The Man with the Iron Heart

III

When Tom Schmidt thought of Nuremberg, he thought of Triumph of the Will. He was a reporter. He knew he wasn’t supposed to do stuff like that. But how could you help it if you’d seen the movie? Precision marching. Torchlight parades. Searchlights stabbing up into the air, building the columns for a cathedral of light. (Nobody then had mentioned that the searchlights were also part of the city’s aircraft-defense system.)

And Hitler haranguing the faithful. Tom’s German grandparents had settled in Milwaukee-well, one of his grandmothers was from Austria, but it amounted to the same thing. His own Deutsch wasn’t great, but it was good enough. Hitler didn’t say anything wonderful in the film, but the way he said it….

Even on the screen, it made Tom sit up and take notice. And the shots of the people listening to it live-! The men in their brown or black uniforms and the boys in Hitler Jugend shorts stared in awe. They might have been listening to the Pope, or to the Second Coming of Jesus.

The women, though, were the ones who really got to him. Wide eyes; open mouths; slack, ecstatic features…They looked as if they were on the edge of coming themselves. If old Adolf could do that without laying a finger on them-well, it was plenty to make Tom jealous.

So that was what he thought of when he thought of Nuremberg. Postwar reality was a little different. Yeah, just a little, he thought with a wry chuckle. It was a field of wreckage as far as the eye could see. A U.S. Army information officer told him the town had suffered ninety-one percent destruction. That included the vast majority of the public buildings, though a couple of churches might prove salvageable. About half the prewar housing was ruins now.

That helpful information officer said there were something like 12,000,000 cubic meters of rubble to clear away. The first big raids came in late 1943, the last in early 1945. Tom wondered how many years hauling away the bricks and timber and plaster and concrete would take. By the way Nuremberg looked now, it might take forever.

If it did, he wouldn’t be heartbroken. Along with the rubble, today’s Nuremberg had something else Triumph of the Will didn’t show: fear. American soldiers here, as throughout the U.S. occupation zone, didn’t travel in groups smaller than four. They always went armed. Representing the Milwaukee Sentinel, Tom was officially a noncombatant. That hadn’t kept him from acquiring a helmet and a grease gun. The M3A1 was almost as ugly as a British Sten gun, but it could chew up a lot of bandits at close range. Since it could, Tom didn’t sweat the aesthetics.

He did wish he had eyes in the back of his head. When he mentioned that to a GI, the dogface laughed at him. Then the fellow said, “Sorry, Mac. If I don’t laugh, I bang my head against a wall. Laughing hurts less-I guess. We’re all as jumpy as cats in a room full of rocking chairs.”

“Nice to know it isn’t just me,” Tom said. “But it shouldn’t be like this. They surrendered. If they mess with us now, we can treat them however we want. It’s all in the laws of war, right?”

“Like I know from the laws of war.” The soldier wore a PFC’s single stripe. No, he wouldn’t be chewing the fat with Patton or Eisenhower any time soon. “All I know is, we’ve shot hostages, and it don’t do no good. Fuckin’ krauts still shoot at us and plant mines and blow themselves up like they’re Japs. Me, I quit goin’ to movies on account of they go after us double when there’s crowds of us like that.”

“Uh-huh.” Tom wrote that down. “Doing without movies is a real hardship. What do you do instead?”

“Waddaya think I do, man?” the GI returned. “I do without, like you said.”

Tom wrote that down, too; it was a good line. “How do we get a handle on these German tactics?”

“Hanging that Heydrich item up by the balls’d make a decent start, I guess,” the PFC answered. “He’s the one supposed to be back of this shit, right? What’s the reward for his worthless carcass up to?”

“Half a million bucks-tax-free if an American bags him,” Tom said. “Not exactly worthless, not if you’re the one who hits the jackpot.”

