The Man with the Iron Heart

Heydrich didn’t want to believe the Amis could know where his hideout lay. They’d come through here before, done some superficial damage, and gone on their way. They’d treated this valley no differently from two dozen others in the Alps.

They were treating it differently now, dammit. How? Heydrich wondered. Why? Had they found one of the drops where his people communicated with the outside world? He couldn’t believe it. The drops were well sited, and everybody who knew about them had the discipline to use them discreetly.

A traitor? Heydrich was sure that would have been Hans Klein’s guess. And it wasn’t unlikely, worse luck. Somebody who decided a million dollars would set him up for life could cause a lot of trouble. But everyone who was supposed to be underground here was accounted for. Some men in Jochen Peiper’s underground center knew where this one was. They would have betrayed both of them, though. And there was no sign Peiper’s center was in trouble. One of the outside connections, then? Even if the worst happened here, Heydrich hoped the pigdog wouldn’t live to enjoy his foul loot.

Or-a new thought-could one of the laborers who’d dug most of this place out of the living rock have survived in spite of everything? Could he have figured out what he’d been working on? Could he have gone to the Amis with the story? Would they have believed somebody like that?

Heydrich shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered. The extermination camps were most efficient. He knew that. He damn well should have. Hadn’t he set the Einsatzgruppen in motion against the Jews of Eastern Europe? Hadn’t he organized the Wannsee Conference, which got all the antisemitic forces in the Reich moving on parallel tracks against the Jewish enemy? So, no, surviving laborers were anything but likely.

But the observer in the graveyard heard him, which he hadn’t intended. “It’s not impossible, Herr Reichsprotektor. I only wish it were. But they’re really here,” the man said. “What will we do? What can we do?”

That was a better question than Heydrich wished it were. He and his men had escape routes. They would have sufficed to let the Germans give most bands of attackers the slip. But the American net was cast wider than Heydrich had ever dreamt it could be.

Decision crystallized in the Reichsprotektor’s mind. “For now, we sit tight,” he answered. “They may have a good notion we’re here, but they can’t be sure. Finding us won’t be easy. Neither will digging us out.”

“I sure hope you’re right, sir,” the observer said, and rang off.

Heydrich hoped he was right, too. The generators would run out of fuel before too long-or maybe he’d have to turn them off to keep their noise from betraying itself to listening devices. The mines had good natural ventilation, but even so…. Heydrich tried to imagine running the war for the liberation of the Reich by candle-and lantern light.

Napoleon had fought his wars that way. So had Clausewitz, and even Moltke. None of them, though, had tried to do it from hundreds of meters underground. The sun rose every day for them. It never rose for Heydrich. When the candles and lanterns ran low…

“Klein!” he called.

“Yes, sir?” The Oberscharfuhrer wasn’t far away. Heydrich hadn’t thought he would be.

The decision that had crystallized broke up and re-formed. “Looks to me like we’ll have to try to break out,” the Reichsprotektor said. “We have…some people who won’t be able to fight or to keep up. You know who I’m talking about?” He waited for Klein to nod, then went on, “Good. I want you to see that’s taken care of, all right?”

Hans Klein nodded again. “I’ll make sure of it. Too bad, nicht wahr? Such a waste, after we went to all the trouble to grab them.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Heydrich sighed. He wanted an atom bomb as fast as he could get one after the Reich was free again. Germany needed that weapon. “Why don’t you leave Wirtz and Diebner for now? We can always tend to them later if we have to. The others…It is too bad, but they’d better disappear.”

“Right you are, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein sketched a salute and hurried away.

Reinhard Heydrich sighed once more. He didn’t know how or why things had gone wrong in the valley, but they had. Not everything worked out the way you wished it would. He patted his tunic. He had a cyanide capsule in his breast pocket, and others in other places about his person. Everybody down here did. Even if the Amis caught him, they wouldn’t question him or make sport of him or try him. He just had to bite down. If Himmler had done it, Heydrich was sure he could, too.

“There, Captain.” Shmuel Birnbaum pointed to what had been a mineshaft till an explosive charge closed up the front of it. “That one heads straight down. You could do like the people in the Jules Verne story and go straight to the center of the earth.”

“I read that book when I was a kid,” Lou Weissberg said. He’d read it in English, of course. Birnbaum would have seen it in Russian, or maybe Yiddish, or possibly even German. And it was really written in French. Ideas bounced across the world like rubber balls.

The main idea in Lou’s head now was seeing Heydrich dead. Maybe, if you chopped off the German Freedom Front’s head, the body would flop like a chicken that met the hatchet and then fall over and die. Maybe. Alevai. Lou muttered to himself. Please, God. Don’t You owe us a little something, anyway? It wasn’t exactly a prayer-more a bitter question. When the Nazis efficiently went about the business of murdering Jews by the million, God showed He’d got out of the habit of listening to prayers.

If God wouldn’t take care of things (or if God wasn’t there to take care of things, which Lou found much too likely), mere mortals would have to do their goddamnedest. Lou waved to the crews of the waiting bulldozers and steam shovels. “Come and get ’em!” he yelled, as if he were calling them to dinner.

They rumbled forward on their tracks, filling the pure mountain air with the stink of diesel exhaust. Dozer blades and the steam shovels’ buckets dug into the mountainside. Earth and stones went into piles off to either side of the closed shaft. This place wouldn’t be nearly so scenic after the excavators got through. Maybe that bothered the Germans who lived here. Lou was no tourist. He hadn’t come for the view.

Along with the dirt and boulders, the earth-moving equipment also dislodged timbers that had helped support the sides and roof of the shaft. Over the blat! of his engine, a dozer jockey shouted, “Damn things look like they’ve been here since B.C. You sure we’re in the right place, Captain?”

Lou wasn’t sure of anything. The people working under him needed to know that like they needed a hole in the head, though. He didn’t even look back at Shmuel Birnbaum as he nodded. “This is all camouflage,” he declared. “C’mon-you know the Germans do shit like that.”

“Hope you’re right, sir,” the dozer driver said, and plunged forward again.

So do I, Lou thought. If this didn’t work out the way he hoped it would, if he didn’t come up with a big burrow full of Nazis if not with the Reichsprotektor’s head on a platter, the Army would be only too happy to separate him from the service and boot his butt back to New Jersey. Chances were it would throw Howard Frank out, too. They would get exactly what eighty percent of the soldiers in Germany craved most: a ride home. It was, naturally, the last thing either of them wanted. If that wasn’t the Army way of doing things, Lou couldn’t imagine what would be.

The earth-movers were tearing the living crap out of the opening to the mineshaft. Lou wondered if they would just peel back the whole mountainside to get at whatever it concealed. Wouldn’t they fill the valley floor below with rocks and dirt if they did?

But the guys who ran the growling, farting, grinding machinery were more purposeful than that. They stayed on the old mine’s trail. Before long, the dozer blades and the steam shovels’ steel jaws clanged off some serious boulders. Here and there, they had to back out so demolition crews could make big ones into, well, littler ones, anyhow.

That dozer driver said, “Big old honking landslide, I bet. This woulda closed the place down better than our