The Man with the Iron Heart

V

If Lou Weissberg hadn’t known what he was looking for, he never would have found it. Even knowing, he almost walked right past the forest bunker. Sergeant Benton saved him, pointing and saying, “Reckon that’s it, sir.”

“Is it?” Lou turned back-and got a raindrop in the eye. Mud squelched under his boots. It was a miserable day to go poking through the woods. But he finally saw the join between the regular forest floor and artfully camouflaged dug-up ground. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He gestured to the squad of GIs who’d come with them. “Okay, guys-we’re here. Spread out and form your perimeter.”

“Right.” The corporal in charge of them sounded no happier to be futzing around in the middle of the Bavarian woods than Lou was. Nobody’d asked his opinion, though, and nobody was likely to. “Take your positions,” he told his men. “And for Chrissake watch out for trip wires unless you want your balls blown off.”

Thus encouraged, the soldiers moved out around the bunker. Half of them carried M-1s, the others grease guns. If they had to, they could put a lot of lead in the air. Nobody touched off a Bouncing Betty, for which Lou thanked the God in Whom he’d had more and more trouble believing since he found out about Dachau and Belsen and the murder camps farther east.

He would rather have come out here by himself, or just with Toby Benton. Several horrors had proved that Americans traveling alone or in pairs weren’t safe, though. And so he had a squad along to remind the krauts that they’d been defeated and surrendered and given up.

Of course, he wasn’t exactly safe even with the hired muscle along. As the corporal had reminded his men, Heydrich’s goons liked booby traps. The fanatics were too goddamn good at concealing them, too.

Sergeant Benton was an artist in his own right. He also had some specialized tools: a battery-powered detector to find metallic mines and a long, thin wooden probe to find the ones that weren’t. And he had wire-cutters to take care of the trip wires he-like the corporal-assumed would be there. And they were.

“Okey-doke, Lieutenant,” he said after a good deal of careful work. “Looks like we can dig now.”

Lou nodded to the corporal. That worthy said, “Rojek!”

One of the GIs jerked as if stung by a wasp. “What’d I do to deserve this?”

“You was born lucky,” the corporal answered. “C’mon. Get your ass over here.”

Muttering bitterly, Rojek did. He used his entrenching tool with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “I oughta write my Congressman,” he said.

The corporal gave him the horse laugh. “Yeah, like they give a shit about us. Now tell me another one.”

Before long, Rojek banged the tool against a roof of logs and planks. “Can’t go through that,” he said with some satisfaction. “I ain’t no beaver.”

“You want beaver, go back to Nuremberg and fraternize with some,” the corporal said.

“We’ve got saws along,” Lou said. The look Private Rojek gave him proved glares weren’t lethal.

But the corporal spread the wealth. Another GI got to play woodsman. He cut through enough logs to open a space a skinny man could use to get in. Lou filled the bill. Before dropping down, he shone a flashlight into the bunker. He didn’t want to land on a detonator-or on a bunch of knife blades or bayonets pointing up. The fanatics came up with lots of ways to make the occupation more…interesting.

This time, he didn’t see anything like that. “I knew I should’ve been a dentist,” he remarked as he lowered himself into the hole. “Then I wouldn’t’ve had to mess around with crap like this. But no. I wanted to study English lit, so when I volunteered they put me in CIC. My mother gets to say ‘I told you so.’”

He let himself drop, and landed with a thump on the floor of hard-packed dirt. A damp, musty smell filled his nostrils. Nobody’d been in this bunker for a while. A prisoner had told the Americans about it, though, so they had to find it and take it out of circulation.

Which would do how much to win the fight against the fanatics? How many of these bunkers were scattered all over Germany-and Austria, and the German-settled parts of Czechoslovakia, and maybe other places, too? Heydrich was a son of a bitch, no two ways about it, but by all the signs he was a goddamn thorough son of a bitch.

Lou turned slowly, playing the flashlight around the bunker. A small stove sat in one corner, with a pipe leading up through the roof to the forest floor above. Neither he nor Benton had spotted where the stovepipe emerged. However much you hated them, nobody could say the Jerries weren’t good at what they did.