“You know what I mean. I-” The soldier paused as a couple of Germans mooched past. One of them was in civvies; the other wore a beat-up Wehrmacht uniform with all the trim removed. The guy in the uniform glanced over at the Americans as if wondering what his chances for a handout were. The other man, who was older, kept his head down. With all the stones and broken bricks and other bits of crap on the ground, that wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

And if he doesn’t make eye contact and get us nervous, his odds for seeing tomorrow bump up, Tom thought.

“Okay. Now they’re out of range,” the GI said. He relaxed-fractionally.

“They wouldn’t go after just two of us…would they?” Schmidt wished he’d managed to swallow the last two words, but he knew what they said about wishes and horses.

To his relief, the PFC didn’t seem to think he was yellow. “Well, you wouldn’t think so,” the man answered seriously. “When they blow themselves up, they try to take out more than two of us at a time. But you don’t wanna drop your guard, you know? If you look like you ain’t payin’ attention, who knows what one of those cocksuckers’ll try?”

“Yeah. Who knows?” Tom’s voice sounded gloomy, even to himself.

“I’ll tell you somethin’, man,” the soldier said. “I ain’t got near enough points for them to hand me a Ruptured Duck and ship my sorry ass home-I didn’t get over here till pretty late in the game. But if they want to throw me on a boat and send me to fight the Japs, I’d sooner do that than this. That’s an honest war, anyways. You know who the bad guys are. They get in your way, you fuckin’ grease ’em. This…Truman said it was over when the Nazis signed the surrender papers, but does it look like it’s over to you?”

“Well…it did for a little while,” Tom said.

“I know. I figured this occupation shit’d be duty you could handle standing on your head.” The American broke off to give another German the once-over. She was young and kind of cute, but that wasn’t why he eyed her the way he did. As she walked off, he sighed and spat in the rubble. “Standing on your goddamn head. Yeah, sure. And then you wake up.”

“Have you heard of any women blowing themselves up?” Tom asked.

“There was one, a coupla weeks ago. Down near…where the fuck was it? It was in Stars and Stripes-you can look it up. Down near Augsburg, that’s where the cunt did it.”

Tom asked one more question: “So if you had your druthers, what would you do with the Germans now?”

“Beats me, man,” the GI said. “Way it looks to me is, we either gotta kill ’em all or else walk away from ’em. Neither one of those is what you’d call a real good answer.”

“I know,” Tom said.

“You got any better ones?” the soldier asked. “You can go all over the place. You ain’t stuck yakking with guys like me-you can talk to officers and shit. Hell, you can even talk to the krauts if you want to, huh?” He made that sound as strange as talking to Martians. To him, maybe it was.

“I could, yeah. If I did, I don’t know how many folks back in Milwaukee’d want to read about it, though.” Tom held up a hand. “And before you ask me, I haven’t run into any officers with ideas much different from yours.”

“Jeez.” The PFC spat again, mournfully. “We are fubar’d, then. But good.”

Soviet troops shouted orders-in Russian. The Germans they were herding onto trains mostly didn’t understand. The Germans weren’t happy to be in the train station to begin with. The Soviets had hauled them out of their houses and flats and shacks and tents and wherever else they were staying. Some Germans carried a duffel’s worth of worldly goods. More had only the clothes on their backs.

“Where are we going?” “Where are they taking us?” “What’s going on?” “What are they doing?” Germans called out the questions again and again. Hardly any of the soldiers understood. Nobody answered.

Watching the chaos unfold, Vladimir Bokov smiled. The NKVD officer had no trouble following the Germans’ worried questions. In broad outline, he knew the answers to them. But he kept his mouth shut. He was there to observe, not to ease the Germans’ minds. His smile got broader. What he could say wouldn’t make these people feel any better.

A train pulled in. Soviet soldiers already aboard opened the cars’ doors. An indignant German voice rose above the general din: “Was ist hier los? Some of these cars are for transporting freight or-or livestock, not human beings!”

He was right, not that it did him any good. The troops started herding-and then cramming-people onto the train. Men shouted. Women screamed. Children wailed. That did them no good, either.

