The Man with the Iron Heart

“How about that?” Heydrich echoed, and his thin lips also shaped a smile. “Like so many whipped dogs, they’re running. Running!”

“That was the idea all along,” the Oberscharfuhrer reminded him.

“Aber naturlich,” Heydrich said. “But getting them to do it-! I thought we would have to keep going longer than this. But the Americans pulled as much as we pushed. More! We never came close to hurting them enough to make them go.”

“And the American government didn’t shoot those people marching and squawking,” Klein said. “I’m damned if I understand why not.”

Since Heydrich didn’t, either, he only shrugged. “You use your enemy’s weaknesses against him. That’s the whole idea in war. That’s how we beat France. We made a big, showy threat in Holland and Belgium, and the French and English couldn’t run fast enough to fight there. Then the real thrust came through the Ardennes, where France was weak, and the Wehrmacht paraded under the Arc de Triomphe.”

“The French won’t want to get out of their zone now,” Hans Klein predicted.

“Yes, I know.” That France had an occupation zone in Germany still infuriated Heydrich. The USA, the UK, the USSR-they’d earned the right to try to hold down the Reich, anyhow. But what had the French done? Ridden on other people’s coattails, and damn all else. The Reichsprotektor pulled his thoughts back to what needed doing next. “Now that the Amis are going, I don’t think the Tommies will stick around much longer. England isn’t what it used to be. When America spits, the English go swimming.”

“I like that.” Klein grinned again.

“And if we hold two zones”-Heydrich pursued his own train of thought-“we have enough of the Reich to do something worthwhile with. Not the Grossdeutsches Reich, maybe, but a Deutsches Reich again.”

“I like that, too.” But Hans Klein hadn’t finished, for he asked, “How much will the Russians like it, though?”

Automatically, Heydrich’s head swung toward the east. Here deep underground, directions should have been meaningless. For all practical purposes, they were. All the same, Heydrich might have had a compass implanted behind his eyes. He knew from which direction the Red Army would come if it came.

“They won’t like it,” he admitted. “Even so, I don’t think they’ll invade as long as we walk soft for a while once we get in.”

“They’d better not-that’s all I’ve got to say,” Klein replied. “We sure as hell can’t stop ’em if they do.”

Heydrich grunted. “I know,” he said gruffly. “Believe me, trading the Amis for the Ivans is the last thing I want.” And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? The German freedom fighters had probably hurt the Russians worse than they’d hurt the Americans. But the Red Army wasn’t going away, dammit. The Russians hunkered down in their occupation zone and fought back.

“Well, Herr Reichsprotektor, what do we do about it, then?” Klein turned Heydrich’s title into a sour joke. What good was a Reichsprotektor who couldn’t protect the Reich?

“My bet is, the Americans won’t let Stalin move all the way to the Rhine,” Heydrich answered. “They look weak leaving Germany themselves. They won’t be able to afford to look weak twice in a row here, especially not when the Reds in China are kicking the crap out of the Nationalists. All we have to do is make sure we look like the lesser of two evils.”

Hitler never had figured that out. Right up to the end, he’d expected the Anglo-Americans to join him in the crusade against Bolshevism. But he’d scared them even worse than Stalin did. And so…Heydrich led the resistance from a hidden mineshaft God only knew how many meters underground.

Klein threw back his head and laughed like a loon. “Sweet suffering Jesus, sir, but that’s funny! We make the Americans run away, and then we use them to keep the Russians from coming in? Oh, my!” He laughed some more.

“It is strange, I know. It should work, though, if we play our cards right. Or do you see it differently?” Heydrich asked. A couple of Foreign Ministry staffers were down here to advise him on such things. He’d talked with them. But he also respected Klein’s judgment. The Foreign Ministry people had brains and education. Klein thought with his gut and the plain good sense that made him win money whenever he sat down to play skat or poker. You needed the whole bunch if you were going to get anywhere.

The Oberscharfuhrer considered. “Yeah, we might bring that off if we’re careful. The Ivans are scared of the atom bomb.”

“Hell, so am I,” Heydrich said. “As soon as we’re able to, we get our own. And we have to get to work on our rockets again, too. Once we can blow Moscow and Washington off the map-”

“We’re back in business,” Klein finished for him.

“Damn right we are,” Heydrich agreed.

Vladimir Bokov neither spoke nor understood English. HE had no trouble at all with German, though. All the Berlin papers, those from the Russian zone and the ones printed in the zones the other Allies held, were full of news and pictures of the American pullout. He wouldn’t have believed it if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes. Even seeing, he had trouble believing.

“They’re going, Comrade Colonel!” he mourned. “The stupid motherfuckers are really going. Is that why we handed them the DP?”

“We handed them the DP so General Vlasov could bust our balls with it for the rest of our lives,” Moisei Shteinberg answered. “He’ll do it, too-he’s just the type.”

“Too right he is!” Bokov was gloomily aware he was the one who’d pushed hardest for working with the Americans. He wouldn’t be the only one who remembered, either. Everybody who wanted to get ahead of him and everybody who wanted to hold him down would throw it in his face. After a while, nobody would have to. The whole world-the whole world of the NKVD, anyhow, which was the only world that mattered to him-would know he was a fuckup.

“Both the officers who took Birnbaum were Jews, you said. If anything gives me hope, that does,” Shteinberg said. “They’ll push things.”

“I’m sure they want Heydrich’s scalp, Comrade Colonel. But how much will they be able to do when everything’s going to pieces around them? Bozhemoi! You can’t even be sure they’re still on this side of the ocean,” Bokov said.

“Don’t remind me.” Shteinberg scowled. “I just wish I could know we’d take care of things ourselves once the Americans all disappear.”

“What’s to stop us?” Bokov demanded. “If the Fascists grab power in the western zones, of course we’ll run them out and kill as many of them as we can. They can’t even slow us down-we’d be on the Rhine in a week.”

“Of course we would, if we were only fighting the Heydrichites,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “But the Americans don’t want us on the Rhine. Neither do the French.”

“Fuck the French! Fuck the Americans, too.” The first part of what Bokov said came out fiercely. His voice faltered when he tried the second curse.

Colonel Shteinberg gave back a sad nod. “You begin to see what I mean. The French are nothing…by themselves. But the Americans are a different story. You can despise them, but you can’t ignore them. They have those damned bombs, and they have the big bombers that can carry them into the motherland. If they say, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ then we can’t, not till we have atom bombs of our own.”

“Fuck the Americans!” Bokov said again, this time as savagely as he wanted to. “Fuck them in the ass! If they walk away from their worry when it’s our worry, too, and then they don’t let us clean it up-”

“Yes? What then? What can we do about it?” Shteinberg asked.

“Those bastards,” Bokov whispered, in lieu of admitting the Soviet Union couldn’t do a damn thing. “Those cocksucking bastards. They have to want to see the Fascists reestablish themselves. If they walk out and they don’t let us walk in…What other explanation is there?” Bokov had made a career out of looking for plots against the USSR. He didn’t need to look very hard to see one here.

“Do you know what the really mad thing is, Volodya?” Shteinberg said.

“Everything!” Bokov raged.