The walls were planked. Neat metal brackets on them held Mausers and Schmeissers and close to a dozen of the halfway-between weapons the Germans had started fielding in the last year of the war. Assault rifles, they called them; some people said Hitler himself hung the handle on them. True or not, it wasn’t a bad monicker. They used a longer, heavier cartridge than a submachine gun’s pistol round, and fired at full automatic out to three or four hundred yards. GIs who’d run into them said they were very bad news.

Sergeant Benton’s head and shoulders appeared above, blocking most of the cold, gray light that drizzled in through the hole. “Is it the goods, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Looks that way,” Lou said.

“Shucks.” Benton sounded disappointed. “Reckon Ludwig gets to keep his family jewels after all. Too goddamn bad.”

“Heh,” Lou said tightly. He didn’t think CIC would have made the prisoner sing soprano if he’d tried to string his U.S. interrogators along, but he wasn’t sure. With the war allegedly over, nobody seemed sure what the rules were for Germans captured in arms against the occupiers. Some U.S. officers called them francs-tireurs and shot them without trial. Some grilled them mercilessly, declaring that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply. And some treated them as POWs. There were no orders from on high; the brass was as confused as everyone else.

Just to make matters even more delightful, the fanatics kidnapped GIs and murdered them and left their bodies in prominent places with placards saying things like VENGEANCE FOR OUR FALLEN COMRADES. Sometimes they would just cut a man’s throat. Sometimes they’d get more creative. Lou remembered the poor bastard with his cock stuck in his…. He shook his head-shuddered, really. He didn’t want to remember that.

He used the flashlight again. A makeshift desk-a filing cabinet, a couple of crates, and boards across them-stood in the corner opposite the stove. Lou walked over to it. He started to open the top file-cabinet drawer. Then he thought better of it.

“Hey, Toby!” he called.

Benton came back. “What have you got, Lieutenant?”

“Stick your head in a little further and see.” Lou lit up the desk. “Just the kind of thing the Jerries’d booby-trap, looks like.”

“Want me to pull its teeth?”

“If you think you can. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The Germans love paperwork. If they give us a roster of half the bastards who’ve been driving us buggy-”

“We’ll take it. Yeah.” Sergeant Benton nodded. “Okay. I’ll have me a look.” His shoulders were wider than Lou’s; he had to wiggle to fit through the hole. He dropped into the bunker.

“Don’t do anything you’re not sure about,” Lou told him. “A booby trap here could be wired to enough TNT to blow up this whole fucking forest.”

“Uh-huh. Don’t I know it?” Benton advanced on the desk with unhurried calm. “I ain’t gonna get cute-believe you me I ain’t. I aim to climb on a ship and go home one of these days whether the krauts like it or not.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lou agreed.

As if he hadn’t spoken, Benton went on, “So if I think they’re getting sneaky, I’ll just back off. I’m good at this business, but I know there’s guys where I’m not even in their class. So…”

He went to work on the top drawer. Lou stood there and waited. He did his best to act relaxed, but sweat trickled from his armpits down his sides. Sweat was supposed to cool you off. These beads felt boiling hot. He told himself that was his imagination. It had to be, but so what?

Benton started to open the drawer, then paused. With a grunt, he went around to the side of the file cabinet and shone his flashlight into the narrow space between its back and the wall. “Uh-huh,” he said on a thoughtful note.

“What’s up?”

“Looks like a wire goin’ back there-two wires, matter of fact, one for top and one for bottom. If I’d’ve pulled…Well, who knows? But I don’t aim to find out.”

“Can you cut ’em?”

“Oh, sure.” Benton seemed surprised he needed to ask. “Be a second or two-gotta fit the wire-cutters to the extensions so they’ll reach. Can you lean over and shine a light down while I work? Otherwise I kinda need three hands. Lean over the desk, I mean. Don’t touch nothin’ if you can help it, you know?”

“I’ll try.” Lou did, wishing he were six inches taller so he had more to lean with. “How’s that?”