The NKVD colonel standing next to Bokov chuckled nastily. “Let the pricks find out what it’s like, eh? Not like they didn’t do it to plenty of other people.”

“That’s right, Comrade,” Bokov agreed. No need to worry that Colonel Moisei Shteinberg would prove disloyal to the Soviet state, not when it came to dealing with the Hitlerites. Lots of Jews in the old Russian Empire became revolutionaries because the Tsars mistreated their people. Well, what the Tsars did to Jews was like a kiss on the cheek compared to what the Nazis gave them.

That angry German man protested again, crying, “This is inhumane!” Then a grinning soldier who doubtless understood not a word he said shoved him into a cattle car. The Red Army men forced more and more Germans in after him.

“Why are you doing this to us?” a woman asked the soldier who was pushing her into another car. “Where are we going?”

Bokov would have bet rubles against rocks that the soldier didn’t follow her questions. The fellow had swarthy skin, high cheekbones, and dark, slanted Asian eyes. He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “Suck my cock, bitch!” he said. Luckily for the woman, she didn’t understand him, either. She squawked when he put both hands on her backside to get her in there. He only laughed.

In slow, schoolboy Russian, a German man said, “For what you do? I not harm you.”

He was over sixty, so he might have been telling the truth, at least in the literal sense of the words. Maybe he hadn’t carried a Mauser or served a 105mm howitzer. But even if he hadn’t, he’d almost certainly made weapons or munitions or uniforms or something else the Nazis had used against the USSR. Not many people here had clean hands.

The soldier he addressed didn’t answer him in words, not at first. Instead, the Red Army man hit him in the side of the head with the stock of his submachine gun. The German crumpled with a moan. The Red Army man kicked him in the ribs. Then he shouted, “Fuck yourself in the mouth! Get up, you stupid, ugly prick!”

Slowly, the old German did. He had a hand clutched to his temple. Blood rilled out between his fingers and ran down his cheek. “Why have you done that?” he choked out. “Not understand.”

“I ought to kill you, is what I ought to do. I ought to gutshoot you,” the Soviet soldier said. “You didn’t harm me, you lying sack of shit? Who the fuck shot me?” He pointed to one arm, then to the other leg. “Who burned down the kolkhoz where I grew up? Who raped my sister and shot her afterwards? Was it the Americans? Or was it you Heil, Hitler! bastards?”

How much of that did the stupid old German get? Here, for once, Bokov was tempted to translate. The losers needed to hear stuff like this. They’d see what they bought when they invaded the USSR four years ago. And they’d see plenty of other things, too-for as long as they lasted.

More and more people kept going into the cars. It was almost like a comic turn in a film. When it ran in reverse after the train got to wherever it was going, how many people would come out alive? Fewer than had gone in-he was sure of that. The idea didn’t break his heart.

He turned to Colonel Shteinberg. “How well do you think this will work, sir?”

“Well, we shook up the Baltic republics as if we were stirring soup,” the Jew answered. “Anybody who might have been anti-Soviet, away he went. Or she went-we shipped out plenty of Baltic bitches, too.” He chuckled reminiscently; maybe he’d been involved in that. But then the grin faded. “We could ship as many loyal Russians back in as we needed-the Baltics are legally part of the USSR now. We can’t do that so well here.”

“No,” Bokov agreed. Germany, however prostrate it was, remained a separate country. “Too bad.”

“Isn’t it?” Shteinberg said. “So we have to depend on scaring the devil out of the Fritzes we don’t send to camps.”

“That will work against most people. Will it work against the diehards?” Bokov asked.

“I doubt it.” Colonel Shteinberg sounded so indifferent, Bokov looked at him in surprise. The other NKVD man condescended to explain: “Sooner or later, we’ll scare one of the ordinary ones enough to make him sing. He’ll think, If I sell out, they won’t take my daughter or They won’t shoot me or whatever bothers him the most. And once we get our hooks into the diehards’ network, it’ll start coming to pieces. They always do.”

“Ah.” Bokov thought about it. “Yes, sir, you’re probably right.”

