The Man with the Iron Heart

spirit and do its best to drive the occupiers nuts.

Fighting the long underground war was less exciting than a panzer battle. It turned out to be more intricate, more exacting. Was it more interesting? Peiper didn’t want to admit that, even to himself. He did what he could to help the cause of German liberty. He did what the Reichsprotektor told him to do. He quit complaining. No one would have listened to him any which way.

He didn’t even complain about being a spare tire. Like any good commander, Heydrich had run the resistance movement his own way. As there had been only one Fuhrer before him, there was only one Reichsprotektor.

And now I’m it, Peiper thought. The radio, the newspapers, and the magazines in American-occupied Germany were full of gloating glee because Heydrich had fallen in service of the cause. He’d been photographed dead more often than he ever was alive. THE GERMAN FREEDOM FRONT’S FRONT MAN IS NO MORE, a typical headline proclaimed proudly.

Jochen Peiper assembled the men who shared the underground secondary headquarters with him. “We’re fighting a war, and when you fight a war you go on even if you lose your general,” he said. “The man who’s next in line steps up, and you go on. The Reichsprotektor was a great German. We’ll miss him. He gave us hope for freedom even in the blackest days. He inspired the Werewolves to remind the enemy Germany wasn’t altogether beaten. The best way to honor his memory is to go on and free our country from the invaders’ yoke.”

He eyed them. A few of the fighters didn’t want to meet his gaze. They feared-or else they hoped, which would be worse-the struggle had died with the Reichsprotektor. But most of the SS men and soldiers seemed ready to keep on soldiering. That was what Peiper most wanted to see. He had to hope he wasn’t seeing it regardless of whether it was there or not.

“We can do this. We can, dammit!” he insisted. “We’ve already got the Americans on the run. We have to show them they haven’t cut the heart out of us. Reinhard Heydrich was a great man, a great German, a great National Socialist. No one would say anything different. But when great men fall, the ones they leave behind have to keep up the battle. And the Reichsprotektor had some ideas he didn’t live to use. We’ll see how wild they can drive the enemy.”

“What kind of ideas?” a man inquired.

“Well, for instance…” Peiper talked for some little while. He could have kissed the noncom who’d asked the question. If the troops were interested in what to try next, they wouldn’t brood because they’d lost their longtime commander. Or Peiper could hope they wouldn’t, anyhow.

But then another man asked, “Can the Americans sniff us out now?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Peiper answered, “Anything that can happen can happen to you, Heinz. They were supposed to use up all the workers who dug out the Reichsprotektor’s headquarters, but it sounds like somebody got through in spite of everything. That’s just bad luck. I don’t think it’s likely that that kind of thing could crop up here, too, but it’s possible.”

Unlike Heydrich, he’d had no direct role in eliminating Untermenschen. He’d been a combat soldier before his superiors tapped him for this slot. But he wasn’t naive about what the Reich had been up to. He talked about it in the same allusive, elusive, oddly dispassionate way someone who’d served in an extermination camp might have. If you talked about it that way, you didn’t dwell on what you were actually doing. Workers got used up, not killed. The survivor got through; he didn’t live. Jochen wished to God the bastard hadn’t lived.

Heinz had another awkward question: “What will we do without the physicists the Reichsprotektor liberated?”

“The best we can.” Peiper spread his hands. “I don’t know what else to tell you. We’ll be able to find other scientists who know some of what they knew, and we’ll find more people who can learn. We’re Germans. Other people would come here to study before the war. There are bound to be men who can do what we need. Remember, we know it’s possible now, and we didn’t during the war.”

Heinz nodded, apparently satisfied. Peiper wasn’t satisfied himself-not even close. He knew too well that losing those physicists meant Germany would take longer to build atom bombs. And he knew the resurgent Reich would need those bombs to keep it safe from the Americans and the Russians.

But, as he’d told the junior officer, all you could do was all you could do. He wasn’t even sure the fighters outside this headquarters would obey his orders. He had to nail that down first. If they wouldn’t follow him, the Amis and Tommies and Ivans had won after all. After keeping up the fight for so long despite the surrender of Wehrmacht and government, giving up now would be tragic.

He went back to his office to draft a proclamation. The struggle continues, he wrote. The hope for National Socialism, the hope for a revived German folkish state, does not lie in any one man. A man may fall. Adolf Hitler did; now Reinhard Heydrich has as well. But the cause goes on. The cause will always go on, because it is right and just. We shall not rest until we free our Fatherland. Sieg heil!

He looked it over, then nodded to himself. Yes, it would definitely do. He signed his name. After another moment’s hesitation, he added Reichsprotektor below the signature. Even though Heydrich had originally had the title because he governed the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, it also suited a partisan leader trying to shield Germany from the foes who oppressed her.

The headquarters had a small print shop, with a hand press not much different from the ones Martin Luther’s printers would have used. That would be plenty to get out a few hundred copies of the proclamation. Sympathetic printers in the U.S. and British zones could make thousands more once it reached them. Word would spread.

Which raised another question. Peiper wondered whether his fighters ought to stay quiet for a while. It might lull the enemy into a false sense of security. It would let Peiper consolidate his own authority within the German Freedom Front. Everybody’d known, and known of-and feared-Heydrich. By the nature of things, the number two man in any outfit was far more anonymous.

Peiper drummed his fingers on the desk. “Nein,” he muttered. Heydrich hadn’t made the Americans start bailing out of their zone by acting meek and mild. He’d harried them so harshly that they were glad to go. The best way to keep them on the run was to keep goosing them.

And the Russians…! No Russian ever born had ever admired meekness and mildness. The only way to get Ivan’s attention was to hit him in the face, and to keep on hitting him till he had to notice you. Peiper had fought the Red Army out in the open till he was recruited for the twilight struggle. Running it out of the Soviet zone wouldn’t be easy. He knew that. But not fighting, against the Russians, meant giving up.

He’d found his answers. He knew what kind of orders to give. Whether anyone would listen to them…He shook his head and said “Nein” again, louder this time. Some people would always follow a superior’s commands. He could use them to eliminate the fainthearts. No, to eliminate a few of them. That should scare the rest back into obedience. Fear was as much a weapon as an assault rifle.

It all seemed simple and straightforward. Peiper laughed at himself. If everything were as simple and straightforward as it seemed, the Reich would never have got itself into this mess. Well, the job of getting it out had landed on his shoulders. He’d do his damnedest.

XXXI

When the phone rang, it was the Mothers Against the Madness in Germany line. It usually was, these days. “Diana McGraw,” Diana said in her crisp public voice.

“Hi, Mrs. McGraw. E. A. Stuart here, from the Times,” the reporter replied in her ear.

“Hello, E.A. How are you?” Diana said. Only the Indianapolis Times, not the one from Los Angeles, let alone New York’s. Well, she lived next door to Indianapolis. And other papers would pick up whatever she said to Stuart. She’d got used to having people all over the world pay attention to what she thought. She liked it, in fact.