“Over to the left a tad…There you go.” Lou couldn’t see what Benton was doing. He heard a couple of clunks, then one soft twang, then another. The sergeant sighed. “Okay-now I’ve pulled all its teeth. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Are you sure? Not asking was as tough as standing there radiating unconcern had been. If Lou didn’t trust Benton to do this job right, he should have brought someone else along. Doubting him out loud would piss him off, and might hurt his confidence. That could make him goof later, which neither of them would enjoy.

Lou opened the top drawer. Nothing blew up. He wasn’t astonished to find the drawer full of potato-masher grenades. “No sweat, Lieutenant,” Benton said. “I cut the wire that woulda tripped those fuckers right away.”

“That’s nice,” Lou said. “You do the bottom drawer, too?”

“Better believe it.”

Thus encouraged, Lou also opened that one. He found more grenades. Whistling between his teeth, he turned the flashlight on the papers in the crates. To his disappointment, they weren’t anything he could use to track more fanatics. Some were comic book-style four-panel illustrations of how to fire the Panzerfaust and the Panzerschreck. Others were propaganda posters showing bestial-looking American soldiers assaulting Aryan children while a mother watched in horror. The German caption read Roosevelt sends kidnappers, gangsters, and convicts in his army.

Toby Benton read as much German as he read Choctaw. The pictures told their own story, though. “Nice to know they love us,” he said dryly.

“This is old stuff,” Lou said. “They printed it while the war was still going on-before FDR died.”

“Well, we’ll still get rid of it,” Benton said. “We’ll clean out all this crap, and that’ll be one bunker the bastards’ll never use again.”

“Sure it will. And that’ll leave-how many just like it?” Lou’d had this unhappy thought not long before. “A million? Nah, let’s look on the bright side-a million minus one.”

Benton gave him a quizzical look-not the first he’d got from the stolid noncom. “Would you sooner leave it here?”

“No, no.” Lou shook his head. “But I was hoping it’d give us a lead to more of the diehards, and it doesn’t look like it will. Shutting down places like this won’t put out the fire.”

“Neither will not shutting ’em down,” Sergeant Benton answered, and Lou couldn’t very well tell him he was wrong.

Congressman Jerry Duncan scrawled his signature on a letter commending a constituent for collecting a ton and a half of scrap aluminum. With the war over, people would find different things to do with their spare time and energy. They’d still need letters of commendation from their Congressmen, though. Jerry Duncan was morally certain of that.

Plump and smooth and well-manicured, he was morally certain of a good many things. Like most Republicans, he was morally certain four terms were too many for any one President, and especially for a Democrat. Well, God had taken care of that. Now that That Man wasn’t in the White House any more, 1948 looked a lot rosier for the GOP.

So did 1946. With any luck at all, his party would recapture at least one house of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration. Duncan had just been getting his feet under him in his law practice in those days. Another world back then, one without Hitler, without the atom bomb, without FDR’s alphabet-soup agencies, without American boys stationed all over the world and trying to figure out what the hell was going on…

Well, people right here in Washington were trying to figure out what the hell was going on, too. Jerry Duncan knew damn well he was. So much had happened so fast since the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And even after V-E Day and V-J Day, things didn’t seem to have slowed down.

His secretary stuck her head into his inner office. “What’s up, Gladys?” Jerry asked, glad to escape his own thoughts.

“That woman from Anderson is here to see you, Congressman.”

“She is?” Duncan glanced at his wristwatch in surprise. “How’d it get to be three o’clock already?” He’d been doing this, that, and the other thing. By what he’d accomplished, it shouldn’t even have been lunchtime. Plenty of people lived their whole lives three steps behind where they should have been. He supposed he ought to be glad he didn’t get the feeling more often. But it still rattled him. He tried to pull himself together. “Well, tell her to come in.”

“Sure.” Gladys withdrew without closing the door all the way. He heard her say, “You can go in now.”

“Thank you.” The door opened again. Duncan got to his feet. The woman who came in was about as old as he was. She must’ve been hot stuff when she was younger. She wouldn’t have been bad now if she weren’t wearing black…and if the look on her face didn’t say hot stuff was the furthest thing from her mind. “Congressman Duncan?” she said. Automatically, Jerry nodded. She held out her hand. “I’m Diana McGraw.”