“You’d better believe I am,” Shteinberg said. “We’ll make every miserable German in our occupation zone sure hell’s not half a kilometer away from his front door. Some of them will decide they’d rather kiss our behinds than keep on getting it in the neck ’cause they’re making like tough guys.”

He talked like a tough guy himself-actually, like a zek, a man who’d been through the camps. Maybe he’d been a guard at one of them. Or maybe he had a term in his past. Plenty of people who went into the gulags in ’37 or ’38 came out again after the Hitlerites invaded. Some of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, too, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t go right back into a camp if they sneezed at the wrong time. Even men like Tupolev, the great aircraft designer, had the camps hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles.

The Red Army men made sure the cars were shut good and tight. Each one boasted impressive locks and bars that hadn’t been on them while they were part of the German railway system-unless the Germans used them to haul people to their concentration camps. Similarly, metal gratings and barbed wire across passenger-car windows made sure nobody would leave that way.

Smoke poured from the locomotive’s stack. The train pulled out of the station, heading east. Vladimir Bokov wondered if any of the Germans on board had the slightest idea how far east they were likely to go. Well, if the sons of bitches didn’t, they’d find out pretty damn quick.

Colonel Shteinberg watched the train go with no expression at all on his face. “A good job, eh?” Bokov said.

Shteinberg looked at him as coldly as he’d eyed the train. “They could put every German ever born on trains like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough to pay them back for what they did,” he said. His voice was also cool and quiet, but Bokov realized there were people who liked Fritzes even less than he did.

Lou Weissberg was eating breakfast at the barracks in Nuremberg when somebody came in waving the Stars and Stripes. “Look at this!” the guy shouted. “Look what we done to the goddamn Japs!”

“Hold the stupid thing still, willya?” somebody else said, more irritably than Lou would have-maybe this fellow hadn’t had his coffee yet. “Give us a chance to see what it says.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The guy with the paper did hold it still-and upside down. After assorted hoots from the soldiers shoveling food into their faces, he turned it right side up.

Upside down or right side up, the headline screamed about an atom bomb. “What the hell is that?” a major asked.

“They dropped one on this, uh, Hiroshima place, and the town is gone. Right off the map,” said the man with the Stars and Stripes.

“Well, they firebombed the living shit out of Tokyo not long ago, too, and they pretty much burned it off the map. So what’s such a big deal about this?” The major seemed determined not to be impressed-or maybe he didn’t fully grasp what was going on.

Either way, the guy with the paper spelled it out for him: “Yes, sir, but that was hundreds of planes and gazillions of incendiaries-Christ only knows how many. This Hiroshima place, this was one plane and one bomb. One.”

“What? One bomb? A whole city? My ass! That’s impossible!” the major said. If not for the enormous headline, Lou would have felt the same way.”

“Here’s what the President said.” The man with the Stars and Stripes opened it and read from a story: “‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.’”

The guy beside Lou stubbed out his cigarette and crossed himself. Lou knew just how he felt.

“‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold,’” read the fellow with the paper. “‘And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

“‘It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.’”

“Son of a bitch,” the skeptical major whispered. That summed up what Lou was feeling, too.

“‘Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it.’” The guy who had the Stars and Stripes didn’t read especially well. Or maybe he was as flummoxed as everybody else. He went on, “‘By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1’s and V-2’s late and in limited quantities and that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.’”

“Oh, son of a bitch.” From Lou, it came out as more prayer than curse. Imagining the Nazis with a bomb that could take out a city at one shot scared him worse than anything he’d seen in the war, which was saying a lot.

“‘The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.’” The soldier folded the Stars and Stripes shut again.

“Wow,” said somebody at another table. “I wouldn’t believe a story like that if it was in Superman, and here it is in Stars and Stripes.”

All through the mess hall, heads solemnly bobbed up and down. Lou understood what the other American meant, but he didn’t nod. He had to fight not to wince, in fact. British and French officers were amazed-and politely dismayed-at how many of their allies from across the Atlantic read comic books. Right this second, Lou understood how they felt.

