The Man with the Iron Heart

Lou Weissberg barely noticed when the first couple of mortar bombs came in. The earth-movers made so much noise, the only thing that told him what was up was a graceful fountain of earth rising into the air-and a sharp steel fragment whining past his ear and clanking off a truck’s fender.

A split second later, machine-gun bullets cracked by him. When they hit metal, they sounded like pebbles banging on a tin roof. When they hit flesh…A man tumbled from a bulldozer, thumped down onto the ground, and never moved again. The bullet that got him in the head might have been a baseball bat smacking into a clay jug full of water. Lou knew he would remember that sound the rest of his days, however much he tried to forget it.

“Holy shit! They’re shooting at us!” someone yelled.

“Get down!” somebody else added.

That struck Lou as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flattened out on the ground and wriggled toward the closest vehicle. If he could put it between him and the deadly spray of bullets…it might not matter much, since the truck wasn’t armored.

Halfway there, though, he had a rush of brains to the head. “Douse the lights!” he sang out, as loud as he could. For a wonder, somebody who could do something about it heard him. Blackness thudded down.

That didn’t stop the machine-gun bullets from snarling by or the mortar bombs from hissing in and going bam! the way he’d hoped it would. But then, what he knew about real combat would have fit in a K-ration can, if not on the head of a pin. That was, or had been, the advantage of CIC work. It was real soldiering: you tried to find out what the bad guys were up to, and to stop them from doing it. You mostly didn’t go out there to shoot and get shot yourself. Except now Lou did.

He hadn’t shit himself. He was moderately proud of that. Lying there with bullets and pieces of jagged metal flying every which way all around him, he didn’t have much else to be proud of.

“Hey, Birnbaum! You there?” he shouted-in English, because he knew damn well his own side would figure Yiddish was German, and would try to liquidate him if he used it.

“Here,” the DP answered. The word was as near identical as made no difference in all three languages.

“Good,” Lou said: another cognate, though in the Yiddish dialect he and Shmuel Birnbaum shared, it came out more like geet. Birnbaum must have been through more combat than he had himself-a lot more, odds were. The DP knew what to do to try to stay alive. His reply hadn’t come from more than three inches off the ground.

When the American armored cars started shooting back at the Germans on the mountainside, Lou let out a war whoop Sitting Bull would have been proud of. Shell bursts stalked the machine guns’ malignant muzzle flashes. He whooped again when two MG42s fell silent in quick succession.

Then an armored car blew up. By the light of the fireball-and by the flame trail from the antitank rocket that had killed it-Lou spotted a kraut trying to slide back into the night. He opened up with his carbine. He couldn’t do anything to the Germans farther away. This son of a bitch…Lou wasn’t the only guy spraying lead at him. The Jerry went down. Whether he was hit or trying to avoid fire, Lou couldn’t have said. He also had no idea whether he’d personally shot the German. He knew he never would.

Somebody running forward tripped over Lou and fell headlong. “Shit!” Lou said, at the same time as the other guy was going, “Motherfuck!” The heartfelt profanity convinced each of them the other was a Yank, so neither opened up.

The light from the blazing car let the other guy recognize Lou. “Well, you got it right, Captain,” he said-he was the driver who’d thought this whole exercise was a waste of time. “Goddamn krauts were down there.”

“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said dryly, which startled a laugh out of the driver.

Another German let fly with Panzerfaust or Panzerschreck. This one missed the armored car it was aimed at. It blew up when it hit something else a hundred yards beyond. Shrieks said it hurt people, too. But the armored car kept blasting away at the enemy on the mountainside, which counted for more.

“How long till the cavalry gets here?” the driver asked.

That made Lou think of Sitting Bull again. It also made him cuss some more. The first thing he should have done-well, maybe the second, after killing the lights-was to tell the radioman to scream for help. Dammit, he wasn’t a front-line officer. He didn’t think that way. He could hope the radioman had done it on his own. For that matter, he could hope the radioman had stayed alive to do it. But he should have made sure of it himself.

Combat was an unforgiving place. How many lives would one small mistake cost? And the more immediately crowding question: will one of them be mine?

Reinhard Heydrich spoke into a microphone: “German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four.” He pushed the mike away. “All right. They know it’s an emergency. If we get away, we get away. If we don’t…” He made himself shrug. “Peiper’s a solid man. He’ll carry on.”

“Hell with him,” Hans Klein said. “I don’t plan on dying now, any more than I did when those Czech bastards tried to bump you off.”

“Good.” Heydrich didn’t plan on dying, either. That might have nothing to do with the price of beer, worse luck.

Faintly echoing down the corridors and shafts from very far away, gunfire said the diversionary force was punishing the Americans. In the short run, that would make them stop excavating. In the very slightly longer run, it would show them they needed to tear everything in this valley to pieces, the mountainsides included.

The move, then, was to take advantage of the short run and not to stick around for the very slightly longer run. Now, to bring it off. Heydrich pulled a panel off the wall. Behind the panel was a red button. Heydrich pushed it. “Let’s go,” he said, a certain amount of urgency in his voice.

“Right you are, sir.” Klein grabbed a different microphone, one hooked up to the PA system. “Achtung!” His voice echoed through the mine. “Get your lanterns and torches. Lights going out-now!”

Logically, they didn’t have to do that. As long as the last few hundred meters of the escape passage were dark, nothing else made any difference. But sometimes logic had nothing to do with anything. If you were leaving forever a place that had served you well for a long time, it was dead to you after that. And, being dead, it should be seen to die.

The generators sighed into silence. The lights went out. For a split second, the blackness was the deepest Heydrich had ever known. Then good old reliable Klein flicked on his torch. The beam speared through the inky air. When God said “Let there be light!” He must have seen a contrast as absolute as this. Reinhard Heydrich never had, not till now.

He turned on his own torch. That was better. Somebody not too far away let out a horrible yell. Probably a poor claustrophobic bastard who thought the darkness was swallowing him whole. If he didn’t cut that out quick, they’d have to knock him over the head and leave him here. One way or another, he shut up. Heydrich was glad he didn’t have to find out how.

When he went out into the corridor, more torch beams flashed up and down it. He wondered if all the men gathering there recognized him. He’d left his usual uniform and Ritterkreuz behind. His outfit said he was a Sturmmann-a lance-corporal. So did his papers.

But his voice…Everyone down here knew his voice. “We will use Tunnel Three,” he said crisply. “As some of you will know, the diversion on the far side of the valley is going well. The undisciplined Americans will surely rush every man they have into the fight against such a large, obvious enemy grouping. And that will clear the escape area for us. Any questions?”

No one said a word. Kurt Diebner stared owlishly through his thick glasses. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, though no one could have made a less convincing soldier. Wirtz played another lance-corporal, and seemed slightly better suited to the role. They’d been told the other physicists were evacuated earlier. Maybe they believed that, maybe not. What they believed counted for little now.

“Some of you don’t have greatcoats,” Klein said. “Go get ’em. It’ll be cold on the mountainside.” Diebner was one of the men who needed a coat. Heydrich might have known he would be. A real SS noncom went with him as he got it, to make sure he didn’t try to disappear.

“When we get over the mountains, there will be people to take us in,” Heydrich promised. “We’ll split up,