As automatically, Duncan shook it. Her grip was firm but cool. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. McGraw,” he said. “And I was very sorry to hear about your tragic loss. Please accept my sympathies. Too many boys are dead.”

Her nod was bitter and determined at the same time. “Yes. Too many boys are dead,” she agreed. “And for what, Congressman? For what? Why did Pat have to die, after the war was supposed to be over?”

Gladys came in with a tray. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Jerry was glad for the interruption. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked while Gladys poured two cups.

“Thank you.” She sat stiffly, as if her machinery needed oiling. Gladys put cream and sugar into Jerry’s cup, then looked a question at her. “Black is fine,” Mrs. McGraw said.

“Here you are, then.” The secretary set cup and saucer near the edge of Jerry’s desk, then went out again.

Without preamble, Diana McGraw said, “Do you know how many American soldiers besides my Pat have been killed since the Nazis said they surrendered?”

Congressman Duncan started to answer, but caught himself. “No, I don’t know, not exactly. The War Department hasn’t publicized the numbers, whatever they are.”

“It sure hasn’t,” Mrs. McGraw agreed with a sniper’s smile. “How many do you think, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Over a hundred-I’m sure of that,” Jerry said. “Some of the atrocities do get into the papers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were twice that number, maybe even three times.”

She smiled that frightening smile again. It made Jerry Duncan want to dive for cover. “The true figure is at least a thousand dead. At least.” She seemed to repeat herself for emphasis. “That doesn’t count wounded. All since the so-called surrender.”

Cautiously, Jerry asked, “How do you know?” Do you really know? was what he meant. Still picking his words with care, he went on, “As I say, the War Department doesn’t go out of its way to talk about figures.”

“Would you, if you had to talk about figures like that?” Diana McGraw returned. “As for how I know, well, I have connections.” She held up a hasty hand. “Not political connections, not the kind you usually think about. But when Pat and Betsy were in school, I was in the PTA. I was Central Indiana vice-chairwoman for several years, as a matter of fact. I went to a couple of the national conventions. I know mothers all over the country. Ever since Pat…died, I’ve been on the phone. I’ve been sending wires. My friends have been asking questions where they live. That’s what they’ve found out, and I believe them.”

Jerry whistled softly. “I believe you,” he said, and meant it: she radiated conviction. “Over a thousand? Good Lord!”

“You have to understand,” she said. “If some German killed Pat in the Battle of the Bulge, I wouldn’t be here talking with you now. I’d be as sorry as I am, but not quite the same way. War is war, and things like that can happen. But we’re at peace now, or we’re supposed to be. Why did Pat have to die almost five months after the war was supposed to be over? Why have a thousand American kids died after it was supposed to be over?”

“That’s…a better question than I thought it would be when you made this appointment,” Jerry said slowly. Like a lot of Midwestern Republicans, he’d wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe when it broke out. He hadn’t called himself an isolationist, but he hadn’t been far from thinking that way, either.

Then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Of course he voted for the declaration of war. He wanted to-he was as furious as anybody else. And if he hadn’t, his district would have tarred him and feathered him and ridden him out of Congress on a rail.

Hitler declared war on the USA. That saved him from wondering how he would have voted when Roosevelt asked for war against Germany. Maybe not knowing was just as well.

“What do you want me to do, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked.

“Get some answers,” she said at once. “Why are we still over there now that the war’s over? What are we doing over there that could possibly be worth a thousand lives? Why is the War Department trying to hush up everything that’s going on over there?”

Those were all good questions. Jerry Duncan said so. They were especially good questions for a Republican to ask, since they could hold a Democratic administration’s feet to the fire. “And what will you be doing yourself?” Jerry inquired.

“Me?” Diana McGraw sounded surprised he needed to ask. “I’m going to the papers and the radio stations. You can’t keep things secret forever, Congressman. You just can’t.”

“You’re right,” Duncan said. “You’re absolutely right. Some of the mistakes we made in the first part of the war…Well, thank God we didn’t lose on account of them. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t. Believe me, I do. And the public still doesn’t know about a lot of them.”