The major who hadn’t wanted to believe in atom bombs said, “We ought to bring some of those mothers over here. If the Jerries want to keep blowing themselves up, we can drop one on Munich and one on Frankfurt and one on this fucking place, too. That’d teach ’em not to screw around with us, by God!”

He got even more nods than the guy who’d talked about Superman. “Uh, sir,” Lou said, “how do we make sure our own people are out of places like this before we blast ’em? Sounds like one of these things takes out about a mile’s worth a ground, maybe more, when it goes off.”

“Hell, we’d do it. That kind of stuff is just details.” The major was in artillery, which meant he’d never needed to worry about “that kind of stuff.” Everything always looked easy to somebody who didn’t have to do it.

“How many short rounds did your batteries fire?” somebody asked, not quite quietly enough.

“Who said that, goddammit?” The major turned the color of molten bronze. He jumped to his feet. “Who said that? Whoever it is can step outside, if he isn’t too yellow.”

“Oh, sit down, Major. Button your lip while you’re at it,” a gray-haired chicken colonel said. “I got a Purple Heart and a week in the hospital from a short round. That kind of thing happens more often than anybody wishes it did.”

Instead of sitting, the major stormed out of the mess hall. Somebody snickered as he got to the door. That only made his back stiffer and his ears redder.

Lou drained his coffee before he stood up. He couldn’t imagine the Japs staying in the war much longer, not after a right to the chin like this. Maybe the Nazis had bailed out at just the right time. If the USA had had an atom bomb while the fighting was still going on, it sure would have dropped one on Munich or Berlin.

Now…This wasn’t a war any more, not officially. What it was was a running sore. Would we blow a city off the map because guerrillas bombed a barracks? Lou shook his head. It’d be like burning down a house with a flamethrower to kill a wasp.

But if you didn’t kill the wasp, it would keep buzzing around. And it would keep stinging. So how were you supposed to get rid of it? There was a good question. So far, nobody’d found anything resembling a good answer.

When Hans Klein first heard reports about the American atom bomb, he said two things. The first was “Quatsch”-rubbish. The second was “Unmoglich”-impossible.

That also pretty much summed up Reinhard Heydrich’s reaction. He’d had much better connections than Klein’s. He knew German physicists had tried to make a uranium bomb. He also knew they hadn’t come close to succeeding. If German scientists couldn’t do it, odds were nobody else could, either.

Odds were only odds, though. Sometimes snake eyes would come up four times in a row with honest dice. Not often, but sometimes. So maybe the Americans really had come up with something new. Maybe.

Three days after they claimed to have destroyed Hiroshima, they claimed to have destroyed Nagasaki. And, less than a week after that, the Japanese Empire surrendered unconditionally. Well, not quite: the Japanese wanted to retain the Emperor. But close enough. Heydrich was astonished, to say nothing of appalled. He’d counted on the little yellow men to bloody the Americans who landed on their beaches to take their islands away from them. That would help make the occupiers sick of holding Germany down.

Would have made. Now the German resistance would have to go it alone. Reluctantly, Klein said, “I guess the American pigdogs really do have these fancy bombs.”

“I’d say so,” Heydrich agreed.

“Can we get our hands on one, sir?” the Oberscharfuhrer asked. “That’d teach the enemy a thing or three.”

“I don’t think we can sneak one from America to here,” Heydrich said. Klein gave back a glum nod. Heydrich continued, “If we can find out where our own scientists were working and how far they got…”

“Don’t you know?” Klein seemed astonished that Heydrich wouldn’t.

But Heydrich had to shake his head. “No. I never found out much about the project-it was highly secret. And, of course, it came to nothing, so I thought it wasn’t important. It seems I was wrong.”

Hans Klein had been through a lot with Heydrich. It took a lot, then, to surprise him. But his eyebrows leaped toward his hairline now. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I don’t think I ever heard you say that before.”

