The Man with the Iron Heart

revolutionaries because the Tsars mistreated their people. Well, what the Tsars did to Jews was like a kiss on the cheek compared to what the Nazis gave them.

That angry German man protested again, crying, “This is inhumane!” Then a grinning soldier who doubtless understood not a word he said shoved him into a cattle car. The Red Army men forced more and more Germans in after him.

“Why are you doing this to us?” a woman asked the soldier who was pushing her into another car. “Where are we going?”

Bokov would have bet rubles against rocks that the soldier didn’t follow her questions. The fellow had swarthy skin, high cheekbones, and dark, slanted Asian eyes. He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “Suck my cock, bitch!” he said. Luckily for the woman, she didn’t understand him, either. She squawked when he put both hands on her backside to get her in there. He only laughed.

In slow, schoolboy Russian, a German man said, “For what you do? I not harm you.”

He was over sixty, so he might have been telling the truth, at least in the literal sense of the words. Maybe he hadn’t carried a Mauser or served a 105mm howitzer. But even if he hadn’t, he’d almost certainly made weapons or munitions or uniforms or something else the Nazis had used against the USSR. Not many people here had clean hands.

The soldier he addressed didn’t answer him in words, not at first. Instead, the Red Army man hit him in the side of the head with the stock of his submachine gun. The German crumpled with a moan. The Red Army man kicked him in the ribs. Then he shouted, “Fuck yourself in the mouth! Get up, you stupid, ugly prick!”

Slowly, the old German did. He had a hand clutched to his temple. Blood rilled out between his fingers and ran down his cheek. “Why have you done that?” he choked out. “Not understand.”

“I ought to kill you, is what I ought to do. I ought to gutshoot you,” the Soviet soldier said. “You didn’t harm me, you lying sack of shit? Who the fuck shot me?” He pointed to one arm, then to the other leg. “Who burned down the kolkhoz where I grew up? Who raped my sister and shot her afterwards? Was it the Americans? Or was it you Heil, Hitler! bastards?”

How much of that did the stupid old German get? Here, for once, Bokov was tempted to translate. The losers needed to hear stuff like this. They’d see what they bought when they invaded the USSR four years ago. And they’d see plenty of other things, too-for as long as they lasted.

More and more people kept going into the cars. It was almost like a comic turn in a film. When it ran in reverse after the train got to wherever it was going, how many people would come out alive? Fewer than had gone in-he was sure of that. The idea didn’t break his heart.

He turned to Colonel Shteinberg. “How well do you think this will work, sir?”

“Well, we shook up the Baltic republics as if we were stirring soup,” the Jew answered. “Anybody who might have been anti-Soviet, away he went. Or she went-we shipped out plenty of Baltic bitches, too.” He chuckled reminiscently; maybe he’d been involved in that. But then the grin faded. “We could ship as many loyal Russians back in as we needed-the Baltics are legally part of the USSR now. We can’t do that so well here.”

“No,” Bokov agreed. Germany, however prostrate it was, remained a separate country. “Too bad.”

“Isn’t it?” Shteinberg said. “So we have to depend on scaring the devil out of the Fritzes we don’t send to camps.”

“That will work against most people. Will it work against the diehards?” Bokov asked.

“I doubt it.” Colonel Shteinberg sounded so indifferent, Bokov looked at him in surprise. The other NKVD man condescended to explain: “Sooner or later, we’ll scare one of the ordinary ones enough to make him sing. He’ll think, If I sell out, they won’t take my daughter or They won’t shoot me or whatever bothers him the most. And once we get our hooks into the diehards’ network, it’ll start coming to pieces. They always do.”

“Ah.” Bokov thought about it. “Yes, sir, you’re probably right.”

“You’d better believe I am,” Shteinberg said. “We’ll make every miserable German in our occupation zone sure hell’s not half a kilometer away from his front door. Some of them will decide they’d rather kiss our behinds than keep on getting it in the neck ’cause they’re making like tough guys.”

He talked like a tough guy himself-actually, like a zek, a man who’d been through the camps. Maybe he’d been a guard at one of them. Or maybe he had a term in his past. Plenty of people who went into the gulags in ’37 or ’38 came out again after the Hitlerites invaded. Some of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, too, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t go right back into a camp if they sneezed at the wrong time. Even men like Tupolev, the great aircraft designer, had the camps hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles.

The Red Army men made sure the cars were shut good and tight. Each one boasted impressive locks and bars that hadn’t been on them while they were part of the German railway system-unless the Germans used them to haul people to their concentration camps. Similarly, metal gratings and barbed wire across passenger-car windows made sure nobody would leave that way.

Smoke poured from the locomotive’s stack. The train pulled out of the station, heading east. Vladimir Bokov wondered if any of the Germans on board had the slightest idea how far east they were likely to go. Well, if the sons of bitches didn’t, they’d find out pretty damn quick.

Colonel Shteinberg watched the train go with no expression at all on his face. “A good job, eh?” Bokov said.

Shteinberg looked at him as coldly as he’d eyed the train. “They could put every German ever born on trains like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough to pay them back for what they did,” he said. His voice was also cool and quiet, but Bokov realized there were people who liked Fritzes even less than he did.

Lou Weissberg was eating breakfast at the barracks in Nuremberg when somebody came in waving the Stars and Stripes. “Look at this!” the guy shouted. “Look what we done to the goddamn Japs!”

“Hold the stupid thing still, willya?” somebody else said, more irritably than Lou would have-maybe this fellow hadn’t had his coffee yet. “Give us a chance to see what it says.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The guy with the paper did hold it still-and upside down. After assorted hoots from the soldiers shoveling food into their faces, he turned it right side up.

Upside down or right side up, the headline screamed about an atom bomb. “What the hell is that?” a major asked.

“They dropped one on this, uh, Hiroshima place, and the town is gone. Right off the map,” said the man with the Stars and Stripes.

“Well, they firebombed the living shit out of Tokyo not long ago, too, and they pretty much burned it off the map. So what’s such a big deal about this?” The major seemed determined not to be impressed-or maybe he didn’t fully grasp what was going on.

Either way, the guy with the paper spelled it out for him: “Yes, sir, but that was hundreds of planes and gazillions of incendiaries-Christ only knows how many. This Hiroshima place, this was one plane and one bomb. One.”

“What? One bomb? A whole city? My ass! That’s impossible!” the major said. If not for the enormous headline, Lou would have felt the same way.”

“Here’s what the President said.” The man with the Stars and Stripes opened it and read from a story: “‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.’”

The guy beside Lou stubbed out his cigarette and crossed himself. Lou knew just how he felt.

“‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold,’” read the fellow with the paper. “‘And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

“‘It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.’”

“Son of a bitch,” the skeptical major whispered. That summed up what Lou was feeling, too.