“A few weeks ago, I would have been shocked if you told me something like that. Shocked. Now I believe you,” she said. “Why do those people want to sweep everything under the rug?”

“To keep folks from pointing a finger at their mistakes.” Again, Jerry replied without hesitation. With a politician’s facility, he chose not to remember that he’d voted against the draft bill that passed by a single vote the summer before Pearl Harbor, and that he’d also voted against more money for the War and Navy Departments before the USA actually got into the fighting. Pointing a finger at the administration’s mistakes was easy. Pointing a finger at his own…

“High time somebody did,” Mrs. McGraw said. “Germany’s smashed. It’s knocked flat. It’s not going to magically come back to life if we bring our boys home.”

“I hope not.” Jerry did remember that people had said the same thing after World War I. But nobody’d blown up American doughboys in the aftermath of that fight. Who could say now what would have happened had the Germans tried it then?

“Let’s get on with it,” she said crisply. “How many GIs will the fanatics have killed by this time next week or next month or next year? And why will those GIs have died? For what?”

“For making sure the Nazis don’t come back and start up again.” Jerry knew exactly what his Democratic colleagues would say. He said it himself, to see how Diana McGraw responded.

She snorted. She looked at him as if she’d found half of him in her apple. She was nothing but a housewife, but she made him flinch. “Oh, nonsense,” she said, and somehow she got more scorn into that than a cigar-puffing committee chairman would have from Oh, bullshit. “How do you hold down a whole country?” she went on. “And how do you fight people who’ll blow themselves up to get rid of you? If they’re already willing to die, what can you do to make them quit?”

Jerry Duncan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Nobody in America had been able to find a good answer to that. One of the things the public didn’t know was how much damage Japanese kamikazes had done. How much more would they have inflicted if the USA’d had to invade the Home Islands? Jerry silently thanked God for the A-bomb. It had saved one hell of a lot of American casualties. Probably kept a good many Japs from joining their ancestors, too, not that he gave a rat’s ass about them.

“It’s a good question,” he said, hoping his pause wasn’t too noticeable. “I’ll be honest with you-I don’t know. Maybe some Army officers do-”

“Fat chance,” Mrs. McGraw broke in.

“I was going to say, but if they do, they sure haven’t given any sign of it.”

“No. They haven’t.” Her bitterness was hidden while she planned action. It came back now. “And Pat’s dead, and my grandson will grow up never knowing his uncle, and my husband stumbles around like a man in a daze-no, like a man who’s stopped caring. And he has. And how can you blame him, if Pat died for nothing?”

“If-” Jerry began.

She interrupted him again: “If we get our troops out of there because of what happened to Pat, it may turn out to be worthwhile after all. It may. If we don’t…” She shook her head, then brushed at the bit of transparent black veiling that came down over her eyes from her hat.

She left a few minutes later, back straight, stride determined. She had a Cause, and she’d stick with it come hell or high water. Jerry Duncan stared after her, even though she’d closed the door when she went out. Damned if she hadn’t given him one, too.

Breslau wasn’t in Germany any more. For that matter, Breslau wasn’t Breslau any more. Stalin had shoved the USSR’s border several hundred kilometers west, and shoved newly resuscitated Poland west about as far at Germany’s expense to make up for it.

The Poles were calling the place Wroclaw, which they pronounced something like Breslau. Captain Vladimir Bokov didn’t give a damn what they called it. He also didn’t give a damn that he was in Soviet-occupied Poland rather than Soviet-occupied Germany. As long as the Red Army was around, nobody except the Fascist bandits he was trying to root out would give him any trouble. Local officials sure as hell wouldn’t.

Breslau, Wroclaw, whatever you wanted to call it, had its share of bandits and then some. Its garrison, surrounded on all sides, had held out till just before the general surrender. The Poles were trying to solve their German problem by resettling their countrymen from Lwow and other cities to the east who didn’t want to live under Soviet rule, and by uprooting the local Germans and marching them west toward the new border-at gunpoint, if necessary. That would probably work…in the long run. For the time being, it gave the remaining Germans every reason to support the fanatics.