“No, eh?” Heydrich smiled a thin smile: the only kind apt to fit on his long, lean face. “Well, maybe it’s because I don’t make mistakes very often. And maybe it’s because, when I do make one, I don’t talk about it afterwards-and neither does anybody else.”

“Er-yes, sir,” Klein said hastily. Anyone in the Reich who talked about Heydrich’s mistakes-with the sole exception of Heinrich Himmler-would have counted himself lucky if he only ended up in a camp.

“Now…” Heydrich pulled his attention back to the business at hand. “What can we do about this? Dammit, I really don’t know much about uranium or radioactivity. Can we get our hands on someone who does?”

“Beats me, sir,” Klein said. “If you don’t know much about this business, well, me, I know less than nothing. But I do wonder about something.”

“What’s that?” Heydrich snapped. Facing the blue glare of his attention was like standing up against a pair of lit Bunsen burners.

Gulping, Klein said, “If we piss the Americans off enough, will they use one of these hellish things on us? One bomb, one city gone.” He shuddered.

“Donnerwetter,” Heydrich said softly. “The whole country is hostage to them.” His fingers drummed on the desktop. “This place is safe against any ordinary bombs, even the big British ones. But what would happen if one of those things blew up right on top of us?”

“Beats me,” Klein said. “How would we go about finding out?” He glanced up uneasily at the ceiling-and at the many, many meters of rock above the ceiling. He’d never worried about ordinary bombs, either. But how could you help worrying about these atom bombs, especially when you didn’t know exactly what they could do?

Dryly, Heydrich answered, “Well, I don’t want to make the experiment. Maybe we’d live even if they did it-we’re a devil of a long way underground. But if they dropped one of those things on us, that would mean they knew where we were. And the only way they could do that would be to squeeze it out of somebody who already knows.”

“What will we do when they start capturing our people?” Klein asked. “They will, you know, if they haven’t by now. Things go wrong.”

Heydrich’s fingers drummed some more. He didn’t worry about the laborers who’d expanded this redoubt-they’d all gone straight to camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. “Things go wrong. Ja. If they didn’t, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would’ve worked Churchill to death in a coal mine.” He barked laughter. “The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we’d be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But…things went wrong.”

“Yes, sir.” After a moment, Klein ventured, “Uh, sir-you didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh. Prisoners.” Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. “I don’t know what we can do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide pills.”

“Some won’t have the chance to use them. Some won’t have the nerve,” Klein said.

Not many men had the nerve to tell Reinhard Heydrich the unvarnished truth. Heydrich kept Klein around not least because Klein was one of those men. They were useful to have. Hitler would have done better had he seen that.

Heydrich recognized the truth when he heard it now: one more thing Hitler’d had trouble with. “I don’t know what we’ll do,” Heydrich said slowly. “We’ll play it by ear, I suppose. I don’t know whether the enemy will treat our men as prisoners of war or as francs-tireurs, or-”

“The Russians won’t treat us like POWs,” Klein broke in. “They’ll jump on us like they’re squashing grapes to make wine.”

“Ja.” Heydrich scowled. Keeping the resistance going in the Soviet zone was harder than it was in the parts of Germany the Western democracies held. The Russians played by the rules only when it suited them. Otherwise, the NKVD was at least as ruthless as the Gestapo had been.

“And so?” Klein was persistent. This must have been on his mind for a while now.

“We’ve done what we can,” Heydrich said. “We work in cells. The cell leaders don’t know where their orders come from-only that they’d better follow them. Losing men won’t make the system unravel. Even if our government surrendered, it’s still a war. What else can I tell you?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” the Oberscharfuhrer answered. He didn’t sound happy.

“Nothing at all,” Heydrich said firmly. “It is still a war, dammit. We hurt the enemy as best we can. Sometimes he hurts us. That’s a part of war, too, as much as we wish it weren’t. Eh?” He wouldn’t have wasted time cajoling many other people-maybe no one else still alive-but he and Hans went back a long way.

