The Man with the Iron Heart

somebody’d kept his head, the story would probably have a happy ending.

Not right away, though. “They better kill those lights, or the krauts’ll knock the shit out of ’em when they get a little closer,” said a GI not far from him.

Sure as hell, mortar bombs did start dropping near the oncoming trucks. One of them took a direct hit, caught fire, and slewed off the road. The other drivers suddenly got smart. Almost in unison, their headlights went out.

The trucks stopped close enough to let Lou hear the order the officer in charge gave his men: “We’re going up that hill, and we’re gonna clean those assholes out!” Then he said one more thing: “Come on!”

They went. Every so often, one of them would shoot at something. That let the diehards know they were on the way. Machine-gun tracers stabbed through the night toward them. Other tracers replied-the new guys had machine guns of their own. And they had a mortar crew. Lou cheered when red sparks rose steeply into the air. But the American bombs burst short of the enemy positions. The Germans, damn them, had more range because they were shooting downhill.

Even so, they could see the writing on the wall. They quit pounding the men by the mineshaft. A couple of MG42s-Hitler’s saws, the Russians called the vicious German machine guns-kept spraying death at the Americans advancing upslope. What were the fanatics not manning those machine guns doing? Trying to get away, unless Lou had lost his marbles.

He hardly cared. “Jesus,” he said. “I think I lived through it.” He realized how much he wanted a cigarette. He also realized a sniper still might ventilate his brainpan if he lit up. Regretfully, he didn’t. He discovered he had a hunk of D-ration bar in the same pocket as his Luckies. Gnawing on the hard chocolate wasn’t the same, but it was better than nothing.

He knew the Jerries’ jig was up when the MG42s stopped ripping the air apart. Maybe their crews were dead, or maybe those men were trying to escape, too. Again, he had trouble caring. Nobody was trying to shoot him right this minute. That, he cared about. A few spatters of gunfire went on, up there on the mountainside, when Germans and Americans got too close to one another. But the main event was done.

Part of Lou wanted to sleep for a week. The rest wondered whether he’d ever sleep again with so much adrenaline zinging through him. Shaking his head, he stood up and started trying to think like an officer once more. “Do what you can for the wounded,” he told the men who’d gone through the fight with him. “We should have medics here real soon now-docs, too, I hope.”

“Some of these guys are bleeding bad, sir,” a GI said out of the night. “They don’t get plasma or something pretty damn quick, they ain’t gonna make it.”

“Yeah,” Lou said unhappily. He didn’t know what else to say, because he couldn’t do one single thing about it.

Then he heard footsteps coming down from above. “Don’t shoot, nobody!” someone called in accents surely American. “I gotta talk to the guy in charge of diggin’ out this mine.”

“That’s me,” Lou called. “What’s up?”

The Yank thumped closer. Or was he an English-speaking German with an explosive vest, intent on vengeance? Dr. Freud would call that paranoia, Lou thought. But you’re not paranoid when they’re really after you, he retorted to himself. And then all that silly fluff blew out of his head, because the guy said, “We’ve got Heydrich’s body up there. Somebody’s one rich motherfucker.”

“Heydrich?” Lou said dazedly. “For sure? No shit?”

“Looks just like him-we’ve all seen enough posters to know. His face ain’t hardly tore up at all,” the GI answered. “Papers on the body say he’s some horseshit noncom, but you know what that kinda crap’s gonna be worth. And there’s another German noncom still breathin’ who says it’s him.”

“Heydrich,” Lou said again. He could hardly believe it, even if it was exactly what he’d been trying to accomplish. “Take me to him. This I gotta see.”

He stumped uphill after the soldier. He stumbled in the darkness a couple of times, but he didn’t fall. Before long, he was breathing hard. A desk job with the CIC didn’t keep him in great shape. But he would have walked up the side of Mt. Everest on his hands to see Reinhard Heydrich dead.

No more shooting on this slope. Up ahead, a couple of flashlight beams marked the place where the GI was taking him. He saw American soldiers and guys in Feldgrau milling around. All the Germans kept hands above head.

“Here comes the captain,” his escort called so nobody would get jumpy. “He wants to see the body.”

Lots of German corpses in uniform lay in a compact knot, with others out around the fringes. “Looks like a bunch of ’em got taken by surprise,” Lou remarked.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier agreed. “They came out right behind one of our guys. He chucked a grenade into ’em, and then he started shooting ’em up.”

“Good for him,” Lou said. The air stank of blood and shit and smokeless powder. One of the GIs shone a flashlight at him. He waved. The beam swerved away: he was judged all right. He raised his voice a little: “Show me Heydrich.”

“Over here, sir,” another man called. He had a flashlight, too, and pointed it at a pale, still face on the ground. “This bastard.”

Lou bent down. The dead man’s pale, narrow eyes were still open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. The face was long and thin. So was the nose, which had a slight kink in it. “Son of a gun,” Lou whispered. “I think it really is him.” He undid the corpse’s tunic. Whoever this guy was, he’d taken grenade fragments and bullets in the chest and belly. “Shine it under his arm,” Lou told the GI with the light. “I want to check his blood group.”

He had to wipe away blood before he could make out the tattoo. It was an A-just what he wanted to see. “Well?” the soldier asked.

“Yeah.” Lou felt as if he’d swallowed a big slug of straight bourbon. “It matches.” He paused, remembering. “The guy who brought me up here said you’d captured another Jerry in noncom’s clothes who could ID him.”

“That’s right, sir.” The other American turned away for a moment. “Hey, Manny! Bring that cocksucker over here. The captain wants him.”

“Sure,” said somebody-presumably Manny. He spoke a couple of words of rudimentary German: “Du! Komm!”

Unlike Heydrich, the man who came over to Lou blinked when the GI shone a flashlight in his eyes. He looked like a guy who’d been a noncom for a long time-put a different uniform on him and he would have made a perfect American tech sergeant. “Who are you?” Lou asked. He pointed to the dead man. “How do you know this is Heydrich?”

“I am Oberscharfuhrer Johannes Klein,” the noncom answered. “I was the Reichsprotektor’s driver, and then his aide when we went underground.”

“Wow,” Lou said. Klein’s name was on his list, too-on all kinds of CIC lists. Nobody seemed to know what he looked like. Well, here he was, in the flesh. Quite a bit of flesh, too. Whatever the diehards had been doing underground, they hadn’t been starving. Lou dragged his attention back to the business at hand. “So what happened here? What went wrong for you?”

“He made a mistake,” Klein answered matter-of-factly. He sounded like an American noncom giving an officer the back of his hand, too. “He thought the diversionary attack would pull your men off this side of the mountain. He turned out to be wrong. We had just come out when….” He spread his hands. One of them had blood on it, but it wasn’t his.

Another German came over. He stared down at Heydrich’s body for a long time. “So he is truly dead,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lou.

“What difference does it make to you? Who are you, anyway?” Lou asked him auf Deutsch.

“I am Karl Wirtz,” the man answered in fluent British English.

For a second, the name didn’t mean anything to Lou. Then it did. “The physicist!” he exclaimed. Wirtz nodded. Lou tried to ask something that wasn’t too dumb. The best he could come up with was, “Where are your, uh, colleagues?”

“Poor Professor Diebner lies over there. Sadly, he is dead,” Wirtz said. “The others…I do not know what has happened to the others.” He nodded toward Klein. “But I believe the Oberscharfuhrer may.”