Thus, the local Polish governor had just come to a sudden and untimely end. A sniper had put a Mauser round through his head from close to a kilometer away. Shooting Poles had its points; Bokov had done it himself, more than once. Even shooting Communist Party members was sometimes necessary, as anyone who’d worked through the purges of the late 1930s could attest.

But shooting someone who was in the Soviet government’s good graces went over the line. And so Vladimir Bokov had come east to do something about it. The highway to Wroclaw was wide and fine. It had been part of the German Autobahn system. Now the Poles got to use it.

There was an American film where one police official told another, “Round up the usual suspects.” The local authorities in Wroclaw, Polish and Russian, seemed to have followed that rule. To them, the usual suspects seemed to include anyone who thought the city should still be called Breslau…should, in other words, stay German.

They’d rounded up hundreds of Wehrmacht veterans. They’d added all the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who’d ever said anything bad about Poles or Russians. In a town like Wroclaw, that gave them plenty to choose from.

A captain in a csapka met Bokov outside the wire-fenced camp where the locals were stowing their prisoners. Bokov thought the square-crowned Polish headgear looked asinine, but that wasn’t his worry. After a couple of false starts, he and Captain Leszczynski conversed in German. He could almost understand Leszczynski’s Polish, but Leszczynski didn’t want to try to follow his Russian. The Pole wore three Red Army decorations on his chest, but he was plainly a nationalist as well as a Communist.

One day, no doubt, Leszczynski would get purged. Bokov was sure of it. Maybe the proud Pole knew it, too. But they were on the same side now.

“These damned Werewolves are driving us nuts,” Leszczynski said. Bokov was highly fluent in German; he’d studied it for years. Leszczynski spoke it like a native. Before the war, he’d likely used it as much as Polish. The Poles might hate and fear their western neighbors, but they leaned toward them as if drawn by a magnet. In Russian, a traveling fort with a cannon in the turret was a tank, as it was in English. The Poles borrowed pancer from the Germans.

“We’ll deal with them. One way or another, we will,” Bokov said confidently.

“Jawohl. Aber naturlich.” Irony filled Captain Leszczynski’s voice. Poles didn’t like Russians much better than they liked Germans. They looked down their noses at Russians, though, and hardly bothered to hide it. So did Germans, of course. It was almost less annoying from them than from fellow Slavs.

“We will,” Bokov insisted. “If we have to kill them all, we’ll do that.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe.” Captain Leszczynski seemed to be reminding himself they were allies here. “Which prisoners will you want to interrogate?”

“The ones you think likeliest to know something about Comrade Pietruszka’s murder,” Bokov answered. Before the Pole could say anything, he added, “The ones who hate us worst.”

“Oh, they all hate us,” Leszczynski said. “The only question is, which ones did something about it?”

Adrian Marwede said he’d been a Wehrmacht noncom. He still wore a ratty field-gray service blouse. Bokov eyed a slightly darker ring on the left sleeve near the cuff: the sort of ring a cloth cuff-title might leave after it was removed. Only a few Wehrmacht divisions used cuff-titles. However…“You were really in the Waffen-SS, nicht wahr?” All their outfits had them.

Marwede turned pale. “Well-yes,” he muttered.

But then Captain Leszczynski took Bokov aside. “When Breslau surrendered, all the defenders were promised life, personal property, and eventual return to Germany-the SS included.”

“What?” Bokov couldn’t believe it. “Who made such an idiotic promise?”

With a certain somber relish, the Pole replied, “Lieutenant General Gluzdovsky, commander, Soviet Sixth Army, First Ukrainian Front.”

Bokov gave him a dirty look. The truth could be far more irritating than any lie. “All right, I won’t knock him around for being an SS swine,” the NKVD man said. “I’ll knock him around because he may know something about what happened to Pietruszka. Does that make you happy?”

“Pietruszka was a solid man,” Leszczynski said, which could have meant anything.