“Ja. I suppose so,” Klein said. “But…”

“But what?” Heydrich snapped. Even with his old driver, he ran out of patience quickly. He was too used to automatic obedience to be comfortable with anything less.

“But we can’t afford to get hurt much any more,” Klein said. “If we do, the resistance movement will fall to pieces.”

Heydrich sucked in a deep breath, ready to scorch the obstreperous noncom with hot words. He exhaled with Klein still unscorched. How could you come down on somebody who was obviously right? Only long habits of discipline, obedience, and patriotism would make a man go out and blow himself up to hurt the occupiers. If the troops in the field had no one of suitable authority to obey…Germany would be ruined forever.

“They haven’t found us. They won’t find us. Even if they discover this place, we’ve got others to go to.” Heydrich realized he was bucking up his own spirits as well as Klein’s. And why not? His morale mattered, too. “We are going to win this fight, Hans. However long it takes, we’ll do it. And the Vaterland will be free again.”

“Ja, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced, but he didn’t call Heydrich a liar with his tone, either. That was something, anyhow. In this uncertain twilight struggle, Heydrich took whatever he could get.

George Patton had the bad habit of sitting up very straight in his jeep. Sometimes he’d even stand up behind the pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine gun the jeep carried. Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-his driver said, “General, I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that so much, especially when the road runs through woods like this.”

Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-the commander of the U.S. Third Army laughed as if he’d just heard the juiciest joke ever. “Take an even strain, Smitty,” he said. “The Huns are whipped.”

“My ass…sir.” Smitty hunched low behind the jeep’s wheel. He had a wife and two kids in Dearborn, and he wanted to get home to see them again-he had just about enough points to do it, too. “They string that piano wire between trees just above windshield level, and no way in hell you can see it till it catches you in the neck. I hear they’ve taken two guys’ heads clean off.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Patton said. “Stories always get bigger in the telling. Do you know either of these unlucky souls? Can you put names to them?”

“Well…no,” Smitty admitted.

“There you are!” Patton said triumphantly. “The Huns are whipped, I tell you. Maybe a few of them don’t know it yet, but we’ll keep licking them till they do. I promise you that.”

“Yes, sir.” Sometimes you couldn’t win. Smitty’d done all the fighting he cared to do before the Germans surrendered. He didn’t want to keep on doing it three and a half months later. But if he said so, Patton would go up like a Bouncing Betty. Smitty did say, “I sure wish you’d leave that chromed helmet back in the barracks, though. It’s like you’re wearing a SHOOT ME sign, y’know?”

“Nonsense!” Patton said. “The Germans fear me, and I don’t fear them-not one bit, d’you hear me? Let them see trouble’s heading their way.”

He stood up again. He swung the big, heavy machine gun back and forth. Sure as hell, he had plenty of firepower at his disposal. But God didn’t issue anybody eyes in the back of his head.

Not to Patton, and not to Smitty, either, however much the driver longed for them. The jeep’s rearview mirror made a piss-poor substitute. Smitty didn’t see the man in ragged Feldgrau get up on one knee in the roadside bushes and launch his Panzerschreck.

He did see the burst of flame from the antitank rocket. The Panzerschreck was a German copy of the U.S. bazooka round. The Germans didn’t just copy it, either; they improved it. A Panzerschreck had more range and penetrated thicker armor than its American prototype.

This one didn’t need the extra range. Smitty had time to go “Aw, shit!” He was starting to yank the wheel hard left when the rocket hit the jeep’s right rear and flipped it over. Patton’s startled squawk cut off abruptly when a ton and a half of metal and burning gasoline came down on top of him.

Smitty was luckier-he got thrown clear of the jeep. He put his teeth through his lower lip and broke several of them when he met the road facefirst, but he could crawl dazedly away from the inferno that engulfed the general.

He’d had a grease gun beside him on the seat. He couldn’t find it now. If the kraut with the Panzerschreck came after him, he was history. But the German seemed content with blasting the jeep-he bailed out. And why not? He’d just scragged a four-star general.