The Man with the Iron Heart

the NKVD general’s name in vain felt extra filthy. And if the soldiers around them overheard him, they’d think he was cursing the collaborator.

“I-” Shteinberg’s head came up, as a wolf’s would have at an unexpected noise in the forest. “What’s that?”

Whatever it was, it got louder and closer much too fast. “Mother-cocksuckingfuck!” a Red Army sergeant shouted, and pointed into the sky.

Not very far into the sky-the C-47 roared by almost close enough to knock off Bokov’s cap. That was how it felt, anyhow. Colonel Shteinberg, the damned clever Jew, was quicker on the uptake than Bokov. “Nooo!” he howled-a wail of fury and despair-and fired a burst from his submachine gun at the plane.

Here and there, a few other Chekists and Red Army men shot at it. But most, like Vladimir Bokov, watched in frozen surprise. One antiaircraft gun opened up-only one, as far as Bokov could tell. Whatever its shells ended up hitting, they missed the C-47. It slammed into the courthouse at something over 350 kilometers an hour.

The blast knocked Bokov flat even though he was in the trench. He and Colonel Shteinberg fell all over each other, in fact. And they fell on the foul-mouthed sergeant, or he fell on them, and everybody close by was falling over everybody else. And then chunks of masonry and sheet metal and everything else that went into a building and an airplane started falling on them, and some of that was on fire.

Squoosh! If you dropped a rock on a pumpkin from a third-story window, it would make a noise like that. Maybe five meters from Bokov, a brick plummeting from the Devil’s sister only knew how far smashed in a soldier’s skull. The poor bastard thrashed like a chicken that had just met the hatchet. He was as dead as a chopped chicken, too.

“Those clapped-out cunts! They did it again!” When Moisei Shteinberg swore like that, somebody’d spilled the thundermug into the soup. And the Heydrichites damn well had.

Bokov ever so cautiously looked out of the trench. The courthouse was a sea of flame, with black, greasy smoke already towering high into the sky over it. Hadn’t an American bomber slammed into the Empire State Building not so long before? Maybe that was what gave the bandits the idea for this raid.

But the Empire State Building was still standing. The architects who designed it must have seen that it might be a target and strengthened it accordingly. Nobody’d ever imagined a nondescript police courthouse in Berlin might get clobbered by an explosives-packed C-47 going flat out. Who in his right mind would have? And it stood no more.

“Comrade Colonel!” Bokov shouted, suddenly thinking of something else that should stand no more.

He needed to shout several times before he got Shteinberg’s notice. Everybody’s ears were stunned. At last, the Jew growled, “What is it?” He glowered at Bokov as if he thought all this was his fault.

“Don’t get pissed off at me, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. He had a good notion of whose fault it really was. “I know what we need to do next.”

“You do, do you?” Suspicion filled Shteinberg’s voice. “And that is…?”

“Sir, we need to go have another talk with Lieutenant General Vlasov.”

Moisei Shteinberg thought it over. Slowly, he smiled a smile that should have shown shark’s teeth instead of his own yellowish set. As he smiled, he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “We do.”

Yet again, the Anglo-americans and the Russians (to say nothing of the remora French, which was what they deserved to have said of them) would not get to put on their show trial for the leaders of the Third Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. A small, cold smile stole across Reinhard Heydrich’s face as he went through newspaper and magazine accounts. Some of the photos were truly spectacular.

So were some of the editorials. One American writer feared the German resistance would start what he called “a reign of terror in the air.” He imagined fighting men seizing planes full of passengers and flying them into buildings all over Europe and maybe even in the States. He imagined seizing laden planes and crashing them on purpose. He even imagined seizing planes and flying them to, say, Franco’s Spain to hold the passengers hostage till the German Freedom Front’s demands were met.

He had one hell of an imagination. None of that stuff had occurred to Heydrich. As far as he was concerned, the attack on the Berlin courthouse was a one-off job. But he recognized good ideas when somebody stuck them in front of his nose. He started taking notes.

Only a handful of these hijackings and atrocities would be needed to throw air transport into chaos all over the world, the editorial writer warned. Would travelers put up with the delays and inconveniences necessary to ensure no one can smuggle weapons or explosives aboard aircraft? It seems most unlikely.

It seemed pretty unlikely to Heydrich, too. He wrote himself more notes. Throw air transport into chaos all over the world? That sounded good to him. He didn’t know whether grabbing a few planes would have the effect this fellow foretold, but he could hardly wait to find out.

Hans Klein walked into his office with more papers and magazines. “We’ve got ’em jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, Herr Reichsprotektor,” the noncom said.

“Good. That’s the idea. May they jump out of Germany soon.” Heydrich bounced some of the American editorial writer’s ideas off of Klein. “What do you think?” he asked, respecting the veteran’s solid common sense. “Can we do these things? Would they cause as much trouble as the Ami thinks?”

“They might,” Klein said slowly. “We don’t have many pilots left to aim at buildings, but anybody with balls can crash a plane. And if you were going to fly to Spain instead of crashing, you could likely point a gun at the regular pilot and make him take you there.”

“Well, so you could.” Heydrich wrote that down, too. Some men who weren’t willing to throw their lives away for the Reich would be willing to fight for it. They might make good hijackers…and quite a few people from the Third Reich had already taken refuge in friendly-even if officially neutral-Spain.

Oberscharfuhrer Klein’s thoughts ran on a different track: “Damn shame that poor Mitzi gal’s chute didn’t open when she jumped.” His mouth twisted. “Too much time to think on the way down.”

“Ja,” Heydrich said, and left it right there. At his quiet orders, the man who’d packed Mitzi’s parachute made sure it wouldn’t open. Why take chances? She was much too likely to get captured and grilled after she landed.

When you issued orders like that, you had to do it quietly. If it got out that you’d thrown away someone’s life-especially a woman’s-on purpose, your own people would give you trouble. Never mind that it was the only reasonable thing to do. What you saw as reasonable, they’d see as coldhearted.

And now Heydrich wanted to find a discreet way to dispose of the man who’d packed Mitzi’s chute. As soon as that fellow started pushing up daisies, he wouldn’t be able to blab to the enemy. He wouldn’t be able to blab to his own pals, either.

None of which showed on the Reichsprotektor’s face. Once upon a time, the Fuhrer’d called him the man with the iron heart. If you were going to hold a position like his, an iron heart was an asset, no two ways about it.

“One more embarrassment for the enemy,” he said. “With any luck at all, it will make the Amis squeal even louder than they are already.”

“Ja!” Klein perked up. He was always eager to look in that direction. “Tomorrow belongs to us.”

“Well, of course it does,” Reinhard Heydrich said.

Lieutenant General Vlasov had looked and acted like a son of a bitch the last time Bokov and Shteinberg called on him. He seemed even less friendly now. For twenty kopeks, his expression said, both the other NKVD men could find out how they liked chopping down spruces in the middle of Siberian winter.

However much he hated them, though, he couldn’t just tell them to fuck off, the way he had before. He might want to; he plainly did want to. But the Heydrichites had humiliated the Soviet Union before the world when they crashed that plane into what would have been the war criminals’ courthouse. Striking back at them any way at all