Whatever it meant, Bokov could worry about it later. He turned back to Adrian Marwede. “So, SS man…” he said, and watched Marwede flinch. In a Russian’s mouth, that was all too likely a death sentence in and of itself. Bokov let him stew for a few seconds, then asked, “What do you know about Reinhard Heydrich, SS man?”

“He’s supposed to be a tough bastard.” Marwede sounded less impressed than he might have. He explained why as he went on, “How tough can you be when you hardly ever get near the front?”

Captain Bokov didn’t care whether Heydrich was personally brave. Things he’d heard made him think Heydrich was, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. The man was a goddamn nuisance-worse than a goddamn nuisance-and needed suppressing. “What do you know about what Heydrich’s up to, SS man?”

“What? You think the Reichsprotektor talks to the likes of me?” Marwede raised an eyebrow.

Without changing expression, Bokov slapped him across the face, forehand and backhand. That was good technique; not only did it hurt, it humiliated. The German staggered. “Don’t screw around with me,” Bokov said evenly. “Tell me what I want to know, and don’t give me any shit. You answer another question with a question and what happens next’ll make that look like a love tap. Get me?”

Marwede spat-spat red, in fact. He nodded gingerly. “Yes, I get you.”

He got that his life lay in an NKVD officer’s cupped palm. Well, what else did he need to get? If Bokov decided to squeeze…“What do you know about what Heydrich’s up to?”

“Not much.” Hastily, Marwede went on, “Nobody up at the front ever found out much of what he was up to. All we knew was, there were times we couldn’t get the guns or the ammo we needed. When that happened, people would swear at Heydrich. He was squirreling the stuff away, or guys said he was.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Captain Leszczynski remarked.

“So have I,” Bokov said. He knew why, too: it was true. He also knew why Heydrich was squirreling that stuff away-to do just what he and his merry thugs were doing now. The Russian eyed Marwede. “What else do you know? What else have you heard?”

“Well…nothing I can prove,” Marwede said. Bokov gestured impatiently. The German continued, “Sometimes guys’d go back with light wounds, things that wouldn’t keep them out of action more than two, three weeks, tops. Only they wouldn’t come to the front again when they should’ve healed up. That’d drive our officers crazy.”

“What happened to them?” Bokov asked. “And don’t tell me you don’t know, either. You Fritzes have paperwork coming out your assholes. I’ve never seen people for paperwork like Germans. If you wanted to find out where these troops were, you could.”

Marwede held up his right hand with index and middle fingers raised together: the gesture Germans used when they were swearing an oath. “Honest to God, I don’t know. Our officers couldn’t track those guys. It was like they fell off the face of the earth. They just disappeared. Nobody knew where. Nobody could find out where. People said Heydrich had ’em. I don’t know if he did, but people said so.”

“I’ve heard that before, too,” Leszczynski said.

“Me, too,” Bokov agreed. He glowered at the SS man. “When did this start happening?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Marwede set himself for another blow. When it didn’t come, he continued, “First couple of people I can remember disappearing like that were right after Kursk, I think.”

“Fuck your mother!” Bokov exclaimed in Russian. Marwede scowled; he must have learned what that meant. The NKVD man didn’t care. If the Germans had started collecting holdouts as early as the summer of 1943…they’d have a devil of a lot of them, and the bastards could raise all kinds of hell. Which, when you got right down to it, was nothing he didn’t know already.

“That I hadn’t heard,” Captain Leszczynski said with calm either commendable or excessive, depending on how you looked at things.

“Neither had I. As far as I know, nobody’s heard that before,” Bokov said. He wanted to slap the SS man around for no better reason than giving him bad news. The look he gave Marwede should have knocked him over by itself. “Listen, cuntface, if you’re lying to me just to make me trip over my own dick, I’ll hunt you down and cut your balls off and stuff ’em down your throat.”

He wasn’t lying. Adrian Marwede had the sense to realize as much. “Not me,” he said, using that oath-taking gesture again. “I’ve done plenty of stupid things, but I’m not dumb enough to screw around with the NKVD.”

So he recognized the collar tabs and cap, did he? That was interesting. “You were dumb enough to join the SS,” Bokov growled. “You’re dumb enough for anything.” 1943? Summer 1943? Bozhemoi!