“I will shoot you if you do not do everything I tell you,” Konrad said. “The plane will crash. Everyone will die. If you do what I tell you, I think everyone can live. Is it a bargain?”

“Who the hell are you?” the pilot demanded.

That was a fair question. He meant Are you a pack of crazy people? If he decided Konrad and his friends were, he wouldn’t see any point to dealing with them. He might think crashing the plane now would be the best thing he could do, so they wouldn’t try to make him fly it into a building or something. Since Konrad didn’t want to die, he spoke quickly: “We belong to the German Freedom Front. We were soldiers in the war. We still fight to liberate the Fatherland.”

Pilot and copilot looked at each other. Neither seemed to like the answer very much. “What do you want us to do?” the pilot asked after a considerable pause.

“Fly this airplane to Madrid. Land there,” Konrad replied. “We will-how do you say it? — use the airplane and the passengers as poker chips to move our cause forward. We will not shoot unless you try to overpower us. Everyone in that case will be very unhappy.”

“When we go off course, the radar will see it,” the pilot said. “They’ll call us up and ask us what’s wrong. What are we supposed to tell ’em?”

“Tell them the truth. Tell them you have men from the German Freedom Front on your airplane. Tell them these men require you to fly to Spain,” Konrad answered.

The pilot eyed him. “You son of a bitch! You want everybody to know!”

“Aber naturlich,” Konrad said. “The world must learn we are still fighting for a free Germany, and we are serious in what we do.” As he had with the stewardess, he let a twitch of the Schmeisser’s muzzle make his point for him. “Now-to Madrid.”

“Right. To fucking Madrid,” the pilot muttered. The L-049 swung from west to south.

Not five minutes later, a voice on the radio said, “TWA flight 57, this is Paris Control. Why have you changed course? Over.”

The pilot grabbed the microphone. “Paris Control, this is TWA57. We have four men from the German Freedom Front aboard. They are all armed, and they have directed us to fly to Madrid. To keep our passengers and crew safe, we are obeying. Over.” He clicked off the mike and looked back over his shoulder at Konrad. “There. Happy now?”

“You did what was needed. That is good,” Konrad answered. The pilot’s eyebrows said he didn’t think so.

“Jesus Christ!” Paris Control burst out. “Say that again, TWA57.” At Konrad’s nod, the pilot did. “Jesus!” Paris Control repeated. Then he asked, “Have the assholes hurt anybody?”

“Negative. They say they won’t if we play along with ’em. You might watch what you call ’em, since they’re in the cockpit with us.”

“Er-roger that,” Paris Control said. A different voice came over the air: “Shall we scramble fighters?”

“Negative! Say again, negative!” the pilot replied. “Not unless you aim to shoot us down. What else can fighters do?”

A long silence followed. At last, Paris Control said, “You may proceed. We will inform Spanish air officials of the situation.”

“Thank you,” the pilot said. He looked disgusted. Paris Control had sounded disgusted. Some of the Anglo-Americans had wanted to clean out Franco’s Spain after the Wehrmacht surrendered. They hadn’t done it, though, even if Spain sheltered more than a few German refugees and other Europeans who’d supported the Reich’s crusade against Bolshevism. Maybe they remembered that Franco hadn’t let the Fuhrer come in and run the English out of Gibraltar. All by itself, that had gone a long way toward costing Germany the war.

“Can we tell the passengers what’s going on?” the copilot asked. “They’re bound to be wondering by now.”

“Go ahead,” Konrad said, and then, in German, to his comrades, “If anybody back there makes trouble, kill him.”

Word went out over the airliner’s intercom. The copilot warned people not to do anything silly, and nobody did. The Constellation flew on, almost at right angles to its planned course.

After a while, Konrad saw the peaks of the Pyrenees ahead. The L-049 flew high above them. The land on the other side was Spain.

He and his fellow hijackers grinned at one another. Everything was going according to plan. The Spanish ground-control man who came on the radio hardly spoke English. He and the pilot went back and forth in French. Konrad didn’t know any, but Max and Hermann did. They nodded to show nothing was wrong.

Spanish planes came up to look the airliner over. “Son of a bitch!” the pilot exclaimed. “Thought I’d never seen another goddamn Messerschmitt again!”

To Konrad, the German design carried happier associations. “We sold many of them to Spain,” he said. “The Spaniards must use them yet.”

“I guess.” The pilot still sounded shaken.

He wasn’t too shaken to land smoothly, though. Tanks rolled toward the Constellation. They were also German-outdated Panzer IIIs-which did nothing to reassure Konrad. “Tell them to go away, or the passengers will answer for it,” he said sharply. The American relayed the message. The tanks pulled back.

“People are hungry. May I serve a meal?” the stewardess asked.

“Ja. Go ahead. Hermann, keep an eye on things,” Konrad said. Hermann smiled and nodded. Plainly, he was happy to keep an eye on the cute stewardess. That wasn’t what Konrad had meant, but…. The lead hijacker turned back to the pilot. “You can talk to the control tower, yes?”

“Yes,” the man said. “They finally found a guy who really knows some English, too.”

“Good. Very good. Get in touch with him.” When the pilot had, Konrad took a folded sheet of paper out of his inside jacket pocket. “Send to the tower the just demands of the German Freedom Front. Tell the tower to send these demands on to the troops unlawfully and improperly occupying Germany. Have you got it?”

“Take it easy. Let me give ’em that much before I start forgetting,” the pilot said. Konrad waved agreement. The pilot spoke into the microphone. Then he looked back to the hijacker to find out what came next.

Konrad was only too happy to oblige him. “First, all demands must be met within seventy-two hours. After that, we cannot answer for the safety of the passengers.”

“You’ll start shooting people, you mean,” the pilot observed bleakly.

“Ja,” Konrad said. “If we do not do this, no one pays attention to us. Send the warning.” After the pilot had, Konrad resumed: “We demand the immediate liberation of all prisoners captured while resisting the unlawful occupation. We demand also an end to the unlawful ban against National Socialist participation in German political life. And we demand-”

“Maybe you should start shooting now,” the pilot said. “They won’t give you any of that stuff.”

Konrad hefted his Schmeisser. “You had better hope they do.”