The Man with the Iron Heart

was when the blast that sealed one mineshaft touched off an underground collapse.

When they stuck him in the back of a truck and hauled him off on what he figured was another wild-goose chase, he just shrugged. Most of the other soldiers under the canvas roof pissed and moaned right from the start. One of them even asked him, “Why aren’t you bitching like the rest of us?”

“What’s the use?” Bernie answered. “We’re going where they tell us to, and we’ll do what they say once we get there.”

“That’s what’s wrong,” the other GI said.

“It’s the fuckin’ Army. This is how it works,” Bernie said, more patiently than he’d expected. “Besides, would you rather be back in Nuremberg or Munich or somewhere like that? Out in the open, at least you’ve got a chance of seeing the fanatics before they start shooting at you.”

“I don’t want to be here at all,” the other soldier said. Several more men nodded. The guy doing the talking went on, “Damn war was supposed to be over almost two and a half years ago. Only reason we’re still fucking around in this miserable country is that Harry Truman’s a goddamn jerk.” His friends nodded some more.

The sentiment had its points. Bernie had said things not very different himself. Hearing it from a punk who plainly hadn’t seen Germany before V-E Day only pissed him off, though. “You better remember, the Jerries don’t know you don’t wanna be here,” he said. “You don’t keep your eyes open, they’ll punch your ticket for you toot sweet. Or else you’ll be the star in one of their movies, and then we’ll find what’s left of you by the side of the road. So keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, huh?”

“Sorry, General!” the new draftee said. His friends snickered. They would all have edged away from Bernie, except the truck was too tightly packed to make edging away possible, let alone practical.

Bernie barely had room to snake a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. After he lit up, one of the guys who’d made it plainest that he thought Bernie was an idiot tried to cadge a smoke from him. Bernie was tempted to tell him to shove it. The other guy likely would have done that to him. But he’d learned you always shared in the field-if you ran out of this or that, somebody else would share with you.

He couldn’t help saying, “I don’t look like such a jerk now that I’ve got something you want, huh?”

“Yeah, well-” The fellow did manage to seem faintly embarrassed. He held the Chesterfield out to Bernie. “Can you give me a light, too?”

“Jeez Louise!” Bernie said, but he did.

After a while, the truck stopped at a checkpoint. An MP with a grease gun eyed the soldiers in the back with a look that said he thought they were all SS men in disguise. “Who won the American League pennant in ’44?” he demanded fiercely.

“The Browns. Only time they’ve ever done it,” Bernie answered before anybody else could. “I was already over here by then, but I know that.”

He figured the MP would shut up, but the guy didn’t. “Did they win the Series?” the snowdrop asked. “One of you other clowns-not him.”

“No,” said the soldier who didn’t want to be in Germany at all. “The Cards beat ’em in…was it seven games?”

“Six,” Bernie said.

“Okay.” Now the MP was satisfied. “You guys are Americans, all right. You can go on.”

“What the hell are we getting into?” Bernie asked.

“You think they tell me what’s going on?” the MP said. The PFC driving the truck put it back in gear. It rolled down into the valley.

“Wonder what they woulda done if we didn’t know baseball,” said one of the GIs in the back.

“Fucked us over and wasted a bunch of everybody’s time,” Bernie said. “Then when it finally did get straightened out they would’ve acted like it was our fault for being such a dumb bunch of cocksuckers.”

“You don’t like MPs, do you?” the soldier asked him.

“Gee, how’d you figure that out?” Bernie said, deadpan. Almost everybody back there laughed.

It got warmer as the truck went down into the valley-not warm, but warmer. Bernie munched on part of a D- ration bar. The damn thing tasted the way he’d always thought a chocolate-flavored candle would. It was too waxy to be enjoyable, but a whole bar would keep you running all day. D-rats were supposed to have all the vitamins and stuff you needed. Bernie didn’t know about that. He did know they were the perfect antidote for prunes; if you had to live on them for two or three days, the memory, among other things, lingered for quite a while afterwards. But it was what he had on him. Unlike these new guys, he didn’t feel like scrounging from people he didn’t know.

After a while, the truck stopped. “Ritz Hotel!” the driver shouted. “All ashore that’s going ashore!”

“Funny guy-a fuckin’ comedian,” Bernie said. “He should take it on the radio…and then stuff it.”

“There you go, man,” said the kid who didn’t want to be there. They agreed about something, anyhow.

One by one, the GIs hopped out. It wasn’t the Ritz. It was a bunch of olive-drab tents set down in the middle of the valley. A barbed-wire perimeter and machine-gun nests protected by thick layers of sandbags protected the camp from direct assault.

“What the fuck is all this?” said one of the soldiers who’d got out of the truck with Bernie.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. It feels like a trap,” Bernie said. The other soldier gave him a funny look, but he set his jaw, nodded, and waved to the mountains reaching up to the sky on either side. “Fucking fanatics want to throw stuff down on us, who’s gonna stop ’em? High ground counts for a lot.” He spoke from experience, which was something the other guy probably didn’t have.

A captain came out of a tent, followed by an older guy in black-dyed fatigues without any insignia-some kind of civilian attached to the Army. “It’s not a trap, on account of we hold the heights,” the captain said. By the way he talked, he came from New York or New Jersey or somewhere around there. “We hold this whole goddamn valley, matter of fact. And somewhere under it, I hope like hell, is Reinhard Heydrich. We’re gonna dig the son of a bitch out.”

“How many other Nazis has he got with him?” asked one of the other fellows just off the deuce-and-a-half. “They gonna shoot it out with us?” He didn’t sound delighted at the prospect.

“However many pals he has, that’s their tough luck. We’ve got what we need to blast ’em all,” the captain answered. He was skinny and sharp-nosed. A Jew, Bernie judged. So was the fellow in black fatigues, unless he missed his guess. No wonder the officer’d stayed so gung-ho, then. Bernie wasn’t sure he had himself. Then the captain said, “There’s a million bucks on Heydrich’s head, remember. A cool million, and you’ll never hear from the IRS. Think about that, guys.”

They thought about it. They liked it…better than they had before, anyhow. Bernie looked down the valley. Other encampments were in place. And…He started laughing.

“What’s funny?” the captain snapped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I been here before-patrol last year.” He remembered the farmhouse with the dirty pictures. “Maybe I walked on Heydrich’s grave.”

The captain’s grin made him look years younger. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you did.”

XXIX

There was a graveyard up on the mountainside. The Americans in the valley paid it no attention. Why should they? By the tumbled headstones and leaning crosses over the graves, it had been there a long, long time. No one shot at the Amis from the position. No one down on the valley floor seemed to remember it was around.

All of which suited Reinhard Heydrich fine. One of those leaning crosses was a dummy. It concealed a periscope, from which an observer surveyed the scene below. Heydrich admired the conceit. He’d filched it from a Russian field fortification the Waffen-SS somehow smoked out. This was an improved version. The observer had a field telephone. He wasn’t actually in a grave, but in a passage that led down to the main mine. If he saw trouble coming, he could get away. Explosives in the passage would make sure nobody followed him.

“They keep bringing in more troops and more digging equipment, Herr Reichsprotektor,” he said now, his voice tinny in Heydrich’s ear. “It sure looks like they know something. What are we going to do?”