The Man with the Iron Heart

German patriots on the ground would do their best for her when she landed, anyhow. He was sure of that.

He felt the door open, and heard the howl of the wind inside the cargo bay. Out Mitzi went. He felt that, too. “Luck,” Neulen said softly.

He flew on toward Berlin. He was about fifteen minutes outside the city when the radio crackled to life: “You’re a little north of the flight path. Change course five degrees right.”

“Five degrees right. Roger,” Neulen said in English, and made about half the change.

“Still a little north,” the American flight controller said. “You okay, Wes? You sound like you got a cold in the head.”

“I am okay,” Neulen answered, and said no more-less was better.

Pretty soon, the flight controller came back: “You’re still off course, and you’re up too high, too. Make your corrections, dammit. Is the aircraft all right?”

“All fine,” Neulen said. He did come down-why not? How fast could they scramble fighters? Nobody flew top cover over Berlin: someone was liable to go where he shouldn’t, and then the Russians and Anglo-Americans might start shooting at one another. Keep them happy as long as he could. Neulen didn’t want them phoning their flak batteries either.

He was below 2,000 feet-600 meters, he translated mentally-when he overflew the airport. “What are you doing, man? Are you nuts?” the flight controller howled. “They’re gonna ground your stupid ass forever!”

“Not that long,” Neulen answered. He gunned the C-47, almost straight into the early-morning sun.

“This time, we try the bastards. This time, we hang the bastards,” Lou Weissberg said savagely. “I want to watch ’em swing. I want to hear their necks crack. All of ’em-and especially Streicher’s, the antisemitic motherfucker.”

“That’s not a Christian thought,” Howard Frank observed.

“Damn straight…sir,” Lou said. “I’m not a Christian, any more than you are. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sounds great to me. Let the Nazis turn the other cheek…under a hood, in the wind.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Ribbentrop and Keitel and Jodl are the ones I want most. The one plotted the war, and the other two fought it. And Goring for the Luftwaffe, even if he was pretty useless once the fighting started.”

“Worse than useless. Didn’t he tell Hitler he could keep the Germans in Stalingrad supplied by air?” Lou said.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Major Frank agreed. “Even so, he was one of Hitler’s right-hand men when the Nazis were coming up. If that’s not reason enough to put a noose around his neck-”

“Reason enough for all of them. Reason enough and then some. And this time they will get it. Oh, boy, will they ever.” Lou eyed the fortified ring the Russians had built around their courthouse. He eyed it from a distance of several hundred yards, because the Russians were liable to start shooting if anybody-anybody at all-got too close. One American officer had already got plugged for not reacting fast enough to “Heraus!” Luckily, he’d live. Nobody except maybe the NKVD knew how many Germans were wounded or dead.

Major Frank was looking the other way. “Pretty soon they go through the maze and in.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. Soviet Stalin tanks, U.S. Pershings, and British Centurions would surround the halftracks carrying the accused to justice. The road had been widened-the Russians had blown up the buildings to either side-so the heavy armor could do just that. Demolitions people swept for mines every half hour. Even the sewers were blocked off, as they were around the court. No rescue for the Nazi big shots.

“Won’t be long,” Frank said, glancing down at his watch. “In they’ll go. The judges are already waiting for them.”

“Uh-huh. Just like they were back in Nuremberg.” Lou ground his teeth together, a split second too late to keep the words from escaping. That goddamn fanatic with his truck full of explosives…Lou counted himself lucky not to have been there when the blast went off. Too many of the men who would have tried the Nazis had died in it.

“Kineahora!” Howard Frank exclaimed.

Lou nodded vigorously. He hadn’t wanted to put the whammy on what was about to happen-just the opposite.

“Here they come,” Frank said.

Hearing the heavy rumble of approaching motors, Lou started to nod one more time. But he didn’t, because that heavy rumble was approaching much too fast. And it wasn’t coming up the widened road, either. It was…in the air? In the air!

The C-47 thundered over them at treetop height, maybe lower. The wind of its passage almost knocked Lou off his feet. “What the fuck?” he choked out-his mouth and eyes and nose were all full of dust and grit that wind had kicked up.

Ahead, a few of the Red Army men guarding the courthouse started shooting at the mad Gooney Bird-but only a few, and too late. Much too late. “It’s gonna-” Horror as well as dust clogged Major Frank’s voice. He tried again: “It’s gonna-”

And then it did.

It wasn’t just a hurtling C-47 crashing into the courthouse. Somehow, the fanatics had loaded the plane with explosives. It could carry more than a deuce-and-a-half could. And when the shit went off…

Lou Weissberg and Howard Frank stood more than a mile from the blast. It hammered their ears and rocked them all the same. Lou staggered again, as he had only seconds before when the transport roared by overhead. The fireball that went up dwarfed the courthouse. By then, Lou had seen newsreel footage of what happened when an atom bomb blew up. This wasn’t just like that. A baby version. An ordinary blockbuster, Lou thought dazedly. Plenty bad enough.

“Gottenyu!” Frank burst out. “The bastards just took out the judges again, and the lawyers, and-”

“Vey iz mir!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. He heard Major Frank as if from very far away. He wondered if his ears would ever be the same. He’d wondered the same thing plenty of times before the sadly misnamed V-E Day. It had always come back then. Maybe it would now. He also wondered why he hadn’t thought of what Frank had. Because you’re punchy, dummy: the answer supplied itself.

More slowly than he might have, he noticed a rumble and clatter from behind him. He turned. Sure as hell, here came the tanks protecting the Nazi Bonzen on their way to trial. On their way to… nothing, now. Judges and attorneys had gone up in the fireball, but the foulest criminals in the history of the world were fine. The way things were going, they’d probably die of old age.

Helplessly, Lou started to laugh and cry at the same time. He waited for Major Frank to slap him silly and tell him to snap out of it. That was what happened when you got hysterical, right? But when he looked over at the other officer, he saw Frank doing the same goddamn thing.

Vladimir Bokov decided the fortifications around the courthouse seemed even more impressive from within than when viewed from the outside. Standing in a trench along the route by which the war criminals would at last come to justice, he couldn’t actually see very much. Even so, he knew he was in the middle of that maze of trenches and minefields and concrete antitank obstacles and barbed wire and machine-gun nests and…everything under the sun. Everything anyone could think of, including artillery and antiaircraft guns and thousands of Red Army and NKVD men.

“They’re going to get it. This time, they’re going to get it. And we’re going to give it to them.” He spoke with a certain somber pride. “We are: the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union.” And the NKVD, of course, and the Anglo-Americans, and even the afterthought that was France. But he knew the propaganda line, and he needed next to no conscious thought to echo it. Any Soviet citizen had plenty of practice with that.

And Moisei Shteinberg nodded. “We’ll do it right. We’ll show the Americans how to do it right.” That also came straight from the propaganda line. But then he lowered his voice to something not far above a whisper: “I wish we could show the Americans…”

“That fucking stupid pigheaded Vlasov.” Captain Bokov also whispered. Because of the Soviet traitor, taking